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Out of necessity, tech startups are changing the way workers are hired

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Re: Out of necessity, tech startups are changing the way workers are hired

#11

Post by HilbertSpace »

Aegean wrote: post #8
HilbertSpace wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"kernel"? For WHAT operating system(s)? Or do you just expect them, naturally, to be expert in all of them, so little their efforts are worth, so great your cash is worth? Then for WHAT work? Writing device drivers? Tweaking the TCP/IP stack? New, tricky things in video? For WHAT? Here is the general situation: A successful information technology startup is a RARE thing, among entrepreneurs, businesses, and even info…

For your "cooperative and preemptive multitasking" - it's not my question - see the link on the article: http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/06/will-the-real-programm... They asked this on RethinkDB interview. I found a similarity and just mentioned it. FYI its a pretty common terminology. I also don't care what you think about my ego. I made a candid post for a problem I am facing. If you criticize that's very welcom…

On your ego, I;m just guessing. It's a common failing.

Broadly you seem to be recruiting a bit too close to the ground, to be straining over gnats and forgetting elephants. E.g., my best work in concurrency was at the Watson lab in Yorktown Heights. We had NO trouble hiring people with lots of smarts, knowledge, talents, and determination. When I interviewed people, I asked more general questions. So for concurrency, ask about some really solid topics in the field.

You gave a URL on your terminology: I still don't think that the terminology is both solid and common enough to use in an interview. Indeed, I would guess that a real expert in concurrency, e.g., a recent CS Ph.D. who did their research in the field, would not use such terminology. What a Dijkstra semaphore is is solid. So, might ask about that. I don't think your terminology is good for recruiting real expertise.

Re: Out of necessity, tech startups are changing the way workers are hired

#12

Post by HilbertSpace »

cageface wrote: post #9

Tech startups are at least partly to blame for this as well. I've seen so many job postings requiring years of experience in exactly the same combination of technologies the company itself is using. I know it's harder to hire people for their innate abilities than it is for the number of years they've done rails or django or rspec but if you're going to be that inflexible you've got nobody but yourself to blame for t…

Well put.

Re: Out of necessity, tech startups are changing the way workers are hired

#13

Post by HilbertSpace »

Aegean wrote: post #3

It's exactly the same problem we are facing. When the job requires very high technical skills its a dead end. I am looking for talented kernel engineers. If I go for employing someone high caliber, the costs would be in the 100K >= range. Not a smooth option for a startup. Also it's still hard to attract them even if you pay well. If I go for contractors, there is the problem of IP disclosure. Contractors are probabl…

"When the job requires very high technical skills its a dead end."

That's a very highly 'mixed' situation: I hold a Ph.D. from a top research university in some very technical material, with a lot of connection with computing, and have published peer reviewed original research in some topics where, thus, I am a 'world-class' expert in those topics, and I can absolutely, positively guarantee you that (1) in a 'job interview' in such a topic I will totally blow away the interview questions and (2) really know so much that the interviewer will feel 'rejected'. So, I won't get hired.

Uh, we're still back 100 years ago where the person hiring insists on knowing more and won't hire anyone who doesn't know less. In particular, the person hiring wants the new person to look just like the person hiring wants, including what the hiring person does NOT know.

This situation is very general: For a person with "very high technical skills", there is essentially no way to get interviewed or hired. There is no way for that person to expect someone else to understand those skills or have a job for them. The academic solution is for such a person to publish papers and, then, have others just count the papers, prizes, grants, whatever -- never try to read the papers. In business there is really just one solution: Have the person with such skills start their own business.

So, there really are people with "very high technical skills", but they essentially can't be hired, that is, they are unemployable.

For a hiring manager to insist that their particular list of skills, some good, some actually 'bad', are just the 'right stuff' is a mistake of the hiring manager.

Re: Out of necessity, tech startups are changing the way workers are hired

#15

Post by arethuza »

Aegean wrote: post #3

It's exactly the same problem we are facing. When the job requires very high technical skills its a dead end. I am looking for talented kernel engineers. If I go for employing someone high caliber, the costs would be in the 100K >= range. Not a smooth option for a startup. Also it's still hard to attract them even if you pay well. If I go for contractors, there is the problem of IP disclosure. Contractors are probabl…

Sounds like simple economics: if you can't afford to pay people in cash and your start-up doesn't look attractive enough that options look attractive then you won't be able to attract the talent.

Re: Out of necessity, tech startups are changing the way workers are hired

#16

Post by zwetan »

here an idea, hire a very very very good programmer or world-class talent, however you want to name them, and yeah pay them the dough that they deserve.

And have them train/teach those rookies.

that is called: "building a team"

it always amuse me to see some people thinking they can get away having the cream and the butter for a cheap price.

Re: Out of necessity, tech startups are changing the way workers are hired

#17

Post by strlen »

HilbertSpace wrote: post #4
Aegean wrote: post #3

It's exactly the same problem we are facing. When the job requires very high technical skills its a dead end. I am looking for talented kernel engineers. If I go for employing someone high caliber, the costs would be in the 100K >= range. Not a smooth option for a startup. Also it's still hard to attract them even if you pay well. If I go for contractors, there is the problem of IP disclosure. Contractors are probabl…

"kernel"? For WHAT operating system(s)? Or do you just expect them, naturally, to be expert in all of them, so little their efforts are worth, so great your cash is worth? Then for WHAT work? Writing device drivers? Tweaking the TCP/IP stack? New, tricky things in video? For WHAT? Here is the general situation: A successful information technology startup is a RARE thing, among entrepreneurs, businesses, and even info…

> Similarly for your "kernel preemption. A blocking mutex and a spinlock". Again I can guess, but I doubt that your terminology is both well defined and common.

Really? That's standard terminology and I could define both in few sentences and could fresh out of college. I don't do OS development (and while I've tweaked a few lines in the kernel source, I'm not a kernel hacker by any means), but I understand the differences between spinlocks, event loops and blocking on mutexes (it's a core part of userland systems/network programming).

I highly suggest picking up Andy Tannenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" (the MINIX book is excellent too, but is more about "the right way" to build an OS with a microkernel etc... rather than a case study of what exists). It's accessible and meant as an undergraduate text and will give you at least a cursory overview of these issues. It just seems like you had a bad professor for your operating systems course.

Re: Out of necessity, tech startups are changing the way workers are hired

#18

Post by HilbertSpace »

strlen wrote: post #17
HilbertSpace wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"kernel"? For WHAT operating system(s)? Or do you just expect them, naturally, to be expert in all of them, so little their efforts are worth, so great your cash is worth? Then for WHAT work? Writing device drivers? Tweaking the TCP/IP stack? New, tricky things in video? For WHAT? Here is the general situation: A successful information technology startup is a RARE thing, among entrepreneurs, businesses, and even info…

> Similarly for your "kernel preemption. A blocking mutex and a spinlock". Again I can guess, but I doubt that your terminology is both well defined and common. Really? That's standard terminology and I could define both in few sentences and could fresh out of college. I don't do OS development (and while I've tweaked a few lines in the kernel source, I'm not a kernel hacker by any means), but I understand the differ…

I've taught computer science in ugrad and grad school but only took one course, that AFTER I taught the ugrad course, and it was a silly course.

I know more than I indicated, but I wanted to say that the questions need to be more clear, Yes, preemptive is like handling a keyboard interrupt. Mutex likely stands for 'mutual exclusion' and typically is supported by a library with various features. Spin locks were an old IBM trick where it actually was faster to let a 'task' just go into a loop on something than use something like a Mutex that would involve the dispatcher -- the dispatcher could be slow. But spin locks had a bad reputation for spinning forever and were a standard system managment problem.

I'd advise the hiring guy first to get a book, maybe like you listed, and go to a university with a good CS department and buy a hour with a good OS CS prof and get an outline of what he needed to hire.

Re: Out of necessity, tech startups are changing the way workers are hired

#19

Post by iuytrfghj »

HilbertSpace wrote: post #13
Aegean wrote: post #3

It's exactly the same problem we are facing. When the job requires very high technical skills its a dead end. I am looking for talented kernel engineers. If I go for employing someone high caliber, the costs would be in the 100K >= range. Not a smooth option for a startup. Also it's still hard to attract them even if you pay well. If I go for contractors, there is the problem of IP disclosure. Contractors are probabl…

"When the job requires very high technical skills its a dead end." That's a very highly 'mixed' situation: I hold a Ph.D. from a top research university in some very technical material, with a lot of connection with computing, and have published peer reviewed original research in some topics where, thus, I am a 'world-class' expert in those topics, and I can absolutely, positively guarantee you that (1) in a 'job int…

People with very high technical skills don't work for companies with hiring managers
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