$150K and up for Software Devs in Austin

I'm a freelance mobile developer in Austin.<p>My experience is that companies are "desperate" in the sense that they're willing to invite you to lavish parties and fill you with free alcohol to get you to work there. But as soon as you start talking contracting, telecommute, or anything other than "sit at this desk for 60-hour weeks trying to get permission to fix an awful codebase with terrible equipment," suddenly they're not interested.<p>Story time: one of the best, most experienced local developers I know interviewed at a name-brand tech firm who is covered once a week on HN. <i>Twelve separate times</i>, they told him "We'll let you know today" as to whether or not he was hired. Several weeks later he found out third-hand he was the fall-back guy for some other non-qualified person they ended up hiring instead. He's told me horror stories about their code base that would make your hair stand up. This company keeps inviting me to parties about once a month.<p>There is a developer shortage in Austin, but the article blows it out of proportion. In reality the reason these few companies are "desperate" has to do with developers who want respect as human beings, autonomy to get things done, reasonable hours, a company that understands the need for technical excellence and not "put out fires" mentality, etc. If you do those things it's not that difficult to hire...

Just wanted to share my experience as a junior software engineer straight out of college (May 2011, UT Austin) with experience at 3 different startups now.<p>There's been a discussion lately about the city of Austin being unable to retain engineering graduates, most of whom leave the city unable to find entry level work here (refer to <a href="http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/11/30/keeping-tech-talent-in-austin/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/11/30/keeping-tech-talent-in...</a> to get what I'm talking about). Many of my college friends want to stay in the city that they've grown to love, but many don't and end up moving back home to find work. The growing exodus has become a problem over time, but prospects seem to be on the rise again with initiatives by the City of Austin and other organizations (campus2careers is a great one) to keep graduates in the area. HireStarter, the recruiting agency that was mentioned in the article, was excellent in placing me at my current startup even though I had little experience. There's hope out there for junior guys, but it's still going to be tough.<p>I don't expect things to get better tomorrow as this movement is still early stage, but if this momentum keeps up, suddenly Austin will have a new supply of junior and (formerly junior) senior devs.<p>Again, I still consider myself very fresh to the local industry so my observations may be a bit myopic :).

"Austin's supply crunch for software developers was bad enough by September to prompt 25 Central Texas tech executives to fly to California in search of new talent."<p>Awesome idea - cause there's certainly not a dev shortage in California, is there?<p>They'd probably have more luck doing a whistlestop tour of the midwest and north atlantic states, hitting up the more rural areas. Many techies in those areas have few options, or may be stuck with remote-only options, and may not enjoy the weather as much. The Austin companies have an automatic 'better lifestyle' story against more of those areas (weather alone) rather than trying to compete with California (where most of the devs are there <i>probably</i> because of the Valley and the software dev culture already).<p>In short, I'd guess it's an uphill battle to get people to move from SF to Austin, probably much harder than getting people from, say, St Joseph, Michigan to uproot for Austin.<p>"After resumes were shared, business cards exchanged and several follow-up phone interviews completed, not a single one of those California candidates has made the move to Texas, according to the Austin Technology Council, which organized the trip."<p>Oh wow, and look at that, it didn't work. Wh not?<p>"It's even tighter there than it is here," said participant Rod Favaron , CEO of Austin startup Spredfast . "The challenge is there just aren't enough good software developers to go around."<p>They didn't think of that before? Or just can't think outside the bubble?

May I submit that if companies collectively hired some junior/entry level employees, they might eventually have some mid and senior level developers in the market? Just looking at Startuply for example, there is maybe one junior position out of 53 positions listed in Austin.<p>Perhaps hire one senior level and a two or three junior level developers to work closely together, and try and raise the productivity of the new devs.<p>If there are NO senior level programmers available, maybe they should get creative.

I'm a developer in Dallas and many of the same things are affecting our market, although we're mostly big companies and less startups.<p>I personally work with a geographically distributed team and as long as we meet face to face on occasion, we're highly effective and we can hire when ever we find good talent no matter where they live.<p>I know companies like GitHub, LivingSocial, and 37 Signals all embrace this remote team model and utilize it well to find the talent they need without taking desperate measures.<p>That begs the question, why aren't most of these startups doing the same thing? I understand big companies are often too paralyzed in bureaucracy to hire remote workers, but shouldn't startups be a little more flexible in this regard?

Okay HN – (forgive the personal bent to this, please) what's the best way for me to find a decent paying, but fun job?<p>I've got ~8 years of python experience, ~2 years of experience with Javascript/JQuery/etc. and will be finishing up my masters in design (and an MBA) in the spring and, while I'm actually really proud of a lot of the work I've done, I'm irrationally terrified that I won't find a fun job that pays halfway decently... so, without becoming a plumb for a recruiter with their own best interests at heart, do y'all have any tips for finding a job worth having?<p>(Backstory -- I haven't been out of a job since I got out of college, so I'm feeling totally out of practice with regards to the job search)

It is pretty depressing to realize how under-paid we are in the bay area when you factor in cost of living. A lead systems administrator in SF tops out at about $150k, but more likely is about $120k, which is the same my friends in Wisconsin and New Jersey make, where the cost of living is 60% and 30% lower, respectively.

There's a lot of discussion in this thread around "junior" vs. "senior". This misses the point, which is to hire good programmers and avoid bad ones. It's as if the industry has finally burned itself out of the "programmers as replaceable cogs" model and has replaced it with the next-laziest model, "hire senior, not junior". That is an improvement, but it's still so off-base that the words "junior" and "senior" applied to programming make me cringe.<p>Here are two factors the junior/senior model does not take into account. First, a good but inexperienced programmer will learn so quickly that they will run rings around mediocre experienced programmers in no time. Second, experience isn't only a good thing. Once people have repeated something a certain way enough times (and surprisingly few repetitions are required), they become locked-in and unable to see alternatives. This loss of flexibility is toxic to effective programming.<p>Of course that happens less to good programmers than bad ones, but that only puts us back at the real question - how do you tell a good one apart from a bad one? - something we have no satisfactory way of answering that is compatible with current hiring practices.<p>What we need is a healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior". Our industry lacks this. What is our path to learning? We have the sink-or-swim model in which people once hired are installed in a silo and told to work on their tasks. Everyone recapitulates all the classic mistakes and has to figure everything out for themselves. I know I did. It cost me at least 5 years developmentally, and I'm only putting the number that low to save face. This way is so inefficient that it must eventually yield to something better. Hopefully when that happens there will also be less of the prickly auto-didact about most of us - but that's another story.

"We've fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent," Favaron said, "and that's a zero-sum game that hurts everyone."<p>Everyone? No, it does not hurt the employees.

Here's my gripe about this:<p>Ok, so startups have limited funds, fair enough. But way too many of them offer way too little in the way of equity to make up for a below-market salary and the risk and opportunity cost of taking the job.<p>I have zero sympathy for larger firms. When they talk of raising H1-B limits and how tight the market is, what they really mean is that they can't find developers for what they're willing to pay. the work these developers do is critical to the bottom line of the company. Why should a CEO make out like a bandit through compensation or stock prices while the teams that enabled it toil away for a pittance, comparatively speaking? Wages across all industries have been mostly flat for years—its only in the last few years that the IT/development industry is starting to show some movement.<p>(And before someone points out that everyone in a software company contributes to success, even non-developers, I totally agree—everyone ought to share in success.)

One of the companies mentioned in the article was advertising internships and failed to even call me in for an interview. And it took them 5 weeks to respond saying that they did not have a position that matched my qualifications. It's possible that I suck, but I have a 4.0 GPA advertised on my resume and offered a pretty compelling cover letter.<p>It's possible that many of these companies have a hard time recruiting talent because their recruitment process is broken.

Why are companies so averse to telecommuting? There is an endless supply of S/D around the world.

I think there are 2 parts of the problem.<p>1-companies want to pay a pittance compared to what the person is actually worth. Face it, if you offer $90K, and your competitor offers $120K, the person has to be insane to take an offer that differs so much.<p>2-companies have really high requirements when they don't actually need them. If you are doing something simple, you don't need a Google level engineer...especially if you are not willing to pay a proper salary for one.

I moved from CA (Palo Alto and San Diego) to Austin in August to start my PhD at UT. Austin is pretty good in the sense that it's probably the best possible city you could live in that's in middle America.<p>That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain rude and self-centered. There is a lot of "get out of my way" attitude, both metaphorically in how people interact in conversation, and literally on the roadways. It's also landlocked, and I miss the ocean terribly.<p>I'm here purely because the CS department at UT Austin is the best in the world for my area of research (Evolutionary Algorithms and Neural Networks). However, in a couple of years when my class requirements are done, I'm planning on finishing my dissertation research remotely from a coastal city.<p>There really is nothing at all I can imagine Austin has to offer me that is worth staying here over SF, SD, or even the east coast like NYC or DC. Maybe I just don't get it.

So I've been toying with the idea of relocating to Austin, because New York is f<i></i>*ing expensive.<p>I even sent a couple of job applications some time ago before I got my new job in NYC. I'm not a rockstar, but I'm good and my resume shows it. I get a LOT of bites in New York metro area.<p>However, these Austin companies didn't even bother to respond, except one. The interesting thing about the one that responded was that the job was tailor made for me. It was uncanny...it's almost as if they read my resume and produced the job listing to match. Which is why I sent in the application in the first place.<p>The response was that they found me unqualified for the job. What a load of horse manure. If you're sending form letters to rejected candidates, please take some time to actually use the right template. I believe this one should've been the "no_relocation" or the "ceos_son-in-law_was_more_qualified" template.

I keep hearing of this huge shortage of developers, but the situation I have encountered while looking for a job seems to be saying something else.<p>Is there really a lack of good talent, or is the recruiting process so horribly broken that good developers don't make it through the first levels of filtering by non-technical people?

Austin is a great place to live.

This is good news.. atleast for texas. I'm about 45mins from austin and finding local gigs are always hard. Wonder if they do remote work...

&#62; "We've fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent," Favaron said, "and that's a zero-sum game that hurts everyone."<p>If they've made an agreement to not recruit from each other, they're in violation of anti-trust law.<p>Google, Apple, and at least one other company got busted for this in SV about three years ago.

Guess I'm moving to Austin!

I think the only reason this article was so popular and generated so many comments was the clever marketed headline

Free beer, taco's and a job interview can't make a good mix. I suppose that if I let one rip before I start slurring my qualifications, and the company isn't interested, then it was never meant to be.

the biggest obstacle in moving to Austin is not what the article states..<p>Think about it people..if the developer has a house mortgage will he move? No..<p>If the dv still has edu debt will he move? no..