Tech sector in hiring drive | Hacker News Reader

Tech sector in hiring drive

online.wsj.com

72 pointsadamhowell25 comments

There are different folks qualified for different size companies.

Some people do best at the 1-5 person company. Some people do best at the 5-25 person company. Some people do best at the 25-100 person company. And some people do best at 100-250, and 250+.

The best people are the ones that grow with you as the company grows and take on bigger leadership roles as needed, constantly working for what's best for the company and it's people.

The people Google is hiring at 20,000 are generally not the people I want as we go from 25 to 100. That's not universally true, but when we lose a candidate (which is rare) it's because they go to another start-up and they had to make a real tough choice, often resorting to commute and other lesser factors to decide. It's not because they went to Google or LinkedIn.

You also have to take into consideration the life status of your employees. As we get older and start families, you tend to value stability, money, and fewer work hours over the start-up culture. Google, LinkedIn, and other late-stage startups offer the best of both worlds.

I'd wager focus has more to do with it than size.

If you're an engineer, it's a bad idea to join a start-up if their focus doesn't align with your interests. Even if there is significant equity and a great salary (it's not uncommon for funded start-ups to pay more than big companies), it's terrible to feel underused, unfulfilled and behind the technology curve in the topics that interest you. If you're the _only_ person knowledgeable about a certain topic in a start-up, there's nothing you can learn about it from coworkers. If one is uncertain of their focus, there's also no ability to switch groups and work on something else.

Your start-up (OpenDNS) is fairly unique in San Francisco, if not Bay Area as a whole, in being focused on network infrastructure (and I applaud you for it, it's a great service!)

Unfortunately, it (+ several other start-ups e.g., rethinkdb) is an exception, not the rule. The focus of most other early stage start-ups is web development. Engineers interested in solving other kinds of problems (e.g., algorithms and scalability challenges) but who like the flexibility of working for an Internet (vs. shrink-wrap product) company typically consider the medium (Facebook, LinkedIn) and big players (Google, Yahoo, Amazon).

>>commute and other lesser factors

For at least me, travel time is a factor of almost equal weight as work content and pay. A two-three hours commute/day just destroys your life.

You know it's getting hot when the vendor that came to sell to your company slips you a card with "your current salary + 15" scribbled on the back.

He knows its getting hot when you give him the card back and tell him to get serious. (That might almost qualify as frothy.)

Light on the santorum, please.

I can echo this. I've had two Fortune 500 companies, several recruiters, and even Google all contact me (unsolicited too) within the past month. It's the oddest thing I've seen in the 13 years I've been a developer.

I find this particularly interesting, especially as a CS student. Is this hiring binge across the board, or primarily for developers who've been in the market for awhile now?

Because if it's the latter, startups can continue to siphon off from universities (through internships, and later job offers) and the like.

Big tech companies already heavily use internships as a recruiting method for new-grads. When I went through, I remember the big 3 all paid substantially more than all of the local companies. A lot of the interns I know (including my self), returned to one of their internships.

Just got an unsolicited from Amazon in my inbox, a good job too, something is going on.

nod

I'm a freelancer, and have been suddenly deluged with new projects in the past fortnight. I'd chalked it up to coincidence, but I keep talking to other people who are experiencing the same.

What I find remarkable about the chart is the volume of tech jobs in D.C. relative to the population:

D.C. has a population of about 600 thousand versus about 8 million in NYC and yet tech hiring seems to be roughly on a par in these two cities.

That's mind blowing (to me at least).

If that's correct, it must be virtually impossible to be an unemployed programmer in D.C.

It could also mean that it's still relatively hard to find a programming job in NYC, or that a greater proportion of DC companies use dice.com than NYC companies.

Is it because of government related jobs?

"So you lived in the imperial seat in the US, the one are where 75% of people are working for the government (directly or indirectly), and the one place that actually GREW during the current recession."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1271560

DC's metropolitan area population is more than a quarter the size of NYC's, so it's as much of a surprise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metropolitan_Area http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area

There's over 5 million people in the D.C. area (D.C., Southern MD and Northern Virginia). Coupled with a highly educated workforce, plentiful higher education options, and a rapidly modernizing federal government, and you actually see very very few unemployed developers. Most places I know in the area get the vast vast majority of their resumes from incoming immigrants looking for an H1-B sponsor or a Green Card sponsor.

D.C. proper by comparison has very little going on.

Do you know if they eventually go for it? (H1-B sponsoring?). I'm a wannabe immigrant, and I wouldn't mind an H1-B sponsor :)

Some places are. It's difficult because the biggest employer in the area is the U.S. Federal Government. So it's hard to hire non-citizens. But there is a relatively healthy private sector as well. You just have to try and find those smaller employers. Most of the resume's I've seen also seem to be coming in through a recruiting agency if that helps.

I was reading an unemployment report the local Fairfax county paper (in northern VA if you don't know). During this recession the unemployment rate was 5.6%. I think it normally hovers around 4.6% or something.

This isn't to say that the housing bubble did not affect the area. It did. But the unemployment rate is still very close to "normal."

Ah, but there's a catch: many of the jobs require security clearances. You need to be a US citizen, and usually need to be cleared already. If you're cleared though... it's a license to print money (heck, you might just BE printing money).

We need to have another Hacker News "Who's Hiring?" thread.

I'm a senior CS student gearing up to graduate this May and starting my employment search. I have worked two software engineering internships and I'm proficient in the .Net stack (particularly ASP.NET MVC), Java, and Python. I've also had a some amount of Android experience over the past two semesters.

There was one last weekend, might want to check it out:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255491

If you're interested in Django development in Manhattan, shoot me a copy of your resume at rich@track.com.

I hope this is indeed true, as I've been having a helluva time finding Rails dev work in West LA...

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