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$150K and up for Software Devs in Austin
- incongruity 15y agoOkay HN – (forgive the personal bent to this, please) what's the best way for me to find a decent paying, but fun job? I've got ~8 years of python experience, ~2 years of experience with Javascript/JQuery/etc. and will be finishing up my masters in design (and an MBA) in the spring and, while I'm actually really proud of a lot of the work I've done, I'm irrationally terrified that I won't find a fun job that pays halfway decently... so, without becoming a plumb for a recruiter with their own best interests at heart, do y'all have any tips for finding a job worth having? (Backstory -- I haven't been out of a job since I got out of college, so I'm feeling totally out of practice with regards to the job search)
- llimllib 15y agoMake a good network, meet lots of people in your area, notice who's good and who's not, and work for one of the good ones.
- incongruity 15y agoThe obviousness of your reply highlights the irrationality of my job-hunting fears. Thanks for the reality-check.
- potatolicious 15y agoMake friends with people who share your priorities. I've got a large number of friends who have prioritized professional enjoyment over simply making bank - and this network is great when you're looking. Surround yourself with people who won't work bullshit jobs, and come job hunting time it shouldn't be hard to find something that fits.
- acangiano 15y agoStart a technical blog, in which you advertise that you are available for hire. Go to meetups (and conferences) to further network with the right people.
- mixmastamyk 15y agoYour resume is fine; focus on the fun, work hard, keep in touch with colleagues, and the opportunities will find you.
- courtneypowell 15y agoJoin the Austin Startup group on Facebook. There are plenty of people on there that can point you in the right direction if you are legit.
- wyclif 15y agoWhich one? I ask b/c there appear to be several with that or very similar names.
- tbrooks 15y agoThis one: http://www.facebook.com/groups/austinstartups/ http://www.facebook.com/groups/austinstartups/
- wyclif 15y agoWhich one? I ask b/c there appear to be several with that or very similar names.
- keypusher 15y agoIn my experience, finding a great job starts with not selling yourself short. Don't send out blanket resumes to anyone who is hiring with the hope that something will stick. Don't waste time with recruiters who have no idea about the tech industry and/or work out of some call center in New Jersey. Spend time searching for jobs that appeal to you, particularly stuff from personal contacts, HN or StackOverflow careers before wading into Monster or Dice. Also, spend the time to check out any companies in your area(s) that you are interested in. Many times companies only post jobs on their own site, and sometimes jobs aren't posted at all. If you know of a company you want to work for, send in a resume even if they don't have open positions. Then, put as much effort as possible into nailing one or two job possibilities a week. That means researching the company and their competition (Twitter/Glassdoor/LinkedIn/etc), refreshing yourself on any software topics related to their niche, and playing with any of their products you can get your hands on. Also, be ready with some real questions for them during the interview, and remember that you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Good luck!
- incongruity 15y agoThanks. That's a great reply -- much appreciated.
- iigs 15y agoWall of text ahead. Sorry. :) Don't sweat it too much. You can do things to adjust your odds, but there's a lot of luck involved, so part of it is out of your control. Who's hiring, what they're looking for, how your resume matches what they want, and how you interview that day can all turn good candidates and good employers into non-matches. Mind your ethics and personal preferences, but don't over-emphasize the fun part of a fun job. Your attitude can control your opinions to some extent, and this plays in your favor here. Employers generally trip over themselves to try to convince candidates that they're a fun and exciting place to work. They're not trying as hard to pour money on you (generally). Geeks are generally bad at negotiating, and bad early steps can have a long-term, sometimes nearly permanent, effect on your salary level. It's also common to feel bitter if you ever realize you're being screwed over financially. Don't sweat recruiters too much. As a candidate your interests don't directly align with theirs. That doesn't mean that you're necessarily always at odds. If you care about a fun work environment you will probably find that they don't have much to offer you. It doesn't hurt to talk to them, but don't expect much. Probably the single biggest attack point for hitting your stated goals is during the job interview. Make sure that you realize the interview is, and treat it as, a mutual process. Are your future teammates boring, stupid, or difficult? What's the manager looking for, explicitly and implicitly? Why did the last person on the team leave (even/especially if the team is growing)? How does the hiring manager (or the higher-up "fit" interviewer, usually a Director or executive) think about the company culture, and what do they do about it? You will probably not benefit by bringing up salary or benefits before the interviewer does, so don't. Once that topic has been broached don't be afraid to dig. If you're feeling brash, ask how the company makes salary decisions. There are services out there that offer salary ranges for employee positions. Maybe they use that data. If so, how? Eventually you'll get an offer. Congratulations! It's very common for employers to set a tight expiration on one. If your offer expires sooner than you're comfortable making a decision, push back gently but firmly. Commit to a response deadline, but give yourself the time you need to decide.
- incongruity 15y agoThanks. I'm often one to write long replies – it's actually a bit gratifying to be on the receiving end of one, so thanks for your time. So, I dig everything you're saying... I guess I should have been more specific – by fun, I mean 'rewarding' in just about every sense except financial/ladder-climbing, etc, but I think all of what you said still applies. In response to what you said, however, do you have any tips on negotiating? A classmate was just offered 65k for a job in NYC that would pay 80-85k at a comparable firm in Chicago and he took the offer with no negotiating because he was afraid to do so... which blew my mind, honestly... so, I am to not be that guy...
- ecuzzillo 15y agoWhy not a) put stuff you've done up on the web so people can see that it's cool and doesn't suck; b) email random cool places you'd like to work (e.g. startups) c) practice interviewing ?
- pm 15y agoHave an e-mail in your HN account so people can contact you. :)
- incongruity 15y agoI had considered that, but I wasn't explicitly trying to troll HN for jobs – just advice... but fair enough. I've added one now.
- matwood 15y agoWhat do you consider "fun?" Does it have to be a startup or a ping pong tables in the office kind of place? Obviously HN is going to place a higher value on a startup, but there are lots of interesting jobs at larger companies too. Do you want to be part of a small or large team? How much autonomy do you want? Figuring out exactly what you want is the first step in getting it :)
- coconutrandom 15y agoAustin is a great place to live.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- ebiester 15y agoQuestion: how far outside the Austin cocoon can a gay man go without being lynched? (I mean this metaphorically, of course.) Austin has a great reputation, but it's still in Texas.
- hkarthik 15y agoIn general, you can find more opened minded folks in the urban areas of Texas. You start to see more of the crazies as you go farther into the suburbs. I've had many gay coworkers and they usually stayed close to the city (I live in the DFW area).
- gatlin 15y agoI was raised 30 miles southwest of Austin in a rather conservative small town. I have family, friends, and experience in Houston, Dallas, El Paso, San Antonio, Lubbock, Amarillo, etc. Most of the major cities that aren't in the border region. There are homophobic troglodytes everywhere. However, it is verboten to be openly rude about that sort of thing in all but the most repressive and tiny communities. Those are the ones that creep out straight white males like myself, let alone minorities of any kind, so barring a flat tire I don't think you'll end up there by choice anyway. Actually, being atheist is something I tend to keep to myself, too. And actually, a lot of rural areas (which is, geographically, most of the state) have hippies in disguise all over the place. The small town of Kerrville is home to a huge hippie music festival every year; Fredericksburg is near the infamous Luckenbach, where Willie Nelson still shows up occasionally; and places like Wimberley are hidden in the sticks but have wiccans and sell quasi-spiritual swag and incense in the local shops.
- juddlyon 15y agoI moved to Austin from SF and was told by a friend prior to moving that "Austin is California surrounded by Alabama." You can definitely sense a cultural contrast outside of Austin.
- drewcrawford 15y agoI'm a freelance mobile developer in Austin. My experience is that companies are "desperate" in the sense that they're willing to invite you to lavish parties and fill you with free alcohol to get you to work there. But as soon as you start talking contracting, telecommute, or anything other than "sit at this desk for 60-hour weeks trying to get permission to fix an awful codebase with terrible equipment," suddenly they're not interested. Story time: one of the best, most experienced local developers I know interviewed at a name-brand tech firm who is covered once a week on HN. Twelve separate times, they told him "We'll let you know today" as to whether or not he was hired. Several weeks later he found out third-hand he was the fall-back guy for some other non-qualified person they ended up hiring instead. He's told me horror stories about their code base that would make your hair stand up. This company keeps inviting me to parties about once a month. There is a developer shortage in Austin, but the article blows it out of proportion. In reality the reason these few companies are "desperate" has to do with developers who want respect as human beings, autonomy to get things done, reasonable hours, a company that understands the need for technical excellence and not "put out fires" mentality, etc. If you do those things it's not that difficult to hire...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- moocow01 15y agoI'd agree that in tech in general you have to be very very careful in terms of understanding what you are really stepping into. There are jobs that are great but there are more jobs that are not so great (meaning the pay may be good but... 60-80 hours, boring CRUD stuff, unmaintained code bases, tyrannical managers, etc. etc.) This is probably true with most occupations but my guess is that it is a lot more extreme for software engineers (especially in SV). I've specifically taken somewhat significant lower offers based on my intuition about a job being "good" or not - I'd highly recommend it (I used to jump around for just higher salaries and to no surprise ended up miserable)
- donw 15y agoThis is something I stress when I talk to other management-types about hiring, now that I've (mostly) joined the Dark Side. If you want amazing people, just spending more money on salaries isn't going to do it. I too have turned down very high-paying offers because they came with the baggage of a company that considered Dilbert strips inspirational rather than satirical. This is an area where small start-ups can really win big, by offering what bigger and better-funded players don't: 1. Sensible hours. Sure, crunch times happen, but being in crunch mode all of the time is a sign of management failure. 2. Accountability defines authority. There's nothing worse than a company where you're responsible for keeping other peoples' (often impossible) promises. 3. Big equity with profit-sharing. This really keeps everybody's goals aligned: the employees win if the company either gets a big exit or becomes a profit-making machine. The three of these together are easily worth more than $30k in competitive salary.
- hkarthik 15y agoI'm a developer in Dallas and many of the same things are affecting our market, although we're mostly big companies and less startups. I personally work with a geographically distributed team and as long as we meet face to face on occasion, we're highly effective and we can hire when ever we find good talent no matter where they live. I know companies like GitHub, LivingSocial, and 37 Signals all embrace this remote team model and utilize it well to find the talent they need without taking desperate measures. That begs the question, why aren't most of these startups doing the same thing? I understand big companies are often too paralyzed in bureaucracy to hire remote workers, but shouldn't startups be a little more flexible in this regard?
- megamark16 15y agoIt seems like most hip startups want you in their office, drinking coffee/beer/coolaid with the rest of the team. I don't know more companies don't give a distributed team a chance, but from my observations it seems like they're all inherently against the idea.
- tylerhobbs 15y agoI don't know what you qualify as 'hip', but beyond the initial three or four first people in a startup, many startups are more than willing to start hiring remote workers. This is especially true when you're looking for workers with very specific skill sets. It's generally easy to find a generic Java developer locally, but if you're looking for, say Cassandra experts (like we are at DataStax, with an office in Austin), then you're probably willing to hire someone anywhere in the world if they're good enough.
- rickmb 15y agoDistributed teams work when the company, its culture and processes are stable and clear. Most software related companies don't get anywhere near that in the first five to ten years. In the mean time, fast growing start-ups look for the engineers they hire to be their future technical leaders, and to be deeply involved in the entire company, not just writing code. In short: drinking coffee/beer/koolaid with the rest of the team is of vital importance, even if the actual work can be done remotely. Also, the people that don't get this aren't good hires for remote work anyway, because one primary skill needed for a remote worker is knowing how to compensate for not being physically present.
- goodweeds 15y agoIt is pretty depressing to realize how under-paid we are in the bay area when you factor in cost of living. A lead systems administrator in SF tops out at about $150k, but more likely is about $120k, which is the same my friends in Wisconsin and New Jersey make, where the cost of living is 60% and 30% lower, respectively.
- boredguy8 15y agoBut you get to live in San Francisco rather than Wisconsin or New Jersey. It might not matter to some people, but I have almost zero desire to live long-term anywhere other than San Diego, LA, or San Francisco. There are enough people who feel the same way that I do, and so employees can pay a bit less.
- baddox 15y agoAre you suggesting that the niceness of the city somehow acts as a benefit so that the employer doesn't have to pay as much?
- teaspoon 15y agoAll else equal, yes. More demand means a higher price -- i.e., less compensation for the same talent.
- andycroll 15y agoI'd definitely concur with that statement. Location and living environment are definitely a factor in deciding to take a job somewhere else than where you are now. Whether SF is 'nicer' than somewhere else is down to the individual's preferences. Who hasn't said "That job looks interesting but the office location is a pain in the ass and will add 30 minutes each way to my commute"?
- orangecat 15y agoSort of, see "Expensive Urban Real Estate Is a Consumption Choice": http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/expensive-urban-real-estate-is-a-consumption-choice/247937/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/expensiv... If coming to New York meant that you had to put four people in a three bedroom apartment that's uncomfortably far from a subway line, instead of buying a nice little condo in Omaha, this does not mean that you are not "really" better off than your counterpart in Omaha; it means that you have chosen to consume your extra wealth in the form of "living in New York" rather than in the form of spacious real estate, cheap groceries, and an easy commute.
- prophetjohn 15y agoOne of the companies mentioned in the article was advertising internships and failed to even call me in for an interview. And it took them 5 weeks to respond saying that they did not have a position that matched my qualifications. It's possible that I suck, but I have a 4.0 GPA advertised on my resume and offered a pretty compelling cover letter. It's possible that many of these companies have a hard time recruiting talent because their recruitment process is broken.
- pagekalisedown 15y agoNotice the quote "I'm not going to pay the California wages". Keeping salaries low is clearly a priority for these people. I have a strong feeling this might be a fluff piece to increase the H1B quota.
- austindev9000 15y agoSo what are the actual salaries they are offering in Austin? The HN post says 150k but that's roughly the SF rate anyway.
- mspaint 15y agoMay I submit that if companies collectively hired some junior/entry level employees, they might eventually have some mid and senior level developers in the market? Just looking at Startuply for example, there is maybe one junior position out of 53 positions listed in Austin. Perhaps hire one senior level and a two or three junior level developers to work closely together, and try and raise the productivity of the new devs. If there are NO senior level programmers available, maybe they should get creative.
- wyclif 15y agoSpot on. I've seen this again and again: everyone is hurting for senior people, and everyone wants rock stars/ninjas. Hardly any companies that I see are willing to hire a junior dev or admin and contribute anything at all to his/her personal development, skill accumulation, and experience. They just wanna plug the hole and fill the position as fast as they can, and that's usually bad for both employer and employee long term.
- VladRussian 15y ago>Hardly any companies that I see are willing to hire a junior dev or admin and contribute anything at all to his/her personal development, skill accumulation, and experience. well and after all that investment the person leaves for better salary/etc... to somebody who is looking to hire senior people and not "willing to hire a junior dev or admin and contribute anything at all to his/her personal development, skill accumulation, and experience" There is a reason for the things even if we don't like the reason. And again, the "hot" skills (any NoSQL/Hadoop) can be picked in a week and even junior with such skills would easy find a place. There is just no excuse for somebody unsuccessfully looking for work in this market to not sit down and master some of such skills.
- mspaint 15y ago>well and after all that investment the person leaves for better salary/etc They could offer them a raise based on their new value? If this company can't pay people well or offer a good work environment, how are they going to get senior developers? > (any NoSQL/Hadoop) can be picked in a week I can't believe there are companies looking for people with a "week" of experience in NoSQL who aren't mid-level developers already.
- oacgnol 15y agoJust wanted to share my experience as a junior software engineer straight out of college (May 2011, UT Austin) with experience at 3 different startups now. There's been a discussion lately about the city of Austin being unable to retain engineering graduates, most of whom leave the city unable to find entry level work here (refer to http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/11/30/keeping-tech-talent-in-austin/ http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/11/30/keeping-tech-talent-in... to get what I'm talking about). Many of my college friends want to stay in the city that they've grown to love, but many don't and end up moving back home to find work. The growing exodus has become a problem over time, but prospects seem to be on the rise again with initiatives by the City of Austin and other organizations (campus2careers is a great one) to keep graduates in the area. HireStarter, the recruiting agency that was mentioned in the article, was excellent in placing me at my current startup even though I had little experience. There's hope out there for junior guys, but it's still going to be tough. I don't expect things to get better tomorrow as this movement is still early stage, but if this momentum keeps up, suddenly Austin will have a new supply of junior and (formerly junior) senior devs. Again, I still consider myself very fresh to the local industry so my observations may be a bit myopic :).
- dasil003 15y agoNot wanting to take entry level software engineers is possibly the most bone-headed move a big company can make. Someone needs to send a memo to management. Big companies with no technical culture are not generally fun places for engineers. Experienced engineers can probably sniff out the really bad ones from a mile away. If they don't take new grads then essentially they're staffing up with the desperate and the downtrodden. Telling the HR guys to hire new grads would, just by youthful ignorance and the law of averages yield a much better team over time. Granted retention would be the next problem, but at least they'd be somewhere.
- nupark2 15y agoOn the contrary, experienced engineers are the ones most likely to be comfortable with a non-exciting big company that provides solid benefits, a reasonable working schedule, and mature, well-considered engineering practices. Our own company isn't large, but we're rather traditional. We're not hackers, we believe in technical correctness, test-driven development and choosing the best tool for the problem at hand. This means that we generally write mobile software in the target platform language, server software in JVM languages, and on the occasions where we get to work on hardware and OS development, C and assembly. The work approach is not laden with technical culture and "fun", unless you find solid engineering to be fun (personally, I do). However, we've had great success in hiring genuinely senior engineers with at least a decade of experience each. We experimented early on with hiring junior engineers, but found that the overhead of dealing with untrained engineers was exceptionally high -- something that models my experience elsewhere, at larger companies. With the caveat that these are generalizations, I've found that the cost to hiring junior engineers is expressed in obvious and (perhaps) non-obvious ways. There are the obvious costs of the training and mentoring required, along-side lower productivity, and a lesser ability to estimate complexity and time to completion. There are also more abstract costs, such as technical and design debt that junior engineers are much more likely to incur simply due to a lack of experience. There are also cultural costs -- if you hire too many junior engineers, you'll create a technical culture and working experience that drives senior candidates away, amplifying the costs I've listed above. Of course, I readily admit that someone must hire untrained junior engineers, and I realize the implicit unfairness of hiring standards that would exclude myself were it 15 years ago. However, there are companies other than our own that are willing to bear these costs in exchange for being able to recruit at the scale they require -- we're just not one of them, and I think our reasoning is sound. That said, there are some things a junior engineer can do to make themselves less junior, (possibly before even entering the labor market): - Get experience (class projects don't count). A great way to do this is by contributing to OSS, especially projects that demand high-technical competence (eg, contribute to the ruby interpreter or MacRuby, not just high-level Ruby on Rails). Senior engineers have past experience to draw on when implementing software projects; this allows them to design not just for the immediate requirements, but with an understanding of how the requirements, maintenance costs, and performance will evolve over time. - Study practical implementation topics (... and then get experience implementing them). A lot of the value of a senior engineer is in their broad understanding of the practical topics of the field. Coming out of a CS program, you should hopefully have a firm grasp of the fundamentals of CS, but what many candidates are missing is a firm understanding of applied programming. Some off the cuff general book suggestions: UNIX Network Programming, Application Programming in a UNIX Environment, Mac OS X Internals, Applied Cryptography, The Design and Implementation of The FreeBSD Operating System, Database in Depth. This list is probably incomplete :) - Don't settle for just an internship. Internships at big companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft) serve as a relatively cheap first-pass filter on college candidates for hiring. Of a given pool of software interns at a company like Apple, it's unlikely that more than a 10% of them will be hirable material, and of those 10, maybe 2-3 will actually get jobs. Other companies may hire a larger percentage (I don't have any experience there). If you want to work for Apple, Microsoft, or Google (or think you might), then don't sit on your laurels if you get an internship there. Pick a real, practical problem that, and work on it, hard, leveraging your access to senior engineers for advice and guidance as much as possible. If you just coast through the internship, you probably won't receive an offer. I think some students look at internships at the big companies as prestigious. However, they may be viewed as the opposite -- an internship at one (or more) of those companies without being hired is a red flag for me, since I'm wondering why you didn't get an offer.
- yxhuvud 15y ago"We've fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent," Favaron said, "and that's a zero-sum game that hurts everyone." Everyone? No, it does not hurt the employees.
- rudiger 15y agoGuess I'm moving to Austin!
- tansey 15y agoI moved from CA (Palo Alto and San Diego) to Austin in August to start my PhD at UT. Austin is pretty good in the sense that it's probably the best possible city you could live in that's in middle America. That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain rude and self-centered. There is a lot of "get out of my way" attitude, both metaphorically in how people interact in conversation, and literally on the roadways. It's also landlocked, and I miss the ocean terribly. I'm here purely because the CS department at UT Austin is the best in the world for my area of research (Evolutionary Algorithms and Neural Networks). However, in a couple of years when my class requirements are done, I'm planning on finishing my dissertation research remotely from a coastal city. There really is nothing at all I can imagine Austin has to offer me that is worth staying here over SF, SD, or even the east coast like NYC or DC. Maybe I just don't get it.
- oldstrangers 15y ago"That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain rude and self-centered." No offense, but that might be the most backward thing I've ever heard. Have you seen LA or SF? I feel like you might live in a one or two person bubble. Honestly, where are you hanging out in Austin?
- geori 15y agoI agree. Austin is one of the most chill places in the world. As a matter of fact, the only thing people bitch about are all the self-centered Californians who moved to TX in order to escape high real estate prices.
- karmajunkie 15y ago... Who then drive up real estate prices here in Austin enough that "normal" people have a hard time buying in town. To the OP: get out of your bubble, man. Austin is one of the friendliest places around.
- lightweb 15y ago
- vaksel 15y agoI think there are 2 parts of the problem. 1-companies want to pay a pittance compared to what the person is actually worth. Face it, if you offer $90K, and your competitor offers $120K, the person has to be insane to take an offer that differs so much. 2-companies have really high requirements when they don't actually need them. If you are doing something simple, you don't need a Google level engineer...especially if you are not willing to pay a proper salary for one.
- gexla 15y agoFree beer, taco's and a job interview can't make a good mix. I suppose that if I let one rip before I start slurring my qualifications, and the company isn't interested, then it was never meant to be.
- adestefan 15y agoYour son Rip is on line toot.
- karmajunkie 15y agoHere's my gripe about this: Ok, so startups have limited funds, fair enough. But way too many of them offer way too little in the way of equity to make up for a below-market salary and the risk and opportunity cost of taking the job. I have zero sympathy for larger firms. When they talk of raising H1-B limits and how tight the market is, what they really mean is that they can't find developers for what they're willing to pay. the work these developers do is critical to the bottom line of the company. Why should a CEO make out like a bandit through compensation or stock prices while the teams that enabled it toil away for a pittance, comparatively speaking? Wages across all industries have been mostly flat for years—its only in the last few years that the IT/development industry is starting to show some movement. (And before someone points out that everyone in a software company contributes to success, even non-developers, I totally agree—everyone ought to share in success.)
- mgkimsal 15y ago"Austin's supply crunch for software developers was bad enough by September to prompt 25 Central Texas tech executives to fly to California in search of new talent." Awesome idea - cause there's certainly not a dev shortage in California, is there? They'd probably have more luck doing a whistlestop tour of the midwest and north atlantic states, hitting up the more rural areas. Many techies in those areas have few options, or may be stuck with remote-only options, and may not enjoy the weather as much. The Austin companies have an automatic 'better lifestyle' story against more of those areas (weather alone) rather than trying to compete with California (where most of the devs are there probably because of the Valley and the software dev culture already). In short, I'd guess it's an uphill battle to get people to move from SF to Austin, probably much harder than getting people from, say, St Joseph, Michigan to uproot for Austin. "After resumes were shared, business cards exchanged and several follow-up phone interviews completed, not a single one of those California candidates has made the move to Texas, according to the Austin Technology Council, which organized the trip." Oh wow, and look at that, it didn't work. Wh not? "It's even tighter there than it is here," said participant Rod Favaron , CEO of Austin startup Spredfast . "The challenge is there just aren't enough good software developers to go around." They didn't think of that before? Or just can't think outside the bubble?
- veverkap 15y agoYou are absolutely right about them hitting the wrong geographical area. However, as a developer in the mid-Atlantic, I think the lifestyle here is just as good :) I'd love to find a remote opportunity with any of those firms, but it seems that is difficult to find these days.
- mgkimsal 15y agoMany people do like where they live, but... I suspect more people would prefer to leave, say, Maryland for Austin than leaving SF.
- Kilimanjaro 15y agoWhy are companies so averse to telecommuting? There is an endless supply of S/D around the world.
- sarcasmatron 15y agoInexperienced management: they're more concerned with supervising task completion than managing deliverables and risk.
- _dps 15y agoThe telecommuting issue is separate from the "rest of the world" issue; the former is primarily a communication and culture problem, but the latter is all about concentration of talent around leading technical companies (primarily in the US). There are indeed many people all over the world with programming knowledge; there are far fewer with experience on a technically sophisticated project. The latter class of talent is highly concentrated around the hotspots of sophisticated technical companies which, on average, keep their most important teams in the US. If you are just reading and writing rows on a single instance of MySQL you can get all the talent you want from just about anywhere in the world. If you want to roll your own fault-tolerant distributed filesystem your options are (statistically) much more narrow, because anyone who can do that is likely to have been tempted by an offer to work at, e.g., Google in Mountain View.
- oneplusone 15y agoI don't know about that. I am located in Toronto, Canada and would be interested in a UX design/front end development telecommuting job that paid $120k+. However, nobody really wants to hire somebody that they can't watch. In the past I have emailed several companies about job postings that list telecommute as an option, and in all but one of the cases they where not open to somebody more than 3 hours away from the office. I don't really understand this position. I am in ET so the time zone can't be an issue. I am in an English speaking country so there won't be any language barriers. I think companies in the US need to realize that increasingly fever people will want to move there because it the US is become very scary.
- shareme 15y agothe biggest obstacle in moving to Austin is not what the article states.. Think about it people..if the developer has a house mortgage will he move? No.. If the dv still has edu debt will he move? no..
- keyston 15y agoThis is good news.. atleast for texas. I'm about 45mins from austin and finding local gigs are always hard. Wonder if they do remote work...
- anamax 15y ago> "We've fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent," Favaron said, "and that's a zero-sum game that hurts everyone." If they've made an agreement to not recruit from each other, they're in violation of anti-trust law. Google, Apple, and at least one other company got busted for this in SV about three years ago.
- pagekalisedown 15y agoApple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Intuit, .. http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkerschberg/2011/05/04/apple-allegedly-at-center-of-employee-compensation-conspiracy-involving-google-intel-adobe-pixar-and-lucasfilm/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkerschberg/2011/05/04/apple-a...
- Maven911 15y agoI think the only reason this article was so popular and generated so many comments was the clever marketed headline
- gruseom 15y agoThere's a lot of discussion in this thread around "junior" vs. "senior". This misses the point, which is to hire good programmers and avoid bad ones. It's as if the industry has finally burned itself out of the "programmers as replaceable cogs" model and has replaced it with the next-laziest model, "hire senior, not junior". That is an improvement, but it's still so off-base that the words "junior" and "senior" applied to programming make me cringe. Here are two factors the junior/senior model does not take into account. First, a good but inexperienced programmer will learn so quickly that they will run rings around mediocre experienced programmers in no time. Second, experience isn't only a good thing. Once people have repeated something a certain way enough times (and surprisingly few repetitions are required), they become locked-in and unable to see alternatives. This loss of flexibility is toxic to effective programming. Of course that happens less to good programmers than bad ones, but that only puts us back at the real question - how do you tell a good one apart from a bad one? - something we have no satisfactory way of answering that is compatible with current hiring practices. What we need is a healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior". Our industry lacks this. What is our path to learning? We have the sink-or-swim model in which people once hired are installed in a silo and told to work on their tasks. Everyone recapitulates all the classic mistakes and has to figure everything out for themselves. I know I did. It cost me at least 5 years developmentally, and I'm only putting the number that low to save face. This way is so inefficient that it must eventually yield to something better. Hopefully when that happens there will also be less of the prickly auto-didact about most of us - but that's another story.
- akkartik 15y agoWhat we need is a healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior". Reading other people's code is too hard. We go through life trying to do it as little as possible.
- mattmiller 15y agoReading other peoples code is a great way to learn, but often other peoples code is not very accessible. How often do you look at the code written by a star dev in another department on another project. I can't: -identify star devs unless I work with them directly, -look at the code base of the project they are working on if I am not also working on it, -find out which portions of the code they wrote (without looking through commit logs) In many places a <i>healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior".</i> is not facilitated by the employer.
- Aqua_Geek 15y agoI keep hearing of this huge shortage of developers, but the situation I have encountered while looking for a job seems to be saying something else. Is there really a lack of good talent, or is the recruiting process so horribly broken that good developers don't make it through the first levels of filtering by non-technical people?
- mattmiller 15y agoI think you have a point. We are trying to hire at a large company and we don't see many resumes that make it through the HR filter. I still haven't figured out how this process works.
- gorbachev 15y agoSo I've been toying with the idea of relocating to Austin, because New York is f*ing expensive. I even sent a couple of job applications some time ago before I got my new job in NYC. I'm not a rockstar, but I'm good and my resume shows it. I get a LOT of bites in New York metro area. However, these Austin companies didn't even bother to respond, except one. The interesting thing about the one that responded was that the job was tailor made for me. It was uncanny...it's almost as if they read my resume and produced the job listing to match. Which is why I sent in the application in the first place. The response was that they found me unqualified for the job. What a load of horse manure. If you're sending form letters to rejected candidates, please take some time to actually use the right template. I believe this one should've been the "no_relocation" or the "ceos_son-in-law_was_more_qualified" template.