6 ms·

The $150k Solution

137 points by jcsalterego 15y ago

simoncpu 15y ago
I know I'll be downvoted for this, but the truth is, if these companies would offshore the jobs to Philippines or India, it easily becomes a $30K-50K/year solution. $50K is more than enough to attract senior devs who will run circles around their American counterparts.
- gvb 15y ago
  RTFA. They want developers to move to Austin. Developers in the Philippines or India need not apply (unless they have a greencard).
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- energytonic 15y ago
  The quality of work from a non-native almost never reaches that of a native. They might be willing to put in more hours, but most people will choose quality over quantity. Managing outsourced workers is expensive, and quite a hassle too. You will most certainly have to hold their hand much more than a native. Without significant oversight and hand holding, it's a recipe for disaster. In most successful outsourcing scenarios, there is a dedicated team to manage the outsourced workers. For every one success story with outsourcing, there are 50 failed and frustrated attempts.
- moocow01 15y ago
  "the truth is, if these companies would offshore the jobs to Philippines or India, it easily becomes a $30K-50K/year solution" - If this was a solution believe me the market would figure it out and reflect that. In fact if it was true, there wouldn't be any engineering jobs available in the US in that it would be uncompetitive to have engineers in the US. Outsourcing has its places but it is not a magical solution where costs are dramatically cheaper - in many cases companies are figuring out the hard way that it is dramatically more expensive.
  - simoncpu 15y ago
    "If this was a solution believe me the market would figure it out and reflect that. In fact if it was true, there wouldn't be any engineering jobs available in the US in that it would be uncompetitive to have engineers in the US." Isn't this what's already happening right now? The US is still competitive only because of the Capitalist structure that is already in place. Obama and other Occupy(tm) Socialists are destroying that, and soon you won't have any jobs left. p.s.: Most of us from the 3rd world would like the US to keep its superpower status, to balance the threat of China. :)
    - spamizbad 15y ago
      Obama and OWS (which I wouldn't lump together) are a red herring to this discussion. Unless the laws have changed dramatically in the last few years, there was never any barriers in place contracting labor outside the US assuming you paid them as contractors. If anything, US labor laws favor outsourcing over insourcing "native" contractors due to tax laws surrounding 1099 Technology workers that were put in place in the early 90s. So really, despite the fact that scales are tipped in favor of foreign contracted labor (cheaper rate, less tax and legal considerations) businesses STILL prefer to hire local labor. To me, that's very telling -- it has a lot to do with the fact that much of the foreign talent, like the US talent, is already gainfully employed and tough to access.
- jtbigwoo 15y ago
  These companies are so unsure of their ability to judge the output of their workers that they're requiring their people to relocate to Austin. What makes you think they'd be able to find a great person and manage them effectively on the other side of the planet? P.S. don't ask for downvotes.
- illumin8 15y ago
  Please, tell me, what senior engineers in the Phillipines or India have 15+ years of software development experience. They don't exist, because the software industry has only been there for the last 5-10 years. So please, take this "our senior developers (with only 2-3 years of real experience) are just as good as your top US developers" idea and stick it where the sun don't shine. There is a huge benefit to hiring people that have been eating, sleeping, and breathing code since age 10. Our 15 year senior developers might only be 25 years old, but they can code circles around any of your 2-3 year experience engineers.
  - rwolf 15y ago
    On a tangent, does it really take 15 years before you can start tossing about the phrase "senior"? The only job ads I see asking for that kind of time appear to be aerospace/government, so I'm curious if it's just the startup bubble making me think 7 years is fine?
    - jarek 15y ago
      In digital agency world "senior" is usually two to four years.
    - brianm 15y ago
      To have "senior" appended to your title, no -- that is basically nothing, and means as much. To be a genuinely "senior developer | engineer | programmer" in the eyes of others it probably takes at least 15 to 20 years of experience building and running things. Not all of that needs to be professional - writing door games in high school counts.
  - plinkplonk 15y ago
    "Please, tell me, what senior engineers in the Phillipines or India have 15+ years of software development experience." I do. Started working as a software dev in 1994. Moved to Bangalore to take up another sw dev position at CyberCash India (an offshore office of a Virginia based ecommerce product company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash,_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash,_Inc . ) in 1998. C on VAX Unix. Those were the days. Lived and worked in the US for a while before returning to India (and have no plans of going back to the USA :) ). " They don't exist, because the software industry has only been there for the last 5-10 years." You have no idea what you are talking about. Infosys was founded in 1981, for example. I never worked for Infosys or any of the large outsourced services dev companies, but the idea that there are no developers in India with 15+ years experience is rubbish. (Not getting into whether 'number of years of experience' is a valid metric for judging sw talent). And as for "living and breathing code", I started programming when I was 10 years old, on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the Eighties, writing games in ZX-80 assembler. We even had a club for Spectrum devs - in a small town in South India, in the eighties. I have many classmates who still code every day (though they have fancy titles like "Senior Architect" these days). Did most of my generation of coders move into management? Sure they did. Are the good developers swamped by tonnes of clueless people flocking to the "hot career"? Sure they are. But none of that is specific to India. If you have to deal with dumb Indians off a boat who can't speak English but seem to take your jobs, I sympathize. There are a lot of dumb Indian devs. But I've also had to deal with a lot of dumb American devs who think they are automatically superior to all Indian devs "just because". Plenty of those too. (all this is just to counter your idea that people with 15 years of experience writing code don't exist here and "the software industry has only been there for the last 5-10 years" (roll eyes). Please educate yourself before making such emphatic (and false!) statements.
- aravind 15y ago
  If the company feels the work cannot be done by a local worker telecommuting , how can they expect it to be done by someone sitting half the world away.It is no longer about how good native / non-native developers are - it seems to be more about is the developer at a place where I can meet him when I want to
- funkah 15y ago
  If my Grandma had balls she'd be my Grandpa.
- danssig 15y ago
  Total nonsense. The good developers in Philippines or India don't work for $30k-$50k/year any more than we do. They earn close to our rate in country or relocate to Europe/the US.
- geebee 15y ago
  I'd strongly encourage you to consider why you're likely to be downvoted before posting. I think that a milder version of what you just claimed, backed up with some data or at least some personal experiences, would have been a good contribution to this discussion. You might have been upmodded. I tried (well, was forced by management) to remotely lead an offshore team (in India). The project was quite complicated (storing, retrieving, and interpreting the results of a large quadratic programming model with millions of variables), and the programmers were paid $12/hr. The first pass was a disaster. I described the problem generally, and got nowhere. I then asked them to use a hashmap to store the results, and they responded ".NET doesn't have a hashmap." I explained that .NET must have some kind of data structure that would allow us to retrieve a variable's value based on it's name or some other lookup key, and that's the approach I recommended they take, though honestly, they're the ones spending hours on the code, so they were free to take an intelligent approach the problem and shouldn't feel obligated to take any approach I suggested, though I was happy to help. A week later, I got code based on arrays. They were iterating through one array to get the variable name's index, then looking it up in a different array. And doing this millions of times. So you'd think I'd soured on offshoring, right? Not really, I'd soured on trying to find good programmers with a decent math background for $12/hr. We ended up hiring two people located in India, one with an MS and another with a PhD (both from good US universities). I think we paid an annualized rate of $65,000-$75,000 each, though I don't really remember, it was around that much. That was considerably less than we would have paid in the US, and they were good programmers - even better, I was able to describe a need rather than a solution, and they were definitely able to fill in the gaps and get it done. So, could they "run circles around their American counterparts?" Well, that all depends on how you define counterparts. If you go by dollar-to-dollar, I'd say so - it's unlikely that you'd hire someone in the US who could do this for such a low salary (though plenty of grad students here do as "research assistants" it for a tenth that salary and a tuition waiver). If you go by salary percentile, I'd say no way. The guys we hired were good, but it'd be stupid to claim that they'd run circles around the top tier of US-based programmers. The top tier in the US is very very strong. Overall, I'm not sure it was worth it, though I wouldn't claim it was a bad experience (like the $12/hr programmer experience, which was definitely a bad one). The company still had to pay me and other developers the higher salaries to oversee the work, converting us into "architects" who managed overseas teams - and I could have just written the damn code myself. We were considerably less agile, and our local people (including me) were less knowledgeable of the code base even though we were spending time reviewing. At the same time, it's hard to hire anyone with these skills, so if they're available overseas, I'd say it's a reasonable option. Just whatever you do, don't fall into the trap that it will be "easy" to hire "top" developers for vastly lower salaries who will "run circles" around Americans. I do think that you can, with substantial effort, hire strong developers for somewhat lower salaries who will perform well, though you will (in my experience) incur enough overhead that it makes more sense to do this to access top talent than to save money.
gvb 15y ago
I am having a guilty pleasure Schadenfreude moment. I was looking for a new company 2-4 years ago because the company I was working for turned from being an engineering-centric company to being a paper-centric company. The companies I contacted and interviewed with professed to be interested in hiring me, but were unwilling to do so due to the uncertain economic climate. Two years ago, one of the companies I targeted got over their fear of the unknown and hired me. Now all the companies that were unwilling to take a chance are lamenting the fact that they cannot hire engineers. I have but one word for those companies: karma (is a bitch).
danko 15y ago
There have been a metric ton of these articles, and there are going to be a metric ton more. And that's great, because it means that engineers are becoming increasingly aware of the market for their own service, which means that they're better prepared to get compensated properly. In the end, any negotiation boils down into a pure tug-of-war, where both sides pull as hard as they possibly can, and the ribbon ends where it ends based off of the relative leverages of the two parties. To this point, engineers have been handicapped not just by not knowing their leverage, but not knowing they were even playing the game in the first place. That seems to be changing.
- danssig 15y ago
  I wish it were so but just look in this thread. It seems to actually be dominated by workers talking like CEO's (i.e. "engineers should be getting less because of the following 10 intangible nonsensical reasons...").
Nate75Sanders 15y ago
"There’s a popular theory that people are most productive when they all sit together in big echoey rooms at communal tables with no dividers between workspaces. I think that’s horseshit. The only people who are “productive” in those settings, in my experience, are the type of management people who feel compelled to come over and interrupt you in person rather than send you a fucking email you can look at once you’re done tracking down a bug six levels of callbacks deep. " yes, a thousand times I realize that we have large variance in both what people work on and how people work on things, but with my personality and most of the work I've done over the past several years, I need a quiet place with no disturbances to get my head wrapped deeply around what I'm working on. It's amazing how management will spin any little thing to gain control over the workplace. While I'm ranting, if any managers/other people designing spaces are listening, use soft/indirect lighting. Overhead fluorescent lights that I can't turn off are the devil.
- nicw 15y ago
  Inversely, I think it's up to each one of us to communicate how we should be interrupted when we're busy. If we don't say "headphones means send me an email" then our co-workers don't know that we're in heads-down-mode and they'll keep walking over.
  - Nate75Sanders 15y ago
    That's all fine and good, but the types of management that Garann is talking about in this article aren't your "co-workers". They'll interrupt you whenever they feel like it because you belong to them.
    - natrius 15y ago
      Is this actually a useful observation to make? How many people have sociopaths for bosses? Why haven't you left?
      - Maven911 15y ago
        Its more common then you think, and not everyone can afford to leave their job for something as relatively insignificant as this - i.e. its annoying but its tolerable and the bills gotta get paid
LiveTheDream 15y ago
> If your company makes something entirely uninteresting, that’s fine. We need useful software to fill niches, or our whole industry suffers. If you make a boring thing, there are two things you can do to still attract good talent. First, if you don’t need a senior dev, don’t hire one. Hire a junior person, give them the chance to architect small changes to the system, help them grow as an engineer. If you do need a senior person, hire them, but carve out 10% or 20% time for them to do open source stuff or personal projects or whatever. This is a really smart idea.
dkarl 15y ago
It's funny how people insist that companies should offer a gazillion dollars to persuade developers to relocate to their shitty town, when it makes much more sense for companies to avoid hiring people who think it's a shitty town in the first place. There's no point in importing people who hate living in Austin and will jump at the first opportunity to go back "home" to the Bay Area. If you think you're owed a premium for living anywhere but San Francisco, then economically speaking, that's where you ought to be. Not to mention nobody in Austin wants to work with you if you're just going to badmouth the town and brag about how much you're paid to put up with it. Sorry to break it to you, darling, but getting stuck somewhere you hate because you're underwater on your house and have "wedding debt" is no reason for anybody to pay you more. If you're miserable here, that's your business. Austin companies are, quite sensibly, looking for people who will enjoy living and working in Austin.
- shasta 15y ago
  Do women prefer "darling" over "sugar tits" now?
  - kariatx 15y ago
    I'm still trying to figure out why there aren't more women in tech.
    - a3camero 15y ago
      Although you may have just figured out why there aren't more women in tech in Austin.
      - dkarl 15y ago
        After proclaiming that she deserves extra money to compensate her for the displeasure of working in Austin, she shouldn't expect to feel welcome here. She made her bed, and she can lie in it. The hostility and disrespect I communicated were intentional, not motivated by her sex, and, in my opinion, a modest and proportional response to what she wrote. @a3camero, I admit that as someone from the south, I should know better than to say "darling." I reached for a patronizing term and used it without ism-checking it. Serves me right for being nasty. It's hard to be offensive to one person without inflicting unintentional and regrettable collateral damage. I apologize.
bluedevil2k 15y ago
Austin is always on the top 10 best economies list, always on the top 10 tech hiring list, and Round Rock is one of the fastest growing cities in the US. This author is definitely in the minority in her feelings about the city. If you know where to look and have the skills, the jobs in the $150k range can be found. If you're thinking of moving here, high end homes in the best schools are only $130/sq ft.
- bostonOU 15y ago
  For what it's worth, I grew up around Austin and have absolutely no desire to move back.
- bretthoerner 15y ago
  It's not about a dislike of Austin. This is a reply to the article about CEOs trying to lure bay area devs to the city with everything but a proper salary and actually interesting work.
- dsolomon 15y ago
  If there were developer jobs paying that much, there'd be a line of people at the front door every day wanting to get hired. Quality people are easy to find, a quality company is not.
cppsnob 15y ago
I normally wouldn't respond to a post like this but when it comes to career advice, many of you who have not been in the workforce long should hear the counterpoint. The Austin businesspeople are right: folks who want to make a lifestyle choice of going to Austin from California should get paid less to do it. On average, they'll earn more than most people in Austin, but less than their counterparts in Silicon Valley. I see no problem with this. It's fair. You usually only get to choose where you want to live or where you want to work. The other one is a compromise. That's life. Compromises. Why would a businessperson not take advantage of this when someone wants to live in Austin? Maybe the OP doesn't want to live there but a lot of people do. Working remotely is a compromise further: you will get paid less, you'll get promoted less, and you will be one of the first laid off. The OP can rant all she wants about "[companies lacking] the tools to communicate remotely, [probably] can’t communicate at all", but the all of us who have done this can tell you that remote workers are almost never as productive. They only work for "guy who takes the app and ports it to Android because we don't care to do it here" type of projects. 1-3 person projects. Large projects are hard enough to manage with the people in the office, and going remote is a nightmare. I've even seen 10 year experts on the specific codebase try to work remotely and it be completely unproductive when they're remote. There will be exceptions. The one guy who's amazing as a remote worker. Sales people are always an exception. And of course, all of this turns on its head when the company is not desirable. A crap company will pay you a lot to work remotely, then go out of business 6 months later. Generally though, what I've spelled out here is the way it is. Here's a proposal, given that she's in Austin already, the OP should demand $150K from those companies or her current employer based on this blog post. Tell us what happens over the next 3 months, 6 months, 2 years.
- mjdwitt 15y ago
  While it may be correct that "folks who want to make a lifestyle choice of going to Austin from California should get paid less to do it," that is not what this article is about. Instead, the author is talking about Austin companies trying to bring developers there that otherwise would be somewhere else (i.e. people who do not want to live in Austin). In that case, its a simple matter of value to the potential employee as to how much extra they need to be paid in order to relocate to somewhere that they had no intentions of living. edit: repeating myself
alecco 15y ago
From the original article, hilarious cluelesness: Austin's supply crunch for software developers was bad enough by September to prompt 25 Central Texas tech executives to fly to California in search of new talent. They offered free beer and pulled pork tacos at the Mighty, a warehouse bar in San Francisco, to attract a couple of dozen job candidates. The next night, they headed to Sunnyvale , in the heart of Silicon Valley, for a Tex-Mex happy hour that drew another 45 potential recruits. http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin-battles-shortage-in-high-end-software-engineering-2024970.html?viewAsSinglePage=true http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin-battles-...
jacquelineslife 15y ago
Visit a job board of a SF based company and you'll find plenty of open positions. There is a supply and demand issue in cities around the world - not just Austin. There are some great companies here who have no problem attracting talent. The companies that are struggling the most (and making the most noise, unfortunately) are the ones that simply don't get it. They throw money at numerous organizations in town asking them to "fix" this "problem" they have. As a result, we've ended up with lots of articles like the one Garann refers to in the Statesman lately. I'm not denying that there is a problem here. I'm just stating that it really isn't specific to Austin.
smallegan 15y ago
Question: If you were hiring a new developer and you did a Google "background check" and found this article. Would you hire her?
- garann 15y ago
  That's an excellent question. I hope you get some answers soon, because if there are companies who wouldn't hire someone on the basis of her belief that people in her industry shouldn't be treated as commodities, I want to avoid them.
  - smallegan 15y ago
    I'm not sure I would hire her... she makes some very valid points but in a very vulgar way. Based on a quick search she uses the word fuck 5 times and shit 9 times in one article. Overall the article seems pretty negative and I'm not saying all developers need to fart rainbows and whistle dixie all day long but I've seen a few jaded developers kill the productivity of an otherwise great team of developers in the past and I'm not sure it is worth the risk.
- jaylevitt 15y ago
  If not, would you also not hire Zed Shaw? If not, explain why.

137 points by jcsalterego 15y ago

I know I'll be downvoted for this, but the truth is, if these companies would offshore the jobs to Philippines or India, it easily becomes a $30K-50K/year solution. $50K is more than enough to attract senior devs who will run circles around their American counterparts.

gvb 15y ago
RTFA. They want developers to move to Austin. Developers in the Philippines or India need not apply (unless they have a greencard).
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
energytonic 15y ago
The quality of work from a non-native almost never reaches that of a native. They might be willing to put in more hours, but most people will choose quality over quantity. Managing outsourced workers is expensive, and quite a hassle too. You will most certainly have to hold their hand much more than a native. Without significant oversight and hand holding, it's a recipe for disaster. In most successful outsourcing scenarios, there is a dedicated team to manage the outsourced workers. For every one success story with outsourcing, there are 50 failed and frustrated attempts.
moocow01 15y ago
"the truth is, if these companies would offshore the jobs to Philippines or India, it easily becomes a $30K-50K/year solution" - If this was a solution believe me the market would figure it out and reflect that. In fact if it was true, there wouldn't be any engineering jobs available in the US in that it would be uncompetitive to have engineers in the US. Outsourcing has its places but it is not a magical solution where costs are dramatically cheaper - in many cases companies are figuring out the hard way that it is dramatically more expensive.
- simoncpu 15y ago
  "If this was a solution believe me the market would figure it out and reflect that. In fact if it was true, there wouldn't be any engineering jobs available in the US in that it would be uncompetitive to have engineers in the US." Isn't this what's already happening right now? The US is still competitive only because of the Capitalist structure that is already in place. Obama and other Occupy(tm) Socialists are destroying that, and soon you won't have any jobs left. p.s.: Most of us from the 3rd world would like the US to keep its superpower status, to balance the threat of China. :)
  - spamizbad 15y ago
    Obama and OWS (which I wouldn't lump together) are a red herring to this discussion. Unless the laws have changed dramatically in the last few years, there was never any barriers in place contracting labor outside the US assuming you paid them as contractors. If anything, US labor laws favor outsourcing over insourcing "native" contractors due to tax laws surrounding 1099 Technology workers that were put in place in the early 90s. So really, despite the fact that scales are tipped in favor of foreign contracted labor (cheaper rate, less tax and legal considerations) businesses STILL prefer to hire local labor. To me, that's very telling -- it has a lot to do with the fact that much of the foreign talent, like the US talent, is already gainfully employed and tough to access.
jtbigwoo 15y ago
These companies are so unsure of their ability to judge the output of their workers that they're requiring their people to relocate to Austin. What makes you think they'd be able to find a great person and manage them effectively on the other side of the planet? P.S. don't ask for downvotes.
illumin8 15y ago
Please, tell me, what senior engineers in the Phillipines or India have 15+ years of software development experience. They don't exist, because the software industry has only been there for the last 5-10 years. So please, take this "our senior developers (with only 2-3 years of real experience) are just as good as your top US developers" idea and stick it where the sun don't shine. There is a huge benefit to hiring people that have been eating, sleeping, and breathing code since age 10. Our 15 year senior developers might only be 25 years old, but they can code circles around any of your 2-3 year experience engineers.
- rwolf 15y ago
  On a tangent, does it really take 15 years before you can start tossing about the phrase "senior"? The only job ads I see asking for that kind of time appear to be aerospace/government, so I'm curious if it's just the startup bubble making me think 7 years is fine?
  - jarek 15y ago
    In digital agency world "senior" is usually two to four years.
  - brianm 15y ago
    To have "senior" appended to your title, no -- that is basically nothing, and means as much. To be a genuinely "senior developer | engineer | programmer" in the eyes of others it probably takes at least 15 to 20 years of experience building and running things. Not all of that needs to be professional - writing door games in high school counts.
- plinkplonk 15y ago
  "Please, tell me, what senior engineers in the Phillipines or India have 15+ years of software development experience." I do. Started working as a software dev in 1994. Moved to Bangalore to take up another sw dev position at CyberCash India (an offshore office of a Virginia based ecommerce product company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash,_Inc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash,_Inc . ) in 1998. C on VAX Unix. Those were the days. Lived and worked in the US for a while before returning to India (and have no plans of going back to the USA :) ). " They don't exist, because the software industry has only been there for the last 5-10 years." You have no idea what you are talking about. Infosys was founded in 1981, for example. I never worked for Infosys or any of the large outsourced services dev companies, but the idea that there are no developers in India with 15+ years experience is rubbish. (Not getting into whether 'number of years of experience' is a valid metric for judging sw talent). And as for "living and breathing code", I started programming when I was 10 years old, on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the Eighties, writing games in ZX-80 assembler. We even had a club for Spectrum devs - in a small town in South India, in the eighties. I have many classmates who still code every day (though they have fancy titles like "Senior Architect" these days). Did most of my generation of coders move into management? Sure they did. Are the good developers swamped by tonnes of clueless people flocking to the "hot career"? Sure they are. But none of that is specific to India. If you have to deal with dumb Indians off a boat who can't speak English but seem to take your jobs, I sympathize. There are a lot of dumb Indian devs. But I've also had to deal with a lot of dumb American devs who think they are automatically superior to all Indian devs "just because". Plenty of those too. (all this is just to counter your idea that people with 15 years of experience writing code don't exist here and "the software industry has only been there for the last 5-10 years" (roll eyes). Please educate yourself before making such emphatic (and false!) statements.
aravind 15y ago
If the company feels the work cannot be done by a local worker telecommuting , how can they expect it to be done by someone sitting half the world away.It is no longer about how good native / non-native developers are - it seems to be more about is the developer at a place where I can meet him when I want to
funkah 15y ago
If my Grandma had balls she'd be my Grandpa.
danssig 15y ago
Total nonsense. The good developers in Philippines or India don't work for $30k-$50k/year any more than we do. They earn close to our rate in country or relocate to Europe/the US.
geebee 15y ago
I'd strongly encourage you to consider why you're likely to be downvoted before posting. I think that a milder version of what you just claimed, backed up with some data or at least some personal experiences, would have been a good contribution to this discussion. You might have been upmodded. I tried (well, was forced by management) to remotely lead an offshore team (in India). The project was quite complicated (storing, retrieving, and interpreting the results of a large quadratic programming model with millions of variables), and the programmers were paid $12/hr. The first pass was a disaster. I described the problem generally, and got nowhere. I then asked them to use a hashmap to store the results, and they responded ".NET doesn't have a hashmap." I explained that .NET must have some kind of data structure that would allow us to retrieve a variable's value based on it's name or some other lookup key, and that's the approach I recommended they take, though honestly, they're the ones spending hours on the code, so they were free to take an intelligent approach the problem and shouldn't feel obligated to take any approach I suggested, though I was happy to help. A week later, I got code based on arrays. They were iterating through one array to get the variable name's index, then looking it up in a different array. And doing this millions of times. So you'd think I'd soured on offshoring, right? Not really, I'd soured on trying to find good programmers with a decent math background for $12/hr. We ended up hiring two people located in India, one with an MS and another with a PhD (both from good US universities). I think we paid an annualized rate of $65,000-$75,000 each, though I don't really remember, it was around that much. That was considerably less than we would have paid in the US, and they were good programmers - even better, I was able to describe a need rather than a solution, and they were definitely able to fill in the gaps and get it done. So, could they "run circles around their American counterparts?" Well, that all depends on how you define counterparts. If you go by dollar-to-dollar, I'd say so - it's unlikely that you'd hire someone in the US who could do this for such a low salary (though plenty of grad students here do as "research assistants" it for a tenth that salary and a tuition waiver). If you go by salary percentile, I'd say no way. The guys we hired were good, but it'd be stupid to claim that they'd run circles around the top tier of US-based programmers. The top tier in the US is very very strong. Overall, I'm not sure it was worth it, though I wouldn't claim it was a bad experience (like the $12/hr programmer experience, which was definitely a bad one). The company still had to pay me and other developers the higher salaries to oversee the work, converting us into "architects" who managed overseas teams - and I could have just written the damn code myself. We were considerably less agile, and our local people (including me) were less knowledgeable of the code base even though we were spending time reviewing. At the same time, it's hard to hire anyone with these skills, so if they're available overseas, I'd say it's a reasonable option. Just whatever you do, don't fall into the trap that it will be "easy" to hire "top" developers for vastly lower salaries who will "run circles" around Americans. I do think that you can, with substantial effort, hire strong developers for somewhat lower salaries who will perform well, though you will (in my experience) incur enough overhead that it makes more sense to do this to access top talent than to save money.

gvb 15y ago

I am having a guilty pleasure Schadenfreude moment. I was looking for a new company 2-4 years ago because the company I was working for turned from being an engineering-centric company to being a paper-centric company. The companies I contacted and interviewed with professed to be interested in hiring me, but were unwilling to do so due to the uncertain economic climate. Two years ago, one of the companies I targeted got over their fear of the unknown and hired me. Now all the companies that were unwilling to take a chance are lamenting the fact that they cannot hire engineers. I have but one word for those companies: karma (is a bitch).

danko 15y ago

There have been a metric ton of these articles, and there are going to be a metric ton more. And that's great, because it means that engineers are becoming increasingly aware of the market for their own service, which means that they're better prepared to get compensated properly. In the end, any negotiation boils down into a pure tug-of-war, where both sides pull as hard as they possibly can, and the ribbon ends where it ends based off of the relative leverages of the two parties. To this point, engineers have been handicapped not just by not knowing their leverage, but not knowing they were even playing the game in the first place. That seems to be changing.

danssig 15y ago
I wish it were so but just look in this thread. It seems to actually be dominated by workers talking like CEO's (i.e. "engineers should be getting less because of the following 10 intangible nonsensical reasons...").

Nate75Sanders 15y ago

"There’s a popular theory that people are most productive when they all sit together in big echoey rooms at communal tables with no dividers between workspaces. I think that’s horseshit. The only people who are “productive” in those settings, in my experience, are the type of management people who feel compelled to come over and interrupt you in person rather than send you a fucking email you can look at once you’re done tracking down a bug six levels of callbacks deep. " yes, a thousand times I realize that we have large variance in both what people work on and how people work on things, but with my personality and most of the work I've done over the past several years, I need a quiet place with no disturbances to get my head wrapped deeply around what I'm working on. It's amazing how management will spin any little thing to gain control over the workplace. While I'm ranting, if any managers/other people designing spaces are listening, use soft/indirect lighting. Overhead fluorescent lights that I can't turn off are the devil.

nicw 15y ago
Inversely, I think it's up to each one of us to communicate how we should be interrupted when we're busy. If we don't say "headphones means send me an email" then our co-workers don't know that we're in heads-down-mode and they'll keep walking over.
- Nate75Sanders 15y ago
  That's all fine and good, but the types of management that Garann is talking about in this article aren't your "co-workers". They'll interrupt you whenever they feel like it because you belong to them.
  - natrius 15y ago
    Is this actually a useful observation to make? How many people have sociopaths for bosses? Why haven't you left?
    - Maven911 15y ago
      Its more common then you think, and not everyone can afford to leave their job for something as relatively insignificant as this - i.e. its annoying but its tolerable and the bills gotta get paid

LiveTheDream 15y ago

> If your company makes something entirely uninteresting, that’s fine. We need useful software to fill niches, or our whole industry suffers. If you make a boring thing, there are two things you can do to still attract good talent. First, if you don’t need a senior dev, don’t hire one. Hire a junior person, give them the chance to architect small changes to the system, help them grow as an engineer. If you do need a senior person, hire them, but carve out 10% or 20% time for them to do open source stuff or personal projects or whatever. This is a really smart idea.

dkarl 15y ago

It's funny how people insist that companies should offer a gazillion dollars to persuade developers to relocate to their shitty town, when it makes much more sense for companies to avoid hiring people who think it's a shitty town in the first place. There's no point in importing people who hate living in Austin and will jump at the first opportunity to go back "home" to the Bay Area. If you think you're owed a premium for living anywhere but San Francisco, then economically speaking, that's where you ought to be. Not to mention nobody in Austin wants to work with you if you're just going to badmouth the town and brag about how much you're paid to put up with it. Sorry to break it to you, darling, but getting stuck somewhere you hate because you're underwater on your house and have "wedding debt" is no reason for anybody to pay you more. If you're miserable here, that's your business. Austin companies are, quite sensibly, looking for people who will enjoy living and working in Austin.

shasta 15y ago
Do women prefer "darling" over "sugar tits" now?
- kariatx 15y ago
  I'm still trying to figure out why there aren't more women in tech.
  - a3camero 15y ago
    Although you may have just figured out why there aren't more women in tech in Austin.
    - dkarl 15y ago
      After proclaiming that she deserves extra money to compensate her for the displeasure of working in Austin, she shouldn't expect to feel welcome here. She made her bed, and she can lie in it. The hostility and disrespect I communicated were intentional, not motivated by her sex, and, in my opinion, a modest and proportional response to what she wrote. @a3camero, I admit that as someone from the south, I should know better than to say "darling." I reached for a patronizing term and used it without ism-checking it. Serves me right for being nasty. It's hard to be offensive to one person without inflicting unintentional and regrettable collateral damage. I apologize.

bluedevil2k 15y ago

Austin is always on the top 10 best economies list, always on the top 10 tech hiring list, and Round Rock is one of the fastest growing cities in the US. This author is definitely in the minority in her feelings about the city. If you know where to look and have the skills, the jobs in the $150k range can be found. If you're thinking of moving here, high end homes in the best schools are only $130/sq ft.

bostonOU 15y ago
For what it's worth, I grew up around Austin and have absolutely no desire to move back.
bretthoerner 15y ago
It's not about a dislike of Austin. This is a reply to the article about CEOs trying to lure bay area devs to the city with everything but a proper salary and actually interesting work.
dsolomon 15y ago
If there were developer jobs paying that much, there'd be a line of people at the front door every day wanting to get hired. Quality people are easy to find, a quality company is not.

cppsnob 15y ago

I normally wouldn't respond to a post like this but when it comes to career advice, many of you who have not been in the workforce long should hear the counterpoint. The Austin businesspeople are right: folks who want to make a lifestyle choice of going to Austin from California should get paid less to do it. On average, they'll earn more than most people in Austin, but less than their counterparts in Silicon Valley. I see no problem with this. It's fair. You usually only get to choose where you want to live or where you want to work. The other one is a compromise. That's life. Compromises. Why would a businessperson not take advantage of this when someone wants to live in Austin? Maybe the OP doesn't want to live there but a lot of people do. Working remotely is a compromise further: you will get paid less, you'll get promoted less, and you will be one of the first laid off. The OP can rant all she wants about "[companies lacking] the tools to communicate remotely, [probably] can’t communicate at all", but the all of us who have done this can tell you that remote workers are almost never as productive. They only work for "guy who takes the app and ports it to Android because we don't care to do it here" type of projects. 1-3 person projects. Large projects are hard enough to manage with the people in the office, and going remote is a nightmare. I've even seen 10 year experts on the specific codebase try to work remotely and it be completely unproductive when they're remote. There will be exceptions. The one guy who's amazing as a remote worker. Sales people are always an exception. And of course, all of this turns on its head when the company is not desirable. A crap company will pay you a lot to work remotely, then go out of business 6 months later. Generally though, what I've spelled out here is the way it is. Here's a proposal, given that she's in Austin already, the OP should demand $150K from those companies or her current employer based on this blog post. Tell us what happens over the next 3 months, 6 months, 2 years.

mjdwitt 15y ago
While it may be correct that "folks who want to make a lifestyle choice of going to Austin from California should get paid less to do it," that is not what this article is about. Instead, the author is talking about Austin companies trying to bring developers there that otherwise would be somewhere else (i.e. people who do not want to live in Austin). In that case, its a simple matter of value to the potential employee as to how much extra they need to be paid in order to relocate to somewhere that they had no intentions of living. edit: repeating myself

alecco 15y ago

From the original article, hilarious cluelesness: Austin's supply crunch for software developers was bad enough by September to prompt 25 Central Texas tech executives to fly to California in search of new talent. They offered free beer and pulled pork tacos at the Mighty, a warehouse bar in San Francisco, to attract a couple of dozen job candidates. The next night, they headed to Sunnyvale , in the heart of Silicon Valley, for a Tex-Mex happy hour that drew another 45 potential recruits. http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin-battles-shortage-in-high-end-software-engineering-2024970.html?viewAsSinglePage=true http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin-battles-...

jacquelineslife 15y ago

Visit a job board of a SF based company and you'll find plenty of open positions. There is a supply and demand issue in cities around the world - not just Austin. There are some great companies here who have no problem attracting talent. The companies that are struggling the most (and making the most noise, unfortunately) are the ones that simply don't get it. They throw money at numerous organizations in town asking them to "fix" this "problem" they have. As a result, we've ended up with lots of articles like the one Garann refers to in the Statesman lately. I'm not denying that there is a problem here. I'm just stating that it really isn't specific to Austin.

smallegan 15y ago

Question: If you were hiring a new developer and you did a Google "background check" and found this article. Would you hire her?

garann 15y ago
That's an excellent question. I hope you get some answers soon, because if there are companies who wouldn't hire someone on the basis of her belief that people in her industry shouldn't be treated as commodities, I want to avoid them.
- smallegan 15y ago
  I'm not sure I would hire her... she makes some very valid points but in a very vulgar way. Based on a quick search she uses the word fuck 5 times and shit 9 times in one article. Overall the article seems pretty negative and I'm not saying all developers need to fart rainbows and whistle dixie all day long but I've seen a few jaded developers kill the productivity of an otherwise great team of developers in the past and I'm not sure it is worth the risk.
jaylevitt 15y ago
If not, would you also not hire Zed Shaw? If not, explain why.