[winter_blue]

> I found great difficulty finding a mid-career developer for the 130-150k range that it started making an "investment hire" feel like a viable alternative.

Wow, are talented developer really that hard to find? (Especially, considering you're offering 130-150k.)

Are you insistent on a developer being "mid-career" (I interpret that as having "years of experience") -- or would you accept a highly talented who has just begun career (e.g. a recent CS grad)?

[cairo140]

I felt similarly incredulous when we first started searching. I'll add some details for color.

Our hiring needs didn't feel too crazy to me. We were a multi-million dollar a year e-commerce shop, I was the first in-house technical hire, and we wanted to expand the team for personnel redundancy.

Ideally, we wanted someone who would be capable of running a business-critical website. On the technical side, I was hoping for a full stack of skills (top to bottom web app security, server ops, managing technical vendor relationships and integrating third-party modules, zero downtime rollouts, performance and architecture, metrics/instrumentation, and fully-independent backend and HTML/CSS/JS skills to build a secure and pixel-perfect feature beginning to end). Plus, we wanted an early technical hire to be able to work the indirectly technical parts, including technical hiring, capacity planning, and expectations management.

None of this felt to me like we were asking for something crazy unreasonable, but you don't learn a good enough coverage of this to independently steer a ship of this scale until a few years on the job. You can learn bits and pieces on the fly with the documentation around, but it's both risky and slow. Given the hiring climate, it was a risk we ending up being comfortable taking, but it fell short of what would be ideal.

In response to some remarks about adjusting our expectations (remote work, higher salary), our particular situation was not doable for remote---there was zero 100% remote staff among 30+ FTEs and none of our workflow was set up for it---although I wish I had influenced the organization of work in more formative stages of the company to optimize more for remote given the personnel advantages. Regarding salary, it's very hard to increase salary past $150k+ because I found it very hard to publicize it in a way that meaningfully increased the quality of candidates we found entering our funnel. I wish there were a job site for "will pay very well above market for strong candidates".

[PopeOfNope]

Just out of curiosity, What's your hiring process look like?

We were a multi-million dollar a year e-commerce shop

top to bottom web app security, server ops, managing technical vendor relationships and integrating third-party modules, zero downtime rollouts, performance and architecture, metrics/instrumentation, and fully-independent backend and HTML/CSS/JS skills to build a secure and pixel-perfect feature beginning to end

Even at a lower end startup not making multimillion dollars, you've just described 4-6 engineer's worth of talents for 1.5x of a single developer's salary. I look at that list and think I'm never going to get a decent night's sleep while in your employ.

[cairo140]

We gave candidates an option of a take-home screen (build a web app that consumes our single-endpoint JSON/XML API and renders content) or a live coding exercise (implement a least-recently-used key value cache to store 100 entries). Folks who could basically code did a 3/4 day onsite that included a code review of their interview project or an applied exercise if they did the live coding. Offer out within 24 hours after the onsite. Any recommendations to improve that process would be much appreciated.

Thanks for the feedback about the 4-6 engineer's worth of talents. It's good to know, and we realized a similar thing and pared down the JD to be less oppressive-sounding.

Sleep and balance was important to the team (I personally averaged around 35-45 hours a week, working one weekend and being called in maybe a half dozen times over a year and a half; the system mostly runs itself), but we didn't find a good way to surface it in the description. Any suggestions on this is appreciated too. I struggled in that when we removed or played down aspects of the job, or emphasized work-life balance, we just got more folks who were seriously green in some parts (front-end devs who can pull together jQuery but have never deployed their own code or had to write backwards-compatible apps).

[PopeOfNope]

That's a decent interview process, provided the focus of the code review and the coding exercise is collaborative in nature. When I interviewed at IFTTT, they did their live coding exercise especially well. I never felt like I was being given an arbitrary pop quiz. It was a series of actual problems you might face on the job (a bunch of string replacement scenarios, if I remember correctly). The environment was more akin to pair programming with a remote co-worker than an interview. Instead of strictly evaluating and overlooking, my interviewer worked through the problem with me and even wrote part of the code. I didn't make it past that first live coding exercise, either. They wanted someone with deep JS knowledge and mine didn't go deep enough. They were honest and respectful, even when delivering a rejection. If I ever decided to move back to SF, I wouldn't hesitate to interview with them again.

Sleep and balance was important to the team ... but we didn't find a good way to surface it in the description.

That's a tough one. Any company you ask will say they're great on work/life balance. What else are they going to say? 'No, we're going to work you 80 hours a week every week. If we ever hit crunch mode, say goodbye to your weekends!' The only thing I can think of is to show them that everybody goes home at 5pm by having the 3/4 day onsite start later in the day and end at the same time everybody goes home. It also gives the added benefit of allowing the interviewee to interact with everybody as a group.

front-end devs who can pull together jQuery but have never deployed their own code

For what it's worth, that's pretty standard in web development. I've deployed code through beanstalk or jenkins, but devops sets that up. I've also deployed side projects to my own servers, but that's a whole different ball of wax compared to deploying to a corporate data center with load balancers. I wouldn't trust a frontend jquery guy to set up those kinds of deploy environments. It's a completely different discipline and field.

[duderific]

Yes, it is really hard to find talented developers. I am a developer who interviews developer candidates at my company, and we only end up giving an offer to maybe one in five candidates. Our standards are fairly high but not ridiculously so. We are desperate for developers, but not to the point where we want to hire someone who we feel like would be dragging us down.

[ryandrake]

Instead of hiring a developer that would drag you down, did you consider offering more money? When people say there's a shortage of developers, or that they find it really hard to find developers, my guess is that they have to add "at the salary I'm offering" to the end of the statement.

I was car shopping a few months ago, and I found there's a dire shortage of brand new $10K BMWs.

[boomshucka]

Seriously. Virtually all people complaining about hiring are way off base on compensation. If they were to increase (sometimes they literally need to double) comp, they'd see things get a lot easier.

[PopeOfNope]

When people say there's a shortage of developers, or that they find it really hard to find developers, my guess is that they have to add "at the salary I'm offering" to the end of the statement.

Or they have a hiring process and that weeds out top performers. And/or they have a hiring funnel that appeals to the bottom of the barrel.

[ryandrake]

I'd agree if they were talking bout "top" developers. But, not everyone needs top developers. Lots of people are simply saying We can't find developers, period, which is baffling, until you find out what they're offering in terms of comp.

[PopeOfNope]

Tomato, tomahto. He said "talented" developers and he also said they make offers to 1 in 5 candidates. Based on that, it sounds like they have a steady pool of candidates, so by definition they can find "developers." They reject 80% of them for some reason. Either their hiring process weeds out good candidates, their funnel isn't attracting the right kinds of devs to begin with, or there's an X factor, like they're located in an expensive city with the highest concentration of software companies on the planet (ie: lots of competition for anyone who can even spell fizzbuzz).

Or all three, which was my experience with about a dozen different companies in SF last October. I chose to take the job where I wasn't humiliated during the interview.

[ryandrake]

> I chose to take the job where I wasn't humiliated during the interview.

It's funny how this is a legitimate filter, from the job-seeker's point of view. And, by "funny" I mean "a sad testament to SV tech interviews".

[mycelium]

Is $150k for a strong full-stack midcareer developer really like trying to get a $10k BMW? What compensation range would you shoot for?

We're shopping in that compensation range and my experience has been exactly like cairo140's above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9964934

[ryandrake]

Keep going up until the candidate pool improves? Just a personal anecdote: Even though I loved writing software, I moved up and away from development (after 12+ years) mostly because of the salary ceiling we all inevitably eventually hit. But I keep my skills sharp and would always go back for the right price. $150K would definitely not be the right price, at least not in the Bay Area. My guess is there are tons of guys like this out there.

[mycelium]

Thanks for the willingness to discuss actual numbers. Using the BLS stats tool that falsestprophet linked below [1] I dug up some numbers. This is for the the "Software Developers, Applications" occupation:

    Area                               median      75%ile      90%ile
    Chicago, IL Metropolitan           $88,630     $109,640    $126,370
    Los Angeles, CA Metropolitan       $102,310    $126,340    $150,320
    San Francisco, CA Metropolitan     $112,570    $143,390    $174,120
    San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara CA  $137,710    $166,280    >$187,000

I'm from the midwest so my frame of reference is where $150k will get you well into in the 90s percentile-wise. I'm conducting my hunt in the LA area. And just so we're on the same page I included Bay Area numbers. Is $180-200k (on the 190 to 200 side) closer to the right number, with the Bay Area as a frame of reference?

[1] http://data.bls.gov/oes/search.jsp?data_tool=OES

[geebee]

I've seen those numbers as well, as part of a regional roundup on US News Best Jobs.

One very interesting realization I had looking through the data is that software development, at the median, isn't an especially well paid field. Dental Hygenists in SF earn almost as much at the median, and registered nurses earn much more.

Overall, I think a big part of why this "shortage" exists is that the work is very difficult for the pay, and that career stability and age related employment issues may actually be considerably worse.

I know this is hard for employers to accept, but salaries may have to rise dramatically before people with citizenship or residency status that allows for career choice are willing to commit to software development. For now, I really do think one reason we are able to staff these positions at "market rate" is that we have created a visa program that essentially prevents a large number of tech workers from changing fields (i.e.., there are serious obstacles to coming to the US on an H1B as a software developer and deciding to retrain as a dental hygienist, this kind of personal and professional freedom is not permitted under this visa).

[ryandrake]

Ahh, midwest changes the equation for sure. Maybe try disclosing a salary _range_ in the description? Without knowing the details of the job, it's hard to tell if there's something in the description driving interest away. If it's exactly like cairo140's job, it may be simply too much for a single person. Here's what he/she was asking for, and I'll take a stab at breaking it down into the fewest mere-mortal-sized job reqs that I can:

Role 1: top to bottom web app security, server ops, zero downtime rollouts, performance and architecture (shared)

Role 2: metrics/instrumentation, fully-independent backend, HTML/CSS/JS skills, integrating third-party modules, performance and architecture (shared)

Role 3: managing technical vendor relationships, work the indirectly technical parts, technical hiring, capacity planning, expectations management, performance and architecture (shared)

These are still three pretty loaded-up people! Even if there was one person capable of and willing to do this all, their current job title is likely "founder of their own startup".

[ryandrake]

Also, my guess would be that the median numbers reported by BLS include many people who have had the same job for 5-10 years and are being paid 2005-level salaries and not 2015 levels. In an upward-trending market, averages/medians over the entire employment base will under-estimate the current market rate.

[boomshucka]

Yes, it is. You can't just say "I should be able to get x for y". You are in dreamland, pure and simple.

[mycelium]

Help me out of dreamland. I've got some money. I want good help, but I'm a dev and this is my first time hiring. What compensation range would you expect for the type of developer in cairo140's description?

I'm in the midwest for reference, but hiring remotely in the bay area is legit too.

[ryandrake]

As someone else replied, cairo140 needs to break his job description into 4 separate job reqs. My guess is that he or she will probably not find a single person capable of or willing to wear all of those hats simultaneously, for any salary. The job description is totally unreasonable.

[boomshucka]

Try 250k and see the responses.