How To Get A (Programmer) Job "In This Economy" | Hacker News Reader

How To Get A (Programmer) Job "In This Economy"

codeanthem.com

17 pointsAmberShah24 comments

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.

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

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.

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

Great copywriters at the top of their industry?

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...

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.

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".

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.

> 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).

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

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

It's not just the valley. The east coast is doing well too.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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...

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.

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.

They have a direct connection. The government is currently propping up billions, maybe trillions, of bad debt. That's what this financial crisis is all about - it's not part of the normal business cycle.

If not for TARP (and the other alphabet soup programs) and the Fed Reserve currency intervention, much of that debt would have defaulted, resulting in a deflationary depression.

A portion of many startups' customers would have found themselves cash limited, and/or unable to borrow more in corporate paper markets, etc. They would have gone into survival mode or outright failed as their own revenue streams dried up. Same with the VC money.

Whether the stimulus trickled down to the startup economy I don't know, but it's the bailout of the financial system and money printing that is keeping massive amounts of cash flows from drying up.

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