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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.'"
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 !
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.
And yet, he is still paid less than two other guys, who didn't win the Super Bowl last year.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Agile is for Teams/projects without a clear goal, vast experience and wÃre nobody knows how to solve it directly.
So basically every project then?
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.
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.
what's wrong with agile?
Nothing in theory, **if** your project meets a certain profile. The real problem is that some people tend to implement an agile process in terrible ways, more so with "extreme programming" (XP). For example paired programming with constantly changing pairs, including pairs where a member is on unfamiliar ground. This may work for some projects or tasks but it is not going to work for others. Where agile/XP can go wrong is where management/leaders believes that this sort of paired programming is always of benefit.
Plus in the above example basic human psychology is ignored. Some people are most productive when they are not bouncing between different domains every day or two. Some people are wired to work in a more depth first manner, not so much breadth first. To force the later to constantly bounce between domains, well management/leadership is basically sabotaging their efficiency. Perhaps some people should only pair in a new domain every month or two.
Assuming a particular task should be paired at all.
Similar problems can be found in other aspects of agile/xp doctrine. Management/Leadership is hard. There is no magic bullet. Great ideas tend to work best under specific circumstances. Deciding when to stick with doctrine and when to deviate from doctrine, or to pick doctrine A over doctrine B, is what makes it so hard.
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
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.
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.
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.
Another thing that would be happening if demand for developers is really that high: Routinely offering developers $250K a year, plus benefits, plus a nice office, plus no on-call or after-hours support duties, plus paid overtime, plus free catered lunch and possibly breakfast and dinner too. That's textbook economics, where the economy responds to a shortgage by raising the price until either the demand drops or the supply increases to meet the demand. But I think a lot of managers have a philosophical problem with managing people who get paid more than they do, so it will never ever happen.
Changing the pricing around might convince them to consider hiring somebody other than the person they're typically after, who is 25-27-year-old, with 3-5 years of experience, a B.A. in computer science or something similar from a top tech school such as MIT or Stanford, with detailed knowledge of the exact technology stack their company uses, currently employed by somebody else, not married and not a parent, with no life beyond work, who will be comfortable being available 24x7x365, and sincerely believes that working 80-90 hours a week will reap financial and career rewards. Unless there are affirmative action rules in place, this mythical person they're after is probably also male, white or Asian or Indian racial background, and speaks Standard American English as his first language.
I am officially gone from
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 $250,000 per year. Don't BS me about the cost of living or you can much cheaper living 90 minutes away.
And if it's a startup (I don't give a rat's ass about the "track record" of the entrepreneurs - one hit wonders), their doors will be closed within the year.
Stock options?! Ahahahahaha!
Of course, I have been around the block a few times and that's why the SF people prefer young and naive programmers - i.e. Less than 30 years old.
Nah, there are also the teams/projects with vast inexperience, and where everybody knows how to solve the problem directly.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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).
Caveat: Outside looking in, have not technically worked in an Agile environment (although I have a new gig that is supposedly going to implement it Real Soon Now).
It seems to me that the main benefit to the business concerns in Agile is the ability to see something rudimentary right away, and be able to give better-informed feedback to the developers with regards to the features that are yet to be implemented. The trade-off is that the new features have costs associated with them, so the benefit to the developers is that that forces the business concerns to curb their scope accordingly, and hopefully provide better specs. However, what I can see happening is costs being invisible (or non-existent) to the business concerns, giving them a blank check to creep the scope and demand features that were never discussed in the planning stages (because the developers selfishly insisted on having adequate time to implement the features in a sane environment, thus committing the cardinal sin of pushing up a deadline).
Without those costs as a check against business concern ignorance, Agile IMHO seems doomed to failure. 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. Had we tried to implement Agile, I would have either quit sooner or had a psychotic break. So, to bring us back on topic, they now have zero developers on staff instead of one because of poor management.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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 :(.
> 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.