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How Do You Find Programming Superstars?
Joe Ganley writes "You are a programming superstar, and you are looking for work. I recognize this happens relatively rarely, which is part of my problem. But stipulating that it happens, how do I, as a company looking to hire such people, connect with them? Put another way, how do you the programming superstar go about looking for a company that seems like one you'd like to work for? The company I work for is a great place to work; we only hire really great people, we work on hard, interesting problems, and we treat our employees well. We aren't worried about retention or even about how to entice people to work here once we've found them. The problem is simply finding them. The signal-to-noise ratio of the big places like Monster and Dice is terrible. We've had much better luck with (for example) the Joel on Software job boards, but that still doesn't generate enough volume." What methods have other people used to find the truly elite?
Sorry to dispute your findings... Arrogant programmers work on what they want. "Superstars" or better said damn god programmers work on items that they find interesting and affect the co. is a strong way.
This opens doors in other places to work on more interesting stuff, and GROW. It is very rare to get two good projects in a row at the same place, normally the first one drives the entire management/marketing staff into a frenzy and they soon forget that any product has a lifetime.
How do you find a damn good programmer? YOU DON'T. Have interesting projects that push boundaries and you (or your co.) moves into the grapevine....
I've been a programmer since Turbo Pascal came on 2 floppy disks. All through the 90's I was billing for 65 an hour or more. I've worked on teams where I do produce more than three other programmers. My last real programing job in 2001 I cleaned up code that other people that called themselves senior programmers would write.
After 25 years, I now work for $40,000 and struggling to survive. What happened????
India happened.
I now work on web development, I find it amazing the the trash that I get from the outsourced programmers. I'm supposed to use this code that they write and supposedly manage the three projects that I work on. I'm a programmer not a manager. I want to stay a programmer.
When I feel the need to do real programming, I spend my time programming open source projects in my off time.
Nobody wants to pay for superstars.
I get up and leave interviews when they say I have to take a test on my programming skills. Shouldn't 25 years of programming mean that I have a slight handle on programming???
So what if I haven't written any Java scripts. So what if I haven't written in Visual Basic for 3 years. I started out in ROM basic, doesn't that mean anything??
And yes, I am going to stay in my $40,000 a year job. I have a corner office with a couch in it. I like the people I work for and nobody knows that I have very rarely ever used the code from the outsourced programmers.
Since every post I have ever made gets tagged flamebate, I am waiting to see this get tagged the same.
Nathan
Sweet.
Let me guess - you are a jaded co-op/intern that picked a bad company to work for? Or are you just narrow-minded? This sort of stupidity has a root from somewhere. Ah...devalue the programming profession. Now I see - you must have gotten downsized at some point or something along that lines. You sure got some bitterness coming from somewhere.
.....
You're a REALLY bad guesser.
You also have no idea what you're talking about. Here's a question for you: in which direction has household income in the U.S. been going since the early 1990s? Do you think that cheap labour from college students contributes at all? I don't think it takes a college degree in applied mathematics from a really good school on the quarter system (of course, all good schools are!) to figure out how the plusses and minuses of this equation works. Consider also that the country is entering a period of greatly enhanced inflation and perhaps you might BEGIN to understand what is going on here
Oh, and fuck you, incidentally, for being an asshole.
Now clearly I am a bit biased considering I am sitting in building 12 of RIT's campus waiting to take a final, but hear this out since I'm about to graduate from here and think it is somewhat better than "worthless"
:) Higher learning in general is an economic rip-off, at least in the US. Say what you will about expaning your mind and all that feel-good grab-assery. It is still a fucken rip-off. Hence, the use of the terms "more or less" and "worthless" in my description of college. Did you know that the endowment for Harvard University is over/about 30 billion dollars? Why is it necessary to even pay to go to school there? It's the same story just about everywhere else too. Here's what I know to be true. COLLEGE==RIPOFF. ENGINEERING_EDUCATION_AT_COLLEGE==(RIPOFF + NO_GETTING_LAID). Heh.
Don't take it personally, bro!
Finally, you mention flaws related to young professionals. (without ever mentioning what they are, except for naivety, for which you never said why that actually harms the effectiveness of an employee) Assuming that these flaws exist, how exactly does a non-co-op university solve for this? These flaws are clearly inherent in young people and if experienced developers don't have them, then it is a matter of businesses identifying and teaching young programmers about these flaws and helping them to overcome them. If nobody ever tells young programmers their problems, don't ever expect those young programmers to improve and become experts.
To just make a quick point here. Business doesn't work like you are describing above and it perfectly illustrates my point about the naivety of youth. I sure you understand the quote "You keep what you kill.", right? I mean, you basically have to do everything yourself, in order to get ahead in business. That's just how it works. Capitalism doesn't encourage businesses to cooperate in the personal development of their employees as you indicate it should. To expect it to, is to fail. Mightily.
Sad, I have no idea where this big "experience" thing comes from
;)
I'll tell you where the "experience" thing comes from. Most young people today are retarded. I'm pretty sure that's how each successive generation views the next.
Uh, what? Did you miss the part where I said that Harvard University has 30 billion dollars in the bank and yet still charges an arm and a leg to receive an education from there? I wonder what we could do with 30 billion dollars ...... hmmmm, oh yeah, fund the university without charging tuition.