<story><title>Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?</title><text>As above - what strategies have people got for attracting senior engineers to join a company full-time, when it&amp;#x27;s pretty much impossible to match day rates pro-rata in the contract market for anyone other than the FAANG&amp;#x27;s?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>junon</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own:&lt;p&gt;- My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don&amp;#x27;t know. I&amp;#x27;m afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads.&lt;p&gt;- I don&amp;#x27;t care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I&amp;#x27;m going to be happy doing the work that I do.&lt;p&gt;- Agile is a time stuck and time waster. Proudly advertising it as your Modus Operandi is a sure way to get your cold-email dumped in the trash.&lt;p&gt;- If you&amp;#x27;re approaching me claiming you&amp;#x27;ve seen my work, you better not mention a technology I haven&amp;#x27;t used in a decade. I don&amp;#x27;t care, personally, if you&amp;#x27;ve done your research on me, but don&amp;#x27;t act like you have if you haven&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;- My #1 priority at this point in my career is being comfortable - in work and out of work. Showing that the company cares about that - work life balance, good pat, etc. - is a little thing but helps a lot in recruiting people like me.&lt;p&gt;- I&amp;#x27;m probably not with your product or service&amp;#x27;s target demographic (yes, even if it&amp;#x27;s some fancy SaaS). Don&amp;#x27;t knock me if I&amp;#x27;m not. Most senior engineers I know of don&amp;#x27;t like SaaS products and tend to keep things fairly vanilla to retain control over the system. We&amp;#x27;re probably not going to use your service in our personal lives, and that&amp;#x27;s okay.&lt;p&gt;- Working remotely, especially these days, is almost a must. I want to be with family, especially now that we&amp;#x27;re making some life altering changes to catch up after the pandemic (moving, new jobs, getting married, etc.)&lt;p&gt;- Stop drowning us in processes. The more we have to play around with your gold-plated project management system, the less we&amp;#x27;re interested in writing code for you. Remember that a lot of us get by with GitHub issues and nothing else.&lt;p&gt;- A lot of us are tired of the industry. Going to be real. If you can figure out that problem, you&amp;#x27;ll be fighting us off with bats.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>g051051</author><text>&amp;gt; incompetent managers or tech leads.&lt;p&gt;This is one of the things that ruined my last gig.  I have 3 decades of experience.  Managers and tech leads are unlikely to have a fraction of that, so let me do my job.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Agile is a time stuck and time waster&lt;p&gt;This was the other thing.  We fell into the hands of Agile cultists (really no other way to portray them) and wound up getting buried in process, useless meetings, etc.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I&amp;#x27;m probably not with your product or service&amp;#x27;s target demographic&lt;p&gt;Same!  I&amp;#x27;ve never worked on anything that I would have an interest in using personally.  I don&amp;#x27;t have anything against the products, and they served their target audience well, but that&amp;#x27;s not me.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Stop drowning us in processes.&lt;p&gt;See above.  The so called &amp;quot;Agile&amp;quot; stuff they brought in basically crushed our development staff.  It was used as a bludgeon.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: How to attract perm Snr Engs when the contract market is so lucrative?</title><text>As above - what strategies have people got for attracting senior engineers to join a company full-time, when it&amp;#x27;s pretty much impossible to match day rates pro-rata in the contract market for anyone other than the FAANG&amp;#x27;s?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>junon</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a senior eng out of work for a year (per my own choice) slowly looking to get back into the market. These points are my own:&lt;p&gt;- My managers have always been a point of friction. If you hire an expert, stop telling them what they do and don&amp;#x27;t know. I&amp;#x27;m afraid of full time work because of incompetent managers or tech leads.&lt;p&gt;- I don&amp;#x27;t care if your company is a unicorn. I care that I&amp;#x27;m going to be happy doing the work that I do.&lt;p&gt;- Agile is a time stuck and time waster. Proudly advertising it as your Modus Operandi is a sure way to get your cold-email dumped in the trash.&lt;p&gt;- If you&amp;#x27;re approaching me claiming you&amp;#x27;ve seen my work, you better not mention a technology I haven&amp;#x27;t used in a decade. I don&amp;#x27;t care, personally, if you&amp;#x27;ve done your research on me, but don&amp;#x27;t act like you have if you haven&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;- My #1 priority at this point in my career is being comfortable - in work and out of work. Showing that the company cares about that - work life balance, good pat, etc. - is a little thing but helps a lot in recruiting people like me.&lt;p&gt;- I&amp;#x27;m probably not with your product or service&amp;#x27;s target demographic (yes, even if it&amp;#x27;s some fancy SaaS). Don&amp;#x27;t knock me if I&amp;#x27;m not. Most senior engineers I know of don&amp;#x27;t like SaaS products and tend to keep things fairly vanilla to retain control over the system. We&amp;#x27;re probably not going to use your service in our personal lives, and that&amp;#x27;s okay.&lt;p&gt;- Working remotely, especially these days, is almost a must. I want to be with family, especially now that we&amp;#x27;re making some life altering changes to catch up after the pandemic (moving, new jobs, getting married, etc.)&lt;p&gt;- Stop drowning us in processes. The more we have to play around with your gold-plated project management system, the less we&amp;#x27;re interested in writing code for you. Remember that a lot of us get by with GitHub issues and nothing else.&lt;p&gt;- A lot of us are tired of the industry. Going to be real. If you can figure out that problem, you&amp;#x27;ll be fighting us off with bats.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jameshart</author><text>You’re shooting yourself in the foot by ignoring companies that take pride in offering an agile development environment.&lt;p&gt;There are, sure, places that have control-through-forced-scrum as their management philosophy who will call themselves ‘agile’; but there are also places that practice exactly what you’re looking for: getting out of the way of tech practitioners, giving them direct access to stakeholders to decide how and what to work on, trusting teams to self-organize; and those companies are going to say they are agile too.&lt;p&gt;Consider the alternative: a company whose ad says “we don’t follow any agile practices” - what would you interpret that to mean? That they just let you get on with things your way, or that they are stuck in their requirement-gathering change-control-document waterfall ways?&lt;p&gt;You can choose to interpret anything a job ad says cynically.&lt;p&gt;Just like any company’s claim in a job ad it needs to be evaluated.</text></comment>