> > I’d argue that you’re way better off hiring 6 devs that can go from business problem -> technical solution in their head, without all the ceremony, instead of 40 devs who can’t and 6 PMs to wrangle them.
> The problem is that finding those 6 experienced devs is _HARD_. And they're usually very expensive and know their value.
It's harder than finding uncaring juniors, sure.
But if you need 40+6 people, or 6 experienced people, that's nearly 8x salary.
In silicon valley money, you'll need to pay those uncaring juniors about 150K.
I guarantee you that you can very easily find those 6 experienced people in a few weeks if you're offering over $1M/yr to them. In a month you can staff all 6 positions.
If you're saying you want ~8x performance but not interested in paying ~8x salary.. then yes, it's harder to find the people.
>>Preferably, I would like to hire senior developers instead, but they are too expensive for my budget.
It sounds like you're trying to hire cheap developers, not junior developers.
If you really want junior developers, you have to do a crazy thing; hire people that are actually junior (have very little experience) but have potential. If you'd done that 4 months ago you'd probably have some decent developers right now.
> It costs a lot to find developers, then to hire good ones. It can be $5-20k + the domain knowledge you have so it’s not cheap to replace a good developer.
My experience is different. Avalanche the expensive and experienced devs with more and more work until they signalize that the team requires upsizing, make them resign. Fish for students, contractors. Hire contractors exclusively through a chain of intermediaries, so their salary and employee rights will be minuscule and they will have no leverage to say "no" to the most ridiculous bullshit.
Please tell me there exist companies which appreciate their specialists, which offer a significant payrise to make them stay. I have yet to encounter and work for one.
>>At Valley salaries hiring someone for a day costs you $100k++. In more moderately compensated locales, lower bound it at $40k or so.
Sorry, WHAT?
>>pportunity cost of other team members (could be coding but are instead spinning up the new engineer)
Hey I've got news for you. Developers don't just waltz in and start coding from day 1, they need to be brought up to speed on the systems. Your business-nosed attitude needs a reality check. Developers are human capital, not robots.
> There is no such thing as a developer shortage; there is a shortage of wildly, identifiably competent developers willing to work for the salaries you're offering.
Depends on the subfield.
If you want to hire 1,000 ARM JIT superhackers, those people just don't exist in the entire world. There are just not 1,000 people total that know ARM, know JITing on ARM, and are strong hackers.
You could advertise double the usual salaries for those positions, and still those people would not show up, because they don't exist. So your only hope if you need 1,000 of them is to train them, which takes time and has risk.
For something like web development on the other hand, sure, I do think the market is far more flexible and if you double salaries, more developers will show up fairly quickly.
> I can confirm that there is indeed a shortage of developers with the right skills. Salary levels is not the issue here.
So you're saying with a straight face that if you doubled or quadrupled the salary on offer you still wouldn't find candidates? Are you looking for someone so specialized that only under 10 people in the entire world are able to fill it? Because otherwise it's just a matter of salaries not being enticing enough for people to work for your clients.
>If you fit that bill you can probably get a role paying $95-120k just about anywhere in the US. You'll wrangle data, make pipelines, build dashboards and occasionally deploy a model or two when the planets align.
If you expect to pay that little to anyone who knows the above to any degree you will have a bad time.
A number of projects I have joined absolutely look like someone treated them as a way to learn the technology before moving onto better paying jobs, leaving the business with a terrible mess that's largely unfixable without a rewrite. You're better off hiring one developer that knows what they are doing at above market rates than three who don't for the same price.
>"they can actually hire five young developers for the price of one senior dev"
I'm sure your dad's experience warrants a premium over others but anybody asking 5x what other devs make are going to have difficulty finding a job unless they have exceptional reputation, contacts and some luck.
> Admittedly, I have no clue if the management realises that !
Well, that's the key thing in many places: it's management that decides whether to hire and how much to offer, not you :)
The first instinct would be to put 'resources' that costs little into a project, and that usually means people with less experience that requires less pay and are easier to drag around. Imagine the difficulty they will be having trying to grok your line of reasoning for respecting and going after these older devs.
>> The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. ... I've been trying to hire, and my inbox is full of people who know half a language and want a starting salary of $130k. The money isn't the issue; I'd pay way more than that for someone good. But six figures is crazy high for the average developer in SF. >>
How much more? $250,000? $500,000? $1,000,000? $3,000,000?
Sure, it is plausible that if all the companies in SF tried to pay virtually unlimited amount of money for exceptional programmers, they'd eventually run out of those programmers. After all even in major league baseball there are only so many 100 MPH pitchers to go around. But it's hard to credit claims that we are in that situation rather than one where the money _is_ the issue, when you aren't seeing numbers that would make a BigLaw junior partner or investment bank managing director jealous, much less a professional baseball player.
> In the project that I am working in the business people and devs all contribute a lot of hard work and many hours to the success - why are the devs paid so much more?
Because you clearly are struggling to hire developers at the prices you want to pay and you are not struggling to hire "business people" at the prices you want to pay.
In either event you are paying developers shit. When an average junior developer starts getting paid what an average finance banker gets paid post school and in 10 years an average developer rising at the average rate in an org gets paid what an average person in finance who is rising at an average rate in finance org, then maybe there would be something to write about.
> that there are really people who are $200K+ better than other devs? I can't really imagine what that level of dev can do much more than those I have worked with who are only paid $50-100K
The 10x myth is real. And having someone with 10x the productivity of another dev isn't a 10x increase in comp, more like 4-5x. So that's an incredible bargain for whoever is smart enough to see it.
I recall a story someone told me a while ago. Software business that did local CoL/prevailing wages. Hired an intern one summer that was just running around in circles around the other, more senior devs. Next summer they tried to get him back but he was already at a large search engine company down in the Bay. Of course, he wouldn't return. That's when they realized a whole class of engineers were completely invisible to them; they lucked out hiring him that summer but there was no chance they could attract someone like him full time.
> I wonder if the perception is distorted by FANNG companies who can afford to simply pay whatever i.e. another 100K for perhaps 10% better candidate just to make sure they get the best?
This has compounding effects. One overachiever stuck with mediocre devs won't be able to do much. But a team of overachievers will ship products like the iPhone. Paying extra for the later make sense if your business model is to ship innovation.
> I'd much, much, much rather have one proficient, in my timezone developer at 200k.
Yes, but do you think you'll get proficient developers on the west coast for just 200k, when unicorn startups and FAANGs pay at least twice that for great people?
For the fully loaded cost of one really good developer in the Bay Area (400k) you can get four equally good developers anywhere in Europe (I'm not even talking Eastern Europe here), who will happily shuffle their schedule to accomodate a few evening zoom calls or reply to a few mails.
The talent pool in this industry is global, and it's extremely hot everywhere, but ignoring purchasing power parity is just self-deception.
>> Preferably, I would like to hire senior developers instead, but they are too expensive for my budget.
I think you will find you will save money in the long run if you hire senior developers if you actually do require senior-level development skills instead of expecting junior developers to do the same work for lower pay.
> There are plenty of devs outside of Silicon Valley. They don't have to look halfway across the world to reduce their costs.
Are those devs currently unemployed and waiting for the phone to ring? If they're going to be headhunted out of the current jobs they'll have to make it worth their while. Conversely their current employers may make them counter-offers. The end result being that overall cost of hiring that person can be significantly higher than initially anticipated. If there was an abundant supply of potential workers the wages would face a natural downward pressure. Even in Silicon Valley...
> In my experience, the 10x programmer is a bit of a myth
It's at least a unicorn, so companies shouldn't worry about hiring any 10x developers because they are THAT rare.
What they should do is avoid the developers that actually cost productivity. I'm a 10x developer compared to someone else not because I'm 10x average but because there is a 1/10th average dev there.
I'd say try to find the people who are just way over average (2x devs) and pay them twice the money if necessary. The problem is finding these people and making sure you aren't paying someone average twice the pay.
> ...if you double salaries, more developers will show up fairly quickly.
Because throwing money at a problem is always the best way to solve it, right? Why would anyone consider hiring the type of developer they actually need?
Here's the inconvenient truth about startups in the Bay Area... lots of them have basic CRUD apps with little to no traffic that a self-taught programmer out of high school could build. They don't need "engineers" with CS degrees from top schools who are Google or Facebook material.
> I need three devs and I can afford to pay each $X.
Okay so far, but if market prices dicatate that they could hire four devs for $X0.7, then wouldn't it make sense to do that? Or still hire three devs at $X0.7 while reducing the company burn rate and extend their runway?
Don't get me wrong, as an employee I'd be thrilled if an employer wanted to overpay me in relation to my peers (meaning those who do what I do, where I do it), but I'm not going to expect it.
> Why is experience valued for outside hires of CEOs but not as much for programmers?
In my experience, it’s that younger devs are cheaper, much cheaper, than older devs. Most software development is easy enough that you don’t need someone with 20 years experience. I can hire 2 or 3 people for the same price. There’s always a budget for resources, and that budget is usually as small as it needs to be. Web dev, CRUD apps, mobile apps are the norm, not Facebook scale. The tools are mature enough that a 20-25 year old can do the development, and their salary expectations are much lower.
> Willing to work at the salary that employers want to ideally pay? No.
I am not quite so sure my immigrant coworkers make noticeably less than I do, although I cannot really validate this claim either as I don't ask people who much they are paid.
> Employers see engineering as a cost sink and want to do everything possible to reduce budgetary pressures.
Yes and no. Employers see developers as a debt pool, because they are a cost factor unlike people in sales who actually generate revenue, but typically they see hiring, recruiting, and retention as even more expensive and riskier endeavors.
That drives all kinds of counter-intuitive behaviors regarding expenses and developers. Companies are typically willing to hire more developers than they need, because hiring is expensive and isn't always quick. Companies are also willing to prioritize slower more expensive technologies that require more developers so long as it means a reduction in recruitment and hiring risks.
I find that process horribly broken. Why is it so hard and deceptively untrustworthy to hire people generally in software? I don't believe it is the hiring process that is to blame, but rather the candidate pool in consideration for the required skills or experience.
> The problem is that finding those 6 experienced devs is _HARD_. And they're usually very expensive and know their value.
It's harder than finding uncaring juniors, sure.
But if you need 40+6 people, or 6 experienced people, that's nearly 8x salary.
In silicon valley money, you'll need to pay those uncaring juniors about 150K.
I guarantee you that you can very easily find those 6 experienced people in a few weeks if you're offering over $1M/yr to them. In a month you can staff all 6 positions.
If you're saying you want ~8x performance but not interested in paying ~8x salary.. then yes, it's harder to find the people.
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