The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent • Hacker News Board

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#31

Post by ChuckMcM » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 11:00 PM UTC

You know what is blood thirsty? recruiters are bloodthirsty. Since there is exactly zero barrier to entry when there is a perceived shortage of talent we get a swarm of 'tech recruiters' that looks kind of like Carp do when you through a handful of popcorn into the coy pond.

There is a shortage of chumps however. For the right price you can hire pretty much immediately. What I don't get are people who are technically talented and not working, mostly because they want too much. Sometimes there is a sad sad story about how they were with big corp for 10+ years, went from starry eyed college grad to large mortgage holding principal engineer, and laid off, and now nobody will hire them as a principal engineer's salary. That is a sad story.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#32

Post by ameister14 » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 11:03 PM UTC

Why are there so few rails devs? Its not as if Ruby is super hard to learn or the rails framework is incredibly complex.

I think I would hire someone for 40k for their first year, train them in RoR and then pay them more their second year. You get 6 months of good work out of them after they're totally trained and at a lower price.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#33

Post by VeejayRampay » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 11:03 PM UTC

thibaut_barrere wrote: post #24

VeejayRampay wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in Paris? Maybe the market is getting bigger for Rails devs there? I left France 5 years ago and the picture was grim then, Java/PHP had a literal death grip on the market. Well, since I'm coming back I guess that's good news :)

I left Paris 3 years ago, since then I've been doing all my work remotely from a very rural place ( http://goo.gl/maps/UTIzF ). That said Paris is the best place to get started networking again. Be sure to go to the Paris.rb group which is very dynamic if you come back! http://meetup.rubyparis.org/

Thanks a lot, will do.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#34

Post by zalew » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 11:04 PM UTC

benjaminwootton wrote: post #29

PixelPusher wrote: post #16

We've been hiring for a little while in Los Angeles. The problem is that there are some Rails developers, but most of the ones I've met are pretty entitled. They expect 100K+, benefits, telecommuting, etc. The problem is that most of them are fairly incompetent when it comes to everything else. Ask them about database design, sockets, parallelism, map/reduce, memory allocation, etc. and you'll get blank stares. This…

I don't think expecting $100k+, benefits, telecommuting etc necessarily indicates entitlement. Most people in finance, senior managers, doctors, lawyers, architects, management consultants etc wouldn't get out of bed for less than that, especially in a big city with high cost of living. I think its great that techies are starting to realise their value and grab a piece of that for themselves.

why are you comparing a qualified doctor or lawyer to a web dev who doesn't know anything about database design?

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#35

Post by PixelPusher » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 11:04 PM UTC

benjaminwootton wrote: post #29

PixelPusher wrote: post #16

We've been hiring for a little while in Los Angeles. The problem is that there are some Rails developers, but most of the ones I've met are pretty entitled. They expect 100K+, benefits, telecommuting, etc. The problem is that most of them are fairly incompetent when it comes to everything else. Ask them about database design, sockets, parallelism, map/reduce, memory allocation, etc. and you'll get blank stares. This…

I don't think expecting $100k+, benefits, telecommuting etc necessarily indicates entitlement. Most people in finance, senior managers, doctors, lawyers, architects, management consultants etc wouldn't get out of bed for less than that, especially in a big city with high cost of living. I think its great that techies are starting to realise their value and grab a piece of that for themselves.

What dictates entitlement is asking or expecting something without actually having earned it.

Obviously finance, doctors, and lawyers went to school for many years. They earned it.

Developers, who can't even explain map/reduce or other important CS concepts, have not.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#36

Post by j_baker » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 11:10 PM UTC

This seems like a pretty worthless test. I mean, who cares how many companies respond to your resume? The real test is how many job offers you can get, and that's a much more difficult than getting responses on your resume.

Secondly, are entrepreneurs really this out of touch with what it's like to be a jobhunter? This post reads like it was written by an anthropologist studying some strange culture he'd never seen before.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#37

Post by benjaminwootton » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 11:18 PM UTC

PixelPusher wrote: post #35

benjaminwootton wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think expecting $100k+, benefits, telecommuting etc necessarily indicates entitlement. Most people in finance, senior managers, doctors, lawyers, architects, management consultants etc wouldn't get out of bed for less than that, especially in a big city with high cost of living. I think its great that techies are starting to realise their value and grab a piece of that for themselves.

What dictates entitlement is asking or expecting something without actually having earned it. Obviously finance, doctors, and lawyers went to school for many years. They earned it. Developers, who can't even explain map/reduce or other important CS concepts, have not.

Market value has nothing to do with having 'earned it' or the numbers of years that you have put in at school.

It's a function of supply and demand and the value that the individual can create.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#38

Post by bicknergseng » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 11:19 PM UTC

JimboOmega wrote: post #4

And here I am, a rails developer trying to move to SF, and I only get maybe a few nibbles a week. I must not be on the right job boards. Or something. Is the meetup.com ruby list the place to go? Someone also suggested changing my location on LinkedIn to SF - however, I am hoping to relocate, but haven't done so yet, so that seems dishonest.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the author, Matt Mickiewicz, runs developerauction.com. I imagine it is in their best interest to drum up the "talent war," to make it seem like there are no engineers to hire.

My experience tells me that this talent war exists... for the top few percentile of engineers. Where these people are dogged by recruiters and companies alike, there is a sharp dropoff; engineers who are smart but don't win in a tech bingo interview or didn't work at Google/Facebook or didn't go to Stanford get pinged by headhunters but passed over by companies. Engineers who have held jobs at start ups or less prestigious companies, who have authored plenty of CoffeeScript or ObC code for a corporate code base but don't remember how to implement a quicksort or don't have experience with framework x are rejected in the interview phase.

It's my opinion, but I think the "shortage of talent" is really a shortage of patience and mentorship, and a sign of the complete unwillingness of many companies to take a risk on someone.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#39

Post by PixelPusher » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 11:20 PM UTC

benjaminwootton wrote: post #37

PixelPusher wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What dictates entitlement is asking or expecting something without actually having earned it. Obviously finance, doctors, and lawyers went to school for many years. They earned it. Developers, who can't even explain map/reduce or other important CS concepts, have not.

Market value has nothing to do with having 'earned it' or the numbers of years that you have put in at school. It's a function of supply and demand and the value that the individual can create.

Well now you're arguing market value not entitlement, which I didn't say it was a bad thing.

If you're a Rails dev, yeah you're valuable and you should be getting paid that much.

However, you still have a lot to learn, and if you're asking for telecommuting and you don't even know what a thread is. That's entitlement, because you think that just because you know Rails, anyone will hire you and that you're 'good enough' to work from home.

Developers we'd want to hire don't just know Rails.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#40

Post by pjungwir » Tue, Apr 02, 2013, 11:21 PM UTC

JimboOmega wrote: post #4

And here I am, a rails developer trying to move to SF, and I only get maybe a few nibbles a week. I must not be on the right job boards. Or something. Is the meetup.com ruby list the place to go? Someone also suggested changing my location on LinkedIn to SF - however, I am hoping to relocate, but haven't done so yet, so that seems dishonest.

Sign up for the SF Ruby group's mailing list. Write a post that you're hoping to move to SF and are looking for job opportunities. Also try directly contacting any companies you especially want to work for.