[quote=utcsox][quote=Coronita]What would you consider a worse scenario.
2. An entry level mobile engineer with 1 year of relevant experience, remote worker, based in “lower cost” Texas, demanding $118k/year because thats the offer he got elsewhere….and your boss and recruiter yelling at you because you balked and said no, considering 2 months ago, it only cost your budget $95k…
..it really sucks to be the person hiring these days just like it sucks to be the one trying to buy a house today…
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Can you explain on why it really sucks to be the person hiring these days?[/quote]
Sure.. It’s basically like trying to buy a house today. Limited supply, everyone else wants to buy a house. Supply and demand driving up prices.
Similar for mobile engineers, even before pre-covid, it was already hard to find well qualified mobile engineers. It took us about 2 months to find 3 good middle level engineers. When covid hit, my company decided (stupidly, out of my control) to furlough all engineers 1 day per week. For california employees,that was great because under CA covid-19 unemployment laws, all the furloughed engineers were paid 32 hours, and then could claim unemployment on the 5th day under CA’s worksharing program, which worked out ok because engineers were paid more that day with the state AND federal lump sum UI benefit (came out to be about $1000/day)
But there were a bunch of non-CA engineers that didn’t have tje same state benefit that allowed them to qualify for state UI benefits since it was only 1 day of lost work…no state UI benefit, then no federal lump sum $600 benefit too… So, well, they quit and found a job quickly within 2-3 weeks by companies that never closed or reduced hours…
Now that we are back to full business (and more, since we have a lot of interest from old and new customers) that need our product to safely reopen, I need to staff up in addition to the engineers I lost.
Problemville: those that are good and looking for a job have 4-5 offers chasing them, and since remote-work has been proven to be a viable option, we’re competing a lot with Bay Area companies, even for the employees that traditionally are located in lower cost areas like Florida, Texas, Idaho, etc. Because most companies are offering 3 choices
1. Fully remote
2. Hybrid (X days in office, Y days remote)
3. Fully in office
just like us…
So the candidates that use to be in lower cost areas..wages has gone up considerably, since they no longer are stuck working at a company in their local area that might want to pay lower.
The funny part is my company is headquartered in FL and for the longest time has complained they don’t want to hire anyone in CA because of the much higher salaries…Well, now that some CA companies went into Florida and are offering remote opportunities at CA salaries, companies in Florida like mine are going through a painful awakening:
1. denial: “nah, that’s not happening. We can still find senior engineers for under $100k”
to
2. shock: “what do you mean a junior engineer that is asking for $115-8k has 3 offers in that range…”
to
3. depression: “we haven’t been able to fill these jobs in the past 3-6 months and it’s starting to impact our business”…
I was called into a meeting, and it started out with …”why haven’t these positions been filled”… And I bluntly said, “well originally you offered a shitty comp package. And now you’re offering something that would have been good 3-4 months ago, but now this is on the low side too. I suggested you hire new pr 1-2 year newbies to train them up… months ago, when no one else was hiring and they were looking for a job..You said you weren’t willing to do that. But now, you’ve changed your mind, but guess what? So has every other company. So you’re going to compete for well qualified new grads and those with 1-2 years experience too…”
The candidates I’m talking to are not even based in CA. These are candidates in the middle of the US…I’m not even really considering CA candidates, and when asked why, I bluntly said “because you can’t afford them…” Speaking of which, I have an interview this week…lol…
Then there was this candidate that we wanted to move into round 2 of the interview, and the way we do it do a take home assignment that the candidate can work on his free time (without the pressure/stress of a chalkboard/whiteboarding programming exercise in traditional interview)…But the candidate got all butt hurt that it took 2-3 hours, and then was upset that the earliest interview time we could give him was 4 days later….So he leaves a negative review on Glassdoor complaining about it..I was like WTF…And he wasn’t even that good and definitely not at the comp’s he wanted…
It’s a great time to be a mobile engineer with a shred of experience. You can get a lot of mileage out of it right now, probably more so than most other engineering types. When I find my next gig, all is fair if I poach my old team, lol…
There’s like a $8000 bounty for each referral at my company. I’m pretty sure other companies have similar things. If I can poach an entire team, that’s like a good $100k lol.
