delphinius81

My first question to any recruiter is "what is the salary range for this position." It's not worth investing my or your time if the range does not work for me. THIS is the reason why posting the range is so important. Withholding the range means that I would be putting in lots of time to interview, only to find out that you were never going to pay me a standard market rate with little benefit. Maybe you'll find some people that are desperate for work that way, since they'll be seeing things as a sunk cost? At the end of the day, you get what you are willing to pay for.

As an applicant, I understand that whatever you put at the low end is what you are going to want to offer me assuming I just minimally pass your bar. To get the higher end requires negotiation. However, if you are willing to pay my x+5, why bother with the games at all? Just make your best offer and let's get things off on the right foot. Why do we need to feel like we each "got the better out of each other?" It also levels the playing field for people that just aren't good at negotiating.

I'm an engineer, not a sales negotiator. What does my ability to argue for a higher salary have to do with my ability to build product. Probably nothing. And if you think this is some coded way of measuring ability to convince people in a discussion, maybe you should explicitly be asking that during your interview process instead.

Most companies don't hire international remote workers directly because of the costs associated with international tax reporting. If a worker is in another country, that means tax withholding / reporting in multiple places. So it's usually done as contract work through an international recruitment firm which handles all the payroll / tax stuff, or not at all. In any case, even if an American employer hired an American on contract, the full brunt of payroll tax would be on the contractor. Companies only pay half the payroll tax for employees classified by W-2s.

No, but as a contractor you have to pay the full payroll tax (15%) + all the other SS / medicare costs (usually comes to about 2-3%), plus income tax (progressive and varies, but for this bracket is probably federal 15-20%, and up to 10% state). So, add it all up, and it's ~40-45%. Then they have to cover their own health insurance, which again, depends on state, but could be 400-700/mo. So yeah, it's easy to end up with half your money gone with each pay check.

I would add that many of the "senior" engineers in SV received that title because they joined a startup 6-months before the company secured major funding and massively scaled. Seniority/familiarity with the startup's stack != senior.

Article doesn't cover the fact that many companies are not setup to deal with taxation issues related to payroll for foreign employees. There's opportunity for a payroll company to step in there and make this less painful, but tax reporting will always be a barrier.

Well in SV all you have to do is work at a startup for more than a year to get "promoted" to senior/lead developer, so it's not surprising that many people applying for those roles aren't actually at that level.

I had a coding test once where I was given someone else's code with an introduced bug, and I had to fix the bug. To do so, you were basically documenting the code along the way as you traced your way through possible trouble spots. It felt far more meaningful than the typical "implement some list traversal algorithm that you won't actually ever use at this job."

No, they were in breach before hand, and Unity attempted (poorly) to make it more clear why Improbable was in breach with the ToS update. According to devs knowledgeable of Improbable's tech, Improbable has been in breach of the Unity ToS for more than a year. Negotiations on licensing probably broke down (as in, Improbable refused to pay the fee Unity was asking for a license), and so Improbable decided to publicly vent and mislead devs.

Regardless, the ToS are incredibly vague on what is/is not allowed, even for developers that have nothing to do with Improbable.

Finally, the $25M comes from the already established Unreal dev grant fund - it's not "new" money, they just rebranded a portion of the fund in a PR stunt.

The problem is the cost of rent for individuals and businesses. Asides from housing costs, SF's cost of living is pretty standard for a city (a little higher than most, but depends on the area). There just are not enough housing units in the Bay Area. Worse, the new units entering the market tend to be mostly market rate, with a few "affordable" units thrown in.

Raising wages will never fix the problem. SF needs to build up or change laws to deincentivize people from living there (e.g. higher taxes on high-income tech workers). The latter has other issues associated with it, but would at least encourage the decentralization of tech talent to other parts of the country.

Right, but everyone knows that if you have a spouse or kids you probably shouldn't be living in the bay area anyway unless you a rich. /s

Yeah, some of the comments in the thread allude to that possibility. If it's a matter of protecting business interests though, there are much more tactful ways of bringing that up with one's spouse.

Same. Ad starts playing? Skip to whatever is next in the feed. Ad at the start of a video, not even going to wait. As it is, after turning off all notifications from FB I maybe open the app once a week.

Junior devs finding an initial job and receiving mentoring is certainly an issue, but I think that the issue raised in the tweet is way more endemic to start-ups than more established companies.

If you focus on computer vision / machine learning at least

If they aren't being paid at the beginning (equity only), then they are a co-founder of the company. If you want an employee, you find a way to pay them either through personal savings pooled together by the co-founders, or because your product is already producing some revenue that you can use for salary.