6 ms·

I don't think this is a good approach. As an employer, I wouldn't want to invest the time in getting someone up to speed with my systems if they have no "lock-

by swombat 17y ago

I don't think this is a good approach. As an employer, I wouldn't want to invest the time in getting someone up to speed with my systems if they have no "lock-in" that means they'll stay with me until they've paid off for that initial ramp-up period (which would cost me time). I particularly wouldn't want to do so for someone who already has a job at a software company - I'd clearly be a distant second (if not third or fourth) priority in that person's life. Next, about the profile - I suggest you pick a narrow specialty that you really want to work on (e.g. Ruby on Rails), and focus on that. I don't think many people, particularly start-ups, are interested in hiring a "C#, Java, RoR, Silverlight, Ajax" guy. That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few. My suggestion to you would be: pick one technology with a thriving OS community (e.g. RoR), and contribute open-source software. That's one way to work for free that will greatly enhance your value to potential employers. Start a blog, talk about your experiences with Rails, promote your open-source projects, etc. You'll soon find paid work coming your way.

HaltingState 17y ago
He lives in India. A programmer there makes 350,000 Rs a year. All these responses are so discouraging. "That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few." In my startup, we have everyone doing everything. If all someone knows is java, they are useless to us. Each of us had to learn 3 different new languages each just to get our product to launch. We do not have the luxury of having someone with 10 years experience who only knows Java. If something needed to be done, someone had to do it. If we did not have the skills in the group, we had to learn them. The critical factor for success in a startup is not 10 year of experience in one narrowly defined technical specialty. Specialization is for insects. The most important characteristics for effectiveness in a startup is the ability to learn and the capacity for getting things done. This is one of the key differences between working in a startup and working in a larger company. In a startup you have to do your own marketing, sales, programming, interface design... Everything needs to be done and it is an expensive luxury to have a person specialized in each area that is required. " That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few." "That's one way to work for free that will greatly enhance your value to potential employers. Start a blog, talk about your experiences with Rails, promote your open-source projects, etc. You'll soon find paid work coming your way." If you want to be poor for the rest of your life and at the mercy of an employer, this is probably a good strategy. Instead of attempting to make yourself more appealing for sale to your bourgeoisie overloads you would achieve greater success and freedom by focusing your efforts on creating something that has value and which people are willing to pay for.
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "He lives in India. A programmer there makes $1200 a year. All these responses are so discouraging." Rubbish. The average annual pay for someone just out of school with zero experience in Bangalore is about 10,000 $. (I live in India fwiw). The lowest salary I've heard of is about 500$/a month and this is for a "walking dead" warm body who couldn't code to save his life outsourced to dumb Western companies to pad team size. You can just about survive and live very frugally in Bangalore on this. "you would achieve greater success and freedom by focusing your efforts on creating something that has value and which people are willing to pay for." This is excellent advice (just discount the "burgeoise" anti employer ranty bit).
  - HaltingState 17y ago
    The average for a well paid programmer is Rb 350,000 from what I have read. At current conversion rates that would be about 4472.51 pounds and 7695.70 USD. At current exchange rates. The salary seems to be higher in Bangalore than elsewhere.
    - plinkplonk 17y ago
      "The average for a well paid programmer is Rb 350,000 from what I have read. At current conversion rates that would be about 4472.51 pounds and 7695.70 USD." You read stuff about Bangalore. I live here. Big difference. Even if true, 7695$ is much more than the 1200$ you claimed people were getting in your original post. That is a multiplier of 6. Exaggerate much for effect? 10k$ is an average salary for a person out of school. I guarantee you won't get a decent experienced programmer with a good degree in CS for anywhere near that amount. As a data point, my last salary (in Bangalore) was 120,000 US$ (then, I could get more today if I were to return to a 9 to 5 job) and I know many people who earn that much and more, doing technical work). Yes this is skewed towards the high end but by no means unusual, especially in product companies (vs el cheapo bodyshoppers)
      - swombat 17y ago
        Even if true, 7695 $$ is much lesser than the 1200$ you claimed people were getting. Exaggerate much? You mean "much more".
jagtesh 17y ago
swombat, everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur. I'm an Indian, one who has lived in Bangalore for the past 6 years. I made a conscious choice of not working for an outsourcing outfit and instead plunged into the unknown realms of entrepreneurship. But I was lucky. I'm young with no dependents. No additional responsibilities other than taking care of myself. It's OKAY for me to get my hands burnt, because I know I'll survive to fight another day. On the other hand, many of my peers have their parents and siblings to take care of. Not to mention their own family if they're married. It's a big risk in India to lose a job and there are lesser financial instruments to aid the people (it's impossible to get a credit card without a job and the govt. doesn't pay anything to the employed, rather it _can't_). Once you've lived under these circumstances, it's understandable to see a person who wants to work in a field they enjoy while having a sense of job security. Maybe because they have 10 years of experience in their fields, (which would pay them significantly more than Rs.350,000, esp. in _Bangalore_), a chunk of which goes into settling their EMIs. In such a case, jumping to a new field won't earn them as much while it could leave them stranded (there's little or no demand for non-Java/Oracle/BI Suite/.NET specialists here). While I hope this give's a better insight into a Bangalore office worker's way of thinking, I do agree with your suggestions.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  This is a pet peeve of mine, and my apologies if it feels inappropriate. I also recognise that, given your post, you are likely not be a native English speaker. If that's the case, please accept this as intended to help you improve your already excellent English. However: > ... everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur. The opposite of "Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur" is "Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur" which is (logically although not in emphasis) equivalent to "Some people don't want to be entrepreneurs." To say "everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur" means that there are no people in the world who want to be entrepreneurs, which is clearly false, because some people do. Again, apologies, but this is a common mistake, and it's really worth being able to recognise it when you see it, and to be able to avoid it. Sometimes it's worth recognising it and ignoring it. Apologies if this was one of those occasions.
  - 17y ago
alnayyir 17y ago
>That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few. Virtually everything programming-related that I've learned has contributed to a more rapid grokking things differently/deeper that I work with on a professional or personal basis. I'm a generalist for two reasons. 1. I believe a renaissance style understanding of programming languages and informatics contributes to my ability to rapidly pick up and in a deep way grasp what's going in anything I have to work with, and 2. It's simply needed by my employers. I don't work in the corporate world anymore, although when I did contract for large companies, I worked as a .NET dev with a specialty in debugging and reversing. Now I'm a django/ajax/admin/db generalist and I enjoy it more. I'm a generalist because it's simply what my employer needs from me. They don't need someone who knows MS SQL Server in and out, they need someone who can make rapid decisions about what tool out of hundreds is going to be able to best fit their needs and rapidly learn how to deploy it for them. There's really only two kinds of understanding when it comes to software. Structural, and memorization. The first large chunk of learning a programming language or technology comes to grasping the structure of how something is built/designed and utilizing that knowledge to be able to predict how things should be implemented. The second part, and certainly the more laborious/time-intensive is memorization. That's anything that falls out-side the "least-surprise" vector and that simply requires memorizing the intricacies of how things interact. (C++ and the English language are notorious for this) Having a broad understanding of virtually any software concept is a form of human-caching. It's caching the common engineering tropes that underlie the things you have to work with on a regular basis, and if you know anything about deploying software stacks or how hardware works, you know that caching is everything. Simply being a static human .NET/Rails/PHP machine might look attractive to an employer, but it leads to dangerously narrow decision making from a broader sense and could lead to problems later if the company wants to pivot to a better approach/technology. Anecdote: Over the past year, my company has moved 2 projects from Jboss/coldfusion to Django. We have 5 more projects to perform the same switch for. This coming week I'll be converting the svn repositories to mercurial. I've already centralized the repository infrastructure, switched them to Linode for the VPSs, will be setting up an extra off-site backup service soon, and we've switched them from Eroi to a local message sending system, saving them $150k per year on mailing costs. All the while, I'm converting perl scripts that handle billing and commissions for another business within the company to python (for direct integration within django), have written an entire customer management frontend + backend, and I've only been here 6 months. By all means, tell me a PHP/Rails/Whatever monkey is more valuable. A good developer can do anything you ask of them in the web world. Exceptions being hardcore Quant type (statistics, huge databases) projects or embedded work (requires strong understanding of the principles of writing software closely mated to the hardware and knowing ANSI C in-and-out, if not the assembler for the target platform). I mean, I wouldn't exactly expect a Rails dev to be able to tell me what the const and volatile type qualifications mean when combined and where you'd normally see them. For my part? I got 9/10 on an embedded.com C dev test, whereas the global average is 4-6/10. I've never even worked in the embedded industry. But do I know x86 and arm assembler and could probably slap together a control system for a production line in a pinch? You bet. I take great pride in being a programming chameleon and in learning as much as I can on my own time, I have no idea why you'd desire a person to be narrow. You think Paul Graham got ahead because he spent 10,000 hours mastering the blub everyone else was using?

by swombat 17y ago

HaltingState 17y ago

He lives in India. A programmer there makes 350,000 Rs a year. All these responses are so discouraging. "That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few." In my startup, we have everyone doing everything. If all someone knows is java, they are useless to us. Each of us had to learn 3 different new languages each just to get our product to launch. We do not have the luxury of having someone with 10 years experience who only knows Java. If something needed to be done, someone had to do it. If we did not have the skills in the group, we had to learn them. The critical factor for success in a startup is not 10 year of experience in one narrowly defined technical specialty. Specialization is for insects. The most important characteristics for effectiveness in a startup is the ability to learn and the capacity for getting things done. This is one of the key differences between working in a startup and working in a larger company. In a startup you have to do your own marketing, sales, programming, interface design... Everything needs to be done and it is an expensive luxury to have a person specialized in each area that is required. " That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few." "That's one way to work for free that will greatly enhance your value to potential employers. Start a blog, talk about your experiences with Rails, promote your open-source projects, etc. You'll soon find paid work coming your way." If you want to be poor for the rest of your life and at the mercy of an employer, this is probably a good strategy. Instead of attempting to make yourself more appealing for sale to your bourgeoisie overloads you would achieve greater success and freedom by focusing your efforts on creating something that has value and which people are willing to pay for.

plinkplonk 17y ago
"He lives in India. A programmer there makes $1200 a year. All these responses are so discouraging." Rubbish. The average annual pay for someone just out of school with zero experience in Bangalore is about 10,000 $. (I live in India fwiw). The lowest salary I've heard of is about 500$/a month and this is for a "walking dead" warm body who couldn't code to save his life outsourced to dumb Western companies to pad team size. You can just about survive and live very frugally in Bangalore on this. "you would achieve greater success and freedom by focusing your efforts on creating something that has value and which people are willing to pay for." This is excellent advice (just discount the "burgeoise" anti employer ranty bit).
- HaltingState 17y ago
  The average for a well paid programmer is Rb 350,000 from what I have read. At current conversion rates that would be about 4472.51 pounds and 7695.70 USD. At current exchange rates. The salary seems to be higher in Bangalore than elsewhere.
  - plinkplonk 17y ago
    "The average for a well paid programmer is Rb 350,000 from what I have read. At current conversion rates that would be about 4472.51 pounds and 7695.70 USD." You read stuff about Bangalore. I live here. Big difference. Even if true, 7695$ is much more than the 1200$ you claimed people were getting in your original post. That is a multiplier of 6. Exaggerate much for effect? 10k$ is an average salary for a person out of school. I guarantee you won't get a decent experienced programmer with a good degree in CS for anywhere near that amount. As a data point, my last salary (in Bangalore) was 120,000 US$ (then, I could get more today if I were to return to a 9 to 5 job) and I know many people who earn that much and more, doing technical work). Yes this is skewed towards the high end but by no means unusual, especially in product companies (vs el cheapo bodyshoppers)
    - swombat 17y ago
      Even if true, 7695 $$ is much lesser than the 1200$ you claimed people were getting. Exaggerate much? You mean "much more".

jagtesh 17y ago

swombat, everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur. I'm an Indian, one who has lived in Bangalore for the past 6 years. I made a conscious choice of not working for an outsourcing outfit and instead plunged into the unknown realms of entrepreneurship. But I was lucky. I'm young with no dependents. No additional responsibilities other than taking care of myself. It's OKAY for me to get my hands burnt, because I know I'll survive to fight another day. On the other hand, many of my peers have their parents and siblings to take care of. Not to mention their own family if they're married. It's a big risk in India to lose a job and there are lesser financial instruments to aid the people (it's impossible to get a credit card without a job and the govt. doesn't pay anything to the employed, rather it _can't_). Once you've lived under these circumstances, it's understandable to see a person who wants to work in a field they enjoy while having a sense of job security. Maybe because they have 10 years of experience in their fields, (which would pay them significantly more than Rs.350,000, esp. in _Bangalore_), a chunk of which goes into settling their EMIs. In such a case, jumping to a new field won't earn them as much while it could leave them stranded (there's little or no demand for non-Java/Oracle/BI Suite/.NET specialists here). While I hope this give's a better insight into a Bangalore office worker's way of thinking, I do agree with your suggestions.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
This is a pet peeve of mine, and my apologies if it feels inappropriate. I also recognise that, given your post, you are likely not be a native English speaker. If that's the case, please accept this as intended to help you improve your already excellent English. However: > ... everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur. The opposite of "Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur" is "Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur" which is (logically although not in emphasis) equivalent to "Some people don't want to be entrepreneurs." To say "everyone doesn't want to be an entrepreneur" means that there are no people in the world who want to be entrepreneurs, which is clearly false, because some people do. Again, apologies, but this is a common mistake, and it's really worth being able to recognise it when you see it, and to be able to avoid it. Sometimes it's worth recognising it and ignoring it. Apologies if this was one of those occasions.
- 17y ago

alnayyir 17y ago

>That long list makes you look unfocused and implies that you probably suck at a lot of technologies rather than being very good at a few. Virtually everything programming-related that I've learned has contributed to a more rapid grokking things differently/deeper that I work with on a professional or personal basis. I'm a generalist for two reasons. 1. I believe a renaissance style understanding of programming languages and informatics contributes to my ability to rapidly pick up and in a deep way grasp what's going in anything I have to work with, and 2. It's simply needed by my employers. I don't work in the corporate world anymore, although when I did contract for large companies, I worked as a .NET dev with a specialty in debugging and reversing. Now I'm a django/ajax/admin/db generalist and I enjoy it more. I'm a generalist because it's simply what my employer needs from me. They don't need someone who knows MS SQL Server in and out, they need someone who can make rapid decisions about what tool out of hundreds is going to be able to best fit their needs and rapidly learn how to deploy it for them. There's really only two kinds of understanding when it comes to software. Structural, and memorization. The first large chunk of learning a programming language or technology comes to grasping the structure of how something is built/designed and utilizing that knowledge to be able to predict how things should be implemented. The second part, and certainly the more laborious/time-intensive is memorization. That's anything that falls out-side the "least-surprise" vector and that simply requires memorizing the intricacies of how things interact. (C++ and the English language are notorious for this) Having a broad understanding of virtually any software concept is a form of human-caching. It's caching the common engineering tropes that underlie the things you have to work with on a regular basis, and if you know anything about deploying software stacks or how hardware works, you know that caching is everything. Simply being a static human .NET/Rails/PHP machine might look attractive to an employer, but it leads to dangerously narrow decision making from a broader sense and could lead to problems later if the company wants to pivot to a better approach/technology. Anecdote: Over the past year, my company has moved 2 projects from Jboss/coldfusion to Django. We have 5 more projects to perform the same switch for. This coming week I'll be converting the svn repositories to mercurial. I've already centralized the repository infrastructure, switched them to Linode for the VPSs, will be setting up an extra off-site backup service soon, and we've switched them from Eroi to a local message sending system, saving them $150k per year on mailing costs. All the while, I'm converting perl scripts that handle billing and commissions for another business within the company to python (for direct integration within django), have written an entire customer management frontend + backend, and I've only been here 6 months. By all means, tell me a PHP/Rails/Whatever monkey is more valuable. A good developer can do anything you ask of them in the web world. Exceptions being hardcore Quant type (statistics, huge databases) projects or embedded work (requires strong understanding of the principles of writing software closely mated to the hardware and knowing ANSI C in-and-out, if not the assembler for the target platform). I mean, I wouldn't exactly expect a Rails dev to be able to tell me what the const and volatile type qualifications mean when combined and where you'd normally see them. For my part? I got 9/10 on an embedded.com C dev test, whereas the global average is 4-6/10. I've never even worked in the embedded industry. But do I know x86 and arm assembler and could probably slap together a control system for a production line in a pinch? You bet. I take great pride in being a programming chameleon and in learning as much as I can on my own time, I have no idea why you'd desire a person to be narrow. You think Paul Graham got ahead because he spent 10,000 hours mastering the blub everyone else was using?