$150K and up for Software Devs in Austin

http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/austin-battles-shortage-in-high-end-software-engineering-2024970.html?viewAsSinglePage=true

by jefflinwood • 15 years ago

136 184 15 years ago

statesman.com

incongruity5• 15 years ago

Okay HN – (forgive the personal bent to this, please) what's the best way for me to find a decent paying, but fun job?

I've got ~8 years of python experience, ~2 years of experience with Javascript/JQuery/etc. and will be finishing up my masters in design (and an MBA) in the spring and, while I'm actually really proud of a lot of the work I've done, I'm irrationally terrified that I won't find a fun job that pays halfway decently... so, without becoming a plumb for a recruiter with their own best interests at heart, do y'all have any tips for finding a job worth having?

(Backstory -- I haven't been out of a job since I got out of college, so I'm feeling totally out of practice with regards to the job search)

llimllib• 15 years ago

Make a good network, meet lots of people in your area, notice who's good and who's not, and work for one of the good ones.

incongruity5• 15 years ago

The obviousness of your reply highlights the irrationality of my job-hunting fears. Thanks for the reality-check.

acangiano• 15 years ago

Start a technical blog, in which you advertise that you are available for hire. Go to meetups (and conferences) to further network with the right people.

mixmastamyk• 15 years ago

Your resume is fine; focus on the fun, work hard, keep in touch with colleagues, and the opportunities will find you.

courtneypowell• 15 years ago

Join the Austin Startup group on Facebook. There are plenty of people on there that can point you in the right direction if you are legit.

wyclif3• 15 years ago

Which one? I ask b/c there appear to be several with that or very similar names.

keypusher• 15 years ago

In my experience, finding a great job starts with not selling yourself short. Don't send out blanket resumes to anyone who is hiring with the hope that something will stick. Don't waste time with recruiters who have no idea about the tech industry and/or work out of some call center in New Jersey. Spend time searching for jobs that appeal to you, particularly stuff from personal contacts, HN or StackOverflow careers before wading into Monster or Dice. Also, spend the time to check out any companies in your area(s) that you are interested in. Many times companies only post jobs on their own site, and sometimes jobs aren't posted at all. If you know of a company you want to work for, send in a resume even if they don't have open positions. Then, put as much effort as possible into nailing one or two job possibilities a week. That means researching the company and their competition (Twitter/Glassdoor/LinkedIn/etc), refreshing yourself on any software topics related to their niche, and playing with any of their products you can get your hands on. Also, be ready with some real questions for them during the interview, and remember that you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Good luck!

incongruity5• 15 years ago

Thanks. That's a great reply -- much appreciated.

iigs• 15 years ago

Wall of text ahead. Sorry. :)

Don't sweat it too much. You can do things to adjust your odds, but there's a lot of luck involved, so part of it is out of your control. Who's hiring, what they're looking for, how your resume matches what they want, and how you interview that day can all turn good candidates and good employers into non-matches.

Mind your ethics and personal preferences, but don't over-emphasize the fun part of a fun job. Your attitude can control your opinions to some extent, and this plays in your favor here. Employers generally trip over themselves to try to convince candidates that they're a fun and exciting place to work. They're not trying as hard to pour money on you (generally). Geeks are generally bad at negotiating, and bad early steps can have a long-term, sometimes nearly permanent, effect on your salary level. It's also common to feel bitter if you ever realize you're being screwed over financially.

Don't sweat recruiters too much. As a candidate your interests don't directly align with theirs. That doesn't mean that you're necessarily always at odds. If you care about a fun work environment you will probably find that they don't have much to offer you. It doesn't hurt to talk to them, but don't expect much.

Probably the single biggest attack point for hitting your stated goals is during the job interview. Make sure that you realize the interview is, and treat it as, a mutual process. Are your future teammates boring, stupid, or difficult? What's the manager looking for, explicitly and implicitly? Why did the last person on the team leave (even/especially if the team is growing)? How does the hiring manager (or the higher-up "fit" interviewer, usually a Director or executive) think about the company culture, and what do they do about it?

You will probably not benefit by bringing up salary or benefits before the interviewer does, so don't. Once that topic has been broached don't be afraid to dig. If you're feeling brash, ask how the company makes salary decisions. There are services out there that offer salary ranges for employee positions. Maybe they use that data. If so, how?

Eventually you'll get an offer. Congratulations! It's very common for employers to set a tight expiration on one. If your offer expires sooner than you're comfortable making a decision, push back gently but firmly. Commit to a response deadline, but give yourself the time you need to decide.

incongruity5• 15 years ago

Thanks. I'm often one to write long replies – it's actually a bit gratifying to be on the receiving end of one, so thanks for your time.

So, I dig everything you're saying... I guess I should have been more specific – by fun, I mean 'rewarding' in just about every sense except financial/ladder-climbing, etc, but I think all of what you said still applies.

In response to what you said, however, do you have any tips on negotiating?

A classmate was just offered 65k for a job in NYC that would pay 80-85k at a comparable firm in Chicago and he took the offer with no negotiating because he was afraid to do so... which blew my mind, honestly... so, I am to not be that guy...

randomdata• 15 years ago

"You will probably not benefit by bringing up salary or benefits before the interviewer does, so don't."

While I do not disagree, why is this? You, the one looking for a job, are the seller. The seller almost always makes the first offer. It seems a lot of time could be saved if expectations were put right out there during the initial sales pitch.

ecuzzillo• 15 years ago

Why not

a) put stuff you've done up on the web so people can see that it's cool and doesn't suck;

b) email random cool places you'd like to work (e.g. startups)

c) practice interviewing

pm• 15 years ago

Have an e-mail in your HN account so people can contact you. :)

incongruity5• 15 years ago

I had considered that, but I wasn't explicitly trying to troll HN for jobs – just advice... but fair enough. I've added one now.

matwood2• 15 years ago

What do you consider "fun?" Does it have to be a startup or a ping pong tables in the office kind of place? Obviously HN is going to place a higher value on a startup, but there are lots of interesting jobs at larger companies too. Do you want to be part of a small or large team? How much autonomy do you want?

Figuring out exactly what you want is the first step in getting it :)

coconutrandom• 15 years ago

Austin is a great place to live.

ebiester2• 15 years ago

Question: how far outside the Austin cocoon can a gay man go without being lynched? (I mean this metaphorically, of course.)

Austin has a great reputation, but it's still in Texas.

hkarthik5• 15 years ago

In general, you can find more opened minded folks in the urban areas of Texas. You start to see more of the crazies as you go farther into the suburbs.

I've had many gay coworkers and they usually stayed close to the city (I live in the DFW area).

gatlin• 15 years ago

I was raised 30 miles southwest of Austin in a rather conservative small town. I have family, friends, and experience in Houston, Dallas, El Paso, San Antonio, Lubbock, Amarillo, etc. Most of the major cities that aren't in the border region.

There are homophobic troglodytes everywhere. However, it is verboten to be openly rude about that sort of thing in all but the most repressive and tiny communities. Those are the ones that creep out straight white males like myself, let alone minorities of any kind, so barring a flat tire I don't think you'll end up there by choice anyway. Actually, being atheist is something I tend to keep to myself, too.

And actually, a lot of rural areas (which is, geographically, most of the state) have hippies in disguise all over the place. The small town of Kerrville is home to a huge hippie music festival every year; Fredericksburg is near the infamous Luckenbach, where Willie Nelson still shows up occasionally; and places like Wimberley are hidden in the sticks but have wiccans and sell quasi-spiritual swag and incense in the local shops.

juddlyon• 15 years ago

I moved to Austin from SF and was told by a friend prior to moving that "Austin is California surrounded by Alabama."

You can definitely sense a cultural contrast outside of Austin.

h3h• 15 years ago

The entire urban core of Austin, Round Rock and Cedar Park are tolerant and generally cosmopolitan, save for the East Side (east of I-35), which has a larger Hispanic demographic and tends toward religiosity and traditional social roles. West of Austin for 20-30 miles, though, are wealthy (and mostly liberal) suburbs that aren't going to give any trouble.

That's a long way of saying that, based on my second-hand experience, gay men don't run into trouble in and around Austin or its immediate suburbs.

natrius3• 15 years ago

Houston has an openly lesbian mayor. Even Republicans here are making fun of Rick Perry's recent campaign ad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PAJNntoRgA). Urban areas in Texas are far from the stereotypes you've heard of. Come visit.

adestefan3• 15 years ago

You could ask the same question about SF. Northern California isn't the bastion of hippies and free love that most people make it out to be.

chrisguitarguy• 15 years ago

I live in Fort Worth. Been to Austin once and it was awesome. I'd live there.

drewcrawford• 15 years ago

I'm a freelance mobile developer in Austin.

My experience is that companies are "desperate" in the sense that they're willing to invite you to lavish parties and fill you with free alcohol to get you to work there. But as soon as you start talking contracting, telecommute, or anything other than "sit at this desk for 60-hour weeks trying to get permission to fix an awful codebase with terrible equipment," suddenly they're not interested.

Story time: one of the best, most experienced local developers I know interviewed at a name-brand tech firm who is covered once a week on HN. Twelve separate times, they told him "We'll let you know today" as to whether or not he was hired. Several weeks later he found out third-hand he was the fall-back guy for some other non-qualified person they ended up hiring instead. He's told me horror stories about their code base that would make your hair stand up. This company keeps inviting me to parties about once a month.

There is a developer shortage in Austin, but the article blows it out of proportion. In reality the reason these few companies are "desperate" has to do with developers who want respect as human beings, autonomy to get things done, reasonable hours, a company that understands the need for technical excellence and not "put out fires" mentality, etc. If you do those things it's not that difficult to hire...

moocow012• 15 years ago

I'd agree that in tech in general you have to be very very careful in terms of understanding what you are really stepping into. There are jobs that are great but there are more jobs that are not so great (meaning the pay may be good but... 60-80 hours, boring CRUD stuff, unmaintained code bases, tyrannical managers, etc. etc.) This is probably true with most occupations but my guess is that it is a lot more extreme for software engineers (especially in SV). I've specifically taken somewhat significant lower offers based on my intuition about a job being "good" or not - I'd highly recommend it (I used to jump around for just higher salaries and to no surprise ended up miserable)

donw3• 15 years ago

This is something I stress when I talk to other management-types about hiring, now that I've (mostly) joined the Dark Side.

If you want amazing people, just spending more money on salaries isn't going to do it. I too have turned down very high-paying offers because they came with the baggage of a company that considered Dilbert strips inspirational rather than satirical.

This is an area where small start-ups can really win big, by offering what bigger and better-funded players don't:

1. Sensible hours. Sure, crunch times happen, but being in crunch mode all of the time is a sign of management failure.

2. Accountability defines authority. There's nothing worse than a company where you're responsible for keeping other peoples' (often impossible) promises.

3. Big equity with profit-sharing. This really keeps everybody's goals aligned: the employees win if the company either gets a big exit or becomes a profit-making machine.

The three of these together are easily worth more than $30k in competitive salary.

blakeweb2• 15 years ago

Bias: I'm a co-founder of BuildASign.com, an ecommerce company in Austin, and we're hiring. (Extra bias: we're a great company to work for, if Austin interests you.)

I agree that this article blows the issue out of proportion, but then again, any intelligent internet company realizes that its future success and future value is determined, more than anything else, by the quality of its software people. That being the case, any company where the higher-ups don't think finding the best software folks is the #1 problem (or at least one of the critical issues) at the moment is probably not a company you'd want to work for anyway. I think this is the #1 problem we face as a company, and yet I agree this article blows the "problem" out of proportion in the way the article presents the issue.

ricardobeat• 15 years ago

No offense meant, but "our pace is often fast and furious. We put in extra hours to output excellent results" in your careers page is working against you here :)

boxaustin2• 15 years ago

Word on the street is that you guys have a core group of developers that are set in their (old and busted) ways.

hello_moto3• 15 years ago

To each of his own.

It's very very tough to find the "best software folks" and hope this cog (yes, sorry bro) can join your company and fit the culture.

I joined a company with decent software developers (that are willing to listen, learn, and also live life like a normal regular human being) and I couldn't be more happier.

During my interview, the manager, the senior people, and the owner keeps stressing 2 things: we hire people that fit our culture and we don't hire stupid people (not the smartest). I asked everybody who interviewed me of how long they have been here and the minimum question was 3 years (the person is one of the Directors). The rest have been there for 6 years, 8 years, etc.

We struggled together. We went through hard times together. At the end of the day, these people go home everyday to their family and go back to work tomorrow without extra baggages.

The best software folks tend to have their own dogmatic approaches that may clash with everybody else that he thinks less superior (U KNO NO EMACS? Ur LVL just went down a few notch and U SHALL BOW TO ME!).

I mean... c'mon, let's get real here and clear those pixie dusts. If the smartest people don't have that kind of ego, they ain't smart to begin with.

hkarthik5• 15 years ago

I'm a developer in Dallas and many of the same things are affecting our market, although we're mostly big companies and less startups.

I personally work with a geographically distributed team and as long as we meet face to face on occasion, we're highly effective and we can hire when ever we find good talent no matter where they live.

I know companies like GitHub, LivingSocial, and 37 Signals all embrace this remote team model and utilize it well to find the talent they need without taking desperate measures.

That begs the question, why aren't most of these startups doing the same thing? I understand big companies are often too paralyzed in bureaucracy to hire remote workers, but shouldn't startups be a little more flexible in this regard?

megamark16• 15 years ago

It seems like most hip startups want you in their office, drinking coffee/beer/coolaid with the rest of the team. I don't know more companies don't give a distributed team a chance, but from my observations it seems like they're all inherently against the idea.

tylerhobbs• 15 years ago

I don't know what you qualify as 'hip', but beyond the initial three or four first people in a startup, many startups are more than willing to start hiring remote workers.

This is especially true when you're looking for workers with very specific skill sets. It's generally easy to find a generic Java developer locally, but if you're looking for, say Cassandra experts (like we are at DataStax, with an office in Austin), then you're probably willing to hire someone anywhere in the world if they're good enough.

rickmb2• 15 years ago

Distributed teams work when the company, its culture and processes are stable and clear. Most software related companies don't get anywhere near that in the first five to ten years. In the mean time, fast growing start-ups look for the engineers they hire to be their future technical leaders, and to be deeply involved in the entire company, not just writing code.

In short: drinking coffee/beer/koolaid with the rest of the team is of vital importance, even if the actual work can be done remotely.

Also, the people that don't get this aren't good hires for remote work anyway, because one primary skill needed for a remote worker is knowing how to compensate for not being physically present.

hkarthik5• 15 years ago

I get this, as I worked in a startup and saw how many of the early employees started to fill in leadership roles within the company. However, we had remote teams too and they worked out just as well. Our VP of Development for a long time was remote too.

I do agree that it's not optimal in every situation, and your culture has to adjust for it. I'm just saying, if there is a talent crunch, companies need to be willing to take steps to handle it. Distributed teams are one such option.

michaelochurch3• 15 years ago

The distributed model imposes a cost that most startups would rather not pay. There's a lot of communication latency that occurs once a company becomes distributed. It takes a high level of aggregate professional maturity and attentiveness to communication to work.

Some teams, usually small ones, can make distributed work work, but it doesn't work for everyone and it doesn't form the sort of culture startups generally want.

That said, the distance metric isn't linear. Across a parking lot is almost as far as 1000 miles away. Once a company is scaling to this point, remote-work arrangements make a lot of sense.

boxaustin2• 15 years ago

Because face to face is that much more valuable; there's no replacement for it; it's worth it

goodweeds6• 15 years ago

It is pretty depressing to realize how under-paid we are in the bay area when you factor in cost of living. A lead systems administrator in SF tops out at about $150k, but more likely is about $120k, which is the same my friends in Wisconsin and New Jersey make, where the cost of living is 60% and 30% lower, respectively.

boredguy8• 15 years ago

But you get to live in San Francisco rather than Wisconsin or New Jersey. It might not matter to some people, but I have almost zero desire to live long-term anywhere other than San Diego, LA, or San Francisco. There are enough people who feel the same way that I do, and so employees can pay a bit less.

baddox2• 15 years ago

Are you suggesting that the niceness of the city somehow acts as a benefit so that the employer doesn't have to pay as much?

potatolicious6• 15 years ago

I live in SF right now. It's not even that nice... it just costs a lot, and in many ways I feel like the insane amount of love the city gets from its residents is at least in part to feel better about paying such ridiculous living costs.

I've lived in a lot of major cities in my life, and SF is the first one where I've had to literally dodge human shit while walking on the sidewalk.

The weather is pretty much the only reason I don't regret moving here. Even the famously liberal population drives me up the wall sometimes - amazingly cliquey, and way smugger than even South Park portrays this place.

hyperation• 15 years ago

Please, don't make me mention the pay here in Hawaii.

joshontheweb• 15 years ago

The fact that you found a job in Hawaii at all is impressive. I lived there for 3 years and left for LA due to lack of jobs or community surrounding the web.

scottm01• 15 years ago

NJ and Wisconsin as a comparison?

Your friends in NJ probably work in NYC (or one of the close in northern NJ cities). Run a cost of living calculator, we're just as bad off (:

If they're out in the middle of the state they're probably not making $120, and you could be living in Sacramento for a lower cost of living (and salary) too.

fooooobar3• 15 years ago

That's a good point, but is it more depressing than living in WI is?

michaelochurch3• 15 years ago

Madison is quite nice. There isn't as much excitement as in New York or San Francisco, but I'd take it over suburbia (including Bay Area suburbia) in 1/5 of a heartbeat.

If the three worst things about a place are December, January, and February... that's a pretty good place to live.

goodweeds6• 15 years ago

Wow, all of the hate on San Francisco, this place is my home and I love it. New York is the only other city in the US I could cope with. I just wish we had saner policies around our housing (like a rent-control system which didn't create so much illiquidity in inventory) and fewer dot-commie 2.0s ruining our culture by taking everything they can and offering nothing back in return, essentially treating the city like a long-term tourist engagement. Every time a large startup has an exit rents go up. My income bracket makes me "lower upper-middle class" and now that I'm in my early '30s I can no longer afford to live here. Analysts preduct that when Facebook and Zynga IPO the average price of a 2 bedroom 2 bath in the city will get close to $5k/month, which is insane. The only way start-ups can manage to operate out of San Francisco is ridiculous valuations, and hiring young kids who are happy to live 3 or 4 to an apartment, since market-rate salaries don't allow you to live alone unless you want to live in a poorly maintained studio in the 'loin.

chairface3• 15 years ago

I grew up in Wisconsin, and until recently worked there. $120k seems an outrageous amount to me - where are your friends?

goodweeds6• 15 years ago

They're all in madison, working primarily for one of two tech companies or large cable-based ISPs. The jobs sound dreadfully boring, and I realize they're only able to command such salaries due to the lack of senior engineers to compete with.

prophetjohn• 15 years ago

One of the companies mentioned in the article was advertising internships and failed to even call me in for an interview. And it took them 5 weeks to respond saying that they did not have a position that matched my qualifications. It's possible that I suck, but I have a 4.0 GPA advertised on my resume and offered a pretty compelling cover letter.

It's possible that many of these companies have a hard time recruiting talent because their recruitment process is broken.

pagekalisedown3• 15 years ago

Notice the quote "I'm not going to pay the California wages".

Keeping salaries low is clearly a priority for these people.

I have a strong feeling this might be a fluff piece to increase the H1B quota.

austindev9000• 15 years ago

So what are the actual salaries they are offering in Austin? The HN post says 150k but that's roughly the SF rate anyway.

mspaint2• 15 years ago

May I submit that if companies collectively hired some junior/entry level employees, they might eventually have some mid and senior level developers in the market? Just looking at Startuply for example, there is maybe one junior position out of 53 positions listed in Austin.

Perhaps hire one senior level and a two or three junior level developers to work closely together, and try and raise the productivity of the new devs.

If there are NO senior level programmers available, maybe they should get creative.

wyclif3• 15 years ago

Spot on. I've seen this again and again: everyone is hurting for senior people, and everyone wants rock stars/ninjas. Hardly any companies that I see are willing to hire a junior dev or admin and contribute anything at all to his/her personal development, skill accumulation, and experience. They just wanna plug the hole and fill the position as fast as they can, and that's usually bad for both employer and employee long term.

VladRussian• 15 years ago

>Hardly any companies that I see are willing to hire a junior dev or admin and contribute anything at all to his/her personal development, skill accumulation, and experience.

well and after all that investment the person leaves for better salary/etc... to somebody who is looking to hire senior people and not "willing to hire a junior dev or admin and contribute anything at all to his/her personal development, skill accumulation, and experience" There is a reason for the things even if we don't like the reason.

And again, the "hot" skills (any NoSQL/Hadoop) can be picked in a week and even junior with such skills would easy find a place. There is just no excuse for somebody unsuccessfully looking for work in this market to not sit down and master some of such skills.

rickmb2• 15 years ago

Bull.

Companies have been hiring tons of inexperienced devs throughout the late '90s and early '00s, and they have been hurt badly by it. Incoherent teams full of junior devs that lacked practical skills and didn't know how to work in a team nearly killed many software based companies.

A CS degree teaches barely any professional skills, it's all on the job training, so training a junior is extremely costly.

So nowadays, smart companies build their team around seniors, and only then start hiring juniors one at a time. Which means 3 to 4 seniors for every junior dev.

It's not about "plugging the hole", it's about making sure the ship doesn't start leaking so badly it sinks.

nhangen• 15 years ago

This is the problem I've had with job listings in the startup world. I'm a jr level web developer, self-taught in the past year, that can't seem to find a single job listing that isn't asking for a ninja, rockstar, guru, or dragon slayer.

Where are the companies hiring warlocks in training, people willing to learn but needing the chance to grow and be challenged.

I guess I wonder why, if I was indeed a sr level engineer, why I would work for anyone at all when I could command high rates as a freelancer, or build my own products.

michaelochurch3• 15 years ago

"Rock star" is code for "junior dev who thinks he should be senior and will work 90 hours per week to prove it". People who've been programming for 5+ years generally avoid the "rock star" epithet like the plague.

phaus4• 15 years ago

I live close to the DC/Baltimore area right now. 95% of the positions I see advertised as either junior or entry level are looking for someone with a Top Secret (SCI) clearance and 3 years of professional experience. In addition to the ridiculous requirements they typically offer 40-60k a year.

On the other hand for people with 5+ years of experience there seems to be tons of high paying jobs.

Five years ago you could get a job around here as a security guard making 80k if you had a TS clearance.

Cyranix2• 15 years ago

I'm going to drop a small plug for my former employer, MyEdu (an Austin startup) -- they frequently hire people into junior roles, and I feel fortunate to have had such an opportunity myself. I'm not saying that everything is sunshine and roses there, but they definitely have a company culture that values the professional growth of junior employees.

viandante2• 15 years ago

How junior? And do you know if the hire remote for a probation period?

larsberg• 15 years ago

The only thing harder to hire than an experienced developer is a manager experienced at turning junior or early-career developers into senior ones.

Seriously, few things can sink the ship faster than taking on inexperienced people and hoping they'll learn. From that point of view, I can see why many startups, particularly those whose CTO/VP-E doesn't have management depth in addition to their technical depth.

sarcasmatron2• 15 years ago

Technical Management - either Operations or Project - is still regarded as a soft skill, and therefore isn't desired by most startups. As a result, they don't know how to recruit, don't know how to interview, and don't know how to manage their teams, whether in the office or distributed.

I've been doing it for about 5 years now, almost exclusively remote - it's not difficult, it just requires that everyone communicate well, or be willing to learn, if they don't already.

Part of the problem I've encountered are founder/senior managment who are willing to learn these management skills themselves - they are conditioned that everything is on them, so that can be tough.

At this point, I'm of the opinion that in most cases, especially with startups, remote is far more humane than in the office. It's also far more cost effective.

bbwharris• 15 years ago

In general companies seem unwilling to "train". Everyone has to start somewhere. I honestly consider software development to be a trade skill.

For startups, it makes sense to desire a senior level developer. Midsize and large companies really should explore internal training programs. Everyone a generation older than me talk about a world where the "entered through the mail room" and worked their way up. Does this world even exist today? From my point of view, it seems like we only expect top talent everywhere.

oacgnol• 15 years ago

Just wanted to share my experience as a junior software engineer straight out of college (May 2011, UT Austin) with experience at 3 different startups now.

There's been a discussion lately about the city of Austin being unable to retain engineering graduates, most of whom leave the city unable to find entry level work here (refer to http://blog.infochimps.com/2011/11/30/keeping-tech-talent-in... to get what I'm talking about). Many of my college friends want to stay in the city that they've grown to love, but many don't and end up moving back home to find work. The growing exodus has become a problem over time, but prospects seem to be on the rise again with initiatives by the City of Austin and other organizations (campus2careers is a great one) to keep graduates in the area. HireStarter, the recruiting agency that was mentioned in the article, was excellent in placing me at my current startup even though I had little experience. There's hope out there for junior guys, but it's still going to be tough.

I don't expect things to get better tomorrow as this movement is still early stage, but if this momentum keeps up, suddenly Austin will have a new supply of junior and (formerly junior) senior devs.

Again, I still consider myself very fresh to the local industry so my observations may be a bit myopic :).

dasil0032• 15 years ago

Not wanting to take entry level software engineers is possibly the most bone-headed move a big company can make. Someone needs to send a memo to management.

Big companies with no technical culture are not generally fun places for engineers. Experienced engineers can probably sniff out the really bad ones from a mile away. If they don't take new grads then essentially they're staffing up with the desperate and the downtrodden.

Telling the HR guys to hire new grads would, just by youthful ignorance and the law of averages yield a much better team over time. Granted retention would be the next problem, but at least they'd be somewhere.

nupark23• 15 years ago

On the contrary, experienced engineers are the ones most likely to be comfortable with a non-exciting big company that provides solid benefits, a reasonable working schedule, and mature, well-considered engineering practices.

Our own company isn't large, but we're rather traditional. We're not hackers, we believe in technical correctness, test-driven development and choosing the best tool for the problem at hand. This means that we generally write mobile software in the target platform language, server software in JVM languages, and on the occasions where we get to work on hardware and OS development, C and assembly.

The work approach is not laden with technical culture and "fun", unless you find solid engineering to be fun (personally, I do).

However, we've had great success in hiring genuinely senior engineers with at least a decade of experience each. We experimented early on with hiring junior engineers, but found that the overhead of dealing with untrained engineers was exceptionally high -- something that models my experience elsewhere, at larger companies.

With the caveat that these are generalizations, I've found that the cost to hiring junior engineers is expressed in obvious and (perhaps) non-obvious ways. There are the obvious costs of the training and mentoring required, along-side lower productivity, and a lesser ability to estimate complexity and time to completion. There are also more abstract costs, such as technical and design debt that junior engineers are much more likely to incur simply due to a lack of experience. There are also cultural costs -- if you hire too many junior engineers, you'll create a technical culture and working experience that drives senior candidates away, amplifying the costs I've listed above.

Of course, I readily admit that someone must hire untrained junior engineers, and I realize the implicit unfairness of hiring standards that would exclude myself were it 15 years ago. However, there are companies other than our own that are willing to bear these costs in exchange for being able to recruit at the scale they require -- we're just not one of them, and I think our reasoning is sound.

That said, there are some things a junior engineer can do to make themselves less junior, (possibly before even entering the labor market):

- Get experience (class projects don't count). A great way to do this is by contributing to OSS, especially projects that demand high-technical competence (eg, contribute to the ruby interpreter or MacRuby, not just high-level Ruby on Rails). Senior engineers have past experience to draw on when implementing software projects; this allows them to design not just for the immediate requirements, but with an understanding of how the requirements, maintenance costs, and performance will evolve over time.

- Study practical implementation topics (... and then get experience implementing them). A lot of the value of a senior engineer is in their broad understanding of the practical topics of the field. Coming out of a CS program, you should hopefully have a firm grasp of the fundamentals of CS, but what many candidates are missing is a firm understanding of applied programming. Some off the cuff general book suggestions: UNIX Network Programming, Application Programming in a UNIX Environment, Mac OS X Internals, Applied Cryptography, The Design and Implementation of The FreeBSD Operating System, Database in Depth. This list is probably incomplete :)

- Don't settle for just an internship. Internships at big companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft) serve as a relatively cheap first-pass filter on college candidates for hiring. Of a given pool of software interns at a company like Apple, it's unlikely that more than a 10% of them will be hirable material, and of those 10, maybe 2-3 will actually get jobs. Other companies may hire a larger percentage (I don't have any experience there). If you want to work for Apple, Microsoft, or Google (or think you might), then don't sit on your laurels if you get an internship there. Pick a real, practical problem that, and work on it, hard, leveraging your access to senior engineers for advice and guidance as much as possible. If you just coast through the internship, you probably won't receive an offer. I think some students look at internships at the big companies as prestigious. However, they may be viewed as the opposite -- an internship at one (or more) of those companies without being hired is a red flag for me, since I'm wondering why you didn't get an offer.

eshvk• 15 years ago

From my limited experience hunting from a job in Austin, I think one of the reasons is that there literally aren't that many firms (small or large) doing software engineering.

The other vibe that I get is that culturally most of the older companies are from a different era which kind of doesn't make them too attractive a destination for a new graduate. Surprisingly enough the situation for EE grads is much more rosier: Anecdotal evidence over the past three years suggests that most of them get hired and stay in Austin.

yxhuvud• 15 years ago

"We've fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent," Favaron said, "and that's a zero-sum game that hurts everyone."

Everyone? No, it does not hurt the employees.

xer02• 15 years ago

Yeah, but they aren't anyone, they're just talent.

adestefan3• 15 years ago

May favorite was when a very large corporation started to call their HR department Human Capital Management. Human Resources is bad enough, but once you start calling me captial I'm never going to work for you again.

rudiger• 15 years ago

Guess I'm moving to Austin!

tansey• 15 years ago

I moved from CA (Palo Alto and San Diego) to Austin in August to start my PhD at UT. Austin is pretty good in the sense that it's probably the best possible city you could live in that's in middle America.

That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain rude and self-centered. There is a lot of "get out of my way" attitude, both metaphorically in how people interact in conversation, and literally on the roadways. It's also landlocked, and I miss the ocean terribly.

I'm here purely because the CS department at UT Austin is the best in the world for my area of research (Evolutionary Algorithms and Neural Networks). However, in a couple of years when my class requirements are done, I'm planning on finishing my dissertation research remotely from a coastal city.

There really is nothing at all I can imagine Austin has to offer me that is worth staying here over SF, SD, or even the east coast like NYC or DC. Maybe I just don't get it.

oldstrangers2• 15 years ago

"That said, it's not California. The people in Texas are generally just plain rude and self-centered."

No offense, but that might be the most backward thing I've ever heard. Have you seen LA or SF? I feel like you might live in a one or two person bubble. Honestly, where are you hanging out in Austin?

geori• 15 years ago

I agree. Austin is one of the most chill places in the world. As a matter of fact, the only thing people bitch about are all the self-centered Californians who moved to TX in order to escape high real estate prices.

hkarthik5• 15 years ago

Maybe he's hanging out with transplants? I find that a lot of transplants tend to carry this attitude, no matter where they're originally from.

Jgrubb• 15 years ago

I'm a consultant from NJ and just got back from Austin a couple days ago, meeting with all my clients who live there and pay me to live and work from here. Anyway, the Texan version of rude and self-centered is pretty quaint by my personal standards...

Edit: If I were a Rails dev, I'd imagine I could be making $200/hr down there. The circles I move through are like desert-island desperate for Rails devs. (Started working through Rails 3 in Action on the plane home).

hello_moto3• 15 years ago

Are these companies willing to recruit remote workers? :D

vaksel• 15 years ago

I think there are 2 parts of the problem.

1-companies want to pay a pittance compared to what the person is actually worth. Face it, if you offer $90K, and your competitor offers $120K, the person has to be insane to take an offer that differs so much.

2-companies have really high requirements when they don't actually need them. If you are doing something simple, you don't need a Google level engineer...especially if you are not willing to pay a proper salary for one.

gexla• 15 years ago

Free beer, taco's and a job interview can't make a good mix. I suppose that if I let one rip before I start slurring my qualifications, and the company isn't interested, then it was never meant to be.

adestefan3• 15 years ago

Your son Rip is on line toot.

karmajunkie4• 15 years ago

Here's my gripe about this:

Ok, so startups have limited funds, fair enough. But way too many of them offer way too little in the way of equity to make up for a below-market salary and the risk and opportunity cost of taking the job.

I have zero sympathy for larger firms. When they talk of raising H1-B limits and how tight the market is, what they really mean is that they can't find developers for what they're willing to pay. the work these developers do is critical to the bottom line of the company. Why should a CEO make out like a bandit through compensation or stock prices while the teams that enabled it toil away for a pittance, comparatively speaking? Wages across all industries have been mostly flat for years—its only in the last few years that the IT/development industry is starting to show some movement.

(And before someone points out that everyone in a software company contributes to success, even non-developers, I totally agree—everyone ought to share in success.)

mgkimsal3• 15 years ago

"Austin's supply crunch for software developers was bad enough by September to prompt 25 Central Texas tech executives to fly to California in search of new talent."

Awesome idea - cause there's certainly not a dev shortage in California, is there?

They'd probably have more luck doing a whistlestop tour of the midwest and north atlantic states, hitting up the more rural areas. Many techies in those areas have few options, or may be stuck with remote-only options, and may not enjoy the weather as much. The Austin companies have an automatic 'better lifestyle' story against more of those areas (weather alone) rather than trying to compete with California (where most of the devs are there probably because of the Valley and the software dev culture already).

In short, I'd guess it's an uphill battle to get people to move from SF to Austin, probably much harder than getting people from, say, St Joseph, Michigan to uproot for Austin.

"After resumes were shared, business cards exchanged and several follow-up phone interviews completed, not a single one of those California candidates has made the move to Texas, according to the Austin Technology Council, which organized the trip."

Oh wow, and look at that, it didn't work. Wh not?

"It's even tighter there than it is here," said participant Rod Favaron , CEO of Austin startup Spredfast . "The challenge is there just aren't enough good software developers to go around."

They didn't think of that before? Or just can't think outside the bubble?

veverkap• 15 years ago

You are absolutely right about them hitting the wrong geographical area.

However, as a developer in the mid-Atlantic, I think the lifestyle here is just as good :)

I'd love to find a remote opportunity with any of those firms, but it seems that is difficult to find these days.

mgkimsal3• 15 years ago

Many people do like where they live, but... I suspect more people would prefer to leave, say, Maryland for Austin than leaving SF.

Kilimanjaro• 15 years ago

Why are companies so averse to telecommuting? There is an endless supply of S/D around the world.

sarcasmatron2• 15 years ago

Inexperienced management: they're more concerned with supervising task completion than managing deliverables and risk.

_dps4• 15 years ago

The telecommuting issue is separate from the "rest of the world" issue; the former is primarily a communication and culture problem, but the latter is all about concentration of talent around leading technical companies (primarily in the US).

There are indeed many people all over the world with programming knowledge; there are far fewer with experience on a technically sophisticated project. The latter class of talent is highly concentrated around the hotspots of sophisticated technical companies which, on average, keep their most important teams in the US.

If you are just reading and writing rows on a single instance of MySQL you can get all the talent you want from just about anywhere in the world. If you want to roll your own fault-tolerant distributed filesystem your options are (statistically) much more narrow, because anyone who can do that is likely to have been tempted by an offer to work at, e.g., Google in Mountain View.

oneplusone• 15 years ago

I don't know about that. I am located in Toronto, Canada and would be interested in a UX design/front end development telecommuting job that paid $120k+.

However, nobody really wants to hire somebody that they can't watch. In the past I have emailed several companies about job postings that list telecommute as an option, and in all but one of the cases they where not open to somebody more than 3 hours away from the office.

I don't really understand this position. I am in ET so the time zone can't be an issue. I am in an English speaking country so there won't be any language barriers. I think companies in the US need to realize that increasingly fever people will want to move there because it the US is become very scary.

wladimir2• 15 years ago

Cut it with the crazy US exceptionalism. You might be surprised how many technically sophisticated projects are worked on outside the US. It's not as if the rest of the world still lives in the stone age.

shareme• 15 years ago

the biggest obstacle in moving to Austin is not what the article states..

Think about it people..if the developer has a house mortgage will he move? No..

If the dv still has edu debt will he move? no..

keyston• 15 years ago

This is good news.. atleast for texas. I'm about 45mins from austin and finding local gigs are always hard. Wonder if they do remote work...

anamax• 15 years ago

> "We've fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent," Favaron said, "and that's a zero-sum game that hurts everyone."

If they've made an agreement to not recruit from each other, they're in violation of anti-trust law.

Google, Apple, and at least one other company got busted for this in SV about three years ago.

pagekalisedown3• 15 years ago

Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Pixar, Lucasfilm, Intuit, ..

http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkerschberg/2011/05/04/apple-a...

Maven911• 15 years ago

I think the only reason this article was so popular and generated so many comments was the clever marketed headline

gruseom3• 15 years ago

There's a lot of discussion in this thread around "junior" vs. "senior". This misses the point, which is to hire good programmers and avoid bad ones. It's as if the industry has finally burned itself out of the "programmers as replaceable cogs" model and has replaced it with the next-laziest model, "hire senior, not junior". That is an improvement, but it's still so off-base that the words "junior" and "senior" applied to programming make me cringe.

Here are two factors the junior/senior model does not take into account. First, a good but inexperienced programmer will learn so quickly that they will run rings around mediocre experienced programmers in no time. Second, experience isn't only a good thing. Once people have repeated something a certain way enough times (and surprisingly few repetitions are required), they become locked-in and unable to see alternatives. This loss of flexibility is toxic to effective programming.

Of course that happens less to good programmers than bad ones, but that only puts us back at the real question - how do you tell a good one apart from a bad one? - something we have no satisfactory way of answering that is compatible with current hiring practices.

What we need is a healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior". Our industry lacks this. What is our path to learning? We have the sink-or-swim model in which people once hired are installed in a silo and told to work on their tasks. Everyone recapitulates all the classic mistakes and has to figure everything out for themselves. I know I did. It cost me at least 5 years developmentally, and I'm only putting the number that low to save face. This way is so inefficient that it must eventually yield to something better. Hopefully when that happens there will also be less of the prickly auto-didact about most of us - but that's another story.

akkartik• 15 years ago

What we need is a healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior".

Reading other people's code is too hard. We go through life trying to do it as little as possible.

mattmiller2• 15 years ago

Reading other peoples code is a great way to learn, but often other peoples code is not very accessible. How often do you look at the code written by a star dev in another department on another project. I can't:

-identify star devs unless I work with them directly,

-look at the code base of the project they are working on if I am not also working on it,

-find out which portions of the code they wrote (without looking through commit logs)

In many places a <i>healthy culture of interaction between "junior" and "senior".</i> is not facilitated by the employer.

Aqua_Geek2• 15 years ago

I keep hearing of this huge shortage of developers, but the situation I have encountered while looking for a job seems to be saying something else.

Is there really a lack of good talent, or is the recruiting process so horribly broken that good developers don't make it through the first levels of filtering by non-technical people?

mattmiller2• 15 years ago

I think you have a point. We are trying to hire at a large company and we don't see many resumes that make it through the HR filter. I still haven't figured out how this process works.

gorbachev• 15 years ago

So I've been toying with the idea of relocating to Austin, because New York is f*ing expensive.

I even sent a couple of job applications some time ago before I got my new job in NYC. I'm not a rockstar, but I'm good and my resume shows it. I get a LOT of bites in New York metro area.

However, these Austin companies didn't even bother to respond, except one. The interesting thing about the one that responded was that the job was tailor made for me. It was uncanny...it's almost as if they read my resume and produced the job listing to match. Which is why I sent in the application in the first place.

The response was that they found me unqualified for the job. What a load of horse manure. If you're sending form letters to rejected candidates, please take some time to actually use the right template. I believe this one should've been the "no_relocation" or the "ceos_son-in-law_was_more_qualified" template.

$150K and up for Software Devs in Austin

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