51–60 of 103 posts
So currently, I'm just working on my own project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never met anyone who was not technical and then became a coder. In pre-2000 dot.com you could've gotten a job with a word 'Internet' on your resume, but nowadays you should at least know decent coding.
Yup. There are people with the logical mindset and problem solving ability to just naturally pick up coding. But most are not, and that's just an ability that's very hard to develop in later phases of life. In most cases it develops during teen age. Guess the last few decades did not really encourage these kind of developments, which is why we are running short now. It's not easy to fix though.
It was the .com bust along with a few other things. The market was so over-saturated with hacks in for a quick buck that when it popped it took a while to shake out who was who. This ran a lot of good developers out of the market never to return. The outsourcing craze right afterward did nothing to help the situation and just reinforced that the remaining few jobs where going to be further and further constrained. Which is what happened for a while. The schools and their CS programs pretty much became ghost town overnight.
I know, I had went back to finish my degree after 10 years in the industry around that time. I remember what was a full class became me an 2 other guys. I remember saying to one of them. Times are going to get good again in about 5 years.
The valley?? The real story of talent drought is in New York City. Recently there has been a gigantic explosion of startups with lots of funding, but _very_ few great engineers available. As CEO of a just-funded tech startup, I am budgeting ~70% of my time to personally recruit a Lead Developer and Senior Software Engineer (despite having a technical background myself).
Have you considered hiring remote workers? Surely your money will go further hiring a remote developer in the Mid West with the cheaper cost of living than NYC? I'm sure you could even fly them in a few times if you needed to and still save money
I live in Montana. I grew up in Kansas City, and went to school in NY. There is no language barrier, I'm a skilled developer and a pretty good communicator. I'm willing to relocate sometime in the next 2 years.
It seems I might as well be a non-English speaker in Siberia, when it comes to getting my foot in the door at an SV, NYC, etc. startup.
I'm an RoR/Java/etc developer/entrepreneur. I get recruited heavily 2-3 times a week, and yet half my non-tech friends (which comprises most of my friends) are under-employed or jobless. That dichotomy is disturbing and very difficult personally to deal with. Here I am making 10 times what the employed ones make hourly, while talking about making millions on a startup. I try to encourage them to get some product or i…
If your current group of friends are not interested in actually working hard to make those dreams a reality, there's a very real danger they will inadvertently poison your own chances of success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered hiring remote workers? Surely your money will go further hiring a remote developer in the Mid West with the cheaper cost of living than NYC? I'm sure you could even fly them in a few times if you needed to and still save money
It seems that despite the ever decreasing barriers, people just don't want to hire, or aren't comfortable hiring, remote workers. I live in Montana. I grew up in Kansas City, and went to school in NY. There is no language barrier, I'm a skilled developer and a pretty good communicator. I'm willing to relocate sometime in the next 2 years. It seems I might as well be a non-English speaker in Siberia, when it comes to…
The good news is, this is changing, and fast. Pretty anecdotal, I get pitched for remote work all the time, but over the last year or so, the number of offers has gone up significantly . Of course plenty of "we'll help you relocate" type offers too. I see many more good devs working for companies in the USA than there used to be (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1879225)
And I live in Bangalore, India where even really good devs are lost in the sea of mediocrity. Kansas is way closer :-)
I suspect you just have to wait a little till the demand supply gap gets painful enough to overcome this particular prejudice/preference.
The valley?? The real story of talent drought is in New York City. Recently there has been a gigantic explosion of startups with lots of funding, but _very_ few great engineers available. As CEO of a just-funded tech startup, I am budgeting ~70% of my time to personally recruit a Lead Developer and Senior Software Engineer (despite having a technical background myself).
The national unemployment rate is over 9% while Silicon Valley is fighting tooth-and-claw to hire. What's wrong with this picture? Software engineering is technical, sure, but it's not that hard -- if some of the idiots I've worked with in the past could hold down jobs, then anyone can. Which dying industries should we be looking at to fill the gaps in the software industry?
It actually is, have you ever notices the absolute void of developers over the age of 40? People yell age discrimination but it is not true, it is the constant churn in ones life. From constantly reeducating yourself to stay relevant to the next emergency that requires 16 hrs 7 days a week for 2 months. It requires a passion for technology just to fulfill the reeducation requirement not to mention the hours. It burns developers out. The worst part is those on the outside don't get it, they think we pay them all this money and they still whine complain and won't take our jobs. So we have a profession with a high reeducation to relevance cycle and extreme requirements of time. Those two alone knock out a good deal of the population from even entering the profession. Then you have to deal with the burn out once you are in the grinder which always take a few of the good ones every year.
So if you couple the education needs, burnout and with the fact that it is really hard to be a good developer you find that even the good one are out of the industry by 40. Usually through earning enough money to "drop out" start a worm farm in Texas. Or they hitched their star to the right wagon and have become very successful.
I know because I have seen it, as a 36 year old who has suffered two burnouts, I have seen every one of my contemporaries fall. I remain because I set my terms, I made a agreement to myself that I would get out of the corporate grind and work for myself.
I found a niche that was under-served (web accessibility, HCI for JS based web apps). So in a sense I am off the market, I don't think that I would go back to a corp gig for anything below 2x what the market is paying. But lets not fool ourselves as a freelancer, I am still for hire it just allows me to set some terms on how and when I work. It seems for me at least that this was enough to stave off a third bout of burn out. Being able to work from home and set my own hours has done a lot for my ability to refresh, recharge and reeducate.
The national unemployment rate is over 9% while Silicon Valley is fighting tooth-and-claw to hire. What's wrong with this picture? Software engineering is technical, sure, but it's not that hard -- if some of the idiots I've worked with in the past could hold down jobs, then anyone can. Which dying industries should we be looking at to fill the gaps in the software industry?
Software engineering is technical, sure, but it's not that hard It actually is, have you ever notices the absolute void of developers over the age of 40? People yell age discrimination but it is not true, it is the constant churn in ones life. From constantly reeducating yourself to stay relevant to the next emergency that requires 16 hrs 7 days a week for 2 months. It requires a passion for technology just to fulfil…
PS: It's a true eye opener to see someone making 500$ an hour working a 40 hour week and know they could raise their rates and keep their job and they also get more done than the average small team.
Running Hackers and Founders Silicon Valley, I get asked all the time if I know of people who are looking for work, and startups are having to work increasingly hard to hire. A few months ago, I was offered a $5k referral bonus for a Python/Django engineer. ( That's not the business I want to be in, btw. And it's not why I do H&F. ) There's easily been 100 startups getting angel money in the Valley in the last 5 mont…
I have a group of friends (from University of Florida) who mostly graduated just before the west coast was really recruiting there. One works at HP doing server stuff, but that's about as "far" as they got. Another one is the smartest dude at his job at bigco where he puts out fires of bad devs every day, cleaning up $20,000 contracting messes with one SQL query that no one there thought could be written.
To these people, trying to get a "cool" job is borderline impossible because, first, they don't know anyone (their social graph converged the wrong way), and second the combination of being far-away and having to blindly email resumes into the blackhole that is domain.com/apply is just plain discouraging (not to mention ineffective).
I don't know of a good solution to this problem, but if anyone is willing to relocate some of these people, I might be able to refer some really smart people ;)
Running Hackers and Founders Silicon Valley, I get asked all the time if I know of people who are looking for work, and startups are having to work increasingly hard to hire. A few months ago, I was offered a $5k referral bonus for a Python/Django engineer. ( That's not the business I want to be in, btw. And it's not why I do H&F. ) There's easily been 100 startups getting angel money in the Valley in the last 5 mont…
Right now the hiring standards (hopefully) haven't slipped too much. When the only requirement to get a Python/Django job is that you read a Python for dummies book and can fog a mirror, welcome to 2001 again.