Is it me or are developer jobs a total lottery?

the_syco

moycullen14 wrote: »

What about getting dragged in for a days worth of interviews and then rejecting you because your CV was unsuitable (hint: read the bl**dy CV BEFORE the interview).

On this; HR will get your CV, will only look for specific buzzwords (ignore CCNA, look for N+, etc), interview you, get people that they like, interview you, and then hand the CV to the person you'll be reporting to, and they'll then be looking at what they know is good (ignore N+ if person has CCNA, etc).

Basically, meeting with only HR and/or someone that will not be your boss is usually a waste of your time, imo.

matrim wrote: »

I've never found glassdoor good from an Irish perspective. Either the company isn't there or if it's a multinational the reviews are for offices in other countries

Can be useful if the company has just moved to Ireland, as you can be sure that all of its management will be from the "mother country" for the first while.

14ned

moycullen14 wrote: »

I think the problem with staying with one company is that you become dependent on that one copnay - often to the detriment of your transferrable skills. You will probably gain a huge amount of domain knowledge that may or may not be useful in your next employment.

You tend to lose perspective on the outside world. Your view of how software should be built, design, quality, development practices become those of the company rather than industry.

Of course this is a gross generalisation. I don't think anyone would would criticise someone who has spent the last 15 years at Google!

In the end, though, as a developer, all you have are your skills. You need to make sure these do not go stale. This can happen if you stay in the one role/company for too long.

Google is as bad as anywhere else and perhaps a little worse on institutionalisation, and on top of that those working at Google tend to believe that whatever Google does must be better than the average anywhere else, which is simply untrue, but rather a psychological consequence of working at the current top tech multinational (Microsoft employees were just as bad fifteen years ago).

From what very important Googlers have told me, Google's biggest dysfunction is on management and development processes, so what they've done is to build a very impressive suite of development automation tools which substantially increase development productivity, which sounds on the face of it to be great - Google engineers are amongst the productive for their cost in the industry.

However, the more tractable engineering problems become, the more engineering solutions get deployed to solve organisational culture problems simply because that's what happens when (a) your company is full of engineers (b) software engineering is pedestalled and especially the lions of the engineering talent are treated extremely deferentially even on topics far outside their field of specialisation (c) changing how people behave and think is far harder than designing and implementing a new software system to enforce changes in behaviour and thought. So Google's big dysfunction is the over deployment of software solutions to address non-engineering problems.

Therefore, Google's excellent per-worker productivity stems almost entirely from a very proprietary internal infrastructure and tooling, and as a rule skills gained inside most divisions of Google are highly untransferable to other employers. Whilst Google are better than Microsoft and Apple on the NIH syndrome, they do still suffer from it badly, and those who work there end up with stale skills as a result.

I've been on interview panels when ex-Googlers have come before us, and I wouldn't say they were anything special over other ex-multinational engineers. Most had great uni grades but clearly lost any passion for coding they had by the time we saw them, but that's not Google per se, it's the same with most early high flyers who get headhunted straight out of uni into a multinational. They get told they have a dream job, and for sure relative to the average job it is very relatively good, but tech jobs are no Shangri-La - they are just as soul crushing and meaningless as working for McDonalds, perhaps even more so as most of the original work you do in tech will get thrown away without being deployed whereas at least the kids seem to enjoy McDonalds.


What I would say though is there is a huge (10x-100x) gulf between the best teams in an org and the average team on almost every metric: budget, scheduling, productivity and unenforced bug rate. When hiring people, I look for evidence that the candidate worked in an above average team for at least some of their career on the hope they can shine again in another above average team. As a general rule, top people from top teams cost far more to hire than we've ever had the budget for, as an example a recent colleague of mine got hired by Facebook for a salary approaching a half million per year, and I can't imagine any European tech employer even remotely considering paying a pure software engineer even half that.

Is he worth half a million a year? Even he'd say not. But he is at least 5x better than even a very good engineer, so by one logic he is worth the money.

Niall

Elessar

14ned wrote: »

as an example a recent colleague of mine got hired by Facebook for a salary approaching a half million per year, and I can't imagine any European tech employer even remotely considering paying a pure software engineer even half that.

Is he worth half a million a year? Even he'd say not. But he is at least 5x better than even a very good engineer, so by one logic he is worth the money.

This begs the question - why is there such a large gulf between salaries for developers in the EU and North America? Even more specifically, between Ireland and anywhere else? It's not even the top-end guys, I've seen dev jobs being advertised here that seem to max out at around 60-65k, in fact from my own anecdotal research few Irish employers seem to be willing to go past 55k for devs with 5+ years experience. Obviously this changes based on many factors, but even in the UK you could expect to earn much more, £ equivalent and then some. In the US experienced developers can expect $120K +.

Tar.Aldarion

In the US the top end of grads in the valley get over 200k...as a grad. They get stocks and other benefits (often stocks are worth 0, less often they are worth a lot). And when they get paid less the cost of living in the areas is much lower. I saw a grad saving 80k+ per year starting off, a couple pay off a house worth 1.5 million in a few years, even my bosses boss doesn't get as much as some grads. Companies realize that skilled labourers such as developers are not in high supply relative to workers in other industries, vital to a company's success in this day and age and, able to easily move from job to job on a whim given the demand in their skill-set. Companies will allocate more money to the positions that have the highest ROI and will pay less to those who are easily replaceable.
Europe has nothing like Silicon Valley and we do not have start ups and venture capitalism to their level. Other things like most of Europe has significantly higher payroll taxes than the US etc. Another reason is that worker protections and required benefits are higher in Europe. For example, some countries in Europe have numbers of vacation days mandated by law, and have strict rules on when an employee can be fired. Cost of hiring here is more, and more risky for every single employee. It works out worse in the EU for people who can be highly valued like a developer but better for unskilled workers who would get no holidays and **** pay in the US.

moycullen14

Elessar wrote: »

This begs the question - why is there such a large gulf between salaries for developers in the EU and North America? Even more specifically, between Ireland and anywhere else? It's not even the top-end guys, I've seen dev jobs being advertised here that seem to max out at around 60-65k, in fact from my own anecdotal research few Irish employers seem to be willing to go past 55k for devs with 5+ years experience. Obviously this changes based on many factors, but even in the UK you could expect to earn much more, £ equivalent and then some. In the US experienced developers can expect $120K +.

You will be paid, in general, what it costs to replace you. You will hear lots of stories of 'massive shortage of STEM works, ICT, blah, blah' but generally that's just guff from employers & industry bodies. What they really mean is that there is a shortage of highly skilled developers willing to work for beans. What they really want to do is flood the market with cheap imports that will drive down wages & costs.

It's not reasonable to compare Ireland as a whole with pockets of the states, especially Silicon Valley which has it's own micro-climate for developers. We really don't have a situation here where you could get 10 smart developers who could come up with an Instagram-like product that sells for billions. Whatever these guys were paid was good value for money!

If you're slogging along in Insurance, Retail, Banking, etc in Ireland with a generic set of skills, you're never going to earn big bucks. I mean why would anyone pay you a fortune? You're just not worth it to them.

Synode

Tar.Aldarion wrote: »

In the US the top end of grads in the valley get over 200k...as a grad. They get stocks and other benefits (often stocks are worth 0, less often they are worth a lot). And when they get paid less the cost of living in the areas is much lower. I saw a grad saving 80k+ per year starting off, a couple pay off a house worth 1.5 million in a few years, even my bosses boss doesn't get as much as some grads. Companies realize that skilled labourers such as developers are not in high supply relative to workers in other industries, vital to a company's success in this day and age and, able to easily move from job to job on a whim given the demand in their skill-set. Companies will allocate more money to the positions that have the highest ROI and will pay less to those who are easily replaceable.
Europe has nothing like Silicon Valley and we do not have start ups and venture capitalism to their level. Other things like most of Europe has significantly higher payroll taxes than the US etc. Another reason is that worker protections and required benefits are higher in Europe. For example, some countries in Europe have numbers of vacation days mandated by law, and have strict rules on when an employee can be fired. Cost of hiring here is more, and more risky for every single employee. It works out worse in the EU for people who can be highly valued like a developer but better for unskilled workers who would get no holidays and **** pay in the US.

Jesus is this true? What am I doing with my life

JackHeuston

Synode wrote: »

Jesus is this true? What am I doing with my life

I think anyone with some connections in the US can tell similar stories. I know a friend in Texas who worked in a tech company right after college, got relatively high salary, stocks of the company, etc...

He's now 39 years old and he's retired. The company went very well and his savings plus the stocks made him comfortable to make the choice to simply retire and do nothing at 40yo.

Life's unfair but it's no news

edit: and he wasn't "anything special". A simple network engineer who learned his stuff on the field, I'm not even sure he finished college.

14ned

Elessar wrote: »

This begs the question - why is there such a large gulf between salaries for developers in the EU and North America? Even more specifically, between Ireland and anywhere else? It's not even the top-end guys, I've seen dev jobs being advertised here that seem to max out at around 60-65k, in fact from my own anecdotal research few Irish employers seem to be willing to go past 55k for devs with 5+ years experience. Obviously this changes based on many factors, but even in the UK you could expect to earn much more, £ equivalent and then some. In the US experienced developers can expect $120K +.

I've worked in Canada, UK, Spain, Ireland and a few other countries.

The pay on offer in North America over Europe reflects a few factors:

1. There is more competition for fewer workers. As much as people in the US complain about H1B visa workers, the annual quota is far below industry demand. In Europe we have a much more liberal immigration policy, so there is less shortfall between tech worker demand and supply, and therefore slightly lower wages (not by much though in Ireland, average wages are much lower in the Continent).
   
   
2. Social insurance and payroll soaks up ~30-50% of the pay here depending on country. In the US it's about 10%. In terms of cost of a senior dev to the employer, the US average is about the same as Ireland or the UK actually, it's within 10% anyway (see below).
   
   
3. Many of the living costs you get heavily subsidised by the government here out of taxes cost full whack in the US. Health insurance, water, education all come to mind. Working in the US is great if you are (a) healthy (b) have no children and (c) are very fortunate in life. You'll be very wealthy, lots of money left over. If any of those change, suddenly Europe looks quite attractive. If more than one changes, Europe is a much better place to live, you'll have more money in your pocket left over long run.
   
   
4. Cost of living in Silicon Valley is very high, so as with Switzerland where a senior developer typically earns north of €200k the pay reflects the cost of living. Subtract the cost of living however, and most SV developers (once excluding usually worthless share options if they're in a startup) are noticeably worse off that those in Seattle or anywhere in Europe.
   
   Back in 2012 I calculated a table of most disposable income places in North America to work as a senior dev. Canada came top, so we moved to Canada. Next best was Seattle area, next was Austin, Texas, and a LONG way down about no 8 position was Silicon Valley. I think you only ought to move to Silicon Valley if you're still building your CV, staying there to raise a family is madness.
   
   
5. It costs a lot more to hire and fire an employee in Europe than in the US where "at will" contracts are the norm. That means increased job security here even if it's harder to find a job, over there if you get sick or your skills don't match an immediate need they simply fire you.

Here in Europe if you'd like to opt out of the social contract i.e. the job security, the social insurance overheads etc. simply self-incorporate and become a contractor. You'll get paid about the same as a typical Seattle employee would within about 10% with a similar level of job security. You get to live in Europe though, with its sane health costs and no truly terrible schools. If severe life misfortune strikes, you'll also be looked after here, over there you'll be homeless on the side of the street at best, dead in a ditch at worst.

Niall

14ned

JackHeuston wrote: »

I think anyone with some connections in the US can tell similar stories. I know a friend in Texas who worked in a tech company right after college, got relatively high salary, stocks of the company, etc...

He's now 39 years old and he's retired. The company went very well and his savings plus the stocks made him comfortable to make the choice to simply retire and do nothing at 40yo.

Life's unfair but it's no news

edit: and he wasn't "anything special". A simple network engineer who learned his stuff on the field, I'm not even sure he finished college.

A good few former colleagues of mine from working in the UK retired aged 40-45. Unlike in the US where everyone is trying to become the next Google, if you aim your sights at about five to ten million euro it's easily achievable with only moderate risk and a bit of luck. Instead of thinking in terms of startups which are risky and require a ton of wife divorcing family destroying type work patterns, think instead of products solving a major pain for corporates. With a bit of fortune, you collect a few thousand euro per year off a few hundred corporate org for whom the money is a rounding error. Your first copy costs you a ton to make, but every copy you ship after that costs pennies. It's a volume and marketing game after that, ship a few thousand copies over five years and you've reached your ten million.

I'm personally aiming for retirement at 52 myself, that minor economic collapse we had kinda lopped off eight years of otherwise earning time.

Niall

yqtwqxqm

Ive been contracting for a good few years now .net and SQL. I wouldnt say i was any better than the next guy, which is unusual for developers in general we over estimate our own skillset and are quick to put assume others are worse than ourselves.

But there is a good living to be made from contracting instead of FT.
So much so, im retiring very shortly at the ripe old age of 50.

jimmycrackcorm

TrueDub wrote:

It's a good sign for a company, though, if people are content to stay there for that length of time, which I think is what the previous poster meant.

I work with long serving developers where swing has been king for the last ten years and will be for the next ten.

Accepting mediocrity does nothing to improve a company.