

Trouble Hiring? Create A Cult. - deepakprakash
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/31/trouble-hiring-create-a-cult/

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wyclif
"There's no shortage of smart, hardworking engineers. There's a shortage of
smart, hardworking engineers willing to work for very little money." ~ David
"Pardo" Keppel

If you're having trouble hiring, it's probably because you're not paying
enough. It turns out that talented people are worth paying a lot for.

~~~
potatolicious
I wouldn't exactly describe the comp packages flying around the Bay Area as
"very little money". Honestly, this is Wall Street thinking - the belief that
a person's compensation is purely a function of supply vs. demand, completely
disconnected from real life.

There is a cap to supply and demand - and that's the real monetary value being
created by the worker. Nobody sane will pay someone more than they will in
turn make for the company.

This isn't to say that we've reached this point in SV, but I don't think we're
that far off. IMO the supply side constraints are so extreme right now that
we're seeing a rapid inflation of comp packages, and rapidly approaching that
point where the compensation no longer makes any sense compared to the real
value of work generated.

One can have a shortage of engineers _and_ high compensation at the same time,
if the supply side is sufficiently, and desperately short. I think that's
where we are right now.

~~~
epicureanideal
I would like to see all these quotes of "shortages" phrased as "shortage of
highly skilled workers at $xx,xxx per year working xxxx hours per year doing
x, y, and z", and then I'd like to hear what exactly caps the salary at
$xx,xxx rather than $yy,yyy other than the CEO decided the number sounds nice
and anything more "sounds like too much".

~~~
potatolicious
I am incredibly tired of this argument, it's a complete straw man by trying to
paint the "other side" as stereotypical MBA suits, and pretends that everyone
is out to get those poor, poor engineers.

Fuck that shit. Let's have some perspective:

I wake up every morning. Unlike 90% of this country, _I have no hard deadline_
on when I have to be at work. Unlike most of the country, I also have
effectively no limits on what to wear. I can stroll in with shorts and sandals
if I so feel like. I get paid well into the six figures to work on things I
love. I get free food, luxurious shuttles to ferry my ass around, and in my
post-lunch drowsiness (that most of the country can ill afford to even
contemplate), I have hammocks to nap in. I have benefits that much of the
country would commit bloody murder for. There are things that are expensable
which would appear shockingly excessive to any other industry. I attend
ridiculously funded parties fueled by my company's largesse, and my office is
one of the coolest places in town, because shit, burning through VC cash is
fun.

And somehow, in the midst of all of that, you decide there's a penny-pinching
CEO character who's being all Scrooge McDuck-like and actively plotting to
screw you out of your hard-earned money.

Really.

Sometimes I feel like software engineers, particularly in the Bay Area, have
the most over-inflated sense of entitlement I've seen _anywhere_. I'm all for
extracting a fair slice of the value I generate for my employer, but come _on_
, this straw man helps no one. It's has shades of Wall Street greed - we're
sitting around, our giant paychecks in one hand, our catered organic/fair
trade free food in the other, and loudly complain that we're _worth more than
this_.

~~~
epicureanideal
Are you guys hiring?

------
Nate75Sanders
Awesome article.

The two huge takeaways for me were:

1) Company-provided lunches aren't simply the value of the food -- it's the
value of the bonding that can be created among co-workers. If people become
friends then work isn't "just a job" anymore.

2) The workcation -- I'm rarely surprised by almost anything I read from
startups anymore, and I've grown skeptical of founders as being
psychologically manipulative of early hires in many ways, but this is truly a
great and non-manipulative idea: Let's all go somewhere else and work some of
the time and explore/play some of the time.

It's so good because so many people in the US are physically disparate from
their families/people they need to visit. Even a fairly solid (by American
standards) vacation of 3 weeks turns into a mandatory visiting of divorced
parents (separate physical locations). This eats up vacation days like mad.

EDIT: drunken rambling

~~~
ido

        2) The workcation
    

Do people bring their spouses/children along on these?

~~~
dagw
I imagine companies that do this also have an unspoken policy to not hire
people with spouses/children.

