I'm at the point where I simply don't believe a word hiring people say about hiring anymore. I have 20 years of experience at world-class companies, and have shipped multiple very well known products that have collectively sold ~150 million copies. I've had nothing but stellar performance reviews and LinkedIn recs. Coworkers and managers have told me often that I'm one of the best devs they've had the pleasure of working with, and I believe they meant it. I'm very comfortable with every major OS and language, and every stack level.
Nobody is going to pay me $500K. Nobody is going to pay me $200K. As recently as 2015, I still had well-known companies trying as hard as they could to bring me on at under $100K! The last time I talked to an SV company publicly claiming to offer $250K, it turned out they were reserving the "top end" for imaginary devs. My work experience only weighed in at $150, according to them. Also, despite having a very rare combination of two unrelated specialties (the reason I applied), and being proficient in 6 languages, including JS, they passed because they felt my JS experience was too light. Writing the AJAX and UI framework used by a team of 30, and working on the front end of a major portal, both at BigCo, were apparently too small-time.
My whole career in the industry I was aggressively low-balled 9 times out of 10. Hiring people can't hire who they want, because they're scheming double-talkers, and they've convinced themselves that it's just good business. I started a small business that pays the bills, and I've never been happier. I sincerely would not go back to the industry even if you did pay me $500K.
Back when we were thriving (as recently as 2015) my top engineers made about $400K/year in salary, bonus, & 401K. That does not include health insurance, we footed the bill for 100% of the health insurance and we covered the whole family.
Truth in advertising though. I'm the founder, I'm weird, I ran that company much more like a cooperative than just about anyone else would have. So I don't expect that comp to be that commonplace.
I also tracked salaries at the big companies and made sure we were competitive. In general, we were very competitive but it is possible to get a better package, not common, but possible. One of my guys went to Saleforce or Linkedin, and I could not beat their package (well I could but then I'd have to bump everyone else up to that and we all agreed that didn't make sense for us).
Sounds like your negotiation skills aren't quite as good as your engineering skills.
The most important thing I luckily learned early was you never, ever say how much you currently make when negotiating salary for a new position. Tell them to make an offer first or kick rocks. If you want to be more polite about it, say you believe firmly that what your current compensation is is not relevant, what matters is the value you can bring to the company.
I would say that had I not followed that rule, I'd have lost tens of thousands in salary already in my relatively short career.
Marketing. You need marketing. You may be the hottest deal in town, but if no-one who knows you "personally", need your skills and can afford your rate, it will be rough riding.
The "tech shortage" is a real myth. The ultimate problem is that people want "unicorns for peanuts" and no one (including Shelly Palmer) wants to take the risk of hiring and developing potential talent. If all you can accept is demonstrated talent, you should be ready to outbid other companies who are looking for demonstrated talent. And if $500K isn't cutting it, that could mean you aren't offering enough (it could also mean your company is in a field that can't really attract top talent, but that's not the case here)
The 10x software developer is a myth. There are 10x ReactJS developers, 10x Angular2 developers, 10x MongoDB developers, 10x Tensor flow developers, etc... But there is no such thing as a general-purpose 10x developer.
I guarantee you that a 10x heart surgeon won't do as good a job fixing your teeth as a 1x dentist.
The reason why so called 10x developers don't get paid 10x is because business owners and founders who actually have that kind of money are too smart to believe it.
Wallstreet/Fin-tech managed to figure this out. They don't look for unicorns they look for developers who can implement a specification and are willing to learn, then sit them beside finance domain experts and mathematicians.
Except that's wrong. As much as you may dislike the tech industry, you can't contradict the data that shows there are more job openings than developers in the Bay Area
That's an awfully lot of words to write, just to say "I'm lying about my $500k offer". If they were actually paying that, they'd have no shortage of talent to burn out with their standard consulting work.
Tons of companies claim "we would pay [huge number]", or "there's no upper bound of income for the best talent". It's almost never true.
If Mr Palmer is going to claim he'd pay 500k, I'd like to see some evidence that he is actually doing this for his top performing employees. He says he lost a few "perfect" candidates to Facebook and google. Did he offer them $500k a year?
Keep in mind, Mr Palmer chose to make this claim very publicly, and he's gotten plenty of attention at this point for doing so. So I'd love to see a good journalist follow up with some real numbers here.
If he's telling the truth, well then, good for him! I tend to be skeptical about people who claim there is a shortage, since they almost never talk about what they're offering. Mr Palmer is.
So far, so good. But he should be willing to offer some real evidence of this claim. Let's see the numbers.
> if a recruiter sends us three candidates who cannot pass our coding test, we fire the recruiter
is there any room to take blame for the quality of the test?
All testing must consider its reliability and validity as a measure.
If it is VALID it measures what you think it measures. EG: by passing a programming test it measures that someone CAN or CANNOT code.
If it is RELIABLE it has the same results time and again.
I'd suggest in their case, that they may have a test which produces a high number of false-negatives - people who can program but struggle with their specific test for one reason or another.
Anyways, it's up to them to do whatever they want with respect to their hires... It's up to the rest of us to not let them get away with blowing smoke up our butts about how great their test is or the exceptionally high quality of their candidates are.
Joel had a great article saying roughly "no you don't really hire the top 1% of programmers"
Right, or publish an (old) copy of this amazing test and let it be critiqued.
Also, if someone is a "top 1%" and you want them to work 100 hour weeks, maybe $500K is just too low.
The technology talent pool in America is just too small right now (even worse abroad)... and requires too many skills that aren't taught in school. On top of that, only the big firms can afford to apprentice as this article points out, but getting into them is difficult for most.
Short term these market dynamics appear to benefit the big firms, but long term it constrains the entire ecosystem. All the big firms need a huge ecosystem of competent little companies who handle integrations at a more local scale. I.e. Google needs small business people who know the webstack well so that Google can integrate its services with your business and sell you ads. So Google is incentivized to invest in community education because every one of those future hackers is a potential future customer.
If you want to differentiate in hiring, I'd say the main thing to offer people choosing between Google and you is leadership opportunities. Don't stick your techies in the basement -- offer then 1:1 time with top execs and owners so they can give the feedback they need to build better products.
I think the "we run a buisiness, not a school" could be the answer to this guy's dilemma. Hiring diamonds in the rough and cultivating talent relentlessly is how the best engineers were found and kept in my limited experience at Apple, and it seems Google has an even stronger internal education culture.
It's also means that they are looking not for tech talent but for skilled labor. Highly skilled labor assumes no re-education for the current job but does not account for future work. If you are a master carpenter or a master mechanic then you probably have invested on tools, educating yourself on your own time. You are also probably specialized.
E.g. you are highly qualified at fixing/tuning Ferraris but Toyotas are n't your thing. So you go to a Ferrari tune up shop where you can spend the $500,000 salary. /s
IMHO, Tech talent on the other hand works completely differently. They are more about talent (i.e designing stuff, critical thinking, analysis skills) rather than rolling into a specific shop to fix a specific issue.
That's where there seems to be this problem with "run a business, not a school" that they have.
> Hiring diamonds in the rough and cultivating talent relentlessly is how the best engineers were found and kept in my limited experience at Apple, and it seems Google has an even stronger internal education culture.
Yeah, that was a weird statement in the article. Tech moves so fast that allowing for internal education needs to be a requirement at any company. I literally learn something new every single day. When I look to hire, I look for some raw talent and enthusiasm to learn because whatever the candidate knows right now will be obsolete in 12 months (except for CS foundational topics, but that's for a different post).
There is something to be said for risk aversion, but I often encounter attitudes like the one in this blog post that seem proud they are willing avoid risk at any cost. It's irrational.
If every company only wants the best of the best programmers and adopts a "better a false negative than a false positive" attitude to hiring, then it is just economics that programmers who are not obviously first class are being undervalued. Translation: if every company wants programmers with a perfect git profile, you can get a programmer w/o a good git profile at bargain prices. Even when you price in the risk of hiring duds, with such an irrational attraction to top-performers, there is a huge opportunity to profit here.
Sure, no one should go seek out unnecessary risks, but I think companies should employ a little more cost benefit analysis. Training people is a risk. Hiring junior programmers is a risk. Hiring programmers from a second tier college is a risk. But risks are opportunities to innovate.
If you only want to hire MIT grads with 10,000 GitHub stars, fine, but don't expect to get a competitive advantage from this, because this is by and large what all your competitors are doing.
The company that learns to identify and retain new talent or manage the risks of hiring "B-team" programmers will be the one with the competitive advantage.
> Feel free to send me a link to your GitHub account. No resumes required.
Does anyone have some example github accounts for a talented web developer? Interested to see what a github account for someone who earns $500k looks like.
A Github account for someone earning $500k is probably completely empty, or barely touched. When you're getting paid that much to program, typically your attention is less focused on your side projects.
I would guess that the people making that kind of bank tend to not have GitHub accounts, or at best their fool-around-on-the-weekend projects on it.
That's a fuckton of money. I don't know how you make that unless you're in finance, self-employed as a high-end consultant, a CTO/senior architect, or a founder.
For $500k, a company could hire three excellent engineers. I don't care how good an engineer is, he won't be doing the work of two people, let alone three, especially in things like UI design/programming which is 95% grunt work. The reason FB and other big companies' products are the quality they are isn't because they have geniuses working for them. It's simply because they have thousands of workers and therefore can concentrate on all the most minute details and follow all the byzantine paths that regular companies simply do not have the manpower to do.
The author thinks he can find someone to pay $500k and this person will outperform multiple teams of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. That's delusional and a horrible way to "lead" a company. Damn right he won't be hiring anyone with that $500k. Such a human being does not exist. Not at FB, not anywhere.
Some days I think about the 18-25% cut of first year salaries that recruiters are collecting, and I think about transitioning from being a technical person to being a technical recruiter!
Unlike most tech recruiters, I actually could vet candidates before presenting them, in theory generating higher quality candidates who are more likely to get placed. There's still a supply-side issue though...
It definitely seems to attract highly qualified people. I've dealt with a recruiter who holds a J.D. law degree and passed the bar to be real-estate attorney. Surely that cannot be easy/cheap in the US? (I'm in Europe). And she's an internal recruiter at that, so salaried with some target bonus I assume.
I'm just starting out in my career, but what do they mean by "good enough to work for us"? Is there a way to measure this metric? And how do I know if I'm there?
My personal understanding (as a web developer) had always been, someone who is "good enough" is someone who can build a system from the ground up, with the capability to handle requests at high capacity and manage performance. BUT, this would just be an advanced CRUD app and I fail to see how that would reach a salary of $500,000 a year.
It looks like ShellyPalmer has a special focus on machine learning and data science. Perhaps their requirements are beyond what I am even aware of.
> someone who is "good enough" is someone who can build a system from the ground up, with the capability to handle requests at high capacity and manage performance
Being a good developer (usually) doesn't mean writing especially performant code, at least not beyond what's noticeable in terms of the end user's experience. It means creating products with:
- intuitive database schemas
- clean code architecture
- good overall readability
- simplicity and optionality
Being a developer isn't much different than being any other type of writer. The best way to figure out if someone is likely to be a good developer is to ask yourself whether they'd likely be successful as a contributor to the New Yorker.
My takeaway from the article is that they are looking for someone who is famous, at least as far as fame among programmers goes. I gather they are not so much concerned with your ability to write good code or solve particular problems, but your ability to market their products/services to your fan base. The article emphasizes having a large following on GitHub, and wants to see your GitHub profile specifically (i.e. to measure your popularity).
Same reason famous actors, athletes, etc. are paid more than others doing the same job: Their marketing ability brings more customers to the theatre, stadium, etc. That brings added value and the leverage from that brings added compensation.
You actually just broke down quite a few skill sets that can be qualified by experience or interviews.
* Build a system from the ground up => Understands how to build custom solutions with or without frameworks and pre-established libraries in order to reach the optimal business solution for the company/client which may include time and resource constraints
* Capability to handle requests at high capacity and performance => Understanding of development operations including but not limited to linux, networking, automation, cloud solutions, databases
Now the extent to which a developer has trained those skills would greatly effect earning potential however having them at a basic level would certainly qualify one for most dev jobs.
Machine learning and data science are particularly valuable because their is simply so much unexplored territory and so few candidates. $500k could easily be the salary of some of the primo researchers working for Uber, Google, Etc.
I don't want look hard, train on the job, or provide the best long-term career opportunities to candidates. Instead, I'll limit my selection pool to perfectly-tailored candidates that also happen to publish on GitHub.
Oh no, other companies are swooping the people I want based on their GitHub! Those candidates are my low hanging fruit, damnit!
TLDR (I think): Due to Github, recruiters can poach employees easily. As such, hiring anyone who has not peaked is useless, because he might be poached after training/getting better and we will have to compete with other (possibly more wealthy) employers to retain him.
One I would be very surprised if his consultancy actually pays an average salary of $500k for developers.
Also $500k is more than 1 in 300 developers make. Every billion dollar company in the world was built with people less talented than the ones your demanding. I would like to see what specific tasks a 1 in 300 developer can accomplish this his 1 in 10 or 50 peer cannot.
Look at Netflix for good examples of a $500k engineer.
What did Chaos Monkey require that a 1 in 10 peer could not have done? Technically? Maybe it wouldn't have gone smoothly, or maybe it wouldn't have been as fast, but I am fairly certain most decent developers (with sufficient sysadmin chops) could have built chaos monkey. But the reason that engineer is worth $500k is because of the unique value it added. Their job wasn't to build Chaos Monkey, it was to make Netflix operations more robust. They identified that they didn't know how their software would behave during infrastructure failure and found a way to better understand failure proactively.
1 in 10 engineers add value by writing code. 1 in 50 engineers build value by solving problems. 1 in 300 engineers add value by identifying and solving problems.
I kept waiting for the punchline that gave away the piece as satire. But... it seems 100% serious.
> In practice, we could train these workers, but not at market prices with added recruiter vigorish. We just can’t get enough value out of B-team players while they are in training
Does the author realize that this is the exact cause of his "problem"? Developers live in constant fear of "if you don't stay up to date, you'll never get another job". Combine that with the generally risky venture-backed tech climate, an at-will employment culture and the zeitgeist of youth worship and blatant ageism. All I can say is: you reap what you sew.
Turn this toxic culture around so that devs can feel comfortable that being a great engineer is enough, instead of chasing frameworks and books about algorithms.
Yep. Great article. Google and Facebook really have learned how to game the talent system with strategic open sourcing of tech. And you're right, it is Macchiavellian.
And here's how you, as a smaller tech company, can beat the system and snag great talent anyway: look for devs with expertise in technologies other than those created by Google and Facebook.
You've seen what lies behind the shadows on the cave wall. You know that the talent gold rush is not really about getting the right tech skills, but using tech to get the right people. Now make a bold move based on that knowledge and go with Ruby on Rails. Or Django. Or Ember. Or Intercooler. Or heck, even PHP, which Facebook uses but hardly has a monopoly on. Or even - dare I say it? - .NET!
> In practice, we could train these workers, but not at market prices with added recruiter vigorish. We just can’t get enough value out of B-team players while they are in training, and by the time we help them become A-team players, their GitHub accounts and contributions will reflect their learning. At that point, they will be firmly on the radar of top-tier tech. And we would have played the role of pre-school for Facebook, Google, or Apple. Great for Zuck, Larry, or Tim, but not so great for us.
They create a culture that doesn't value the workforce, and then they wonder why people leave?
Personally I feel a mix of eagerness and skepticism. Just to rule out the bait-and-switch, this is $500k to write code? Not to travel half the time and bring in more sales? They say they want "React/Redux specialists, Unity developers, data scientists, and data engineers (proficient with TensorFlow), technical project managers (who used to do the above, but have evolved into managers), and technical account executives." The hero image is just some React.
If this is for real, I'm willing to apply. I've built web-based software for clients for 17 years. I can handle the tech, but also lead a team, manage a project, design products and features, learn a customer's problems and advise them, and offer creative solutions that bring massive value and savings. I'm a great fit for a consulting company. I do pretty well right now working for myself, but $500k would still be a big bump up. So I'm looking for the call-to-action, and it is . . . "Subscribe to the newsletter." Really? Who is this article for anyway? It is just one executive commiserating to others? It definitely doesn't seem to show ShellyPalmer in their best light: I don't see any solutions, just complaining and excuses. They are advertising their inability to hire the best people?
Offer me $500k to solve technical problems (and not leave Oregon), and I'll apply. But I can't even find a Careers page. I guess they feel I should have to work for it. That's fine, I'll tweet at you if you want, but in that case I'd like to see some proof first that this offer is for real.
Wow there's a ton about this that I'm reacting badly to.
* It's a jobs ad; it shouldn't be frontpaged and they're not paying anyone $500k.
* Nobody says "I want 100 steaks for 200 dollars and I couldn't find it; there's a steak shortage!!" Labor markets and scarcity are a thing, I'm sorry this person isn't getting (by their own admission) the same output from their few employees as the world's most valuable companies. I wonder how good their consulting is if their reaction to tech's labor market is "the world is rigged and most developers are useless or untrustworthy."
* I'd be curious to know what the author's tech chops are. There's no shortage of non-tech people who think building an app is "simple" because "I know what I want and explained it to you" and surely the issue, should problems arise, is that the developer was subpar. "I'd pay you, but you can't do the work." Please.
This is exactly the person you avoid in your career, life.
There might be a correlation between effective workers and large companies. A person who is willing to memorize "Cracking the Coding Interview" is the type of person who has his or her life on guided rails and would prefer the upper middle class of a large company rather than the scrappiness of a smaller company which results in poor/rich. Chinese culture especially has a long history of exam guided lives dating to ancient dynasties. Stereotypical desired professions like lawyers and doctors are also very credential-gated and similar.
So small companies are left with a much smaller pool of candidates, often less credentialed and much stronger willed. They cannot grow a workforce of highly credentialed/technical workers who do what they are told.
Are there mavericks who are also very technical out of passion rather than trying to oull their families out of poverty? Yes. But they usually aren't willing to play second fiddle.
[+] [-] psyc|9 years ago|reply
Nobody is going to pay me $500K. Nobody is going to pay me $200K. As recently as 2015, I still had well-known companies trying as hard as they could to bring me on at under $100K! The last time I talked to an SV company publicly claiming to offer $250K, it turned out they were reserving the "top end" for imaginary devs. My work experience only weighed in at $150, according to them. Also, despite having a very rare combination of two unrelated specialties (the reason I applied), and being proficient in 6 languages, including JS, they passed because they felt my JS experience was too light. Writing the AJAX and UI framework used by a team of 30, and working on the front end of a major portal, both at BigCo, were apparently too small-time.
My whole career in the industry I was aggressively low-balled 9 times out of 10. Hiring people can't hire who they want, because they're scheming double-talkers, and they've convinced themselves that it's just good business. I started a small business that pays the bills, and I've never been happier. I sincerely would not go back to the industry even if you did pay me $500K.
[+] [-] luckydude|9 years ago|reply
Truth in advertising though. I'm the founder, I'm weird, I ran that company much more like a cooperative than just about anyone else would have. So I don't expect that comp to be that commonplace.
I also tracked salaries at the big companies and made sure we were competitive. In general, we were very competitive but it is possible to get a better package, not common, but possible. One of my guys went to Saleforce or Linkedin, and I could not beat their package (well I could but then I'd have to bump everyone else up to that and we all agreed that didn't make sense for us).
[+] [-] nicolashahn|9 years ago|reply
The most important thing I luckily learned early was you never, ever say how much you currently make when negotiating salary for a new position. Tell them to make an offer first or kick rocks. If you want to be more polite about it, say you believe firmly that what your current compensation is is not relevant, what matters is the value you can bring to the company.
I would say that had I not followed that rule, I'd have lost tens of thousands in salary already in my relatively short career.
[+] [-] venture_lol|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheetjs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jondubois|9 years ago|reply
I guarantee you that a 10x heart surgeon won't do as good a job fixing your teeth as a 1x dentist.
The reason why so called 10x developers don't get paid 10x is because business owners and founders who actually have that kind of money are too smart to believe it.
[+] [-] hackermailman|9 years ago|reply
Here's a typical HFT entry level job posted by a recruiter note the emphasis on how they are willing to teach and knowledge in any specific language is not necessary http://www.biviumgroup.com/search_job_details.php?job_id=707...
[+] [-] ferentchak|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iaw|9 years ago|reply
Could you provide data or at least anecdotal evidence to back this statement?
[+] [-] xux|9 years ago|reply
Except that's wrong. As much as you may dislike the tech industry, you can't contradict the data that shows there are more job openings than developers in the Bay Area
[+] [-] maxsilver|9 years ago|reply
Tons of companies claim "we would pay [huge number]", or "there's no upper bound of income for the best talent". It's almost never true.
[+] [-] geebee|9 years ago|reply
Keep in mind, Mr Palmer chose to make this claim very publicly, and he's gotten plenty of attention at this point for doing so. So I'd love to see a good journalist follow up with some real numbers here.
If he's telling the truth, well then, good for him! I tend to be skeptical about people who claim there is a shortage, since they almost never talk about what they're offering. Mr Palmer is.
So far, so good. But he should be willing to offer some real evidence of this claim. Let's see the numbers.
[+] [-] iaw|9 years ago|reply
$600k isn't that hard to make at these companies.
[+] [-] AlexC04|9 years ago|reply
is there any room to take blame for the quality of the test?
All testing must consider its reliability and validity as a measure.
If it is VALID it measures what you think it measures. EG: by passing a programming test it measures that someone CAN or CANNOT code.
If it is RELIABLE it has the same results time and again.
I'd suggest in their case, that they may have a test which produces a high number of false-negatives - people who can program but struggle with their specific test for one reason or another.
Anyways, it's up to them to do whatever they want with respect to their hires... It's up to the rest of us to not let them get away with blowing smoke up our butts about how great their test is or the exceptionally high quality of their candidates are.
Joel had a great article saying roughly "no you don't really hire the top 1% of programmers"
[+] [-] snarf21|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsunamifury|9 years ago|reply
Short term these market dynamics appear to benefit the big firms, but long term it constrains the entire ecosystem. All the big firms need a huge ecosystem of competent little companies who handle integrations at a more local scale. I.e. Google needs small business people who know the webstack well so that Google can integrate its services with your business and sell you ads. So Google is incentivized to invest in community education because every one of those future hackers is a potential future customer.
If you want to differentiate in hiring, I'd say the main thing to offer people choosing between Google and you is leadership opportunities. Don't stick your techies in the basement -- offer then 1:1 time with top execs and owners so they can give the feedback they need to build better products.
[+] [-] Breefield|9 years ago|reply
Agreed!
[+] [-] mattnewton|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shortsightedsid|9 years ago|reply
E.g. you are highly qualified at fixing/tuning Ferraris but Toyotas are n't your thing. So you go to a Ferrari tune up shop where you can spend the $500,000 salary. /s
IMHO, Tech talent on the other hand works completely differently. They are more about talent (i.e designing stuff, critical thinking, analysis skills) rather than rolling into a specific shop to fix a specific issue.
That's where there seems to be this problem with "run a business, not a school" that they have.
[+] [-] matwood|9 years ago|reply
Yeah, that was a weird statement in the article. Tech moves so fast that allowing for internal education needs to be a requirement at any company. I literally learn something new every single day. When I look to hire, I look for some raw talent and enthusiasm to learn because whatever the candidate knows right now will be obsolete in 12 months (except for CS foundational topics, but that's for a different post).
[+] [-] jaredklewis|9 years ago|reply
If every company only wants the best of the best programmers and adopts a "better a false negative than a false positive" attitude to hiring, then it is just economics that programmers who are not obviously first class are being undervalued. Translation: if every company wants programmers with a perfect git profile, you can get a programmer w/o a good git profile at bargain prices. Even when you price in the risk of hiring duds, with such an irrational attraction to top-performers, there is a huge opportunity to profit here.
Sure, no one should go seek out unnecessary risks, but I think companies should employ a little more cost benefit analysis. Training people is a risk. Hiring junior programmers is a risk. Hiring programmers from a second tier college is a risk. But risks are opportunities to innovate.
If you only want to hire MIT grads with 10,000 GitHub stars, fine, but don't expect to get a competitive advantage from this, because this is by and large what all your competitors are doing.
The company that learns to identify and retain new talent or manage the risks of hiring "B-team" programmers will be the one with the competitive advantage.
[+] [-] tomtemplate|9 years ago|reply
Does anyone have some example github accounts for a talented web developer? Interested to see what a github account for someone who earns $500k looks like.
[+] [-] Arcten|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phamilton|9 years ago|reply
What the author is pointing to is the $250k dev who just 2 years back was struggling to land a $90k job.
[+] [-] douche|9 years ago|reply
That's a fuckton of money. I don't know how you make that unless you're in finance, self-employed as a high-end consultant, a CTO/senior architect, or a founder.
[+] [-] mnm1|9 years ago|reply
The author thinks he can find someone to pay $500k and this person will outperform multiple teams of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. That's delusional and a horrible way to "lead" a company. Damn right he won't be hiring anyone with that $500k. Such a human being does not exist. Not at FB, not anywhere.
[+] [-] ljoshua|9 years ago|reply
Unlike most tech recruiters, I actually could vet candidates before presenting them, in theory generating higher quality candidates who are more likely to get placed. There's still a supply-side issue though...
[+] [-] hocuspocus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derialstrazus|9 years ago|reply
My personal understanding (as a web developer) had always been, someone who is "good enough" is someone who can build a system from the ground up, with the capability to handle requests at high capacity and manage performance. BUT, this would just be an advanced CRUD app and I fail to see how that would reach a salary of $500,000 a year.
It looks like ShellyPalmer has a special focus on machine learning and data science. Perhaps their requirements are beyond what I am even aware of.
[+] [-] Alex3917|9 years ago|reply
Being a good developer (usually) doesn't mean writing especially performant code, at least not beyond what's noticeable in terms of the end user's experience. It means creating products with:
- intuitive database schemas
- clean code architecture
- good overall readability
- simplicity and optionality
Being a developer isn't much different than being any other type of writer. The best way to figure out if someone is likely to be a good developer is to ask yourself whether they'd likely be successful as a contributor to the New Yorker.
[+] [-] randomdata|9 years ago|reply
Same reason famous actors, athletes, etc. are paid more than others doing the same job: Their marketing ability brings more customers to the theatre, stadium, etc. That brings added value and the leverage from that brings added compensation.
[+] [-] ben_jones|9 years ago|reply
* Build a system from the ground up => Understands how to build custom solutions with or without frameworks and pre-established libraries in order to reach the optimal business solution for the company/client which may include time and resource constraints
* Capability to handle requests at high capacity and performance => Understanding of development operations including but not limited to linux, networking, automation, cloud solutions, databases
Now the extent to which a developer has trained those skills would greatly effect earning potential however having them at a basic level would certainly qualify one for most dev jobs.
Machine learning and data science are particularly valuable because their is simply so much unexplored territory and so few candidates. $500k could easily be the salary of some of the primo researchers working for Uber, Google, Etc.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|9 years ago|reply
It's just another consultancy business.
[+] [-] forgottenpass|9 years ago|reply
Oh no, other companies are swooping the people I want based on their GitHub! Those candidates are my low hanging fruit, damnit!
[+] [-] wohlergehen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamesBarney|9 years ago|reply
Also $500k is more than 1 in 300 developers make. Every billion dollar company in the world was built with people less talented than the ones your demanding. I would like to see what specific tasks a 1 in 300 developer can accomplish this his 1 in 10 or 50 peer cannot.
[+] [-] phamilton|9 years ago|reply
What did Chaos Monkey require that a 1 in 10 peer could not have done? Technically? Maybe it wouldn't have gone smoothly, or maybe it wouldn't have been as fast, but I am fairly certain most decent developers (with sufficient sysadmin chops) could have built chaos monkey. But the reason that engineer is worth $500k is because of the unique value it added. Their job wasn't to build Chaos Monkey, it was to make Netflix operations more robust. They identified that they didn't know how their software would behave during infrastructure failure and found a way to better understand failure proactively.
1 in 10 engineers add value by writing code. 1 in 50 engineers build value by solving problems. 1 in 300 engineers add value by identifying and solving problems.
[+] [-] OhHeyItsE|9 years ago|reply
> In practice, we could train these workers, but not at market prices with added recruiter vigorish. We just can’t get enough value out of B-team players while they are in training
Does the author realize that this is the exact cause of his "problem"? Developers live in constant fear of "if you don't stay up to date, you'll never get another job". Combine that with the generally risky venture-backed tech climate, an at-will employment culture and the zeitgeist of youth worship and blatant ageism. All I can say is: you reap what you sew.
Turn this toxic culture around so that devs can feel comfortable that being a great engineer is enough, instead of chasing frameworks and books about algorithms.
[+] [-] tboyd47|9 years ago|reply
And here's how you, as a smaller tech company, can beat the system and snag great talent anyway: look for devs with expertise in technologies other than those created by Google and Facebook.
You've seen what lies behind the shadows on the cave wall. You know that the talent gold rush is not really about getting the right tech skills, but using tech to get the right people. Now make a bold move based on that knowledge and go with Ruby on Rails. Or Django. Or Ember. Or Intercooler. Or heck, even PHP, which Facebook uses but hardly has a monopoly on. Or even - dare I say it? - .NET!
Step off the hype train. Break the monopoly.
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
They create a culture that doesn't value the workforce, and then they wonder why people leave?
[+] [-] pjungwir|9 years ago|reply
If this is for real, I'm willing to apply. I've built web-based software for clients for 17 years. I can handle the tech, but also lead a team, manage a project, design products and features, learn a customer's problems and advise them, and offer creative solutions that bring massive value and savings. I'm a great fit for a consulting company. I do pretty well right now working for myself, but $500k would still be a big bump up. So I'm looking for the call-to-action, and it is . . . "Subscribe to the newsletter." Really? Who is this article for anyway? It is just one executive commiserating to others? It definitely doesn't seem to show ShellyPalmer in their best light: I don't see any solutions, just complaining and excuses. They are advertising their inability to hire the best people?
Offer me $500k to solve technical problems (and not leave Oregon), and I'll apply. But I can't even find a Careers page. I guess they feel I should have to work for it. That's fine, I'll tweet at you if you want, but in that case I'd like to see some proof first that this offer is for real.
[+] [-] srpablo|9 years ago|reply
* It's a jobs ad; it shouldn't be frontpaged and they're not paying anyone $500k.
* Nobody says "I want 100 steaks for 200 dollars and I couldn't find it; there's a steak shortage!!" Labor markets and scarcity are a thing, I'm sorry this person isn't getting (by their own admission) the same output from their few employees as the world's most valuable companies. I wonder how good their consulting is if their reaction to tech's labor market is "the world is rigged and most developers are useless or untrustworthy."
* I'd be curious to know what the author's tech chops are. There's no shortage of non-tech people who think building an app is "simple" because "I know what I want and explained it to you" and surely the issue, should problems arise, is that the developer was subpar. "I'd pay you, but you can't do the work." Please.
This is exactly the person you avoid in your career, life.
[+] [-] dlwdlw|9 years ago|reply
So small companies are left with a much smaller pool of candidates, often less credentialed and much stronger willed. They cannot grow a workforce of highly credentialed/technical workers who do what they are told.
Are there mavericks who are also very technical out of passion rather than trying to oull their families out of poverty? Yes. But they usually aren't willing to play second fiddle.