> If you really care which programming languages I already know or which applications I have used before, I can only assume that you're overlooking my ability to quickly pick up new technologies and adjust to new ways of thinking. I would encourage you to correct this, as it is a mistake.
I don't know that these questions are necessarily bad. Often, when I look to see what programming languages someone knows, it's to see if they're operating in the same ecosystem. If you've spent your career writing Java, Ruby, Python and Erlang, you're going to be miserable if I hire you to do ASP.Net and Sharepoint development. You'll probably be fine if I hire you for a Scala job.
You're also not going to be as experienced in the quirks and design patterns in that ecosystem / framework. I'm ok with hiring people who are smart enough to figure it out, but if I'm looking for a senior developer I want someone with some domain expertise who's not going to be learning hard lessons on the job. If it's an existing project, I may not have the luxury of picking the best tool for the job, so I may need to hire people who know the tools that we have. That includes not just the ability to pick up the technology, but knowing from experience how it behaves at scale in a full-stack configuration.
It depends on many factors, such as experience, learning abilities, and how well people work together. Speaking for myself, I can start becoming useful within my first morning using a new language or technology. Then, given that I'm working with people who enjoy sharing their knowledge, I can be up to speed with them in a week.
What I tend to dislike with the concept of prior knowledge before being let to work on something, is that in the vast majority of cases, once you join a team that has such a requirement, you notice their knowledge acquisition rate is currently flat; they've become stagnant themselves and are generally insecure about what they know and don't know; it's usually people with a currently flat learning curve who assume others need to know a technology prior to working on it; they're just projecting their static mindset onto others.
Some people eat new programming languages for breakfast if they have to. Deal with it?
> Some people eat new programming languages for breakfast if they have to. Deal with it?
Yeah, I understand that because I'm one of them. And this attitude is fine if you're a junior or mid-level developer; I usually just hire best-athlete for those positions for that reason. But if I'm looking for a senior developer, I need someone who has enough domain knowledge that they can come in and lead other people in using that technology. I'm not talking about small things, but if I'm hiring a senior developer for a data services group that uses Cassandra on the back-end, I want someone who at least has some experience building data services at scale with Cassandra (or some other schema-less NoSQL database tech). They need to be able to catch the mistakes that junior guys make.
It's also different if I'm starting something from scratch - you usually have enough of a runway that someone can develop the expertise along the way. But saying language and technology are irrelevant is just naive: the more senior we get, the more we have to specialize (well, either that or eject to the management track). There are simply too many technology stacks out there to do it otherwise.
Agree with all you say. I can pick up languages with ease, but my real value in a team is the baggage of burns I had fighting against the Java ecosystem.
Some day ago one dev here had trouble getting an image parsed, and I remembered being burn by it many years prior, and indeed was an issue with the in-container initialization order of ImageIO extensions. I see this happening more and more as I grew on. As Spolsky said (but I'm sure there were others) experience is having made all the mistakes in a domain.
Presumably in your first email to this guy, you'd say, "Hey, I'm looking for someone to do ASP.Net and Sharepoint."
Is it honestly that difficult to say what you're looking for up front? Or are you scared that when you tell someone that you're looking for those technologies, that they'd go away cause they're not interested?
You make good points, but I think they might be mostly applicable to someone whom you expect to be productive day 1, as in a contractor or on a project with an extremely tight deadline.
I have been in the microsoft ecosystem for many years, and then I did an internship at a Java shop. Granted, a lot of the things there were new to me, but most of them were parallels from the asp.net world. Even if you are looking for a senior dev, maybe start them out as intermediate for 3-6 months, and then re-evaluate them to see if they've caught up and deserve to be made senior at your shop?
> Even if you are looking for a senior dev, maybe start them out as intermediate for 3-6 months, and then re-evaluate them to see if they've caught up and deserve to be made senior at your shop?
That's hard to do in practice. Do you pay them as if they're an intermediate or a senior dev? If they're really a senior dev who just doesn't know your stack, then you're going to have to pay them senior money. What happens if they don't pick it up as quickly as you hoped, and you have an intermediate dev pulling down a senior dev salary leaving no budget to hire a real senior? That's an awful position to be in - development groups without strong technical leadership have high turnover and low velocity. It's almost always better to hire the right person up front.
Ideally you can promote from within for those types of positions, but not every company has a deep bench of talented people.
I love this. It's well-written, funny, and apparently it worked. It also fits quite well with how I like to see the world...
(The following is kinda a side note...) Some time ago, a friend told me "You are so lucky! You never apply anywhere - Companies come to your and ask you if you want to work for them!" Which is not entirely true, I do apply for projects, but...
I have been working as an independent consultant for almost 10 years now. And creating a steady stream of business is crucial for my survival. So I spend a lot of time - more than some are willing to spend on their hobbies - to make sure as many people as possible know me - and that they know what I can and what I cannot do for them. Also, that the right people know me.
I'm still not as good as it as I would like. But sometimes, good jobs "just" come to me. I can just tell you: It still requires a lot of work from my side. This work just doesn't include writing job applications / RFPs.
"Possess strong written, verbal and interpersonal communication skills. If you can't tell the difference between "you're" and "your", your never going to be able to get you're points across to me."
Whether or not that's a joke, as someone looking to hire people, I just can't be bothered to read on.
It clearly is a joke. I could see myself making the same joke when I'm in a playful mood. His other sentences are excellent, and he doesn't have other writing errors (disclaimer: not the best writer myself), that's enough proof for me. Also, he's communicating in a playful way the whole time. As cpfohl said in a similar vein: I think the joke acts as a disqualification for people who don't appreciate it, i.e. acting as a filter.
This is so true. I've discovered this as well since going back for my masters after working for a few years. It has gotten much harder to get a job now for some reason. Everybody thinks they're Google and make you jump through hoops. Just today I have a second interview with a company in a neighboring city and they expect me to travel there, do the interview and go back all in a day without any reimbursement for travel or hotel stay. And this is a big multi-national tech company. I have half a mind to just cancel it right now.
I think the best thing to do is have a kick ass portfolio on github and maybe do some personal branding on linked in and let these suckers come to you.
And yet, none of those articles get down to the simple meat of the situation: It's hard to recruit people because companies don't want to pay for them, they don't want to show any loyalty toward them, and they don't want to do simple stuff like help with travel to another city for the interview.
Haha, nice one! I created https://e.l1t3.com/pavelkaroukin after being tired seeing "Awesome opportunity with great pay" only to find out after hours of interview that pay is half of what I am making, or company is really boring, or people leave company after just a month in there because of management, etc.
You should ask for pay upfront when dealing with these out-of-the-blue offers (unless, IMO, SpaceX or someone of similar prestige walks up to me). If they won't tell you, you know to ignore them.
Great ending. Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there in the same boat. A complete waste of human talent that will hurt us in a decade or so.
Man, this hurt like a liver punch. I graduated about a year and a half ago.
Two years before graduation, I interned at a really big oilfield services company and they, engineers and managers, liked me despite a Van Wilder academic track (I spent 9 years in college for a 5 year degree. I failed to adapt to academia. I was just someone on which it is easy to apply those rules rarely applied on anyone).
I was to be hired if I applied after graduation. Right before I graduated, there was a law that was passed preventing people not from the cities where the oilfields are situated to be hired to work there. The local population (mostly without degrees) was protesting about why all the good jobs went to people from North of the country while they, in the South (where oilfields were), didn't have that chance.
There were also protests from people without degrees about why it takes a degree in the first place, or the ability to speak English, to be hired by those companies. Uhm, because NMR and Gamma rays are neat things?
This created tension at a critical time, and the Government pushed for a law requiring any new hire by the oil companies to be someone from the area (without consideration to qualifications). That's the Government standard operating procedure.
So I was jobless because the company who wanted to hire me couldn't hire me because I was born in the wrong area according to a law that was passed to reduce unemployment. I didn't fail to be amused by the irony of joblessness due to joblessness reducing measures.
Now, I reached out to some people to circumvent that. I needed a card to be able to work there. They set out to procure me that card. I waited, a lot, mainly because, to worsen the situation, the instance delivering the cards was investigated for "selling" 3,000 jobs.
You see, some people complained about not finding work or a lot of companies "giving" jobs for people they know.. So there was this idea to create a Government instance that would do arbitrage: Companies would send them job offers. People looking for work would register with the organization. Then the organization would play match-maker and send the companies applicants who correspond to their profile. This is how it was supposed to work to prevent HR people in those companies to sink in nepotism.
How it worked in real life though was that the organization hid the offers and sold them to job applicants willing to pay. Beautiful.
Again, my problem was that the company wanted to hire me, but I needed the card from the government organization of that specific place, which was investigated for selling jobs to people instead of simply connecting them.
I didn't fail to be amused by the irony of this, too. Jobless because the instance that should connect the unemployed to the employers is under investigation for trying to squeeze a profit from it.
And then, to make things worse, again, a law was passed to prevent people from being hired if they're not squared away as to their Military Service. We have compulsory conscription here. I tried to avoid it because I thought that the company I was going to work with had an age limit for the position (28 years old) and I was 27 years old. I thought that going to the Military for one year (it used to be 2.5 years) would make me too old, so I decided to apply for the job first. If you fail to show up after three letters, the Military can snatch you as you are (so if you went to buy stuff and, at a check-point, someone stops you and finds out you failed to show up, you are taken on the spot, in the clothes you have with you, to a Military base). I'm not really dodging the Military Service: if my country was at risk and they really needed more people to bear arms and actually kill terrorists, I would do it without question. But most people spend a year there doing nothing and sometimes are sent back for different reasons.
As I waited, I decided to work on a project to enable mobile subscribers to send airtime to other subscribers who are on a different network (say from Verizon to AT&T). I started the project to learn Python (github.com/jhadjar/uniflex). I abandoned it because there are limitations only carriers can lift and they lack the incentive to do so (that's why I didn't go the route of USSD commands or added value provider, because I'd eventually need their consent to enable the transfer). I put the code up as it was (it sucks because it was still a rough draft and that was the first thing (useful, real) I write).
Now, I'm still looking for work. The only companies worth working with, here, are in the oil business since the salaries other companies offer are petty (I made more in a part-time job with my buddy as a student). And these companies like to hire Engineers fresh out of college, provide expensive training, and then make a return on investment. The ROE is rapidly made since quotes are high and the Engineer's training is paid for rather quickly.
Other companies, though, tend to prefer people with experience. Or post ridiculous job offers for people without experience that only require a `mastery` of C, C++, Java, and a bunch of other things, even for a web design position.
Reading those offers, I get the impression that people actually do tech in my country. I lived here long enough to know better. It only means those who write those job offers are clueless as to what is required for a specific job, and clueless enough to accept someone fresh out of college saying he has `mastery` of C/C++ (most think it's the same for they only have C classes here) because he wrote a couple of programs in college. We went to the same classes and the people who put `mastery` are the same who capitalize `INCLUDE`.
It's also sad that I worked at a school that didn't require I provide a degree, teaching something I don't have a degree for, for a salary that was like 4 times what most those lame companies offer.
I'm also working on a project (in Python) that would appeal to companies who do a lot of banking operations (but again, since not all banks offer electronic forms, I need to make them change their forms and there need to be strong incentives so I started with those who already have electronic forms (XLSX)).
When I read job offers for Engineering on here or elsewhere, they feel like a dagger in the heart because I don't know anything deep enough. I started programming at 9 and for Electronics in college, but one here ends up worrying more about if his exam sheet is going to be graded by te teacher who doesn't like him, than technical proficiency (just an example: A teacher of mine gave me a failing grade because I didn't write in x86 assembly language "the way she does". We used the A86 compiler for a class, I read the whole doc. She used MASM's style and directives to write stuff for A86. In the exam, I wrote correct code, with comments explaining why I wrote what I wrote the way I wrote it, even citing page numbers of the doc). She gave me 5/20). The system is also rigged: for example, they don't display grades until the period for any possible plea to regrade your paper is expired. Many don't even bother to grade papers and give you an estimation of what they think you could get (many get the same grade they did the semester before, if one gets a high grade when he had a low grade in first semester, it's considered cheating). Of course, you can't complain to anyone since these teachers have been there for 30 years, are buddy of the dean or the Minister (they're not going to jeopardize their relationship for a student who won't be there in a few years), and you're the kind of students who's frequently absent (6 hours daily in transportation to get to and come back from college where most teachers suck and density of information/unit time is tiny is no fun). Just a few examples as to the ways you can waste time dealing with issues instead of focusing.
Sometimes I wonder why I haven't studied abroad where you only have to worry about things like exams and papers, you know, normal stuff.
Then again, it could be worse and I'm not dead yet. Sorry for the rant but I needed to laugh a little bit. Writing this helped.
I don't know that these questions are necessarily bad. Often, when I look to see what programming languages someone knows, it's to see if they're operating in the same ecosystem. If you've spent your career writing Java, Ruby, Python and Erlang, you're going to be miserable if I hire you to do ASP.Net and Sharepoint development. You'll probably be fine if I hire you for a Scala job.
You're also not going to be as experienced in the quirks and design patterns in that ecosystem / framework. I'm ok with hiring people who are smart enough to figure it out, but if I'm looking for a senior developer I want someone with some domain expertise who's not going to be learning hard lessons on the job. If it's an existing project, I may not have the luxury of picking the best tool for the job, so I may need to hire people who know the tools that we have. That includes not just the ability to pick up the technology, but knowing from experience how it behaves at scale in a full-stack configuration.