liquidcool

I almost responded without reading the article, assuming he was talking about moonlighters. Meaning hiring developers who have already put in 40 hours somewhere else. Many responding here seem to be making the same assumption. That's always been a disaster (as the employer).

But he is actually talking about offering his first 20 hours to a client, which is what I do as a consulting CTO. It works out exceptionally well for my clients. And I have had few issues when I hire contractors who juggle a couple part time clients. If you do that full time, you quickly learn time management.

He's also right there is no market for this for programmers beyond Upwork or Toptal. Companies rather pay a premium to get 4 productive hours, 2 hours of email and meetings, and 2 hours of coffee and socializing.

One exception might be DevOps, which is more project based.

The Amplify team seems to be allergic to docs. They should double the size of their evangelist/tech writing team.

I don't know when this was, but I'm just starting learning it now and the "Getting Started" tutorial seems to be 2+ revisions behind the current CLI, which is their main product.

And UI components moved to v2 with a new doc site, but all the main docs/tutorials still refer to v1. There are breaking changes.

I'd also expect to pull up docs on any class or function in my IDE (IntelliJ), but there is nothing for Amplify. Just type definitions, no explanations.

Really rough developer experience.

"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini

This explains so much of human behavior, but I hesitate to recommend it to people because it is so easily weaponized. To borrow from Harry Potter, it's the closest thing I've seen to a book of charm spells, but was written as a defense against the dark arts. Better everyone read it rather than just the marketers.

What I really love about this book is how much of politics it has explained for me, including the downfall of the USSR and the American civil rights movements, but also newer events like Schwarzenegger's poltiical career.

If you like this, I'd also recommend:

"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg

All are in a similar vein. For more focused book on human behavior, I recommend first time team leads/managers read:

"Switch" by Dan and Chip Heath

A solid guide to changing organizational behavior.

It seems to me that like last year, several countries with very large developer bases are underrepresented. I'm thinking of India and the Philippines in particular, where English is not an issue. I'm an American, but I'd like to get a good global picture.

In addition, it would be good to see other indicators such as downloads, jobs (admittedly hard to measure accurately), BuiltWith trends, etc. Considering the millions of front end developers, this seems a very small sample size.

I thought this was already posted, but I had read this longer article with more context, including the original text from the book that is short and written in a fun, old-timey style:

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/fall-asleep-fast/

For me, none of the imagination techniques work, but mindfulness meditation - simply focusing on my breathing - does the trick.

Hi Charles, what you are describing is what I specialize in (outsourced/offshore software project rescue). I run a 4-part audit/assessment:

1. Client education, AKA managing expectations. Educating the client on the principles and challenges of software development. Most know very little about this and it makes their job very frustrating. Every failure of consulting is really a failure to manage expectations.

2. Communication. How are they communicating, what are the problems? This is the most important thing in software development (and business in general).

3. Methodology review. How are they managing the project? What methods and tools are they using? Are the tools configured, integrated, and automated correctly?

4. Developer practices. Mostly based on my programmer productivity talk.

You are focused on #4 (and some of #3), which is important, but I find the first 3 way more important for "success." #2 sounds like your biggest problem. When I hire developers (always 100% remote) I prioritize two things: communication skills and discipline.

I'll give you one tip: static code analysis tools. This way the tool is criticizing the code instead of you (of course, I agree with code reviews). When I realized how useful this is I started giving talks on it.

Also, Gerald Weinberg's The Secrets of Consulting is gold: https://amzn.to/2JvDZnx

I would love public transportation like I've experienced it in Europe, but train tracks have exceptionally tight tolerances and high costs to build/maintain vs. roads. I hope Musk will fix this, but probably not before "good enough" self-driving cars arrive. Also, trains get into accidents pretty regularly. First Google hit:

According to the US Department of Transportation, there are about 5,800 train-car crashes each year in the United States, most of which occur at railroad crossings. These accidents cause 600 deaths and injure about 2,300.

At least they were honest about the terrible pay. That's refreshing.

I think it's good to remove "friend potential" from the hiring process. Most people are not jerks, and that's really all you need. I find I'll become friends with anyone reasonably pleasant to be around.

But listing criteria without saying anything about how you test for it - like empathy - is a pretty big gap. Hopefully you have a talented HR member with a psych background who can guide you through behavioral questioning.

I hire 100% remote developers, so my #1 soft criteria is discipline. And I find I can test for that, along with communication skills (#2) by asking them to write about best practices. Disciplined developers love to talk about best practices.

It's hard to say what to improve without more details, but contract work should be high paying because of the uncertainty. Could be issues with your resume and/or interviewing skills. For the latter, you could try interviewing.io. Almost everyone underestimates the amount of practice required to get good, and they procrastinate until it's too late (just like with networking). Also sounds like you're a generalist, which will work against you.

I have a career course that should give you a ton of ideas to help, see my profile for details. If it's taking you that long to find a job, there are some fundamental issues with your strategy and tactics.

Traditionally it's been Java web application development and ecommerce, and I've subcontracted a few times when friends needed help.

But now I'm currently focusing more on staffing, since almost nobody technical is in recruiting, hence I'm a no brainer to hiring managers. Long term, I'll funnel recruiting revenue into products.

Wow, 5X! I have a small consultancy and most engineers are surprised to learn that 2X is typical. I do know some of the large management consulting firms have very high margins, especially on junior programmers, which you're clearly not. Specialist knowledge will also raise rates. But I suspect they have high churn with abuse like that.

Do they have an awesome sales/marketing team, or are those rates typical for your industry? If it's typical, you might consider freelancing. Or finding a small consultancy that will treat you better and take care of sales for you.

I'll say I was once unhappy and asked to be laid off. They told me no, essentially because I was a cash cow. You think your bargaining position is tough, but if your utilization rate is 100% and their margin is 80%, if you leave they are guaranteed to lose at least 160 billable hours (up to 480) while they replace you. I'm assuming you're not in gaming or a glamour industry where there is a line out the door to replace you.

You mention a couple times that your work has a significant impact on the company's sales/revenue. If you can actually quantify the value of your work, you are in a much stronger negotiating position with your employer and others. It is rarely done by engineers and sets you apart.

In addition to fair compensation, you mention "stressing over issues." I've noticed more than once that I've been stressed over problems my clients didn't really care about. It's not easy, but it's important to keep your stress levels in line with management's (or lower).

I'm confident you will improve that rate if you move #1 to #3. It's a form of the halo effect, where we over-weight the beginning of a sentence, paragraph, document, etc.

Got an application from a developer that looked terrible. Was ready to dismiss it, when I happened to notice there were patterns to the garbage, and it was really too terrible for anyone. Asked her to send me the original and I found the culprit:

It was two columns.

That was all it took to throw off the resume parser at Indeed of all places. So what you're doing will be hopelessly destroyed by any resume parser out there. That is likely the reason for the performance.

As someone who does contingency tech recruiting, I'm very curious how this plays out. I have a couple biases, mainly 2 decades in software engineering and a sense of ethics many recruiters would call "stupid." But I'll clear some things up in this thread.

First, I'm shocked this worked. Typically, recruiters send out "headless" resumes with the name and contact details stripped out, for candidates you can't easily match on LinkedIn or other resume databases. I assumed they were fake and consider it a form of phishing. I will add that this is not done by just lone recruiters hard up, but by many major firms. And they do it to me, too, which means they didn't even read the first line of my LI profile to learn we are competitors.

Contingency recruiting fees are well known in the industry. But I suppose if you were not a technical manager (or very inexperienced), and didn't run it past HR, this might happen. You might think, "how much could it be?"

While there is no contract in place, there are lawyers who specialize in collecting recruiting fees because so many companies try to get out of them even when there is a legit contract. So the threat of a lawsuit is real, and depending on the jurisdiction and the actual correspondence, they may be liable for something (IANAL).

Personally, the same ethical code that prevents me from trying to trap potential clients would also prevent me from lying to the recruiter. I'm sorry you were put in such an uncomfortable position.

Isn't crowd-funding just changing names to ICO? I'm not saying it's any better, just that there's as much talk about it now as there was for crowd-funding. Curious what the numbers are for that in comparison, and what percentage of seed stage was crowd-funded.

Hadn't seen that article, but will take a look.

Friend sold Kirby vacuums and had a very high opinion of them, but of course they are extremely expensive, something like $1,500.

Author here, great feedback, thanks.

My ultimate goal would be, if possible, to ask one of the SI's professional services developers out to lunch and pick their brain in an informal setting. Someone who has been there for a couple years and has seen some things and is ready to talk.

One of the challenges with the SI model is because people go to the vendor, they give you a lot of business and help keep payroll going, so you never want to badmouth them in public. But you don't have to badmouth anyone to say, "We think for your needs, this is the best solution." Problem is, you're not allowed to say even that when the lead comes from the vendor.

Perhaps the best question is, "Who has the best developer experience?" IMHO, that's the best sign of a quality product. Granted, still might not have the features you need out of the box like a bigger, older vendor. You need to weigh all pros and cons.

A friend asked me the same, so here's my info. It is dated, and you're best calling a repair shop before buying, but likely still some nuggets of truth here.

Big trend is consolidation in the industry. Whirlpool, Maytag, and Kitchenaid are all the same company now. For dishwashers (and I got this info recently), repairman said they all have the same motor and core components, which is the most important. They differ on the control panel, aesthetics, and price. He also said that LG dishwashers have a problem with hard water, which is problematic in SoCal.

BTW, this was a call for a dishwasher problem on a Kitchenaid my brother bought used. The door kept popping open during washing (just enough to stop the cycle), and he said the problem was that the frame was slightly bent, probably during transport. My brother got a great deal buying a matched set of appliances used (you nearly always do), but sadly there was nothing he could do for a bent frame and it had to be ditched.

For washing machines, the guy said "Buttons and knobs, the simpler the better. No electronics. When these things have problems, it's always the electronic control panel, which is expensive to replace." He also suggested Whirlpool and Maytag, so I went with Whirlpool since again, same company, cheaper price.

Some years ago, a vacuum cleaner shop explained that everyone is racing to put out a lighter vacuum, and hence they switched from metal gearing and components to plastic. This greatly diminishes their lifespan. He had a number of used models he personally serviced and felt good about selling used. Afraid I forget the model he was really excited about, but again, your local vacuum shop will likely have something.

And thanks to all the nice comments, this really made my day!

What country is this in? I've never heard of an exclusivity clause from US tech recruiters.

Shocked to hear nobody asked about past projects, that's usually the core of the interview. What are they asking instead? If behavioral questions, are you practicing those?

And if they are not asking about algorithms, you're likely not interviewing at startups or major software companies. I know startups tend to go for experienced engineers, but you still have established s/w companies.

Short answer is to contribute to a popular open source project, that should raise eyebrows. I find meetups are also motivating. Finally, I have a developer career course (link in profile). Will help focus your efforts.

It is definitely easier to recruit Java/Spring folks. Not only are there way more of them, but there is a lot of competition for Scala folks right now (not just Play, but Spark, etc.), and pretty much any Java EE dev can learn Spring since it's an abstraction. Similarly, I use Groovy/Grails and love it, and can hire Java/Spring people because it's easy for them to learn. With Play, as you know, you throw away all your Java EE knowledge and relearn that stack. You could, of course, hire full stack Java devs and send them to Scala/Play training, assuming you have the time and budget. You might get a lot of folks eager to learn, although they may struggle with functional concepts. Not sure how functional your Scala is.

Is there anything about the app itself that would make either framework more applicable? My hunch is no, but figured I'd ask.

BTW, where are you located? Could affect recruiting.

To me, Angular 2 looks great because of TypeScript, which is so similar to Groovy. Most Java devs seem to prefer it.

So he actually gives a response? Callooh callay!

I'd say none of the recruiter emails were terrible, but I see the points about requiring passion and code ownership.

Also, he makes a point about emails going to his personal email address. I've had companies email my "friends and family" address, which must've been harvested from private mailing lists, and that does cross a line.

In general, you have a contract in place first. Sometimes they'll send in nameless resumes, and if the hiring manager likes them, they get the contract in place then. I've had clueless recruiters do that to me, and I suspect some are fake resumes. I've gotten good at spotting recruiter submissions and just ignore them now.

My clients have me do all the coordination with the candidate, and we keep each other in the loop. I only work with reputable companies, but there are a couple lawyers out there who specialize in collecting from deadbeat staffing clients, so it is a risk. I understand it's more an issue with small businesses (kind of like software consulting).

The contract will stipulate grace periods, and usually if the candidate applied in the last 6 months, through any means, you are ineligible for the placement fee.

The first recruiter to submit the candidate "wins," and of course this includes internal recruiters, who get credit for website applications. I was bitten my this once, where I essentially placed a client by selling them on someone who was already in their system, but had been ignored. He had shotgunned his resume and didn't pay attention where, so he wasn't lying when he said he wasn't familiar with the company. It was painful to lose out, but at least he and the hiring manager are very happy with me, so small consolation.

This "first submission wins" has motivated recruiters to submit resumes as soon as they get them, before even talking to the applicant. To me, that is unethical and would hurt my reputation. However, I've had job seekers tell me they trust me to apply to relevant jobs on their behalf. Obviously, that's very different.

Have you tried this?

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/22210-facebook-unsponsored

Fixed it for me. Web-only, but I just removed the icon from my phone's home screen and my FB usage went way down, which I think is a good thing.

Revenue per sale, but in ecommerce, the standard term is "average order value."

Last I checked the pricing was very different; nodes for BigTable, reads/writes for Datastore. BigTable is more cost effective for large workloads, but it requires buying a minimum of three nodes, which is ~$1,500/mo total. If you're small potatoes it seems infeasible. Happy to be corrected if I misread.

Yes, about five 9's of recruiters don't understand the tech on the resume or the job description. That may prevent them from responding.

But in general, they rely on you to self-qualify. So they are far more likely to call you and run through the list of requirements verbally so you can tell them if you have them or not. That also gives them a chance to pitch other jobs. Of course, if you say no to something the hiring manager said was a must have, you disqualified yourself, but that's on the hiring manager, not the recruiter.

This comes from being in a tight labor market. Think of it this way: how often are you contacted for jobs you're totally unqualified for, but they think you are? In this market, I see that a lot more often than the opposite.

Sounds like you want to be a consultant, or like you said, at a startup. It's a tautology, but working for a big company makes you better at working for big companies. And startups are biased against corporate/enterprise developers. If you've been there a while, you may need to compromise on some level.