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Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders

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Re: Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders

#181

Post by ig1 »

Swannie wrote: post #166
ig1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's recruited heavily at the entry level, you're mistaken. Even substantial number of computer science graduates lack the capability of basic coding (i.e. "here's the detailed specification of this function; go implement it"). There is substantially more demand than available talent. SF, New York, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc. all have huge talent shortages. Even developer markets that were relatively…

For London I strongly disagree. When start-ups, profitable ones, are offering £35k + bonus + stock options (worth £0), for senior developers, in Central London, there's not a talent shortage. Similarly skilled developers are getting £35k+ & bonus outside of London, where the cost of commuting/living is significantly cheaper, in established companies with full benefits packages, that don't expect them to work 50 hour…

As it happens I also used to run a developer recruitment startup (CoderStack) in London, so I'm intimately familiar with the market.

While there are certainly companies trying to hire iOS developers at 40k, there are also companies trying to hire iOS developers on 80k+ and iOS contractors on day rates of £500/day.

What you're probably seeing is selection bias. That is the crappy jobs (i.e. low pay) stay on the market far longer than good jobs. Hence you end up thinking that crappy jobs represent a large proportion of the job market than they actually do simply because they stay around longer.

Re: Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders

#182

Post by calinet6 »

khuey wrote: post #118
zanny wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a rockstar at all (I'm barely passable) but I would never work on a project not understanding the entire tech stack, from the base language to all libraries in play. That is how you get security gotchas where you dump your passwords in plaintext or let anyone into the admin panel. I've spent the last 3 weeks reading documentation around qt 5 in preparation for some 5.1 mobile development I plan on doing, for…

Down to the programming language is hardly the entire stack. There's also the VM the language runs in, the operating system, the assembly language the CPU executes, so on and so on down to the transistors in the CPU. At some point you realize you can't understand the entire stack. (In case you thought these issues didn't affect you: http://bugs.python.org/issue13703 )

You can, and you should. Learn how an ALU works and how an instruction runs on bare silicon. Learn what silicon doping is and how transistors work to actually create a digital logic gate out of analog concepts. Learn how to design your own processor in a simulator, and how the clock frequency affects your whole chip.

First and foremost, it's fun for anyone interested in engineering to begin with. Second, for programmers, it gives you a tactile experience of programming, and a real respect for what Assembly language really is and what it does, why a compiler is important, how interpreted languages are run differently, and why optimizing your code is important.

You will never know the direct effect that this secondary understanding will have, but the unknowable effects here will be wholly positive, I guarantee it.

I remember one semester in college where it clicked for me... I was taking CS61C, machine structures (basically learning C and how it translates to Assembly) and EE40 (basically learning electronics and how silicon works, and how processors work at an electronic level) and suddenly I understood at least on a basic level how everything worked. The code you type in gets compiled to ASM which gets loaded into memory which the processor loads instruction-by-instruction into registers which are represented by the states of transistors which are loaded each clock cycle by the switching of voltages on a germanium-doped silicon plate which causes the voltage to swing at a certain predictable speed at a given frequency which is controllable and engineered to tolerances which put the whole thing in sync. Holy shit. And each part can be understood in isolation, combined, and it makes sense. It's engineering at its best—break down the problem, understand the tolerances, rinse (with a HF acid wash) and repeat. No single part of it is beyond the realm of understanding, but together they build a system of such complexity, and it's amazing and beautiful that it all works as well as it does.

Knowing this—yes, it makes me think about programming differently.

Re: Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders

#183

Post by dyno12345 »

aurelianito wrote: post #109
sybhn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i always thought that rockstars are smart, driven people who were able to achieve substantial results because of favorable circumstances. The term itself is laughable at best, especially when self proclaimed!

I thought the same until I actually worked with one. This guy can build things in a week that a group of 5 competent programmers will do in a month.

And yet he doesn't get paid proportional to that ratio. He probably makes 20% more.

Re: Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders

#184

Post by el_fuser »

btilly wrote: post #123
tzaman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rockstars are a myth No they are not. One would think it's easy to find smart people who can learn new things , but I've dealt with both young and senior developers (by senior I mean writing code 15+ years) and was amazed how most of them feel comfortable being completely ignorant of new technologies/libraries/frameworks/best practices/whatever. I've met a rockstar the other day, and could feel him being the one I'…

...and was amazed how most of them feel comfortable being completely ignorant of new technologies/libraries/frameworks/best practices/whatever. I don't know how to judge that comment. It is true that if you take anyone who is competent and ask them to teach you something that they learned in the last year, they should be able to come up with something. If not, then you've likely got "1 year of experience, 15 times".…

It's so easy to wrongly screen out senior devs for the reasons you mention. I've seen JR devs want to ask tricky algorithm questions, because that's still fresh in their minds from school... I've seen mid level devs ask the framework gotchas because that's the world they're in...

Coders have misconstrued fizzbuzz into a whiteboard pissing contest because they want a binary yes/no interview framework... But that causes them to miss the forest for all the trees.

Re: Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders

#185

Post by papsosouid »

niggler wrote: post #20
Udo wrote: post #13

I was absolutely with you until but it is a hirers' market which, even if it is (and that's debatable), is not the correct reason for anyone to behave differently. In this case, applicants should not be reading the actual postings because it's a hirers' market and hirers are now somehow considered royalty. Instead, applicants should be reading them because it's basic curtesy and not doing it ends up wasting everybody…

It is absolutely a hirers' market if the market is for a low-level coder. Many people, especially coming from an engineering background, have the requisite programming and computer science experience to do what you need. It's a hirees' market at the rockstar level, as always.

As someone who has tried to hire a competent entry level programmer, no it is not a hirers market. Finding someone who can pass fizzbuzz is a huge challenge.

Re: Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders

#186

Post by randallsquared »

tzaman wrote: post #174
btilly wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and was amazed how most of them feel comfortable being completely ignorant of new technologies/libraries/frameworks/best practices/whatever. I don't know how to judge that comment. It is true that if you take anyone who is competent and ask them to teach you something that they learned in the last year, they should be able to come up with something. If not, then you've likely got "1 year of experience, 15 times".…

From what you have written I can see you don't suck (I'd need to meet you and see some of your code to actually assess you're good :). You see, you used words like "Bayesian", "Promises". Guys that I was writing about not only don't know what promises are, they don't give a fuck either. A rockstar (in my book, at least) would hear about them and google them as soon as possible. So at the end of the day, it's not real…

By your criteria, everyone on HN is a rock star. I think that might be too broad. :)

Re: Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders

#187

Post by nollidge »

anthonyb wrote: post #158
asveikau wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a good laugh at that quote, but now I'm thinking: is it legit to cite one or more persons doing their job poorly to dismiss the entire profession? Do you keep around bad code to remind you why you don't talk to programmers? Examples of quack medicine to remind you why you don't talk to doctors?

Essentially every recruiter message that I've received on LinkedIn follows one of two patterns: a) Hello, you do Python, do you want a job? (with no position details, salary, reason to join, etc.) b) a) followed by a clumsy attempt to fish details of my contacts (I don't connect with recruiters). So, er, yeah - "Ha ha, profession!"

My favorite is when they CALL ME AT WORK to network at me, especially since I specifically say "don't call" on my LI profile.

Re: Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders

#188

Post by lifebeyondfife »

lsiebert wrote: post #108
ig1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with that stat but it's perfectly believable. Many people are clearly getting by with a mixture of memorization and trial-and-error rather than understanding. I think of those who understand algorithmic reasoning (i.e. understand loops, assignment, etc.) they also fall into two categories. Those who can understand more abstract programming concepts (indirect referencing, recursion) and those who can'…

Recursion isn't hard, it's just not taught correctly. It's fairly easy to break it down into rules. Because they are shown examples, instead of taught how, people memorize how to do stuff, instead of learning it from principles. Take the classic question, recursively reverse a linked list. You will see a lot of people making false starts, or trying to reverse the list in some way like they would reverse an array, or…

Because it was lunchtime and I wanted to make sure I was still employable...

static MyLinkedList ReverseLinkedList(MyLinkedList linkedList) { if (linkedList.Next == null) return linkedList;

  var newTail = linkedList.Next;
  var reversedList = ReverseLinkedList(linkedList.Next);
  newTail.Next = linkedList;
  linkedList.Next = null;

  return reversedList;
}

Re: Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders

#189

Post by Swannie »

SandB0x wrote: post #173
Swannie wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For London I strongly disagree. When start-ups, profitable ones, are offering £35k + bonus + stock options (worth £0), for senior developers, in Central London, there's not a talent shortage. Similarly skilled developers are getting £35k+ & bonus outside of London, where the cost of commuting/living is significantly cheaper, in established companies with full benefits packages, that don't expect them to work 50 hour…

What regions outside London are you referring to? Genuinely interested.

Particularly, Bristol and Bath, Oxford, Reading, Manchester/Warrington.

Re: Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders

#190

Post by Swannie »

ig1 wrote: post #181
Swannie wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For London I strongly disagree. When start-ups, profitable ones, are offering £35k + bonus + stock options (worth £0), for senior developers, in Central London, there's not a talent shortage. Similarly skilled developers are getting £35k+ & bonus outside of London, where the cost of commuting/living is significantly cheaper, in established companies with full benefits packages, that don't expect them to work 50 hour…

As it happens I also used to run a developer recruitment startup (CoderStack) in London, so I'm intimately familiar with the market. While there are certainly companies trying to hire iOS developers at 40k, there are also companies trying to hire iOS developers on 80k+ and iOS contractors on day rates of £500/day. What you're probably seeing is selection bias. That is the crappy jobs (i.e. low pay) stay on the market…

You are right, I'm almost certainly exhibiting selection bias. As we all know, the best jobs don't even go on the wider market, such as jobs sites, but are filled by word of mouth referrals, or conversations at events.

But if I go and search: http://www.technojobs.co.uk/search.phtml?page=2&row_offs...

You will see most senior dev roles advertised with a range, that seems to average out about £45k. That's for the whole country, and London seems no different.

Personal experience with London based recruiters was that despite jobs advertising £60k, the number that the recruiter had from the client was actually lower. When asked about the requirements for getting the top end of the pay scale, "Well, they really only want to pay low 40's", was something I heard time and time again, and caused me to not apply, time and time again.

Crappy jobs? Maybe.

EDIT: Also, I've seen an expensive corporate salary survey (shh, don't tell HR), and whilst London mid-senior people have seen a good bump to their salary in the last 2-3 years, the averages there were approx: junior ~£28k, mid-level ~£36k, senior ~£47k, architect ~£60k, dev lead ~£72k).

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