

How To Get A (Programmer) Job "In This Economy" - AmberShah
http://www.codeanthem.com/blog/2010/06/how-to-get-a-job-in-this-economy/

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petercooper
_I contacted a company that I had done interviews with but had been biding
their time. I let them know that I needed to make a decision NOW and I really
wanted to work them, and so pretty please hurry up, thankyouverymuch._

So the TL;dr is "give companies you interviewed with who never got back to you
a kick in the ass." The other assertions are conjecture with no connection to
the parable.

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eventhough
TL;DR If you are a great programmer, you will find a job regardless of how the
economy is doing.

~~~
petercooper
That's true of every job, no? You wouldn't see the top 0.1% of archaeologists,
paleontologists, or even aromatherapists out of work for long.

~~~
alanstorm
I know a lot of good copy editors who are out of work.

~~~
petercooper
_Great_ copywriters at the top of their industry?

~~~
starkfist
you can be a great copywriter and be out of work in a good economy. in
contrast, when the economy is good, anyone with a pulse can get SOME
programming job. when the economy is bad, you have to know how to do
fizzbuzz...

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smltalk
If you're good, you'll get a job. I agree about SV job market. I'm getting
pinged by recruiters everyday, mostly for Hadoop and Java work.

~~~
strlen
It's amazing how many cold calls you get if you mention Hadoop in your
LinkedIn profile or resume. It's also a bit myopic: the strength of Hadoop and
MapReduce in general is a simple, scale agnostic programming model. I can give
somebody Tom White's book and they'll be able to write working code in few
days.

My team uses Hadoop extensively, but while a background with Hadoop never
hurts (it's a great system that solves a difficult problem, but it has many
quirks and rough edges that need to be worked around) it's much more important
that the candidate is a great programmer and has domain specific skills (in
data processing, information retrieval, machine learning, statistics,
numerical analysis -- the tasks you typically use Hadoop for).

Asking "how do you compute <some function> over <some dataset> on a cluster of
unreliable, commodity machines, communicating through message passing" is a
much better interview question to use than "what is the difference between
TextInputFormat and SequenceFileInputFormat" and "what is the interface you
implement to specify a custom partitioner and how do you configure the M/R job
to use it".

~~~
fizx
Yeah, but its a practical necessity to have at least one person on the team
who really groks hadoop, and has experience with the "quirks and rough edges."
I wonder how many of the companies calling you need that person, or are just
looking to add more programmers.

~~~
strlen
> Yeah, but its a practical necessity to have at least one person on the team
> who really groks hadoop, and has experience with the "quirks and rough
> edges." I wonder how many of the companies calling you need that person, or
> are just looking to add more programmers.

This is true for an architect or principal-level position (but how frequently
do people hire _externally_ via a recruiter for that? Typically such people
are promoted from within or are referrals), but if you need somebody to
develop data infrastructure (whether on top of Hadoop or not) Hadoop
knowledge, while very useful (more so than for a data application development
position), is still secondary to ability to reason about distributed systems
(a parallel and asynchronous system lives in an Einstenian universe with each
processing having its own frame of reference, as opposed to a synchronous
shared memory system which lives in a Newtonian universe with an absolute
frame of reference), understanding of storage hardware/operating
systems/memory management/network communications (other important domain
specific skills) and general programming (particularly being able to come up
to speed with a large, fast changing open source code base).

You're right however, at times companies may be looking to sex up a position
to attract enthusiastic but young/inexperienced developers who don't
understand that learning any specific technology is not as important as
learning new concepts or being up to speed on new technologies in general (a
narrow focus of one company may put one out of touch with the overall
technology curve).

------
krakensden
"Don't suck" is good advice, but only to people who don't have a problem
anyway.

------
shalmanese
Pretty much everyone I'm talking to is saying this is the hottest job market
in Silicon Valley in the last 5 years.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, I think he drew the wrong conclusion in this particular case. It's not
that "this economy" is terrible but he succeeded due to his personal unique
excellence, but probably more that the perception his friends/family had of a
bad job market is not actually correct for tech. I mean he might be amazing
too, but he nonetheless succeeded in a good job market.

It's actually not really a bad job market for most white-collar professionals.
If you look at the job losses and the unemployment rates, the people who are
having a tough time in the current economy are mostly blue-collar workers
without college degrees. A strange exception seems to be law, which has
somehow ended up with an unexpected oversupply of new grads.

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steveklabnik
It's a coder's market, at least in my town... I wonder if it indicates any
sort of general bounce back in the economy.

~~~
SkyMarshal
As long as the govt continues to prop up the financial system and economy,
sure. But somehow I doubt that's going to last. Still too much bad debt out
there.

~~~
steveklabnik
While I generally agree with your comment, it's kind of a non-sequitor. These
jobs are all startups, either doing well or with funding. They don't have any
connection to all that shenanigans.

~~~
nostrademons
But they do have a connection to that shenanigans, at least to the extent that
government spending does eventually "trickle down" through the economy. By
propping up firms through direct fiscal injections and bailouts, they prevent
the employees of those firms from losing their jobs. Those employees then
continue spending, at least more than they would've if they'd been laid off.
The businesses that receive that money do better than they otherwise would've,
they make investments that they'd clamp down on if they perceived the economy
was in the toilet, and that makes its way to technology startups.

~~~
eru
On the other hand, the state has to levy more taxes (or crowd out other
investments in the capital market), if it spends.

~~~
nostrademons
Well, in practice it never actually does levy more taxes for its spending, and
the crowding out of the capital market is kinda the point, since firms cut
their capital investments during a recession anyway.

In the long run, it'll be detrimental to the economy, because firms would
otherwise shift their capital investments and the government's deficits and
artificial support prevent that adjustment from happening. But in the short
run - which I think is what this comment thread is talking about, since it's
predicting another dip once the stimulus is withdrawn - it really does make
for an improvement.

~~~
eru
> Well, in practice it never actually does levy more taxes for its spending
> [...]

Sources? On the other hand, Germany and the UK have increased e.g. VAT in
recent years.

~~~
nostrademons
Hyperbole.

But OTOH, you need only look at the spiralling U.S. govt deficit to see that
just because they spend more doesn't mean that they'll raise taxes to cover
it. Source on _that_ :

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_progressivity_in_federal_income_tax)

Since about 1960, the top tax bracket has almost uniformly gone downwards, as
has the bottom tax bracket, except for a slight blip around 1989. We know what
that did to Bush Sr's reelection campaign.

~~~
eru
The USA is very special, because they happen to own the printing presses for
the reserve currency of the world. Most other governments can't go that route
for that long.

