The $150k Solution

"There’s a popular theory that people are most productive when they all sit together in big echoey rooms at communal tables with no dividers between workspaces. I think that’s horseshit. The only people who are “productive” in those settings, in my experience, are the type of management people who feel compelled to come over and interrupt you in person rather than send you a fucking email you can look at once you’re done tracking down a bug six levels of callbacks deep. "<p>yes, a thousand times<p>I realize that we have large variance in both what people work on and how people work on things, but with my personality and most of the work I've done over the past several years, I need a quiet place with no disturbances to get my head wrapped deeply around what I'm working on.<p>It's amazing how management will spin any little thing to gain control over the workplace.<p>While I'm ranting, if any managers/other people designing spaces are listening, use soft/indirect lighting. Overhead fluorescent lights that I can't turn off are the devil.

I normally wouldn't respond to a post like this but when it comes to career advice, many of you who have not been in the workforce long should hear the counterpoint.<p>The Austin businesspeople are right: folks who want to make a lifestyle choice of going to Austin from California should get paid less to do it. On average, they'll earn more than most people in Austin, but less than their counterparts in Silicon Valley.<p>I see no problem with this. It's fair. You usually only get to choose where you want to live or where you want to work. The other one is a compromise. That's life. Compromises. Why would a businessperson not take advantage of this when someone wants to live in Austin? Maybe the OP doesn't want to live there but a lot of people do.<p>Working remotely is a compromise further: you will get paid less, you'll get promoted less, and you will be one of the first laid off.<p>The OP can rant all she wants about "[companies lacking] the tools to communicate remotely, [probably] can’t communicate at all", but the all of us who have done this can tell you that remote workers are almost never as productive. They only work for "guy who takes the app and ports it to Android because we don't care to do it here" type of projects. 1-3 person projects. Large projects are hard enough to manage with the people in the office, and going remote is a nightmare. I've even seen 10 year experts on the specific codebase try to work remotely and it be completely unproductive when they're remote.<p>There will be exceptions. The one guy who's amazing as a remote worker. Sales people are always an exception. And of course, all of this turns on its head when the company is not desirable. A crap company will pay you a lot to work remotely, then go out of business 6 months later. Generally though, what I've spelled out here is the way it is.<p>Here's a proposal, given that she's in Austin already, the OP should demand $150K from those companies or her current employer based on this blog post. Tell us what happens over the next 3 months, 6 months, 2 years.

I am having a guilty pleasure Schadenfreude moment.<p>I was looking for a new company 2-4 years ago because the company I was working for turned from being an engineering-centric company to being a paper-centric company. The companies I contacted and interviewed with professed to be interested in hiring me, but were unwilling to do so due to the uncertain economic climate.<p>Two years ago, one of the companies I targeted got over their fear of the unknown and hired me. Now all the companies that were unwilling to take a chance are lamenting the fact that they cannot hire engineers.<p>I have but one word for those companies: karma (is a bitch).

There have been a metric ton of these articles, and there are going to be a metric ton more. And that's great, because it means that engineers are becoming increasingly aware of the market for their own service, which means that they're better prepared to get compensated properly.<p>In the end, any negotiation boils down into a pure tug-of-war, where both sides pull as hard as they possibly can, and the ribbon ends where it ends based off of the relative leverages of the two parties. To this point, engineers have been handicapped not just by not knowing their leverage, but not knowing they were even <i>playing the game</i> in the first place. That seems to be changing.

From the original article, hilarious cluelesness:<p>Austin's supply crunch for software developers was bad enough by September to prompt 25 Central <i>Texas tech executives to fly to California in search of new talent</i>.<p>They offered free beer and <i>pulled pork tacos</i> at the Mighty, a warehouse bar in San Francisco, to attract a couple of dozen job candidates. The next night, they headed to Sunnyvale , in the heart of Silicon Valley, for a Tex-Mex happy hour that drew another 45 potential recruits.<p><a href="http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin-battles-shortage-in-high-end-software-engineering-2024970.html?viewAsSinglePage=true" rel="nofollow">http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin-battles-...</a>

&#62; If your company makes something entirely uninteresting, that’s fine. We need useful software to fill niches, or our whole industry suffers. If you make a boring thing, there are two things you can do to still attract good talent. First, if you don’t need a senior dev, don’t hire one. Hire a junior person, give them the chance to architect small changes to the system, help them grow as an engineer. If you do need a senior person, hire them, but carve out 10% or 20% time for them to do open source stuff or personal projects or whatever.<p>This is a really smart idea.

Visit a job board of a SF based company and you'll find plenty of open positions. There is a supply and demand issue in cities around the world - not just Austin.<p>There are some great companies here who have no problem attracting talent. The companies that are struggling the most (and making the most noise, unfortunately) are the ones that simply don't get it. They throw money at numerous organizations in town asking them to "fix" this "problem" they have.<p>As a result, we've ended up with lots of articles like the one Garann refers to in the Statesman lately. I'm not denying that there is a problem here. I'm just stating that it really isn't specific to Austin.

Austin is always on the top 10 best economies list, always on the top 10 tech hiring list, and Round Rock is one of the fastest growing cities in the US. This author is definitely in the minority in her feelings about the city.<p>If you know where to look and have the skills, the jobs in the $150k range can be found. If you're thinking of moving here, high end homes in the best schools are only $130/sq ft.

It's funny how people insist that companies should offer a gazillion dollars to persuade developers to relocate to their shitty town, when it makes much more sense for companies to avoid hiring people who think it's a shitty town in the first place. There's no point in importing people who hate living in Austin and will jump at the first opportunity to go back "home" to the Bay Area. If you think you're owed a premium for living anywhere but San Francisco, then economically speaking, that's where you ought to be.<p>Not to mention nobody in Austin wants to work with you if you're just going to badmouth the town and brag about how much you're paid to put up with it. Sorry to break it to you, darling, but getting stuck somewhere you hate because you're underwater on your house and have "wedding debt" is no reason for anybody to pay you more. If you're miserable here, that's your business. Austin companies are, quite sensibly, looking for people who will enjoy living and working in Austin.

Question: If you were hiring a new developer and you did a Google "background check" and found this article. Would you hire her?

I know I'll be downvoted for this, but the truth is, if these companies would offshore the jobs to Philippines or India, it easily becomes a $30K-50K/year solution. $50K is more than enough to attract senior devs who will run circles around their American counterparts.