Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (January 2011 Edition)

As many have been posting about new beginnings and starting afresh, it's time for another Hiring thread.

Please lead with the location of the position and make it clear if working remotely is a possibility.

I would be interested to hear from YC companies (or companies at SF incubators) that are looking for tech co-founders.

Between Bath and Bristol, possibly relocating to Bath, England.

Looking for a PHP developer to join a small web design agency.

Email: andrew [AT] moresoda [DOT] co [DOT] uk

In New York City there are a lot of jobs. I went to 3 job interviews and got offers from 2. All 3 had tests of my programming skill, though the 3rd was ruthless about minor syntax errors. For instance, the guy talking to me asked me how to find all of the Apache servers running on a server. He just wanted the number. I typed:

ps aux | grep apache | wc -l

but this wrongly included the command I was typing. We were working on their dev server and I was typing the commands into the terminal. I got back 12 when the real answer was 11. He eventually showed me what I should have typed:

ps aux | grep apache | grep -v grep | wc -l

The grep -v screens out the line I had just typed which had "grep apache" in it. Of course, there are other ways to do this, but this was the first thing I thought of. Of my error, I thought that was somewhat minor, but this guy had recently been hired to clean up a sloppy programming department, so he was looking for programmers who were flawless.

The other 2 tests at the other 2 jobs covered the usual questions (write a JOIN statement, write a sub-query, what is the difference between GET and POST?). On one of the interviews, 2 programmers came in to talk to me and they gave me a short PHP script which was working but which was badly written. They asked me how I would re-write it. Easy enough.

My sense is there is a lot of hiring going on in New York City. Possibly not enough local talent to fill all the jobs, but the businesses are here for other reasons (other than programming talent) so I think eventually programming talent from elsewhere will get drawn to New York City. There are some cities in the USA that are in deep economic decline, and will probably remain so for the next 5 years, so perhaps some of the programmers from those cities will migrate to New York City.