lrobb

I can never resist... From a recruiter I know:

"A doctor, a lawyer and an Accountant with 30 years experience is probably a semi-reitred millionaire. A software engineer with 30 years experience is probably out of work." Or doing an hourly contract to keep some money coming in.

Tony - Send me your resume and I'll be happy to review it. I might see something sticking out like a sore thumb.

Curious... What tech is it?

Related: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-da...

Not too uncommon... and why people should never apply if the poster uses an anonymous address (ala craigslist).

One of the bright spots of my career was building a distributed system that spanned 64 different nodes and regularly did over 100Mb/sec... Built on machines holding (at the time) a top-end config of 2Gb/ram per machine...

That's more RAM than our entire system had.

oddly, I would hardly classify the administrivia you listed as "big problems"... Those are first world middle class problems.

Why the downvotes?

TRULY Big problems:

Every year 15 million children die of hunger. ... 1 in 5 children in Africa die of malaria ... 1 million people die of malaria

I would hardly classify "having to fill out the same form every time I go to the Doctor's office" as a "BIG" problem.

The original post, and my comment, mention nothing about "basic stuff" on the whiteboard.

In the US, it's easy to do a contract-to-hire. I know at least a few companies that bring in most of their new people this way.

I've always admired the 37Signals approach of having potential hires do a short contract.

That's not what I meant.

White-boarding in a high pressure situation is simply a different "skill"... I think it's fair to say that most coders are "internal" thinkers / introverts, that do their best work when they have a chance to quietly think about a problem.

On the whiteboard, you're asking them to do the exact opposite.

Eliminating the "brainfuck" white-board questions doesn't mean you need to soften the interview. You can actually give a more substantial take-home problem to your final round of candidates.

"allows you to see how some one approaches a problem"

Although the whiteboard is good for some purposes, the author specifically mentions "brainfuck" coding questions.

Having them do those on the whiteboard really only tests how the think on their feet in high pressure situations... Something not really required of 99% of coders.

Rob - how do you make the decision between going to oDesk vs doing it yourself?

You must know a lot of unlucky people. The unemployment rate for lawyers is 1.5%!

http://www.cooley.edu/newsevents/2011/081111_lawyer_employme...

I saw an interesting chart, but can't find it now, that showed the average salary of programmers in the US hadn't budged in 10 years either... Hardly something you would expect if there was a true shortage.

Since I never pass up a chance for the joke: A lawyer or accountant with 30 years of experience is charging a lot of money or semi-retired... A programmer with 30 years of experience is likely unemployed.

I think it's even worse...

I've done a lot of "desktop" aka "client/server" programming... 5 years ago everyone declared that DEAD.

Now, we're going back... it's just now there's a few more devices to support, with tinier screens + touch.

I was going to make the same comment.

I've known plenty of really sharp, talented developers that have zero interest in ever even looking at a P&L sheet.

When you've immersed yourself in a certain sub-culture (say startups), it's sometimes easy to forget that not everyone out there shares that model of thinking.

While some recruiters get a cut of the salary, others operate on a fixed contract. I know of one company that pays a recruiting firm $110-$150 per hour, and the recruiting firm only pays $50-$60 per hour.

"Applicant: Great, I can’t wait to get started. Getting me that extra $4,000 would make this a much easier decision. Considering that this is conceivably worth millions to you, we’d be silly not to do business with each other."

I think the problem is that you don't have a verifiable skill that will increase sales by X%... Because if you did, then you'd be silly for only asking for an extra $4000 based off of increasing sales by millions.

"the Golden Ticket of Employment."?

Hey monkeys... Here's a hoop to jump through, and if you do it good enough we might give you a job.

What's all this talk about not being able to find engineers?

I don't think most engineers or engineering managers really give a flip... At least IME they don't.

They want to see that you can produce code. So if you can point to features/apps that you developed, or how you optimized some feature somewhere, that's what they want.

Sales == Huge. I've known guys to clear 250k because they could bring in millions in revenue single-handedly.

I wouldn't classify "making things" as nearly important; The founder that can sell can also "sell" someone on making it for him... But, having a good sense of design would be incredibly useful.

Unfortunately I succumbed to several dozen of these mass business books before realizing how utterly insipid this industry is... Just learn to write a business plan and get busy already. Great free articles (& some paid) on both hbr.org and score.org.

>> Fancy employee outings

Or even more atrocious to me, are the 48 hour up all night over the weekend "code jams"... Jeez people, get a life.

Those things are always off the mark...

He assumes the way too much about the quality and quantity of the student's future earnings if they just continue "in the workforce", whatever that means.

Or, as the old joke goes: "A lawyer or accountant with 30 years of experience is semi-retired... A software engineer with 30 years of experience is likely unemployed".

When I first read this piece, I was shaking my head "yes!"... Then I read what Asana actually DOES... <sigh>

So I re-read it, and my takeaway was "Hey googlers, come work for us, you'll have a bigger impact".

I was reminded of the awful quote I heard recently: "The best minds of my generation are being wasted trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads".

Apparently I'm one of the few that actually read the article... The workload is cited as one of the main reasons.

This was true when I was in school, a long time ago.

Engineers could only party on the weekends, because they always had homework to do.

Architects couldn't party at all, because they were always in the lab.

Liberal arts majors were the most fun... They could always party.

Then, at least in my peer group, quite a few of them went to law school and "buckled down"... Now they charge me $250 per hour to review a stinking form contract.

Did you even read the article?

It's also weird to see fc have a "get big, then figure out how to make money" mentality.

Maybe it's more helpful for product development teams in mid-size or larger firms... In the realm of bootstrappers & hustlers, most of the advice is SOP, just re-branded.

>>This is a brilliant idea, and after you explore it (using, for example, the lean methods which only evolved 10 years later, because you're a visionary), you decide that this is worth pursuing, it has a lot of market potential.

I do hope that was tongue in cheek... Those "lean methods" have been around forever; What's happened in the last 10 years is that they've been packaged and sold.