71–80 of 99 posts
I'm finding my own meme here - CI is the key to enabling remote working and so enabling a company to truly select the best With CI it's pretty easy to see what needs to be built and whether it works - every few minutes if needed. You can see progress happen throughout a day. No other metrics matter.
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;…
The 10x figure is pseudoknowledge - something we "all know" that isn't actually true (or that at least we have no good reason to believe to be true), cf. http://vimeo.com/9270320 . In brief: the study that it is ultimately derived from had a tiny sample size (on the order of 30, to wit), and for several reasons the experimental design would have invalidated its results outside the very narrow original focus of the st…
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Some/most companies have a real problem with the concept of telecommuting/remote working. It's really quite astounding to me: the internet is in more places than ever before, video conferencing, text conferencing, etc, are at all-time highs, yet for some reason companies simply think remote work is unacceptable. Blows me away.
I've worked remotely with a strong distributed team. It worked quite well, and I formed relationships on par with the year I worked in-person at another company. That being said, I'm not very interested in it for my company since it just seems less fun to not be able to hang out with your employees in person. And fun is the reason I do this. I'm still on the fence about it though.
Hire telecommuters outside of SF. For example, I personally could get a drastic increase in income by moving to USA/SF, but I won't consider physically moving since it would be a great disruption to my wife and babies and I can afford not to move, as developers are wanted everywhere (though not so piranha-style). And there are many more developers like me. Long-range telecommuting is an option, and it's easier to be…
Well yes, but for startups that doesn't work. Every day you need to look at the results of your product, talk with your team and adjust course. Having remote workers really kills your ability to do that.
I'm finding my own meme here - CI is the key to enabling remote working and so enabling a company to truly select the best With CI it's pretty easy to see what needs to be built and whether it works - every few minutes if needed. You can see progress happen throughout a day. No other metrics matter.
What is "Cl"? Thanks.
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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…
2. Put the rest of the stuff up on GitHub, with suitable disclaimers, e.g. "I was working on this to learn X ..." Everyone understands (well, everyone I like understands) that creative people have lots of projects in various stages of disarray.
3. Target a few small/midsize startups, not the super-hot ones, and spend 1-2 hours to learn their product. I would be THRILLED to get an email from someone who said "I love what you do, here's three things I would like to work on with you to make it better, are you hiring?"
4. Put up front your willingness/unwillingness to relo. If you have remote working experience, give an overview of that. "Worked remotely for company X for two years, with daily standups, weekly sprint meetings, monthly 3-4 day visits, and two visits of 2 weeks duration 2x/year." That lets me know what you're up for.
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…
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.
The problem is you have to think a year ahead, but I don't think that's such an issue.
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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.
I know that; Let's say it takes 6 months of training to be fairly proficient. you have 6 months after that at a proficiency worth 42k, but you've only paid 40k for the entire year. Then when you raise the salary to 84, you have someone you know works in your company, who is happy with the huge raise, and you've gotten a bargain out of it. The problem is you have to think a year ahead, but I don't think that's such an…
In other words, once the employee has the skills to earn $85k, why should she wait six months for her giant raise when she could just switch employers and get the giant raise right away?
Not that this is the reason why the fantasy scenario doesn't work - if it were reliably possible to turn a raw recruit into DHH with six months of training, the fact that we'd have to pay market rates the entire time would be the least of our problems. Indeed, it would not be a problem at all.
A real reason why more companies don't try training up raw recruits is that (a) running a school is a specialized business and (b) the yield is far less than 100%, so it only works at scale. You need to admit - optimistically! - 10 or 20 bright and motivated nonprogrammers in order to graduate one person who, after six to twelve months of training, can be expected to successfully attack problems like:
"A customer has called; he has an obscure problem with his web site. Help him debug this problem over the phone. You have no access to the code or the server."
or
"Here's a legacy codebase that spans 267 files, two major versions of Rails, and three generations of programmers. Improve it. Don't break it, though, because our revenue depends on it."
or
"Here's a collection of 175 cloud instances running in Amazon. Build a system that reliably backs them all up once a day, with no downtime, and that can verify on demand that those backups exist."
or even something as "simple" as
"Here is a Wordpress site with a handful of specialty plugins installed. Here is an empty Git repository. Fill this Git repository with Rails code that implements a site that looks and acts exactly like the Wordpress site."
[1] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/andrewbird/howyougonnakeepemd... - this song is now 95 years old, so I guess I better footnote it!
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I know that; Let's say it takes 6 months of training to be fairly proficient. you have 6 months after that at a proficiency worth 42k, but you've only paid 40k for the entire year. Then when you raise the salary to 84, you have someone you know works in your company, who is happy with the huge raise, and you've gotten a bargain out of it. The problem is you have to think a year ahead, but I don't think that's such an…
How are you going to keep this hypothetical honor student down on the farm? [1] In other words, once the employee has the skills to earn $85k, why should she wait six months for her giant raise when she could just switch employers and get the giant raise right away? Not that this is the reason why the fantasy scenario doesn't work - if it were reliably possible to turn a raw recruit into DHH with six months of traini…
In order to solve the problems you mentioned, it's confidence and a particular mindset you need, not simply skill. I had overlooked that.
I think you could actually keep employees, though, with the right management. There are lots of reasons she would wait six months before the giant raise. Money isn't actually the main motivator for a lot of people, and with the knowledge that she is appreciated and people depend on her as well as the fact that she will be better paid upon contract negotiation at end of term, she's more likely to stay.
Oddly enough, lots of people want to have a career. They just don't expect to get loyalty from a company anymore and so don't give a company theirs.
If training is specialized, why not pay for people to go through some external training program in exchange for contract? I know some companies do this now for Rails and it's common for other skills.
Master craftsmen have apprentices. It's a model that works, that's all I'm saying.