Slashdot Mirror
Inside the War For Top Developer Talent
snydeq writes "With eight qualified candidates for every 10 openings, today's talented developers have their pick of perks, career paths, and more, InfoWorld reports in its inside look at some of the startups and development firms fueling the hottest market for coding talent the tech industry has ever seen. 'Every candidate we look at these days has an offer from at least one of the following companies: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Square, Pinterest, or Palantir,' says Box's Sam Schillace. 'If you want to play at a high level and recruit the best engineers, every single piece matters. You need to have a good story, compensate fairly, engage directly, and have a good culture they want to come work with. You need to make some kind of human connection. You have to do all of it, and you have to do all of it pretty well. Because everyone else is doing it pretty well.'"
Joe Flacco got a $120 million dollar contract because he won the Super Bowl.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The number one problem is many top brains burned too brightly and sometimes they burn out too fast
I've been in the industry since the 1970's, have had worked with geniuses that could out-produce a contingent of code monkeys for any given task, and I've seen too many cases of burn-outs amongst those top brains
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You can also give them an quiet working environment or stop being Agile.
This doesn't seem to be the case where I am in Australia. :-(
Very few jobs these past couple of months
If you have talent, don't go work for those stuffy old companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Square, Pinterest, or Palantir, who will all kill your inventiveness and originality with million-dollar budgets.
It's no secret that HR departments advertise fake job openings to make themselves look busy and justify their own jobs. It's no secret that managers like to claim to be interviewing candidates to make themselves look popular and important. How many of these hip trendy tech firms are faking it to make themselves look hip and trendy?
I must be drunk because I could have sworn the title to this story was "Inside the War for Top Developer Taint."
More Dice influence?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
We make stuff for phones! Like apps and stickers! We want to hire you to write on our computers. We can offer you a bunch of paychecks!
1) This sort of data isn't easy to verify - if there's one thing my experience in recruitment has taught me, it's that a lot of people outright lie, exaggerate, or have a completely distorted opinion of the truth. For example, some of my "I've worked for Google" candidates have, on further exploration, been "I've worked for a company which had a contract with Google";
2) As my physics teacher, who once worked at NASA, put it (metaphorically - he wasn't a toilet cleaner),: "Even NASA needs people to clean their toilets". A big organisation is very likely to have some wonderful talent, but don't expect everyone at that organisation to be amazing. Indeed, for most positions, it's more important to have someone who fits in than it is to have an outstanding performer. You're NOT there to change the world, but to do a little bit of some bigger thing in a yet larger overall plan, and in most cases your creativity will not be exercised nearly to its full potential. The really bright people will thrive in a research position - and you'll find them in academia, in IBM, and even in Microsoft - but not in Pinterest, lol;
3) To follow on from that, "top talent" doesn't equate to a job offer from a major company. That just means you've succeeded in the interview process, which means you were well prepared for the interview process. It doesn't mean you've achieved anything. In the UK, about 50% of people who get into Oxbridge were educated privately (present company included). Yet the interviews are designed to teach potential, and obviously people who went to private school aren't inherently brighter - they're just better prepared. Never underestimate "cultural" bias in an interviewer.
tl;dr Someone who claims to have worked at a well-known brand isn't necessarily brilliant, nor even entirely honest. They will absolutely have desirable qualities for a major corporation, but these qualities may not be what you think they are.
As I understand it, free software is the best! All ya gotta do is offer a job at no salary to get the best candidates!
Even better, they won't file those pesky software patents that might stifle innovative or bring that wacky revenue into the business.
It's a win win all around!
I'm looking for a rockstar developer!!!
You need to have 5 years experience (of a 4 years old) technology.
And you need to be very cheap.
REALLY good developers are still hard to find for specific target markets E.g. MySQL DBAs, Sench,a (pick framework here), Ruby, JQ-Mobile, Linux admins / scripters (counting bash/perl/python scripters here too) etc.
"Good" developers are plentiful, but have trouble connecting because of:
1. Contract House Spam (thank you Monster.com for that concept.)
2. Ridiculous job descriptions (I have seen more than I can count that look like: "Rockstar wanted, 10-15 years of: html5, css3, app, mobile, sql dba, C/++, PHP, all variants of OOP, Sencha, JQ/JQ-ui, WebGL, tighten compiler code in Hex, expert-in-all-required - 1 year contract to possible hire.", I laugh myself silly at those ones...)
3. Between the age of 25-35 (no 50+ yo "burnout, job hoppers please")
4. Increased use of computer screening. Think Taleo and the rest, leading to resume's that are 1 page w/ 15 pages of keywords. (I really hate the way this is going... if you don't know it, they share just enough data to make targeted resumes impractical - beware)
5. "Job hopping" (think: multiple / many 6m-1.5y year contracts) is no longer considered "a positive thing" as it was in the late 90s early 2000's.)
I haven't had too much trouble staying busy (an admitted 52yo, I started "real" programming on the Fat Mac 512, and work on all 3 platforms from C++, PHP-OOP/Zend, SQL, Jquery and good Linux admin skills and a PMI member), but I am also close to #2 in the list with an MBA (sorry, I don't do Sencha.)
HOWEVER, a LOT of my friends are not so fortunate in this area. They have been contracting since the late 90's and have touched (some even partially mastered) almost all today-relevant tech, but their network is filled with similar "old people" with the same problem.
Stay tech fresh, talk a lot, lie (read: keyword heavy) on your resume for the HR computers, bring actual resume and your skills to an interview and be prepared to wait if (2 >== $HRstaff). In my life I have seen boom and bust, hired the next day or we'll get back to you in 6-8 months (with an offer too, not a "thanks, but no thanks."
Note: I live in Massachusetts , USA
I remember prepping for interviews where there were 30 applicants for every opening, and each of us competed for low pay, a random grab-bag of on-site 'non financial incentives', with zero focus on the work environment or corporate culture, and where your only chance to stick out was to make a strong human connection.
Now it's shifted the other direction, but devs - don't be lax. If you're any good, you've already been approached by at least 3-4 recruiters a week via phone & email. Do not blow these people off. In a few years, they could be your best friends. Write a short letter that includes that sentiment: Sorry, not now, but please keep me in mind when a position pops up, because my situation may change It doesn't hurt to ask them if you can forward it on to friends or ex-coworkers who may find it interesting either; it increases their interest in you, and most companies provide referral bonuses even to folks outside their company structure - I usually cash in 2 or so of these a year. I like to ask them too, what their focus is - for example, some look more for admin and general IT, some for java or C# devs, some for embedded devs, and so on so I can send them good candidates.
Once you have a list of non-robotic/non-spam real actual recruiters in your area, when someone you know does indicate they're looking for a job, play matchmaker. Send them to the folks on your list. Tell the recruiters to expect to hear from so-and-so. Grow the professional relationship.
It's not just about the occasional free lunch. Once, when I was part of a large contract for a company, there was an emergency meeting as our contract had been cancelled out of the blue, and some 200+ of us were effectively laid off. We all shuffled into a big meeting hall to hear about COBRA insurance and such, and after the first 15 minutes, one of the recruiters comes over to me and says, "Oh, you don't have to worry about this stuff; they still need 2-3 folks, and you're one of them. Technically you'll be unemployed for a week and a half, but we got you a pay raise and more vacation time. No need to interview, we're just shifting you over. Congrats!"
Sure, without my technical skill, I wouldn't have been considered, but out of the some 100 or so with that same skillset in the group of 200, they picked me because they knew me personally. I had brought them 3 new hires, and about 5-6 potentials that didn't get hired. When we had lunch meetings, we spoke about the employment environment, and what it looked like from our perspectives so they could better market jobs. When they had candidates, I made myself available to answer working environment questions, things like that.
Basically, I had value to them more than just the contract, and they knew it. So my name was at the top of the list when it came time to hand out the more rewarding jobs or christmas bonuses.
So the tl;dr: Software devs would do well to nurture your relationship with recruiters, because it could pay off in the long run.
People use "agile" as a way to start coding when they have no requirements.
Then when they produce the predictable crap anyway, they claim they have to go live because "well, we used Agile".
The worst part is....
PEOPLE ACTUALLY FALL FOR IT
Sounds like treating us programmers like "human beings" is a real challenge...
We don't have things that our Father's generation had: pension, job stability, work life balance. The only first world country who works more hours than the US is Japan and that's *nothing* to brag about.
I think the real problem noted here is that the only reliable measure HR Zombie HQ has for identifying successful programmers is if a *better* company than theirs offered the candidate a job. Then they know they're in the clear. That's a lot of reliance on the HRs at Google/FB; maybe top companies should just do an HR/Recruiting-Share plan with Google/FB since they don't know how to recruit talent.
...offering employment contracts which don't bind employees in intellectual slavery. Some employers - especially tech employers - lay claim to every thought, word and deed of value that the employee creates during his term of employment - even if done in his own time and on his own dime.
Funny how attracting the top talent only requires you to compensate *fairly*, not "well" or "very well", just fairly.
Does this mean that the strategy for hiring "average" talent involves compensating unfairly?
Umm, sure since you interrupted me in the zone I might as well help you, what is it?
I can't install this USB device?
(thinking to self)You're supposedly a tech savvy IT professional with a decade of experience and the first thing you think of when you can't get a 3rd party USB device working is talk to software engineering since hey you know, co-location human interaction. Oh and you plug it in and it shows up as a serial port
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
47% of statistics are just made up, but I don't know if that even applies to completely unverifiable statements like "eight qualified candidates for every 10 openings". Please define "qualified".
"Qualified" means "meets our prejudices". Most of the time they're only interested in a certain "type" of person (worst of all is the line "bad fit for culture" - if your culture is that full of BS then I don't want to fit in). I think many employers are not even aware that their prejudices are prejudices. If you really want to see how many qualified candidates there are, tighten the job market further and see how quickly any company that wants to survive becomes more flexible in their hiring practices.
The best examples of this are the world wars, when many men volunteered or were drafted, and demand for production soared. In WWI northern factories (there were very few down south back then) took the radical step of not only hiring black people, but sending recruiters down south to hire them (there were comparatively few black people in the north back then - it was the start of the great northern migration).
In WWII factories hired women. What do you know, that cute brunette does a pretty good job of building airplanes (cue sanctimonious criticism of my use of the phrase "cute brunette"). A truly tight labor market makes employers very creative.
If there was truly a tight labor market for programmers today, then you'd see prejudices put aside. They would, for example, try re-tooling old farts. I'll be the first to admit that some old farts genuinely deserve to be put out to pasture (just as many young squirts don't deserve to be hired in the first place) but many of them have kept up with the tech, even if they can't shake the habit of calling an app a "program" (whatever that is). Many more old farts who might not have kept up as much as they should, would educate themselves in newer technologies, before looking for a job, if they thought it gave them a ghost of a chance of getting hired. Typically old farts avoid things like the slide at Box's Los Altos, Calif., as shown in the article, but might still get some use out of it when they bring the grandkids in for a visit. Hey ma, grandpa doesn't really work - he goes to the playground every day!
tl;dr
This article brings new meaning to the term BS.
With eight qualified candidates for every 10 openings
To me that means that the companies are being far too selective and / or not using screening methods that reflect positive employment outcomes.
.
As google's selection process has shown, rejecting qualified candidates just because they do not do well on some obscure testing hurdles is not the way to find qualified candidates.
It seems like agile would be good if you need something quick. So management hears "Oh it's quicker than what you're doing" and dive on that like a pigeon on a French fry. Honestly the agile I do currently should just be called "go fast, be stupid" because that's how it works out.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Funny, that's not my experience up here in the north east. What I basically find is there's 3 or 4 jobs that every recruiter tries to drop on me. (Which makes for very short conversations.) I think I've been asked about 1 company from at least 5 interviewers.(I interviewed there and didn't like it btw.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
There are top developers everywhere, not just in SF or Seattle or NY. But not everyone wants to work at giant companies, some would rather work for a small team that does great work but doesn't burn itself out. Some people like living in smaller towns. Some people want a life outside of a job as well. Some would prefer working in a startup where they can make a huge difference and do something amazing. I think a lot of those companies aren't any better at evaluating talent than anyone else and often succeed due to market position, luck, being first to something, or something other than simply hiring "top" talent.
Gotta love how these recruiters and employers screen so badly and allow office politics, greed, and silly prejudices to blind them to what's right in front of their noses. This insistence on "top" talent is one of the prejudices.
Then, as you say, they drive talent away with ridiculously harsh and thoughtless demands, threats, pushing, and bullying.
They could find talent, if they wanted to. They're good at coming up with excuses why they can't do it. They can't be bothered to train people either, not even allow 2 measly weeks for self training, no, they demand that developers "hit the ground running". Their complaint that schools aren't teaching the skills they need, as if the skills they think they need now will still be hot 5 years down the road, totally misses the point that education isn't about memorizing the specialized knowledge needed for any one or two petty little skills, it's about learning how to think and study so one can solve problems and acquire skills outside the classroom, without a teacher holding one's hand. "Hit the ground running" is a philosophy better suited to indentured servitude and menial labor, not careers in technology and science.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I actually think the best talent comes from the programmers who don't advertise themselves. The coders coming out of university / college generally can't program very well at all, well you do find a diamond in the rough it's not common. I'd rather interview a programmer who doesn't have a flashy resume and doesn't try to show off his coding ability because it's often the case that these kind of programmers are the best to have around.
This article is about the San Francisco Area.
In the tech-crazed San Francisco Bay Area, it exceeds $110,000.
IN SF, $110,000 is SHIT pay. For me to move to SF from Metro Atlanta and keep my lifestyle, I would need a minimum of $250,000 per year. Don't BS me about the cost of living or you can much cheaper living 90 minutes away.
And if it's a startup (I don't give a rat's ass about the "track record" of the entrepreneurs - one hit wonders), their doors will be closed within the year.
Stock options?! Ahahahahaha!
Of course, I have been around the block a few times and that's why the SF people prefer young and naive programmers - i.e. Less than 30 years old.
SV is all about advertising apps/social media.
I'd rather work on something much more meaningful that the shit that being developed in the Bay area.
I'm looking for a rockstar developer!!!
Great stuff, I have fantastic "rockstar" developer credentials:-
.
* Regular user of both cocaine and heroin
* Drink Jack Daniels pretty much 24/7 (got a drip hooked up for when I need to sleep), can't remember the last time I was sober
* Throw 60" monitors out of boardroom windows
* Once sexually pleasured a lower-ranking female colleague with a red snapper fish (probably Not Safe For Work unless you Work with Rockstars like me)
Was that what you were looking for?
And you need to be very cheap.
Fuck you, I cancelled my last programming tour because I was offered less than $1m a night and no guarantee of red-haired groupies with a proclivity for red snappers...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
This. I am not interested in working at Google or Microsoft. Maybe Apple, but not enough to pursue it. I don't think I'd like California, and I like to do things other than programming. I'm too far removed from college to appreciate a college atmosphere with mostly dudes. I like to shift gears. My concentration is C#, but I also write iOS apps in my spare time. I've had Java stints as well. I believe in Relational over NoSql. Agile is a buzzword fad that takes a good idea (iteration) and makes the duration way to small (2 weeks, cmon). Web is a horrible platform for most serious apps, yet our industry overlords just can't let it go. Web programming is way to simple, yet it is still unnecessarily tedious. Damn I'm getting old.
Must be time to review H1B and other status quota.
Telecommuting is the single most important thing you can offer a programmer. Enlightened companies allow telecommuting, crap companies do not. Programmer need to demand this before the culture can change.
Edison vs. Tesla; I seem to recall that it sucked to be Tesla.
How would the 3 Laws of Robotics created by the Taliban work?
Amazing as it sounds, it's not the technology that wins, it's marketing. For example, ear phones on a music player is nothing new. But put a go-go dancer on a some street dancing/walking to music that only she hears, and one has the iPod.
From the 1900's, in New York there were steak houses everywhere. A successful marketing person said, "Don't sell the steak, sell the sizzle."
I don't see how this has changed. With the fact that companies can hire 1Bs (not even H-1Bs) and the fine for not bothering with checking for a work permit is so cheap, I don't see much changing, other than trying to be the cheapest for the job (which is damn hard especially if one has a family or isn't living five to an apartment.)
The fact that one can hire a CCIE, MCSE, RHCA, or other top tier certificate holder for $30,000 a year makes it tough to compete in IT, and the dev market is the same way.
The developers I encounter are almost at the level of starving artists when it comes to income. The way they try to even compete with the dirt cheap labor from overseas is promising things like the ability to write 10,000 lines of code a day, and having part of their coding done gratis so they get a PM's attention.
As in "Glenn Greenwald will choose life over carreer" Palantir? Are they hiring? Who's taking paychecks from them?
The gift that keeps on giving: "Palantir Apologizes For WikiLeaks Attack Proposal, Cuts Ties With HBGary" http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palantir-apologizes-for-wikileaks-attack-proposal-cuts-ties-with-hbgary/
It's like the old Star Trek script gimmick, "They'll mention you in one breath with the great scientists Newton, Einstein, and Sorek of Rigel 5".
Jokes aside as how 50% of the world things software testers are monkeys bashing on a keyboard and another 40% think we're just game testers with no degrees. Where's the cry for talented software testers? It's reached the point that developers are far easier to get than a good software tester. The number of bugs that are openly visible in software is ridiculous as people tell companies to push rapidly & push often and let their customers find the bugs :(.
...but pay for an accordionist.
> Google didn't develop Android, they acquired it.
That's as true as saying Microsoft didn't develop DOS/Windows, they acquired it.
Android 1.0 ALPHA was after Google bought Android. Everything from 1.0 through 4.4 has been developed by Google.
Companies which say they can't find talent lack the insight or creativity to find talent. Literally they want a technician who can answer questions on the topic the particular company is working on. The key is to find smart people and let them figure things out. Granted the average engineer with " I have a certificate or degree in abc" will have a hard time in a totally new situation but a smart creative individual will learn fast. I know Music majors, physics majors and other non-computer trained individuals who are great engineers.
If you think the iPod was successful just because it was marketed better than what came before, then you didn't use what came before!
There are top devs everywhere, but suburbs don't scale well. Even a small company can need 5-10, and getting a bunch of good devs who didn't already move to SF or Cambridge, are interested in your projects, are ok with your conditions, and happen to be in the same small town as you, is ridiculously hard.
Its just easier in most cases (not all!) to have a few hubs where both top companies and top talent know where to find each other, and its what happened with the couple of top cities.
Let me reassure you that REAL computing has not changed since the days of Fortran. All the funny crap ("GUI", "HTML5", win32, you name it) are just distractions. What really matters is churning numbers and bits. Hashtables, indices. THAT is BEEF. Let the goats eat their HTML5 grass. I know, because I am a lion and had some episodes of playing goat.
Ask your local NSA recruiter, if you don't believe me.
Or Larry Wall, he also worked on snooping at goats and sheeps.
It is always funny to see educated people fall for all sorts of Very Shitty concepts. Real engineering is about Deep Insight, strong concepts, broad and deep knowledge. Strong education in the field (yeah, computer science needs computer scientists and all the amateuers should get off my nice lawn) It's not about making a primitve manager happy.
And the "if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage ist" claptrap is just that: BEANCOUNTING in new clothes.
"Wernher, I see you have not produced the targeted 157 drawings this month. I am afraid the Führer will be disappointed about your insufficient rocketry metrics !"
Demand that candidates pee in a cup.
There, fixed it for ya
Slides, foosball tables, air hockey, game consoles, whatnot... they make developers sound like a bunch of immature dilatantes who will soon be put out of a job once one of them invents a perfect voice actuated requirements parser that allows some suit to blather their desires into a mic and spit out a working application 30 seconds later.
...
Sure, but how many able and willing candidates were there? 200 for every 10 openings? 300 for every 10 openings? The tech execs' lobbyists and tools refuse to say.
...
which violates my privacy, unlike the local red-necks (which, BTW, originated as a designation for Presbyterians). But the vast majority of south-easterners drive quite well... except for some of the retirees and "Yankee tourists". I've seen a pilot project test or 2 and was not impressed.
"book scanning"
Librarians were already doing that quite well, though not well funded, and that "work on digitization" goes back decades.
Gmail is brain-dead these days, insisting on mobile phone numbers and other privacy violations. Ad targeting is similarly entertaining, at least: I don't wear many sarongs or extremely ugly high heels, not the least bit interested in dating other guys... But the search results have been getting worse and worse, with the "headlines" not matching the URLs and the content, and fairly often not matching the search criteria.
The real problem with so many of these "brilliant" firms (FB, Goog, MSFT, Oracle, GE, Siemens, LinkedIn, Friendster... and their execs) the media seem to love soooo much is their determination to violate peoples' privacy. As one receent article put it, too many people confuse getting money with earning money, being wealthy with being virtuous. Of course, the left tends to the opposite, assuming anyone who is wealthy must be evil unless proven to have leftist credentials. The reality is that one must actually look closely at how the wealth is obtained and sort out the details to arive at the net balance for each executive.
But not everyone wants to work at giant companies, some would rather work for a small team that does great work but doesn't burn itself out.
It should be noted that such can also be found at giant companies, if you look hard enough. The quality obviously depends on how well the manager can isolate the culture of such a team from the rest of the company, which in turn depends on having a really good manager... but from personal experience working on just such a team in Microsoft, they do exist. This is truly the best of two worlds, because you get the typical "big corp" compensation package, but there is much less bureaucracy and red tape and corporate culture bullshit than is typical of such jobs.
The real problem is that some people tend to implement an agile process in terrible ways, more so with "extreme programming" (XP).
Extreme programming RUUUULES!!!!
I come to work, wearing big old Birkenstocks and long board-shorts, with my long curly hair wrapped up in a rasta-colored nappy, then I pound on my keyboard while yelling "Woooooooo!", then I grab my snowboard and go down the side of the building.
Extreeeeeeeeme!
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
At my last job (and this is one of the reasons I no longer work there) we had a big client. A really big client. A client that was big enough to bully their way into creeping the scope and providing inadequate (and by inadequate, I mean non-existent) specifications. A client that would not allow us to bill them for additional time when they changed their requirements and demanded new features. Without that check (increased costs) the development process went way beyond initial estimates to the point where we ate most of the development costs and burned out our resources.
Yeah, I heard about the healthcare.gov debacle. Sad.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
my 2c.
It is harder to find a good company than talent! I have been retired since 2005, forced out by disability and age from a career in Silicon Valley as a developer and system admin. And it is hard to stay current and to know what to study. Right now I am enamored with Python, but not too experienced, yet.
The thing which bothers me is that I am turned off by the companies, especially the well-known ones. I live a bus ride away from Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, and not far from Google, not that either would hire an old grey beard like me, and yet I would not clamor to work to either, except to try and cause trouble. I am totally unimpressed with these and many of the other famous companies around here. Seeing the crap that these companies do makes me laugh at Capitalism and at business in general the way it is done here in the U.S. and world. I am frankly ashamed and embarassed for the people who run these and who persaude investors. OK, I get that it takes some smarts to do some of the things behind the scenes, like the Big Data backend of Facebook, and I have had words with the people at Google about the design of their products, Google Docs mostly, So I know that I wouldn't fit in because despite what I know and don't know, I would try to be disruptive because I can see basic evil in what they are doing.
I know that there are lots of smart people, all those that learned their computer science and other things, and I took my degrees in Earth Science and got int Scientific Programming by way of that, but the way business is done is wasting talent on useless and destructive things. You would be better off writing words than code, analyzing why the world can go so awry as it has under the poor leadership we get for these people.