We pay the best we can. It’s completely open and transparent to all our employees. But there is no way to compete with $400k salaries paid to selected workers by few companies.
So what should we do? Close?
Sorry if this is blunt:
Paying low 100s + de minimis equity for distributed systems and DSP engineers in a super high COL city like LA is going to be a hard sell for most. People with real experience in those fields will be older, can't reasonably support a family there on that salary, and have a lot of options. The type of inexperienced employee who could pick these things up quickly is already being courted by FANGs on campus, for more money.
To get someone to work for that salary, the equity needs to be meaningful, or the startup needs to be the next Facebook or Google, not a niche product. If I'm thinking of working for you, at the max equity you list, the rosiest picture I could paint myself is an exit 4 years from now for $500mm, after which I'd get $500k assuming no dilution = $125k a year. And that's assuming all the stars align to make that happen.
I don't think you should close, since you have a cool product, but maybe consider moving to a lower COL area? I'm sure you could find plenty of people in a place like Huntsville, AL. Lots of defense contractors have engineers with the skills you need and I bet working for a fun startup would be more exciting than what they're doing now.
In person conferences can happen in LA or Vancouver with tourist visas.
And have the same time zone.
More and more companies are doing this, that's why the article mentions Toronto.
If another city say Bangalore or Vancouver does get the critical talent required to kickstart the Tech boom and be a viable competitor, tech companies will migrate wholesale and never look back.
Then this little immigration and globalization issue will finally disappear, which would be fantastic for everyone.
(2) Or we can continue opening up the globalization box piece by piece because each change is really great for some groups and really bad for other groups, which only serves to heighten social conflict and wars like the trade war that has been happening. There will never be enough assistance provided for groups that are negatively impacted by globalization; governments are much too slow acting reactively and proactively.
You realize that most of the changes that you and others want to make are just as unrealistic solutions as the above, and only one is a permanent solution? Right? And as a result of the fragmentation of the world we find ourselves in, incremental changes will not solve anything really. You can move the tech hub or dominant economy somewhere else and it will end up getting restricted again because there will never be enough relief from crowding unless the tech hub becomes more decentralized like most other industries. Further, even being decentralized there will be incumbents created in Canada that will eventually find the changes to be undesirable just like the USA.
Canadians will eventually say China is ok but Indians are externalizing too many degree education costs. And there might be another trade war, and someone thinks they have the answer by moving the dominant economy somewhere else and the same issues will surface again.. and round and round we go in circles until people have finally had enough of kicking the can down the road, throwing the garbage over the wall, and the globalization wars and option 1 happens.
We already have sister offices in CO, MN and Czech Republic for this reason. It ads crazy complexity to the operations, but at least we have access to more talent than we had before.
[1] it's not FAANG level, but it's also not 105k. (if your top end compensation is significantly higher, you should probably be indicating that. Or perhaps breaking out minimum salary by position if they differ significantly.)
Which skills?
> it's not FAANG level, but it's also not 105k.
105k is minimum wage for an engineer. That's why it says minimum in the post.
C/C++, DBA/Architect, Java, DevOps, QA
> 105k is minimum wage for an engineer. That's why it says minimum in the post.
Perhaps it's just me, but when I see a salary listing without I high-end, I assume that's because it's pretty low.
Those are not skills, those are positions. We don't list skills, as they are quite arbitrary and really don't say much about their potential.
> Perhaps it's just me, but when I see a salary listing without I high-end, I assume that's because it's pretty low.
We found that writing the upper bound, many candidate assume that the upper bound is the general compensation and get quite upset if we don't value them as high.
We found this to be working better.