My experience is that companies are "desperate" in the sense that they're willing to invite you to lavish parties and fill you with free alcohol to get you to work there. But as soon as you start talking contracting, telecommute, or anything other than "sit at this desk for 60-hour weeks trying to get permission to fix an awful codebase with terrible equipment," suddenly they're not interested.
Story time: one of the best, most experienced local developers I know interviewed at a name-brand tech firm who is covered once a week on HN. Twelve separate times, they told him "We'll let you know today" as to whether or not he was hired. Several weeks later he found out third-hand he was the fall-back guy for some other non-qualified person they ended up hiring instead. He's told me horror stories about their code base that would make your hair stand up. This company keeps inviting me to parties about once a month.
There is a developer shortage in Austin, but the article blows it out of proportion. In reality the reason these few companies are "desperate" has to do with developers who want respect as human beings, autonomy to get things done, reasonable hours, a company that understands the need for technical excellence and not "put out fires" mentality, etc. If you do those things it's not that difficult to hire...
I'd agree that in tech in general you have to be very very careful in terms of understanding what you are really stepping into. There are jobs that are great but there are more jobs that are not so great (meaning the pay may be good but... 60-80 hours, boring CRUD stuff, unmaintained code bases, tyrannical managers, etc. etc.) This is probably true with most occupations but my guess is that it is a lot more extreme for software engineers (especially in SV). I've specifically taken somewhat significant lower offers based on my intuition about a job being "good" or not - I'd highly recommend it (I used to jump around for just higher salaries and to no surprise ended up miserable)
This is something I stress when I talk to other management-types about hiring, now that I've (mostly) joined the Dark Side.
If you want amazing people, just spending more money on salaries isn't going to do it. I too have turned down very high-paying offers because they came with the baggage of a company that considered Dilbert strips inspirational rather than satirical.
This is an area where small start-ups can really win big, by offering what bigger and better-funded players don't:
1. Sensible hours. Sure, crunch times happen, but being in crunch mode all of the time is a sign of management failure.
2. Accountability defines authority. There's nothing worse than a company where you're responsible for keeping other peoples' (often impossible) promises.
3. Big equity with profit-sharing. This really keeps everybody's goals aligned: the employees win if the company either gets a big exit or becomes a profit-making machine.
The three of these together are easily worth more than $30k in competitive salary.
I once interviewed with a company that had built in "crunch mode" into their release schedule. I told them that I regarded relying on "crunch mode" as a strategy smelled of management failure & if they couldn't get product out the door without it then they had a problem. Needless to say the interview went downhill from there.
Every programmer recognises there might be times when something has gone horribly wrong, or there's an immovable deadline that has to be met. Actually planning to put your team through that amount of stress on a regular basis for no particular reason other than some arbitrary "deadline"? Well, some people were obviously happy to sign up to wear a "kick me" sign on their backs, but it wasn't going to be me.
(Yeah, I know all the arguments about startups / success / equity / return on time invested etc etc. Lets just say that they didn't apply in this case.)
That's a good question, and depends on a lot of factors.
I'm going to assume we're talking about employee equity, and not founder equity. If you signed on at a reasonable salary, then you're an employee. If, on the other hand, you worked without pay until the company got to the point where a salary was possible, then you're a co-founder.
For a first employee, somewhere between one and five percent makes sense to me. Exactly where the number falls depends on their role, as well as small details like company funding structure, cashflow at time-of-hire, etc.
The next two to five or so employees would be somewhere around one percent.
After that, the number starts diving rapidly, with a total employee ownership converging to a number near ten percent or so.
In my experience, this is more than a lot of startups offer, and feels fair in terms of risk.
On top of the equity, though, I think that profit-sharing is also important. Not as a mechanism for motivation, but as a means of retaining talent. Exits are few and far between, and it's quite easy to screw over minor shareholders. An annual bonus check based on company performance goes a long way towards showing personnel that you're serious about the idea of "if the company succeeds, you succeed".
At the end of the day, no matter how much equity gets passed around, it's unlikely to pay out big unless your company goes public.
Too many companies attach conditions to their equity and too many acquiring investors and big companies will readily dilute employee shares to sweeten the equity deals for founders and early investors.
Thats why sweating hard times out for equity is a hard sell to engineers these days. There's too many ways for equity to be worthless paper later on and there's countless examples of it happening recently (e.g. Skype, Zynga, etc).
Hence the profit-sharing. If the company never gets, or was even aiming for, a big exit, but instead turns into a long-term sustainable business, then as an employee you still get a cut of the success you helped create.
Bias: I'm a co-founder of BuildASign.com, an ecommerce company in Austin, and we're hiring. (Extra bias: we're a great company to work for, if Austin interests you.)
I agree that this article blows the issue out of proportion, but then again, any intelligent internet company realizes that its future success and future value is determined, more than anything else, by the quality of its software people. That being the case, any company where the higher-ups don't think finding the best software folks is the #1 problem (or at least one of the critical issues) at the moment is probably not a company you'd want to work for anyway. I think this is the #1 problem we face as a company, and yet I agree this article blows the "problem" out of proportion in the way the article presents the issue.
No offense meant, but "our pace is often fast and furious. We put in extra hours to output excellent results" in your careers page is working against you here :)
It's very very tough to find the "best software folks" and hope this cog (yes, sorry bro) can join your company and fit the culture.
I joined a company with decent software developers (that are willing to listen, learn, and also live life like a normal regular human being) and I couldn't be more happier.
During my interview, the manager, the senior people, and the owner keeps stressing 2 things: we hire people that fit our culture and we don't hire stupid people (not the smartest). I asked everybody who interviewed me of how long they have been here and the minimum question was 3 years (the person is one of the Directors). The rest have been there for 6 years, 8 years, etc.
We struggled together. We went through hard times together. At the end of the day, these people go home everyday to their family and go back to work tomorrow without extra baggages.
The best software folks tend to have their own dogmatic approaches that may clash with everybody else that he thinks less superior (U KNO NO EMACS? Ur LVL just went down a few notch and U SHALL BOW TO ME!).
I mean... c'mon, let's get real here and clear those pixie dusts. If the smartest people don't have that kind of ego, they ain't smart to begin with.
I completely disagree with your last statement, and believe that that kind of thinking is bad.
It allows assholes to continue to pose as 'smart people' because they simply bully their peers, and their superiors will assume they must be smart because their peers defer to them.
There is absolutely no reason why truly smart people would be assholes.
Sure, I am throwing a blanketed statements. That's why I opened my comment as "it is very very hard to find...".
Assholes will be assholes regardless whether they're smart or not. If their superiors like assholes, then that's the culture in there. It's up to you whether you want to work there or not.
Smart people that aren't assholes are hard to find. Linus Torvalds, Theo de Raadt, Zed Shaw, DHH, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, should I go on with the list?
I'm not suggesting that smart people should be asshole. Or people should pretend to be asshole. But based on my tiny speck of observation, experienced, interviews, reading the tone of blog posts, smart people tend to be assholes.
I think that's likely to be the perception any time you have a company that's grown quickly and organically, at least when your whole company depends on your software as much as ours does. Ditching something that's interwoven into every business process is tough, and making new approaches play well with existing ones is tricky. We're all for doing things the best way.
If you have specific ideas, I'd love to hear them, and would gladly buy you lunch. Shoot me an email.
My experience is that companies are "desperate" in the sense that they're willing to invite you to lavish parties and fill you with free alcohol to get you to work there. But as soon as you start talking contracting, telecommute, or anything other than "sit at this desk for 60-hour weeks trying to get permission to fix an awful codebase with terrible equipment," suddenly they're not interested.
Story time: one of the best, most experienced local developers I know interviewed at a name-brand tech firm who is covered once a week on HN. Twelve separate times, they told him "We'll let you know today" as to whether or not he was hired. Several weeks later he found out third-hand he was the fall-back guy for some other non-qualified person they ended up hiring instead. He's told me horror stories about their code base that would make your hair stand up. This company keeps inviting me to parties about once a month.
There is a developer shortage in Austin, but the article blows it out of proportion. In reality the reason these few companies are "desperate" has to do with developers who want respect as human beings, autonomy to get things done, reasonable hours, a company that understands the need for technical excellence and not "put out fires" mentality, etc. If you do those things it's not that difficult to hire...