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Hiring (Superstar) Programmers
Ross Turk wrote, "We've been looking for senior engineers to work on SourceForge.net for a while now, and it's been a lot more difficult than it was a few years ago. Has the tech market improved so much that working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent? Is everyone else running into the same problems, or is it just here in the Valley and other high-tech corridors?" This is a question that I've seen coming in a lot; the economy has not picked up everywhere — so how are other people handling this? Going outside the traditional Valley/Route 128 corridors? Outsourcing? And how do you find people — beyond just using job boards? (Full disclosure: That's our job board thingie, as you probably have figured out.) Or do job boards alone work? Some people have been swearing up and down that CraigsList works — and there's always something to be said for nepotism.
Actually, we've all retired on our stock options.
Has the tech market improved so much that working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent?
I think things like pay, benefits, location, etc. matter far more to the vast majority of techies than merely "working on a prominent website." After all, in today's world, prominent websites come and go in a matter of months.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Yeah... that should work :-)
Has the tech market improved so much that working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent?
Yes.
We have this same problem at Sony, noone seems to want to work for us.
Yes, there is a bidding war for employers to hire top computer scientists. Colleges and potential students haven't noticed yet, that that's par for the course. Applications and admissions will triple about when the market dries up again.
And I'll show you developers.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Paying them well. :)
However, let it be said that alot of talented young people are tired of watching their bosses get rich while they give up their lives writing code till 1am every night and barely making it month to month. Young entreprenuership is on the rise.
At least for me in the Boston area, when I freelanced, for every 1 decent job on craigslist there were probably about 80 start ups/1 man and his dream type of 'opportunities'. Of course they were all looking for the same thing: a developer that has years of experience that wants to work for next to nothing and get that 'big pay' off when the site is complete.
It got bad enough for me that I stopped looking on craigslist and anytime I go back just to check it out - it seems to not have changed. There are quite a few 'tech/programmer' based headhunters in the more computer savvy areas of the country, I'd give them a shot on top of the normal web based options.
A trap I often see so-called "prominent" companies falling into is assuming that their name is so famous, people will be falling all over each other trying to be first in line to work there. The problem is, these companies then figure that they don't have to pay people as much.
Yes, a name can get you ahead of the game, but if you pay people 20% less than they can get at another, less well known, company, you are going to have a hard time finding people.
Also, you'll need to have interesting work for your developers to do. If you want highly talented developers, but all you want them to do is help maintain an already stable website, you may have a hard time finding (and especially keeping) good talent.
Also, it helps to be a growing company with good prospects for the future. People don't want to go to a company that is not going anywhere. People want to work at a place where they have a good chance to advance within the company, and where they can expect regular salary increases. The ability to reliably hand out performance bonuses helps too.
If you want to be flooded with resumes from highly talented people, you need all four of the following: a big name, pay at or above the market rate, interesting projects to work on, and a strong and growing financial situation. If you are missing any of these things, you're going to have to work harder to get the really good people.
The reason you're having problems attracting good candidates is that sign in the hallway leading to the interviewer's office. It reads:
ATTENTION:
Beatings will continue
until morale improves.
Thank you.
The Management
* * * * *
A man's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink.
--W.C. Fields
The best engineers are going to fall into one of a few categories. Either they are going to want to do something cutting edge, they're going to want a lot of money, or they are going to want public recognition. If the job is sourceforge, it seems to me that only one of those three is a viable option. There are lots of jobs out there right now and lots of new technology. Everybody can't have the best of the best. It's just not possible.
I would recommend trying for some new talent. Get somebody fresh out of school... Take in some co-ops and pick the best to stay on full time. If you have a tired technology, you're more likely to get the best engineers at the beginning of their career than later on. This is especially true in the current market where companies have this crazy idea that they should hire somebody who's past experience is an exact match to their current task. The young talent is getting left behind...
What has been your efforts in attracting developers to this position? Have you only posted it on your corporate site or have you advertised it on the various popular job boards such as monster and dice? Also, working through head hunters can get you some leads. The best way, however, is to ask your current developers for leads and pursue them yourself.
I am currently evaluating SFEE and I find it to be a great product. Good work! I hope you find who it is you're looking for.
As if we wouldn't realise your intentions, huh? ;-) So, give us the details. It's apparently in the states (California), but what is the job about, really? And the salary, is it superstar too?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
How much is the pay? A lot of places who have (or think they have) cool points seem to think that those are a substitute for cash. I recently got a job offer from one of those cool places (you've heard of it, I'm sure) in the Bay that paid a paltry 16% more than I make in nowheresville, South Carolina. It hurt, because the job, was indeed cool as all hell, but I've got a family to look after.
Sure, you can talk about the wonderful things I can do in the Bay Area, but after paying the rent, all that would change is that I'm a lot closer to the things that I still can't do because now I can't afford it.
Personally, I'd like to live in a place where I've got at least a ghost of a chance of buying a decent 3 bedroom plus an office house without needing a galactic-scale interest only ARM.
The job offer reads "willing to travel frequently" to I presume Fremont. Does that mean they're willing to pay for that travel, too?
Working insane hours for low pay because the job is "cool" is so 20th century. I think most of us have played on that roller coaster once or twice and don't want to do it again. Maybe you can sell that to fresh graduates, but the senior people have learned these lessons already.
Things have picked up a lot in Massachusetts. When I put out a resume a year ago I was getting dozens of calls and emails every day. It was crazy and things have gotten even more heated since then.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Example: I know a small company (but stable) that's been searching for an experienced and motivated PHP programmer. And they're willing to pay a decent salary. With all the talk of outsourcing taking away jobs .. how come it's hard to find coders who are motivated and know what they're doing?
As a long-time sysadmin, I've found it hard to keep steady employment -- although I usually do startups and small dev shops because they're fun (if not so lucrative). One thing I've had a hard time with, is getting through all the job board spam -- I hate it!
I have my resume up on monster -- clearly as a sysadmin. I get messages about insurance sales, modeling, marketing, and Amway-style multi-level-marketing jobs. Also, there are recruiters up there harvesting resumes, with no actual jobs. I got so mad that I had to do something about it -- so I did.
Recruiter-Rater is a rate-your-recruiter type of website. Have good dealings with a recruter? Please post about it, we'd love to hear your success story. Got a recruiter repeatedly wasting your time? Post about that too. Bad recruiters need to be shamed out of existance, and good recruiters should see their commissions increase.
Seriously. I would get an email about a job in my area. I'd apply, send-in a resume, sometimes talk to the guy on the phone -- and never hear from them again, until they have another req, starting the cycle again.
I've been at this job-hunting game for a while, and just recently I've almost completely given up as a wage-slave, except that I still need money to live. Of course, being here in Pittsburgh certianly does *not* help, but it is easier to be broke and still live pretty well here, than it is to be broke and live in places like Boston.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
On the link:
Since when are Java Developers "Engineers"?
Wincopy
Money Magazine's Best Jobs
Top o' the list?
Software Engineer
More
Certain specific skillsets in most markets are experiencing negative unemployment levels... in other words, all available people with any experience whatsoever are already taken, and there are not enough people to go around. The tech bust dramatically reduced the supply of techies, and now it does not take all that much demand to completely use up that relatively small supply.
If you want to hire techies, you have three alternatives:
1) be prepared to pounce on anyone that does become available due to normal turnover (takes time and patience).
2) grow your own internally via training (takes even more time and patience, and is not guaranteed to work).
3) take them away from other companies (which can be very expensive).
I know a lot of you people fly into a rage at the mention of his name, but: Joel Spolsky on this very topic and related topics.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Cranking out an alphabet soup of css, html, php etc. ad nauseum isn't the most challenging programming work.
Because they could.
The best engineer I know left the profession during the last downturn. He was a doctor, so he returned to medicine.
I think a lot of other smart people changed profession.
It's the law of unintended consequences again.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
For a regular career-gig I'm looking for the usual stuff - market-rate pay, quality-of-life, quality-of-workplace, etc. I'm not interested in working from home 40 *yeah right* hours a week I'd rather be in an office or visiting clients.
For side jobs, I'd much rather work for a good cause than high-profile work. Is Slashdot a good cause? Yes, but I'm thinking charity work.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The best programmers are most likely to be sought by companies, not vice versa. To think the best of the best will be looking at job boards seems silly to me. People like that will be in demand to the point where companies find them. It sounds like your approach is a little off. I mean really, what super programmer is out of work to the point they are looking on job boards?
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6OGvufVoc8
in person. Everybody puts a "jobs" link on their site just for kicks and it usually leads to /dev/null. If you want some specific people contact them directly with a straight fair offer and no silly tricks.
Man, it would be super easy picking up women at bars if only I worked on a super popular site like SourceForge. The only thing that would get me more chicks is if I worked as a Slashdot editor.
.. on where you are. Last time I looked, NYC was dead. Presumably the market's more liquid in CA, but tech work in NYC has dried up and it's all now either consulting or moving/moved to NJ and areas further out.
On the plus side, I presume there's fewer ridiculous candidates out there, after they went back to fixing toasters and foaming lattes since the gold rush dried up...
I think the problem stems from just so many great jobs available for great designers and developers in the industry these days. We've been looking for an Interactive Creative Director for a few months now, with no impressive resumes coming in.
Most people are happy enough where they are--good enough pay, good enough benefits, and currently there is a lot of stability... it's hard to get people to want to make the effort to move unless they are Really excited about what you are doing and there is more than just a financial benefit to them. I think, at least right now, pay and benefits are important--but an interesting opportunity can pull the right people. Sounds like you are doing all the right things, it just takes a lot of time for people with good jobs to find a new opportunity when they aren't looking for it. Fact of the matter is, most awesome designers/developers are working on awesome projects and not browsing job boards.
Good luck.
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
What are you doing that's really all the cool or interesting? What's the reward for working there? Working for a name people have heard of? People have heard of General Mills too, do they need "superstar" factory workers?
If you don't really have work that's truly interesting and innovative, get off your ego horse and hire good people who can do the job you actually need done.
Having moved from a relatively cheap area (Central Orlando) to northern California, I can say with experience how bad the difference is. A home that would cost 250k$ in Florida would cost 800k$ here. I was nearly reluctant to move out here having been offered 45k "straight out of college" in Florida I could afford a mortgage on a small 100-150k home, something I would have liked to have done. Now, in California even being paid in the upper 100k's, it's very difficult to afford a mortage. My point is this: "People in their 20s are more inclined to buy real estate now than they were 20 years ago, according to annual statistics from the U.S. Census bureau. In 2005, almost 26% of household heads under 25 years old owned their home, up from 17% in 1985. Homeownership rates for 25 to 29 year olds also increased over the past two decades, though not as sharply." (src: http://www.realestatejournal.com/buysell/tactics/2 0060802-meehan.html)
A lot of really smart and educated people straight out of college, or at any age really, are looking to own property and do things with their income than pay for the silly cost of living in CA. A website (i.e., sf.net) can be run from almost literally anywhere so why run it from the most expensive place in the country? I think a lot more people with talent have the option to persue these things and therefore refuse to move to the valley.
Run a story about needing Programmers right after your SysAdmin nominations story
/.'ed apparently.
1. Need tech help
2. Run SysAdmin nomination story
3. Harvest talent
4. PROFIT!!!!
Actually what makes this funny is that sysadminoftehyear is
Think for a moment, then join the not-so-recent trend of outsourcing your work.
:)
But plan for the backlash when you change the domain name to www.outsourceforge.net.
Right now, I'm doing programming work for clients in California. They like to hire guys who work at home. We communicate remotely, I get to sit around in a pair of shorts all day and nothing else, they have no overhead in having someone on site, and we are all happy.
There is a tremendous amount of development work around right now. Companies should look to the untypical parts of the U.S. for talent, and...Canada. The Canadian dollar is still slightly cheaper than the U.S. dollar, so Canadians are a good deal, the education levels are the same, and similar cultures and time zones make it an easy choice.
I personally think companies in very expensive areas with a tight technical labour market are crazy for struggling to hire locally.
To be honest, if this post is at all indicative of how you make your job posts I think its all in the wording. When you say "Wanted Superstar Programmers" you must know that 99% of developers probably don't consider themselves superstars. The ones that do, are probably either way to full of themselves, or they are already working somewhere making a nice salary. If you want more applicants, try being realistic in your requirements and you willingness to pay them what they are worth in the current market. You might be really selective when it comes to choosing someone, thats your choice, but I know for a fact labels like that would turn off many would be applicants, including those you would consider "superstar" status...
Maybe if VA Software Corporation didn't spend a few years trumpeting the virtues (including banner ads on Slashdot) of using the closed-source Sourceforge software to help companies offshore their product , enabling them to lay off their American programming staff, you wouldn't have so much trouble recruiting American programmers to help work on it.
Maybe some of those great offshore coders can help.
Many folks just don't want to pick up and move some place where real estate prices are insane just so they can get a job with a company that gets bought out 6 months later and downsized 6 months after that.
For 99% of software development, system administration and network management, physical proximity is completely pointless. Hell, most of the time you end up working for a company with more than one office, and you do remote work on remote systems anyway. Yet the majority of tech companies are still afraid to hire telecommuters.
I've been telecommuting for almost 6 years with great success. An employer who is willing to hire remote workers suddenly has a gigantic field of potential employees to pick from.
--- Tao
wants to work at VA Linux since you riffed a bunch of people a few years ago to focus on sourceforge. Guys who regularly contributed to the linux kernel like Ted Tso. I suspect the problem isn't the job offering - it's the company.
Thalasar
It depends on how you're defining "superstar" programmers. Are you looking for someone with a bunch of buzzwords & acronyms on their resume? I see Spring, Hibernate, and JMS in your job description, yet I've never worked with an application architect who was willing to use the first two, and one only used JMS because we didn't have time to write our own messaging system from scratch. I've worked with teams FULL of superstar talent who just don't have exposure to every technology out there. If you're not shopping for buzzwords, what techniques are you using to separate the "Highly detail oriented and organized" folks and the "Motivated self-learner[s]" from the dregs?
Share your profits with them..... That's it!!!
Building windturbines, solar arrays and tide power stuff is so much more fun that doing C++ or SQL. Sorry. =]
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Problem is the best ones are already employed, if you want the best be prepared to pay. I am very happy where I am but I have a 10-15% rule if anyone can match my benefits, insurance, work environment and I don't have to touch a blasted windows machine and beat my pay by 10-15%...I jump in a heartbeat...
The popularity of your web site has absolutely no bearing at all on my decision. Hell google's president could call and beg me tomorrow but if he cannot put up the dough I would hang up on him in a second. That and I am not about to
take a beating on my cost of living by having to move to the west coast just to program on your fancy web site which I do over a ssh connection anyhow.
Got Code?
I think the key is community. Find a place that has and attracts those that you are looking for, and submit your job posting to them.
I frequent the Joel on Software discussion boards (http://www.joelonsoftware.com), and they recently launched a job site (http://job.joelonsoftware.com). Might want to check that out.
And I'll show you the dancing monkey.
People will always switch jobs for enough money, so I have to guess you're hoping to get a superstar for a monkey salary. If you are willing to pay for the best, then use a good headhunter who will know who to call and dangle the carrot in front of.
As a reality check on your salary, a top senior programmer on the east coast can easily make $100K+ without stepping foot in NYC, and that's in a non-glamorous corporate job.
This doesn't just apply to work. I just recently changed my major from computer science to accounting to keep school from being so boring. I'm actually learning and making good grades again.
...you insensitive clod!
Hey I'm one of those developers! I'm a junior developer working on java certification, learning JEE, beans, tags, servlets, AJAX toolkits, javascript etc., etc. I also have some management courses from undergrad and have considered an MBA. When I go to Dice.com and see Senior developers in my zip code making 3/4 of what "software managers" are making by using the Dice salary search feature, I scratch my head confused by whether coding until 1AM is "worth it"...if going the management route would make me a lot more money anyway (and still let me code as a hobby/entrepeneur on the side). What's a young person to do?
From the Sourceforge job listing: "US Citizenship or Permanent Residency required". See, that's the problem right there. You're discriminating against all the superstar illegal alien programmers, you ignorant clods!
Time to up the H1-B quota again??
It's hard to get people to really look at your company. For example, I work for ITA Software, and we're probably one of the best options for the superstar programmer on the east coast. We do real computer science (you know, that stuff you thought you'd never do for real work again after your PhD? One thing that works out is that we have programming puzzles on each of our job's pages like this one: Computer Scientist/Programmer. These puzzles are fun, and just hard enough that your average Java Certified Web flunky will get weeded out. It really helps.
Of course, for operations and other areas of the company, it's still hard to attract the right eyes.
...so how are other people handling this? Going outside the traditional Valley/Route 128 corridors?
Seriously?
I live in Massachusetts, outside 128. It'd take some major amounts of money to get me to commute anywhere near 128.
Also, I don't work in IT. The closest I've come was a year-long stint selling computers at ComputerWorks in Middleton in 88-89. I learned BASIC on a PET in '77 and wrote my own programs to keep track of my paper route customers on a VIC-20 back in the day, but life lead me down a more mechanical path. I wouldn't mind working in IT, but any employer would have to invest in my training. It irks me to hear companies complain about a lack of IT candidates when they aren't willing to train anyone.
-Rich
Somebody pointed out that Dilbert's company set salaries based on the industry average but claimed to want only the best employees.
The PHB acknowledged the point, saying that they were looking for the bright but clueless set.
I have a PhD in computer engineering from a good school and years of industrial experience working at pretty big companies. I'm decently senior. I write about one journal paper per year (maybe 1-2 conference papers), I file a patent every couple of years.
Now that that's over with, I wanted to bring up my point. I know very little about the internals of your company (other than the fact that I use it download some code every once in a while). BUT, my impression is definitely not of a place which is at the forefront of research & development, nor one which fosters post-graduate-level research. I can't imagine that your website would have sufficient resources to pay me anywhere close to my current salary, and I am highly skeptical that you have any PhDs on staff which would foster an atmosphere of continued learning & growth.
Of course, this is my impression, and could be very far from the actual truth. And therein lies the important point of my response -- if you're having a hard time attracting senior developers, you shouldn't be asking what the industry is doing to you, but what you are doing to promote yourself within the right echelons of the industry. In other words, your company may not be "advertising" itself properly (in the form of conference papers, published research, and so forth) to attract the type of senior engineer that you're looking for.
Everyone I know who works at google loves it. And they've hired lots of top talent.
This is a serious question. Given the odd quirks that come with upper-echelon talent (either correlated, caused by, or causing), and given that programmers are already not exactly renowned for their social skills and even-keeledness (now that's a cool word) - why on earth would you want to find the most volatile combination of the two?
Are the best programmers for a business the superstars? I'd say go with people in the top 20% or so and focus more on getting a well-rounded employee than just looking for the coding superstars. This is a company, right, not professional sports?
Just checking.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
But since this is an article about professional developers, SourceForge and what it takes to find an employee/employer... My question is:
As an inspiring developer still in school is a SourceForge project a good way to develop experience? I currently have a full-time job (in IT) and leaving it for an internship is not a good option. I'm hoping to build some type of marketable experience elsewhere.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
A lot of (talented) sysadmin's like me aren't looking for full time employment anymore. I am currently looking for downphasing to a part time job now and if you have something to offer, I can always look into it. Full time sysadmining (as I am doing now) leaves talented people exhausted and squeezed out before they hit 40. I know a lot of people that quit their IT-profession (programmers, administrators) and either work for themselves or work somewhere part time because bigger companies are constantly looking to get the most out of them since they are so dispensable and we have (or had) a lot of them.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I have 10 years in IT. From 1996 to 2001 I worked almost non-stop. In 2001 I had a decent paying job but the market was tight so we started to get treated like crap and no one else was hiring. So I just quit and moved back in with my parents. Aside from a six month contract somewhere in the middle of that, I didn't start working again until earlier this year.
Regarding the economics stuff I mentioned earlier, that is the predominant theory but I don't believe it. I look, as many heterodox economic watchers look, at the business cycle as a back and forth primarily over the division of profit and wages. Inflation, recessions, booms, and unemployment are all byproducts of this, in our view. So the business cycle is like this: things are going along and growing, so people start demanding more wages, which cuts into profits. So the companies start laying people off, so that people will be happy to have a job and won't ask for a raise. A threat to the profit rate results in greater unemployment. After a time the pressure on profit is reduced and the economy gets going again, and the cycle repeats.
Some people have families, are not from my area or even the US and have to work. I don't, so I didn't, when I feel I'm not getting what I deserve. I felt my time was better spent when I wasn't working. However, people like me actually prolong recessions because the companies just increase unemployment even more since I'm not playing their game.
In the old days, even in skilled/professional jobs like ours, groups like associations for professionals (lawyers - ABA, doctors - AMA, dentists - ADA) or unions for skilled workers (telecommunications - CWA, electricians - IBEW etc.) would handle a lot of this, since it works less well on an individual level. You're not really fighting the system when you're off on your own. But if you just look at what's happening in Oaxaca, Mexico now, you can see that a real class war against them (with the addition of their own internal problems - corruption, bureaucracy, lack of solidarity) has knocked all those things down to where they're pretty much powerless and non-existent in the US.
Back to the original point - with all this belief in supply and demand and capitalism, how come the answer is never "pay more"?
1. Don't mention that you are developing a website. This is hardly going the encourage good quality applicants. Web development is dull.
2. Offer decent pay and conditions. An employer contribution of at least 10% of salary to the company pension scheme is a minium. If you are a US employer, you should include comprehensive health care benefits.
3. Set out a clear career path for applicants.
4. Lower your expectations. No superstar programmer is going to want to work on a website - nor do you really need the top people for this purpose. The best programmers belong doing the trickier jobs - OS development, scientific/engineering, financial applications, desktop apps, etc.
5. Rule out outsourcing, and include a statement to such effect in all employees contracts. Who wants to work for a company with a history of outsourcing? That's one of the first things that I would ask a prospective employer - and I would leave prior to any interview if they gave the wrong answer. I am considering leaving my current job due to a current spate of senior managerial cost cutting (which is all costs, except the higest ones - their salaries, their benefits, and their numbers).
How about trying to hire internationally? Telecommuting?
The world is larger than just the US of A, and not every engineer lives in or wants to move to them.
See my blog for my free opinions.
The smart guys all have jobs or are smart enough to know that working for a place that can outsource you tomorrow with the "benefit" of leaving you stranded with a big mortgage and bills is a no-win too-chancy proposition. People are looking for any shred of job security now, moreso than just raw starting pay. That might mean just giving up programming, especially for someone else.
My take on it anyway. I'm not in programming, but I know several years ago I gave up a much higher paying job that was starting to go flakey on me to take a more stable and secure job, just for that reason. Already had had two decent jobs go overseas, facing the third or a severe reduction in pay or availability, I just split ahead of time as soon as I could, and I went into a totally unrelated but more secure field now. What I do now can't be outsourced easily, although I do work with the potential of imported people taking the job for cheaper, I know my boss is totally against that idea, so that is the only guarantee I have, but compared to before, at least it is something. And it is reverse good from a global economic angle, if energy prices, etc keep going up, my job gets more secure as our products become more attractive compared to imports.
I would imagine a lot of programmers might feel the same way or at least be thinking similar right now. The entire concept and practice of dual loyalty is gone,both worker to company or company to worker.
And I know in my own small way when I go to vote this week (we have early voting here) I am reacting to this, I will NOT vote for any incumbent, as far as I am concerned this whole situation has come about from congress working in collusion with the top 1% globalists to just royally screw the US worker, white, blue, green or pink collar. When I found out they were giving *tax breaks* to corporations to outsource I had had enough. We need radical change in government,top to bottom,and laws and economic policies to avoid the US turning into some second rate half assed boss class rules society. Freaking close right now, worse it has ever been in our history. We DO need some sane protectionism action until we can get back to building the middle class instead of wearing them down with credit, deficits, balance of payments deficits and so on. We NEED a diverse economy, all of it like it should be, a solid manufacturing base, etc. The US worker can NOT duplicate the living conditions and cost of living associated with second and third world nations, it is not possible even in the poorest areas of the US, whereas the fatcats can just keep shifting their "capital" around to the cheapest place, and screw their neighbors and fellow citizens over.
I'm an MBA student with an engineering background and I'm currently in a Dual Degree program getting a MSIS and an MBA. I can tell you that this tech-focused program is FULL of former developer / engineer types who are running away from the low-reward/long-hours experiences of writing code and are now looking at starting their own companies, or breaking in the the management level at other promising new companies. Those that are targetting established companies are going to the highest bidder, which generally means Pharma or Consulting. Overall, I just think that the .com collapse and the increasingly sweatshop-like working environments (EA anyone?) for developers have sent a lot of people scurrying to find other things to do that are more enjoyable.
It's ironic that people keep whining about the end of IT, outsourcing, etc. and concurrently it's near impossible for employers in most NA markets to find good talent.
(I know - we hire, or at least try to hire, top talent in multiple cities in Canada and the US, and it's hard to find good people).
The reality is that compsci programs graduate fewer and fewer people every year, while the demand for IT skills grows every year. Can you spell supply and demand?
You're looking for senior Java people. Assuming you're serious about that, then you're looking in a very small pool. Most people who aren't totally unemployable douchebags and really know Java are academics, already making a pile of money in one of the rare "good jobs", or have realized what a clusterfuck Java is and refuse to work with it anymore.
Note, I am not one of these people. I wouldn't admit to it if I were. I just know where some of them are hiding. No, I'm not telling.
Game... blouses.
Let's assume for a second that I'm a superstar programmer. Why would I want this job? It says nothing! Frankly, sourceforge's website does not appear technically sophisticated, and the existing stuff is all in PHP. What would I be doing? Why would it interest me? Even super-secretive, super-prestigous gives way more information than this. If you want super-star programmers, you're competing with google. You don't have their prestige, so you need to do something better than them. This is it.
You are in good company, though. Much of the time I see places asking for superstar programmers without giving the slightest idea why they're needed or what they'd be doing. It's not a successful strategy...which is probably for the best, because a superstar programmer would be bored out of his (or her) skull if he actually got the job.
If sourceforge human resources guys don't know hire good programmers... maybe they should just hire new HR managers.
Anytime I get stuck on my job I don't go whining to slashdot and hoping they'll fix my problem.
Besides, you should be asking successful HR experts in the tech field, and they are less likely to be found at slashdot unless their techies told them to read it to be up on the trends.
Also, see why microsoft can't hire great programs.
Shure, everybody wants highly qualified programmers. But looking for the superstars might be the wrong idea. In the last 'further training'-class I did, there were a number of newbies with a non-IT-background and also quite a number of well trained and skilled and experienced professionals. Guess who finished the final project with the best result? A team of newbies who had worked as architect, linguist, etc. The key obviously was that they had the best cooperation. The skilled guys proved to be competetive divas and some of their teams didn't even finish the project. Conclusion? Find well skilled people with a team-spirit that fit into or improve the existing team.
Idha khatabahum lijahiluna qalu salaman
They 'want' me to relocate. I seek programming jobs that I can fulfill via telecommuting. ESPECIALLY on something like working on a web site that is 'Net based intrinsically.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
Another thought is to look far outside of Silicon Valley/California. Here in Baltimore, it's relatively easy to find great developers, and the going rate is FAR lower than on the West Coast. Maybe you can setup some type of remote contractor arrangement?
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Reading the SourceForge announcement, they want someone who's prepared to either live in Fremont, California, or do lots of traveling.
Well, air travel is a nightmare these days, and living in Fremont is unaffordable. So I wouldn't even bother to glance at the actual job.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
They bitch about not being able to hire good programmers, then when good programmers show up, they chuck them out the door - usually with armed escort - while replacing them with the cheapest labor they can find, made even cheaper with their constant "oh noes, labor shortage" attempts to flood the labor market and drop those wages even lower.
You companies want competent programmers? Treat them like equals, not something you stepped in while shortcutting across the lawn.
Don't trust any concentration of power.
I just graduated `06 EECS from a certain east coast 'tute. :)
Many close friends are now working for M$, Google, etc. but the fiercest hiring demand has actually been from the financial sector. Undergrads these days typically get 6-figure comp (first year) from the ibanks and hedge funds. The attrition rate is high, but those who thrive as traders can rise up to 7 to 8 figures in less than a decade. It's not quite up to the levels of Messrs. Page and Brin, but you can certainly secure a mortgage with that kind of cash
Superstars? How about just hiring a programmer who can both solve programming problems and feedback their estimates and progress so they're manageable? Years of working for idiots who can't tell the difference has trained programmers to just get through their day without getting fired, and do the interesting stuff with open source on their own time. The good programmers are safely embedded in longterm employment, and a world of half-assers stumbles around pretending they can do work that they barely understand. Which they then insist on writing from scratch, rather than reusing all the objects and source already available - and reinventing all the same bugs and design problems.
Damn Netscape, with its "public betas" and HTML "programming", has ruined whatever "discipline" the programming industry used to have.
--
make install -not war
First is the wording. When I see terms like "superstar" in a job ad, the first thing I think is a dot-com startup that wants someone with every buzzword in the book, or they want someone with 20 years experience willing to work 80-hour weeks for an entry-level salary plus stock options (which may make you a millionaire 5 years down the road, assuming you haven't gone up a bell-tower with a rifle before then, or may be worth less than toilet paper, but definitely won't pay the bills in the meantime). Needless to say, this isn't something that instantly makes me think "I want to work for these people.". One of the problems is that the better a developer is, the less likely they are to think of themselves as a superstar. All too often I look at a job description and say "Well yes, but that's the minimum you should be expecting from someone with any sort of experience at all. Do I want to work for someone who considers that exceptional?".
Then there's the fact that, like I suspect most good developers, I'm already working. I'm not likely to leave a decent job on a whim. The last job change I had, it happened only because the headhunter was one a friend of mine gave a good reference on, the job was offering a 20% salary increase just after my current employer had announced 2% raises and the call came shortly after my then-current manager had pulled a particularly nasty and uncalled-for back-stabbing move on me. If people are in a comfortable position, you may have to go looking for them rather than having them come looking for you and you may have to catch them at just the right time to get them to consider changing jobs.
As one of the people you likely target I can tell you my reason. SourceForge is hardly the example of great project. It has been completely stagnant for over 3 years, adding no new significant features. It had quite large update just recently, which was mostly cosmetic in nature. There were no significant new changes since the project went closed source years ago. Who would want to work for a project that is in maintenance mode for the last 3+ years? Certainly not me. I could have three people work with me for six months to create a serious challenger to sf.net. So you are not even maintaining such a large lead for the maintenance mode to be justified. Simply, your self-image is slightly distorted.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
The person they're looking for is probably in their 20s or early 30s. There aren't as many of those as there used to be, and they can be real picky. Besides 'senior engineers', this is also true for doctors, auto techs, accountants, carpenters, laborers, and rocket scientists.
Anyway, to answer the question, yes. I mean, no. Yes, working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent. No, I don't think it really has that much to do with the state of the tech market. When the tech market was bad, it was a prominent website that was drawing employees, it was having a job, any job. And we've all seen our fair share of examples of what can (and does) happen to any website. Certainly, all other things being equal, yes, I'd take a job working on a higher profile website, but when I say "all other things being equal", I really mean "all other things". A prominent website won't compete with better projects, better location, better pay, better stability, better benefits, better management, better coworkers, better lighting, or a better stocked kitchen.
For that matter, if I was looking for a job working on a prominent website, it help to be prominent outside the geek crowd. If I told my friends or relatives that I worked on Google or Yahoo or even Ebay, they would know what I was talking about, and might even be impressed. If I told just about anyone that I know that I worked on SourceForge, I'd get a blank stare in return. So even among the crowd where working on a prominent website would be a draw, SourceForge probably doesn't have the drawing power that your hoping for, because you're up against a lot bigger names.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
You make a lot of noise in the add about how cool you are, but it seemed to be all sizzle and no steak.
1. List the salary range you're willing to pay. You already know what you're willing to pay. You're gonna ask the developer what they need. Instead of playing this kind of guessing game, cut the bull and say what you're willing to pay. If you have any objections to doing this, pack it up and go home now. If I have to play this kind of game to get in the door, it indicates that there are going to be a lot of other games that I'll have to play once I get the job. Frankly I can get corporate BS games anywhere--I want to work at the place where I don't have to play them.
2. Tell people what's cool about the project and the company. Not empty buzzwords, but real information. If my eyes glaze as soon as I've seen the text, I've just lumped you into the bin with the 50 other employers that I'm not going to consider.
3. Consider your public image. Sourceforge isn't exactly the model of responsiveness or stability. That doesn't make you a "cool" company, it screams at the top of its lungs that there are serious problems. It's going to be very hard to attract people based on your reputation.
Instead of posting a job on your site, start actively recruiting individual developers. Find people who do work that you like. Offer them good projects and insane cash. The type of programmer you're claiming you're after is rare, and it's unlikely that they're just going to casually stroll by your site and see what you have open. You need to make face to face contact, or at minimum via email or the phone. Don't expect them to come to you, because they won't.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
how blind companies and HR managers can sometimes be about this. I worked at a company that committed this sin. They would list radically deep skills and experience requirements from multiple fields for single positions, but the pay wasn't anything special, really just entry-level, and the location sucked.
Each time they would interview what amounted to entry-level candidates (the only ones interested at that pay level, naturally) for months and finally they'd get desperate and make a hire that didn't quite measure up to the extreme the standards they'd set for positions. Then, when it didn't work out and the hire either left or got let go, they wouldn't try to make the position more attractive to someone who was more qualified, they'd just re-list with the same salary and benefits package(s), only each new time they'd add even more required skills and experience, as though they just hadn't been stringent enough the first time.
Meanwhile, for those of us inside already, the workload just got bigger and bigger since we couldn't make any good hires and couldn't keep the ones we made. Needless to say I moved on after just over a year, once I realized that for the amount of work I was actually doing as the result of the (I realized) never-to-be-resolved staff shortage, I was also getting underpaid.
It's like HR thought that if they just kept asking for more, eventually they'd get it.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
You can get flooded with applicants if you were to pay what a superstar is worth.
you guys are known to not pay and offer benefits that a superstar would look for.
also your location is a negative. A superstar can take that $130K a year in ohio and live like a king in a 6000+ Sq foot home.
$130K a year in the valley gives you a shitshack you can barely afford. Up it to $280K and you will start getting responses.
What the fuck is a superstar programmer? Who invented that brainfucked term? I'm getting so annoyed by that, it's unbelievable!
I'm a 20 something with a Computer Science degree, a few years of experience dealing with Linux and Windows networks, servers and a few programming languages, and the job market is so rediculous in the UK I can't get even the lowest 1st line support job. What I would like to know is what does it actually take to get that 'Your Hired' letter sent in your direction?? IT admin jobs, sorry not enough experience. 2nd Line Support, Sorry not enough experience, 1st Line Support, well maybe but not this time. and then Junior Admin Jobs, sorry you've got too much experience I think you'll probably up and leave within 6 months. It does my head in!! Sorry for the rant got another Sorry but no letter today.
becuase the thought of maintaining some other bozos shitty scripts is simply not that exciting to me.
I am not an admin on Sourceforge, but I run IBM's Community Source and IIOSB environments (very similar in functionality to Sourceforge, and on a scale that is probably unprecedented outside of Sourceforge itself). Could I make more money somewhere else? Certainly. But I work with some of the top minds in the Linux community right now, so there really isn't a lot of incentive to look around.
Early on there was a bit of a free-for-all as money for Linux gurus was springing up all over the place. Now it's a little better understood who the big players are, where the job satisfaction is the highest, and where the best minds are drawn to, and so on.
These days it takes more creative thinking to lure the most qualified people. Many of us were burned badly when the bubble burst and will pick and choose our career paths more carefully today. The tables have turned. So what if your company is the hottest thing going today; where will it be five years from now? Ten? How will your company survive when the fad it is riding on ends?
Speaking at least for myself, I had to choose between moving out of an affordable house in a town with very few programming jobs, or stay here and make better money at a far easier job in another industry... Now, on the side I just do contact work for my old employer to keep my skills up and the money rolling in. Right now, though, there's just not enough money and motivation for even many MEDIOCRE programmers to stay in the industry. Bugfixing is too much work rarely fun, and nobody likes to watch software get driven into a wall by marketing wonks, and too many programmers of all sorts are tired of the industry mentality that most software should be overpriced + underperforming.
2) Stat out what someone that is going to LEARN to do the job already needs to know. The people that are sent/brought in by recruiters should all have jobs slightly worse than the one you are offering. Go through them, weeding out the lies and looking for the smart people that are UNDEREMPLOYED and are more than capable of learning your job.
Hire them, teach them, and boom, you got a great deal for a smart man that that likes your company (you trained them). Best of all, he will probably NOT be qualified for any equivelent job in another company - you trained him to do the job at YOUR place, not trained him to do all jobs of that level.
Of course, this requires A) a Smart boss, B) a good company that people will want to stick around, instead of taking the training and going someplace else, C) the ability to take an actual risk,
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
There seems to be a growing gap. As a trilingual (spoken languages that is) senior software architect (multiple university degrees) I'm finding no job offers that are in the least interesting. Most of the job offers I see passing by are either junior or 3-5 years of experience. with profiles (J2EE | .net | [some other language] ) developer with experience in (Hibernate | Spring | Zope | [some technology] ). ;) ).
That's it.
The more high profile technical job offers are just plain rare, and since there are no good offers, I'm staying in my current job.
As an extra remark: If I would want to, I could become a project/programme manager for a big development team, but that is not my intention (I would probably perform suboptimally as well
Try relocating to a better area. Not everyone wants to live in California, with all of the problems that it has (and if you don't know what I am referring to, then you probably don't view them as problems). You'd have to pay me $1M/year just to CONSIDER living there - no matter who I was working for. But salary isn't the main thing - it's quality of life and for me, California (or NY, or Texas, or AZ, WA, or pretty much most of the U.S.) simply does not have it for me. There is more to life than the rat race! I may be making only 90K (and no such thing as bonuses or stock options) here in Alaska, but I can afford to live within 15 minutes from where I work (20 in the worst traffic), have no state income tax, no liberal politicians trying to take my money and give it to someone else, no liberal politicians making up a whole host of other stupid laws (we have conservative politicians taking care of that job), reasonable cost of living for housing and other factors, no overcrowding, less population/gang problems - and as an added bonus, I don't need to speak Spanish! It gets a little cold once in a while - big deal. I'll take that over what California has to offer any day.
Cheers!
AKDiver
We are working on the most useful myth since "the liberal media". Keep those drums going!
Reading the comments, it seems pay appears top of the list as far as criteria goes. This is sad as you guys in the US and UK will never be able to compete with the up and coming markets in China and India.
I've used freelance coders from India and Russia, who are technically as good, or better, than people here in my native UK. Why *should* I pay more for the same piece of code? For the same price, I can pay someone in the developing world top dollar, or I can listen to someone in the developed world bitch at me that I'm not paying enough.
Open Source PVR Hardware Database
It's not Dotcom2, it's Dotcom 2.0..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And your job posting for a senior J2EE developer makes it clear that they will be using legacy crap. A few examples:
- Java/J2EE technologies (Java Enterprise Application Development,including JSP, Servlets, EJB, Taglibs, JDBC)
*No one* wants to use raw JSP/Servlets/Taglibs or EJB2 anymore (I assume the ad would mention EJB3 specifically, so I'm guessing it's EJB2). It's unnecessarily painful, which is why everything in that list except JDBC has been replaced by something better.
- In-depth Experience with at least one of the following application servers: JBoss, BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and cross-application-server development (knowledge of xdoclet is a plus)
I would rather write an entire RDBMS in JavaScript (OK, bad example since it's been done and is actually pretty cool) than have to deal with all three of those monsters at the same time! I understand that not every web app can run on Tomcat and that app servers offer real value, but they're hardly on most programmers' "fun to play with" list.
- Hands-on Experience in web application technologies (HTML, Javascript, CSS, Struts)
Wow, what's this "Struts" thing? Is it one of those exciting new Java web frameworks I've heard so much about? Oh, no, it's that ancient bucket of code that's so cumbersome and outdated, even the original author has no interest in it anymore. Try Tapestry, Echo, JSF -- anything but Struts, JSP, Servlets and Taglibs.
- Practical experience in *Unit testing tools (JUnit, HttpUnit, JWebUnit, Cactus)
OK, this one is debatable but most of us have moved on to TestNG.
In short, you're either looking for a maintenance programmer here or you've been living in a technology-free zone for the last 3-5 years. You don't even mention Java 5 or any kind of IOC container (and I personally would not go back to a world without annotations, generics, autoboxing or IOC). So even if I thought SourceForge would be a cool place to work (and I do), I wouldn't touch this job with a proverbial 9-foot pool.
Top-level programmers, as a general rule, do not want to work with painful technology. And it's not just because we want to "play with new toys" -- most of the new developments in Java are demonstrably "better" than the stuff they replace. They are more expressive and far more productive. They allow us to spend more time on important things like domain and data modeling, effective UI design, testing, security, scalability and performance tuning.
Sorry for the rant, and good luck.
You want superstar programmers, you have to pay a superstar salary.
In my experience (as a programmer) many companies think they can ask for the world yet still only offer a crappy salary.
Funneeee. Wish I had mod points, for the third time in 4 days.
I have developed software for 20 years, but I still seem to be squized when I talk to recruiters. I rarely ever hear about any projects that are actually interesting, or that I can expect to learn much from. So I have given up on looking for web/mobile related projects and do specialised ERP projects instead. It's unbelievably boring, but I can get a decent pay. Hopefully my own projects will be profitable soon, so I can retire from contracting permanently.
If you get a bunch of hotshot egomaniacs together who can't or won't talk to each other, you'll be less successful than if you have a mix of talent that work together well.
If you post it, they will read.
It's not that working for a high-profile service such as SourceForge is not fun, it's that working for a startup is often more fun, and working on your own startup even more fun. It's not fun joining a company that has been around for years - everything there has been pretty much figured out. Creative work has been done. Facing scaling issues has been done, massive email servers - done. Now it's maintenance phase, tweak here and there phase, rewrite component X from scratch (not so fun), and so on.
.signature below).
In startups you are the one who has to figure all this stuff out, and for lots of people that's a lot more interesting (see
Simpy
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JohnE
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While at another company I worked on a project for Sony (based around providing an online platform integrating accounts from SoNet - Sony's Network provider in Japan- with services from Sony Europe) and that was my experience too. The design was a shambles no-one with enough technical knowledge had enough authority to knock heads together to sort the design out. The project fell apart in the end.
I work for Sky in the UK (a NewsCorp company) and see a lot of the same issues, that's why we have having so many problems with our new products (HDTV, broadband, email) . Frankly, a lot of large companies have people in senior and middle management positions that don't have the first idea about the technologies they are dealing with, and think that generic management skills (that you'd use maybe in a retail environment) are enough to be sucessful when managing a complicated technology product.
Unfortunately, the systems involved are too complicated for such a simplistic and generic approach to work, but never the less they keep making product and technical design desicions based on what new paradigm they've read about that week in publications like 'Business 2.0' or they do what some external consultant tells them is a good idea (and they not only have vested interests, but know less about the subject matter than the average nerd-in-the-street). It's very depressing when you have other people in an organisation who you know do 'get it' - and when very senior management also seem to 'get it' - but they are so swamped by people busy trying to climb the greasy pole that product quality goes down the pan (even as millons of pounds are spent with litteraly thousands of people working to keep patching broken platforms that a competant team consisting of a handful of programers could re-write in a few months).
A critical failing of senior management often seems to be the inability to tell the people around them who are a waste of a good paycheque (and that only appear to deliver results and to know what they are doing) from the people who can actually offer them meaningful results and who do know what they are doing.
I keep hoping that the industry will grow up, but in the meantime it does allow for much smaller, more competant companies to compete with much larger ones and provides a great source of employment for those of us that can really deliver.
When the job market picks up the best people get jobs first. So if the market improves a little bit, the best people will have jobs. What are you offering to get them to quit their existing job and come work for you? What makes you special? Offer them $20k more than they get now. Post on a job ad: "Looking for the best of the best". If we hire you, we will pay you $20,000/year more than your current salary. You will get good people contacting you. If you are offering teh same as everyone else, why would someone good leave? What really gets me is when people who pay LESS complain that they can't get top people. Top people radically outperform average people so they should be paid alot more. If not, what is the incentive to be good?
With the dot com implosion and the offshoring of IT work, why would someone care to bother? I personally would not advise anyone to pursue a CS curriculum. If you love tech so much, go to a tech school and become a "tradesman" (digital mechanic) so that the kinds of things you are likely to touch, e.g., a data center, can't be easily offshored.
Otherwise, you better be pretty darn passionate to stay employable... that or lucky...
-M
PS: Former Programmer. Thank God.
I just clicked through the link in the article and I can see why you might be having trouble attracting tallent: you make it much too difficult to find out what the job entails. I had to click through three links to get to any real meat about the job. Along the way all I saw where boring, ugly pages (each one doling out a tiny bit more of the information I was looking for than the previous page), with no particularly exciting elements (no description of the neat stuff I would do, no mention of compenstation or benefits, no steak and no sizzle).
I just completed a three month long job search, so I can say with some authority that this is one of the most uninteresting job posts I have ever seen. I wouldn't bother applying to this position, especially when I have a half dozen other job posts to apply to from bigger name companies willing to tell me, up front, the job title, duties and compensation. I mean, what's the point of not putting all this information in the second link (if not in the first)?
I don't really think that there is any malice involved, just stupidity. Whoever constructed this job posting didn't put any thought into it, didn't consider what would entice prospective empolyees. I also don't think that the job market is so great that you shouldn't be able to find a few good candidates, if only you put some effort into pitching the company and the position (of course, the economy is nowhere near as bad as it was three years ago, so maybe it looks really good to some people who don't remember the first Bush recession).
<old-man-voice> kids these days ... don't know how good they've got it ... barefoot in the snow, up-hill, both ways! .. and we liked it! ... bah! GET OFF MY LAWN! </old-man-voice>
just a ghost in the machine.
I think one big problem is that a lot of companies exploit the fact that a lot of programmers are passionate about their work. They rely on the fact that people would love doing the job and end up underpaying their employees. I've worked in the video game industry and the fact is that most people don't get paid overtime. They get paid less to work more because of what they're doing. People have mentioned to me that they have worked 120 hours in ONE week, that they've worked 80 hour weeks for a year, etc. and they don't get paid to do it. Programers typically work very long hours but don't get paid for it. To me it seems like widescale exploitation of a workforce. /end rant
Actually in practice, there's only the best paid programmers, not the best programmers. Even if there were some objective criteria for determining the best (which there is not), there's no published ranking of programmers to consult. BS ability probably correlates better with high salary than programming ability anyway.
I hear offering them lots of money works.
The cake is a pie
Stp assuming people are looking for you and drop the arrogance. Have the humility to realise
you need to go and look for those people.
Companies with specialised needs can easily and quickly find staff to fill any position.
That's because they should *know* who are the top few thousand people in the world in any specific
discipline or be able to find them. Sought after specialists don't hide, they have a prominent
net presence. You should actively be on the lookout for them with a pro-active HR policy, that
is a responsibilty for the company to know who the players are.
I have a prominent notice on my website stating my skills, experience and jobs that I would
consider. I've done everything I can to succinctly make that part easy for any recruiter passing
by my site, including a list of countries I won't consider working in and my minimum expectations.
I have a niche talent/knowledge and I am in the top 100 players in the world in my area.
If you search on the relevant terms my site will come up in the first page of Google.
I get a high volume of traffic from within my own area of specialisation from my peers but I get surprisingly
few direct offers from companies who are after that skill. They waste their money on advertising
on obscure agency sites when they just need to use Google and find my email address.
I think companies have the arrogance to beleive that the market is so competitive for employees
and that we should all come begging to them, on the contrary, they need to go and hunt for the employees they
need, they should be doing the work. There is a wonderful thing called Google that can find you exactly who
you need if you know how to use it, then make them an offer. If it's any good (ie worth the market price for
that skill and reasonable terms) then you'll get your man in less than 24 hours if you are lucky.
Comapnies do as little as they can to actively chase candidates. Maybe it's to preserve the myth of job scarcity.
But they shoot themselves in the foot.
Four simple words sum it all up nicely:
Show Me The Money.
I'm a programmer. C, C++, C#, PHP, you name it, I code in it. Want it to use a database? Sure, no problem. Throw some networking stuff in there? Why not!
You want me to program your web-application? Hell no!
Why? Because it's freaking boring, that's why!
Sure you have to design it, interact with one or more databases, but in the end it's always getting some variables from the request, process them, do some data storing/retrieving and make sure a page is displayed. What's the fun in that?
I'd rather program some real applications, thank you.
Seriously. You want the best of the best? Then make your pay and benefits the very top. Does the position normally pay $100k in your area? Offer $150k at least. Make it clear that you are willing to outbid for this job, that it is important enough to you to spend more than your competition. Also make sure the non-direct pay (like health insurance) and non-economic compensation (like good computers and free soda) are top notch. Show these people that if they truly are the best you will pay them more, and give them more, than other companies.
However, if you aren't willing to do that, don't bitch. Don't assume that your company is so super awesome that people should be dying to work there. When someone is top of their game, they've got options for miles. They get to choose what they want to do and where they want to do it. They aren't going to be wooed by some big name, they don't need that.
So you have to offer more of everything. Money would be the big one since, let's face it, money is why most of us work. Make sure that what you are offering is significantly more than normal. Not like 5-10%, like 50% or more. Also as I said, don't slack off on the other benefits either. As nice as lots of money is, it's not worth it if your work environment sucks. Make it a place that people want to work.
If you offer more money and a better environment, you won't have trouble wooing top talent. If you aren't willing to do that, you don't want the top talent as much as you think you do.
If you want to move (which it doesn't sound like you really do) try Garner, NC. Housing prices are nice, it's just south of Raleigh. You can commute to RTP if you want to, or if you snag a job at IBM (not that hard) you can probably telecommute. My wife and I have the house you described. Granted, we both work full-time, but we're also not terribly thrifty. Just avoid Cary, NC like it's the plague.
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
Any serious commercial software house will smack you in the face with a flat refusal if they hear you worked for SourceForge.org, this is just ridiculous, only some terrible loser programmer would want to join the elephant graveyard of failed software to help undermine any existing software business.
Rather than look outside the U.S with the usual language barriers that ensue, look instead to the middle 90% of the country.
A lot of talent lives between Pennsylvania and Nevada. Advertise in those metro areas, do a couple levels of phone screens to keep costs down, fly candidates out for interviews and offer decent relo packages.
Look past NYC, DC, Boston, SoCal, Seattle, Portland, Austin, and the research triangle. Those places are meccas, but there are, oh, 250,000,000 people in flyover states that you're forgetting about.
I've been a Raleigh resident for 14+ years, and I have to agree. Especially when comparing and contrasting with the Bay Area.
I have family in the Bay, and I'm amazed at the crap they put up with for luxuries like shelter. The same folks just bought a house in the heart of SF, and are subsequently in hock up to their eyeballs. But, they claim that they'd never move to Raleigh because they "have it all". (Thffpt. Be careful what you wish for.)
Also, I've worked for 2 companies with senior management in the Bay, and the arrogance out there is nothing short of apalling. I find most Valley residents, especially managers, to be nothing more than mindless stooges who are convinced that, because they have a zip code that begins with a 9, they're God's Gift to Software Management.
Nothing could in fact be further from the truth: I was let go from both companies because of the, um, interesting decisions these twits forced upon my local organization.
Granted, Raleigh is the kind of place that is described as "a nice place to raise a family". (Translation: the night-life easily fits on four city blocks.) And if you like the Bay, hey, more power to you; try to scratch out a living there. But I'm spoiled.. I have homeowner's equity now. And a decent hockey team.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
d) none of the above. Everybody hates how many steps you make us go through when we JUST WANT TO ******* DOWNLOAD SOMETHING and would rather stick pins in our eyes than come to work for you. Besides, we've seen the code. Nuh-uh.
Every time I've followed the Competitive Salary trail, it's lead to below average. It's a horrible phrase.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Personally I can say that I've had recruiters start call me again so even if I wanted a job I probably wouldn't have to go search. Have you tried hiring a recruiter? Second, one of your pre-reqs is limiting your talent pool for no reason "Bachelor's degree in a related area or equivalent". Does equivalent mean equivalent work experience or equivalent degree? I don't know so even though I meet or exceed almost all your requirements I'd be discouraged from applying because I don't have a Bachelors, I think a lot of high-level IT workers are tired of getting our resumes filtered by some HR person that can't understand that MySQL experience isn't that much different than "Basic SQL with Oracle".
Here's that actually job posting:
SourceForge.net - Senior Java Developer - Fremont, CA
Position Summary:
The Open Source Technology Group is seeking a Senior Java Developer to work on the backend architecture powering SourceForge.net, the world's largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications.
Responsibilities:
* Design, develop, and implement enterprise Java applications to support business requirements.
* Follow approved life cycle methodologies, create design documents, and perform program coding and testing.
* Resolve technical issues through debugging, research, and investigation.
Requirements:
* Bachelor's degree in a related area or equivalent
* 4-6 years of experience in this field or a related area
* Excellent person-to-person skills
* Highly detail oriented and organized
* Motivated self-learner
* Familiar with standard Java engineering concepts, practices, and procedures
* Excellent troubleshooting skills and problem solving abilities
* Experienced with J2EE, Spring Framework, and Hibernate
* Experience with JMS and message based architectures is preferred
* Familiar with SQL-based databases, preferably MySQL and PostgreSQL
* Familiar with Linux, CVS/Subversion, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript
* Familiar with Open Source development methodologies
* Past contribution to an Open Source project is desirable
The SourceForge.net Engineering team has recently been growing as part of an extensive re-factoring project. We are mainly based in Fremont, CA, but the team as a whole is geographically distributed. The person chosen for this position will report to the SourceForge.net Engineering Manager.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
I've been in the business a while and recently left a company after the job turned out to be nothing like advertised. (That's hurdle 1 - can you ensure you're not being lied to?). Another hurdle is the 'getting the job' process. Perhaps you send a resume to an agency. Nah, the second-hand car salesmen that run the place don't like your CV, it's more than two pages long and has got all these cryptic acronyms (Hurdle 2).
But, miracle of miracles, the agency sends your resume to mega-corp BigBucks! It goes to a manager who lets it sit on his or her desk for three weeks because they're too busy. Most of them then get thrown into the round filing cabinet because "...we don't employ unlucky people here!" (Hurdle 3). But then, another miracle, the manager likes what they see and arranges an interview or three (Hurdles 4 and 5).
Of course, Joe Deadwood has wanted this job and is annoyed that he wasn't considered first. Joe interviews you and however friendly ("...the guy just sucked up to me") or professional ("...the guy isn't a team player"), you can't win (Hurdle 6). Then HR gets in on the act "Why can't we resource this post internally?" (Hurdle 7).
And when you finally get the job, it's to work on a crappy failing project for which you get 90% of the blame. Who would want to work in this business (or change job - you can stay where you are and get crapped on just the same)?
I was on the verge of getting out because of all the solids constantly hitting the air-con but something came along that has changed my mind - possibly. I may still get out next year, sit on a beach somewhere cheap and write the definitive novel...
If you are going to post a job, for god's sake, post the salary range! Especially for the Bay Area! Would I apply for that job? Only if I thought I could improve my standard of living -- and I don't think moving to the bay area is particularly conducive to that, unless the job pays $250K... I can't afford to live there!
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Hi! I am a systems engineer from Argentina. I am a Java/J2EE SemiSenior-Senior programmer and I am finishing my Systems Engineering Career. Currently I have my own pretty small software factory meanwhile I work in a huge software company. I've been aware of this problem since a few years ago. I think that the answer to your post is that there are too many offers for Senior Engineerings. At this time, there are tons of opportunities for working. In my case, I would like to work for Sourceforge because it is Sourceforge, but I could not because I live in Argentina. Here in Argentina there is the same problem in hiring software engineers. Why is that' I think that many factors contribute to this. First of all, the software industry is growing up in huge steps, that provides more and more job opportunities and engineers are highly requested. Second in list as software industry grows people tend to study IT-related careers because it's payful. Here in Argentina, in many non-public universities there is a wrong approach to that problem that consists in force pupils finish their career as soon as posible, in some cases universities give the career title as a gift. This doesn't contribute with the industry because engineers don't get mature and because it pulls down the quality degree of argentinian software professionals. In summary, in my opinion the problem is that the industry growth has fulfilled the available professionals. By professional I mean those who really are systems engineers, not them who do a 2-year course in programming. Even if at first glance we could see no difference, there is a difference and is huge between university systems engineering and non-university programmers. When a really difficult problem araises there difference is mandatory in almost all cases. Finally, may be I could be not 100% accurate in my opinion, but it's based on my experience in the marketplace. Thank you very much for reading my reply.
I just went thru a bunch of resumes this morning. I am surprised that that many people are actually out there submittign resumes with gaps in their employment and other obvious bad things on their resumes.
We have been trying to hire a DBA or two since April. We are still trying to find good candidates that will actually show up for work.
What I'm surprised by this post is the title: "superstar programmer".
I think it's a decadent concept that cannot hold in the future - people expect more involvement!
When looking at job posts I always looked for developer positions and was always doubtful of any position advertised as "programmer" for the fear of being dumped into a corner - just me and the compiler.
If you really are looking for "superstar" people then you cannot expect these people to be happy just programming. The modern software developer is a (usually young) talented guy that can play guitar, do sports, brew beer and have a hell of a time with friends - a social animal.
No more grey beards, dusty books and no life - that's just jurassic.
Talented people are no longer happy with just programming! They want lots of it, but lots more too.
If you want superstars then hire people who are dynamic and different from the average, be ready to be challenged, proven wrong, involved, and finally rewarded beyond expectation.
1) Don't lay off developers when times are bad. When times are good and you have a temporary overload of work - use consultants. no-one wants to work for a company that has a history of laying people off
2) Pay well. Screw the other benefits. Pay is what really matters. If you try to get developers with "our daycare is worth $30k/year alone" you won't get many good developers.
3) Explain business purpose behind the work. No developer wants to do anything if it seems stupid.
4) Foster an open, honest, tolerant, and cooperative work environment.
5) Offer interesting work. If the work isn't interesting put more emhphasis on item #2.
Do these and you shouldn't have a problem.
Why does Slashdot even HAVE a jobs page? I'm in the middle of a job search now, and it's very hard just to FIND openings because of morons like these who stick their ads in a small corner of their own site. If you want good applicants, you must advertise where people can find you!
To start with, you must advertise in your local paper. Then you must advertise on all of the major job boards that cover your area - Dice, Monster, Craig's, and every other site with more than a few ads from your area.
This really drove me up the wall during my current search - the newspaper contained nothing at all for me, Dice and Monster had a few listings, but some of the larger companies only advertise on their own site. You have no right to complain about applicant quality if you refuse to get the word out!
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Yes it has improved so much, maybe not in multi-million dollar projects or the sheer size of the salaries offered, but in varieties and liberties offered.
We (people on slashdot, developers and people who are not on slashdot, casual internet surfers, ebayers, small businesses that are running ecommerce sites, gamers, bloggers, chinese and so on) have virtually created a new nation for ourselves in the internet here.
This world has no boundaries, and offers extreme liberties.
This has naturally got an effect on the tech job scene.
You might live in sweden and work for an indonesian company, whereas doing small contract jobs for some canadian based small businesses. Also at the same time join an open source project that was initially started by a brasilian, to collaborate with a russian, south african and irish.
Its downright crazy.
As a result, there are much supply of developers/programmers/techies in the scene, there are many individuals, small to medium businesses that are looking for them - either for contract jobs or regular - to the point that we have a good activity going on.
Finding a good, RELIABLE (the most important and valued thing on the market) developer/techie is as important as getting punctual, up-to-the-point, honest-paying clients who know what they want, and equally hard.
This is why, both developers and clients, after finding clients and developers (respectively) who they can trust, do tend to stick to them and go ahead with them from then on.
This results in a situation that each developer happens to create his/her own set of clients after getting some outside jobs, and clients have 1-2 developers they can go to if one of them is busy.
So they become a compact group, doing business among themselves.
This has the effect of liberating tech people from seeking out regular jobs, which tend to always include a wear/tear factor due to repetitiveness and mundanity (even in IT) of a regular job, and allow them to go for creating stuff for projects (which is always fun, and always includes a great deal of respect from the client and a sense of being among equals) and maintaining them instead.
Hence the increasing difficulty of hiring people.
The best advice i can give you - if you get one that is reliable, stick to him/her like hell.
Read radical news here
Has the tech market improved so much that working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent?
Umm, working on a prominent website was never attractive to me, nor anyone else I have heard of with "the best talent." Getting paid the most for my services is, provided the intangibles are taken care of. But the prominence of the product figures pretty low on my list, unless my compensation is linked to its success (e.g., stock).
Those of us who survived the dot com bust value stability as much as cash. If a company has a short track record, or worse yet a record of layoffs and outsourcing, it can expect to have to pay a great deal more cash to make up for the lack of job security.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
All I can say is: yep.
I left because management, from the bottom to the top, had no clue. It's a shame.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Give me an idea what the job pays. Responding to an ad takes some effort because I'll research your company before I even contact you. I don't want to invest a lot of time in the process only to find out that you really want to hire someone for $20,000 less than I'm making now.
I know it's hard to show your hand even that little bit, but if you want exceptional people to respond, you need to make it clear that you're exceptional, too.
I have decided how much my services as a software engineer are worth. I always make that clear in the interview. I've never settled for anything less, and I don't plan on ever asking for less than my skills warrant. Being a very senior engineer, I have no need for a prominent project to work on, or high profile company to work for. I enjoy working on interesting projects, but at this point in my career, it's not essential, and besides that, boring = easy, in my experience. Doing harder work for lower pay? Why?
There was a time when movies had plots. So you knew who's ass it was, and why it was farting.
-Not Sure
Do you offer the opportunity for someone to work for you as a developer while living outside the high-tech corridors which appear to be very expensive, cost-of-living-wise? Could someone do development for you while living in Montana, for example?
I am not interested in commuting hours a day or relocating at a cost of over $100k. Even the coolest work has its limits.
Maybe it's as simple as no one wanting to work in Silicon Valley or LA areas. My employer has just been bought out and is closing the office. I don't have any family within 1000 miles of where I am now or any other ties to this area, so I'm looking nationwide. My only geographical requirements are that it not be in LA or Silicon Valley, and preferably not in the D.C. or New York areas. Why? Because I've lived in California before, and the traffic, crowds, taxes, and other bullshit just aren't worth it, no matter how cool the job is or how high the salary looks (before taking into account housing prices, of course.)
"As someone pointed out before, people trying to hire the top 90% or 95% of employees had better be willing to provide salaries and benefits in the top 90% to 95% as well."
We did. It's called the Dot.com era. Besides aren't you all happy with your salary of "doing it for the love"?* At the very least all those "doing it for the money" people (like the doctor someone previously mentioned) are leaving for greener pastures.
*To the point you're giving it away.
The thing is, working on sourceforge.net doesn't gain much interest not because it's sourceforge.net, but because it's solely web-oriented. Web technologies in general are suffering from a huge degradation of credibility in the past few years, I believe mostly due to the influx of kiddie PHP coders. Honestly, the credit of "I am working on a webpage" is absolutely gone, if every second thirteen years old counterstrike player can say that (often along with "I am a hacker").
I would bet that maintaining clusters for sourceforge would get in far more people, mostly because it's a lot more interesting job than working on a webpage.
Cheers
-- iSteve as the Anonymous Coward
Many star coders remain, but I've been struck by how many (here in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley) have left the programming field. I don't think it's the economic cycle of boom/bust, but more the threat of offshoring the work. I can think of several ultra-brainy colleagues who saw what the executives were doing -- sending all technical and scientific work offshore -- and being smart dudes, they got the message. They are all now doing something else (2 self-employed as small business owners, restaurant types) and one guy figured he had enough to get by and he retired. So, kudos to the MBAs and others running corporate America, you just destroyed your talent pool over the last 6 years.
By the way, one of the Unix/C++ coders turned restaurateur had an IQ of 160 (as measured in testing) and he was beyond a doubt the smartest guy I have ever met. Losing that kind of talent is not a good thing for the future of this country. Oh well.
>And how do you find people -- beyond just using job boards?
I think primarily there are two ideas to consider: (A) We seekers of knowledge find the jobsource before they find us because the most qualified of us have both leadership potential and skills. (B) The supplyside outlines a niche, we fill it, then both get paid for work without either side going ad-hoc.
In Sf.net's case I can think of about a dozen things I could help them out with both on a temporary basis and in the long term. The problem today is more one of finding a good protocol for success which is why you have to avoid the ad-hoc situations. As a competent programmer the last I want to do is have to explain everything I do first *without actually performing the real work*. In a demand-based economy, identity is sacrosanct. I want an exchange. Some L.L.C. or partnership I want to work with wants an exchange. That there I think we can all agree on.
The real challenge is forming non ad-hoc alliances where the brightest of us who are held up to public scrutiny stand out and are appropriately recognized for what we do best: our jobs. The more proactive among us have already repeatedly demonstrated we can do this by architecting and designing better Open Source software for a pittance and in our spare times. We do the work because we enjoy it. We like what we do and we want more. We want to make technological improvements and improve conditions for our fellow earth dwellers.
''..help up to public scrutiny'' is a device we could all make use of by functionalizing the steps to make it so. A ratings system must take the form of a decentral independent ratings board which both private profits and private-public & public-private profit enterprises can submit opinions to about how well we do our jobs and more importantly what we do. This is no easy task. It requires commissioning the criteria by which we're judged and our alliances certainly cannot take part in assessing our own work that's a conflict of interest.
We have the power to positively program for improved change and social network for a better world at the same time.
Based on my interview with Slashdot/SourceForge, I would have to say the problem is that your interviewers/hiring decision makers are nit-picky and finicky compared to many other technology companies out there.
Something about high tech companies really baffles me. There is a LOT, i do mean A LOT of top talent other than people that live in NY or Seattle. Theres also a LOT of people with great talent that didnt go to cal poly or MIT.
Theres lot of talent in the midwest and there is TONS of talent in the south..and the deep south. Just because you think that Mississippi, Alabama or Louisiana, for example, is filled with a bunch of rednecks doesnt mean its so. Yes its more rural and there are a lot of "rednecks", farmers and cattle ranchers but thanks to that we all can have fresh food on the table where a lot of food are grown in these areas. but theres a secret for all you recruiters...
There is also a lot of talent, high tech talent in these areas..mostly in the "bigger" places, you wont find them in the middle of a corn crop. they will be in the areas of universities and research facilities.. think Huntsville, AL.. think southern mississippi such as Hattiesburg,MS or the Gulf Coast where there is a lot of hi tech research going on. Mississippi for example is ranked in the top 10 in total supercomputing power..imagine that. Who runs these supercomputers? who manages the databases and who are the programmers that do the real work on these systems. they are there. but theres a catch..
they wont go to Seattle, or San Fran or NYC. why? because its almost all sunshine year round. because they have families they dont want to leave. because the cost of living is less and its less fast paced(relatively speaking). example.. come down to the south in November.. mid to upper 70's, clear skies, sunshine. now go to Seattle. mid to upper 40's, rainy, gloomy, hardly no sunshine etc. maybe seattle is not a fair example because its rainy and gloomy for most of the year but i hope you get the point i am trying to make. So anyway how do you get hold of this talent might you ask?
This will actually solve 2 problems. Take part of your business and move down to the south. thats right.. set up shop there. Silly? no.. not at all. You could pay top talent, a programmer for example $50K - $60K start for example instead of what you would pay for the same guy in seattle or NYC.. which is about i would guess $120K. a 2 Bedroom in Manhatten probably runs about $3000 a month and the size of probably 1/4th the size of a normal house someone would want to live in in the south. for 3 times the square feet someone can buy a house and pay $1000 a month lets say in Huntsville,AL. to move to NYC and bear all those extra expenses..well that is too much to ask.. or live out in the burbs of NYC and go in debt to live in an actual house. so anyway i digress...if you move a shop down there you would not only save tons of money you would also NOT have to outsource because you can pay less there.
there has been talk of this a little bit on the net that i have seen.. its name is rural outsourcing. I cant believe more companies havent taken advtantage of this. Its like they think all the talent is in 2 or 3 areas. That's a little closed minded IMO. Perhaps all the top talent is gone from the normally high tech areas..maybe either they all have their own businesses or they already have work.. and arent leaving. Maybe thats why it's getting harder to find them.
Personally, I've seen tons of code monkeys in my time. Lots of people who coded zillions of lines day and night. What I want is a developer - someone who writes maintainable code (this starts with comments, it doesn't end there), who develops clean unit tests, who works within QA and Production rules rather than griping about the rules, and who takes on the bureaucratic tasks outside of design, coding, and testing again w/o griping.
... I really think that pay is overrated as a motivator. People want free time. Not simply hours per week, but a company that treats people's private lives as important even when dealing with the customer. When asked to add feature "X", they don't say "sure, we can have Joe put in the next 2 weekends"; they suggest a schedule inline with human life.
As for Pay
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
A few years ago VA I.O.U. was laying off by the hundreds. What do you mean you can't find enough people?
It isn't a shortage of talent but a shortage of people who can afford to live in Fremont on a sourceforget programmer's income. Salaries are 20% lower than they were in 2000 and that's without the VA I.O.U. discount. Most people are content to stay at their 2000 jobs than taking a paycut at one of the new jobs.
You're looking for a senior person. But senior people aren't born; they're made. So what are doing to grow the talent in your own organization? I assume you have good people. Why aren't you investing in them?
A couple of other thoughts:
Make sure resumes that come in are evaluated by something other than HR droids who only count buzzwords. Are you looking for people who really have done precisely the things you're looking for, or are you looking for people who have done a useful subset, and have demonstrated an ability to pick up what they need to fill in the blanks?
Anybody who is even remotely qualified for the position is probably in a pretty good situation right now. I know I am. I'm doing some of the coolest shit I've ever done, am having a great time doing it, and am well paid. I have lots of toys to play with, and a boss who expects me to amuse myself with side projects (no, I don't work for Google).
Why would I want to move? Tell me.
...laura
Truth be told, spending 50+ hours a week hunched in front of a computer may sound like a lot of fun for an ambitious coder coming out of college, but the appeal falls off quickly in my experience. Good, young engineers are talented, creative, committed people with active interests and a talent for self-directed learning. As such, they have a LOT of options. I'm 29 years old and have been coding ofr a decade. I KNOW that I'm not going to get rich off of stock options. I KNOW that there are a million opportunities to make a difference in this world. And I KNOW that coding 50+ hours a week is doing nothing for my waistline, or to reduce my chiropractor's bill. It's an unhealthy, unsustainable profession being chained to the keyboard. After a while, the talented and creative figure out that there's more to life. My advice, hire the best new grads and get as much out of them as you can before they move on.
Well, let's see.
But if you need people, put a recruiting van out in front of the Sun complex in Newark. Sun is closing that facility.
Hey SourceForge, did you ever consider this? Maybe your company and culture suck, and that's why you can't find the right people?
Extra credits for advertising to the open source crowd, but defining experience as "having significantly contributed to a commercial application" (Apache lead developers need not apply ;-) and throwing more buzzwords around than a flock of venture capitalists...
Stephan
Troll -1
Flamebait -1
Funny +1
Insightful +1
Informative +1
Maybe you're just looking in the wrong place.
In the Detroit area it is so hard for IT and engineering people to find jobs that lots (and lots) of people are moving out of state.
People are leaving so fast the housing market was just declared the worst in the nation because everyone is selling but no one is buying.
The US auto companies (and their labor suppliers like EDS / Compuware) have been laying people off by the thousands, so if you're looking for some fresh talent you're bound to find some in a talent pool of that size.
Google apparently is interested, they're opening an office in A^2.
Aside from that, a lot of people that didn't jump jobs for higher salaries in the dot com boom saw all of their friends go unemployed when those fancy companies went under.
So you can understand if a lot of people are hesitant to leave their current stable-ish job.
It sounds that management does not change, I meet a person that was the CTO of a big corporation, and he mentioned that he was disappointed about the IT work force, it was not loyal anymore (being from a company that cut the IT jobs to be moved to INDIA) was very ironic. Sorry duds, but there is nobody left smart, only cheap (so hire ten programmers, no, 1000 so they can write a world class play (or program, whichever is written first)
Of course this is all commercial applications development and maintenance, not rocket brain surgery so all the work is in Brazil and India. There's simply no way, as an employer to compete with that differential.
That's really funny. Smart people in the south, that's a knee slapper. You could become a standup comic with material like that!
Really amazing programmers are generally doing more than just earning a paycheck. If the job is to do something truly extraordinary (land a rover on Mars, cure cancer, create a new genre of software) then it is easier to catch the imagination. If it is another release of an existing accounting package, then it is not quite as strong a draw.
I'm not so certain that this is due to less people in I.T., as it is employers wanting their entire staff to be 28x12x486 wunderkind ueberhackers--but only in highly specialized areas.
I live in Des Moines, Iowa, and have been looking for a new position for over a year. I'm in my mid-30's, have worked as a developer, 'nix sysadmin, DBA and project manager/systems architect. Excellent references also. Since starting my job hunt, I've had one--count 'em--one (1) interview, in which I was told I wasn't qualified enough for a position identical to the senior-level one which I held for 4 years at a global corporation in another state.
And I've friends here experiencing the same thing. One friend sent out 50 resumes with only about 3 interviews. He's worked in the Valley, at Bell Labs and for NASA in his career. Another friend only barely found a contract position, and he's been a software architect for years--and he doesn't hold high hopes for the future in this area.
All three of us have discussed our similar situations, and have come to the same conclusion for this area. Positions are becoming overly specialized. It used to be that 80% of the requirements--and the aptitude or work experience in a similar area--would cut it. Now it seems that one needs 120% of the position's requirements, be the foremost expert in the field, and have spent one's entire career in the company's business domain--just to be considered for an interview.
And companies are willing to hold off hiring. I know of several positions around here which have been open the entire time I've been looking. To me, that sounds more like bureaucratic turf-building than a true business need.
All I know is that something's going to have to give...
..is also a great area to live with good growth and affordable housing. Not a terrible hike to RTP either. I highly recommend it =D
What exactly is a superstar? According to this: "Superstar is a term used to refer to a celebrity who has great popular appeal and is widely-known, prominent or successful in some field."
So, you want to hire someone that has popular appeal. Someone that is well known in the world out there. I would imagine hiring a superstar in any field comes down to who you know, and your own personal fame. If you want to snag a superstart actor, you need to know someone in the business. You can't just call up their agent and say "Yeah, I got $100 million, how abuot it?" You have to bring a lot more to the table. Like, "Hi, this is George Lucas, I am doing a movie on xyz, it has a $200 million budget, $100 mil of that is for Tom Cruise. We will hire a private helicopter for him for the leangth of shooting. And three personal assistants. And a team of drivers. And free lodging and food. And he only has to work 4 hours a day. Let's do lunch. Of course he will be the main star. And of course he will look like an action hero."
Superstars want varying things. Money is certainly important. Perks are also highly important. Those superstar actors get their own pimped out trailers on set to hang out in. You best be ready to give your superstar programmer his own office decorated with anything he wants with any technology he wants. Or maybe the option to work from home.
I guess that leads to the question: Are you *sure* you want a superstar? Superstars come with baggage. They are concerned about their public image. A superstar programmer might only get to work on your projects 20-25% of the time. He/She needs to keep up the image of a superstar. How will your non-superstar programmers feel if you throw obcene amounts of money at your superstar while they work for next to nothing?
In my opinion it is better to have a good programmer who documents code well, has a deep breadth of programming knowledge, and works hard. That guy is worth a lot more to any project than a superstar.
I've been working as a Software Engineer for more than 20 years, and am no dinosaur (I'm up-to-date in my field, or close to it), but it seems, as a Senior Engineer with no management responsibilities, the most I can ever hope for in a starting salary for any company is around $120K in a major metropolitan area.
That may seem like a lot to some, but one would think 20 years' experience would gain one significantly more money than someone fresh out of college (many of whom are making 80K or 90K).
Why doesn't experience count for something with regard to salary in this business?
If you are a superstar programmer, you want to do interesting, challenging stuff like building JIT compilers for dynamic languages, sending missions to Mars, doing image and audio recognition or IP telephony. If you can't do any of those, you go work for Google, because it is the cool place, and they gobble up talent like nobody's business.
Most good software engineers and programmers would work for ordinary pay if the environment was OK. The trick to getting GOOD help is to make the place a nice place to work, hire cool people, set clear objectives (with a coherent, do-able plan), and provide all the tools a developer needs, including respect from upper management. The REALLY GOOD people tend to drift into projects where there is a challenge, novelty, high-stakes, enthusiasm and real appreciation.
The last place I worked, I liked the people I worked with so much I practically would have paid them to work there. Unfortunately, management disdained us. We could tell because the pay was substandard, the air-condidtioning sucked, the chairs were old and uncomfortable, and management kept trying to institute new rules to control us rather than empower us. As a result, they lost some really good people who simply went where they felt they were appreciated. (I went back to working for myself.)
Success is doing what you like, being good at it, being rewarded for it, and feeling good about yourself while doing it. Any company that throws obstacles in the way of these conditions for success will have a hard time getting and keeping good people. (A good place to start determining the environment might be reading Tom DeMarco's book, "Peopleware".)
In this day and age, the American programmer is seeing management send ordinary programming jobs overseas, then expecting high quality programmers to work for shit pay in an unrewarding environment. Good programmers will work on boring tasks as long as they know they are appreciated and get rewarded appropriately. If they can't find a job like that, they will find another career.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Haven't you heard? All the dumb people went into politics!
The problem I have had with most job offers is that they are 2-6 months or 1 year with a chance to get hired. I can't commit to a company that is this up front about not committing to its staff. Also I didn't know about jobs.slashdot.org and I see now why I didn't there are none in my area!
1. You list 5 years experience in
Java Enterprise Application Development
JSP,
Servlets,
EJB,
Taglibs,
JDBC,
OO design and development,
JBoss,
BEA WebLogic,
IBM WebSphere,
HTML,
Javascript,
CSS,
Struts,
SOAP,
XML,
XSLT,
JUnit,
HttpUnit,
JWebUnit,
Cactus,
PostgreSQL,
Oracle,
DB2,
Linux
Anyone still here? Has anyone bothered to read down this far? Are you seriously telling me,
that if a candidate turned up with everything else in spades, but only used mysql before,
he would be out the window? How about someone who wasnt familiar with just the testing tools?
Every single thing other than 5 years java should probably be listed as "an advantage", if you
end up hiring someone who cant learn a few new tools quickly, then your hiring process is braindead
anyway.
2.
"We offer a competitive salary," - meaningless, you will pay as little as you think I will work for, like any other sane employer.
"a fun team-oriented casual work environment," - who claims not to?
"excellent benefits including medical, dental, 401-k, section 125 plan, PTO and holidays." - fairly standard package
If I am a well paid successful developer, why do I bother to apply? I have no idea if you are even willing
to match my existing salary. You may not want to put a price out on the table so early, but I may not
be bothered to waste my time finding out if you are competitive. The job market is good right now,
you dont have the power you had a couple of years ago. If you want me to apply for the job , tempt me.
A fun environment? prove it, where are the photographs? Google looks like a fun environment, and I know
without looking, its hard to avoid all of the photos of their offices. What do yours look like? I have no
idea. And my default vision is one of bog standard cubicles and drudgery. If thats not what you are offering
then make a big song and dance about it. It matters.
3. The position is in our Fremont, California headquarters, but we are open to applicants in the United States who are willing to travel frequently.
Why isnt this information in the main job information page? Why is it only in hte forum posting? And why dont you link to the precise page
for the job information rather than the generic careers page and make me figure out what you are talking about? Second of all, I live
in Ireland, I work for a company in California, I do great work. Shame you have cut off a massive no. of developers by demanding
I work in your office and am a citizen of your country.
4. One of the main things that attract me to an new oppertunity are the people I will be working with. In your case I have no idea
who they are. Any of your developers contribute to famous OSS projects? Any well known? Any talk at a lot of conferences? If so
make a big deal out of it, I have moved jobs to work the right people.
You seem to think you are offering a great oppertunity, and it may be that you are. But your job posting does not reflect it.
The requirement are unduly rigid, I would think upon reading them that they where concocted by a moronic HR department. There
are many candidates out there you would be lucky to get who do not match them. The tone of the posting says "form letter".
Get your team direct control of their job ads, you will be glad you did.
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree"
Joel's blog has some interesting stuff on how to attract the right people and also how to interview them so that they actually ARE the right people.
Going outside the traditional Valley/Route 128 corridors? Outsourcing? And how do you find people -- beyond just using job boards?
Just send me an EMAIL damnit, that's all you have to do!
She can have the PC anytime she wants.
I am just tired of having the Job Offers that how about working for us for 3 months at no cost as a volunteer, and maybe we will hire you at the end.
I really have had this offer way too many times to count from Tech Companies. People wonder why the good ones have moved to E-Commerce and internet retail. Making 40K a year is not that complicated if you know what you are doing and are willing to actually do the work for it. You then have no boss, and no Glory Hound manager looking to line his own pockets with your work.
My 2 cents...
Internet Retail spaces are wonderful. Get over it!
Quite right.
Am I the only one that is bothered the use of terms such as superstar, ubergeek, or technogod?
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
Two words "batchelor's degree."
As soon as an ad demands a degree it's a clear sign the people running the place do not know what they are doing. It means that all they know how to do is look at paperwork or credentials. Capability, ability and knowledge mean very little. All that matters is the paperwork.
I have something over 25 years of experience programming. I've been far too busy scratching out a living to be able to take several years and get a degree. And I've seen too many people with technical degrees who were not all that good. From what I have seen, all that a technical degree means is you have been able to sit in a class and take tests; they do not prove one is capable of doing the work involved as a programmer (or that you're even of mediocre ability). Not that I am denegrating education, what I object to is the lazy dependence on paperwork by incompetents who are inadequate to understand what is necessary to be able to do the work in question.
Places I have interviewed for that showed me they did know what they were doing never once specified level of education; instead they had people take a skills test. They had found that having someone write an answer to a skill question told a whole lot more about the ability of the person doing the work as would any paper background. And they weren't even that concerned that the person have a really correct answer as much as they were able to give a reasonable answer relative to the question being asked, e.g. to show how you would solve the problem, even if the solution was wrong as long as it was an intelligent attempt to solve the problem. But to do that requires your technical people who do interviews know what they are doing and how to ask the questions.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
There is a shortage of high quality applicants because of people fleeing tech jobs, and the ones remaining can therefore be more choosy. Job satisfaction (and therefore whether anyone will consider your company) is driven by many things - salary, working conditions, location of the employer (city/state), benefits, coworkers, coolness of projects, room for advancement, job training/re-retraining, flexibility in hours/hands off management, and long term stability or viability of your company. I'll consider lower pay for a job that gives me flexible hours, is laid back, M-F only, and doesn't try to kill me. My social life is important to me, so non-24X7 environments are better. Happiness is not directly proportional to salary, but short term, that's what people think, until they realize they sold out, and have had enough. If your pay scale is low, you need to have other advantages to attract good employees, so emphasize the other things in the list you DO have. Last year I took a new job that paid 30% more, but I found later was misrepresented by the management and recruiters... the company was constantly advertising... when I finally hired on, months after the initial interview, my boss had been 're-orged' the day before, along with HIS manager, and I asked the temp manager as to what the hours were on average, and he said currently it was 12-13 hour days - this because they were grossly understaffed and management would not let them have reqs due to re-orgs (for over a year!!!)... this was a salary job. Even though the salary was 15K more than my old position, factoring in extra hours, I was making $3 less an hour. I left that day and headed back to my old position (they didn't want me to leave) and they threw in a 20% pay increase, which didn't quite match the other job, but beat the heck out of 60-65 hour work weeks and the instability of re-orgs.
Finally, don't overstate your requirements. If you don't really need a superstar, then don't hire one. Too many firms do this, and the employee is bored in the position, and will be a flight risk. The person might be ok with being overqualified if the salary is stellar, and the company is good to work for, but many times, that 'average' employee you overlooked will bust his a$$ for you, and is completely capable of doing what you want.
Does it stop them from paying you every payday?
Quit looking at a job as some grand Zen event and look at it as a means to get money.
Ross Turk wrote:
"Has the tech market improved so much that working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent?"
Yes.
But Sourceforge also isn't nearly as special as they used to be. There are a number of alternatives, making them less necessary, and some of the alternatives also have more features and fewer hassles. Besides which, I think the "do it yourself" alternative is becoming more and more of an option for medium-sized projects, with the advent of improved wiki / release management / ticket management / etc. software. This isn't a "netcraft confirms it" moment, but seriously... you're not Dancing with the Stars, you're Hollywood Squares. That's why you're not getting the superstars. ;)
Geez Louise!
I think what the poster wanted was a superstar willing to work for 85% of industry median pay...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
is to spend lots of time talking about SAT scores. People will think you are cool and smart and want to work for below market wages for the prestige of being associated with chronological adults who think the key criteria of future success is what you did one weekend morning while you were in high school. I find folks who are that insightful altogether magnetic.
If you're happy and you know it, think again!
What would a 'superstar' programmer be doing writing code for a website? At best you got some mildly interesting workflow and collaboration tools and a simple search engine. It's not like they're looking for a kernel hacker or creating a new graphics engine. Incidentally, I think John Carmack has a couple rockets to launch, so he's a little busy.
I've created a short list of cool areas for a programmer to work in:
search engines
voice recognition (some good libraries already exist)
optical character recognition
computer vision
graphics engines/visualization tools
scientific computing (especially biology)
data mining
kernel hacking
The not-so-cool list:
workflow/collaboration/document management
data shoveling
yet another web app, with yet another J2EE.NETerific framework
Yeah, I know this a pretty bitter post, but sheesh.... It's not like they need a real 'superstar' programmer. They need a GOOD web developer. Someone you can write clean code, prehaps proficient in the agile methodologies. They don't need a top-notch programmer.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
https://hiddennetwork.com/
made by the guy behind the ever-funny thedailywtf.com
If you want the best (no matter how you define 'the best') you have to pay the going rate for 'the best'. It's a simple premise, you get what you pay for.
There are very, very few people, as they get older, that will work for "less" because something else they find worthy to justify the lesser salary. Later on in life, once someone has their 401k expanded and savings and everything paid off, that attitude can flip. But for most geeks that are in the 25-45 range (that worked through the 90's boom) they now have a family, a mortage, college to pay off, college savings to bank for their kids. They cannot afford to work for less then what they are worth. And they've spent plenty of days, weeks, months and years behind that monitor, reading those books, donating some freetime to open source stuff, helping newbies on IRC (etc), working the extra hours when the rest of the office went home @5, they deserve to be paid what they are now worth.
And it *is* difficult to find *good people* when you don't want to pay them what they're worth. Every employer I've ever worked for tries this approach. It just doesn't work. They hire newbies who aren't worth the time involved, or middle-tier-level people whom they want superstar work product from. Until things become so scewed up (missed projects, faulty projects, missed deadlines, other departments projects delayed cancelled because IT cannot come through) that they eventually have to clear the position, bump salary threshold for the now-posted-position to a reasonable++ level, and then they are able to acquire good talent. But things are such a mess that they are indebted to where they must spend a year or two (or more) paying the piper having cleanup done. So they don't initially see the "productivity gains" they thought they'd see when they finally hired someone with talent. Nothing's free in the IT world.
Why they just don't do the hiring right from the first place, I don't know. Well, I do know their reasoning, I've heard it. We can save money.
Yeah, right. Two years later I'd be willing to bet you can demonstrate how this attitude and behavior costs more then it was ever projected to save.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
There is nothing quite like staffing up with friends of the CEO and then discovering that they are protected and untalented. This can lead to deep resentments and a whole new level of dysfunction.
I know this reply is way late in the arc on this post but the threads here hit home so very, very much I figured I'd post to an empty room anyway.
I've been on both sides of the fence as top talent and trying to hire top talent. First the hiring view. The reality is in certain niches (especially networking, protocol, embedded systems type talent) there aren't nearly as many rock stars as you think. My last permanent job was smack in the middle of the Valley and the reality is there were probably only a couple of hundred people out there in top little piece of the bell curve in any general skill set. There's a ton of talented people just a bit farther down the curve, but you look at most tech companies and it's really a very, very small group of people that drive the design, technology and innovation. It also seemed like you had to find the rare combination of technically brillant but market aware individual as the quality of product marketing in most organizations is _sh*t_ as far as defining innovation (versus spitting out glossies extolling your virtues and trashing the competition).
Then you can't hire them because you can't really get management to pay the top salaries because the VCs are breathing down the necks of the officers and board wondering why it hasn't already all been shipped to India much less trying to shake out an attractive salary.
On the working side once you get hired you end up only being around 2-4 years on average because you get squeezed on the late side of the capital/startup curve and salaries stagnate at 2-3% a year and bonuses and perks get squeezed - or you just plain run out of $$ and go under and if you're good enough you eventually become the most expensive body in the shop and easy pickings in a quarter the beancounters are sweating dollars instead of head count.
I've worked for a ton of startups as well as established companies and the reality is 98% of companies more than 10-20 people as an organization don't give a rat's a** about their people. There's still individuals out there that fight the good fight but the reality is if they need to do a short pump and dump on the share price or fixup the burn burn rate prior to the next financing round they'll RIF us 20% accross the board in a heartbeat and then whine a month later about the lack of employee loyalty these days and wonder why we jump ship for a lousy 5% salary differential or an extra week of vacation. Options are worthless - I've had some come in and most go under and my net gain from options over a 20 year career works out to about $1500 a year (maybe $2000 in today's dollars).
There's a glass ceiling of $100-$120k a year everywhere outside the Valley and maybe $140k a year in the Valley (where the delta doesn't cover the cost of living diffs) if you want to be a developer, architect, technical anything. And that's the very peak of the bell curve. There's a bunch of development jobs that have typical _Senior_ developer salaries down more in the $60-$80k and the non-developer IT guys have it worse. To move forward you have to cross the dark side to management or leave the traditional work force entirely and do your own thing - consulting, starting a business, inventing the next pet rock. Out here in middle America the number development focused technical companies is small enough that there aren't a lot of Director and up level positions - and the majority of them are in larger organizations that tend to promote from within so to break that inital barrier into management requires backsliding your salary - sometimes a lot - and dredging along at "Director of IT" for a salary that works out to a pitiful amount per hour just to slide the resume over to a new track with job titles with words like Director and Vice in them.
There's a lot of top flight technical talent outside the Valley and the Beltway that will choose to schluck along under-employed just to live in a place with affordable housing and decent public schools and a bit of green grass, but most companies are so weakl
Yes, I agree with you fully! There's lots of smart people here in the midwest. Cost of living is very low so they could pay what would be a scandalous payscale in silicon valley and it'd be considered nice here.
This is why people like myself are not going to NY or silicon valley for jobs. They are NOT paying like $120k anymore, they are paying like $40-60K. The place I'm working now I only make $8/hour, or about $12,000/year. My boss offered I could work for his son's co in silicon valley for "maybe up to $40k to start". Sounded good, but then taking a look at cost of living, it seems I would be worse off than I am here. I'm in a city with somewhat higher cost of living than the surrounding countryside, but still at 26 own a house, and no I did not previously have some significantly better job.
You want resume's? How about posting a salary range?
A lot of senior engineers don't care about the reputation, we care about the bottom line.
That's and your job posting sucks. The job posting sounds like SF is too self absorbed in its own reputation.
Working on a "prominent website" screams boooooorinnnnngg. If you need talented people, you must have interesting problems. Advertise your problems, and you'll find people who want to work on them.