Sure, I kind of assumed that went without saying. Actually, I think Google's interview capabilities are at a fairly low level of competency compared to a lot of places I've seen.
I mean, I bet you are thinking about all the famous leaders to come out of Switzerland right now, and how the US never produces anyone who takes any kind of leadership roles in business or politics.
I definitely disagree. People with great memories can bring context to a problem that a lousy memory just can't. If you can't hold all 20 factors to consider in your mind at once, meandering from one to another will leave you with a solution that effectively considers only a couple.
I have reasonably solid anecdotal evidence on this. I've seen top coders with great memories produce software that dominates their industry in three different industries now, and some of that software is now in the mid third decade of proven maintainability. It may not always be a winning asset, but it clearly can be.
SSD is significantly faster than HDD at both sequential and random writes. Top 15K SAS drives write ~250MB/s sequential. Top SSD write 550MB/s sequential. Write random and it gets much worse for the SAS drive. Try to even find an enterprise HDD benchmark done in the last year. No one bothers because enterprise buys SSD if they care about performance.
All of the best developers I've met had phenomenal memories. I think both a natural reasoning ability and great memory are assets. If you are missing one, you aren't going to be as strong as someone who has both.
Well, you certainly can pay much more, and large numbers of people DO pay much more. And if you insist on your schools being in the top 1% of the country rather than the top 10% of the country, you'll start at about 1.6M (I looked yesterday), which may be where the impression gets started. There's a popular publication here called Homes and Land of the Peninsula (the Peninsula being where SV is located) which is used by realtors to sell high end properties, and even there the low end of listings is still only 900K (basically for people who want a convenient bike ride to their job at Google and don't care much else about the house.), and the prices go up to about 15M. If you go by that publication (and it's the first thing a lot of people will see because it is free and everywhere) you'll definitely think the housing market is completely insane, but that really only represents the worst 5% of the market, those who quite literally have marketing budgets to sell their houses (and thus can pay the exorbitant listing fee for that publication).
And in fairness to your expectations, things have declined about 35% from the peak (before the housing bubble blew), and during that same period Google and Facebook BOTH went on major hiring sprees which drove up salaries more than 20% in a year. That combination of events has made a drastic change in the affordability of housing on typical software developer salaries.
But then those people wouldn't be out of work, which was the original point. There's massive unemployment, and large numbers of jobs which no one will fill at an affordable price. The bottom line for our organization is we can't pay even 30% more than we are and remain profitable. At the same time our pay is enough to live very well on, and there large numbers of people out of work.
A 2000 SF house with a less than 20 minute commute in a great school district goes for $850K. Admittedly, that is a lot of money, but we do pay enough to afford the mortgage on that (enough to keep the mortgage payments under 35% of your gross). If you're young and don't need the school district yet, you can get started on building equity on a similar house without the school district for 400K. Our pay at that end of the scale is even more sufficient.
Certainly, paying people enough to buy equivalent houses is reasonable, but we're there. Having to buy houses for them would seem to suggest we live in an area inferior to the area they already live in, but by most quality of life surveys and measures we actually are located in a much better area. You may be right that those outside the area are not even considering our jobs because they believe they can't afford to live here, but that doesn't necessarily make them right. We do what we can to recruit from out of state, and our close rate, again, is nearly 100%, which I think would suggest that the few who are willing to consider our jobs are discovering that we actually offer plenty to live here.
And rather than not desperate enough, I'd say we're not fortunate enough. We're not (anywhere close to) profitable enough to buy a $2M house per developer we want to hire. Dev salaries are already our largest expense by a large margin.
Well, we're in a popular area (SV). We have escalated our offers (and our close rate is almost 100% on the few candidates we can get). The real problem is at the front of the pipeline... just not enough people willing to come for interviews in spite of superior pay.
Admittedly, it could be 2 (though the fact that top recruiters are also going begging may suggest this is not the case). It can't be 3, as we do occasionally manage to get some to interview, and if they are good and we make an offer our close rate is actually very high (and at the other end, we have tried job posting techniques which are both differentiated and cloned from postings for very similar employers, either way we don't see much variation in our candidate flow).
I tend to think that it is 1b: there are a lot of qualified people, but none of them are looking for work.
Well, the true masses of unemployed lack software development skills. The less common unemployed software developers have probably not kept up their skills. If you haven't built expertise in one of the tiobe top 5 (accounting for about 60% of all job postings), I'd strongly recommend doing so. List it on your resume, and back it up with some open source contribution.
Personally what I have on my resume that is attracting recruiters (as far as I can tell) is experience in java, with enough projects to make it obvious I at least SHOULD know what I'm doing. And they clearly aren't being super picky here: I have gaps in both employment and education.
My information is coming from numerous contacts in SV, and seems an accurate reflection of the recruiters both begging me to take jobs and to send them candidates, with huge lists of jobs to choose from (in one case I had a recruiter ask me if I was interested in anything on a list of over a hundred startups he was trying to find people for).
I think what's interesting in this case is that in spite of the upward spiral in wages, colleges are not, in fact, spitting out more interested grads. Enrollment in CS majors is on the decline.
Well, in our case, we are outpaying just about anything else. We're definitely in a more expensive area, but our pay is still some ~2.5X the average for the country for the same level of education.
I agree that much of the industry (and world) is guilty of poor practices in this regard. Unfortunately, it has left us, even though we're NOT guilty of same, in a difficult position.
Good means able to solve basic problems. We interview unemployed people (when we can find them!). We've hired a couple. But it seems that many of the unemployed aren't brushing up on their skills, they definitely fail the interviews more often than the employed do, and our employment interview is (at least mostly) blind to the employment status of the candidate.
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I'm fairly sure that's the exact opposite of the best way.
Sure, I kind of assumed that went without saying. Actually, I think Google's interview capabilities are at a fairly low level of competency compared to a lot of places I've seen.
Redundant?
You mean in one day, or 3 separate visits? If you don't get an offer after the first visit with Google, you got rated poorly by someone.
Yeah, not taking sides when one of those sides is at an almost comically contrived level of evil shows real leadership.
I mean, I bet you are thinking about all the famous leaders to come out of Switzerland right now, and how the US never produces anyone who takes any kind of leadership roles in business or politics.
I'm referring to long term memory. The subset that you can easily or immediately juggle is constrained to those you can hold in your long term memory.
Depends on your definition. I'm certainly 'holding' more than that in my mind right now.
I definitely disagree. People with great memories can bring context to a problem that a lousy memory just can't. If you can't hold all 20 factors to consider in your mind at once, meandering from one to another will leave you with a solution that effectively considers only a couple.
I have reasonably solid anecdotal evidence on this. I've seen top coders with great memories produce software that dominates their industry in three different industries now, and some of that software is now in the mid third decade of proven maintainability. It may not always be a winning asset, but it clearly can be.
I don't think you can legally claim that a system developed using any PHP is fast.
SSD is significantly faster than HDD at both sequential and random writes. Top 15K SAS drives write ~250MB/s sequential. Top SSD write 550MB/s sequential. Write random and it gets much worse for the SAS drive. Try to even find an enterprise HDD benchmark done in the last year. No one bothers because enterprise buys SSD if they care about performance.
All of the best developers I've met had phenomenal memories. I think both a natural reasoning ability and great memory are assets. If you are missing one, you aren't going to be as strong as someone who has both.
Well, you certainly can pay much more, and large numbers of people DO pay much more. And if you insist on your schools being in the top 1% of the country rather than the top 10% of the country, you'll start at about 1.6M (I looked yesterday), which may be where the impression gets started. There's a popular publication here called Homes and Land of the Peninsula (the Peninsula being where SV is located) which is used by realtors to sell high end properties, and even there the low end of listings is still only 900K (basically for people who want a convenient bike ride to their job at Google and don't care much else about the house.), and the prices go up to about 15M. If you go by that publication (and it's the first thing a lot of people will see because it is free and everywhere) you'll definitely think the housing market is completely insane, but that really only represents the worst 5% of the market, those who quite literally have marketing budgets to sell their houses (and thus can pay the exorbitant listing fee for that publication).
And in fairness to your expectations, things have declined about 35% from the peak (before the housing bubble blew), and during that same period Google and Facebook BOTH went on major hiring sprees which drove up salaries more than 20% in a year. That combination of events has made a drastic change in the affordability of housing on typical software developer salaries.
But then those people wouldn't be out of work, which was the original point. There's massive unemployment, and large numbers of jobs which no one will fill at an affordable price. The bottom line for our organization is we can't pay even 30% more than we are and remain profitable. At the same time our pay is enough to live very well on, and there large numbers of people out of work.
A 2000 SF house with a less than 20 minute commute in a great school district goes for $850K. Admittedly, that is a lot of money, but we do pay enough to afford the mortgage on that (enough to keep the mortgage payments under 35% of your gross). If you're young and don't need the school district yet, you can get started on building equity on a similar house without the school district for 400K. Our pay at that end of the scale is even more sufficient.
Certainly, paying people enough to buy equivalent houses is reasonable, but we're there. Having to buy houses for them would seem to suggest we live in an area inferior to the area they already live in, but by most quality of life surveys and measures we actually are located in a much better area. You may be right that those outside the area are not even considering our jobs because they believe they can't afford to live here, but that doesn't necessarily make them right. We do what we can to recruit from out of state, and our close rate, again, is nearly 100%, which I think would suggest that the few who are willing to consider our jobs are discovering that we actually offer plenty to live here.
And rather than not desperate enough, I'd say we're not fortunate enough. We're not (anywhere close to) profitable enough to buy a $2M house per developer we want to hire. Dev salaries are already our largest expense by a large margin.
Then I misled you unintentionally. We pay about 10% over the average for the position in this region (within 25 miles).
Well, we're in a popular area (SV). We have escalated our offers (and our close rate is almost 100% on the few candidates we can get). The real problem is at the front of the pipeline ... just not enough people willing to come for interviews in spite of superior pay.
Admittedly, it could be 2 (though the fact that top recruiters are also going begging may suggest this is not the case). It can't be 3, as we do occasionally manage to get some to interview, and if they are good and we make an offer our close rate is actually very high (and at the other end, we have tried job posting techniques which are both differentiated and cloned from postings for very similar employers, either way we don't see much variation in our candidate flow).
I tend to think that it is 1b: there are a lot of qualified people, but none of them are looking for work.
Well, the true masses of unemployed lack software development skills. The less common unemployed software developers have probably not kept up their skills. If you haven't built expertise in one of the tiobe top 5 (accounting for about 60% of all job postings), I'd strongly recommend doing so. List it on your resume, and back it up with some open source contribution.
Personally what I have on my resume that is attracting recruiters (as far as I can tell) is experience in java, with enough projects to make it obvious I at least SHOULD know what I'm doing. And they clearly aren't being super picky here: I have gaps in both employment and education.
My information is coming from numerous contacts in SV, and seems an accurate reflection of the recruiters both begging me to take jobs and to send them candidates, with huge lists of jobs to choose from (in one case I had a recruiter ask me if I was interested in anything on a list of over a hundred startups he was trying to find people for).
I think what's interesting in this case is that in spite of the upward spiral in wages, colleges are not, in fact, spitting out more interested grads. Enrollment in CS majors is on the decline.
Well, in our case, we are outpaying just about anything else. We're definitely in a more expensive area, but our pay is still some ~2.5X the average for the country for the same level of education.
I agree that much of the industry (and world) is guilty of poor practices in this regard. Unfortunately, it has left us, even though we're NOT guilty of same, in a difficult position.
Good means able to solve basic problems. We interview unemployed people (when we can find them!). We've hired a couple. But it seems that many of the unemployed aren't brushing up on their skills, they definitely fail the interviews more often than the employed do, and our employment interview is (at least mostly) blind to the employment status of the candidate.