Hiring (Superstar) Programmers 570
Ross Turk wrote, "We've been looking for senior engineers to work on SourceForge.net for a while now, and it's been a lot more difficult than it was a few years ago. Has the tech market improved so much that working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent? Is everyone else running into the same problems, or is it just here in the Valley and other high-tech corridors?" This is a question that I've seen coming in a lot; the economy has not picked up everywhere — so how are other people handling this? Going outside the traditional Valley/Route 128 corridors? Outsourcing? And how do you find people — beyond just using job boards? (Full disclosure: That's our job board thingie, as you probably have figured out.) Or do job boards alone work? Some people have been swearing up and down that CraigsList works — and there's always something to be said for nepotism.
Hubris! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think things like pay, benefits, location, etc. matter far more to the vast majority of techies than merely "working on a prominent website." After all, in today's world, prominent websites come and go in a matter of months.
Re:Hubris! (Score:5, Insightful)
You could always try... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hubris! (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone pointed out before, people trying to hire the top 90% or 95% of employees had better be willing to provide salaries and benefits in the top 90% to 95% as well.
Your name won't get you everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, a name can get you ahead of the game, but if you pay people 20% less than they can get at another, less well known, company, you are going to have a hard time finding people.
Also, you'll need to have interesting work for your developers to do. If you want highly talented developers, but all you want them to do is help maintain an already stable website, you may have a hard time finding (and especially keeping) good talent.
Also, it helps to be a growing company with good prospects for the future. People don't want to go to a company that is not going anywhere. People want to work at a place where they have a good chance to advance within the company, and where they can expect regular salary increases. The ability to reliably hand out performance bonuses helps too.
If you want to be flooded with resumes from highly talented people, you need all four of the following: a big name, pay at or above the market rate, interesting projects to work on, and a strong and growing financial situation. If you are missing any of these things, you're going to have to work harder to get the really good people.
Everybody can't hire the *best*... (Score:5, Insightful)
I would recommend trying for some new talent. Get somebody fresh out of school... Take in some co-ops and pick the best to stay on full time. If you have a tired technology, you're more likely to get the best engineers at the beginning of their career than later on. This is especially true in the current market where companies have this crazy idea that they should hire somebody who's past experience is an exact match to their current task. The young talent is getting left behind...
I dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
How much is the pay? A lot of places who have (or think they have) cool points seem to think that those are a substitute for cash. I recently got a job offer from one of those cool places (you've heard of it, I'm sure) in the Bay that paid a paltry 16% more than I make in nowheresville, South Carolina. It hurt, because the job, was indeed cool as all hell, but I've got a family to look after.
Sure, you can talk about the wonderful things I can do in the Bay Area, but after paying the rent, all that would change is that I'm a lot closer to the things that I still can't do because now I can't afford it.
Personally, I'd like to live in a place where I've got at least a ghost of a chance of buying a decent 3 bedroom plus an office house without needing a galactic-scale interest only ARM.
The job offer reads "willing to travel frequently" to I presume Fremont. Does that mean they're willing to pay for that travel, too?
Working insane hours for low pay because the job is "cool" is so 20th century. I think most of us have played on that roller coaster once or twice and don't want to do it again. Maybe you can sell that to fresh graduates, but the senior people have learned these lessons already.
shortage of techies (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to hire techies, you have three alternatives:
1) be prepared to pounce on anyone that does become available due to normal turnover (takes time and patience).
2) grow your own internally via training (takes even more time and patience, and is not guaranteed to work).
3) take them away from other companies (which can be very expensive).
Re:Hubris! (Score:3, Insightful)
So many companies forget that part! Particularly if they can convince the employees that their company is prestigious and worth taking a pay cut over. Don't buy it, somewhere around 4am one night you're going to realize that your prestigious company was just like the dump you got out of, only instead ofm anagers ASKING you to work weekends, they EXPECT it.
Re:Hubris! (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you meant the top 5% or 10%.
Why does SourceForge need "superstars"? (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you doing that's really all the cool or interesting? What's the reward for working there? Working for a name people have heard of? People have heard of General Mills too, do they need "superstar" factory workers?
If you don't really have work that's truly interesting and innovative, get off your ego horse and hire good people who can do the job you actually need done.
It's the way you word it (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe because no one (Score:3, Insightful)
Define "superstar" (Score:2, Insightful)
That's me! need advice from Slashdotters (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good, intelligent coders are hard to find (Score:3, Insightful)
There aren't any.
The ones who are motivated don't know what they're doing and the ones that know what they're doing can be found in a dark corner of the machine room banging their heads against the wall.
KFG
Re:Hubris! (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I hear this, I almost feel a little sad. If I didn't have a job writing code, I don't know that I'd write code at home. Frankly, the problems and the meaning behind the code I write for work will get me to work past the 'expected' hours often - I'm writing code to analyze biological data and change how people treat common human disease. I don't think I'm going to have a 'pet project' at home that matches that. At work, I have lots of resources (large data sets, big machines, etc) to work on. At home, what could I do? Put up a dinky website? Maybe make an app to solve some problem everyone else already has?
Maybe I'd get involved in an open source project, but my gut feeling is that if I'm unemployed, I'm going to NOT code for a bit, take a break, get refreshed, then get another job. I like coding, but there's just so much more to life than that. (see: sexy girlfriend, mountain biking, cooking, music, reading, games, friends, etc)
Does this make me not a superstar? Maybe. On the other hand, I've been talking to some people lately about my current job and how well it's (not) going. I'm getting job offers left and right from lots of different people for very nice positions in both academia and industry. So, I must not suck - but this notion that someone who's a good problem solver would always be solving problems, and in one particular area (coding, and there's a lot of other areas you can apply your same understanding of logic, math, statistics, process, etc to.)
Funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Each time they would interview what amounted to entry-level candidates (the only ones interested at that pay level, naturally) for months and finally they'd get desperate and make a hire that didn't quite measure up to the extreme the standards they'd set for positions. Then, when it didn't work out and the hire either left or got let go, they wouldn't try to make the position more attractive to someone who was more qualified, they'd just re-list with the same salary and benefits package(s), only each new time they'd add even more required skills and experience, as though they just hadn't been stringent enough the first time.
Meanwhile, for those of us inside already, the workload just got bigger and bigger since we couldn't make any good hires and couldn't keep the ones we made. Needless to say I moved on after just over a year, once I realized that for the amount of work I was actually doing as the result of the (I realized) never-to-be-resolved staff shortage, I was also getting underpaid.
It's like HR thought that if they just kept asking for more, eventually they'd get it.
Yeah, we've all pretty much quit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All the smart people have left IT (Score:2, Insightful)
Incidentally, Deloitte released a most interesting report on outsourcing some time ago. URL www.deloitte.com/dtt/cda/doc/content/us_outsourci
That being said, the I.T. industry seems to be too unstable for long-term work/financial security. By that I mean the repeated cycles of oursourcing, overvalued stocks (even today sometimes), and all the mergers and acquisitions among other things. Instead of developing new talent or cultivating the talent they already have, companies "develop" new technology by gobbling up other companies. The resulting glut of buying can ruin them financially. I'm no economist, but that's just common sense to not buy more than one can afford!
Re:Hubris! (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm bitter that I got an 'up yours' form letter turndown, though.
Re:Plenty of Great Jobs (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course not. Because candidates are more than the sum of their resumes. One candidate might have a super-impressive resume, but only be a mediocre programmer. (In some cases, they're lousy.) Another candidate may appear to have a mediocre resume, but ends up being a perfect fit for the role. As a result, "superstar" programmers are almost never found through resume searches. They're found through word of mouth or networking. Sometimes you accidently hire someone for another role who happens to fill the other role perfectly. But I guarantee that you would throw out the resume of a candidate who could meet your needs.
Seriously, the entire hiring process needs to be revamped. Your on the job experience is often less important these days than your off the job experience. So perhaps we should start asking for examples of work. However, that would also require that employers list what skills they find important, and not the technologies in particular.
For example, I could nail your HTML/CSS/JavaScript/etc. requirements easily. I can make demos that would make you cry, "I didn't know you could do that in a web browser!" But that might not make me a good fit for your positions. Most likely, you really want an artist who is technically competent. Yet you're asking for a strong programmer, which is going to get you a completely different class of resume. The two are rarely one and the same.
Of course, I may be misreading your ads. However, I've interviewed with a few companies like yours in the Madison area. What they ask for and what they want are almost never the same thing.
Re:Hubris! (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I can find a few jobs that are well paid. The distinguishing factor that I'm looking for while living in the current economy is stability and long term viability with good pay. If you can combine those three things, you have a good job (even if it isn't very exciting).
Re:It's the way you word it (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreed on the word choice point. I really don't know if I'm a superstar, which in a way probably means I'm not one. But at any rate, I move right past all the ads for "rockstar" or "superstar" programmers. Not because I'm not a superstar, but because that choice of words indicates to me that the company is probably looking for someone they can put a lot of pressure on and attach a lot of unrealistic expectations to. He's a rockstar! He can move mountains! He'll fix everything and have a super-awesome web 2.0 thing shipped and bug-free in two months! He loves working 14-hour days!
Re:Hubris! (Score:2, Insightful)
It ended up being a ton more stressful, and a lot more work than being able to leave your work at the office, and not being accessible after I've left.
Re:All the smart people have left IT (Score:4, Insightful)
Now you know why entrepreneurship is such a hot market at the moment. The business plan is:
1. Boss won't listen about developing new technology.
2. Leave to found new company based on technology.
3. Technology is very cool, but no massive coporate support.
4. Corporations see that your boss was an idiot (without actually blaming your boss) and purchase your company.
5. You profit!!!
Additional steps:
6. Key developers hate the new corporate work environment because their boss won't listen, and leave for the next startup.
7. Cycle repeats.
Re:You could always try... (Score:3, Insightful)
I still do my job as per my requirements, but I'm no longer going past my job requirement.
Re:Location (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like that bridge to nowhere [salon.com] for 50 people? Thanks a lot for trying to steal our money and spend it on some stupid bridge that no one needs, Alaskan.
You, an Alaskan, complaining about politicians trying to take your money and give it to someone else is a prime example of the pot calling the kettle black. I can't think of a single state currently that more exemplifies this thanks to this example. Even CA and NY don't have such ridiculous public works projects.
One of my pet peeves (Score:4, Insightful)
I know it's hard to show your hand even that little bit, but if you want exceptional people to respond, you need to make it clear that you're exceptional, too.
Re:Ignoring a potential talent pool (Score:3, Insightful)
Glass Ceilings and Work Environment (Score:2, Insightful)
I've been on both sides of the fence as top talent and trying to hire top talent. First the hiring view. The reality is in certain niches (especially networking, protocol, embedded systems type talent) there aren't nearly as many rock stars as you think. My last permanent job was smack in the middle of the Valley and the reality is there were probably only a couple of hundred people out there in top little piece of the bell curve in any general skill set. There's a ton of talented people just a bit farther down the curve, but you look at most tech companies and it's really a very, very small group of people that drive the design, technology and innovation. It also seemed like you had to find the rare combination of technically brillant but market aware individual as the quality of product marketing in most organizations is _sh*t_ as far as defining innovation (versus spitting out glossies extolling your virtues and trashing the competition).
Then you can't hire them because you can't really get management to pay the top salaries because the VCs are breathing down the necks of the officers and board wondering why it hasn't already all been shipped to India much less trying to shake out an attractive salary.
On the working side once you get hired you end up only being around 2-4 years on average because you get squeezed on the late side of the capital/startup curve and salaries stagnate at 2-3% a year and bonuses and perks get squeezed - or you just plain run out of $$ and go under and if you're good enough you eventually become the most expensive body in the shop and easy pickings in a quarter the beancounters are sweating dollars instead of head count.
I've worked for a ton of startups as well as established companies and the reality is 98% of companies more than 10-20 people as an organization don't give a rat's a** about their people. There's still individuals out there that fight the good fight but the reality is if they need to do a short pump and dump on the share price or fixup the burn burn rate prior to the next financing round they'll RIF us 20% accross the board in a heartbeat and then whine a month later about the lack of employee loyalty these days and wonder why we jump ship for a lousy 5% salary differential or an extra week of vacation. Options are worthless - I've had some come in and most go under and my net gain from options over a 20 year career works out to about $1500 a year (maybe $2000 in today's dollars).
There's a glass ceiling of $100-$120k a year everywhere outside the Valley and maybe $140k a year in the Valley (where the delta doesn't cover the cost of living diffs) if you want to be a developer, architect, technical anything. And that's the very peak of the bell curve. There's a bunch of development jobs that have typical _Senior_ developer salaries down more in the $60-$80k and the non-developer IT guys have it worse. To move forward you have to cross the dark side to management or leave the traditional work force entirely and do your own thing - consulting, starting a business, inventing the next pet rock. Out here in middle America the number development focused technical companies is small enough that there aren't a lot of Director and up level positions - and the majority of them are in larger organizations that tend to promote from within so to break that inital barrier into management requires backsliding your salary - sometimes a lot - and dredging along at "Director of IT" for a salary that works out to a pitiful amount per hour just to slide the resume over to a new track with job titles with words like Director and Vice in them.
There's a lot of top flight technical talent outside the Valley and the Beltway that will choose to schluck along under-employed just to live in a place with affordable housing and decent public schools and a bit of green grass, but most companies are so weakl