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"Why is it so hard to find programmers?" In my experience recently, employers are demanding a hire who has every single bullet point, no exceptions. I believe
by georgieporgie 16y ago
"Why is it so hard to find programmers?"
In my experience recently, employers are demanding a hire who has every single bullet point, no exceptions.
I believe one of the more entertaining job listings I saw last year required someone who had written embedded firmware, as well as Adobe Flash animation.
- yummyfajitas 16y agoI'm going to give YC startups the benefit of the doubt and assume that their recruiting practices are somewhat better than the standard BigCo HR Dept.
- j_baker 16y agoThat's being pretty generous. If anything, I'd assume that a YC-backed company knows less about hiring than BigCo HR departments (assuming we're talking about software companies). Most BigCos got to where they are for a reason. A lot of YC-backed startups have never hired a single person before.
- neurotech1 16y agoExcept that BigCo makes arbitrary hiring decisions without flexibility. Isn't part of the benefit of YC-backing to get advice from people on things such as hiring?
- j_baker 16y agoI'm not trying to put YC down. I'm just trying to add a dose of realism here. Yeah, these companies get advice from experienced people. That doesn't make them superhuman though. Everyone makes dumb mistakes when they're new, no matter how intelligent they are or how much good advice they get.
- pg 16y agoThey know more about some things and less about others. They know less about employment law and benefits administration, but they are probably better at judging someone's programming ability.
- pg 16y agoI think the problem is supply and demand. There just aren't enough really good programmers. Google alone seems willing and able to absorb all available really good programmers, for some value of really good.
- puredemo 16y agoI think this is partially because there are very few short programs that attempt to teach people how to be good programmers. It's not like I can take a college course on EC2 administration or on learning TurboGears.
- nitrogen 16y agoWait, I meet those qualifications. Where was this job? ;) I would think the problem is not that programmers that meet all the bullets don't exist, it's that those programmers either work for startups, start startups, or work as consultants. What's ridiculous is when one of the bullet points requires 5 years experience with a technology that was invented only 2 years ago.