grainsout

I have a friend who graduated with a PhD in Chemistry a few years ago. He went down the research path, but eventually didn't like the pay. He had a good amount of programming experience and was primarily building simulation frameworks for chemical-environment interactions.

I told him he could triple his salary if he applied for non-research positions. He's now a research developer at a pharma company making three times as much.

Many hard science STEM graduates don't realize that their programming skills (even if they're not totally honed) will make them more valuable on the market. If you can find a position that uses both your degree skills and programming, then you'll be a unicorn to that company.

I graduated in 2000, and I applied for a company doing telemetry processing in Java. I learned Java in 1997 (because Gosling was a PhD student at CMU a little before that time; we eat our own dog food). When I interviewed they asked me all sorts of questions about Java (GC, JIT, JVM, bytecode, etc) and I passed with flying colors. However, they said they wanted someone with more Java experience and I was rejected.

Two weeks later I got a callback from them saying they wanted to offer me a job. I had already accepted a position. This is when I figured out that hiring managers have no idea about the talent pool they're dredging.

This company wasn't even in SV. They should have offered me a job on the spot, because the fact I had any knowledge of Java.

Consider that senior developers are busy and aren't going to make time to prep for interviews that lead to a job landing them a $15k-$20k bump (before taxes). Together with all the other intangibles (culture, nature of project work, career paths) it makes jumping ship difficult to gauge.

Three suggestions - 1) raise the compensation for seniors 2) offer more interesting projects/products 3) use a different interview process for seniors, they hate algorithm quizzes

Most software companies just churn out database-backed MVC apps. After 5 years of that any good developer would be bored.