Categories
Recruiting TechBiz

In LA Coders Are Scared To Take Risks

In Los Angeles, it’s pretty hard to find good coders for a startup in this market. I’d say even harder than in Silicon Valley. Social media experts are easy to come by here, though. Why? Most coders in LA are scared.

To start things off, I just want to say that I’ve tried and swung for the fences at an LA startup at a very reduced salary. I am still smarting psychologically and fortunately no longer financially from it, but as soon as I’m strong enough, like tomorrow, I will start swinging for the fences again.

I’ll talk about perks that companies in LA offer, the difference between the labor force in LA and Silicon Valley, and what companies can do to hire new recruits for a startup. No matter what the size of your business, even if itโ€™s only a part-time gig, an arizona tax ein is an important tool to have.

Perks

Most startups provide the following perks:
1. A new laptop
2. A new phone
3. 1 to 2 telecommute days per week because the LA traffic is awful.

More established companies like Google & Microsoft can provide on top:
4. a stipend for further education ($2000 – $10000 / year)
5. daycare
6. “free” lunch — we know that this means shorter lunches and higher productivity
7. gym
8. trips to conferences like SxSW or the Web 2.0 Expo or Macworld

With the new Google office opening in Venice there will provide further strain on a small pool of coders.

The Talent Pool: LA vs. Silicon Valley

The pool is interesting. (source: http://www.calmis.ca.gov/htmlfile/msa/sf.htm & http://www.calmis.ca.gov/htmlfile/county/losangel.htm )

Silicon Valley Information Technology Workers (excludes hardware, e.g. Apple, Intel, financial software which would total 387,000): 49,900

Los Angeles Information Technology Workers (excludes hardware, financial software which would total 758,000): 106,100

Despite having a smaller pool of talent, Silicon Valley tech workers’ companies are able to produce 1% of the GDP of the United States or $174 billion annually.

Compare this with Los Angeles which despite having sheer numbers will only produce $10 billion this year.

Silicon Valley produces $3.8 million per worker and Los Angeles roughly $90,000 — just enough to keep the lights on.

How do we account for this discrepancy?

I did an informal survey of different Los Angeles based Information technology companies. One common theme: although espousing a culture of innovation, and although some are very profitable, most are simply not cutting edge, and some are very behind the times. This means that Los Angeles is not taking advantage of innovations in automation.

Let’s take MySpace which many used to be a flagship of Internet technology in Los Angeles. In most Silicon Valley Startups, coders know SQL, a major scripting language as well as HTML and CSS. However MySpace had positions solely for just HTML/CSS, a trend that harkened back to the 90s when web pages were manually created.

Another Los Angeles great, eHarmony.com, uses 40 to 50 engineers for its matchmaking algorithm and servers, whereas OKCupid.com uses only 10.

Also, the *big* main factor is that if you look at the graduating class of 2011 from Stanford for CS and compare it with UCLA, UCLA has only 60 CS majors out of 800 going to startups. Stanford has half!

How do you recruit? How do you get unscared?

The pool is so limited but deceptively so. In LA the coders are there, more than there are in Silicon Valley. The options seem to be:

1. Train people willing to take the risk on a startup.
2. Entice folks in already cushy Fortune 1000 jobs or similar to jump ship.

I’ve done option number 1 a few times already and it can take 6 months to a year assuming they’ve got the chops. Option 2 is still a bit of a mystery to me. If you have any thoughts for making LA coders take more risk, please feel free to comment below.

Categories
Career Recruiting TechBiz

What’s It Like To Be Fired?

I got fired many years ago while working as a web developer. I won’t go into who or where. This is just a description of what it’s like to be fired and how to cope afterwards.

I am hoping this will help some folks out there for when this tech bubble bursts and more firings occur.

When I got fired many years ago in the 90s, it was a surprise to me. My boss the previous week had told me what a great coder I was. The CFO and CTO met with me in a room. They told me the cause for my termination and then said, “Because of that, we have to terminate your employment.”

They gave me 2 papers to sign. One was the grounds under which I would receive severance (i.e. do not mention that we fired you for 7 years), and the other mentioned that I had to exercise my stock options in 1 month or forfeit them. I signed both papers with tears almost ready to start running down my face while the CTO said, “I had nothing to do with this.”

If you get fired, 3 awful things happen if you are a coder:

1. In the startup, tech community, if you get fired, you become a persona non grata. That means all the social circles I had booted me out. I literally had to start from zero.

2. You cannot use the employer who fired you as a reference.

3. I know there’s no techie blacklist but the only 2 jobs I could find were as a spam engineer or in a totally different industry. I chose the latter.

I don’t regret getting fired. I became a wandering gypsy coder for a few years and saw different parts of the world. It takes awhile until you get enough experience so that gap of where you got fired is in the deep past. Also getting fired is something that shouldn’t come as a surprise. I’ve learned how to spot when a firing will happen. Here are some major signs:

1. You are scapegoated. Or have insurmountable personal difficulties that just can’t be ameliorated. If this is you, it’s best to just get out of Dodge. Develop more social skills.

2. You failed to deliver on a big project. There are two solutions: immediately work on a project that is in trouble. This is rough but if you make it succeed, then folks will forget the failure. The other solution is just leave.

3. Your skills don’t really match your job. This is the main reason for most firings, but is the easiest to fix. Get more training!

Categories
Career Coding Questions Recruiting scalability hacking Social Media TechBiz

Coders Who Don’t Job Interview: Zed Shaw

I wrote a piece about the current state of job recruiting from a coder looking for work. I wondered:

What would it be like if you didn’t have to do a job interview?

(The non-tl;dr summary is below.)

By “job interview,” I just mean the normal process where I job candidate replies to an ad, contacts an employer directly, or works with a recruiter, and gets a job through that process. High-profile experts are courted, or work out a mutually beneficial deal where it doesn’t feel like an interview.

I asked around for folks that didn’t have to interview. One name that consistently came to the top was Zed Shaw.

Zed is the creator of the Mongrel Web Server, and a really great framework that is powered by Mongrel, Tir. Personally, I first heard of him from a video Leah Culver linked to on a talk that Zed gave, “The ACL is dead.” A careful viewing of that talk is always rewarded, especially if you are a coder freelancing for a corporation.

Here’s my interview with him (conducted over email). Thanks Zed!

Barce: What’s your own process for choosing the projects you want to work on?

Zed: Within my profession I try to just work on whatever is needed to get the
project or job done. Sometimes that ends up being a lot of crap work so
other people can do more important stuff. Professionally I don’t mind
this kind of work as it’s low investment and removes the pressure off
other folks who would rather do interesting things. I think I also tend
to pick off the lower level work because most of my original ideas are
usually too weird for a professional setting.

Personally, I tend to work on projects that match ideas I might have,
and usually they have a secondary motive that’s outside of programming.
Many times these ideas come from combining a couple of concepts, or
they’re based on a problem I’ve noticed, or they are just a kind of
funny joke or cool hack I thought up.

I think the most important thing is I don’t try to plan my inspiration
in my personal projects, but instead go with it when it comes. I don’t
have a “process”, and in fact I think “process” kills creativity.
Proess definitely helps make creative ideas a reality, but it doesn’t
create the initial concepts very well.

Professionally though, inspiration is for amateurs and I just do my
work.

Barce: What advice can you give someone who feels trapped by their job or surrounded by recruiters?

Zed: Well, if you’re trapped by your job then I’d say start working on
getting a new one. Nobody is every really *trapped*, but maybe you
can’t just quit right away. Instead, work on projects at home,
constantly look for new work, and move to where the work is. Even if
it’s temporary, moving to say San Francisco during the boom times could
be a major boost to your career.

I’d also say that going back to school is a good way to update your life
and change your profession. I’m a firm believer in getting government
student loans and using them to go to school. They’re cheap, low
interest, and the US government is usually very nice about letting you
pay them back. I’m not so sure about other places around the world
though.

Barcee: What’s the most disruptive technology you know about right now?

Zed: If I were to be honest, I’d have to say Facebook, even though I
absolutely hate it. It’s probably the one technology in recent history,
maybe after HTTP and the Browser, that is changing the way governments,
societies, and regular people work. It’s also sort of irritating that
the most important thing to hit most people’s lives is also one of the
most privacy invading companies in the world.

After that I’d have to say the rise of automated operations and
virtualized machines. Things like Xen, kvm, and even llvm as compiler
infrastructure are changing how systems are managed and deployed, which
then leads to bigger automation for large hetergenous networks. I’m
sort of waiting for operating systems to catch up and realize that their
configuration systems are getting in the way of real automation.

Barce: Thanks again, Zed, for the interview. The take aways that I hope readers get from this are:

  • Zed has open source projects that free him from the normal interviewing process. Building your own open source project is one way to free yourself.
  • “Professionally though, inspiration is for amateurs and I just do my work.”
  • “[W]ork on projects at home,
    constantly look for new work, and move to where the work is.”
  • Facebook is the most disruptive technology that’s changing governments… Virtualization / Cloud technologies are a 2nd.
Categories
How-To Recruiting TechBiz

3 Creative Ways to Recruit Developers

Recruiting talented developers in this market is still extremely difficult. How should a recruiter find the talent (PHP, Ruby, MySQL, iPhone, .NET, Java) your clients need? I outline a few creative out of the box solutions below.

Disclosure: I work as the lead developer at AppDevAndMarketing.com . This article in no way suggests we’ve used any of these methods.

Update on 4/15/2011: Ya, I’ve had to resort to all these methods and they’ve worked for us. ๐Ÿ˜€

1. Turn your project managers, account executives and marketers into coders. This is a fairly cheap investment with a high ROI. It is cheaper than paying out a bounty, and you already trust these folks. Send them to iPhoneDev Bootcamp now! Just be sure to prepare their machines for the development they’ll need to do. I tried this at a previous place of employment with great results! If you were trained by me and are reading this, please ask for a raise.

2. Look for places not so obvious. Use dating sites to find talent. Ya, I know, you haven’t used that match.com account in awhile, or have sworn of okaycupid.com or JDate, but guess what. For you bleeding edge types, try the iPhone, dating app, Skout. Although s/he might not be the person of your dreams, s/he might have the talent you need. The key take away is to use unexpected social media spaces for recruiting. Don’t be sleazy or sly about it. A simple, “Hi, I read your profile. You seem very talented in X. I’d actually like to hire you. Coffee or drinks?”

3. Use IRC. If you’re smart enough to do this, you probably shouldn’t be recruiting, but IRC is this best place to find pure, raw talent. Details on how to get onto IRC can be found on Google, but the best guide for newbies can be found on this gaming site. Use reputation defender services to help improve your business reputation and attract reliable talents.

There’s one more special place that I haven’t revealed that will guarantee you top talent every time. Leave a comment and I’ll contact you with that exclusive place to find developers.

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