I don't have a clever solution for 1. This is definitely a broader cultural issue - non-lawyers at a law firm would completely expect to make less than the lawyers but programmers still don't nearly get that level of respect.
EDIT: I think we're miscommunicating a little. There absolutely are quite a lot of qualified senior developers right now. Most of them are employed. You're just not seeing a lot of qualified senior developers applying to your jobs, which is a different issue entirely. Given that nobody's turned an offer down, there's something that your job postings are missing that people are learning during the interview process. "Not paying enough", in this case, can be effectively synonymous with "not communicating that you're paying enough".
You are quite correct—I haven't yet figured out how to convey the interesting product/technical challenges we're working on in a mass way: especially not well enough to overcome must developers instinctual reaction to "publishing."
If you have a minute, I would love to hear your thoughts on how we could better communicate through our listings: http://www.cafe.com/careers
If you want to attract exceptional engineers then by gosh, you might just have to pay exceptional salaries.
At the end of the day, it's a business relationship and an intelligent engineer is quite justified in capturing some of the value that he or she generates.
And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty weaselly word.
Also, I didn't see any technical people mentioned on the About page? Are they not part of the team?
Here's what I'm getting at- sell people on the vision and what their specific role in it would be. What impact are they going to have, both in the company and in the world? As a startup, you've got the vision thing, or at least you damn well better, and it's your advantage. :-)
> And "competitive compensation" to me signals "eh compensation". It's a pretty weaselly word.
What do you think would sound better? Above market compensation?
> Also, I didn't see any technical people mentioned on the About page? Are they not part of the team?
Good catch. I'm on there (Director of Product & Technology) but we haven't done a good job of keeping it up to date with new hires.
> What impact are they going to have, both in the company and in the world?
Yes, I definitely need to work on this. I've done a pretty good job of refining the technical vision and how it fits with the overall company, but haven't yet distilled it down to a good description. How's this:
Cafe is building technology for discovering, publishing, and sharing great stories. We're building: web scrapers which analyze content across the web (with NLP and Amazon Mechanical Turk) to identify promising writers, a platform which makes it easy for non-technical writers to publish interactive stories, and analytics which model how ideas and stories flow across the web in real time. As a developer at Cafe, you'll be using technology to inform and entertain millions of people while driving clickbait off the web.
I like the reworked description too. Definitely implies some interesting work to be done.
1. We don't really want to make the huge salary discrepancies obvious to our non-tech employees. While it's theoretically true, publicly listing the difference wouldn't be great for morale.
2. There's a huge range, and where a particularly candidate falls in that range requires qualitative judgement. We consider everyone from talented new grads to senior developers with over a decade of experience, but the expected salary range can swing by as much as $100k—publicly listing such a big range isn't helpful for anyone. (Yes, I understand that we could theoretically have different job listings but our criteria are driven more by "how much smart shit can you get done" and "how much will you learn" than by years of experience or anything quantifiable on a careers page.)
> Note that it's pretty strange to claim that you can't attract enough skilled engineers even at higher salaries when you're keeping the fact that you pay higher salaries a secret. How do you expect this mechanism to work?
It's not that I think an unadvertised salary will by itself attract skilled engineers—I'm just using our experience as a counterfactual for the claim that there are loads of senior developers but we aren't willing to pay them enough. Note that in private conversations/outreach, we do try to be upfront about salary ranges.