[Cymen]

I've been contracting lately and I'm on two active contracts. One of the two is winding down. I've been billing at $155/hour via an agency (to be clear, their fee added on top of that $155). They offered me $90,000 salary to go employee. They upped that to $100,000 when I said no (I thought we were done but I said no again). Their thinking is they can take advantage of the situation to get cheap engineering staff.

If you're running a startup and thinking that now you can get cheap senior engineers, you might want to consider that it might be true for those who aren't careful with their finances. However, the talent you attract with this method is going to leave as soon as they find a better offer.

I don't think most management teams are like this one but I'm amazed by the short term thinking. Professionally, I can't really call them on this behavior but I'm glad to have been saving for financial independence (now is the time to go back to working on my own things and yes, I do have a multi-year runway).

[battery_cowboy]

Get an engineer for a year or two at the cut-rate price and once they've gotten ingrained into your org and code base they'll head off when (if?) the economy recovers. Not very forward-thinking.

[tonyedgecombe]

There is no guarantee those high salaries will come back quickly or at all. This event might well usher in a more cost-conscious era.

[battery_cowboy]

Maybe, but right now it's too early to tell and a move like that, to take advantage of developers during this time, will hurt them nonetheless. I personally have been keeping track of companies I've applied for to see how they treat people during the worst times, right now, and I won't work for a company like that. I'm sure there are other developers who would do the same.