2006 / October 23^rd/ The deception of job-hunting in the web business

It seems that every day there’s a new job posting site popping up on the web. It makes sense — business is booming, and everyone who is anyone is hiring right now. It means a great expansion and a lot of movement in the industry. Not only do we have hoards of newcomers to the web, but we have seasoned pros trading places for a few more bucks and maybe a bit more sunshine.

With the boom in hiring, comes a boom in salary negotiations. Anyone who’s ever looked for a “real” job before will know that this is by far the lamest part of looking for a job. More often than not, when you’re looking for a job, you’re in need of money. This puts you in the compromising position of needing any money you can get — but requiring the ability to starve for a little while until your employer comes around to a decent offer. In short: it sucks.

Here’s a quick challenge: Look through any of these fancy new job posting sites and count how many entries have actual numbers for salaries posted.

The initial offer is everything

I know plenty a friends that have been burned by this before. Even with not-so-”real” jobs, this can come back to bite you hard. One of my roommates worked at Home Depot for several years. At first, he was hired in a city with relatively low cost of living — so his wages were lower than the employees make down here in SLO, where the cost of living is higher. When he transferred, he didn’t get a raise to account for this — so even though he had more raises and experience than other employees, he was still making $1-2 less an hour than people just starting out. As stupid as it seems, he quit and then reapplied, and effectively got a $2/hr raise.

This is because the initial offer is everything. Raises are based on percentages (generally), which leaves your entire career and future in the nerve wracking interview and initial offer.

Initial offers are generally based on absolutely nothing useful. The true value of a producer is in his/her ability to problem solve and react to things on the fly. The true value of a designer is their ability to continuously adapt and create no matter the circumstances. How could you possibly judge something like this on an interview or simple portfolio? (let’s face it: most people’s portfolios suck) Maybe that producer’s XHTML is copied from another site — maybe it took them 35 hours to do a job that should have taken 6. Maybe that designer’s great layout was really a rip of an obscure blogger that you haven’t seen before.

What is the initial offer based on? Negotiating skills. This is why I personally think that interviews are useless (as does Seth). You’re hiring someone based on a skill that has nothing to do with what they’ll be doing day-to-day to benefit your company.

You tell me, and I’ll tell you

Salary negotiations. This is the biggest bunch of bullshit the business world has ever come up with. The big problem with our industry in particular? There is a massive delta between the low-earners, average-earners, and high-earners. Skill plays almost no factor in average salary.

A naive rockstar producer might easily be making $25,000 a year, while average to sub-par producers can be making $80,000 in the same company. Agencies get all huffy-puffy when people ask what expected salaries are because of this massive delta. If you can catch a worker for $25k instead of $80k, that’s two and a half more producers you can afford to hire for the same price. This often results in a “you tell me first” type situation when negotiating salary. The agency wants to know how much you should be making — and you want to know how much they’re going to offer.

When you start breaking down how much these producers might be earning the company — you suddenly wonder why anyone could consider $25k to be “fair.” Let’s assume an agency bills out at $100/hr (this is very low). Let’s assume it costs the company 1.5x to hire this person (due to taxes, etc). So we’re up to a cost of $37,500 a year. This means that person must bill out 375 hours in a year to break even. A full time employee spends 2,000 hours a year working — meaning this person must be billable 18.75% of their time. This is absurd. Most employees have a higher non-billable percentage (25% is a standard goal), let alone billable percentage.

Why does this delta exist? Why do some producers get paid $10/hr while others are getting $80/hr? Hell if I know — and hell if I want to know. I know the industry is severely broken, and is continually spiraling out of control with no hopes of rescue.

Why just the web?

There’s a reason I tacked on in the web business to the end of this title. This kind of decieving crap doesn’t exist in the Civil Engineering field. You apply for a position in a company, interview, and then you receive an offer. There is usually very little negotiating, and the amount under negotiation is usually a very small delta ($5,000 or less). More likely than not, an offer letter has an amount printed right there. The salary delta between firms is more often based on the firms projects (i.e. high profile like the Bay Bridge, or low profile track homes) and area of residence (cost of living). This slims down the salary delta for starting employees to a comfortable amount. You wouldn’t be too mad if you heard your co-worker was making $5,000 more a year than you — but if you heard he was making $50,000 more than you, your feelings would change a lot quicker.

How did this happen? How do we fix it? Can it be fixed?

We need standards for our standardistas

What are we to tell people just getting interested in the web? That maybe if they try hard, keep learning, and practice their CSS they might one day make either $25,000 or $80,000 depending on how well they interview? Screw that — I’d rather tell them to take some psych classes and learn how to interview. The real problem is that there is almost no way to put a numerical value to a designer or producer’s skill set.

I believe that we need some sort of test that can rate a producer’s knowledge of XHTML, CSS, Javascript and map it against their ability to solve problems. There’s a roadblock here — there’s both the analytical (what does a <dl> mean?) and the design (what combination of tags, classes, and ids to use in order to represent Nike’s navigation scheme to work with Vignette CMS?) aspect to web production.

This is tough because of the design aspect. There are a million and a half ways to accomplish the same exact visual result — but the beauty and intelligence of the approach are the things that will make a site maintainable, compatible, and expandable.

Other ideas for repairing our broken machine?

I’d like to hear some more ideas for fixing this broken machine we call the web industry. Surely there must be better scales to match people on than some useless degree they happen to have their name on.

1. 

   franky

   October 23^rd | #

   I believe that we need some sort of test that can rate a producer’s knowledge
   How much would the people taking the tests get paid. As they obviously need to be the gurus to know the 100 and 1 ways.

   Or do you take the web is already mature enough to start working at a gouverning body for those things. Standardistas (the so called gurus) forming a W3C/anything body. That would be a huge step forward, but is it possible?
   Or is it still too early, or does the world wide nature of the web block such a thing to happen?

2. 

   J Phill

   October 23^rd | #

   I wouldn’t say that interviews are completely worthless. It helps break the the ice, but I don’t think you can hire someone based on just that. It’s good to talk about projects and stuff and get a feel for the person.

   But I think having the person maybe come in to the agency for a day, and give them a test project; that way you can see how they work and interact with other people. It could be a great way to see if they fit.

3. 

   Cody Lindley

   October 23^rd | #

   @kyle - Have you always only worked at a small agency? Have you ever work for a large corporation? I asked because in my experience the small agency is were web positions are most diluted with old school thinking left over from the advertising world of yesterday. If you want to be treated fairly (or as fair as possible), I suggest trying on the shoes of a corporate web developer. It’s not as glamorous as the work that a typical small agency will do. But one thing is for sure, they know how to size up an employee, pay them and reward them fairly, and provide career path training. Mostly this is possible because in a bigger company they can afford large HR departments whose only job is to make sure the crap that happens in small agencies is filter out. Just my two cents…

4. 

   Kyle

   October 23^rd | #

   J Phill: Yeah, that’s something like how we try to do it now. The problem becomes trying to hire people that are out of the area. It’s hard to convince someone to come down, take a couple days off work, and do that. Gets even worse when you start adding up how much it costs to do this.

   Cody: True, although the worst offenders of this from my experience are the larger in-house dev teams. From talking to a lot of my friends working in similar roles, most in-house dev teams base salaries off longevity and “years experience.” This is just trading in one broken model for another.

   Also, I’d be careful who you call small ;) We do more work, better work, and have more employees than a lot of the Top 50 interactives. We just dont’ do ad-buys, so our revenue doesn’t get inflated.

5. 

   Cody Lindley

   October 24^th | #

   @Kyle - The term small was used objectively, in that a company with 250,000 employees is large, while a company with 100 employees in contrast could be consider small. I meant no offense; just that mathematically they are different.

   Also, I would imagine that any model is broken under enough scrutiny, all my point was is that larger companies in my opinion make an attempt to classify and pay employees in an objective way with objective data. In fact, in the larger companies where I have worked there are people who’s single job is this task, as opposed to the small business owner who pays what he can regardless of what a person might be worth.

   I think also we can’t over look or minimize the fact that most of us in this buiz. produce tangible measurable work. Those with this type of work, should get paid more than those who say they can do this or that, but have no tangible measurable work. Heck, in most cases its what we do that does the talking, not what we say.

6. 

   Daily itzBig Links 2006-11-1 - The itzBig Blog - Serving the Unserved – Recruiters, Job Seekers, Quiet Working Professionals

   November 1^st | #

   [...] WarpSpire: The deception of job-hunting in the web business “With the boom in hiring, comes a boom in salary negotiations. Anyone who’s ever looked for a ‘real’ job before will know that this is by far the lamest part of looking for a job. More often than not, when you’re looking for a job, you’re in need of money. This puts you in the compromising position of needing any money you can get — but requiring the ability to starve for a little while until your employer comes around to a decent offer. In short: it sucks.” [...]

7. 

   Kyle

   November 4^th | #

   I know exactly what you mean, but here in Alberta - we have this labour shortage meaning that nearly everywhere is hiring. Yeah, it sucks to be a business owner here in this province, I know.

8. 

   Neil D’Souza

   November 13^th | #

   It’s impressive how prospective employers place their ads for hiring. You’ll find that they require all the skills possible and yet when going in for an interview have no sense of a pay grade for the same.

   So the questing is whether a guy/gal with a skill set of (X)HTML/CSS/XML/Javascript/ PHP/Photoshop/Flash etc etc. get paid the same way as one with just about good experience with XHTML/CSS/Javascript?

   A small company always faces this problem because unlike a large organization, the smaller employee (tsk) probably got to do a 3-man job, service multiple clients and even brew his own coffee. All this just before his lunch break.

   Is it possible to quantify the value of each of your skills vis-a-vis your experience vis-a-vis your actual market exposure?

   If it is then it seems like a wise choice in determining what pay you may command. Unfortunately, it’s too complex a mathematical equation to actually determine a point rating, or star rating ;)

   Any thoughts?

9. 

   Dave

   November 15^th | #

   Woah, great article Kyle, way to expose the truth of employment in our incredibly corrupt business society…thing. makes a mental note to take psych classes

10. 

    Larissa

    October 15^th | #

    To judge the qualification of a job candidate in web business is easier than in other businesses. You can ask for his projects in the past. Nevertheless I agree to Phill, invite him/her for a one, two days trial to see if he/she will fit into the team.

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