I was hoping to use my lessons in trying to buy a rental properties these days and apply it to trying to hire someone and was trying to explain with an analogy to my senior execs the concept of how a bidding war works…But they didn’t listen.
So we wanted to make an offer to a great junior engineer in the mid-west 2 years experience, remote worker. He mentioned he had a few additional interviews through the end of the week, so I’m like great, I respect that, we’ll give you an offer now to think about it, and then let us know if you are interested in pursuing it further next week. Current comp including stock grant around 95k so I figure he’ll be getting offers around $100k-118k, so I figure let’s go on the high end at $118k and see how it shakes out, figuring we’ll probably need to do a $10k signon bonus and we’ll save that once we get the other offers in.
But, no…Exec felt, well let’s go high right now, and maybe he’ll accept the offer without taking anything else. I’m like, come on…Even if we put a 48 hour time limit on the offer, what’s to prevent him from accepting our offer, continuing interviewing, and then take our offer, ask someone else to beat it, and then rescind our offer? Because that’s what I would do in this market. So no point in trying to put your highest offer in now, without waiting to see what else comes back…
See, it’s very similar to trying to buy a house right now. You want to put in a offer just high enough to make it to the short list of the selected people they will give a counter offer to. But you don’t want to go too high because otherwise your high price will end up being the floor for the counter offer that goes out, and you’re going to end up bidding against your own price you set.
Of course, they didn’t listen. Offer went out at $118k with a $10k sign on bonus… i bet it’s going to be cross shopped with the other companies he’s interviewing for, and after its’ done, we’re going to need increase the sign on bonus to $20k.
2 years of solid mobile experience….That’s how much it’s costing…
The other funny part is, there’s a bunch of people who aren’t really mobile software engineers trying to pass themselves off as one. They basically go attend some 6 month crash course at some for profit university, and claim they are a mobile engineer.
It doesn’t work with my company and my team, but I’m pretty confident they can find a job with some company that is desperate and isn’t as picky…and would pay roughly the same. Jokes on the engineers spent 4-6 years in a real college getting a BS/MS engineering degree…
