I literally can’t relate to this on any level. I’m an HM at a company that pays on the order of a FANG and at best matches one of these credentialist barriers and yet we can’t come close to hiring targets on devs.
I don’t get how people can see the plethora of individuals under 10yrs experience in SWE and other tech roles in SV/NYC/SEA with incomes of $250-600k/yr and think this happens without a “shortage” of talent.
Shortage in quotes because it’s hard to define in context of supply/demand but it’s clearly the case that devs have a lot of bargaining power.
I've mentioned this on HN before, but I have 10+ years experience, a BS in CS from a top 10 school, worked as SWE at Google for over 3 years, I've done 100+ leetcode questions, studied grokking the systems interview/designing data intensive applications, I live in the Bay Area, and I've _still_ failed 90% of my onsites last few years at the top tech companies (Stripe, Lyft, AirBnB, Square, Dropbox, etc).
Reasons for failure vary, you don't get much feedback but when I've gotten it it's been distributed across coding/systems/behavioral.
I've also been rejected at resume round by companies like Instacart and Coinbase.
The interview bar has gotten insanely high it seems. And I left Google way back without anything lined up assuming in this job market I could waltz into a good job with some modest prep but that has not been the case.
I objectively have top credentials, and I find tech interviewing an absolute nightmare. The standards have gone through the roof and one slip up and you get dinged. And the system is way more arbitrary and subjective than anyone admits.
Now, this isn't a woe-is-me story becasue to your point, there's a lot of companies paying top dollar and I have a decently paid job. Furthermore, I'm not failing interviews at random startups but as senior engineer at top companies that would probably offer $400k if they made an offer. They have the right to be extremely picky and subjective, but let's at least admit that they _are_ extremely picky and subjective.
The "I'm a HM and can't hit dev targets", reeks of ignorance as to your own process. I wonder if you do things like tell your interviewers "a false negative is better than a false positive" ? Or let one interviewer use some arbitrary criteria to dock a candidate and then pass on them because of one bad score? Because you probably do lack perspective on how many good devs your company is rejecting if you're only sitting on the HM chair and not seeing what it feels like to go through these rounds as an IC SWE.
Interviewing is a skill of itself for sure. Random offer, if you want to get some honest no-consequence feedback dm me and we’ll do a mock interview. Have hired a lot of people and want to pay it forward for all the people o have rejected not because they err bad but because I was bad at interviewing. Send me a message.
This seems like the most relevant anecdote in this thread. When I talk to friends about how they interview, it’s never about skills. Some say they’re not actually hiring, but they interview experts for free advice. If they are desperate, they hire for exact experience. I don’t know who out there is hiring new grads at giant salaries for Leetcode skills, but I think they’re mostly looking for impressionable followers.
> The interview bar has gotten insanely high it seems.
Software developers are starting to commonly earn doctor-like salaries. Doctors typically burn ~12-15 years between school and residency before they start getting paid serious salaries.
A top 20%-30% software developer can be earning $150k in their mid to late 20s, outside of the Bay Area.
It's no surprise that the hurdles are going up for such high compensation. Software devs in the US as a mass employment field (1.5m people) are the best paid large group of people in world history. Combined wages (not total compensation, that's far higher) for the 1.5 million software devs in the US is in the neighborhood of $215 to $250 billion per year. It's doubtful anything like this concentration of huge globally important industry dominance + very high pay will ever been seen again anywhere else in the world, it's an outlier economically to put it mildly. Enjoy it while it lasts.
I agree to the extent that it might not last and "make hay while the sun shines."
At the same time, I disagree it's that unprecedented. There's about as many lawyers as software developers and the compensation distribution is surprisingly similar (including some bimodal aspects). Yeah they put in 3 years and took some debt but it's not that significant big picture, many CS students get an MS.
There's a lot of doctors in my family. It used to be a gold mine field and now it's much less so, as hospitals have a lot more power over the doctors than they used to.
If you want a really good bang for your buck, look at salaries for nurses who get some specialization like CRNAs, who can make similar money to SWEs, with about 2 years extra school work.
I mostly agree we're in a golden age of software engineering compensation and as I mentioned in my first post, these companies have a right to be picky. Still, to some extent I think engineers of all stripes were relatively underpaid relatively to some other white collar professions historically and its just been catching up a bit.
Employees don't seem to have enough bargaining power to meaningfully control working conditions, though. Maybe these are worth a ton of money to the company, or such desires are an outlier. But here is my experience:
I'm a professor of computer science, and frequently get recruiters trying to get me to jump ship to industry. I'm open to it in principle. I'm reasonably happy in my job, but there are certainly things I don't like about academia, and the pay is not industry-level. But it's generally a rewarding job, and has various perks, like private offices and considerable control over your own schedule.
A question I ask recruiters: I have a private office... could you match that? So far, the answer has always been no. They can double or occasionally triple my salary, but they can't offer me a private office. I am not sure what to make of that. They are willing to offer me $100k+ over my current salary, but are absolutely unable to offer me an office with a door.
The hiring managers don't have that power. Not sure if you have done an interview loop but I assume that as a tenure track/tenured professor you're going to be L6+ individual contributor in a research group. In that interview loop you're probably going to have a decent amount of face time with a director level or VP. IMO if you're actually interested in making the jump the right play is to get the job, and then negotiate the office with the director/vp that you'd be reporting to, they will 99% of the time not let office access be something that stops them from hiring a staff+ engineer. Feel free to ping me directly if you want to ask more questions.
I've had similar experiences with desks, even though desks are a much easier problem to solve than 4 walls that make an office. $200 at IKEA would do it. And yet it's still an unsolvable problem to many companies. Desks have been the main reason I quit two of my past ten jobs.
One was at a euro stoxx 50 telco. They had a desk with a single plate that 10 people sat at. I had to sit with the project team I was working with who, unfortunately, weren't all the same height. But the plate could only be adjusted to one height for everyone which was way too low for me. Every day at the office, it felt like working at a coffee table and my back and knees hurt like crazy. I was fighting the corporate system for half a year, including making a fool of myself in front of the global director of human resources and company medical officer. This was ultimately unsuccessful as I was a freelancer, not an employee, and earned me the scorn of my direct manager. The whole experience was so undignified and humiliating that it was ultimately one of the main reasons I quit that gig. After all I was just trying not to have to endure physical pain.
The other occasion was at a well-known Wall Street investment bank back in 2010. They put the computers in the space under the desk that should normally be legroom and every day at the office felt like a long haul flight in economy class.
My boss's boss, a partner at that firm, privately owned a floor in a highrise residential building in Tribeca. Yet, during the work week, he still basically never got to see daylight. Our business unit wasn't high enough in status to be able to swing a work area on the outside of the building that had daylight. He had an office but still no privacy. One of the walls of his office, facing his underlings' open plan space, was made of glass. Glass walls is something that these firms do these days even for very high-ranking executives to create witnesses in cases of allegations around what may or may not be happening behind those walls between colleagues of opposite gender (or preempt those kinds of goings-on or allegations).
> They can double or occasionally triple my salary, but they can't offer me a private office.
You might have more luck if instead you asked about working remotely full-time. It's not the same if you want to go into an office, but companies are seriously thinking about their post-covid office plans.
True, that's an interesting possibility with the current trend towards remote work. With enough of a pay raise, I could solve the private office problem by just renting the office myself out-of-pocket...
I think the author is talking about pretty large, well-known companies (e.g., FAANG -- see his first point). Many people applying to these well-known companies are auto-filtered by resume software, which artificially decreases supply.
Small and mid-size companies have a different problem: people haven't heard of them and don't know to apply. My company is in this situation. We have a good culture, I think, and pay very well but people don't know about us or don't think of us as a "tech" company, even though we do quite a bit of innovative software development.
Hiring at these companies is very different from the bad examples described here, except for the indexing on degrees (if you don't have extensive experience you're not getting hired without a degree). They don't test trivia and don't typically look for "X years experience with Y framework". I remember seeing that in lots of smaller, lower paying companies' job postings on websites like Indeed but I've never seen that at a big bay area tech company unless it's something sufficiently broad like "infrastructure" or "frontend"
The difference is that big tech companies aren't meant to be applied to over the internet. Seriously, it's like throwing your resume into a black hole. Referrals are the same way, honestly. The only good way to get hired is to get a recruiter to message you on Linkedin. I have never got an interview at these companies from applying on their websites and have made it to the first round of interviews every time if I was contacted by a recruiter.
And because of that, it should be no surprise that nobody is scouring the internet to find your company and send in an application on your company's website. Everybody has been conditioned for that to essentially not work. Even though it's expensive you really should be paying third or even first party recruiters.
Except none of his points apply to FAANG companies either.
>A bad interview is when you ask them the definition of some specific thing in some specific framework like “Tell me what a closure in javascript is.” then treat them like they’re stupid if they don’t know.
FAANG companies do not interview like this. I've done interviews with most of them twice in the last 5 years and all questions are the typical algo stuff.
Then his whole rant about credentials... I am a self-taught dev with no degree, none of my interviewers ever cared about that. Every interview is about whether or not you can solve the algo question.
Is this auto filtering happening at the senior level for FAANG? Amazon keeps reaching out to me (a junior who already failed one of their interviews) on LinkedIn. Google did as well at one point.
If I am somehow worth personal attention as a not terribly impressively pedigreed and inexperienced developer, are they really dumping seniors through crappy filtering software and missing them there?
The stakes are lower. As a CTO (hypothetically) I get to hire 4 junior devs, 2 senior, and 1 architect.
Hire the wrong junior? No biggy, he'll be less effecient but we may yet turn him around. Anyway, I get three more tries. Anyway, he'll leave after 2 years. They always do.
Hire the wrong architect? I'm stuck with him, for a very long time. Moreover, I now have the wrong guy for a high-impact job. And one that is very visible.
So you betcha I'm going to be much more picky, the more senior the job becomes.
> I think the author is talking about pretty large, well-known companies (e.g., FAANG -- see his first point).
Except almost nothing outside of some amount of resume filtering fits his points. Seriously, go to levels.fyi and look at the pay of the FANGs (ex. Amazon). You think his bad pay point is a problem for them?
Personally, I’d happily accept being a lifeless drone, at least for a few years. Save the extra income and invest it. Reap the dividends.
Having said that, I don’t know how bad those roles actually are. Obviously, it’s not worth it if it affects your mental health… and unfortunately yeah, that is an issue working in this field.
The difference between both taxes and the "next in line" isn't large enough.
Hedge funds pay as much as Google/Facebook, but work and life balance at SV companies is much better.
Compare my two offers from a few years ago - well known hedge fund in CT vs a food delivery tech company.
Well known hedge fund paid $250k+50k bonus for expected minimum 50hour weeks and 20 days of vacation time.
Food delivery company offered $170k+200k in stock over 4 years for 6 hour work days in a relaxed environment and unlimited PTO.
It's at the point that it's not worth the money. Sure it's about $3k extra monthly income.... and if you're not burdened with student debt, it's not a game changer.
They are the minority with a VERY small staff, compared to most others. (Also HRT engineers work a lot, not leasurely 40 hours per week)
Pointing to extreme outliers is not giving your opinion much credence. Because I can point to some people who work in crypto, that earn $600k+ without breaking a sweat - in Singapore with Singaporean taxes(which blows HRT salaries with US taxes out of the water)
As a perfectly competent dev having immense difficulty getting anyone to consider me for any position, I cannot see this as anything other than false.
I have a job now (and by all accounts my employer is really happy with me), but the interview gauntlet I had to run to get here was absolutely ridiculous.
Then it seems like your replying to me with your experience not matching isn’t very reasonable, eh? I’m being very explicit about the US SV/NYC/SEA experience.
Well that would be the expected outcome, no? The author claims a problem exists in hiring and sets out articulate what that problem is. If the problem exists, then as a hiring manager, it's a good bet that you are, at some level, involved with that problem. For your stance/perspective to lie anywhere from a harsh opposing view to merely unable to unable to endorse the author's perspective ("what is water?") would be unsurprising.
(Note that this is true just as a matter of logical consistency and is not particular in any way to hiring itself; try replacing "hiring" here with "skub" and it's still true.)
If you accept non-US people, tell me what company you work for so I can send my resume.
Because all the issues the guy pointed out I am on receiving end of them right now.
And although I've been in leadership roles before and started programming when I was 6 years old (my dad taught me), I started lately to see if sending my applications to junior developer roles will get me any replies (people don't even tell me they got my application, except the occasional robot).
I'm pseudonymous for a reason but here's a list of companies, none of which I am employed at, that have similar pay and issues with staffing:
Uber, Doordash, Asana, AirBnB, Pinterest, LinkedIn and literally so many more. Especially if you are willing to accept mature but not yet liquid equity and then there's Stripe, Airtable, Robinhood and so many more.
Post your resume. Tried to go to your personal website but it wouldn't load.
I’ve interviewed with many of those listed. They’re not struggling for talent. They all have a very high hiring bar. I’ve seen them reject many people (besides myself) on trivia and whether or not you studied the right set of problems on LC.
For instance, could you regurgitate topological sort out in less than 20 minutes to solve a problem? You forgot the implementation but generally know what it’s used for? Failure. You’re a failure. Even if you know how to solve the problems but get tripped up on some simple parts of the algorithm because you haven’t really studied or used it in years, failure. Same with system design type interviews and other stuff.
The bar is very high for people who will never use any of that work. It’s hazing.
From the hiring manager perspective it’s a numbers game of time and risk mitigation. Firing people sucks; managing people out sucks. Not firing people that should be fired sucks. Unless you’re in a big company with centralized hiring and onboarding, having headcount that needs an expensive ramp up period sucks.
If you’ve done a lot of different things because you’re smart and creative, maybe I’ll have to spend more time making sure you’re motivated (so you’d have to be worth the extra time cost). It’s also common to see people with an ungrounded perception of their abilities, and I often see breadth-heavy people suffer from an inflated sense of their own abilities due to lots of small scale, diverse wins.
Most people don’t understand how valuable a hard worker who will agreeably take orders and deliver consistent results is; magnitude doesn’t even matter that much. Unless you’re single handedly driving significant business metrics (e.g., directly saving millions of dollars), from my perspective, my job success is tied to predicting your output. If I succeed, I get to expand the teams or build new ones. If a product release is late or buggy, it’s also wasting tons of other teams’ time or damaging customer relationships besides pushing the eng roadmap back.
We reject a bunch of faang people for having experience we don’t find valuable. If you work at a big tech company, but don’t have an impactful role, you’re potentially not going to succeed in a small startup at the level you’re demanding.
Finally, one bad hire can ruin a team (i.e., one bad hire converts others into bad hires). “Bad” is subjective and can refer to different things. At the end of the day, it’s my job to define it and make sure we’re avoiding it. You can ask about this in an initial phone screen, or in a follow up conversation because it’s not secret, but I can’t talk to you about it after we reject you due to lability.
I was a professional game designer (still a designer, but more a hobbyist now) with extensive (>10 years) game, mobile, full stack web and enterprise development experience, and all of that is current, as I'm developing games, including mobile games, in my spare time. It's very possible to do both.
Because the shortage is self induced. First of all you mentioned only super expensive locations. I would need 600k in SV to equal the mediocrity I enjoy in Texas. So while that sounds like an insanely huge number it doesn’t really say anything.
Second, at this point in my career developers at large companies aren’t expected to write code. Save that for startups. Instead developers are expected to debug things and string tools together like a homemade necklace. If you are an established company and want somebody to write original code you have a lot extra work to do to ensure a good cultural fit.
Me neither. Every single point the author makes does not match my (or any other dev I know) experience. The only explanation is the guy is in a really bad tech market, in which case, move.
If your place pays FANG ish and allows full remote (as Facebook does) feel free to hit me up. Preparing final round at facebook but it's a crapshoot (philosophecles0@gmail.com)
Grad students and postdocs seem like a fairly untapped source for tech recruiting, especially outside of the CS department. Physics, neuroscience, econ, biology, and many other fields now involve lots of programming and data analysis, sometimes under demanding conditions (real-time or huge, noisy data sets). Many of the people are smart and highly-motivated, but making a tenth of the numbers you quoted (and with rubbish job security to boot). It should be like shooting fish in a barrel.
And yet.... they don't seem to be on many company's radars. I'm the only one in my group who is ever contacted by recruiters, and it's an undergrad CS degree.
Yes, you'll have to screen to figure who tweaks "the script that gives the numbers" and who's more like a developer. Recruiters might need to put in a little legwork to figure out how different kinds of researchers map onto open reqs. You might want to somehow prep non-traditional candidates for a developer interview, or figure out an on-boarding track. But you can afford a whole heck of a lot of that if a $250k/year job is sitting open.
From talking with my PhD and MS friends, it's mainly about time. PhDs work around 40-60 hours a week. Full time MS students are juggling courses, research, and part time work, also around 40 hours a week. That usually leaves little time and energy to apply for jobs and practice interviewing.
As a terminal MS student, most of the interviews and offers I've gotten were from professor recommendations to their industry colleagues. I researched computational linguistics and dynamical systems in my undergrad, and in grad school I researched HPC and distributed systems. I still interview poorly because I don't invest enough time practicing/applying compared to reading papers or doing grad student grunt work. On paper, having an MS can also be a negative signal.
Paying that much for a tech worker doesn't mean there is a shortage of them, it means FANG companies are gambling on "rockstars" to try get an edge.
Flood the market with very good but not exceptional workers, and the top salaries won't change much.
Flood the market with exceptional workers and it probably won't change much either, FANG will just be even more selective with their top salaries.
Top devs have a lot of bargaining power not because companies need some "X amount" of development work done but can't find anybody who will do it. They have bargaining power because those companies are competing against one another and they're hoping the next billion dollar idea will come from one of _their_ employees first.
If you aren't playing this kind of roulette, I don't understand why you would try to compete in the same job markets. You can get developers for far less. And yes that may mean moving elsewhere, SV is obviously heavily selecting for such developers (people who can get those salaries will tend to move there, those who can't will tend to be pushed out).
If you are playing in that space but you just can't afford to pay for its inputs then it doesn't automatically mean those inputs are in a state of shortage, sometimes it just means your business does not create enough value to to pay for said inputs. This is the market's way of telling you to fold. Capitalism is a harsh mistress.
> If you aren't playing this kind of roulette, I don't understand why you would try to compete in the same job markets.
Ever since Blockbuster failed dramatically, large brick and mortar company execs are worried that SV will take their market. And, for good reasons too, I'd say. Software is eating the world etc.
I don’t get how people can see the plethora of individuals under 10yrs experience in SWE and other tech roles in SV/NYC/SEA with incomes of $250-600k/yr and think this happens without a “shortage” of talent.
Shortage in quotes because it’s hard to define in context of supply/demand but it’s clearly the case that devs have a lot of bargaining power.