5 ms·

The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent

80 points by allangrant 13y ago

allinzen 13y ago
Too true. The trouble is not enough people are trying to address the underlying problem - the lack of education in our public schools needed to become a desperately desired rails programmer! Computer programming should count as learning another language!
VeejayRampay 13y ago
In the meantime in France, we can't get past that PHP/Enterprise Java illness that's been afflicting the dynamism of our net ecomomy for a decade now. Sad.
- thibaut_barrere 13y ago
  Not my experience: I'm in France doing Ruby/Rails since 2004/2005, and I'm most likely booked until end of 2014... So it's more a matter of niches and networks I believe.
  - VeejayRampay 13y ago
    Are you in Paris? Maybe the market is getting bigger for Rails devs there? I left France 5 years ago and the picture was grim then, Java/PHP had a literal death grip on the market. Well, since I'm coming back I guess that's good news :)
    - thibaut_barrere 13y ago
      I left Paris 3 years ago, since then I've been doing all my work remotely from a very rural place (http://goo.gl/maps/UTIzF http://goo.gl/maps/UTIzF). That said Paris is the best place to get started networking again. Be sure to go to the Paris.rb group which is very dynamic if you come back! http://meetup.rubyparis.org/ http://meetup.rubyparis.org/
      - VeejayRampay 13y ago
        Thanks a lot, will do.
      - bambax 13y ago
        > since then I've been doing all my work remotely from a very rural place Excellent! I'm in Paris but my wife's family is in Charente (Ruffec) and I go there often. We should setup some kind of local meetup group!!
        thibaut_barrere 13y ago
        Sure, would be fun :-) I don't know many technologists around so far, but a good idea!
JimboOmega 13y ago
And here I am, a rails developer trying to move to SF, and I only get maybe a few nibbles a week. I must not be on the right job boards. Or something. Is the meetup.com ruby list the place to go? Someone also suggested changing my location on LinkedIn to SF - however, I am hoping to relocate, but haven't done so yet, so that seems dishonest.
- cgag 13y ago
  For what it's worth, I found a job in SF as a rails developer while living in a small town in Georgia via the site mentioned in the article, Developer Auction, and it was a great experience.
- mmanfrin 13y ago
  Send me your resume, manfrin@gmail.com.
- doktrin 13y ago
  When I was in the market, I never saw the kind of rabid attention the OP is describing. Sure, occasional recruiter spam, but no more or less than anyone else. I can't argue with the OP's experience, but I would take all claims of "super massive talent shortage oh em gee" with a good pinch of salt.
  - ericb 13y ago
    It is real. I've had companies calling me after I brush them off. I do the interviewing for my current company, and we have had a senior role open for 10 months. We have gotten to the offer stage 3 times but lost nonetheless. This is for a rails role. edit: my boss makes the offers, and I suspect we have been losing out on these positions while making offers around 130-140.
    - bambax 13y ago
      10 months is a long time... you could try to hire non-rails experts and then train them...? I'm under the impression that it's not only recruiters but also companies who try to hire people with the exact amount of experience for the position; but a good Python dev can certainly pick up Rails fast, no?
jquery 13y ago
s/Rails dev/dev/g
cheyne 13y ago
^^ Jimbo, Change your LinkedIn profile to say you live in San Francisco. I just moved here a few months back and I get dozens of emails. I have a job, and dont respond to them, but its generally the same pitch ... "VC backed company, wants ruby/rails people, descent money, benefits, yada yada" ..
PeterisP 13y ago
Hire telecommuters outside of SF. For example, I personally could get a drastic increase in income by moving to USA/SF, but I won't consider physically moving since it would be a great disruption to my wife and babies and I can afford not to move, as developers are wanted everywhere (though not so piranha-style). And there are many more developers like me. Long-range telecommuting is an option, and it's easier to be competitive financially since practically everywhere has lower cost of living than SF, I believe. (How much would a home for a full family within cycling distance of the office cost?)
- sendob 13y ago
  I agree! Geography is very valuable to some individuals; Especially with the tools available at this point, it seems strange to value being physically co-located for work.
- dirkdk 13y ago
  Well yes, but for startups that doesn't work. Every day you need to look at the results of your product, talk with your team and adjust course. Having remote workers really kills your ability to do that.
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    Maybe, but not really. Two hours of google hangouts, screen -x, git and CI servers will do you for every conversation you can imagine apart from, let's grab a beer
  - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
    You have clearly not tried any number of tele-worker suites out there. I use/develop Teamspace and its absolutely capable of all of that.
- pnathan 13y ago
  Some/most companies have a real problem with the concept of telecommuting/remote working. It's really quite astounding to me: the internet is in more places than ever before, video conferencing, text conferencing, etc, are at all-time highs, yet for some reason companies simply think remote work is unacceptable. Blows me away.
rhizome 13y ago
This has not been my experience, but I haven't posted to meetup.com either.
PixelPusher 13y ago
We've been hiring for a little while in Los Angeles. The problem is that there are some Rails developers, but most of the ones I've met are pretty entitled. They expect 100K+, benefits, telecommuting, etc. The problem is that most of them are fairly incompetent when it comes to everything else. Ask them about database design, sockets, parallelism, map/reduce, memory allocation, etc. and you'll get blank stares. This is good though, because it makes people who know those things that much more valuable as well they should be.
- tomp 13y ago
  Well, I've been programming since I was 13, I know everything about how computers work, from asm to HTTP, I've tried databases, parallelism, Haskell, distributed map/reduce, ... but I'm not a Ruby/Rails developer (yet, I grok Django ATM) and not from the US (so remote is the only option), so mostly uncompatible... :(
  - PixelPusher 13y ago
    Honestly, I'd more likely work w/ someone like you and teach them Rails than the opposite. MVC frameworks are very similar and a good developer should be able to switch easily. I suspect that employers who only look for Rails developers are hurting themselves.
- ericb 13y ago
  > 100K+, benefits, telecommuting, So, a not particularly high salary considering cost of living and benefits too? Where would they get these crazy expectations? Oh right, the open market.
  - PixelPusher 13y ago
    That's why i said it's a good thing. It bumps up the base developer salary and makes experienced developers even more valuable. At least those who are able to properly market themselves as such.
    - 13y ago
viseztrance 13y ago
It's clear that popping on everyone's radar gets you a lot of attention, but really, how many would follow through all the way? The article mentions that none asked for any sort of online presence (Linkedin, Github, etc). Perhaps it's because they weren't serious to begin with.
- viseztrance 13y ago
  Why the downvote? I don't live in the States, but I get emails from recruiters across Europe all the time (I'm a rails dev as well). In my experience they're not as serious as you might expect. Sure, the situation is extreme in SF, but is the signal to noise ratio better?
cletus 13y ago
Honestly this is just a PR piece for DeveloperAuction. "How to win the bloodthirsty battle for tech talent"? Why come use our site of course! This strip from 1995 sums it up pretty well: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-05-22/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-05-22/ I see a number of problems (on both sides): 1. There is no shortage of talent. There might well be a shortage of talent for the price you're willing to pay but that's hardly the same thing; 2. What constitutes "talent" seems to be largely based on social proof. 25 year old Stanford graduate? Offers galore I'm sure compared to, say, the 45 year old University of Iowa graduate. Hell, I get an awful lot of cold calls based simply on listing "Google" on my online profiles (as my employer). Social proof can be a useful indicator. The problem is that groups tend to self-select down to nothing this way where you end up with a tiny fraction of the group being over-subscribed and the majority struggling; 3. People like to employ people like themselves. So find a company full of MIT graduates and they're likely to hire... more MIT graduates. This isn't just a question of social connections or geographical area either (IMHO); 4. If you pick a high-demand high-cost area like the Bay Area you're obviously going to have a harder time finding and retaining talent and it'll be more expensive; 5. Larger companies tend to treat talent as interchangeable where the only units are the number of warm bodies, perhaps stratified into "junior", "midrange" and "senior" whereas we all know there can be a 10x or greater difference between two engineers in terms of productivity, hence the more productive talent is harder to attract and retain.
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  I would like to think there is a talent shortage. I pitch that we are in a similar position to Europe post Gutenberg - where they went from 2% literacy rates to 20% in a gut wrenching century. We are going to go from a lot less than 2% of people who are source code literate to that magic 20% in less - in short we are millions of talented people short. In our generation, the observation talent shortage only occurs at certain ,price points is right - but when you want all companies to have the same code in their DNA as perhaps google or MS, we are so embarrassingly short of people it's a public policy issue not a Market lead one. But I still laugh at the filbert cartoon - it's just I acknowledge that is true if your definition of talented developer is a software engineer who will write code primarily for a living and perform a sort of back office function. What about the CEO who codes? The deputy CFO?
ChuckMcM 13y ago
You know what is blood thirsty? recruiters are bloodthirsty. Since there is exactly zero barrier to entry when there is a perceived shortage of talent we get a swarm of 'tech recruiters' that looks kind of like Carp do when you through a handful of popcorn into the coy pond. There is a shortage of chumps however. For the right price you can hire pretty much immediately. What I don't get are people who are technically talented and not working, mostly because they want too much. Sometimes there is a sad sad story about how they were with big corp for 10+ years, went from starry eyed college grad to large mortgage holding principal engineer, and laid off, and now nobody will hire them as a principal engineer's salary. That is a sad story.
ameister14 13y ago
Why are there so few rails devs? Its not as if Ruby is super hard to learn or the rails framework is incredibly complex. I think I would hire someone for 40k for their first year, train them in RoR and then pay them more their second year. You get 6 months of good work out of them after they're totally trained and at a lower price.
- jdminhbg 13y ago
  But now you have to hire a Rails trainer as well as a Rails dev!
- patio11 13y ago
  That's an attractive option iff you're training non-programmers and, when you say "pay them more", you are prepared to more than double their wages after they reach journeyman proficiency in Rails. If you expect people to have a CS degree prior to year 1 or react to a 10% raise in year 2 as generous, you would not find the Silicon Valley hiring market offering you as many candidates as you desired positions.
  - ameister14 13y ago
    I know that; Let's say it takes 6 months of training to be fairly proficient. you have 6 months after that at a proficiency worth 42k, but you've only paid 40k for the entire year. Then when you raise the salary to 84, you have someone you know works in your company, who is happy with the huge raise, and you've gotten a bargain out of it. The problem is you have to think a year ahead, but I don't think that's such an issue.
    - mechanical_fish 13y ago
      How are you going to keep this hypothetical honor student down on the farm? [1] In other words, once the employee has the skills to earn $85k, why should she wait six months for her giant raise when she could just switch employers and get the giant raise right away? Not that this is the reason why the fantasy scenario doesn't work - if it were reliably possible to turn a raw recruit into DHH with six months of training, the fact that we'd have to pay market rates the entire time would be the least of our problems. Indeed, it would not be a problem at all. A real reason why more companies don't try training up raw recruits is that (a) running a school is a specialized business and (b) the yield is far less than 100%, so it only works at scale. You need to admit - optimistically! - 10 or 20 bright and motivated nonprogrammers in order to graduate one person who, after six to twelve months of training, can be expected to successfully attack problems like: "A customer has called; he has an obscure problem with his web site. Help him debug this problem over the phone. You have no access to the code or the server." or "Here's a legacy codebase that spans 267 files, two major versions of Rails, and three generations of programmers. Improve it. Don't break it, though, because our revenue depends on it." or "Here's a collection of 175 cloud instances running in Amazon. Build a system that reliably backs them all up once a day, with no downtime, and that can verify on demand that those backups exist." or even something as "simple" as "Here is a Wordpress site with a handful of specialty plugins installed. Here is an empty Git repository. Fill this Git repository with Rails code that implements a site that looks and acts exactly like the Wordpress site." [1] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/andrewbird/howyougonnakeepemdownonthefarm.html http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/andrewbird/howyougonnakeepemd... - this song is now 95 years old, so I guess I better footnote it!
j_baker 13y ago
This seems like a pretty worthless test. I mean, who cares how many companies respond to your resume? The real test is how many job offers you can get, and that's a much more difficult than getting responses on your resume. Secondly, are entrepreneurs really this out of touch with what it's like to be a jobhunter? This post reads like it was written by an anthropologist studying some strange culture he'd never seen before.
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
I'm finding my own meme here - CI is the key to enabling remote working and so enabling a company to truly select the best With CI it's pretty easy to see what needs to be built and whether it works - every few minutes if needed. You can see progress happen throughout a day. No other metrics matter.
- chrisbennet 13y ago
  What is "Cl"? Thanks.
  - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
    Continuous Integration, any of a number of source control/automated build systems that keep the code working at all times over multiple developers/sites.
    - chrisbennet 13y ago
      Oh duh! Thanks! I was reading it as C L.
guylhem 13y ago
After reading that, I can only imagine what this demand curve means for the actually available talent one may buy. You know the saying - "the market is so hot even chickens can fly" If you have to hire, that'll be a very expansive chicken - or maybe even a lemon. That's the cost of doing business I guess.
HunterV 13y ago
I've always wondered why companies aren't recruiting kids out of High School to learn Rails instead of attending college. Understandably there is immaturity to deal with and all that but it seems there is enough demand to overshadow that.
cllns 13y ago
One agency’s pitch consisted entirely of this: “I saw that your [sic] looking for some work. I have a few posions [sic] in SF that might be a fit, let me know when you have some time to talk.” It provided no last name, phone number or company name. The author should remember this is craigslist. This seems like run-of-the-mill spam (likely sent to EVERY new job posting)
- Matt_Mickiewicz 13y ago
  It was actually on the Ruby meetup list... I was surprised how many recruiters where monitoring that group, how quickly they responded to the fake message (within 5 minutes), and how little care, thought or attention they paid when asking people to entrust them with their career/job.
  - cllns 13y ago
    Ah okay. I should have read the article more carefully. It still could have been automated spam though :)

80 points by allangrant 13y ago

Too true. The trouble is not enough people are trying to address the underlying problem - the lack of education in our public schools needed to become a desperately desired rails programmer! Computer programming should count as learning another language!

VeejayRampay 13y ago

In the meantime in France, we can't get past that PHP/Enterprise Java illness that's been afflicting the dynamism of our net ecomomy for a decade now. Sad.

thibaut_barrere 13y ago
Not my experience: I'm in France doing Ruby/Rails since 2004/2005, and I'm most likely booked until end of 2014... So it's more a matter of niches and networks I believe.
- VeejayRampay 13y ago
  Are you in Paris? Maybe the market is getting bigger for Rails devs there? I left France 5 years ago and the picture was grim then, Java/PHP had a literal death grip on the market. Well, since I'm coming back I guess that's good news :)
  - thibaut_barrere 13y ago
    I left Paris 3 years ago, since then I've been doing all my work remotely from a very rural place (http://goo.gl/maps/UTIzF http://goo.gl/maps/UTIzF). That said Paris is the best place to get started networking again. Be sure to go to the Paris.rb group which is very dynamic if you come back! http://meetup.rubyparis.org/ http://meetup.rubyparis.org/
    - VeejayRampay 13y ago
      Thanks a lot, will do.
    - bambax 13y ago
      > since then I've been doing all my work remotely from a very rural place Excellent! I'm in Paris but my wife's family is in Charente (Ruffec) and I go there often. We should setup some kind of local meetup group!!
      - thibaut_barrere 13y ago
        Sure, would be fun :-) I don't know many technologists around so far, but a good idea!

JimboOmega 13y ago

And here I am, a rails developer trying to move to SF, and I only get maybe a few nibbles a week. I must not be on the right job boards. Or something. Is the meetup.com ruby list the place to go? Someone also suggested changing my location on LinkedIn to SF - however, I am hoping to relocate, but haven't done so yet, so that seems dishonest.

cgag 13y ago
For what it's worth, I found a job in SF as a rails developer while living in a small town in Georgia via the site mentioned in the article, Developer Auction, and it was a great experience.
mmanfrin 13y ago
Send me your resume, manfrin@gmail.com.
doktrin 13y ago
When I was in the market, I never saw the kind of rabid attention the OP is describing. Sure, occasional recruiter spam, but no more or less than anyone else. I can't argue with the OP's experience, but I would take all claims of "super massive talent shortage oh em gee" with a good pinch of salt.
- ericb 13y ago
  It is real. I've had companies calling me after I brush them off. I do the interviewing for my current company, and we have had a senior role open for 10 months. We have gotten to the offer stage 3 times but lost nonetheless. This is for a rails role. edit: my boss makes the offers, and I suspect we have been losing out on these positions while making offers around 130-140.
  - bambax 13y ago
    10 months is a long time... you could try to hire non-rails experts and then train them...? I'm under the impression that it's not only recruiters but also companies who try to hire people with the exact amount of experience for the position; but a good Python dev can certainly pick up Rails fast, no?

jquery 13y ago

s/Rails dev/dev/g

cheyne 13y ago

^^ Jimbo, Change your LinkedIn profile to say you live in San Francisco. I just moved here a few months back and I get dozens of emails. I have a job, and dont respond to them, but its generally the same pitch ... "VC backed company, wants ruby/rails people, descent money, benefits, yada yada" ..

PeterisP 13y ago

Hire telecommuters outside of SF. For example, I personally could get a drastic increase in income by moving to USA/SF, but I won't consider physically moving since it would be a great disruption to my wife and babies and I can afford not to move, as developers are wanted everywhere (though not so piranha-style). And there are many more developers like me. Long-range telecommuting is an option, and it's easier to be competitive financially since practically everywhere has lower cost of living than SF, I believe. (How much would a home for a full family within cycling distance of the office cost?)

sendob 13y ago
I agree! Geography is very valuable to some individuals; Especially with the tools available at this point, it seems strange to value being physically co-located for work.
dirkdk 13y ago
Well yes, but for startups that doesn't work. Every day you need to look at the results of your product, talk with your team and adjust course. Having remote workers really kills your ability to do that.
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  Maybe, but not really. Two hours of google hangouts, screen -x, git and CI servers will do you for every conversation you can imagine apart from, let's grab a beer
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  You have clearly not tried any number of tele-worker suites out there. I use/develop Teamspace and its absolutely capable of all of that.
pnathan 13y ago
Some/most companies have a real problem with the concept of telecommuting/remote working. It's really quite astounding to me: the internet is in more places than ever before, video conferencing, text conferencing, etc, are at all-time highs, yet for some reason companies simply think remote work is unacceptable. Blows me away.

rhizome 13y ago

This has not been my experience, but I haven't posted to meetup.com either.

PixelPusher 13y ago

We've been hiring for a little while in Los Angeles. The problem is that there are some Rails developers, but most of the ones I've met are pretty entitled. They expect 100K+, benefits, telecommuting, etc. The problem is that most of them are fairly incompetent when it comes to everything else. Ask them about database design, sockets, parallelism, map/reduce, memory allocation, etc. and you'll get blank stares. This is good though, because it makes people who know those things that much more valuable as well they should be.

tomp 13y ago
Well, I've been programming since I was 13, I know everything about how computers work, from asm to HTTP, I've tried databases, parallelism, Haskell, distributed map/reduce, ... but I'm not a Ruby/Rails developer (yet, I grok Django ATM) and not from the US (so remote is the only option), so mostly uncompatible... :(
- PixelPusher 13y ago
  Honestly, I'd more likely work w/ someone like you and teach them Rails than the opposite. MVC frameworks are very similar and a good developer should be able to switch easily. I suspect that employers who only look for Rails developers are hurting themselves.
ericb 13y ago
> 100K+, benefits, telecommuting, So, a not particularly high salary considering cost of living and benefits too? Where would they get these crazy expectations? Oh right, the open market.
- PixelPusher 13y ago
  That's why i said it's a good thing. It bumps up the base developer salary and makes experienced developers even more valuable. At least those who are able to properly market themselves as such.
  - 13y ago

viseztrance 13y ago

It's clear that popping on everyone's radar gets you a lot of attention, but really, how many would follow through all the way? The article mentions that none asked for any sort of online presence (Linkedin, Github, etc). Perhaps it's because they weren't serious to begin with.

viseztrance 13y ago
Why the downvote? I don't live in the States, but I get emails from recruiters across Europe all the time (I'm a rails dev as well). In my experience they're not as serious as you might expect. Sure, the situation is extreme in SF, but is the signal to noise ratio better?

cletus 13y ago

Honestly this is just a PR piece for DeveloperAuction. "How to win the bloodthirsty battle for tech talent"? Why come use our site of course! This strip from 1995 sums it up pretty well: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-05-22/ http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-05-22/ I see a number of problems (on both sides): 1. There is no shortage of talent. There might well be a shortage of talent for the price you're willing to pay but that's hardly the same thing; 2. What constitutes "talent" seems to be largely based on social proof. 25 year old Stanford graduate? Offers galore I'm sure compared to, say, the 45 year old University of Iowa graduate. Hell, I get an awful lot of cold calls based simply on listing "Google" on my online profiles (as my employer). Social proof can be a useful indicator. The problem is that groups tend to self-select down to nothing this way where you end up with a tiny fraction of the group being over-subscribed and the majority struggling; 3. People like to employ people like themselves. So find a company full of MIT graduates and they're likely to hire... more MIT graduates. This isn't just a question of social connections or geographical area either (IMHO); 4. If you pick a high-demand high-cost area like the Bay Area you're obviously going to have a harder time finding and retaining talent and it'll be more expensive; 5. Larger companies tend to treat talent as interchangeable where the only units are the number of warm bodies, perhaps stratified into "junior", "midrange" and "senior" whereas we all know there can be a 10x or greater difference between two engineers in terms of productivity, hence the more productive talent is harder to attract and retain.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago
I would like to think there is a talent shortage. I pitch that we are in a similar position to Europe post Gutenberg - where they went from 2% literacy rates to 20% in a gut wrenching century. We are going to go from a lot less than 2% of people who are source code literate to that magic 20% in less - in short we are millions of talented people short. In our generation, the observation talent shortage only occurs at certain ,price points is right - but when you want all companies to have the same code in their DNA as perhaps google or MS, we are so embarrassingly short of people it's a public policy issue not a Market lead one. But I still laugh at the filbert cartoon - it's just I acknowledge that is true if your definition of talented developer is a software engineer who will write code primarily for a living and perform a sort of back office function. What about the CEO who codes? The deputy CFO?

ChuckMcM 13y ago

You know what is blood thirsty? recruiters are bloodthirsty. Since there is exactly zero barrier to entry when there is a perceived shortage of talent we get a swarm of 'tech recruiters' that looks kind of like Carp do when you through a handful of popcorn into the coy pond. There is a shortage of chumps however. For the right price you can hire pretty much immediately. What I don't get are people who are technically talented and not working, mostly because they want too much. Sometimes there is a sad sad story about how they were with big corp for 10+ years, went from starry eyed college grad to large mortgage holding principal engineer, and laid off, and now nobody will hire them as a principal engineer's salary. That is a sad story.

ameister14 13y ago

Why are there so few rails devs? Its not as if Ruby is super hard to learn or the rails framework is incredibly complex. I think I would hire someone for 40k for their first year, train them in RoR and then pay them more their second year. You get 6 months of good work out of them after they're totally trained and at a lower price.

jdminhbg 13y ago
But now you have to hire a Rails trainer as well as a Rails dev!
patio11 13y ago
That's an attractive option iff you're training non-programmers and, when you say "pay them more", you are prepared to more than double their wages after they reach journeyman proficiency in Rails. If you expect people to have a CS degree prior to year 1 or react to a 10% raise in year 2 as generous, you would not find the Silicon Valley hiring market offering you as many candidates as you desired positions.
- ameister14 13y ago
  I know that; Let's say it takes 6 months of training to be fairly proficient. you have 6 months after that at a proficiency worth 42k, but you've only paid 40k for the entire year. Then when you raise the salary to 84, you have someone you know works in your company, who is happy with the huge raise, and you've gotten a bargain out of it. The problem is you have to think a year ahead, but I don't think that's such an issue.
  - mechanical_fish 13y ago
    How are you going to keep this hypothetical honor student down on the farm? [1] In other words, once the employee has the skills to earn $85k, why should she wait six months for her giant raise when she could just switch employers and get the giant raise right away? Not that this is the reason why the fantasy scenario doesn't work - if it were reliably possible to turn a raw recruit into DHH with six months of training, the fact that we'd have to pay market rates the entire time would be the least of our problems. Indeed, it would not be a problem at all. A real reason why more companies don't try training up raw recruits is that (a) running a school is a specialized business and (b) the yield is far less than 100%, so it only works at scale. You need to admit - optimistically! - 10 or 20 bright and motivated nonprogrammers in order to graduate one person who, after six to twelve months of training, can be expected to successfully attack problems like: "A customer has called; he has an obscure problem with his web site. Help him debug this problem over the phone. You have no access to the code or the server." or "Here's a legacy codebase that spans 267 files, two major versions of Rails, and three generations of programmers. Improve it. Don't break it, though, because our revenue depends on it." or "Here's a collection of 175 cloud instances running in Amazon. Build a system that reliably backs them all up once a day, with no downtime, and that can verify on demand that those backups exist." or even something as "simple" as "Here is a Wordpress site with a handful of specialty plugins installed. Here is an empty Git repository. Fill this Git repository with Rails code that implements a site that looks and acts exactly like the Wordpress site." [1] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/andrewbird/howyougonnakeepemdownonthefarm.html http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/andrewbird/howyougonnakeepemd... - this song is now 95 years old, so I guess I better footnote it!

j_baker 13y ago

This seems like a pretty worthless test. I mean, who cares how many companies respond to your resume? The real test is how many job offers you can get, and that's a much more difficult than getting responses on your resume. Secondly, are entrepreneurs really this out of touch with what it's like to be a jobhunter? This post reads like it was written by an anthropologist studying some strange culture he'd never seen before.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

I'm finding my own meme here - CI is the key to enabling remote working and so enabling a company to truly select the best With CI it's pretty easy to see what needs to be built and whether it works - every few minutes if needed. You can see progress happen throughout a day. No other metrics matter.

chrisbennet 13y ago
What is "Cl"? Thanks.
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  Continuous Integration, any of a number of source control/automated build systems that keep the code working at all times over multiple developers/sites.
  - chrisbennet 13y ago
    Oh duh! Thanks! I was reading it as C L.

guylhem 13y ago

After reading that, I can only imagine what this demand curve means for the actually available talent one may buy. You know the saying - "the market is so hot even chickens can fly" If you have to hire, that'll be a very expansive chicken - or maybe even a lemon. That's the cost of doing business I guess.

HunterV 13y ago

I've always wondered why companies aren't recruiting kids out of High School to learn Rails instead of attending college. Understandably there is immaturity to deal with and all that but it seems there is enough demand to overshadow that.

cllns 13y ago

One agency’s pitch consisted entirely of this: “I saw that your [sic] looking for some work. I have a few posions [sic] in SF that might be a fit, let me know when you have some time to talk.” It provided no last name, phone number or company name. The author should remember this is craigslist. This seems like run-of-the-mill spam (likely sent to EVERY new job posting)

Matt_Mickiewicz 13y ago
It was actually on the Ruby meetup list... I was surprised how many recruiters where monitoring that group, how quickly they responded to the fake message (within 5 minutes), and how little care, thought or attention they paid when asking people to entrust them with their career/job.
- cllns 13y ago
  Ah okay. I should have read the article more carefully. It still could have been automated spam though :)