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Comment by maryrosecook | Hacker News Reader

Ableton, the company I work for, are based in Berlin and are looking for Python devs: http://www.ableton.com/jobs It's a really nice place to work, and the pay is OK for Berlin.

Great summary of cost of living and tech scene from maxklein. You can live very cheaply here, if you work at it. Some bars serve a half-litre of beer for 1€, some reasonable apartments can be got for 120€ a month if you can live with coal-fired heating.

The other tech company I know well is SoundCloud. They are great. They are mostly Ruby-based, but they're expanding the technology they use rapidly at the moment, so they might be flexible.

Good luck: Berlin is a fantastic place to live.

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Cubase user here cough Anyway I'd imagine that working for Ableton is fairly cool.

Although I am not qualified enough for such a position I am curious what requirements they have. I check your link and they ask for at least 2 years of experience. Is that "all" ?

As a CS drop out I can't even provide bachelor's degree. The point I am trying to make is: As far as I know here in Germany employees always ask for degrees. Am I way off?

Could I train myself the necessary skills and then work my way up and then some day I'd be qualified enough to work for a company like Ableton?

I'm the chap responsible for the Python developer hiring at Ableton.

To sum it up: I don't give a rats ass for any degrees. I don't even have one myself. We send applicants a programming test. I get these tests, and I assess them without even skimming the CV. Because it would otherwise just skew my observations.

If the test convinced me that you can code, you will have a job-interview, via phone or in person depending on if it's feasible to fly you in to Berlin or not.

This interview is pure technical, either.

If this convinced me that you are a good coder, I will arrange a third interview with the CTO, who has the final say on all employments. I won't spoil the enjoyment of that for you :)

Ableton Live fanboy here -- You guys are doing a great job. I haven't looked into it lately but what's the status on scripting Live (with Python or whichever language) ? I would kill to have an API I could use to create tracks programmatically.

[edit] sorry, re-read your post. You asked for any way, not python specifically.

The defined API for interacting with Live is Max For Live. Python is only used internally, and to a limited extend.

And for The Bridge, we introduced an XML-based document format, which should be a second option to generate live-sets.

Thank you for your fast reply which was quite revealing.

I've been into electronic music production & sounddesign for about 8 years now. But I never saw a way that this could somehow be helpful when it comes to finding a job.

Two terms of CS gave me some insight into programming but I mainly solved little mathematical problems rather than gaining insight into "real world software programming".

Now I am attending business school and try to figure out how to avoid a typical office job so that I can do something more rewarding, where I can be somewhat more myself, instead.

I should seriously get into programming in my spare time...

Sorry to everyone else for hijacking this thread. ;-)

€: just finished the video. Looks like an awesome working atmosphere indeed!

Hi, I have read the job descriptions and they sound really great. I have 2 questions:

1. I have left university 13 months ago and have worked for an online shopping company in Berlin ever since. I have done freelance development as a student, so is the 2 years experience an absolute must?

2. The hiring page is in English but would you like a German-style application (photo, lots and lots of certificates and grades) or the much shorter Anglicized version (3 pages max).

The 2 years are no strict requirement. If you apply for a job + I like your programming test, you are interviewed.

Regarding the CV: give us whatever you have. I personally won't read it, eventually somebody in HR might - but it's not used to filter applications.

The other day we even looked at a 20-year old highschool student, because he looked promising. Neither CV nor experience. We didn't take him for a bunch of reasons, but that's another story.

Hi! It's nice about the degree, I'm also a dropout. One question: is fluent german necessary, or can a newcomer speak english and learn on the way? I'm quite good at learning languages, but I suppose I won't speak fluently in the next few months :)

We gather around 20 nations under one roof - english is the main language.

We also offer german-courses for employees. And english for the germans ;)

nice! sounds really promissing :)

4th year EECS major here. I'm doing a 5 year bachelors/masters program. Do you typically take summer interns?

No. It makes no sense to us. Regardless of how good one is, the amount of time & effort until he or she is productive is a waste IMHO. And working with SCRUM makes it even harder, as there are no idling side-projects one can place a student on and then look at occasionally. All devlopers need to be real team members.

Yep, SoundCloud is great (so is Ableton!). While we are ruby-based at SoundCloud, we are definitely expanding and open to various backgrounds! So definitely visit the jobs page if you're interested: soundcloud.com/jobs.

Agree with Mary - Berlin is a fantastic place to live and very affordable in many areas. Great city with a growing start-up scene!

How many vacation days? I have relevant experience for SoundCloud (and also use and like Ableton) but I've recently decided I should probably try to visit my family more often.

Around 25, which is common in Germany.

This is something that is completely confusing to me. Berlin seems to have a lot of interesting Jobs with "fun" languages (ruby, python, even some scala, ...).

Down in the south (Stuttgart), it's all C or Java and most projects seem to be boring on the first look :-/

Ableton seems like it would be a great place to work. Enabling creative people appeals to me a lot more than putting yet another spin on social networking.

The Python jobs are web-related only though. While Python is used inside Live itself, it's not enough to justify a pure-Python coder position for that.

But the web-team is large enough to also offer more back-end related work, which is the reason we advertise Python-developers instead of Web-developers only.

I fear though that this is not really that much different from another spin on social networking in the end.

I fear though that this is not really that much different from another spin on social networking in the end.

I guess this is unavoidable in just about any web development job these days but at least the context is a little more intrinsically interesting at Ableton. At least to me.

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