6/24/2018

軟體工程師:換工作時如何談判薪資



是故勝兵先勝而後求戰,敗兵先戰而後求勝 - 孫子兵法

軟體工程師:換工作時如何談判薪資


已經拿到Offer就沒啥好談了

軟體工程師在經過繁瑣面試之後,一旦從某公司HR(人資)拿到offer,其實薪資談判已經結束。在台灣,無論是本土還是外商,大多數都會由既有資訊:也就是履歷,面試評核,薪資市場參考,工作本身價值等等,給出一個數字,這個數字在給出之後,就表示此公司認定的市場價值。

薪資福利經過「談判爭取」有可能改變嗎?當然有,也因此許多企業巫醫,都會提供一些意見,例如包裝。但以軟體工程師而言,頂多是幾個%的差距,這樣的差距,遠不如這工作本身的意義來得重要。

另外一方面,倘若拿到offer時,無論經過什麼方式爭取,竟然可以取得15%以上的薪資差距,通常表示這個組織並不確定這職位應該帶給組織什麼樣程度的「價值」,換言之,組織裡面很可能因人設事。如果是在研究機構,這可能是一件好事。但如果是在盈利企業,可能是個警訊,表示用人主管與人資並不確定公司政策,更有甚者,公司其實沒有政策!

談判薪資的兩方向


因此,所謂談判薪資,其根本在於:在還沒談之前,就已經站在談判成功的立場。


方向一:人才市場。


同樣是軟體工程師,即便在同個城市,也因不同產業有極大的差別。在台北,如果求職的方向是傳統產業的IT部門,其薪資就大概不如銀行業的IT部門。

同樣的產業,在不同的地理環境也有極大的差別。同樣是智慧手機應用程式開發,在印度外包城市班加羅爾,其薪資就遠不如新加坡。

同樣的產業,同樣的城市,同樣類型的工作,也會因為企業組織的市場定位而有所不同。組織急於擴張,自然就會提出高於市場的薪資水準。

方向二:個人價值

所有人都知道,「自己很厲害的話,薪水自然就會高,就容易找到薪資高的工作」。然而,許多軟體工程師常忽略價值的兩個重點:

(a) 其他人所認定的價值才是個人價值

自己認為自己很有價值,不見得是真的,很有可能是自我感覺良好。根據其他人所「實質認定」的價值才是真的。舉例來說,一個有N年工作經驗的軟體工程師,過去9個月,都只能找到月薪3.5萬的工作,那麼他在市場上實質價值就是月薪3.5萬。反過來說,如果一個有N年工作經驗的軟體工程師,他已經在目前的公司服務N年,最近的薪水是月薪10萬,然而,過去9個月他四處尋找更好的機會時,始終都沒拿到offer,或者拿到offer但是遠少於月薪10萬。這就表示他很有可能在現在的工作薪資是overpay,也就是目前企業可能高估其價值。

(b) 對組織有意義之產出才是個人價值

在徵才的過程中,偶有軟體工程師會覺得「自已都做一些沒有成長性的工作」或者透露「這工作無法讓自己持續成長發展」

這當然表示龍游淺池,組織可能受限於先天環境,沒辦法給這個軟體工程師更大空間。然而,這必須是此軟體工程師對組織已經有「大幅超乎期待」的產出,並且有「實質事實」才行。


建議的行動


作為軟體工程師,如果對你現有的薪資不滿,或者在目前工作領域上做得極度不開心。建議有以下實質行動

(A)  面試自己想去的公司



面試會讓你有機會知道「其他人」對你的價值判斷

(B)  把現在的工作做到超乎所有人的期待

如果無法做到這點,怎麼會知道自己的價值是提升的?又怎麼會知道下次換工作時,薪資談判已經處於不敗之地?

(C)  找到自己喜歡的市場缺口

這幾年來許多軟體工程師會前往中國,或其他成長中市場。這當然也是一種薪資成長的方式。然而,市場的缺口不見得只有成長中市場,即便在台北,也有許多職位和產業有明顯的軟體人才缺口。

找到自己喜歡的市場缺口,或許是個突破的行動。

舉例來說:過去半年來,DevOps在新創和有對消費性市場服務的公司就是個很大的缺口,此外,大數據在銀行產業似乎也是同樣缺口。



6/23/2018

The history and talent market of crawler for online-store


This article contains a brief of history of product comparison of online-store and short survey of 8 TW’s organization
Crawler and full indexing of web for online store became a pretty mature technology in Taiwan. There are not much technical difficulties to build a decent crawler. The real key points are (1) patient (2) patient and mature engineer mindset (3) patient and customization on specific needs.
Almost every local companies leverage the same technology stack.

History


Price comparison requires web crawler and full text indexing search engine as foundation. Therefore, this brief of history shows not only the evolution of technology in past 23 years (#1) but also the overview of talent market in Taiwan.
Taiwanese started to build web crawler since 1995, the earliest local crawler is yam (1995) and kimo (1997). Kimo was acquired by yahoo in 2001. During 1995~2001, the technology of crawler was limited by environment itself. Meaning, network bandwidth and data-center cost were the main reason to limit crawler. Full index search engine was still task which need sophisticated knowledge in both data structure and file structure. Talents at early internet stage sometime worked more on infrastructure and basic implement of algorithm. For example, almost all EC need to host their own email server (#2) In university, the algorithm, math, protocol or conceptual classes were major thing students need to learn.
After 2000 dot-com Bubble, crawler and product listing in Taiwan grow slowly. However, many tools and platform emerged during 2000 to 2010. Firstly, stable version Python 2.0 released at 2000, Lucene (search engine) became top leave Apache project at 2005. However, the most critical service should be “google” in this period of time. Soon google’s service started to impact Taiwan, just a few years google became the most biggest crawler and web indexing around the world. It is still the best crawler and indexing service at this moment. Gradually PChome, yahoo store grows their own store-hosting during 2000~2008. Talents in this stage had more changes to focus on business requirement. There were more and more students in University learned application development, software engineering and software project management, those are the keys in eBiz to make things happened. Google, FB and AWS started impact the web development world since 2005, there were some interesting free service opened for example google shopping API(#3) In 2010, the elasticsearch’s first release created a whole new world. Although elasticsearch was just leverage Lucene as search engine and focus only on how to make this engine scalable and easy to use, it did help all engineers to focus only in building application, instead of reinvent the wheel. So does other big-data platform/tools, for example hadoop. The talent markets of software engineers also changed in Taiwan after 2010. There were more and more open positions purely looked for software engineers. Most engineers could easily implement their idea and to test their idea toward real world in an amazingly short of time. This also drive eBiz startups. Since there are useful and dedicate tools which make internet technology not rocket science anymore. The only drawback here was that some talents engineers will look for “more interesting” job in commercial world for example machine learn or AI. However, only very few engineers will do the cutting edge task, most of them on those “more interesting” job are actually try to invent the wheel not the business focus.

Talent position in history


Nevertheless, engineers’ skill set and how to be handy with tools and not limited in tools are the major difference between talent and normal engineer. It is also critical to have a few engineers’ leader who had went through different stage of internet and also some young talents who can make things from existing tool soon. It seems a 3-4 engineers team size could fit our target. One is pretty senior and lead 2-3 young talent or even just graduated. Companies in Product-Listing

The 8 organization


The 8 companies we survey shows to build a fair product comparison website is not secret anymore. However, to build a good one still require patient and fine tune on every detail. Feebee has more engineer resources, however, the visits numbers is not a target which NO2 to NO3 can’t reach. After interviewed with ezprice engineers and also gather information from Linkedin. We could easily understood that current crawler (python), full-indexing (elasticsearch) and NLP (jieba or others) are pretty mature. A team with 2-3 mature engineers and has 2-3 months to leverage tools could build a decent product.


URL
Visits (4month)
Names
38M
firstweb 第一網站股份有限公司 ( http://sitetag.us)
20.8M
樂方股份有限公司
Funmula
17.2M
ShineWant Tech. Co., Ltd. 嚮網科技股份有限公司
11.2M
環通資訊股份有限公司
UCS Inc.
9.2M
億普媒體股份有限公司Eprice Media,Inc
2.4M
EZpriceCo.,Ltd. Taichung
2.38M
Personal website
0.5M
Reddoor Media Group Co. 紅門互動股份有限公司 (dotmore.com.tw)


Comments 


#1. 23 years is from 1995 to 2018. 1995 was the year which first “easy to get” consumer OS (Windows95) released.

#2. Email server hosting was never easy and it did make trouble for EC in early internet age. However, that also created opportunities for mail hosting service around the world. Gmail should be one of the best but mail.com and zoho.com were also good.

#3. https://www.programmableweb.com/api/google-shopping-search

#4. at 2005, Apache Lucene became a top-level apache project and latter on it almost become a core of all free full-index engine.