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Comment by VeilEm | Hacker News Reader

Any kind of JavaScript, iOS or Android engineer getting laid of will get a job within a month if they want. Competent backend developers, devops, ML engineers also will have no problems finding a job. I recently went through a job search in the bay area and only applied at places I wanted to work and got a job at the first place I applied with phone interviews and in person interviews scheduled at other places.

The job market is really great right now. If you're getting laid off, now is a good time.

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I'm not seeing a great hiring market right now for engineers in the Bay Area, at least as a high demand JS engineer. I took a look at testing the waters within the past month, I found the offers/opportunities a little wanting, and I am now debating whether to stick around at my job for a while even with some of its faults. The market looked a lot better a half year ago.

Getting hired is not a problem - getting a really nice job though is much more difficult, especially due to all of the companies that like to talk a nice game but are disguising weak aspects of the company such as leadership/management, quality engineering, work-life balance, etc.

An aside, that popup iframe with video on the top as you scrolled down is one of the most annoying dark UX patterns I've encountered in a news site. It is one of a handful times where I used Chrome's element inspector to set display: none.

> I'm not seeing a great hiring market right now for engineers in the Bay Area, at least as a high demand JS engineer.

Can you explain this further? If by "high demand JS engineer" you mean "front end" and not just node (which is not bad or anything btw), and by "high demand" specifically you mean you are: * you understand JS well, doesn't mean we get to grill you on all the weird corner cases - but you understand the language * want to work with a modern stack (i.e. react, flux/redux/whatever, backbone, that sort of thing) * are mature and want to help grow a team, can communicate with PMs and all that effectively

we'd kill to hire you (250-300 person company.) Every friend of mine that has started a company asks me every time they see me if I know a good front end person (that isn't busy counting their RSUs at Uber, etc and isn't going anywhere.)

Our company (in general) and team has more than one designer focused on bringing a good experience to the table, before it even gets to the code level. To translate, that doesn't mean our reqs go from sales person to "make it do this now, code monkey", but rather we want to make good, long lasting products, in a thoughtful manner. And still, finding someone is tough.

So I find it hard to believe the hiring market for what you describe isn't great.

Personally, my experience is all back end. I consider myself a good engineer in general, and feel I could ramp up to being a decent front end engineer in 3-12 months time depending on how much depth we're talking, but think that things are specialized enough now that that would be a waste of effort, and plenty of people would still be better than me. However, from what I've seen, being a F.E. eng that understands CSci and what's happening under the hood should make you SUPER in demand right now.

I'm not trying to make this a hiring post, but if you'd like a fun job with a decent company trying to expand its front end capacity on this coast, with a relatively green field project (i.e. you get to build new stuff), and at a place making real money, not just selling to other startups, and not in a moon shot social space, PM me. If not, I'd still be curious why you think being a "high demand JS engineer" isn't a good spot to be in in the current market.

Unless I'm missing something, there is no contact info in your profile.

I do Node.js as well, although it doesn't show nearly as strongly in my background due to every company I've been at wanting my frontend skills. I get pinged heavily due to being a major non-Google contributor in the Angular community (code contributions to Angular.js, Angular 2, Ionic, and am involved in the teams for Universal Angular, UI Bootstrap, and UI Router).

Finding a job is still pretty easy - I don't dispute that. Finding one that pays competitively, respects work-life balance, and focuses on quality of engineering & getting product right, even if it means pushing deadlines a little later is much harder I've found, unless you look to the Google/FB/Netflixes. My current job meets most of those bars (a little less on the salary side, but I was willing to accept that for everything else), but only dissatisfies me on wanting to move faster & having more influence on tech choices.

While there are no shortage of companies that want to hire, most haven't put their best foot forward I've found. The market is still good for software engineers, but it's noticeably not as compelling as it was just a half year ago - I feel like the balance has tilted a little more to the employer's side in the employee/employer dynamic.

We'd also kill to hire you. (PlanGrid)

I left Zenefits in December and had three job offers after about a month of looking, and they were all high-growth Series B/C startups.

Happy to connect you to any of the places I talked to if they're interesting to you, contact info in profile.

What's your opinion on the CEO scandal with zenefits?

I live on the east coast and one of my colleagues is being flown to the Bay Area to interview for a JS position at a very popular company. But that's just one data point.

That's interesting to hear. I've seen a very sharp drop off in unsolicited emails lately from recruiters (50 per month to ~2). I already have a job so I'm not looking, but the silence has been noticable.

Because they fired all the recruiters? Sorry that was mean.

I honestly hope these companies start culling these non essential employees. When I left the valley, they were one of the biggest reasons. They were affecting the local intelligence culture in a very negative way.

I feel like you are being harsh. Recruiting seems like a pretty essential part to a fast growing company. And to say they affect the “local intelligence culture”, well there’s a lot of locals in SF who say that about all of tech and there’s many a way to define intelligence.

As a developer, I appreciate the role recruiters play. Reaching out cold to people isn’t easy and the fact someone else spends time on this while I write code is great. And the fact that my LinkedIn has multiple leads from people about job opportunities should I want to move is fantastic. Are we so spoiled to scoff at people offering us jobs when so many people can barely find quality work.

Certainly there are some shady players, but not really more than I’ve seen on the Engineering side, and my main issues have been less with recruiters and more with the hiring managers who the recruiters work for. “Oh, your rocket ship hasn’t grown revenue for 6 months straight yet you told me 100% YOY growth.” It was two directors of engineering and not a recruiter that lied to me about growth at a well respected YC startup. I blame the people crafting the message more than the messenger.

I'm not speaking specifically on recruiters, whom I also believe play a valuable role (possibly second most valuable to actual engineers, given their importance on bringing in talent), more on middle managers, marketing and sales orgs. I had a general sense of ennui with the way they shaped self-obsessed materialism in SF, and their insistence on packing 5 at a time in apartments they couldn't afford, driving out families with fewer income earners per head just to be part of something they didn't help make. To me, that brand of person gives Baby Boomers a run for their money.

It really takes a special kind of person to hope that tons of people lose their jobs...

i would argue it takes a more special person to think perpetual growth and bloated companies are realistic. Nobody's wishing misery on others. Just natural culling cycles.

Good recruiters are essential for building a good team. I have been happy to know many of the great recruiters I have had the pleasure to be on the same team on. Hiring is a complex topic involving marketing the company, searching for candidates, understanding the needs of the company and the legal terrain and helping everyone through the process.

Possibly a timing issue? People often leave jobs after 2-3 months if it's not a good fit, otherwise they generally stay until they hit their year mark. Looks like you're at six months.

A sudden flood of engineering talent on the market has other problems. Salaries could go down and given how expensive The Bay Area is then that could be problematic.

Given how hard hiring has been, I doubt it. The current talent shortage could absorb a huge number of engineers. A lot of startups are well funded for many years anyway. People are predicting doom and gloom but I really don't see it. Home prices falling is also probably not a terrible thing, even on an engineer's salary homes are hard to come by, and rents are extreme. A small correction is probably a good thing. I bought my house at the bottom of the housing market in 2011 and its value has nearly doubled since then which is ridiculous to me. I also have enough savings to last me years. Lots of companies are also doing just fine. This really isn't the earth shattering dot com bust some of you want it to be.

Why do you think home prices will fall? There is plenty of foreign investment money out there to shove into the real estate market.

We have this problem in Boston right now. We're building and it's doing nothing to the rents because it's being snapped up by foreigners.

The Chinese stock market hasn't exactly been doing great lately either...

Which is why wealthy Chinese will be seeking a safer place to put their money.

How do I find out who the Chinese owned housing people are so I can seek to rent their vacant properties while they live in china?

You might try local Realtors (especially those who specialize as buyer agents) that advertise in Chinese (or that they speak Mandarin or Cantonese) to see if any recent transactions fit the bill.

Also, sales are open record - you might look at buyers with Chinese surnames that lack Americanized first names.

Which is why Chinese money needs to chase returns elsewhere?

In the short run, sure. In the long run, what happens when many of the Chinese business owners who have been parking their wealth on the coasts of America face a liquidity crunch and suddenly need that money to keep their companies going?

We've been here before: back in the 80s, Japan was buying up most of the real, tangible assets in the U.S.

http://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buyin...

The cause was the same: strong export products, an undervalued currency, and easy-money policies. The first signs of trouble were the same: high inflation, crony capitalism, and poor transparency in the market. Let's see if the rest of history plays out the same way.

This. I was reminded of the Japanese and Middle East based investors who were on a real estate buying rampage in the 80s.

They get bailed out by the communist gov't?

Why do you think most of the new housing here in Boston is going to foreign investors and staying empty?

It's probably just like vancouver, lots of money, no place for it to go, you can launder foreign money basically legally into a house in the US. You should search for vancouver and see the ycomb story on it earlier this week.

Housing here is just limited supply and high demand. I don't see prices falling, given how strict getting a $1m+ loan is in the first place.

Prices won't really go down unless people are forced to sell.

That said, I have sympathy for the LinkedIn engineers who were holding all their stock for a down payment. That's gotta hurt.

The out-sized "demand" is largely coming from yield hungry investors and Chinese investors looking for a bolthole.

Both kinds of demand could easily be clamped down upon by raising property taxes - the victims of which would be wealthy foreign investors and people who have sat on one of the largest increase in property values in history.

Likewise, supply could be increased if local government were at all interested in doing so just by building 10,000-20,000 low income apartments.

If the government announced both, the cost of San Francisco housing would plummet within days.

When the supply is affluent, the salary goes down, period.

why do we need minimum wage laws then?

Seriously? You're going to use the impact on Silly Valley tech salaries that a glut of engineering talent would cause as an argument against minimum wage laws?

If technology professionals ever find themselves in a position where minimum wage regulations are relevant to their incomes, we'll have been through something far worse than a few layoffs.

The myopia of tech people is really mind-blowing sometimes...

EDIT: phrasing.

i am merely pointing out that there are many factors involved not just supply and demand.

Like, for example, corporations preying on people who have no choice but to take any job that's available, and offering wages that are below a starvation level?

Is this sarcastic? If you think 100k is the minimum wage law should go at, what a wonderful world we are living.

No. Engineers are spoiled during up time because the market, so we have to bear the correction during down turn which is also from the market.

Wages didn't go down during the dotcom bust. There were just no jobs to apply for until after the dust settled in 2003-2004.

They certainly did go down. I was personally at a company where the CEO came in one morning during late 2001 and announced a cut of 10% across the board. No-one left as a result either, until 2003.

No, as an industry, wages absolutely did not go down. Your salary went down because your company and some others were in trouble, but most companies did not have salary cuts, and salaries were not cut whatsoever.

If a company goes bankrupt and it lays people off, it doesn't mean that salaries all fell, it just means those employees' salaries dropped to $0. This is what happened to you. I got modest salary increases during the same time.

"wages absolutely did not go down" being followed by "Your salary went down because your company and some others were in trouble" makes me wonder how well this line of logic was thought out.

Not sure what you mean. Anecdotal evidence is valueless. Sure, some companies cut salaries, but as a whole, the wages did not go down. It's not all of a sudden the going rate for a programmer went from 100k down to 85k in general.

Yours is anecdotal, too -- you just stated it as fact. Where are the data?

Look at the top of this thread from the post from:

http://www.bls.gov/opub/regional_reports/200908_silicon_vall...

As already pointed out this covers 2001 to 2008. I'm interested in 2001 to 2003/4 inclusive. Tech salaries obviously went up between 2001 and 2008, everyone in the Bay Area knows that.

If the data for this specific range is available, I'd love to see it. Perhaps I missed it.

>This is what happened to you.

This is not what happened to me. I kept my job, but my salary went down.

Various companies also enforced extended shutdowns (over Holiday periods). If you had no vacation left, you didn't get paid. This is effectively a wage cut.

I am aware that wages are "sticky" and companies would rather lay off than cut salaries. But the statement that "wages did not go down" is not correct.

Yeah, @pfarnsworth is stuck on some weird point. Wages in the tech industry went down during the dotcom crash for those that had jobs. And some people lost their jobs and couldn't get new ones. And there were some people who did not have their salaries change, like me. I was not in the bay area, that's probably why mine didn't go down. My stock went did go down in value :-)

No, as I said, as an industry, wages did not go down. Sure, some companies cut their wages, but that was the minority. The salaries for programmer didn't go for $100k to $85k for example. Either the companies died, or they survived and kept wages the same. The vast majority of companies that survived didn't cut wages. They either laid people off, or kept the status quo.

The reason why they didn't is because they didn't want to give an arbitrary pay cut to their best employees, who would leave as soon as things got better. They would rather cut the fat and get rid of employees they didn't want.

Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Cisco, Oracle, etc, none of those companies instituted pay cuts, and wages did not go down in those companies. Some of them had layoffs but they cut salaries.

So we've reached the point where you say the (presumably average) salary for programmers didn't go down between 2000 and 2004. And I am at least one data point that shows that it did (and I know of plenty others).

I wish someone actually had data for the time in question, as opposed to anecdote. I find the question quite interesting, and would like to know the answer.

As posted above by someone else: http://www.bls.gov/opub/regional_reports/200908_silicon_vall...

Nope.

Make of this what you will:

"Average annual wages in high-tech rose sharply between 2001 and 2008 compared with overall average wages in the Valley. For the Silicon Valley, the average annual wage in high-tech industries rose from $97,344 in 2001 to $132,351 in 2008, an increase of 36.0 percent. (See table 2.) In comparison, average annual wages rose only 21.7 percent across all establishments in the area"

http://www.bls.gov/opub/regional_reports/200908_silicon_vall...

Good reference. But I wonder what the trend was between 2000 to 2003 inclusive, which is the time of interest. At most flat, probably. The Valley started to come back by 2004 and by 2008 was in good shape.

There's a difference between getting any job and getting a "good" job, even in tech. There are tons of startups and other tech companies with enough funding to continue hiring, but I wouldn't personally waste my time in 90%+ bay area companies I see hiring these days.

>Any kind of JavaScript, iOS or Android engineer

Yeah, no. As someone who hires on the east coast, and has a pretty extensive network of professional peers in generally "high" positions -- all these general assumptions about applying the SF market to anywhere else in the country is complete non-sense. And rightly so.

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