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Ask HN: Why is it so hard to find a job?

8 points by shimi ↗ HN
Thought you lot may have an answer for this

In short I've been living in the SF bay area for 3 years with a 7 years total of software development experience (last 4 years mobile stuff mainly Android) and just struggling to get a job.

Yes I'm a bit fussy, I'm looking for a senior role with a decent commute from where I live, which still leaves me with heaps of opportunities.

So you can come up with the assumption that I'm useless (don't know you may be on the ball with this one), but my last interview experience kind of proved to me that that's not the case. In essence the company changed the description after making the decision not hire me (The message to the recruiter was we didn't employ him for a given reason here is the new job description)

Any tips, or personal experience will be appreciated!

14 comments

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bartonfink
I don't live in SF so this may be a bit ignorant, but it's possible the market is simply saturated out there. You may see heaps of opportunities, but you may not be seeing a horde of people who are actually looking at the same heaps of opportunities and are better positioned for them or simply luckier than you are. 4 years of mobile development seems to plant you pretty strongly in the mobile realm, as you would have gotten on board back when OpenMoko was still relevant. Are you looking to switch away from that? That might be rough in a saturated job market.

Are you currently unemployed? That can also send a pretty rough message and make it harder to get a job than it would be otherwise.

shimi
Thanks for the reply.

I'm currently contracting, I'm not sure that saturation is the problem, it was like this a few months ago but now things look different.

foresterh
I'm quite surprised by this. I live in the Seattle area, and there are more dev jobs than developers... everyone company/team I know that looks for a developer has a problem doing so... positions sit unfilled for months.

I should emphasize, there are definitely a lot of developers here, but the amount of _good_ developers is less than the amount of jobs looking for them. I have three times in the past two years been the primary resource (interviewer/researcher) for finding new developers, and each time I find 90-100% of the devs I interviewed were just trash. I lucked out one of those three times and found an outstanding one, but the other two times I had to settle on a less than ideal one.

I'd also say that networking plays a huge part... join groups with similar programming interests (such as .Net user group or Alt.Net), post on Facebook that you're seeking a gig, etc... that will you help you get through the pile of devs that are simply developing for the money, not for the love of development.

atomical
What do you mean by trash? Could you give an example?
shimi
I'll give you one, in a previous project I was working on the requirements were C++/QT/J2ME/Android and I was the Jave guy. I had people coming who couldn't tell the difference between String and StringBuffer
foresterh
Trash like, they could recite some programming knowledge from books/classes, but once you asked them to start thinking on their own, they fell apart. For example, asking them to model a simple, scenario, such as orders, line items, customers, etc.... (but one in the domain I was hiring for). They had no clue how model it in a way that would work. Or, asking them to work through a problem, logically trying to solve something, or going through the steps they would use to solve a problem.

Sometimes if they made it far enough, I'd sit with them at a computer and ask them to do something fairly simple, but something they most likely hadn't done before, so they need to figure out how to... then watch how the interact with the IDE, how they figure out how to do something (they can use the internet, any tools, ask me, etc). And most of the time, they just fall flat on their face.

owkaye
I've been a programmer for 15+ years and I'm very very good in the capabilities you say you're looking for.

I am also very business-minded having run my own outsource programming service overseas for the better part of a decade until I moved back to the USA 20 months ago.

Unfortunately I have learned that most companies in the USA these days are not willing to allow me to use the language in which I have developed and practiced my expertise for the past 15 years, regardless of how much faster I can produce for them in this language.

Instead most companies seen to hold out for programmers who know today's "popular" languages. So they lose out on my extensive background and experience, and I lose out on an opportunity to bring one of these companies the kind of service and performance they complain about not being able to find.

geebee
I have noticed a disconnect between the reality of getting hired and the articles in the "career" section of the newspaper about how hard it is to hire programmers. It's tougher to get a job than they make it sound.

Are you focusing very heavily on android development? If so, you might be more successful if you expanded to web development, which of course has more competition but also has a lot more potential employers as well.

I'm also not sure how your interviews are going - one thing I've learned is that you should always pull out the data structures book and review the crap out of it before you interview. I've lost out on jobs almost certainly because I was rusty on this.

Not sure what else to say without more info about your specific situation... good luck.

drallison
Conversely, why is it so hard to find good developers, people who really know something? For example, here's what we are looking for at Maxeler (http://www.maxeler.com):

   Software Engineers: HPC Application Acceleration, Palo Alto, California

   Application acceleration engineers work with client applications 
   to deliver order of magnitude speedups. You'll be involved 
   in every stage of accelerating applications, from analyzing 
    multi-million line code bases through developing new algorithms,
    to implementing complete solutions running on FPGA, GPU, or 
    other technologies. We are in the early stages of growing and 
    building up the Palo Alto office, so you'll be part of a very 
   small team working in a start-up-like environment.

   You will need a degree or equivalent professional qualification 
   in Computer Science or a related discipline as well 
   as experience in some of the following:

    * » High performance software development in C/C++ or FORTRAN.
    * » Program analysis and transformation
    * » Compiler design and implementation
    * » Computer architecture / digital circuit design.
    * » Working with scientific software code in HPC application 
        domains such as computational finance, seismic processing, 
        life sciences or fluid dynamics.
We've looked at a many resumes (sadly, resume writing is frequently creative writing) and interviewed many candidates without finding many people who even come close to our standards.
shimi
Good question, I guess its open for debate
bartonfink
To be fair, that is a VERY specific skill-set. I'm sure you know that, but I'd bet that most of the people with that skill-set are already employed somewhere (someplace like Intel would be my best guess) using it and not as amenable to moving on as, say, Johnny Rails-Developer would be.

It sounds like a very interesting and challenging gig, though. Out of curiosity, what's the salary for something like this?

drallison
Did you notice that the skills/experience bullet list said "some". We are interested in abilities, insight, and basic knowledge. As part of the candidate evaluation process we test candidates on their performance with a substantial design and implementation project, one that we believe should be fairly simple for someone with good programming skills and a good knowledge of algorithms and design. Most fail, and most of the rest perform badly. Even at the coder level, we see people who are unable to translate written descriptions into code. It is really depressing.

Maxeler is an interesting and challenging gig. Maxeler takes clients "known to work" code running on a cluster of machines (typically several thousand) and accelerates it by as much as a factor of 250X using a combination of hardware and software. Salaries depend upon skills and performance and are competitive with those elsewhere.

olegious
The company that I'm working for (a great, quickly expanding startup) is looking for mobile devs, if you're interested shoot me an email and I can provide further details.
shimi
Sure I'll be more than happy to hear about new opportunities, unfortunately you haven't posted an email in your profile.