"How will offering a higher salary deter less qualified people?"
You've got it exactly backwards: it's not intended to deter the unqualified, it's meant to attract the qualified.
And yes, high salaries do tend to attract good people. Maybe not exclusively, but it's an important factor. So, if the complaint is that "there are no good programmers" (and we assume that your screening process isn't totally arbitrary), there's a pretty good bet that you're not attracting good programmers from the places where they currently work. High salaries are a good way to do that.
You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well. Put another way, you may get more qualified people in absolute numbers, but the signal-to-noise ratio could go up, too.
One option is to find a qualified technical individual - either someone on staff (such as a systems administrator), or someone from outside the company whose opinion you trust (perhaps a service provider, or perhaps the lead developer at your friend's startup, etc.).
Find someone who doesn't actually want the job, but who has the skills to help you narrow things down. Trim out the people who obviously aren't qualified (or who didn't even read the job application properly). Pay him by the hour (his normal IT wage, $75-150/hr, whatever he's worth) to sift through the resumes you've narrowed it down to. Have him pick out the most qualified or most interesting candidates with little annotations as to why yes or why no. Doesn't have to be complex - notes like 'Only Microsoft experience listed', or 'lots of experience with web app development' or 'he lasted four years at BlahTech; if he weren't awesome they'd have fired him after three months', or 'he wrote half the code on the database system you're using'.
It's something he could probably do in his spare time, lounging at home on the couch with a stack of PDFs. If he spends five hours at $100/hr over the course of a week, that's $500 that went towards not wasting your time in useless interviews, or less risk of hiring the wrong person and wasting far, far more. That could be a dozen first-round phone interviews you've skipped over by narrowing the candidates down. If each interview is an hour long, that's a day and a half of everyone's time saved.
It's pretty easy to find someone with technical skill if you do your research; the hard part is finding someone who's looking for a job, or at least the one you're offering specifically. A 'clueless' manager won't know what to look for in a candidate, but if they can narrow things down and then hire someone else who can, it can save a lot of time and money.
An outside person has no "skin in the game," thereby creating a skewed incentive structure. Paid by the hour, the incentive is to process as few resumes as possible. Paid by the resume, the incentive is to reduce th effor per resume.
Personally, I this kind of work terribly tedious, at best. One would have to pay me at least double my normal rate.
The traditional model might call this role an "in house" conteract recruiter, and I doubt the good ones get paid what a good programmer or sysadmin do, thoug perhaps they should.
"You may attract more qualified people, but the number of unqualified people may increase as well."
...which is why you have a screening process.
When people are complaining that there are no good programmers (and this is a common complaint on HN; it's not just a straw man), there's at least one of two things going on:
Maybe the interviewing process is different where you are, but around here the salary is normally not mentioned in the posting - you'd normally get asked about your salary expectations once you've been through the interview.
I will not attend a long interview process if the salary is completely unknown. The least I do is to tell the possible employer what my expectations are and check whether this is ok for them.
Of course it would be better to make them define a salary range, but until now I was never able to do this.
It's a question of supply and demand. An hour or two for someone who is already working can be quite annoying when it's a dead end. On the other hand, it may lead to future opportunities.
Once you reach senior level development in popular technologies, companies are often eager to come after you. (At least, that's what the recruiters and help want ads seem to indicate about senior level J2EE developers around the Philly area.)
As the parent pointed out, in some areas/countries it's completely uncommon to announce salary ranges in job ads. What are you going to do then? Never apply? Move to another country?
I no longer apply to jobs where the salary is not advertised. After turning up to a few interviews in the past where the salary was well below market rate I don't bother wasting my time any more.
I'm trying to bring up an automated screening service at http://codeboff.in/ (self-promo alert) because I think we need way more of these, especially being the sort of people who could make them.
There is already codechef.com, codility.com, spoj.pl, online-judge.uva.es, ideone.com, turingscraft.com, etc. How is your service going to be different?...
In my experience when someone is looking on the top-end of the salary range, they NEVER post that to a job board. It's done through networks and well established recruiters. I've never seen a $150k+ programming job, my only exposure has been through recruiters contacting me working on filling it.
I'd imagine the incompetent ones wouldn't bother applying to jobs that are "way out of their league".
If you are "sucky" you might still apply for a $60K job, thinking that you might slide through. But you wouldn't bother applying to a $100K job, thinking that there'd be way more competent people applying so it'd be a waste of time
You'd imagine that, but you'd be wrong - there are a great many technical employees who don't realize they are way out of their league and will apply anyway.
"Hey, I've got 'two years of experience with .NET'! I remember, because it was my birthday last week and on my birthday two years ago I wrote a little digital clock app from a tutorial I found in a magazine. Man, who ever thought ten minutes in Notepad would net me a $100k job! I'm totally going to apply, and when I get this job I'm never working at another Burger King again!"
Haven't been on the hiring side, but in my experience as an applicant years-of-experience requirements are often inflated and represent wishful thinking. I'll usually apply to anything that lists within 50% or so of what I have, and often still get called in for interviews despite my resume clearly showing I don't meet the nominal criteria.
I actually thought it was better to be specific about why I liked the parent link, because that way the parent would get more upvotes, which I believe it deserved.
This is not a community concerned with upvotes. It is a community concerned with content, and especially with getting good content as quickly and as easily as possible. We upvote to signal good content. We do not comment to signal good content; that is what upvoting is for. We comment to add content; this can be in the form of insight, correction, elaboration, humor, summarizing a long article well, adding a personal anecdote or expert knowledge, answering a question, or any number of other things. Our comments should not be complaints, memes, or other wastes of space and time.
Before clicking the reply button, ask yourself, "Am I really adding something, or should I stop procrastinating and get back to work?"
OK, I appreciate this explanation. By your rules 'upvote for satire' deserves its downvotes. I agree.
I still don't see why the child-post was downvoted. In my view I wasn't whining there, merely asking.
So I'm skeptical that everyone here behaves perfectly rationally in the context of the community rules you've listed. And I don't view this as a waste of time, because I'm trying to figure out how things work here.
Edit: OK, forget it. I'm taking it too personally. You're right, asking 'why the downvotes' is also not good content I'd like to read from other comment'rs.
And on the flip side I've seen a lot of arrogant people on the hiring side who think a given applicant is way out of their league -- but the applicant isn't. It's just that the hiring side folks have preconceived notions, stereotypes and "goggles" distorting their judgment. So, it works both ways.
Maybe, maybe not. I think a better way to filter people would be something like Justin.tv or Facebook does where they have applicants write code as part of the application. I don't have any experience with hiring so i don't have any real data, but I'd love to know how effective those are.
Company I work for issues a basic data structures test to be completed in 1 hour for all resumes worth their paper (about 10 to 15 out of 100 candidates). The test boils down to 'fill in these two functions'. About 20% finish both functions correctly in an hour (I still had an infinite recursion at the 1 hour mark and submitted a correct entry 10 minutes later).
In conjunction with a phone interview we typically only have an actual sitdown with 2 to 4 candidates out of the initial pool of 100. We recruit out of college so resumes get handed in like candy, but this process has effectively helped us find candidates that are at least capable of learning the monolithic code base and getting fully up and running in a few months.
Our company still has an absolute terrible code base. It is very feasible to nuke skilled programmers once you have them.
Isn't this what happened throughout the industry? (with a very few exceptions).
This is exactly what makes my belief about "great programmers" just went out of the window: no matter how great an individual is, the fact that plenty software houses have terrible code base show something else.
People can blame the businesses, the time-to-market, the deadline or whatnot and I believe you guys.
But at the same time, are you being fair toward your profession at the same time?
If great programmers do exist, I'm expecting them to change these ugly code bases everywhere to the point where 50% of any companies out there would have good code base (and that includes unit-tests)
Unless management has made the decision to invest in a solid-wall backstop of functional tests, then no amount of great programmers can clean up a codebase. I've known and learned from some of the best coders alive, and none of them would wade into a known-good codebase that they didn't have solid experience with or responsibility for and start refactoring. Code that they were on the hook for? Open season. Code that someone else was going to get the call on at 3 a.m.? Wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
Given that, I wouldn't expect '50% of any companies' to be good. "If it ain't broke..." is really good advice about 95% of the time. If you're 50-100% overbooked, you don't screw with other peoples' code just to try to make things better around the office.
This only works if there's a time-limit. Facebook's doesn't have one, so they make the problems inordinately time-consuming, which has the side-effect of filtering for not just skill, but desire to work at Facebook as opposed to the many alternatives that won't make you spend the equivalent of nearly an entire workday applying. Six months ago when I applied, I spent a day completing a puzzle--and getting their puzzle-bot to accept it... it only runs every few hours, on input which is unbounded so you're not sure how optimized your solution has to be. If your solution doesn't pass, the puzzle-bot does not tell you why. Afterwards they asked me to do another puzzle at which point I voluntarily dropped out of their interview process. Overall I would say the experience was very poor and reflected badly on Facebook in my mind.
