This is the reason I don't even bother with permanent roles in startups anymore. Every time the budget ends up being disappointing and about half my current income.
Even worse when they approach me on a platform where they can see my profile & history and infer very well what I currently make and still proceed to pitch me their terrible role.
Also, thanks mostly to equity appreciation, I'm almost up to what my previous jobs starting pay was :-)
Protip: on the very first call, say “My current salary is XY. A competing offer is in your budget?”
Protip2: XY doesn’t have to be your actual salary, use a number that is your desired floor to start the negotiation from.
So how about just saying, "I'm currently only considering positions with salary XY. Is that in your budget?"
- UK: https://devitjobs.uk
- US: https://devitjobs.us
- Germany: https://germantechjobs.de
The audience is growing steadily and the US and UK sites are free to post (but you have to provide the salary)
Of the 100 or so professional software engineers and it pros I have worked closely with over the last decade, I think I know... 1 that used twitter. Maybe they follow engineering on twitter, maybe not. Twitter gets you, twitter people, not necessarily software engineers.
Go to universities and hire motivated juniors. Offer paid internships etc.
Highly recommend to follow https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz
I don't know a single person from my college days who I'd describe as a strong performer that would have taken a job from a random startup (i.e. no name recognition of founders or investors) for subpar pay. The people who ended up working at these no-name companies with subpar pay were almost always 1x or 0.5x programmers, whereas many of the people I knew who got A/A+ in OS and compiler classes were easily 10x programmers capable of building complex products from scratch.
Not saying we don't need 1x programmers but if you're a startup I think paying 3x salary for a 10x programmer is a much better deal than hiring 3 1x programmers.
I mean yeah, you were operating in a different talent market. If you are a U.S. based company it's going to be very hard to get high quality talent out of university as a rando company with median pay. If you are in Europe then it's a lot easier because there is less competition.
> all good tech talent is immediately already in the "amazing" companies as soon as they graduate
Yes, there are going to be missed gems, but if you're looking to hire without going through a couple hundred bad candidates (not even an exaggeration) to find gems you need to stand out as a company.
If you think about this from the employer perspective, there's no signal to go on to find these gems: people with decent, but not incredible grades, no prior internship history, bog standard side projects, etc. Now imagine those resumes are mixed in with a bunch of people with 0 side projects or work experience, subpar grades in core CS classes, etc. What do you filter on? What's your signal for hiring?
- There's a monthly "Who is hiring" thread on HN every 1st day of a month.
- Create a technical blog. When it gets popular and people see that it's high quality, brand awareness will increase. It takes time but it can bring massive gains. Extreme example: Cloudflare. But there are many smaller nice blogs. If your blog is good, it will naturally come up when people google for things etc.
- Create an RSS feed for the blog and a Twitter account ${Foobar}Engineering that RTs your blog posts. Just make sure the blog and Twitter are high quality and rare, and not random filler content every day.
- Do something unexpected, like: TikTok or YouTube channel. There's one small company in Poland that has a YouTube channel with basically short fun programming sketches (2-3 min), and this YT channel became huge. Everyone in IT in Poland knows them (https://www.youtube.com/c/HRejterzy).
- Relax your requirements, and post job offers to good job boards. Are you fine with people working remotely? Or 4 days a week? Check stuff like https://remoteok.com/ https://4dayweek.io/ etc.
- Include approx. salary data in job offer. No one likes this dance of "do they want seniors at half my current rate?".
- Perhaps become a sponsor of some underinvested opensource repos? The repo owners will likely give you some visibility on their website and top of the repo README.