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The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

fastcompany.com

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Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#61

Post by JimboOmega »

HaloZero wrote: post #46
JimboOmega wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, is LinkedIn even the best way? I get a fair amount of (local, I live near DC) recruiter spam through it, but it's often nothing to do with rails, and it is mostly third party recruiters. I'm looking for a startup or small-company environment that actually uses rails. Big ERP jobs are easy to find, but the startup jobs are, despite the supposed feeding frenzy, a little bit more scarce on the ground. (Or else I'm…

You're more than welcome to apply to ApartmentList, I'm currently working there. We're a fairly small profitable company using Rails in San Francisco. You can shoot me an email at rohan@apartmentlist.com and we can talk there.

You (and everyone else who asked) should have an email and a copy of my resume, assuming the google drive sharing worked.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#62

Post by rayiner »

JimboOmega wrote: post #59
bicknergseng wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Funny. Sounds like me. I went to a decent but "wrong" school (UVA), lured by promises of a free ride. I missed my tech bingo interviews (and I've had a lot of them), for reasons worthy of a blog post. My first, for instance, with MS, went wrong because Alaska Airlines got my flight in around 1 or 2 AM - for an 8 AM interview the next day. I know I was not at my best. I am also totally done with Google - it's just not…

What's ridiculous is that these same recruiters are probably blowing up the voicemail of UC Berkeley grads, even though pretty much anyone who could get into UVA could get into Berkeley (in-state preferences aside), and vice versa.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#63

Post by [deleted] »

cletus wrote: post #22

Honestly this is just a PR piece for DeveloperAuction. "How to win the bloodthirsty battle for tech talent"? Why come use our site of course! This strip from 1995 sums it up pretty well: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-05-22/ I see a number of problems (on both sides): 1. There is no shortage of talent. There might well be a shortage of talent for the price you're willing to pay but that's hardly the same thing;…

[deleted]

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#64

Post by jdminhbg »

ameister14 wrote: post #32

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.

But now you have to hire a Rails trainer as well as a Rails dev!

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#65

Post by doktrin »

RandallBrown wrote: post #56
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.

I can't explain map reduce. I generally know what it is but I've never needed to use it or implement it. That doesn't mean I'm not a good engineer. It just means I haven't done something before.

Yeah, I agree. This is one of the pitfalls of working in a fairly unstructured and nascent industry. Everyone seemingly has their own collection of miscellany and trivia that encapsulates what a Good Engineer (tm) ought to know.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#66

Post by doktrin »

zalew wrote: post #51
benjaminwootton wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that it's possible for even an average web developer to create at least a comparable amount of economic value as the doctor or lawyer. I don't know why our own community find this hard to accept? We're a rare species who can create massive value for ourselves or our employers. We can build great products that many would pay for, or automate away whole departments of people with our code - not that I tak…

a web dev who doesn't know databases is like [some creative analogy about a doctor hurting people]

It's practically impossible to be a web developer without knowing anything about databases.

Most of the topics the parent listed are significantly more complex than "knowing about databases", which implies that "database design" in this context isn't simply drawing an ER diagram and correctly identifying the purpose of a foreign key.

Given that the other topics listed include sockets, parallelism & map reduce, my guess is that "database design" might in this case mean distributed database concepts and/or sharding.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#67

Post by PixelPusher »

RandallBrown wrote: post #56
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.

I can't explain map reduce. I generally know what it is but I've never needed to use it or implement it. That doesn't mean I'm not a good engineer. It just means I haven't done something before.

That's great, I don't expect an academic explanation but just having heard of it is pretty good. That question by itself is not a deal breaker. An 'engineer' should at least know about things like data structures or just anything beyond Rails. Most interesting problems require more than knowing how to create CRUD apps.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#68

Post by patio11 »

ameister14 wrote: post #32

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.

That's an attractive option iff you're training non-programmers and, when you say "pay them more", you are prepared to more than double their wages after they reach journeyman proficiency in Rails. If you expect people to have a CS degree prior to year 1 or react to a 10% raise in year 2 as generous, you would not find the Silicon Valley hiring market offering you as many candidates as you desired positions.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#69

Post by PixelPusher »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #47
PixelPusher wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enoug…

I am arguing that people are not asking for these packages out of entitlement. They are asking for them out of increased awareness of their market value. In the end the market will sort this out, and some developers will inevitably be left disapointed. However, I think it's quite reasonable that techies of all skill levels are pushing for and often achieving the salaries and working conditions that they want. (I real…

Asking for telecommuting, equity, and time to work on other projects is ridiculous. I've gotten these requests from developers who have only done basic Rails projects.

Do you think you deserve a better quality of life than say, a teacher? a doctor? I fail to see how even comparing yourself to them is not entitlement, especially if you're not a CS major.

The whole productivity bit is crap, I've been on that side and I know it. You may be more productive, but for very selfish reasons. The business is not more productive, and you isolate yourself from everyone else.

Businesses don't generally fail because of bad tech, they fail because they're not nimble enough to adapt and test ideas quickly.

Re: The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

#70

Post by PixelPusher »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #41
zalew wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would argue that it's possible for even an average web developer to create at least a comparable amount of economic value as the doctor or lawyer. I don't know why our own community find this hard to accept? We're a rare species who can create massive value for ourselves or our employers. We can build great products that many would pay for, or automate away whole departments of people with our code - not that I tak…

An average web developer in no way can compare to a lawyer or a doctor.

First of all, doctors generally save lives. And they have to go to school for at least 8 years. Lawyers, almost just as long.

How long does it take to learn Rails, HTML, and Javascript? A few months?

Average web developers are not that special. However, great engineers for whom Rails is an afterthought compared to what they know, are indeed comparable.

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