Ask HN: Who's Hiring?
We're in a recession. Many great, talented people are out of work (including plenty of folks here at HN, I'm guessing). We know, though, that many companies are also still hiring - so let's put these companies and job seekers in touch.
Are you hiring? Does your company (or your friend's) have openings? Let HN know!!! Let's get some good people good jobs.
(We've got 900+ startup jobs at Startuply right now, and we'd love to get you all involved - it's easy and completely free for everyone. That being said, post any openings you know of here, too, to get some love from the best hacker community evar.)
214 comments
[ 313 ms ] story [ 4573 ms ] threadCraigslist used to work wonders for me.
I currently have a F/T job at a bay-area startup (which I don't want to leave), but am extremely interested in supplementing my income with some consulting/contract gigs.
http://jobs.rubynow.com http://jobs.37signals.com http://bostonrb.org/jobs
If you also just google "rails jobs" you'll find the other useful rails job sites out there.
The best way to find work, however, is to build your network. One of the best clients I had was referred to me by a fellow I happened to have lunch with when I was in NYC for a couple weeks. Another of my best clients was referred to me by a friend. Where are you located, btw?
Another way to find work is to find other web development companies and just email them asking if they need help. I've found work this way as well, and have had more success contacting local companies.
edit: One thing that helped a lot was I developed a rails tool (Palmist, http://www.flyingmachinestudios.com/projects/) , then I gave a presentation on it at the Boston ruby group. Since then, many interviewers have perked up when I mentioned it because they had either seen it or used it.
Hope this helps!
I've actually seen a fairly steady number of job postings the past couple of months (it's always been a somewhat low volume jobs board -- 3-5 new posts per week, I'd guess -- but the volume hasn't dropped off).
I don't think you have to push your RoR experience, since many business owners won't get it.
Find out what problems business owners are having and offers suggestions to solve it, even if it's doesn't include your services.
Exactly, business and dating have more parallels than people like to admit, it all comes down to forming relationships.
Numbers are good, first impressions are better, and solid performance are best. Once you have a track record it is a lot easier, because woman .. err .. businesses always want the guy everyone else has.
Being spread across a few clients lessens your risk a great deal, but it shouldn't become unmanageable to keep in touch with all of them.
[Edit] I should have said - couldn't agree more about the conferences. Whether full on conferences or more community driven events like BarCamps, they're a great place to meet very good contacts.
If you need a Rails consultant, contact me. :) http://andrewcantino.com
I did a bit of consulting years ago, for another software shop --- I think the general rule is network in the area that your customers are going to be.
I wrote the site over a weekend after I got laid off for the second time in 3 months. The first time I was laid off, I took a very haphazard approach to looking for jobs and it caused me a lot of stress. I made Happy Job Search to help get organized. It's like a GTD app just for job hunting. It's optimized for quickly adding jobs to your "inbox", then going through and investigating each job, adding notes, and filing the job under a next action (send email, make call, etc). Finally, it's made to be useful for quickly reviewing a job opportunity before you interview.
It takes a little time to actually go through and enter job information, but it really helped me. It's also free. Hopefully others will find it useful as well and won't go through what I did the first time I was laid off :)
(ps, LukeG I'd like to email you but your address isn't listed. Mine is daniel@flyingmachinestudios.com. Thanks!)
I see there are a lot of sites that to do something for employers but its good to see someone else thinking of job seekers. Not much out there for us and I think an opportunity exists for someone that can optimize and organize the process with us in mind.
NotchUp has an interesting play on this problem, though hard to say if they're getting any traction.
Obviously the employers and recruiters are the ones holding the money, so most solutions tend to cater to their dealflow needs.
Any other stakeholders with money that are part of this ecosystem? Or other monetization ideas?
Are there any affliate players in the job space? E.g. capitalizing on bounties/etc for successful hires/interviews?
There's one in the UK (who's name I can't remember right now) which specializes in "referal" hiring, taking advantage of the fact many large employers give employee's significant bonuses for referred hires to essentially create a secondary market for recruitment based upon referal bonus payments.
I will post more details at Startuply next week.
The more events and meetups I attend the more I realize that this city is full of great talent, interesting companies and even some reputable VC's. The biggest "problem" for me personally has been weeding through all the non tech people to find others who are doing things that interest me.
The job market isn't all that wonderful anywhere else either. What I think will happen is some the people laid off from the various wall street positions will go start boutique shops... Long term they will be bought out and merged together to create larger groups...
Plenty of banks are using this period to ramp up hiring to get the best talent for a bargin. C++ talent is always hard to hire regardless of the market.
(um or http://startuply.com/#/in%20new%20york/1)
Anecdotes != conclusions, but for us it worked very well.
In NYC
http://buglabs.net/jobs
We're often putting up new jobs. At the moment we are looking for a QA engineer and a business intern (that one is probably San Fransisco but I'm not sure).
I'm not very in tune with our hiring but for a while we were looking for development engineers too. I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to drop a resume if you have experience with embedded Linux development (OpenEmbedded especially), JavaME/PhoneME, Eclipse plug-in development, and a passion for open source.
http://www.pmdsoft.com/ChargeCapture/about_us/developer.html
If you want to talk to him directly, email me at ben at devver.net and I'll put you two in touch.
Some hedge funds are hiring, and aggressively.
I get the idea that those hiring are suddenly flush with plenty of good applicants.
I went with Bloomberg, who's still hiring aggressively.
But, I got good leads on openings @ the Ars technica job board.
http://www.vimeo.com/173714
Some requirements: 4+ years experience doing fulltime development, proven UI/UX skills, experience with SaaS oriented development, and desire to continuously improve your skills. And at least 10 points of karama at Hacker News :)
You'll be working on projects from conception to launch, contributing to the success of the business in a big way.
Preferred: Experience with Perl and Scrum.
Also, our office is in San Diego. Details, details :)
Too bad I'm already working...
http://www.fuzzwich.com
http://www.habitindustries.com/jobs
Anyway, I'm a recent grad and my partner is graduating in spring 09. We are starting something up in NYC. We may be looking to add one more guys on the technical side. Shoot me an email if you want to talk (address in profile). I was personally in a similar boat as yourself.
http://www.snapmylife.com/static/jobs#rre
That's unfortunate, since computer science has almost zero relevance to what you do.
http://supercoolschool.typepad.com/blog/
Software developers (front end PHP focused and backend distrubuted Java focused) and QA engineers are especially needed.
For those of us who are hiring, what strategies can we use to ensure that we in-person interview more of those candidates (with whom we can generally sell them) and spend less time on the "perma job seekers" that seem to form the bulk of the job applicant population. I don't mean to sound overly elitist, but if I've only got 1 spot open, I want to take a shot at selling the very best candidates, and spend as little time interviewing the also-rans as possible. (This is in regards to professional hires; our college-level recruiting program is in good shape, and there's less change from last year there than in the landscape for professional hires)
The other key is to move fast. If you want one of these people, don't waste their time with phone interviews and things like that, just get them scheduled to come in as soon as possible.
At my last two companies we would bring people in for an afternoon of interviews and have an offer ready for them at the end of the day if things worked out. That's the kind of process you need to have to snag people like this.
As a simple case study, the last time I decided to get a job I had 3 offers within two weeks. All through my network.
Currently, I left my last startup in the middle of last week. I haven't started actively looking for something else to do yet, and I've already had one offer through my network.
I'll grant you that true networked hires may have earned a skip-the-phone stage, though I'd still rather answer THEIR questions on the phone than find a no-fit after 3 hours in-office.
Be able to move fast is always good advice though!
Also, I'm not suggesting that you cut out the phone interview all-together, just keep it short and be ready to schedule an in-person interview them as soon as possible, preferably while you have them on the line.
When I'm looking at a company, I'm trying to determine if they're a good fit for me just as much as they're trying to determine if I'm a good fit for them. A big part of this is showing me that you have the ability as a company to recognize talent and execute accordingly.
I've been fortunate thus far and always looked for a new job when I want to try something new, not when I'm out of work and hungry. Taking time off of work to interview for a bunch of low-chance jobs is not something I'll do unless I'm extremely excited about the company.
Maybe this isn't a bad thing (you want excited people), but how many employers work at companies people wake up knowing they have to work there.
I wouldn't worry about skipping the phone screen. But if your phone screener comes away saying "wow, this guy is amazing", bring them in for face-to-face meetings as soon as you can.
It's far more important to make sure that when you bring someone on-site, you make good use of that time. I'll forgive an hour spent on a phone screen far more easily than a day wasted because I flew down to San Francisco for a day of interviews with the wrong people.
A simple programming question will filter out a huge chunk of the candidates (i.e., those not smart enough to code or to cheat), then email screen, phone screen, and then an in-person interview.
You should also figure out _exactly_ what qualities are most important in a candidate, and which ones you're willing to overlook.
Generally, I test for: (1) can they think? (2) can they code? and (3) can they learn?
You'd be amazed how much chaff you have to sift through to get even that much grain.
Personally, I found a VERY strong correlation between what we wanted in a game developer and their answer to #1. #2 I didn't find all that valuable, other than to weed out people who'd never taken any algorithm/data structure coursework.
For that company, and those roles, it worked very well, because there's a correlation between bit twiddling, pointer operations, and knowing whether someone "gets" pointers and their job performance. That's not the case in most jobs, nor in most modern languages. (Who cares if you "get" pointers if your language doesn't have them?)
My current company asks on from a set of some fairly basic questions on the phone screen, and we pretty much grade the whole phone screen "pass/fail" (interview/thank you for your time). I can't say they work quite as well, but we're also looking significantly "up market" from what the game company needed.
My idealized criteria: For professional hires: keep it short, but not so basic as to be insulting. For college hires: keep it short, and probably basic. For all in-person/whiteboard exercises: ignore error checking, exceptional conditions, etc. It's just too much effort to go through in that format.
Best coding test I ever took was for Accolade, who sent a zip file of source code for a very simple game (fly an airplane across a 2D map with mountains) and asked you to write "AI" (in the game sense, not the compsci sense) for the player. You had an evening and mailed them back a zip file with your code included. That was fun to do, and I suspect gave them fairly fine-grained insight into how good a coder you were, as there's "working", "optimal" and "elegant" dimensions into which various solutions bucket themselves.
Vast hordes of candidates with err "augmented" resumes get filtered out, as do "experienced" programmers (sometimes calling themselves "architects" and such) who haven't coded in (literally) years.
I would have thought more people would look up the solution online , but apparently even that effort is too much.
So, overall I would say a coding problem is an excellent idea. I am not sure how valid is the "tell me your program letter by letter over the phone" approach yahoo, google etc seem to take in their phone screens.
My favorite question to ask involves walking through a tree structure and summing up a particular property of all the leaf nodes. It can be done recursively or (preferably) iteratively. About half the candidates can't really do it. I often see answers that only process two levels of the tree, or aren't thread safe, or include lots of duplicate code, or simply don't work at all.
Joel Spolsky has some good suggestions on the subject. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...
> immediate personal + professional networks > existing customers/users > extended network > recruiters & job boards
From our perspective, that means we can create value by helping people leverage their networks (http://startuply.com/Apps/Overview.aspx), gain access to existing high-quality networks (http://jobsyndicate.com, coming soon), and by making job sites that are focused on the communities and companies themselves (e.g. http://www.startuply.com
Also keep in mind, how you run the interview process says volumes about what its like to work in your company. Taking > 2 weeks between responses shows lack of interest. Making a person have to "ask" for a plane ticket to come to the interview is a big turn off too. The interview process is a great time to show that you take care of your people and make it easy for them to do their jobs. Take care of us as candidates and we'll assume you'll take care of us as employees.
These are pet peeves. One other thing... communicate the type of position you're looking at putting the person in before lining up their in-person interviewers. I've had situations where I interviewed with people who did stuff I found interesting and I felt rapport with them. Likewise I had one company thought about putting me in a position completely wrong for my skills and the people I interviewed with had nothing in common. They later offered a position after the interview that was more in the right direction but this would have been good to figure out in a phone interview.
Thats my $.02.
I absolutely agree here. There's nothing which turns good people off more than feeling unappreciated, and HR people simply don't know what to appreciate.
communicate the type of position you're looking at putting the person in before lining up their in-person interviewers
I'd go a step further than that. If you're interviewing someone really good, don't put them through the standard interview process. Invite them to your office and talk to them about what you do. Show them around; have them talk to people in a variety of areas (if you're a large enough organization for that to make sense).
At the end of the day, ask the candidate where he/she thinks they could help you most, and ask your people where they think the candidate could help you most. If there's consensus between the candidate and your people, that tells you what to do. If there isn't consensus... well, then that person wasn't actually the great candidate you thought he was.
Insulting your candidates, and then calling them back begging them to come in for another interview, and then ignoring their availability... this is not a way to encourage people to work for you.
There are definitely benefits to this, as you mention, but taken to the extreme (all recruiting is done by engineers), it's a pretty high cost to the company's productivity.
Think about it from the other perspective: would you, as an engineer, want to work at a company where a significant portion of your job is recruiting? If you were the CEO, would you rather your engineers focus on recruiting or on engineering?
If you want your potential hires to feel valued, move through the recruitment process at a good pace. There is absolutely no reason there should be a 4-week gap between first and second interviews. I've seen plenty of companies that have gone from first interview to offer in the space of a single week - that includes flying the candidate in.
The worst part is that I emailed the HR contact reminding them that this deadline existed, and to this date (a week and change now...) I have not yet even received an acknowledgment on their part.
Oh well, I'd been warned against that company to begin with.
Oh well, I guess I'm going with the other offer :)
Don't cold call at 8.15AM because it's business hours somewhere. Every. Single. Day. Didn't need an alarm clock that week.
It isn't about engineers vs. non-engineers. It's about helpful, courteous, and respectful, vs uninformed, detached, and unconcerned. A lot of HR people don't seem very invested in the position whereas the direct manager might be, so maybe that's where the stereotype comes from, but I've had many, many, many contacts from engineers (usually at smaller companies) who weren't so hot on the people skills.
On one occasion I worked with HR people. They were sharp and had their stuff together. In meeting them before interviewing with the engineering team, they were well dressed and very professional. They were courteous.
At all points I was aware what expectations I should have for notification, what the timelines were, and what the next steps were. In salary negotiations they were very respectful and it didn't feel like they were trying to find my lowest spot (though presumably they were).
This was extremely impressive to me. I've worked in plenty of situations where the engineers are good but the organization is poorly led or otherwise dysfunctional. I can talk to the engineers and tell if they know their stuff. That'll come in due time. It's harder to tell, does payroll go out in time? Is this an environment that will treat me like an adult?
When I ask for time off, am I going to have to e-mail ten different people for all the projects I'm in (I'm someone that can be useful in multiple areas), or will there be some structure there?
These things are harder to tell. Some people might like to be more seat of your pants. I personally expect competence at all levels of an organization, and not knowing these fundamentals is a red flag, and demonstrating them, conversely, is a good sign.
Jobs page here: http://www.lolapps.com/jobs.html (sorry for the lame-ish job descriptions). Drop me a line if interested (email in my profile).
http://quantcast.com/ingamenow.com
If you're a sysadmin, network engineer, or programmer, you can find work here: http://www.justin.tv/jobs
Hmm... This post is difficult for me. On one hand, I don't want to negatively impact Justin.tv. On the other hand, I feel obligated to let everyone know that if you don't have a college degree or other qualifying credentials, you probably won't get hired there.
I went in for an interview, and as far as I could tell, I passed. But afterwards, Justin took me to a bookstore across the street and told me that their investors felt they needed to hire "more qualified" developers. So I wasn't brought on board.
My credentials: I dropped out of high school when I got hired in the gamedev industry. When I went in for the interview, I had been in the industry for about three years, and had been programming in general for 8. So if you have credentials similar to mine, it would probably be better to not waste the time in the interview. But if you have credentials that would convince an investor that you should be hired (college degree, etc), then go for it.
Sorry, JTV. I wasn't going to say anything until I saw "we have almost as many graduate degrees as we do college drop outs" ... this gives people a false sense of hope, from my point of view.
I mean there is plenty of other things than just experience related to hiring someone. "More qualified" may well be a nice way to say "you don't seem to fit in" or whatever their reason not to hire you.
"Listen bud, you're talented, but not quite right for us due to X, Y, and Z."
... or ...
"Sorry, we want to hire you, but our investors won't let us."
If that was the case (and I don't think it was), then the latter is a cop-out. You don't make up reasons not to hire someone, no matter how much you want to. You'd be doing a disservice both to the candidate and to yourself.
My single case is just that: a data point. Weigh it along with all your other data points before making your interview/no interview decision.
Anyway for some reason you original reply sounded to me pretty much like: "these guys did not give me a job, they suxxors! Don't go near them!"
Often you do not know the reason for not hiring. "Just does not feel right" or "gut feeling" may be the real reason, and then you try to rationalize it somehow. Hiring is not an exact science.
No sir, that wasn't my intention at all. :) JTV's interview was extremely rigorous, and they all seem like great hackers. In that regard, they r0x0rz. Unfortunately, their investors may have the final say as to whether you are hired or not, which is what I wanted to tell everyone.
I still this this statement is an unfair generalization based on your personal experience:
"...if you don't have a college degree or other qualifying credentials, you probably won't get hired there."
What do I consider? Basically I use three things to try to decide if someone is going to work out at JTV:
1. Codes fluently and happily. I don't care what syntax or language you use, or if you use pseudo-code, but you should be able to do basic things without much thought and you shouldn't be offended or unhappy to spend time coding in an interview.
2. Grasps algorithms. Recursion, trees, lists, big-o notation, etc. I don't care if you can recite the Master Theorem, but you should be able to estimate runtime for a recursive algorithm. I don't care if you know Dijkstra's algorithm, but you should be able to find a shortest path in a graph.
3. Excited to work on the kinds of problems we have at JTV. This is the hardest to judge, obviously. If you don't have any ideas, before or during or after the interview, about something you'd like to do or change at JTV, that's a bad sign. If you don't have any interest in working on our website or on video or on chat, that's a bad sign. If it just doesn't seem like you genuinely want to work at JTV, that's a bad sign. None of these are disqualifying, but they lose a few points. I try not to weight this too highly because it's so easy to read too much into someone's surface personality, but this is the thing I think we've made the most mistakes on in the past.
That's what I go by in hiring, and that's the kind of thing I see discussed when we email about the candidate. So I'm reasonably sure that's what everyone else goes by as well.
If you say "long hours, low pay, incompetent management" I'll know you're just a sell-out :)
On low pay: when I first arrived at The Corporation, I made nothing for the first nine months. I was an "intern", and they don't pay interns. I'm not complaining. It was excellent experience. After that, I was paid a very low salary. A year and a half after that, I was paid "slightly less than low, but still half of what an average developer makes" salary. So the pay wasn't especially good. I was there for the experience anyway, not the pay.
On incompetent management: We had a "daily report" to fill out each day. The idea was to list what we did, what we were "blocked" on, and what we will do soon. On Fridays, we had to fill out a weekly "time allocation sheet". We would assign percentages to various categories of what we spent time on. (e.g. "50% primary tasks, 30% debugging, 10% meetings, 10% other".) We also had many, many meetings. One day, a few months before I left, all developers spent over four hours in meetings. (The "Monday Morning Meeting", followed by the general "Developer's Meeting", followed by the "Version-one-point-something Product Meeting"... Over half the day spent in just meetings.) Our direct manager was very controlling. A few times, he walked by and asked people to implement a brand-new feature, claiming that "it would be easy". So he was apt to gloss over details, and the details are often the hardest part of software development.
The biggest reason why I left The Corporation is because I wasn't learning anything anymore. The three years I worked there were filled with nonstop learning... up to about six months before I left. At that point, it became hard to be passionate about the job, because I wasn't doing much that allowed me to grow as an engineer.
Are the conditions at your gamedev job pretty good? I heard from a friend that The Corporation was an outlier, and that every one of the five other gamedev companies my friend had worked at were a lot better, so I'm still holding out hope for the gamedev industry in general.
http://www.atalasoft.com/company/careers/#aspnetarchitect