

The $150k Solution - jcsalterego
http://www.garann.com/dev/2011/the-150k-solution/

======
Nate75Sanders
"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.

~~~
yangez
In my experience, face time is very important in an organization and it's not
just about productivity. It's very hard to effectively motivate people and
align the company's vision if half of your employees aren't even there.

~~~
moe
_It's very hard to effectively motivate people_

I hear this a lot and am starting to wonder if they teach that in business
school?

You don't motivate people by "aligning them with the company vision". That
only leads to these embarrassing company events where the 3 stakeholders gush
over their "mission statement" for 45 minutes straight while 3/4 of the
attendants really only wait for the free pizza to arrive...

You motivate people by treating them like adults, paying them well, and by
minimizing the amount of bullshit in their workflow.

~~~
tcskeptic
Fundamentally I don't think you _can_ motivate people. We may actually be
saying similar things, but I think you can only really demotivate them by
treating them in a psychotic, demeaning or inhumane ways. Motivation on the
other hand is is an emergent, instrinsic human quality that can only be
killed, not created. "Not killing it" as you say is largely a question of
people actually contributing to work that they find worthwhile and having
their contributions respected by the company. But there are some folks who
would never be motivated, as they simply do not have that quality within
themselves.

~~~
perlgeek
I think it's possible to motivate people by providing positive feedback.
Suppose you work on a web app, and have 1k signups on the day you go live, and
2k on the next day. Wouldn't that increase motivitation? I surely enjoy
watching the visitor stats of a new website, and feel more motivated when they
are rising quickly.

Yes, you can't motivatve everybody for everything, but I do think it's
possible to achieve something with positive feedback.

------
cppsnob
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.

~~~
brianm
I disagree. The original article is specifically about attracting good talent
to Austin. Someone presently in the valley, who is worth attracting, generally
has _no_ reason to leave. You need to come up with good reasons for them to
leave which outweigh the massive black hole of attraction for tech talent
which is the valley. Offering a significant salary cut is not going to help
your cause -- you cannot be losing on hygiene factors when you are selling
from a weak position.

Trying to sell the candidate on the cost of living being lower is actually
bogus anyway. At high salary levels you cannot look at cost of living as a
percentage difference, you need to look at absolutes. A thirty percent pay cut
on a 150k salary works out to about 2500-3000 per month after taxes. This is a
lot more than the absolute value cost of living difference.

Making it even worse, you are asking candidates to move from an environment
where they have a couple hundred interesting alternate employment options, all
at that 30% higher salary, if the current job does not work out. They are
moving to a, at best, tertiary market -- meaning there is a very good chance
that they will have to move again for their next job.

~~~
moocow01
"Someone presently in the valley, who is worth attracting, generally has no
reason to leave" - I get your point but many people once they have families
feel pressure to get out of SV probably due to long hours, cost, etc. Not
everyone leaves but I've seen many good engineers leave to the more affordable
tech hubs (Austin, Portland, Seattle, etc.) I have to admit that once I
started visiting these places I can now understand why many people move.

~~~
mjwalshe
why would you move your family to an area with less opportunity for them? Is
their partner going to be able to find a "propper" job will their kids get a
good education and have a wide choice of "propper" carrears (or will they join
the army as thats the best choice on offer)

~~~
allenp
Its probably worth saying that there is a big difference between moving from
SV/SF to Seattle, Portland, or Austin, and moving to a small town of 1000
people in the middle of nowhere.

Opportunity for career growth isn't the only factor in where a family moves -
there are a number of other concerns like safety, values, closeness to family,
and fresh air and water.

------
gvb
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
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
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...").

------
alecco
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-...](http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin-battles-
shortage-in-high-end-software-engineering-2024970.html?viewAsSinglePage=true)

------
LiveTheDream
> 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.

------
jacquelineslife
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.

------
bluedevil2k
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.

~~~
bretthoerner
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.

------
dkarl
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.

~~~
bretthoerner
> when it makes much more sense for companies to avoid hiring people who think
> it's a shitty town in the first place

So your advice to tech businesses in Austin is to further reduce the pool of
people they can hire from? Interesting, considering this wasn't an "I Hate
Austin" post but rather a reply to a story about the fact that _Austin
businesses currently can't find talent_.

Also, just because you don't want to up and move to Austin for half as much
money doesn't mean you think it's a shit town. You can want to live here _and_
want to be paid well. For the time being the only way I've found to do both is
to work remotely for bay area companies. That sucks for Austin.

~~~
dkarl
Money isn't necessarily the reason why Austin businesses can't find talent,
and if there is a reason, money won't necessarily fix it. If someone really
dislikes a place, it's a bad idea to hire them at _any_ salary. They'll just
leave at their first opportunity. The argument that developers are highly
mobile is actually an argument against luring them to a place where they'll be
unhappy, because they can and will leave.

The fundamental mistake behind the idea that Austin should pay a premium to
attract talent is the assumption that money and happiness are fungible. The
author lists a bunch of things she doesn't like about Austin and suggests that
the solution is to pay developers more, that people who dislike Austin will
come here for the right price. Some will, sure, but will they do good work for
you when they're unhappy? Can you expect them to still be around in five years
as a guru and leader if they dislike where they live? People don't work that
way. They don't want to put down roots in a place they don't like. It's no fun
to make friends and fall in love while in the back of your mind you're
thinking, "Three more years of paying off my debt and I'm outta here." Not
liking a place creates a sense of detachment about everyone and everything
that you can't take with you, which is very chic, but not very healthy, and in
a good job market, there's no reason for anyone to live that way.

Developers are motivated by a lot of things that aren't interchangeable, and
employers should be very, very wary of trying to substitute one kind of
satisfaction for another even when they have the upper hand. There's a limit
to how much people can trade off respect for money, interesting work for
status, or lifestyle for job security. That's why it makes sense for salaries
to vary by cost of living. Money is 100% fungible with money, but not with
much else. Austin companies have to hire employees who want to live in Austin,
and paying them more won't make them like Austin more.

That isn't the end of the world. It's true that developers have more of a
taste for ramen and public transit than the population as a whole, and it's
true that a lot of developers prefer more urban places such as San Francisco
and New York, but some people prefer Denver or Austin. When someone who loves
San Francisco compares your city to "the damned Yukon" and "middle-of-nowhere
fucking Montana all River Runs Through It," _money is not going to make that
better,_ and that's okay, because she's not the only person in the world who
can do her job. When someone says, "If I’d been single, more confident in my
skills, and sans wedding debt I would have moved to San Francisco or New
York," well, personal regrets are not fungible with money and anyone would be
crazy to suggest otherwise.

As for her complaints, here are some comments for anyone considering a move to
Austin:

 _commuting to some isolated office park that was cheaper to rent than
something on a goddamned bus route_

There are actually a lot of tech companies located downtown, and they're
hiring. When the folks on the Austin big data mailing list organized a new
meetup a few weeks ago, it was felt that a downtown meeting location would be
best since that's where most of the potential attendees work. Since developers
have such the upper hand these days, there's no reason to work anywhere else,
unless you prefer the suburbs. (And if you do, Austin is apparently pretty
nice. All of my insanely smart coworkers who have kids also have yards and
houses. Most of them believe in religions that terrify me. Austin is the kind
of place where nobody is surprised that the creator of Linux and git wears
polo shirts and blogs about his kids, because what does the one thing have to
do with the other? Squares and non-squares have a pretty relaxed relationship
around here, to the point that nobody bothers keeping track of the
difference.)

 _don’t believe that spending two hours on the freeway every day is a healthy
lifestyle_

Again, there are tech companies downtown, right next to our hike and bike
trail around Lady Bird Lake, on which you can run, walk, or bike less than a
mile to a spring-fed three-acre swimming pool where you'll often see
triathletes practicing in their wet suits.

 _Austin’s lovely, but I like being able to get a decent bowl of ramen. And
take public transit._

I can't help you with the ramen (and I'm very sad about that) but who needs to
take public transit when you can live, work, shop, run, kayak, swim, and
drink, all within a couple of miles? I won't lie: you'll need a car a few
times a week, if only because everybody expects you to have one, and if you
ride a bike, you'll need more courage (and have more white hairs) than you
would in Portland. Plenty of people get around on bikes, though. Also, there's
a Car2Go car-sharing service, even here in the middle of Texas, and some
people rely on it quite happily.

 _tacos tacos tacos!_

The Mexican food here really is much better than in California ;-)

~~~
pwang
> The fundamental mistake behind the idea that Austin should pay a premium to
> attract talent is the assumption that money and happiness are fungible. The
> author lists a bunch of things she doesn't like about Austin and suggests
> that the solution is to pay developers more, that people who dislike Austin
> will come here for the right price.

THIS. Spot on. The title of the blog post itself tells you the error: paying
people more money will get them to do stuff, but they won't be happy about it.

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

~~~
garann
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
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.

------
simoncpu
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.

~~~
illumin8
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.

~~~
plinkplonk
"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> . ) 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.

~~~
illumin8
I stand somewhat corrected, but you must admit you are in a very small
minority in your home country, and your salary probably reflects that.

What I've noticed from working first-hand with outsourcing companies is that
they promise degrees and accreditations that don't exist. They promise the
developers working on your project will have 5-10 years experience, but for
the most part you will get developers with 2-3. They promise masters level
CompSci but you are lucky to get associates or trade school level. They
promise systems and network engineers with MCSE or RHCE or CCIE but you are
lucky to get MCP or CCNA.

I apologize for making blanket statements, but there is a lot of job hopping
for qualified candidates in Bangalore (as I'm sure you are aware), so the
outsourcing companies are usually offering those candidates that are new to
the industry and have not had the time to generate sufficient experience and
get a better job somewhere else. That is just the reality of what I have seen
in my career.

~~~
plinkplonk
Hey no worries. I completely agree that outsourcing companies (Infosys, TCS
etc) suck big time. The services outsourcing companies scrape the bottom of
the barrel talentwise and lie through their teeth to their clients, are
infested with scummy middle managers and so on. I am not arguing about any of
that.

Just saying, don't dismiss a country of a billion people so easily - with so
many people, there have to be _some_ smart ones.

Good engineers are a minority in every country. That said,the USA (and it is a
great country) has the advantage of attracting smart people from all over the
world to learn, work and settle there, so you have a constant influx of really
smart people, an adavantage no other country has(these days, Canada and
Australia maybe?). The US also has the finest universities in the world. So I
am _not_ surprised that in general, the US has the best tech companies and the
best engineers.

But that doesn't mean there aren't good engineers elsewhere. I was only
_mildly_ pushing back against your somewhat sweeping generalizations. No
insult or harm intended.

If the only Indian devs you've encountered are the lying incompetents exposed
to you by the typical Bangalore bodyshop, I am not surprised if people draw
conclusions that may not be very flattering.

