
Ask HN: What roles have you had the most difficult time filling? - ropman76
I am not personally looking for work but I was having a conversation with a friend and he was talking about a particular position he was having a hard time filling due to a lack of local people who have experience in that skill set.    So I am curious, what roles are you having a hard time filling on your team?
======
chollida1
People who know how to clean and work with large disparate datasets.

I guess its not surprising given how Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies
fame indicated that of his first 10 employee's almost half were cleaning data.

It's alot more difficult than people realize and you know right away that
someone has no real idea of the scale and difficulty of the problem when they
suggest that a shell script can solve most of the data issues.

I think Renaissance Technologies actually illustrates just how much a good
data cleaning and back testing platform is a real competitive advantage.

A couple of former RenTech people left for Millennium partners and for a
couple of years.

Even though these employees were good enough to work at RenTech and had
insights into the strategies employed there, they weren't able to be
successful on their own without the huge backtesting and data cleaning
framework at RenTech.

~~~
lastofus
What are some if the types of problems that needed to be solved when cleaning
data that required heavy tooling?

~~~
itronitron
Lots of data typically means streams of data, which means processes running
24/7 moving data and files around. Streams, connectivity, and processes can
cut out periodically which means you need some logic to reconcile and fill the
gap and also restart the processes. You will also need some data QA as it is
perfectly reasonable to get 'extra' data, either as duplicates or metadata
bleeding into content.

If your data is from disparate sources then you may need to normalize
timestamps across records from different sources, you may be dealing with
different languages, identical tokens that mean different things depending on
the source, different formatting of numeric fields, etc.

This is an incomplete list, the GP probably has a more exhaustive list of
problem types...

~~~
pcmaffey
ie a subset of Data Engineering role

------
souprock
Low-level hacker roles are hard to fill. For example, my posting on the "Ask
HN: Who is hiring? (January 2018)" thread is this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057016](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057016)

We get a little bit of luck with people who started hacking back when it was
normal to care about assembly language. For example, somebody on our team used
to write cartridge-based games for the Atari 800XL computer, which was an
8-bit home computer system. There are not a lot of people like that though,
and many of them don't want to move because they have settled down with houses
and family.

We get a little luck with people fresh out of high-end engineering schools
like Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech. Those schools still prepare students
for dealing with low-level hacking.

I think much of the trouble is that many people entering college have a focus
on games, web sites, and phone apps. Writing low-level code (hypervisor,
emulator, exploits, boot loader, OS kernel, compiler back end...) isn't
something that seriously enters the mind of the typical student. People pass
(or avoid?) their "Computer Architecture CS351" course with MIPS code, and
their "Operating Systems CS302" course with Minix, and then they forget that
stuff as fast as they can.

~~~
stevekemp
Your advert sounds pretty awesome, I used to do a lot of low-level coding back
in the day (first z80, then intel), and now I'm rediscovering my love after
starting to develop hardware-based projects with Arduinos and ESP8266 devices.

One thing that jumps out is that I know many of the tools you list, but I'm
basically AVR + Intel these days, so seeing all the architectures listed is a
bit overwhelming.

When I see posts like that though I always imagine it comes down to location
and salary. For the right price many people would move, if they're not local.

I've seen too many adverts where people want the kind of skills you'd learn
over 20+ years of industry employment, with a salary a teenager could live
off, and its not too hard to understand why the same jobs get posted year-in,
year-out. (Not that I'm accusing you of that, but it's a slippery slope, and
filling "impossible" jobs gets easier every time you increment the salary.)

~~~
souprock
The more of those things you can deal with, the better. We certainly don't
require a person to know about them all. We're trying to redundantly cover all
those skills with a few hundred people.

Hmmm. Maybe I'm scaring people off.

For example, we'd hire somebody who is fully focused on x86 if they are good
at that. The sort of level we'd be looking for is a person who can recognize
the common string.h functions in bare x86 assembly code.

The Arduino usually uses a ATmega8 CPU. I just encountered that CPU, not in an
Arduino, and might soon be dealing with it. Adaptability is really desirable;
this is a CPU that I've never dealt with before and I'm not about to wimp out.

The ESP8266 has a core based on the Tensilica Xtensa, which I've dealt with.

I think I heard somebody around the office dealing with a Z80, but I'm not
sure if I remember that right. Chances are, we've done Z80 work.

It's kind of fun to encounter a new CPU. It's especially neat to encounter one
for which step 1 is to write a disassembler.

I certainly do post the same jobs year-in, year-out. That doesn't mean we got
nobody. We need more than one person.

Lots of people really won't move. Maybe for a $million they would... but only
"maybe"! It is particularly hard to convince people on the west coast that
there is civilization elsewhere. There is a fear of being stuck if the job
doesn't work out, yet here I am in a city with at least half a dozen large
defense contractors and a whole bunch of cyberwar-related startup companies
and even some space program work.

~~~
stevekemp
I suspect you might find more applicants if you focused on family - e.g. look
for an x86 hacker, then a powerPC person, then a microcontroller person.

I'm not sure about American, but the Z80 was very very popular in the UK and
Europe, being at the heart of the ZX Spectrum and other 8-bit home computers
in the eighties (which is when I first got started, hacking games for infinite
lives, and removing protection systems).

But either way good luck, it sounds like you're doing fascinating things
though your niche is going to struggle it shouldn't be impossible. I know
local people who comparable levels of low-level work A/V companies, and
malware analysis.

