5 ms·

There are two questions here: What's the situation with LA and What's the situation with Perl. It's challenging to get people to move to LA. People who like LA

by bugsy 16y ago

There are two questions here: What's the situation with LA and What's the situation with Perl. It's challenging to get people to move to LA. People who like LA are in LA. People outside of LA have a hard time seeing its charms given the lack of transportation structure other than giant freeway traffic jams and busses that come a few times a day and can take a half day to travel a few miles. The cost of living in a decent neighborhood is very high, yet most positions offer mid west style salary. Most developers will take a huge hit to their standard of living by accepting an LA job, so LA employers mostly try to recruit locally and even when they do recruit from out of town, few are willing to attend to basic hygiene issues such as paying for relocation costs. On the Perl issue, I use Perl for a lot of things because it is very fast to code in and to execute. I find both C and assembler easier to understand than trying to read a complex regular expression in perl or decipher data structures in perl that use pointers due to a syntax that is still unintuitive after a decade of use. Regular expressions probably can't be simplified since they are their own very dense language, but the pointer syntax could be improved a lot. Perl code that creates classes and objects is quite hard. Coding in Perl can be a challenge and Perl is so large that all of us are expert at different things which means that almost every single piece of new perl code I see is like having to learn a new language. I have just "dealt with it" all this time, but it's possible, given this post about LA, that fewer developers are willing to deal with the overhead of learning Perl given that for simple sites PHP can be more efficient for them, and for system scripts things like python have gotten more traction.

tomkarlo 16y ago
As someone who hires in LA, and moved to LA to take a job here, your perception is either outdated or simply incorrect. There are a good number of shops here in LA, including Google, Amazon, Hulu, Sony and Yahoo that pay well above the median for good talent. A good dev or PM is going to make as much here as in New York, Seattle or San Francisco, although admittedly there are fewer positions overall than those cities. Additionally, most if not all of those major tech employers regularly pay relocation costs to move people here from other tech centers - it's just not practical to run a dev team here and not do it, given the smaller number of engineering grads. Additionally, while having a car is a requirement (as it is in all but a handful of US cities), cost of living is lower than in New York or SF, which are the two most likely alternatives. Rent is lower (my rent here is half of what it would be in those cities) and most of your weekend activities are either free (beach, mountains, etc) or cheaper than SF or NY. And there's more of them too: there aren't many places in the US where you can ski on Saturday and go play volleyball on the beach on Sunday, which is why much of our team are Seattle or San Fran weather refugees. As for Perl, I'd argue that because the tech / web media industry here in LA is newer, there aren't as many folks around who date back to the years when Perl was the dominant platform. When I started developing for the web, it was one of the few practical options; now I'm sure I'd be starting with Ruby or Python. What we do is hire engineers who are smart enough to work in any language, and then let them pick up a book and learn Perl, rather than filter first for that specific language.
- cageface 16y ago
  I liked a lot of things about L.A. but the traffic eventually killed it for me. I need a car here in the S.F. East Bay too but I very rarely have to sit in the kind of traffic that became my daily nightmare in L.A.
  - btilly 16y ago
    Many places in LA will let software developers choose their own hours. It is amazing how much easier the commute is for a 11:30-7:30 day than a 9-5 one. So much so that I don't want to even consider jobs where I don't have that flexibility.
  - tomkarlo 16y ago
    It's all about where you choose to live relative to where you work - my new apartment and my old one are across town from each other, but neither commute took more than 15 minutes at peak rush hour. The same can be said of NY, it's all about positioning to minimize the commute. Also, working from home is pretty big - we allow about 20% of days to be WFH - and that's zero commute.
    - cageface 16y ago
      WFH would have definitely made things easier, but there's just a certain amount of traffic you have to put up with in L.A. if you want to enjoy the city at all. I'd come home after a long day at work and the idea of trekking across town for a concert or dinner just seemed like too much work. Even in West Hollywood, where I was living and where there was a lot more going on, just dealing with parking and traffic kept me home many nights.
- bugsy 16y ago
  Every employer believes they pay market rate and their city is the best place to live in the world. This may be true for them, but is not true for others. I have seen job offers from LA shops ranging from $18k-$60k range. This entire range is very very silly. Developers and engineers are professionals. Living in a one room apartment or in someone's basement are not acceptable options. Salary needs to cover the cost of a single family house. A decent house in a safe neighborhood in LA runs from $400,000 to $2 million. Yes, you can buy in the barrio for much less. You can also rent decently and that is what most in LA do. But to attract a developer who is married and has a family and who will be leaving his 4000 sq ft house on an acre of land, that is not a good option. I agree completely that people in LA like it there and are OK with it. All I am saying is that recruitment is difficult from outside the area because nearly all developers are asked to take a huge hit on their standard of living when moving there. LA recruiters feel the low rates are justified because living in LA is considered itself to be a valuable benefit. Most people outside the area do not see it that way however. Having lived in both areas, if a company in LA is really offering bay area salaries which are $110k-$170k, then yes, they are paying market rate. But a shop in LA offering $70k or even $90k is simply not comparable to a SF job at twice that, given that the costs of living in both areas for reasonable accommodations and commutes are essentially the same. As far as free things to do, SF has LA beat by a mile.
russell 16y ago
Early in the year I was job hunting. I live half-way between SF and LA (no jobs near home), so I was looking for jobs in both places and have worked in both. First there were way fewer jobs in LA than in The Bay Area, maybe a factor five. The jobs in LA in general were far less interesting, a lot using the MS stack. The pay was considerably lower by 10 to 30%, often in the 50K range which doesnt come close to paying the mortgage, let alone food and gas.
kentnl 16y ago
Pointer Syntax? What? I'm not trying to be an ass here, but I'm confused as how you could have a decade of Perl use up your sleeve and not realise Perl has no pointers. It has references, perhaps, and perhaps I'm just being a semantic pedant, but they're quite different to me. Then again, I actually find C/C++ pointer tracking and memory allocation daunting, so perhaps that is why I find Perl references more intuitive than not? In my estimation you can make Perl harder to work with if you try, but you can also make it easier. ie: regular expressions are easier to work with if you use the /x modifier so you can whitespace fill it and document the regex itself, you can do things the hard way with objects, or you can use something like CPAN and get a module that makes this easy ( Moose is my favourite ). Sure, Perl is perhaps hard for people, I'll give you that, but it doesn't have to be.
- draegtun 16y ago
  ... regular expressions are easier to work with if you use the /x modifier so you can whitespace fill it and document the regex itself ... Absolutely agree. I made a similar comment on HN post Regex: a little Clojure DSL for readable, compositional regexes only a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719554 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719554
phaylon 16y ago
or decipher data structures in perl that use pointers due to a syntax that is still unintuitive after a decade of use Hint: Perl doesn't have pointers, it has references. It's odd that you haven't gotten used to it after 10 years. Perl code that creates classes and objects is quite hard. Not with Moose. Simply declarative OO that contains an MOP and is very extensible. Coding in Perl can be a challenge and Perl is so large that all of us are expert at different things which means that almost every single piece of new perl code I see is like having to learn a new language. This always surprises me. I code Perl for a living, and I never have this problem. I never run into code I don't understand. Sometimes the formatting and I need half a second to locate the curly brackets because the original author was a C/C++ guy, but that's about it.
- bugsy 16y ago
  Speaking from the perspective of someone who routinely writes his own compilers, and who has extensive experience designing VLSI microprocessors, etc various fancy complicated stuff. It's also odd that many people after 10 year with Perl have not realized that it has pointers which it calls references. Pointers and references are not so different that they need separate names. There's too much branching of terminology. Pointers are pointers. Even those & things in C++ are pointers as well, they are just a syntactic simplification of pointers for ease in typing. If C++ didn't have references, what it calls references could be implemented in the preprocessor as an alternate syntax for pointers. Oh, references can't be nil in C++? No, they can be if you try hard enough on every compiler I've ever seen. Lots of people agree as well. Perl has pointers. Call them references if you like. They are pointers. http://ist.marshall.edu/ist334/perl_pointers.html http://ist.marshall.edu/ist334/perl_pointers.html This whole sidebar is pretty off topic for this thread though so if you'd like to continue please create a new thread. The post was about finding Perl programmers in LA. Part of the problem is fewer people are embracing Perl nowadays. Part of the reason is that Perl is difficult. I like Perl. I use Perl all the time. I also recognize that, like C++, Perl can be a pain in the ass for people, and there are much easier languages to read and write in which work just as well for things like basic web programming. So as a result people learn those other things more nowadays and not so many adopt Perl. That's not hating on Perl, that's just explaining why the dude can't as easily find his Perl programmers (for whatever lowball salary he is offering, which is not stated) in LA anymore.

by bugsy 16y ago

tomkarlo 16y ago

As someone who hires in LA, and moved to LA to take a job here, your perception is either outdated or simply incorrect. There are a good number of shops here in LA, including Google, Amazon, Hulu, Sony and Yahoo that pay well above the median for good talent. A good dev or PM is going to make as much here as in New York, Seattle or San Francisco, although admittedly there are fewer positions overall than those cities. Additionally, most if not all of those major tech employers regularly pay relocation costs to move people here from other tech centers - it's just not practical to run a dev team here and not do it, given the smaller number of engineering grads. Additionally, while having a car is a requirement (as it is in all but a handful of US cities), cost of living is lower than in New York or SF, which are the two most likely alternatives. Rent is lower (my rent here is half of what it would be in those cities) and most of your weekend activities are either free (beach, mountains, etc) or cheaper than SF or NY. And there's more of them too: there aren't many places in the US where you can ski on Saturday and go play volleyball on the beach on Sunday, which is why much of our team are Seattle or San Fran weather refugees. As for Perl, I'd argue that because the tech / web media industry here in LA is newer, there aren't as many folks around who date back to the years when Perl was the dominant platform. When I started developing for the web, it was one of the few practical options; now I'm sure I'd be starting with Ruby or Python. What we do is hire engineers who are smart enough to work in any language, and then let them pick up a book and learn Perl, rather than filter first for that specific language.

cageface 16y ago
I liked a lot of things about L.A. but the traffic eventually killed it for me. I need a car here in the S.F. East Bay too but I very rarely have to sit in the kind of traffic that became my daily nightmare in L.A.
- btilly 16y ago
  Many places in LA will let software developers choose their own hours. It is amazing how much easier the commute is for a 11:30-7:30 day than a 9-5 one. So much so that I don't want to even consider jobs where I don't have that flexibility.
- tomkarlo 16y ago
  It's all about where you choose to live relative to where you work - my new apartment and my old one are across town from each other, but neither commute took more than 15 minutes at peak rush hour. The same can be said of NY, it's all about positioning to minimize the commute. Also, working from home is pretty big - we allow about 20% of days to be WFH - and that's zero commute.
  - cageface 16y ago
    WFH would have definitely made things easier, but there's just a certain amount of traffic you have to put up with in L.A. if you want to enjoy the city at all. I'd come home after a long day at work and the idea of trekking across town for a concert or dinner just seemed like too much work. Even in West Hollywood, where I was living and where there was a lot more going on, just dealing with parking and traffic kept me home many nights.
bugsy 16y ago
Every employer believes they pay market rate and their city is the best place to live in the world. This may be true for them, but is not true for others. I have seen job offers from LA shops ranging from $18k-$60k range. This entire range is very very silly. Developers and engineers are professionals. Living in a one room apartment or in someone's basement are not acceptable options. Salary needs to cover the cost of a single family house. A decent house in a safe neighborhood in LA runs from $400,000 to $2 million. Yes, you can buy in the barrio for much less. You can also rent decently and that is what most in LA do. But to attract a developer who is married and has a family and who will be leaving his 4000 sq ft house on an acre of land, that is not a good option. I agree completely that people in LA like it there and are OK with it. All I am saying is that recruitment is difficult from outside the area because nearly all developers are asked to take a huge hit on their standard of living when moving there. LA recruiters feel the low rates are justified because living in LA is considered itself to be a valuable benefit. Most people outside the area do not see it that way however. Having lived in both areas, if a company in LA is really offering bay area salaries which are $110k-$170k, then yes, they are paying market rate. But a shop in LA offering $70k or even $90k is simply not comparable to a SF job at twice that, given that the costs of living in both areas for reasonable accommodations and commutes are essentially the same. As far as free things to do, SF has LA beat by a mile.

russell 16y ago

Early in the year I was job hunting. I live half-way between SF and LA (no jobs near home), so I was looking for jobs in both places and have worked in both. First there were way fewer jobs in LA than in The Bay Area, maybe a factor five. The jobs in LA in general were far less interesting, a lot using the MS stack. The pay was considerably lower by 10 to 30%, often in the 50K range which doesnt come close to paying the mortgage, let alone food and gas.

kentnl 16y ago

Pointer Syntax? What? I'm not trying to be an ass here, but I'm confused as how you could have a decade of Perl use up your sleeve and not realise Perl has no pointers. It has references, perhaps, and perhaps I'm just being a semantic pedant, but they're quite different to me. Then again, I actually find C/C++ pointer tracking and memory allocation daunting, so perhaps that is why I find Perl references more intuitive than not? In my estimation you can make Perl harder to work with if you try, but you can also make it easier. ie: regular expressions are easier to work with if you use the /x modifier so you can whitespace fill it and document the regex itself, you can do things the hard way with objects, or you can use something like CPAN and get a module that makes this easy ( Moose is my favourite ). Sure, Perl is perhaps hard for people, I'll give you that, but it doesn't have to be.

draegtun 16y ago
... regular expressions are easier to work with if you use the /x modifier so you can whitespace fill it and document the regex itself ... Absolutely agree. I made a similar comment on HN post Regex: a little Clojure DSL for readable, compositional regexes only a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719554 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1719554

phaylon 16y ago

or decipher data structures in perl that use pointers due to a syntax that is still unintuitive after a decade of use Hint: Perl doesn't have pointers, it has references. It's odd that you haven't gotten used to it after 10 years. Perl code that creates classes and objects is quite hard. Not with Moose. Simply declarative OO that contains an MOP and is very extensible. Coding in Perl can be a challenge and Perl is so large that all of us are expert at different things which means that almost every single piece of new perl code I see is like having to learn a new language. This always surprises me. I code Perl for a living, and I never have this problem. I never run into code I don't understand. Sometimes the formatting and I need half a second to locate the curly brackets because the original author was a C/C++ guy, but that's about it.

bugsy 16y ago
Speaking from the perspective of someone who routinely writes his own compilers, and who has extensive experience designing VLSI microprocessors, etc various fancy complicated stuff. It's also odd that many people after 10 year with Perl have not realized that it has pointers which it calls references. Pointers and references are not so different that they need separate names. There's too much branching of terminology. Pointers are pointers. Even those & things in C++ are pointers as well, they are just a syntactic simplification of pointers for ease in typing. If C++ didn't have references, what it calls references could be implemented in the preprocessor as an alternate syntax for pointers. Oh, references can't be nil in C++? No, they can be if you try hard enough on every compiler I've ever seen. Lots of people agree as well. Perl has pointers. Call them references if you like. They are pointers. http://ist.marshall.edu/ist334/perl_pointers.html http://ist.marshall.edu/ist334/perl_pointers.html This whole sidebar is pretty off topic for this thread though so if you'd like to continue please create a new thread. The post was about finding Perl programmers in LA. Part of the problem is fewer people are embracing Perl nowadays. Part of the reason is that Perl is difficult. I like Perl. I use Perl all the time. I also recognize that, like C++, Perl can be a pain in the ass for people, and there are much easier languages to read and write in which work just as well for things like basic web programming. So as a result people learn those other things more nowadays and not so many adopt Perl. That's not hating on Perl, that's just explaining why the dude can't as easily find his Perl programmers (for whatever lowball salary he is offering, which is not stated) in LA anymore.