> You think it's hard to find programmers, at any given level of skill?
If it were easy to find programmers, you wouldn't have all these shops using spam-tactic recruiters to drive volume. They wouldn't need to.
It's most definitely a seller's market, if programmers can take their pick of corporate gig | freelancing | startup. My last job hunt took one hour. Their search went on for two months. If they fired me I could line up a dozen interviews next week, they'd still have to wade through a sea of unqualified/foreign/unmotivated alternatives.
It's not that I'm that good, I'm an entry-level Ruby guy working in a .NET shop. I interview well, but they interviewed a dozen guys before me. My job offer came the same day as the interview, after a token 4 hour wait. It's not that they were being overly selective, the pool they were fishing in was just that bad.
I don't know where you're getting the idea that it's a buyer's market for programming talent.
Maybe it is just perspective. I'm not good either, but I am a deep introvert that always botches interviews, and I've been job hunting for ~6 months, across the Internet. No network, I live in the middle of PA so no person-to-person tech sector without spending a few hundred dollars traveling, and I've been doing FOSS for a while now just biding my time so I have a portfolio to sell to get a 9-5 or go freelance (though I'd probably prefer the latter).
From my experiences, it is very circumstantial if you hit the ground running in a week like you said, or just get stuck in a mile of resumes, 3 week delays between responses with anyone from a 5 man startup to Amazon, and I think it is all about the network / school / area you are in. Besides being good, which I'm not either - that is kind of the golden ticket to glory.
Friend: If you can get the money together, get on a bus to Boston (many other cities will work, but that's my home base) and go on couchsurfing.com to find a crash pad. Show up, unannounced, at any of the many, many recruiting offices around here with link to a portfolio or github account and let them know you are looking for work. If you have even decent skill, you will have interviews within a day or two at most.
And I mention recruiters only because it will open your eyes to the possibilities. Much better, got to any of the many free meetups (check the "NERD center" calendar) that happen almost daily and you will find plenty of like-minded introverts to talk code and network with.
Whether or not you're actually good, I of course don't know. But don's sell yourself short. Take a shot. I did about five years ago and it was like being fired out of a cannon. Good luck to you.
> you wouldn't have all these shops using spam-tactic recruiters to drive volume.
I think those are unrelated concepts. I think connecting with the right pool of talent is an art, and a lot of shops are completely artless.
> It's most definitely a seller's market, if programmers can take their pick
Maybe I've been lucky, but I've never worked at a company that felt like we couldn't take our pick of applicants. Especially the lower down the scale we went.
> My last job hunt took one hour.
I have applicants for positions that don't exist. My applicant search takes negative time.
> If they fired me I could line up a dozen interviews next week
If someone quits, I can line up a dozen candidates next week.
> they'd still have to wade through a sea of unqualified/foreign/unmotivated alternatives.
Every day, you make judgements about which companies would be fun to work through - you're always doing that background processing.
> they interviewed a dozen guys before me.
So, as a Buyer, they had a line of candidates applying. Most of their problem was probably announcing to the world that they had an open position that people should know to apply to. That sounds like a Buyer's Market to me.
> I don't know where you're getting the idea that it's a buyer's market for programming talent.
The length of time I've seen open positions sit unfilled, and the number of applicants who'd be qualified to fill it.
In any market, a good that's sufficiently - well - "valuable" - will be picked up in no time. Congrats on crossing that threshold, I guess.
I'll be somewhat blunt - but this isn't meant as disrespect for you.
The software industry is highly bimodal. There are two very, very clear camps - you fall into the other camp than most HNers.
The market for mid-top end talent is a huge sellers market. There aren't enough people to go around, salaries inflate double-digit percentages every year, and crazily does not seem to be stopping.
The market for low-end warm-body coders is a huge buyers market. There are more clueless VB coders than there are seats; many, many more.
Do you, by any chance, work for a consultancy where innovation, code quality, or engineering excellence aren't exactly high up on the list of priorities? This may explain your glut of candidates - whereas on the other side of the industry fence companies are offering six-figures to fresh graduates and creating bidding wars around entry-level applicants?
I agree on the two camps ideology, and this is HN after all, so I'll ask - how to you get into the sellers market? I graduated with my CS degree with an ok 3.4 GPA recently, and I cast a wide net on jobs from Django to openCL, but everywhere I apply I either get cold shoulders, a 30 minute phone interview that never gets a response even with follow up, or rejection on a lack of project experience. I've been working FOSS for a few months now, and I hope that helps, but when you live in the middle of PA and not a big tech hot spot, have no networking contacts, and no desire to try to play founder-with-some-arbitrary-webapp-maybe-1mil-people-will-use-but-will-be-forgotten-in-a-year how do you get ahead?
Get very smart about who you apply to. Seriously, stop responding to ads right now and spend the next week studying job postings. Look carefully at every statement. Ask yourself, "why would someone put this in a job posting?" Don't just assume you know, think about it and ask yourself if there's something you missed. Memorize the posting, before you reply.
Then when you finally answer the ad, you'll be so far inside the person's head that it will look like God himself sent them the PERFECT candidate.
You need to be patient and to sharply cut down on the number of ads you're answering. So pick the good ones, the ads that look like they were written by engineers. The ones where you can see the thought processes of the people hiring.
In my job search, I sent out exactly one reply to exactly one ad, to the company that hired me.
Hang out in NY or Boston. Attend every meetup you can find and let people know you're looking for a job. You don't have to be super pushy. Just do it in the middle of explaining your background.
-“What kind of work do you do?”
-“I do this, this and this. I just graduated and I'm hoping to find some work or freelance gigs. You?”
Sorry about the late reply - I've been mostly cut off from the internet (mostly due to hotel charging exorbitant rate).
You've touched on one of the most involved and complicated questions in our industry. There are many qualified coders stucks on proverbial other side of the fence for no good reason.
The short answers, for me, is blind ass luck. I did well in high school, stumbled my ass (unintentionally) into what turned out to be a prestige school, stumbled into some interesting internships with well-known companies, and as a result attracted the attention of one of the "A-level" tech employers, whose name on my resume put me on the correct side of the fence (the employer is Amazon, btw).
It's not just the resume effect - being in said companies also puts you in a network of people already in the camp, which opens up networking and job opportunities also.
Being in the right camp is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. You get jobs at a particular level, with a particular type of employer, which in turn attracts more of that sort of employer. Unfortunately, the inverse is also true - if you're outside the camp, you attract the other employers, and your resume begins to look less and less like a resume from within the camp.
None of this particularly helps you, even if it does explain why you can't seem to get into the camp.
Here are some tips - but keep in mind that I've been in the camp from "the beginning" (i.e., right out of school) so I really cannot vouch, first-hand, how well these will work for you.
- Network more. A lot more. Look at technologies being used within the camp (Rails, Node, etc) vs. tech being used outside the camp (VB.NET, JavaBeans, etc), and learn according to where you want to be.
- Go to developer meetups hosted by companies/individuals in the camp. This community maybe small in Philly, but I'm certain it exists. This will reinforce both the learning and networking parts of above.
- Go to events in New York City, which is the closest tech hub available to you. There are events held all the time - hackathons, conferences, etc. Go, learn, make friends, network.
- After you've done this a few times you've probably collected at least a few cards from interesting companies. Hit them up, see if they're hiring, or if they know anyone hiring. Considering the severe, ridiculous high-end tech shortage in NYC, you will get substantial hits.
- Consider also traveling to NYC and crashing an AirBnb for a few days/week. Companies are a lot more receptive if you can talk to them face to face. If you can line up a few interviews beforehand, even better.
There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem for intelligent developers trapped in a less favorable city: you can't make it to in-person interviews in a more active city, so you have to cross a higher threshold to be interesting to employers there; you don't have the funds to move to a better city, so you need to find a local job; local jobs are both low-end and scarce, so you can't save the funds you need to move.
If you're in a small town, you need to network more. My preferred method of doing so is to hang out at Starbucks and shoot the breeze with whoever walks through the door. Eventually a job will fall into your lap.
I'll note that the salaries at some of the top companies have not been inflating that much. For them, it's a Buyer's Market. Like I said, perhaps I've been lucky with the companies I've worked at, and didn't even realize how fortunate I was.
> So, as a Buyer, they had a line of candidates applying. Most of their problem was probably announcing to the world that they had an open position that people should know to apply to. That sounds like a Buyer's Market to me.
Choice isn't all there is to it.
Let's say you're at a grocery store to get onions, but all the onions you see are terrible but really cheap. Being a discerning buyer, you decide to hit the next store. Same there too; more crap onions. It's like this at the next three stores. Finally you get to a store with decent onions, but they're 4x the price of normal onions. You, starved for choice and not willing to shop any more, despite the glut of onions, grab one and go home to make dinner.
This is a classic seller's market. The sellers with the goods command premium prices because there aren't that many of them at the quality that the buyer wants. Lots of crap onions to pick from, good ones are ridiculously expensive.
A buyer's market would be the other way around, there'd be lots of good onions, so you could get them at bargain rates.
I also think you might be misreading the fact that the company you work for is letting open positions sit. What this effectively means is that the workload hasn't gotten to the point where they have to take the next person that comes along. They can still afford to be discerning. If it goes on like this the workload will either get worse, at which point they will have to take the first guy that comes along, or they'll just stop looking, deciding they didn't really need a new guy. Both outcomes are exactly what happens in seller's markets, the buyer eventually gets fed up and takes a sub-par deal or walks away.
Perhaps, but honestly the wording lead me to believe he was referring to the practice of keeping job postings open for non-existent positions. It's a relatively common practice, albeit a questionable one IMHO.
The length of time I've seen open positions sit unfilled
There's an excluded middle here, where the ability of a company to choose correctly (avoid false negatives) is not a given, and that they are filtering properly in the first place (as I mentioned of a rockstar-seeking YC company elsewhere in this thread).
Are you in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere? Because there's nearly always a number of web designers out there serving even small-ish towns, sometimes even a shop or two. These designers are always looking for web programmers, because the freelance guys they use come and go. If you're a halfway decent coder, you'll have 80% of the small-town freelance market beat, and the other 20% will already have remote gigs. Sure, 90% of your work will be laying out HTML/CSS, in my experience, designers are terrible at it, but it beats flipping burgers.
Let me give you some perspective. I'm not "good", interviews are incredibly painful to me. I work at a big-corp right now doing perceptual computing which I'm very happy with. It's not Google in terms of public perception, but it's not extremely bad either. I tried job hunting a few months ago, interviewed at the big ones. The interviews went mostly well actually, but I didn't get a single offer. Basically, given my specialty, I have to be extremely good to get an offer. I can't apply to any job that has to do with the web or mobile, because the stuff I'm building in my spare time is not enough experience.
Basically, the more specialized you are, the more brittle your situation is. I also happen to be an immigrant, which together with the specialization means that for any given city, there might be 2-3 employers I can apply at tops. My plan going forward is to basically abandon my specialty in favor of a more common/in demand skill set.
Unqualified:
One of the questions they asked me was the difference between a TCP and a UDP packet. I assume this question tripped up earlier applicants.
Foreign:
On their ad, they specified that they couldn't sponsor H1-B Visas, because they had a lot of replies asking for that. They didn't want to deal with a language barrier.
Unmotivated:
I learned after I took the job that of those applicants that weren't A or B, the rest of them really wanted to work in games. They decided against hiring them because they were worried about the guy jumping ship as soon as a game job opened up.
I was the first guy they interviewed that didn't have any of these hangups, and jumped immediately on me, despite having no real previous experience with C#, .NET or other C-like languages. They offered me the top-end of my salary request range. I had nothing to negotiate. I can't imagine this having happened in anything other than a seller's market.
Companies unwilling to do H1B visa sponsorship probably are not refraining due to language barrier issues. There is a cost, both money and time involved that small shops simply can't afford.
> You think it's hard to find programmers, at any given level of skill?
Outside of the tech hub cities, yes, it can be very hard. Even just an hour out of Philadelphia, helping a local company offering $95k salary and benefits (well above average in their area), there were very few applicants and fewer actually qualified to do any professional programming. It took almost a year to fill a single developer position.
Programmers are a rare species in most of the country. My CS graduating class a few years back was probably 30-40 people and, having worked with many of them in various classes, many were completely incompetent, having only passed by copying and pasting or sharing code. The entire country graduated less than 10k people from CS programs in 2010.
> "helping a local company offering $95k salary and benefits (well above average in their area)"
I work for a NYC startup that has hired Philly residents in the past - either remote or remote-occasional-commute. Geographic salary fences are falling, and falling quickly - may I suggest $95K is below-market? Heck, around here $95K is below-market for a good, fresh undergrad.
Yea, that seemed off base. I work about a 40 min. outside of Philly and the going rate in my group is $100/hr...with some guys negotiating more than that. Not suggesting that that is normal in the area, but half that for senior devs isn't either.
> The entire country graduated less than 10k people from CS programs in 2010.
I've gotten into a debate with some friends about this: a degree on a resume is really great, but it's not necessary for the vast majority of programming jobs.
> helping a local company offering $95k salary and benefits
I hear that driving a truck in the North Dakota oil boom can earn you $150k, to start. Even in a Buyer's Market, you have to offer a realistic salary.
> well above average in their area
Average what? Average programmer?
> there were very few applicants
How did the company find candidates? I feel like a lot of companies expect applicants... This is like expecting the phone to ring and having someone ask you out on a date. Putting your profile up on Match.com isn't much better.
If you want to hire people an hour out of Philadelphia, have you considered training people who live an hour out of Philadelphia for the job?
Again, I've said this a few times, maybe I've been very fortunate to work at companies with enough gravitational pull, because we work hard to make sure people know they're supposed to apply. But since we've put that effort in, we have overly-qualified applicants lined up for openings that don't exist.
> many were completely incompetent
You just told me that CS graduates can still be completely incompetent, but then you expressed surprise that apparently degrees don't matter that much any more. =)
> You just told me that CS graduates can still be completely incompetent, but then you expressed surprise that apparently degrees don't matter that much any more. =)
In his defense, and as a recent grad with my CS degree this last year, the curriculum doesn't really sell itself at all for professional software development. Knowing algorithms / language theory / OS theory / theory in general doesn't mean you can throw together a Django app or use git. I had to learn those outside the classroom, because class projects were about convex hull and Monte Hall, not making useful software.
In 9 months since graduating I've gone from my favorite language being C, my experience being in Java and a smidgen of Swing (and still an incomplete knoweldge of the Java thread model, how to write for the JVM, and some others) I did know some CUDA / pthreads / openMP but from an elective on parallel systems, I had a touch of Python 2.7, and almost no sysadmin experience, to now my preferred language is Python3, I know and use qt for FOSS work, I learned html / javascript / C# / regular expressions / SQL / proper networking / the kde libs / pyside / simpy / numpy, I switched full time to Arch and learned Unix ground up, I learned about assembly, unicode, byte order marks, etc.
I never touched on any of that in school. Given, my school was a mediocre liberal arts place I went to just for the near-free scholarship, but I get the impression from other schools I encountered during ASM contests that the curriculum was similar.
> the curriculum doesn't really sell itself at all for professional software development
Oh, I completely agree. It's a Liberal Art, essentially. As opposed to a Trade School. I'm a huge fan of a liberal arts education, and I think the background of a Computer Science degree is fantastic, but I can't lie to myself that it's necessary.
I think the future is more mentorship, and once someone is a bit established in their career, that they will take continuing Liberal Arts education to improve themselves.
It was a class project my freshman year. I already knew the probabilistic parts to it from junior statics in high school, so I was bored out of my mind.
Where outside Philly are you? I'm in Berks and while I'm shopping everywhere from NY to SF for an entry position out of college, there is nothing close to any demand for developers I can find in these parts. Philly itself can be ok for positions, but outside the city seems like a barren wasteland.
Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. I'm absent a network, so I'm just using online job boards from Careers 2.0 to Dice to Linked In, and I just don't see anything.
You need that "network". And by "network", I mean people. Find someone you respect, at least professionally. Someone that impresses you. Someone that you'd be happy to pattern your professional self after. Solicit their advice. Listen to what they say. Earn their respect in return for the time they offer you. Good things will eventually happen. (Translation: they'll help you find jobs.)
If you feel that you've tried this and you can't find anyone, I see two options:
1. Establish these relationships online. HN is a good start. There's also no shortage of good software developers writing blogs. Interact with a few that you really respect. Comment on their posts. Connect with them on LI and Twitter. Email them. Taking it to a personal level where they'll feel the desire to go out of their way to help you could be difficult, but it's possible.
2. Move. If your present community truly is devoid of people you respect who would be willing to mentor you in some way, you need to switch it up and expand your circle of potential colleagues.
I was in that fortunate situation until last year. Now even that well has virtually dried up.
Some of the programmers in my team are fairly high profile within the community, but what they've been reporting back from conferences and meetups is "dude, half the people are trying to hire the other half..."
On what planet?