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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
We have this same problem at Sony, noone seems to want to work for us.
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.
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...
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.
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
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).
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."
Not when this is what you have listed under Careers:
NTH Tier Solutions Careers
Please be patient while we build
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.
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
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...
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?
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??
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.
.. how come it's hard to find coders who are motivated and know what they're doing?
There aren't any.
The ones who are motivated don't know what they're doing and the ones that know what they're doing can be found in a dark corner of the machine room banging their heads against the wall.
KFG
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
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
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.
It's not Dotcom2, it's Dotcom 2.0..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Of course not. Because candidates are more than the sum of their resumes. One candidate might have a super-impressive resume, but only be a mediocre programmer. (In some cases, they're lousy.) Another candidate may appear to have a mediocre resume, but ends up being a perfect fit for the role. As a result, "superstar" programmers are almost never found through resume searches. They're found through word of mouth or networking. Sometimes you accidently hire someone for another role who happens to fill the other role perfectly. But I guarantee that you would throw out the resume of a candidate who could meet your needs.
Seriously, the entire hiring process needs to be revamped. Your on the job experience is often less important these days than your off the job experience. So perhaps we should start asking for examples of work. However, that would also require that employers list what skills they find important, and not the technologies in particular.
For example, I could nail your HTML/CSS/JavaScript/etc. requirements easily. I can make demos that would make you cry, "I didn't know you could do that in a web browser!" But that might not make me a good fit for your positions. Most likely, you really want an artist who is technically competent. Yet you're asking for a strong programmer, which is going to get you a completely different class of resume. The two are rarely one and the same.
Of course, I may be misreading your ads. However, I've interviewed with a few companies like yours in the Madison area. What they ask for and what they want are almost never the same thing.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wow your expierience differs from mine.
A company I used to work for tried outsourcing to Russian and Indian programmers. The quality of the code coming back was just awful and cost a lot more in after-support than the dev. cost saved.
here in Alaska, ... have no state income tax, no liberal politicians trying to take my money and give it to someone else,
You mean like that bridge to nowhere for 50 people? Thanks a lot for trying to steal our money and spend it on some stupid bridge that no one needs, Alaskan.
You, an Alaskan, complaining about politicians trying to take your money and give it to someone else is a prime example of the pot calling the kettle black. I can't think of a single state currently that more exemplifies this thanks to this example. Even CA and NY don't have such ridiculous public works projects.
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.
You, an Alaskan, complaining about politicians trying to take your money and give it to someone else is a prime example of the pot calling the kettle black. I can't think of a single state currently that more exemplifies this thanks to this example. Even CA and NY don't have such ridiculous public works projects.
NY and CA? They're not the ones suckling at the Federal teat. The welfare states are the red states. All the states that vote for the tax cut President are the same ones that are putting us in debt. You want to know where the welfare checks go? It's the Bush backers.
Federal Taxes Paid vs. Spending Received by State
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
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