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Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

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Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#61

Post by grammaton »

agentultra wrote: post #59

What I like about the concept of the mythical "top 1%" is that every company must hire only these cream-of-the-crop developers. It's quite presumptuous to believe that you could convince someone with a PhD in CS and probably at least a bachelors in Math to work on your web application. This is someone who could literally be considered in the top 1%: think Norvig, Sussman, etc. The truly great programmers who taught t…

Thank you for saying this. Sorry, but you don't need a rocket scientist to build your glorified CMS, no matter how neat and innovative you think it is. When you're building the fault-tolerant, highly optimized code to align a communications satellite with a ground station, or sharding code to handle a database dozens of terabytes in size, then you can make a case that you need the top 1%.

For the 99% of CRUD sites, mobile apps, and glorified accounting systems that most programmers will spend their careers on? Not so much.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#63

Post by pnathan »

danohuiginn wrote: post #51
bartonfink wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to play devil's advocate, doesn't that rest on the assumption that the top 1% of software developers are also strong enough networkers that they can get a job pretty much anywhere without using the formal channels which would require item (d)? I'm not at all convinced that's the case, even though I understand that there's some truth to the conclusion.

The point is that they don't need to be networkers, because they will be networkees. i.e. other people will notice how good they are, and actively try to get them into appropriate jobs. I think this is largely true, though it takes a while for reputation to spread. There are some brilliant young developers who haven't yet been noticed by anybody in a position to hire them -- but they won't stay in that situation more…

I'm not sure your exception is an exception. In the company I work for, there are some amazingly bright guys, but I don't hear about them being in any open-source project. I would suspect only the interns and a few of the younger guys have code published on bitbucket or whatever.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#64

Post by jasonkester »

mooism2 wrote: post #31
potatolicious wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you're hiring the top 1%, but you're not paying at top-1% levels, you're probably not actually hiring the top 1%. That's my main takeaway anyhow. Extraordinary people command extraordinary compensation - if you can't cough up the cash you're not going to get to play.

I'm not sure how true this is. Paying high wages to knowledge workers causes them in general to be less productive. The top 1% might rather go for the money anyway. But the top 1% also care about working conditions (more screen space, faster computers, fewer interruptions, etc). Perhaps more than money, after they're being paid enough not to have to worry about money.

On the flip side, I find that my productivity drops to zero below a certain level of compensation, at least when I'm working on other people's projects for money.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#65

Post by noamsml »

crocowhile wrote: post #28
snippyhollow wrote: post #13

All my friends that are really good "never went on the job market" and got hired following to their summer internship, and a few others (good ones) and I went forward to a Ph.D. This proves nothing, but brings some evidence.

Bad for them. Going onto the job market is not an opportunity only for those who hire but also for those who are looking for a job: if they are SO good, thew will have to chance to interview in many good places and pick the one they like the best. Settle down after a stage means taking the easy way. not a sign of excellence, if you ask me.

Then again, chances are that for people like that, going back to the market wouldn't mean looking up postings on Monster.com anyways.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#67

Post by damoncali »

potatolicious wrote: post #26
nailer wrote: post #25

Last year I was interviewed by a company that frequently proclaims they hire the top 1% of candidates. The role was working on infrastructure apps using Python, as a Site Reliability Engineer... The interviewer proclaimed he knew Python. Later, during a programming question, after he didn't quite understand the code presented as an answer, I reconfirmed this. His response, quoting: 'I do know Python, but I'm not fami…

If you think you're hiring the top 1%, but you're not paying at top-1% levels, you're probably not actually hiring the top 1%. That's my main takeaway anyhow. Extraordinary people command extraordinary compensation - if you can't cough up the cash you're not going to get to play.

I don't know, I've met some seriously talented, seriously underpaid programmers over the years. Money isn't everything, especially to people who live for the intellectual stuff.

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#69

Post by capstone »

praptak wrote: post #7

Remember this article when you hear the "hundreds of resumes per job opening" argument in a debate on immigration laws.

You presume that the 199 bad developers are american and adding immigrants to the mix will improve overall quality. But if we follow the article's logic, we would be adding 199 bad immigrants to the 199 bad americans already here. So instead of 199 bad developers and 1 good one, we end up with 398 bad developers and 2 good ones. The end result is, 199 more americans unemployed, decreased pay for the 199 H1-B's, and no overall improvement of quality.

(I am not necessarily arguing against more H1-B visas, I am simply saying the article applies equally to all developers regardless of origin so it really doesn't speak for looser immigration laws - if anything, once you apply the math to the immigration issue, the logical conclusion is negative).

Re: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

#70

Post by dspeyer »

damoncali wrote: post #67
potatolicious wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you're hiring the top 1%, but you're not paying at top-1% levels, you're probably not actually hiring the top 1%. That's my main takeaway anyhow. Extraordinary people command extraordinary compensation - if you can't cough up the cash you're not going to get to play.

I don't know, I've met some seriously talented, seriously underpaid programmers over the years. Money isn't everything, especially to people who live for the intellectual stuff.

So make that "being a top 1% employer", which includes pay, perquisites, environment, culture, the interest of the work itself....

Harder to measure than pay, but so is being a top 1% programmer. This can be a good reason to talk about pay -- an employer can claim excellent culture without any truth to it, but it's harder to self-deceive about money. And pay often correlates to important ephemerals like respect.

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