throwaway022014
throwaway022014 on Hacker News
I have never found it difficult to hire for my dev shop in San Jose and I don't pay anywhere near what I'm told the "market" rate is. I hire engineers fresh out of no-name colleges, self-taught programmers, former freelancers who decided they wanted the stability of a salary and people over the age of 35.
Basically I will hire the people who won't get the time of day from a lot of the big tech companies and rocketship startups and who wouldn't make it through the interview process there if they get through the front door. And you know what? Most of my hires turn out to be entirely adequate and the duds are not nearly as difficult to deal with as everyone says they will be.
Granted my company is not building database engines or running social networks with a billion users but we do enterprise web apps for good clients and we are profitable. This idea that you have to give every employee 10% of the company and 130k a year to get people who can get the job done is a terrible, terrible myth and posts like this perpetuate it.
When my best engineers want to move on to bigger and better things I support them. It would be nice to keep them of course but I'm honest enough with myself to know that I don't need the type of engineers that can get a job at Google.
My retention rate with my "adequate" engineers is very high. Most of the ones that I know have complained about money find out that it's one thing to see jobs that pay $$$$ and another thing to actually get those jobs.
I run a dev shop in San Jose. I hear all the time that the "market rate" is a good 40-50% higher than what I pay my engineers but I have all the engineers I need. Are they the best engineers in the world? If we're talking about pure talent no, but we're not doing anything exotic. We build modestly complex web applications for enterprise clients.
Have I lost engineers? Yes. In the past 3 years I lost 2 of my favorite employees. I was disappointed but it wasn't a surprise and I supported their decisions. They were superb engineers and I knew that they would one day go on to do great things. It wasn't just an issue of not being able to match the salary of a publicly traded tech company. These engineers were destined to work on the type of things we just don't do here. So why would I want to hold them back?
On the flip side I have one engineer right now who I know is looking to leave. He told one of our other employees that he's unhappy with the pay and thinks he can get a better job at a big tech company. Guess what? I heard about this 8 months ago and he's still here. I know he has interviewed elsewhere but you see, for every engineer who can get a $$$$ job at a tech giant or rocketship startup there are 50 engineers who THINK they can. And then they find out they can't.
There is no shortage of engineers. The big names often get 100s of applicants for every open position. But you need to be really, really good, not just at your job, but at the interview process. The interview process at some of these companies is so difficult that a lot of very good people get filtered out.
So I have no problem finding engineers at "below market" and still manage to deliver good work product to our customers at good margin. Apparently I'm doing the impossible!