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What Programming Languages Do You Struggle To Hire For?

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Re: What Programming Languages Do You Struggle To Hire For?

#71

Post by auvrw »

mildtrepidation wrote: post #32
nevir wrote: post #9

Don't hire someone for their knowledge in a specific language! (Unless you're doing some very core work in that language) Hire someone who knows the concepts behind most languages, and can easily understand new ones.

I don't understand how people believe this is universally good advice. Perhaps if your company is large enough that you can reasonably pay new employees for weeks or months before they're actually productive, I can see this being feasible. But that's not most companies. Keep in mind that this also likely impacts the productivity of at least one of your current employees, and if it doesn't, your newbie's language acqu…

> months

that's a drastic overestimate. at some point, procedural languages really are all more or less the same. sure, there are different notions of types, variable scope, modularity/oo-ness, etc., but someone who knows a bunch of languages knows what concepts to get straighted out from the beginning and can be productive in days. if you find someone who knows a handful of procedural languages and haskell and lisp, they'll be able to pick up whatever language you're interested in.

now, picking up a bunch of toolkits is a different matter, because they really can be just a quirky as their designers want them to be. for example, using gson yesterday, i ran into a bug with json serialization that was pretty quick to diagnose by stepping through a few lines in the debugger, but it took over a half hour of searching and browsing api docs to find out that Maps weren't being serialized properly because i hadn't called GsonBuilder.enableComplexMapKeySerialization(), which it seems like really ought to be enabled by default.

then -- and not even finally in general, just finally for the sake of keeping this post briefish -- there are frameworks, which are like a perpendicular axis to the original language question. perhaps someone really familiar with rails or django and a little java background would be a better choice for a java project built on play than an expert java desktop developer with no server-side experience.

so in summary, if you can find someone who has basically already built your exact project before, yeah, you'd better hire him or her, but otherwise, intelligence, the ability to figure new things out, is always going to trump experience along any single line of expertise that one can attempt to draw through a software project.

Re: What Programming Languages Do You Struggle To Hire For?

#72

Post by mrweasel »

lportion wrote: post #57
mrweasel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're currently trying to hire one or two people in Aalborg, Denmark. Getting anyone with skills beyond C# or Java for a smallish company is next to impossible. We're looking for Python and/or Javascript skills, preferably working knowledge of Unix. We've gotten may one real application, it's strikes me as a bit strange, I would have loved to have had open positions like ours when I graduated. An open position in boo…

That is interesting. What would you think if someone applied who had several years C# experience, but had only used python in their spare time on one or two small projects? Assume they have solid understanding of general software development, but they'd need to get used to writing python in your work environment?

We've done that before. Our last two hires didn't know Python when they started, they learn quickly enough. Still that doesn't help us, I assume that the local developers are content working for bigger companies but with less fun stuff.

Re: What Programming Languages Do You Struggle To Hire For?

#73

Post by logfromblammo »

kolektiv wrote: post #3

Or, to put it another way, why are you so averse to investing in people/your company that you're looking for the finished article on the job market, rather than finding good people and helping them learn the specific skills you need?

Because human resources are mined, not grown.

It's because recent trends in corporate management have prioritized cost cutting over re-investing in the company's assets. Besides that, training is a dangerous investment when your employees are all "at will". They could take the training and then flip to your competitor, and there's nothing you could do about it.

...other than, perhaps, paying them what they are worth and giving them a measure of basic human dignity. But you can't put that on the quarterly reports!

Re: What Programming Languages Do You Struggle To Hire For?

#74

Post by vonmoltke »

humanrebar wrote: post #60
k-mcgrady wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "Skilled software developer ( and yes you can be newly graduated ) will get us nothing" Maybe that's the problem. I'm a freelancer but anytime I've thought about applying for a full-time software developer position I get put off by words like 'skilled', 'senior', and a list of technologies the person needs to know that no single developer in the world knows. I've been coding for about 8 years, professionally for 5…

For good companies, laundry lists of skills are more like wish lists than requirements, especially with niche technologies. Use the job description to figure out what general kind of developer they're looking for (low level? database? UI? enterprise? team lead?) and apply if you're interested. Regarding the idea in your edit, huge companies like Facebook and Google do have coding puzzles and competitions. People who…

> For good companies, laundry lists of skills are more like wish lists than requirements, especially with niche technologies.

No, for good companies requirements will be actual requirements and as such be fairly short, the rest if the list appearing as "bonus", "preferred", or other flexible adjective.

I'm a former systems engineer who used to do requirements analysis, so I am a little sensitive to misuse of the word "requirement". Job postings like you describe drive me up the wall.

Re: What Programming Languages Do You Struggle To Hire For?

#75

Post by mrweasel »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #40
mrweasel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're currently trying to hire one or two people in Aalborg, Denmark. Getting anyone with skills beyond C# or Java for a smallish company is next to impossible. We're looking for Python and/or Javascript skills, preferably working knowledge of Unix. We've gotten may one real application, it's strikes me as a bit strange, I would have loved to have had open positions like ours when I graduated. An open position in boo…

>> "Skilled software developer ( and yes you can be newly graduated ) will get us nothing" Maybe that's the problem. I'm a freelancer but anytime I've thought about applying for a full-time software developer position I get put off by words like 'skilled', 'senior', and a list of technologies the person needs to know that no single developer in the world knows. I've been coding for about 8 years, professionally for 5…

We don't use the words "skilled", "Talented" or similar in our Python job posting, we simply ask that you know Python and preferably have used the language professional.

Our Javascript developer posting is a bit more demanding.

Previous job posting have been even more flexible, still we had to post the jobs twice to get qualified applicants.

Personally I don't believe in coding tests, and would never require it. Coding tests aren't all that common in Denmark, and I think they would scare perfectly good candidates away.

Re: What Programming Languages Do You Struggle To Hire For?

#76

Post by logfromblammo »

humanrebar wrote: post #34
rch wrote: post #19

I'd like to come at it from the opposite direction, and help engineers build out profiles of what they are looking for. Not another resume site, but a forum for making anonymous declarations of what the the perfect job(s) would look like. And something similar for potential employers. I probably wouldn't even focus on making connections, but instead just provide scores and feedback on availability, trends, regional f…

Isn't this sort of what LinkedIn is for?

It's what the theory of LinkedIn is for. In practice, LinkedIn is a cesspool of useless recruiter spam, from the very people that drove the employers and candidates to try LinkedIn in the first place.

It was destroyed well before it ever became useful to me. I won't even try the next iteration--whatever it's called--until I am convinced that they can keep the bozos out.

Re: What Programming Languages Do You Struggle To Hire For?

#77

Post by mrweasel »

eyko wrote: post #36
mrweasel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're currently trying to hire one or two people in Aalborg, Denmark. Getting anyone with skills beyond C# or Java for a smallish company is next to impossible. We're looking for Python and/or Javascript skills, preferably working knowledge of Unix. We've gotten may one real application, it's strikes me as a bit strange, I would have loved to have had open positions like ours when I graduated. An open position in boo…

Try offering the position to remote workers (within a reasonable distance... in your case, somewhere in Europe where there would be no more than +/- 2 hours of timezone difference).

We're not interested in remote workers. We not a software company and the jobs require almost daily interaction with non-developer colleagues (sales team, buyers, marketing, warehouse, accounting).

Re: What Programming Languages Do You Struggle To Hire For?

#78

Post by vonmoltke »

logfromblammo wrote: post #73
kolektiv wrote: post #3

Or, to put it another way, why are you so averse to investing in people/your company that you're looking for the finished article on the job market, rather than finding good people and helping them learn the specific skills you need?

Because human resources are mined, not grown. It's because recent trends in corporate management have prioritized cost cutting over re-investing in the company's assets. Besides that, training is a dangerous investment when your employees are all "at will". They could take the training and then flip to your competitor, and there's nothing you could do about it. ...other than, perhaps, paying them what they are worth…

CFO asks his CEO, “What happens if we invest in developing our people and then they leave the company?” CEO answers, ‘What happens if we don’t, and they stay?”

Variations of that exchange float around the intertubes, but its really true. I saw it first-hand at a defense contractor that mostly reserved enrichment training for those being groomed for bigger things.

Re: What Programming Languages Do You Struggle To Hire For?

#79

Post by vonmoltke »

rch wrote: post #70
humanrebar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this sort of what LinkedIn is for?

I find linkedin to be relatively useless in this context. I need to be able to supply scores and weights to the various things I'm looking for, and to submitted job descriptions. I'd like to get at what candidates are looking for, not just what they have done. It makes sense to list Java and C# in a profile, but I'd give a bump to Python and Haskell opportunities, personally (others might do the opposite). Actual hir…

What you are describing sounds more like OKCupid for engineering jobs.

Re: What Programming Languages Do You Struggle To Hire For?

#80

Post by logfromblammo »

falcolas wrote: post #43
mildtrepidation wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how people believe this is universally good advice. Perhaps if your company is large enough that you can reasonably pay new employees for weeks or months before they're actually productive, I can see this being feasible. But that's not most companies. Keep in mind that this also likely impacts the productivity of at least one of your current employees, and if it doesn't, your newbie's language acqu…

No employee is going to be productive on a new codebase for weeks or months, regardless of the languages they knew coming in. And they're still going to be a drain on resources while coming up to speed with the code base, even if they know the language. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you'll understand what your real hiring requirements are.

I once eavesdropped on some HR people talking shop, and heard the unsupported claim that thanks to employment laws in the US, new employees are rarely profitable until their second year with the company, which is why it is important to hide the company's warts from the new employees.

After that first year, it isn't quite so crucial to keep you happy. That explains why you never get the raise you were expecting after the annual reviews. You are now profitable, therefore paying you more would reduce profits and make you a less valuable employee.

And so we must go job-hopping.

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