5 ms·

Outside of the Googles and Facebooks, this couldn't be further from the truth. Its so hard to find talent these days, and easy for the talent to jump ship to ot

Outside of the Googles and Facebooks, this couldn't be further from the truth. Its so hard to find talent these days, and easy for the talent to jump ship to other firms, that most are hiring whoever is even remotely qualified just to remain fully staffed.

mtogo 15y ago
Haha, funny. Wait, that was a joke, right?
- dangrossman 15y ago
  It's certainly not in my region. Companies are begging for developers to take their jobs.
  - gaius 15y ago
    There's actually only one kind of begging a company can do: offer enough of a premium salary to lure talent from wherever it is.
- msbarnett 15y ago
  I assure you that if you are not an extremely well-known brand name dev company, advertising for months without finding a single candidate, let alone a qualified candidate, is absolutely the norm.
  - KevinMS 15y ago
    qualified There you go. Who determines who is qualified? HR screening everybody in the dev business that doesn't have a compsci resume? Under 30 years old? Been out of work for a few years living on savings? I've said it before and I'll say it again, the developer scarcity is artifical
    - msbarnett 15y ago
      We're a 9 person shop. The devs (ie, me and two other guys) determine who is qualified where qualified means "can code their way out of a paper bag". Out of the three of us, I'm the only one with a CS degree. We sure as hell aren't looking at academic qualifications. Basically competent coders are absolutely a scarce resource. More than basically competent are rare and precious diamonds in the rough.
      - KevinMS 15y ago
        A single exception doesn't mean your right. You might not require a CS degree (I see a lot of shops starting to give up on that, but its still common), and hopefully you don't discriminate (3 guys, all about the same young age right?), but I'm convinced there's a lot of development talent out there not being utilized because employers have an exact image of what a developer looks like and is only trying to find that, which would explain why there is both a "hot jobs market" and lots of unemployment at the same time.
        gaius 15y ago
        I don't know why you were downvoted. If some 55-year-old geezer, 30 years experience in COBOL on a mainframe, rocks up to a shop like that, would they give him a fair shake or laugh at him for not knowing Ruby?
        msbarnett 15y ago
        I can't say I've ever encountered, or even heard of anyone encountering, such a candidate. The parent post claims that there's some vast, undocumented sea of talented unemployed developers, but I am aware of no statistical documentation of such, and no anecdotes resembling your hypothetical situation. That the parent has a large chip on his shoulder about his age is obvious from his posting history, but in my experience if a dev of any age is having trouble finding work the reason is always that they're not nearly as talented as they think they are. 90% of the people in this industry are just plain bad at what they do. But let's say it happened: would we give this hypothetical person a fair shake? I'd like to think so. His age is irrelevant. His experience is valuable. But why is COBOL his only listed skill? If that was the only tool at his mainframe job, that's all well and good, but the #1 thing I want to see out of candidates is a lot of evidence that they are keeping up with the industry and keeping their tool chest well stocked with cutting edge tools they're picking up on their own time. I want the people I work with to be autodidacts who can quickly and smoothly move from ruby to clojure to objective-c as a project evolves. 30 years at one tool doesn't scream self-motivated learner to me. But maybe he could talk me around at the interview.
gaius 15y ago
Ageism is the elephant in the corner of the room. That and the vestiges of the old class system. A manager on the "graduate fast track" doesn't want to admit that his skills are simply not that difficult and so refuses to offer market rates for dev talent, who he sees as mere "workers".
earl 15y ago
That has not been my experience. Names: Twitter was fucking obnoxious to deal with, and I was referred by an employee. My recruiter there only responded to messages when I harassed her or emailed my friends working there. Phone screens took forever to set up. A9 blew off my resume, also internally referred, for two and a half weeks then wanted to rush rush rush! when they finally contacted me and I was in late stage interviews with other companies. After I dropped what I was doing and went there for a day, they didn't even have the courtesy to contact me and say, "no thanks." I'm not pissed they didn't move forwards; it's just they are assholes w/ no class for not contacting me after I wasted a day there. Linkedin: I turned them down because after I took a day off work to interview there, they then only used four hours, conveniently in the very middle of the day so it burned a whole day of vacation time. They then wanted me to come back again for another two meetings. Um... let me think about that. NO. If I kill a day of vacation to interview somewhere, people need to do whatever the fuck it takes so that at the end of the day, they can move forwards to reference checks or say no. I'm not giving companies two days of vacation (keeping in mind that vacation is paid out when you resign, so that's $500 per day I'm paying to interview.) Note I also have a broken leg, which they were aware of, which makes driving places more than a little inconvenient.
- aaronblohowiak 15y ago
  We (Gobble.com) pay for the two-day trial (the last step after phone screen and after-hours skype session) we ask candidates to partake in -- and we only have that trial as a way for both the candidate and us to try each other out before an official offer is made. I hate it when people don't reply promptly, and I endeavor to follow-up to each stage within 24 hours either way. Then again, I am a programmer directly hiring other programmers so I know what it's like. At those bigger places, you aren't interacting with the people you'd actually work with =/ We are hiring people to hack with ruby -- nerds@gobble.com
- dangrossman 15y ago
  These are still "Googles and Facebooks" compared to the rest of the country. If you were willing to leave California/Washington/New York/Boston/etc. and have any kind of decent resume you'll have a job in a heartbeat.

mtogo 15y ago

Haha, funny. Wait, that was a joke, right?

dangrossman 15y ago
It's certainly not in my region. Companies are begging for developers to take their jobs.
- gaius 15y ago
  There's actually only one kind of begging a company can do: offer enough of a premium salary to lure talent from wherever it is.
msbarnett 15y ago
I assure you that if you are not an extremely well-known brand name dev company, advertising for months without finding a single candidate, let alone a qualified candidate, is absolutely the norm.
- KevinMS 15y ago
  qualified There you go. Who determines who is qualified? HR screening everybody in the dev business that doesn't have a compsci resume? Under 30 years old? Been out of work for a few years living on savings? I've said it before and I'll say it again, the developer scarcity is artifical
  - msbarnett 15y ago
    We're a 9 person shop. The devs (ie, me and two other guys) determine who is qualified where qualified means "can code their way out of a paper bag". Out of the three of us, I'm the only one with a CS degree. We sure as hell aren't looking at academic qualifications. Basically competent coders are absolutely a scarce resource. More than basically competent are rare and precious diamonds in the rough.
    - KevinMS 15y ago
      A single exception doesn't mean your right. You might not require a CS degree (I see a lot of shops starting to give up on that, but its still common), and hopefully you don't discriminate (3 guys, all about the same young age right?), but I'm convinced there's a lot of development talent out there not being utilized because employers have an exact image of what a developer looks like and is only trying to find that, which would explain why there is both a "hot jobs market" and lots of unemployment at the same time.
      - gaius 15y ago
        I don't know why you were downvoted. If some 55-year-old geezer, 30 years experience in COBOL on a mainframe, rocks up to a shop like that, would they give him a fair shake or laugh at him for not knowing Ruby?
        msbarnett 15y ago
        I can't say I've ever encountered, or even heard of anyone encountering, such a candidate. The parent post claims that there's some vast, undocumented sea of talented unemployed developers, but I am aware of no statistical documentation of such, and no anecdotes resembling your hypothetical situation. That the parent has a large chip on his shoulder about his age is obvious from his posting history, but in my experience if a dev of any age is having trouble finding work the reason is always that they're not nearly as talented as they think they are. 90% of the people in this industry are just plain bad at what they do. But let's say it happened: would we give this hypothetical person a fair shake? I'd like to think so. His age is irrelevant. His experience is valuable. But why is COBOL his only listed skill? If that was the only tool at his mainframe job, that's all well and good, but the #1 thing I want to see out of candidates is a lot of evidence that they are keeping up with the industry and keeping their tool chest well stocked with cutting edge tools they're picking up on their own time. I want the people I work with to be autodidacts who can quickly and smoothly move from ruby to clojure to objective-c as a project evolves. 30 years at one tool doesn't scream self-motivated learner to me. But maybe he could talk me around at the interview.

gaius 15y ago

Ageism is the elephant in the corner of the room. That and the vestiges of the old class system. A manager on the "graduate fast track" doesn't want to admit that his skills are simply not that difficult and so refuses to offer market rates for dev talent, who he sees as mere "workers".

earl 15y ago

That has not been my experience. Names: Twitter was fucking obnoxious to deal with, and I was referred by an employee. My recruiter there only responded to messages when I harassed her or emailed my friends working there. Phone screens took forever to set up. A9 blew off my resume, also internally referred, for two and a half weeks then wanted to rush rush rush! when they finally contacted me and I was in late stage interviews with other companies. After I dropped what I was doing and went there for a day, they didn't even have the courtesy to contact me and say, "no thanks." I'm not pissed they didn't move forwards; it's just they are assholes w/ no class for not contacting me after I wasted a day there. Linkedin: I turned them down because after I took a day off work to interview there, they then only used four hours, conveniently in the very middle of the day so it burned a whole day of vacation time. They then wanted me to come back again for another two meetings. Um... let me think about that. NO. If I kill a day of vacation to interview somewhere, people need to do whatever the fuck it takes so that at the end of the day, they can move forwards to reference checks or say no. I'm not giving companies two days of vacation (keeping in mind that vacation is paid out when you resign, so that's $500 per day I'm paying to interview.) Note I also have a broken leg, which they were aware of, which makes driving places more than a little inconvenient.

aaronblohowiak 15y ago
We (Gobble.com) pay for the two-day trial (the last step after phone screen and after-hours skype session) we ask candidates to partake in -- and we only have that trial as a way for both the candidate and us to try each other out before an official offer is made. I hate it when people don't reply promptly, and I endeavor to follow-up to each stage within 24 hours either way. Then again, I am a programmer directly hiring other programmers so I know what it's like. At those bigger places, you aren't interacting with the people you'd actually work with =/ We are hiring people to hack with ruby -- nerds@gobble.com
dangrossman 15y ago
These are still "Googles and Facebooks" compared to the rest of the country. If you were willing to leave California/Washington/New York/Boston/etc. and have any kind of decent resume you'll have a job in a heartbeat.