Job ad seeks 'mediocre' developers Are you just scraping by coding in Ruby? Are you not prepared to pull infinite all-nighters? Are you less than amazingly fast? If you answered yes to any or all of the above, worry not: Melbourne, Australia, company Flippa has advertised for “Mediocre Ruby Devs”. The ad is not entirely serious, as Flippa does want good …
When a company has to tell you how "great" it is to work for them it always carries with it a strong level of doubt. It actually sounds like there are quite a few wankers running the show.
Great coffee - What a stereotypical piece of crap.
Great food - See above.
3 days to work on what you want - Yeah as long as there is nothing more important going on.
Team week - without precision that could be a week at a coal pit.
Sound like they might have a highly volatile workforce.
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@VWDan
The companies that truly are great to work for and have an excellent working environment do not need to advertise or market anything, they simply don't need to. Word of mouth and the grapevine soon let you know who's who in the business environment.
It's a bit like MacDonalds constantly "reminding" you how good their burgers are compared to the familly run burger joint that do need to say anything..
Regardless of the analogy, it is difficult to imagine that something is not quite Kosher in any company that needs to express itself in such a manner.
I'd be interested in hearing what you actually think would make a good employer?
I'm struggling to see how 3 days a month to work on your own stuff (even if it could potentially be denied 90% of the time) is somehow worse than the guaranteed no days at all that most employers give.
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> Great coffee - What a stereotypical piece of crap.
But Melbourne *does* have the best coffee in the world. That's what happens when you get a city full of immigrants from Italy, Greece, Lebanon and Turkey. (Plenty of immigrants from other places too, but they didn't help with the coffee.)
Yes, it's a wonderful NZ city plus more British, in the best sense, than even GB has been for decades. Even working for a mediocre employer there would be better than the "good" ones elsewhere, who in any case tend to be good only while they can more than afford it (I worked for two rather good ones, the old Digital and a very relaxed, small firm in Switzerland, both went bankrupt in the end).
Hi Khaptain,
I work for Flippa, the company this job ad was for. It seems like you've already made up your mind about us, but I did want to take a moment to address your concern about our coffee facilities.
Our coffee machine is a Vibiemme Domobar Super and our grinder is a Compak K3 Touch (doserless model). Both these bits of gear get pretty decent reviews if you have time to google around. Our coffee beans are supplied by a local roaster (Seven Seeds). We use their "espresso" blend which is a combination of beans sourced from Guatemala, Brazil & Honduras.
I'd be happy to address the other concerns you've raised if you're genuinely open to being convinced your impression of us is wrong. :)
... is that hiring "Ruby Professionals" is hard because "Ruby" isn't a professional's tool. It's a toy. By way of explanation, the standard implementation of Ruby is written in C ... I, personally, have never seen anything written in Ruby that couldn't have been better coded in C ... maybe with a perl front-end.
"never seen anything written in Ruby that couldn't have been better coded in C"
Never wrote in Ruby. But, either you don't know much about programming languages or the things you see are half-pagers that you get as exercise at uni. Even then, programming these in C would be painful and wasteful. Might even result in a Ruby interpreter.
You haven't written any Ruby and I'm pretty sure you're not very good at C either.
Look, hands down C happens to be one of those perfect languages. Of course its very easy for a bad C programmer to write some crappy code.
Ruby and C are totally different paradigms so if you want to blast Jake for his opinion, go for it.
But to Jake's point. If you've mastered a primitive language like C, then you can spot inefficiencies in Ruby that could be hand coded in C to specific requirements that would perform better.
That said... you can write something in Ruby much faster than in C that performs adequately.
C primitive? How much C have you written? Not a lot I daresay (I do mean C, not C++ or similar).
Perl professional? Yes. I have written moderately complex code for telecoms etc. in it and seen vast swathes by others for such work (wonderful when you have to process vast chunks of text, at speed, for complex patterns and over various feeds. If used properly, it is professional.
How about Python?
"....Perl professional?...." <Sigh> It is probably very indicative of the lack of relevance of the programming language if I was actually preoficient in it a long time ago (in industry terms). Sorry, I used to write stuff in C/C++/Perl, so has to be obsolete!
Hey jake, ruby is not so bad..
Hows the ranch? I love the sound of a slackware driven greenhouse..
Why would you classify ruby as a toy and perl as professional grade?
I quite like the (ruby) extension api as a way to expose C or C++ libraries to a scripting language (plain C api) as opposed to some of the other scripting language choices..
Ok it's totally hamstrung by a slow vm, but I must say it's quite nice to knock up little tools and scripts, testing is quite well supported, the community, well the community is the community what can you do?.
Perl is nippy and very powerful but testing perl is painful, extending perl is initially painful, (perlguts lied to me and I'm still sore).
There's lots of stuff I wouldn't use ruby for but I don't think it's a toy, so I'm interested in your thoughts, I usually enjoy your posts.
Sed
"Hey jake, ruby is not so bad.."
I didn't say Ruby was "bad", I said it was a toy.
"Why would you classify ruby as a toy and perl as professional grade?"
Where did I suggest perl was "professional grade"?
My claim was that I've never seen anything written in Ruby that wouldn't have been better implemented in C, and possibly with a perl front end.
The Ranch is doing well, thanks for asking. This round's on me :-)
Professional grade is my term not yours, I meant a tool fit for a professional to use for a front end, in the example you quote.
I've written a few applications as.
1)Front end application implemented as some web interface (ruby/perl are 50/50 % split here)
2)Interface layer implemented as scripting language extensions in the same language as (1)
3)Backend end libraries in C & C++
Quick to develop, easy to enforce constrains in the API layer and access to your favourite scripting language for the glue.
language choices for 1 & 2 have largely been dictated by the client existing software stack.
For me I've not really seen much to choose between the current crop of scripting languages, they all more or less do the job within the contraints I've encountered. Then again perhaps we are thinking of different use cases.
I use ruby as a glue/scripting language, maybe some parsing/pre-processing or tools. But the code is more or less the same code I used to write in C i.e. I still use the self pipe trick and select in ruby ( it doesn't expose the pselect syscall, I can still use pseudo-terminals etc).
Nowdays, I'd only write in C/C++ to talk to hardware or if the code is something other than the usually (throwaway tools/sysadmin helper/fancy web app) that ruby seems to end up being used for.
The quality of people producing ruby code varies but I see ruby and C as complementing each other. I agree that given time to craft the work and a skilled worker, C and C++ and a sprinkling of assembler is all one really needs.
I'm glad I have ruby in my toolbox, I'm intensely grateful that it's not the only tool, I still don't see why it's a toy and not a tool ?
Exhibit 1. In Ruby, you do not declare a variable. It springs into life upon assignment. A Ruby variable or function parameter has no type; only values have types, so it's like a void pointer in C. Therefore every function must check the types of its arguments at invocation time, but few programs do this.
Yes if you want polymorphic variables you should use 'God's own' arrays of unsigned char and void pointers.
The only real alternative is to use variables which are assumed to be numbers apart from when the variable name starts with one of I, J, K, L, M and N which are integers.
And how long would it take to write that web application in C compared to Ruby?
Obviously the C app would probably be faster, once written. But in the real world people have deadlines and budget constraints - pretty much nobody writes web applications in C, and this is for a reason.
As an emacs user (when I can, at a pinch vi, why would you use anything less?), so given as these folks are never going to offer me a job here are some of my previous confessions.
I have developed in both C and various front end tools. Whilst there may well be an initial advantage in reduced development time using some front end tool (AgileTOM *), as projects develop the AgileTOM's lack of flexibility becomes apparent. Thereafter as today's AgileTOM is superseded, by the next flavour of the month development tool, the application or at least the effective support of the application, is now on borrowed time.
For both of these reason I have then been left thinking indeed we would have been 'better' writing that in C, oh and plus it would have run a lot faster as well.
(*) Agile Tool Of Month
>Have you seen HipHop?
Yeah, although I've not really used it.
My main point is that for the large majority of web projects which are not in the facebook/google scale and needing massively optimised code, programmer time efficiency is more relevant than the number of processor cycles a given task eats up. I'm not a ruby guy myself (perl and PHP background) but the whole point of the language as I understand it is the 'on rails' rapid application development methodology which comes with it, so knocking it because it's (obviously) not as optimised as C or C++ seems to me to be an academic argument which misses the point entirely.
Kidding... though it probably would tempt me if I was in Melbourne and it was an ad for a C position. Put me in the 'capable but lazy' camp. i love tech, but there's more to life than coding all night for your job.
Most superstar/ninja/ultimate warrior type programmers aren't actully all that hot anyway. They think they are but they make as many or even more mistakes than anyone else, in a very self-assured way. They do tend to have enthusiasm in droves though, which I guess is a positive. Most of the actually supremely capable devs I've ever met were rather understated about the whole thing, they just get on with it.
Count me in the lazy camp too. I can code well, I make few mistakes.
BUT
I couldn't tell you a single word of programming terminology.
At university I had more than one lecturer call me the lazy genious because I'd come up with amazing solutions to problems we weren't meant to be able to solve, but I'd completely mess up the simple stuff.. Go figure.
Yep, it always amazes me how little "superstar" programmers know about infrastructure, in my experience it somehow seems to be less than no knowledge. However a really good infrastructure guy will script, program, DBA a bit, know about hardware and networking as well as all the other stuff like backup software, data storage, different OSes etc.
Guess that rules me out, then...
*Takes a sip of his pint-sized teacup*
'Team weeks' probably means huggy-feely exercises, 'team sports'(Usually Paintball), 'characterbuilding exercises'(rafting or mountainclimbing) and other crap.
I don't like being shot at(And aren't allowed to bring a H&K G3 to shoot back), I understand the dangers of rafting and won't have anything to do with it, mountainclimbing is completely out as I'd probably vomit on the poor bloke below me...
And I'm afraid that I've become allergic to the huggy-feely stuff as I always break out in sarcasm whenever I encounter it.
I find the best way to get yourself off HR's list of team-building events is not sarcasm or obstructiveness, it's simply telling the team the answer right at the start of each task. After you've done a few of those days, and read a few books on the subject matter (it's all pretty low-level psycholgy), it's very easy to take a look at the exercise and work out the shortcut that will get your team through the task in the shortest time possible. Most IT guys - especially coders - are problem solvers, and most of the tasks at these teambuilding events have problems that are designed for even the receptionist to solve, so you should be able to break them down in moments. Which spoils it for the HR types as they want you to learn something from it "as a team", and having the IT guy supply a solution in a few seconds really gets their wick as they can't complain. You just have the satisfaction of not having to waste your time on them. Except for the paintballing, which is the best form of legal retribution available to staff!
I'm reminded that a certain famous not entirely acronymic IT company would regularly send groups of minions on week-long team building exercises, then split up the teams as soon as the exercise was over. So they never actually got to work together, ever.
I'm not sure if the HR genius responsible for that idea is still working there.
Team building is a nice little earner for the companies that supply team building services - rock climbing, paint balling, samba drumming, art appreciation, that kind of thing.
But personally when I see the words 'team player' I get an overwhelming urge to spit supersonic red hot rivets at the nearest middle manujment HR drone.
"....a team week was to fly the whole dev team out to California...." Yeah, we tried one of those once. We had a Yank who transferred across to our UK operation so ge could "experience the culture of Europe" or something of the like. He organised a team weekend away to Amsterdam. BIG mistake! We were still missing three of the guys, one being the Yank, two days after we crawled back on the Monday, and then Finance threw a fit when someone put bubbly and strippers on the company plastic. The Yank was shifted sideways back to the States soon after.
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