London Hacker News February Meetup | Hacker News Reader

London Hacker News February Meetup

meetup.com

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OT: I'm thinking about moving from Rome to London in a couple of months. During the first months there I'd like to work part time as a programmer: I'm very experienced with Ruby on Rails and Javascript/CoffeeScript and I would like to see from the inside how it works in the London startup scene, while I also work on my side project for which later I'll be looking for investors.

Any suggestions about how to start looking for contract or temporary work while not residing in London? Of course I'm willing to travel to interview and/or make arrangements, but I can't leave my current job immediately.

Hey Dan. Drop me an email (address in my profile). I'm looking for contract ruby folk at the moment and know quite a few others looking for contractors.

Hey Stevie. Thanks! I'm writing right now.

Really - my contacts in recruitment world say the contract market is dead in London ? Perm work is five times the volume and teams are all in house now? Am I wrong?

Yes, you are wrong.

"Contacts in the recruitment world" are probably right about contracts with clients that use recruiters.

I'm currently turning down more work than I know what to do with through my network.

Very. I'm an inhouse recruiter myself however I used to work on the dark side as an agency recruiter. Contract work (particularly for rubyists) is still surpassing perm work.

as a Pythonista I must ask - why Ruby?

You could start with checking out what London companies are hiring and contacting them. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150834

Thanks for the suggestion

I'm in a similar boat as you :) I'm from Slovenia and I've been searching for a full-time job from here. It really isn't a problem since most companies are doing phone/skype interviews these days. I'm actually coming to London today to do a couple of face-to-face interviews and I already have one offer. So really, the fact that you are in Italy shouldn't be a problem.

Look here for jobs: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ https://jobs.github.com/positions?description=&location=... http://workinstartups.com/job-board http://www.3-beards.com/jobs http://www.cwjobs.co.uk/ http://jobstractor.com/ linkedin ...

Also check out the monthly hiring thread here on HN (and you can use my bookmarklet to make it a bit easier :P https://github.com/janhancic/hnHiringFilter)

I can also hook you up with a good recruiter if you want (my email is in the profile).

Thank you! How long did it take to get these interviews?

Depends, some companies responded in matter of hours, some in a couple of days. Some didn't respond at all (or they will eventually). So after that we usually setup a quick phone chat the same or next day. And if all went well we continued from there.

You really should first decide when you'll be moving. If it's in 3 months then I think it's a bit too soon to start searching. But once you do start searching things should start moving rather quickly. Just make sure you'll have the time to answer all those emails and calls :) And try to send a large batch of applications at once so you can have as many interviews at once when you'll come to London (it's not really cost effective to come just for one interview).

Yes, my main problem is having to give a 2 months notice at work. I'll try find employers (or clients) that are comfortable with that.

Thanks again

Don't forget http://hackerjobs.co.uk ;-)

Here's a longshot: PG, when are you going to grace us with your presence and come give a talk? (we have pizza & booze)

+1 for sheer chutzpah :-)

In case people are interested, the talks from previous events are online at https://vimeo.com/hnlondon

Hey Dmitri, a couple of questions...

Will you be reducing the involvement of sponsors now you're raising £3k per event?

What are the additional events and projects now in the pipeline as a result of the extra funds?

Having just got back from San Francisco and seeing a lot of the pay-it-forward culture in action, I'm glad there is a fee at it means that we're able to contribute to something that can help build something larger and be part of a difference in the London startup culture. So I'm really keen to hear about how those funds are now going to be invested to make that change happen.

I'll let Dmitri give his own response but one thing I will mention is the fact that the cost of putting on the event each month is in excess of £2k and that's not taking into account Dmitri's time & efforts (or mine for that matter).

Dmitiri's plans for improving the event are solid but it's not my place to reveal them.

Not at all. I think many of the sponsors are providing huge value to the community and I don't see much point in reducing their involvement. Another event that I am hoping organise very soon is a screening of The Startup Kids film. There is also a hackathon in the pipeline, though I am still working out some of the details.

I see first hand how much time and effort Dmitri puts into organising this event, and I can't imagine how he (or anyone) would be able to make this event sustainable without getting an income from it.

When you consider transaction fees, tax and expenses, Dmitri is being generous with his time.

I was at this event (the 'freelancer' in the front row getting picked on by Sanderson), it was brilliant. Big thank you to yourself and Steve for putting on such a good show.

You are totally welcome :)

I enjoyed the last one of these I went to, but it's not much of a networking event. You can get a bit of meet-and-greet in between the speaker talks, but everyone pretty much left after the last one, as the venue closed down. Anyone who wanted to network had to move on to a nearby pub, and few people made the effort, or knew where to go.

Several people have made the same comment and it's especially important for people who are new to the scene and don't know many people. It's something that I would definitely like to improve and welcome all suggestions. I'll post an update with pub details on the event page too.

with so many startups and hackers in the room-

Setting aside 10 slots of 30 seconds (or min) each to pitch to the room on what they are working on may help people connect and find like minded people? kind of like show and tell..

I also attended some HN meetups in Munich and those worked very well. You show up, you talk to people. The organizers set aside a short time for anyone who wanted to talk about their project to do so, apart from that it was just a meetup, focused on the attendees rather than pre-prepared content.

I have always found the best time for networking was at the start of the event but that might be because I usually get there early.

it's london... we need excuses to talk to strangers.

And conflicts with the other decent grassroots event in London - find-a-tech-job-in-London meetup - aaargh

I am sponsoring that one ! :-)

Slightly weird coincidence.

See above chain about £££.

There's absolutely no-way to run a tech/startup event in London without clashes now. There's multiple events running pretty much every single day.

Out of interest, how many people from outside London go to these meetups?

I'm in Bristol, so a bit far to travel.

Not sure numbers but there's definitely people who travel a couple of hours from outside London to get to it.

Alternatively why not setup a local HN meetup for Bristol and the south west ?

I'm unconvinced that Bristol (or any other region of the UK, especially those commutable to London) has the critical mass necessary to support one. Perhaps a worthwhile experiment though.

To be fair, HN London started off with 15-20 people in the living room of one guys apartment and now we've got over 4,000 members.

IIRC it was 15-20 in Songkick's original offices at the back of Spitalfields market (although physical size wise it was probably about the size of a living room), it frequently over-flowed into the corridor.

They used to make everyone introduce themselves at the start, modern HN meetups lack that sense of intimacy :)

I'd say critical mass is around 20 passionate people who do cool stuff. Once you have that the rest is surprisingly easy.

Well, there are two MS/.NET usergroups in Bristol, one of which has had 100+ people in attendance a couple of times and there a few other user groups in human factors and such.

London will always be the exception, but given the number of user groups already held in Bristol that manage to get around 50-100+ people in a month with ease I think that Bristol would be the natural choice outside of London.

Whether a HN meetup would be successful or not is another story. It'd be entirely down to who would choose to organise it and what they could offer to local HN members.

Yeh, South West Founders seems to be consistently pretty popular. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely something that I'd love to happen.

I'm in Cardiff, and I'd attend a Bristol meetup.

I would go to that one (I am also in Bristol). London is way too far away when you factor in driving back and forth to the train plus tube in London.

There are typically quite a few people from Brighton and Cambridge who come along. We usually finish at around 10pm so there is scope for getting the train home after.

The furthest that people have traveled just for the event (that I am aware of) is from Paris.

I used to travel up from Brighton (1 hour on the train, about 1.5 hours each way all in), now I live in London (and work a 5 min walk from the event).

I went to london specifically for the last- i live in northern ireland

We've had someone travel from France in the past! You should have told us in advance and we could have reserved a prime seat right up at the front for you.

... and probably saved you some pizza

being picked on by sanderson is not what i would have wanted...

I'm going to miss this by a week =(

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