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Larger companies can be more patient about long-term bets, but in my experience I've found that they aren't regarding experienced hires. Of course they'll train

by fecak 12y ago

Larger companies can be more patient about long-term bets, but in my experience I've found that they aren't regarding experienced hires. Of course they'll train the young and inexperienced, but I don't see as many large firms hiring experienced developers with a different skill set than they are ideally seeking. Part of this can probably be explained by the traditional big firm HR departments. Tech culture is probably the key ingredient regardless of company size, though I'd theorize that the type of culture open to diverse tech backgrounds is generally found in smaller shops.

vonmoltke 12y ago
This has been my experience as well. With large companies, once you have "Senior" in your title, you are officially pigeon-holed. I broke out of that by going to a small company[1], but I think my varied background and career path is now blocks me from ever going back to a large one. [1] Incidentally, a non-enterprise Java shop, where I was hired despite not having written much code in Java.
curun1r 12y ago
You nailed it with the HR departments. I'm a manager at a large company and I've done a lot of hiring. Whenever I open a rec, it's always a fight with HR to limit the scope of the filter they use to screen out candidates. They always want a list of 4+ skills with number of years experience to include in any job ad that they can confirm an applicant has before forwarding me the resume. I mostly want to see code that a candidate has written, regardless of language. It took me a lot of arguing/debating, but I figured out that they can (be forced to) handle ORs in the requirement, so my ads now ask for 2-4 (depending on whether it's a senior position) years of cumulative experience in any of C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, Haskell, Rust, ML, D or OCaml. But there are a lot of managers that won't bother to fight with HR for a month to avoid giving HR the simple filters that they seem to crave, so they end up with only candidates that have experience using the languages to be used in the position.

by fecak 12y ago

vonmoltke 12y ago

This has been my experience as well. With large companies, once you have "Senior" in your title, you are officially pigeon-holed. I broke out of that by going to a small company[1], but I think my varied background and career path is now blocks me from ever going back to a large one. [1] Incidentally, a non-enterprise Java shop, where I was hired despite not having written much code in Java.

curun1r 12y ago

You nailed it with the HR departments. I'm a manager at a large company and I've done a lot of hiring. Whenever I open a rec, it's always a fight with HR to limit the scope of the filter they use to screen out candidates. They always want a list of 4+ skills with number of years experience to include in any job ad that they can confirm an applicant has before forwarding me the resume. I mostly want to see code that a candidate has written, regardless of language. It took me a lot of arguing/debating, but I figured out that they can (be forced to) handle ORs in the requirement, so my ads now ask for 2-4 (depending on whether it's a senior position) years of cumulative experience in any of C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Go, Haskell, Rust, ML, D or OCaml. But there are a lot of managers that won't bother to fight with HR for a month to avoid giving HR the simple filters that they seem to crave, so they end up with only candidates that have experience using the languages to be used in the position.