

The Bloodthirsty Battle For Tech Talent - allangrant
http://www.fastcompany.com/3007649/how-win-bloodthirsty-battle-tech-talent

======
ChuckMcM
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.

------
PeterisP
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?)

~~~
dirkdk
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
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

------
JimboOmega
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.

~~~
bicknergseng
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the author, Matt Mickiewicz,
runs developerauction.com. I imagine it is in their best interest to drum up
the "talent war," to make it seem like there are no engineers to hire.

My experience tells me that this talent war exists... for the top few
percentile of engineers. Where these people are dogged by recruiters and
companies alike, there is a sharp dropoff; engineers who are smart but don't
win in a tech bingo interview or didn't work at Google/Facebook or didn't go
to Stanford get pinged by headhunters but passed over by companies. Engineers
who have held jobs at start ups or less prestigious companies, who have
authored plenty of CoffeeScript or ObC code for a corporate code base but
don't remember how to implement a quicksort or don't have experience with
framework x are rejected in the interview phase.

It's my opinion, but I think the "shortage of talent" is really a shortage of
patience and mentorship, and a sign of the complete unwillingness of many
companies to take a risk on someone.

~~~
JimboOmega
Funny. Sounds like me. I went to a decent but "wrong" school (UVA), lured by
promises of a free ride. I missed my tech bingo interviews (and I've had a lot
of them), for reasons worthy of a blog post. My first, for instance, with MS,
went wrong because Alaska Airlines got my flight in around 1 or 2 AM - for an
8 AM interview the next day. I know I was not at my best.

I am also totally done with Google - it's just not worth 4 months of runaround
and countless phone interviews just to come in and fail because one of the
interviewers hates the whole process. And last time they contacted me, they
told me to learn either Java or Python and call them back when I did. No
thanks. Nothing against Python, but I am not putting that much effort into the
chance at another interview. I would totally work for a company that did
Python, and learn as I go - I've done that plenty before. (Edit: Oh, and the
number of interviews google puts you through just should not be allowed)

I spent a year working on my own startup, which is what got me into rails, but
it ran out of runway and I was then tied to the area by romance, and got a
mediocre job at a huge company. I am no longer encumbered, but my resume lacks
any recognizable names (of schools or companies). I've had a lot of other
personal projects that never went anywhere and which earn me no points, but at
least keep me in the game. (I should have put them all on GitHub, I suppose,
but was too embarassed about their unfinished nature to do so).

I also don't get what the obsession is with CS 201 questions. But I keep my
data structures textbook around just so I can relearn how to implement A* or
remind myself what the big-O of a B-tree delete is before interviews. Of
course, at Google I'd need to be implementing these data structures daily(?).
I don't have a big problem with them, it's just an odd thing to be obsessed
with.

~~~
esperluette
1\. Finish just one project (not to shiny-perfect, just to functionally
complete) and put it on GitHub. This is to show you can finish something. It's
a huge risk mitigator if someone can look at your code. Nobody's code is
perfect, but some code is always better than no code.

2\. Put the rest of the stuff up on GitHub, with suitable disclaimers, e.g. "I
was working on this to learn X ..." Everyone understands (well, everyone I
like understands) that creative people have lots of projects in various stages
of disarray.

3\. Target a few small/midsize startups, not the super-hot ones, and spend 1-2
hours to learn their product. I would be THRILLED to get an email from someone
who said "I love what you do, here's three things I would like to work on with
you to make it better, are you hiring?"

4\. Put up front your willingness/unwillingness to relo. If you have remote
working experience, give an overview of that. "Worked remotely for company X
for two years, with daily standups, weekly sprint meetings, monthly 3-4 day
visits, and two visits of 2 weeks duration 2x/year." That lets me know what
you're up for.

~~~
T-hawk
_> I would be THRILLED to get an email from someone who said "I love what you
do, here's three things I would like to work on with you to make it better,
are you hiring?"_

What's your company? I'd love to send you that kind of email. :) (My email
should be in the HN profile)

------
j_baker
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.

------
VeejayRampay
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
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
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
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>).

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/>

~~~
bambax
> _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
Sure, would be fun :-) I don't know many technologists around so far, but a
good idea!

------
cletus
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/>

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.

~~~
KaeseEs
The 10x figure is pseudoknowledge - something we "all know" that isn't
actually true (or that at least we have no good reason to believe to be true),
cf. <http://vimeo.com/9270320> . In brief: the study that it is ultimately
derived from had a tiny sample size (on the order of 30, to wit), and for
several reasons the experimental design would have invalidated its results
outside the very narrow original focus of the study (which was the relative
productivity of batch processing vs. interactive processing on the computing
systems of 1968) even if the sample size had been larger.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The 10X figure is true. My study is 30 years of working with a wide variety of
people in startup environments. Adding some people makes a project later.
Others can manage a whole project alone (if they are LEFT alone).

------
cheyne
^^ 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" ..

------
ameister14
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.

~~~
patio11
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
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
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/howyougonnakeepemd...](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/andrewbird/howyougonnakeepemdownonthefarm.html)
\- this song is now 95 years old, so I guess I better footnote it!

~~~
bambax
I may have missed a step in your reasoning but why are you assuming they have
to start with a "raw recruit"?

Why couldn't companies hire _actual developers_ with no previous experience in
{some_tech} or {some_framework} and train them in said tech/framework?

It seems companies, just like recruiters, feel safer when they hire a "rails
dev" for a "rails position" when in fact a good programmer with zero rails
experience would be much preferable to a mediocre programmer who has some
rails experience.

PS: the song is excellent but I couldn't find any recent cover; this old guy
with a Banjo is killing it: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlUExq2hNBU>

~~~
rmc
But developers know that they can learn on the job. So an offer of "half
regular salary, but we'll train you!" is not too appealing. Many companies
will just pay regular wages. So we're back to where we started.

~~~
bambax
You're right. What I meant is that companies trying in vain to find rails
developers should hire generalists, regardless of rails experience (at a
competitive, normal salary according to the skills/experience of the recruit).

It seems companies only advertise for specific languages or frameworks; maybe
they think they need someone capable of hitting the ground running, but if
they spend a year finding them... it's pointless.

------
HunterV
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
_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
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
Ah okay. I should have read the article more carefully. It still could have
been automated spam though :)

------
viseztrance
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
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?

------
PixelPusher
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.

~~~
benjaminwootton
I don't think expecting $100k+, benefits, telecommuting etc necessarily
indicates entitlement.

Most people in finance, senior managers, doctors, lawyers, architects,
management consultants etc wouldn't get out of bed for less than that,
especially in a big city with high cost of living.

I think its great that techies are starting to realise their value and grab a
piece of that for themselves.

~~~
PixelPusher
What dictates entitlement is asking or expecting something without actually
having earned it.

Obviously finance, doctors, and lawyers went to school for many years. They
earned it.

Developers, who can't even explain map/reduce or other important CS concepts,
have not.

~~~
RandallBrown
I can't explain map reduce. I generally know what it is but I've never needed
to use it or implement it.

That doesn't mean I'm not a good engineer. It just means I haven't done
something before.

~~~
PixelPusher
That's great, I don't expect an academic explanation but just having heard of
it is pretty good. That question by itself is not a deal breaker. An
'engineer' should at least know about things like data structures or just
anything beyond Rails. Most interesting problems require more than knowing how
to create CRUD apps.

------
guylhem
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.

------
allinzen
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!

------
jquery
s/Rails dev/dev/g

------
lifeisstillgood
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
What is "Cl"? Thanks.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
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
Oh duh! Thanks! I was reading it as C _L_.

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

