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How Do You Find Programming Superstars?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Feb 27, 2008 05:06 PM
from the can't-beat-a-human-signal-to-noise-filter dept.
from the can't-beat-a-human-signal-to-noise-filter dept.
Joe Ganley writes "You are a programming superstar, and you are looking for work. I recognize this happens relatively rarely, which is part of my problem. But stipulating that it happens, how do I, as a company looking to hire such people, connect with them? Put another way, how do you the programming superstar go about looking for a company that seems like one you'd like to work for? The company I work for is a great place to work; we only hire really great people, we work on hard, interesting problems, and we treat our employees well. We aren't worried about retention or even about how to entice people to work here once we've found them. The problem is simply finding them. The signal-to-noise ratio of the big places like Monster and Dice is terrible. We've had much better luck with (for example) the Joel on Software job boards, but that still doesn't generate enough volume." What methods have other people used to find the truly elite?
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Submission: How do you find programming superstars? by Anonymous Coward
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Uh (Score:5, Funny)
Appeal (Score:5, Funny)
That, or go trawling through the strip-clubs near Boston.
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Re:Appeal (Score:5, Insightful)
So you advertise on the basis of the interesting work that you're doing, and aim for the ears of someone who has been itching to build such things rather than talking about the creature comfort and monetary perks.
Great people want strong leadership that will help them achieve beyond what they can do alone.
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Re:Appeal (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd take a step back on that one. Before they're "programmers superstars", they're usually college graduates. Start by trolling for college students. Lower your needs from "must be" to "can be" and take those who actually enjoy programming and build them up into superstars by putting them in your super company. They'll probably turn into Superstars in no time if your company is as good to work for as you describe.
Cheers,
Fozzy
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Re:Appeal (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Appeal (Score:5, Interesting)
What businesses should realize is that students have a lot of energy but no experience and a lot of them lack the grit to finish when it gets boring.
A good seasoned program + 2 interns is a good combination. The interns do not argue with the good programmer all the time or try to put their "stamp" on the project. They just code a LOT and learn a LOT from the seasoned hand.
It is so sad, here in 2008, to STILL see companies pay $150 an hour to a consulting firm for recent college grads who lack any experience in thinking ahead 5 years.
I'm a good programmer- but there ARE superstars. I've known a few. They tend to be fanatics and don't work so well in teams. They write superior code, quickly. They are not so great on huge projects (unless paired with novices as above) because they get on each others nerves.
A good team needs one superstar with authority to decide things, a few solid programmers to catch the mistakes the superstar does make, and an equal amount of rookies.
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Re:Appeal (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
I've worked with people like this. No matter how much you try to encourage them to follow good design, they will continue to just ignore all good sense. A typical example is a former coworker of mine who was asked to make a small change to an app that sent out email notifications. He needed to make a slight change to take care of one particular circumstance, so he copied an entire class (hundreds of lines of code) and changed exactly one line to do what he wanted.
When this code later broke (due to that single line) we asked him about it and he denied even writing it. We looked at source control and it was definitely him. (This in itself was surprising because he often deployed changes without checking in code. We tried many times to tell him never to do that.) I asked him why he had copied an entire class just to change one line when it was trivially easy to modify the class to handle both situations. He said he just wanted to get it done. I told him it probably took him longer to do it the way he did it. He just shrugged.
How do you respond to someone like that? I'm sorry, but he will never be a good programmer. Some people just don't have it in them. He was a very nice guy, but he was a terrible programmer.
Thankfully, most of my coworkers do have it in them. I've been privileged to work with some great people. But it's pure fantasy to think that everyone is capable of being a decent programmer.
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I'll one-up you with a car analogy. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Appeal (Score:5, Insightful)
Because
1) You can't teach hard working programmers the creativity needed to come up with novel solutions to hard problems, where the right creative solution can net orders of magnitude better performance and/or reliability. The rough order here can be of a better PhD thesis or Digital labs paper (but with more attention to reliability).
2) Experience productizing solutions _well_ is needed to build reliable complex software. I know of distributed systems groups that had to flush their first products due to algorithmic bugs and others that needed heavy operator support to keep things running because inexperienced groups lacked sufficient practical background in simulation.
The best you can do is grow people towards their potential. Some engineers have a creative mindset and will solve problems when given a description, with the size of the problem dependant on experience and aptitude. You can get them working on bigger and bigger problems with more attention paid to practical concerns. Some engineers can implement something given a description (smells like a log structured file system, with a separate log for B+ tree nodes). You can teach them better engineering discipline.
>Why? Because if you hire savants, they'll do their work in 10 minutes and bill you for 2 hours because that's the time it takes for everyone else to build the same amount of code.
If you pick their brains on an as-needed basis on what you think is important, you'll be paying $500 for their 4 hour billable minimum and not getting fringe benefits.
If you actually hire them and they have interest in how the product and company go, they'll work 60-80 hours a week (it's not about the money) for options on
If you're solving the same problems over and over again, it doesn't matter and they wouldn't be interested.
If you have something that's too hard for other companies to pull off, the right handful of gurus can mean the difference between success and failure.
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Re:Appeal (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Appeal (Score:5, Insightful)
The firm that realizes that is golden in my book.
When it comes to any form of engineering I would take a good process over any amount of talent. Talent is what I want in an artist not someone building complex technical devices (including software). Yes it would be nice to have both, but if you have to give up one don't make it the process.
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Simple answer... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Simple answer... (Score:5, Interesting)
The superstar is more than just somewhat hard to come by.
First, they are only going to be 1 out of every 100 programmers you work with. And that is only if you are lucky, and if you are good at hiring. If you hit job boards, you aren't good at hiring. (with apologies to the job board advertisement that is almost definitely above this post
Second, they can almost never identify themselves. Lots of people THINK they are the superstar. But then they get very little actually accomplished. These are the people I've lost to Google. But the superstar does much more than just know the tech details. They actually get stuff done. And their code really really works. And it is highly reusable. And they change others around them. The always make sure the best tools are in place, and they get others to use those tools, not just themselves. In this sense, they are also quite good leaders, although most do not want to manage large teams (and you'd be wise not to have them do so).
I've probably worked with 1000-2000 programmers in my lifetime, and I think I would give only about 10 of them the "superstar" status.
The superstars produce 2x to 10x what a very good programmers can produce in the same amount of time.
As far as finding and hiring them, the biggest problem is that they are very rarely on the market. So job boards are a bad place to start.
Just about all (maybe even 100%, actually) of the superprogrammers I've hired have come from friend referrals.
Go to your current employees, and give them very big checks if they can attract other programmers to your firm. Make sure this is worth their while (ie: $10,000 or more for bringing in someone). This will almost always be your best bet to find these guys.
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Change the others around them: Bingo! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've met very few superstars and this more than anything else set them apart as someone I would want on my payroll.
You want people who can lead by example, without even trying.
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Re:Simple answer... (Score:5, Insightful)
If anyone knows how to locate superstar programmers in the first place I'd love to hear it. Once I have one on the phone I have a fighting chance to hire him, but you certainly can't spot them from their resumes.
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Re:Simple answer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every superstar I've ever known would run at either of those two thoughts. Cash is nice, but superstars are superstars in part because they love programming. So yes, they do want to be programming in 10 years. They may want to be lead programmer and be paid more, but that's about it.
As for the religion part of your comment- well, it shows your bias, but its absolutely not true.
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Re:Simple answer... (Score:5, Insightful)
The original poster of this disussion hasn't specified what the nature of the work is - is it user-interface - is his company designing the next killer application. Then they would need someone who knows how to design and implement really polished application UI's.
Are they looking for someone to implement highly computational intensive core libraries - then maybe a programmer with Matlab experience or someone with a mathematics background would be more suitable.
Or are they looking for someone to write general purpose libraries that can be reused - then someone with good object-oriented design experience would be best.
If they are just looking for a programmer to implement specifications, then looking a someone who has done similar ework in a final year project or thesis would be a good place to look.
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One opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
The first thing to do is remove arbitrary barriers. IE, "must" have X years of experience, X degree, held X previous positions, must move to our area. That's the sum of major mistakes most operations make. The best programmers in the world don't typically get that way by being just another college / job drone (though some do... just don't slam the door based on mundane requirements - you want the problem solved, not a title you can be proud of.)
Secondly, market the job — make sure people can find out about it. That's perhaps obvious, but I know a lot of companies that try to stick to the back alleys of old boy's clubs, and it's no wonder they can't find anyone. Put an ad, a BIG one, somewhere programmers go a lot. Like slashdot. :-)
Third, salary, salary, salary, and benefits (particularly insurance and family coverage). Move 'em if you have to. We've even bought houses outright for our programming team members. You can't expect to hire a superstar by treating them like a drone.
The problem is almost always that really good programmers don't have to go looking, and if they do, they can - and will - turn their noses up at being treated like a commodity. Yet that's just what most companies do. Plus they throw up arbitrary and unrelated barriers to entry. Unfathomable, really.
Re:One opinion (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:One opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Attitude, attitude, attitude!
I won't take a job where the person interviewing treats me as if they are doing me a favor in offering the job. They are after me, not the other way around. Even if I need the job, I'll never portray it like that. It is they who need me even then. Call it arrogance if you will but I'm not into indentured servitude.
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Re:One opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I have heard one or two that were programming problems in disguise, I would argue that even in those cases your riddles are worthless to determine their skill, and anyone would be well within his sanity to respond "well, I'd look it up online. Why waste time figuring it out when the answer is done for me?".
A great programmer will love to talk shop. Have one of your existing coders talk to him.
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Re:One opinion (Score:5, Funny)
But they're so much fun to ponder in a non-riddle context.
"Why does a farmer have a wolf? How can a 5lb chicken eat a 50lb bag of grain? How is he able to prevent the wolf from eating the chicken when he's present?"
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heh, if you ask riddles (Score:5, Funny)
I did-like the riddle portion of an interview. Often given by people who thuink that are good at riddles.
Example you responses I have given":
"How man quarters would it take to fill this room"
4 (I had to explain this answer at the end of the interview. )
"How would you move MT. Fuji"
"Am I going to work at Microsoft?"
alternate answers:
"Hire David Copperfield"(This gets a laugh)
"Convince the boss guy who sold that project to fire his sales team"
"Spec out the task, come up with a rough number, 500 Billion, after it is about 'half way through' Use the "Managed 500 Billion dollar project" on my resume to get a higher paying job somewhere else.
Yes, I know the answer there looking for, but really who doesn't?
I just remembered one that really pissed off the person interviewing:
I can't believe I ahd forgotten theis.
You have a farmer and chiken and a fox, only two of which can cross the river, but the chicken and fox can't be together without the farms.
I picked up the phone, hit speaker, called a buddy of mine and had him put on his 9 year old son, who I repeated the question to and he answer in about 30 seconds
My friend and his wife where laughing hysterically.
After which I hung up, told them this was a great interview now I know for sure I never want to work here, and left.
The word "Livid" comes to mind when thinking of there reaction. speechless would be another.
One guy was literally sputtering....ah good times.
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Re:One opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't necessarily agree with all of the points made because I've seen research show otherwise and have experienced otherwise myself.
The first thing to do is remove arbitrary barriers. IE, "must" have X years of experience, X degree, held X previous positions, must move to our area.
This part I agree with. Many hiring agencies shoot themselves in the foot asking for very specific requirements (must have 5 or so years experience with C++, must know domain specific but stupid tech with buzzword acronym, etc). The problem is you're always going to train an employee and there will always be some sort of lag time to start up. You're rarely going to get an employee who will be spitting out production quality work on day 1. If that was possible we'd all be contractors. What organizations should be after are highly qualified technical learners and a good foundation in software engineering practices.
Secondly, market the job -- make sure people can find out about it. That's perhaps obvious, but I know a lot of companies that try to stick to the back alleys of old boy's clubs, and it's no wonder they can't find anyone. Put an ad, a BIG one, somewhere programmers go a lot. Like slashdot. :-)
This in practice sort of works but not as well as you'd expect. If you post the job, the only people interested will be people actively seeking a job. Everyone else will just gloss over it because it is more of a waste of time than anything else. It's like commercials.
Third, salary, salary, salary, and benefits (particularly insurance and family coverage). Move 'em if you have to. We've even bought houses outright for our programming team members. You can't expect to hire a superstar by treating them like a drone.
There's a limit to how much you can bribe someone. Furthermore, just because you bribed them does not necessarily mean they will perform. You ideally want a match: you like them, they like you, for reasons other than money. For example what if you got paid to hack together open source linux code at home and you just happened to be a kernel dev? What if you got paid to work on your fancy game idea without any restrictions? Most people would rather do the job they enjoy for decent pay rather than get paid a boat load of money to do something they could care less about or worse hate to work with.
The easiest, cheapest, and most reliable way for a company to find quality employees is by word of mouth and employee referrals. This makes sense. If you were to start your own company from scratch, what would you rather do? Dig into the back of your mind across every trust-worthy and awesome programmer you worked with or interacted with and convince them to join you, or go through a lengthy hiring process about people you know jack about? I would rather do the former because I have personal work experience with the people I know that I don't even have to ask for a resume or guess if they're lying or not. I also probably have some sense of their personality and quality of work. In fact, I can easily make a decision in the back of my mind without even contacting them. The only barrier is if they would be willing to accept the offer.
I'm not surprised this is getting asked on slashdot, but I do think that slashdot lacks the expertise to answer it correctly. If you want a better answer to what truly works, you need to get in contact with an HR agency on a personal level rather than a business level. Yes, that's right, you need to know a friend that works in the HR or head-hunter business--if you come to them from the business front they will treat you like a customer rather than a friend so they'll skew everything they say towards supporting their business. But if they are more a friend they will easily be able to tell you things like success rates and employee turn over rates because that is what they deal with. People on slashdot often are just in front of their computers all day and don't g
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Re:One opinion (Score:5, Funny)
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quality vs quantity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:quality vs quantity (Score:5, Funny)
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It takes a good software guy to know one (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming you already have a couple good guys on staff (but how do you know they are good?
Re:It takes a good software guy to know one (Score:5, Interesting)
Class A people hire class A people
Class B people hire class C people
I think that is spot on.
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Re:It takes a good software guy to know one (Score:5, Funny)
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Linkedin (Score:5, Funny)
(Dodges ballistic vegetable matter)
Not a programmer here but... (Score:5, Insightful)
My suggestion would be to use a headhunter, sure they are expensive but you get matched up with quality people that match your business philosophy. Also to you job seekers out there I would suggest finding and hitting up Head Hunters. I have had extrordinary success with em on both sides of the table.
Get lucky, or hire young (Score:5, Insightful)
the 2 best strategies for having a high hit rate with your new hires:
1. hire young - bring people in as interns/coops and use their term as a 6 month interview - this can give you a great insight into their potential
2. poach - has anyone else in your organization worked somewhere else? find out if there are any excellent people from previous jobs looking for work
Re:Get lucky, or hire young (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, those who think the best candidates are fresh out of school are power-hungry narcissists. They want fresh minds so they can indoctrinate their experience in the manager's image. You never forget your first. So, you have fresh minds who want experience: perfect captives. They do things your way and no better and you still get to blame them for mistakes and take credit for their accomplishments. You don't have to deal with any alternative viewpoints that might undermine your authority, so the Peter Principle is safe in your back pocket.
Don't listen to this guy, he's probably only an aspiring manager anyway.
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In 3 Ways... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, universities do not look for supergenius professors (if not only for label "Nobel prize winner"), they are mostly looking for a person who will be able to get grants
Supergeniuses are good in the environment that does not require any results any soon. That's the way they work.
Normally people are looking for good workers with a good experience able to fit in the environment.
I am actually glad that in my line of work there is no obsession with top level performers, like it happens in showbiz. As a result a lot of people are paid quite well.
grow your own thru training! (Score:5, Insightful)
We use the old boys network (Score:5, Interesting)
So go to the experts at your current job, the people you REALLY respect, and ask them if they know someone. If they say no, then they're probably LYING, and you just don't have enough to draw their friends. Try to find out why, and fix that. Then those same people you asked will begin suggesting people.
If you don't have experts at your company, cast your web out to all the experts you know, and offer to pay people what they're worth. You may have to pay enough to relocate someone. That can get expensive. Say you'll do it.
This is in conjunction with the advertising of the job, not in lieu of it.
Start an open source project (Score:5, Interesting)
How Do You Find Programming Superstars? (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't that be sort?
Make sure their shoes don't match their belts (Score:5, Funny)
Real programming superstars, usually love coding so much they take precautions so that they are not accidentally promoted to have management responsibilities like tracking vacation requests and authorizing the expense accounts. So they make sure their belts don't match their shoes, their pants, if and when they wear it, are never ironed. If they are forced to wear ties, they pair it with half sleeved shirts. They are the the programming superstars. But be prepared for huge number of false positives.
Rarity requires a different approach (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't find me ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously.
I haven't had to 'look' for a job (i.e. interview with more than one company) since the early 90s. I have a network, and if I want to change jobs, I ask the people I respect the most (and who I think have respect for me) if there is anything out there. (Changed job 5 times due to corporate changes such as mergers, acquisitions and startup failures.) Usually my income went up, but I took a cut in pay for the last one because the company appears to be that much fun to work for.
People who are truly superstars are probably working at a job they like and you won't be able to budge them *unless* you have an open pocketbook or something 'Google-like' that would appeal to someone who can get a job anywhere. Or something has changed (or their patience has just run out) and in a month or two will have another one through people they already know.
My suggestion is if you want a superstar, start networking with the people YOU know and respect the most. Maybe your network and a prospective employee's network will connect somewhere. That's how I got this one. A guy I know knew about this job and let me know about it because he thought it was something I would be interested in and knew that my company was going through an acquisition and thought I might be looking.
Production Abstraction (Score:5, Insightful)
Every good programmer's worst nightmare is to step into a new job bright-eyed and ready to be creative, only to be told that their function will be to learn and maintain a piece-of-crap monstrosity that someone else created. Make it crystal clear that this is not the situation they are being hired into.
...as far as "where to find them"...The same principle that applies to "getting hired" (i.e. networking is always the best) also applies to hiring. Ask your five best programmers to give you the names of some of their friends and don't be afraid to aggressively go after them and lure them away from their current gig.
Non-technical interviews (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking for a job straight out of uni, I did a lot of interviews heavy on the technical side. Looking back, I'm not sure what the point was. They could already see how good I was at technical learning from my degree. The major difference between programming academically vs industry always seems to me to be that in industry you're programming for users other than yourself. In most academic situations you've got fairly clear user requirements of what the software must do. Most of the work I have done since then has begun with vague ideas about what the system needs to accomplish. Getting from there to coding a system that meets the requirements is very much like that question in the interview - 'how would you tackle it?'.
Any technical questions will allow any good programmer to just fall back into answers they know. You'll be swamped with applicants who look good but are only mediocre.
You don't. They find you. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://mozy.com/contest [mozy.com]
What you have to be prepared for is the unexpected winner:
http://uphpu.org/pipermail/uphpu/2006-November/005608.html [uphpu.org]
It was so succesful they did a second take, check here for sample questions:
http://mozy.com/contest [mozy.com]
Are you a superstar company? (Score:5, Insightful)
The first part of this is going to sound antagonistic, but its meant to be helpful.
Are you a superstar company? Really? What product do you work on? Is it cutting edge/interesting/socially minded? Is it going to present a new challenge every day for your programmers?
How top-heavy is your company? Are the salaries of the managers 3x more than the programmers? How about the top-level execs? Are they getting $1.5M bonuses every year while solving no problems themselves? Do their salaries go up 12% every year while programmers get 2% raises? Do the execs get their own parking spaces while the programmers have to park on the street? Is the disparity noticeable and constantly rubbed in the face of your programmers? Do the execs act snooty and drive $60,000 dollar cars? If these qualities apply to your company, there is no hope. If not, read on.
People who can really solve tough problems (i.e. "superstars") know who they are. Their minds don't work linearly and they see patterns in everything. They make suggestions and observations only to get ridiculed because the small minds around them can't understand what they are saying. But they usually get vindicated [nobelprize.org]:
The unfortunate thing is that superstars, as you call them, experience this pattern again and again. You need to recognize that this pattern is common for them. You need to cater to their intellectual needs, make sure they are payed well, and, yes, appeal to their egos. This doesn't mean a constant suck-up, which is a common misconception. You need to give your damn best to understand what they are saying, to understand that their insight might be better than yours and to recognize that they have shown insight through a solid record of achievement. Superstars are players and not coaches (i.e. cheerleaders) and they can point to success, but you don't need to acknowledge it directly. If you want to employ them, you need to show that you can be student instead of master, because superstars are also teachers.
I know that that last one is going to hurt, especially in the hierarchical realm of corporate politics. However, your ability to be a student of your employees will separate you from mere mediocre employers and will get you those superstars you want so badly.
Dig in the hinterlands (Score:5, Interesting)
As an example, I spent most of my life stuck in Southeast Idaho. There's a surprisingly large geek population there, but not a lot of employment for them. Generally people wind up stuck in low-paying dead-end jobs doing whatever they can (first tier phone tech support at the call centers that constitute the majority of non-agricultural employment, or as IT for a cash-strapped school district that is distrustful of the internet for religious reasons).
Because you are living paycheck to paycheck, you don't have the ability to relocate yourself with the funding necessary to find a job somewhere better. The majority of escapees (including myself) that I know of actually LIED on their resume and put a friend's address on it in a more lucrative market, and then lived homeless/couchsurfed/hitchhiked in order to get to interviews. It takes a lot of guts to throw caution to the wind and do that, and there's so much potential talent out there that could be snagged if employers would just reach out and find people and offer an escape that doesn't involve so much uncertainty.
Most people within 20 miles of Silicon Valley/NoVa tech corridor, etc. have the physical support infrastructure to get a job already. The hidden gems will be found in places where geeks don't have that option. The best places to look are population 25k-75k towns which don't have a major metro area within a 150 mile radius, and a depressed economy that precludes local employment providing enough income for geeks to self-finance a move to the high-cost-of-living of a tech hub.
Re:Simple filter. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I did that a lot when I first got hired at my current company. I flunked a round of interviews partially because of my hot-headed attitude and MS bashing.
I did a 2nd round with a different group and kept the rhetoric to a minimum. But once I was in, I turned on the flame-thrower again. "I can't beleive you put up with this crap -- pine and sendmail will service 25,000 mailboxes on a 1 proc machine", etc. I would constantly compare the lame MS experience to some F/OSS experience. This was back in the 2000-2001 time frame. Was it annoying? yes. Did people listen to me? Yes. Did we switch to f/oss software? No. Did a lot of the software we used to do our jobs get better? Yes.
The company I did this at?
Microsoft.
I'm a Microsoft Employee, and I'm a QA engineer (tools & automation developer). You had better beleive that when one of us says "F/OSS kicks our ass at this", people here eventually notice and try to remedy the problem. (Clearly, there's great job security here
I agree with the generalities of your point. You need to pick and choose your battles. But one thing I'll say is -- if you're frustrated that MS products are so (in your opinion) inferior to some F/OSS (or any competing offering) product, MS is a great place to work. We take competition very seriously, and we need more people that are used to not rebooting, apps not taking down more than they need to, user separation, simple tools that are efficient and single-purposed, etc, to help us make better software. When I joined, there wasn't a linux compete team, a compatibility lab, etc etc. Now we have all of those things and there are people who actually study where we don't measure up.
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