Tempt tech talent without Googlesque mega perks

HR box ticking

Assume those smart programmers you are hiring can learn.

We have decided to use Hardoop for our next product cos it's Kewl. So we need to only hire Hardoop programmers. We need good ones so we want senior programmers with 10years of Hardoop, intermediate programmers with 5years and junior programmers with 1 year - well those are the numbers we used to use with SQL so it should be OK.

Of course we wouldn't consider hiring a 10year SQL/Java veteran in the hope they can learn - cos they wont be adding value while they are learning.

Oh dear we couldn't hire any 10-year Hardoop programmers we better stick to doing the next app in Foxpro as usual - we have lots of 20years experience Foxpro programmers.

I would like to point a difference between Google and JP Morgan

Google and Facebook do not ask applicants to already have 5 years experience in Hadoop. They know that people can learn.

Haven't really done your homework.

Not too long ago we had a recruiter mouth off, tell the assembled techies they were useless because they couldn't write a CV just the way he liked it. Turns out just about every recruiter wants it slightly differently. And it goes way downhill from there.

Me, I think the jobs market is highly inefficient, not least caused by recruiters, but HR is equally guilty. Regularly you see adverts asking for more years of experience in a technology than said technology exists. The very fact this can happen means a massive disconnect in hiring.

It's worse than that. A good unix generalist will take most any unix and make it dance in no time. Yet hiring is usually after a specific flavour and a specific version. A generalist versed in database technology could equally well learn, and learn quickly, to adapt to something new like hadoop, and maybe in a while we'll see different technologies building on the same ideas; perchance we'll invent something that'll do for big data what unix does for operating a system and small data while at it. This isn't chauvinism; pipes and filters are a bit primitive but general enough to get by for most small data related tasks (and tricks like "xml" are actually not that helpful an idea there). Other systems focus on other things. Want a whole store of cookie-cutter type apps with an eye-candy interfaces? You know where to find it.

Anyhow. Technology generalists have their place, even if they're hard to assess. And, of course, because it often takes quite a bit of time for someone to grok the underlying patterns in computing and become that generalist. "Hiring" is still looking for cookie-cutter people, preferrably young ones that can be thrown at the problem like hardware. So I submit that most HR people and their "best practices", like the execs letting them go about it in that way, are as outdated and as useless any random tech recruiter. Knowledge work really is different from factory work. So sorry. Of course I'm biased, and by now I'm too bitter to find employment ever again. But that doesn't change that even the hiring process is far less about skills than about, well, doing what dogs do when they meet: Sniff each other. See if the new guy would fit in.

And that too is important. Some people get very petty when you don't, even if they ought to know better. (Telling people who work double your hours for less than half your pay they're "not committed" does not earn you brownie points, you silly veep, you.) But it is still more important to get the thing done. You want high expertise? You find it, you train it, you make do with generalists, all of the above. Bitching about it been done, never helped. Fire some of those useless chair 'taters in HR, get rid of your recruiter chums, git off yer arse and try again. And if you fail, well, that too is part of entrepeneurship, now innit?

how about this?

spend less time caring about the rock stars, primadonnas and shiny resume holderns, and more about the guys in your wiring closets and server farms who've proven to be the guys who "made it work" time and time again?

All the fancy apps don't mean sh*te if your infrastructure isn't reliable.

Essentially, stop the emphasis on "think outside the box" and start "thinking ABOUT the box"

big tech jobs, I don't believe it

You mentioned hadoop. I had a look.

Gumtree: 1 job in entire uk

Monster: 36 in 'all jobs'

dice: 599 in the entirety of the US.

You talk about these frankly exotic jobs, dan olds go on about analytics being the next big thing, blather about gpus etc, I'd be damn glad of a chance to do something other than bog standard data crunching, tech support and whatever. Erlang anyone? model checking? some mathematics? (which for 1st time *ever* I have a chance to do at my place, except I'm too busy doing the daily stuff that keeps the company going to get involved). Formal methods? Data mining & MDX etc? Hows about learning some snort, would make a change. Or some actual work reason to write a modest compiler. Haskell or functional stuff generally? Scala, even?

No. Great majority is for Java/mysql/web. The rest is equally mundane. MSSQL is about as exciting as it gets, and then it's just mostly trivial tuning. And some regexps + xslt [*] to break the monotony. I've seen exactly one unusual job (erlang) in five years.

A real challenge would be nice. I just don't see them.

[*] xslt breaks the monotony in the same way breaking a bone stops you being bored.

Maybe they could just use proper databases

Plenty of people know how those work.

For the sake of balance

Can we now have an article about the upside of tempting us with Googlesque perks?

I'd like some of those.

Sysadmins?

Hard getting people who know how to deploy Hadoop? They're not likely to be the people that write code in various open source projects - they're going to be sysadmins/DBA types. How's open source going to help you find them?

That said, not forcing people to move to the cultural vacuum of silicon valley is no bad thing. Companies might learn a thing or two about localisation that way too ;-)

@Matt

I recently spoke to a London-based friend who is building a Hadoop-related company. He told me that his biggest challenge has been hiring qualified Hadoop engineers, to the point that he may well be driven to put off development of his product business to focus on a training business... that provides Hadoop training. In other words, his solution is to build a pool of qualified Hadoop engineers, since he can't "buy" them.

That's one option, but unlikely to fly at Best Buy or JP Morgan Chase. For these companies, another option is to avoid competing with Silicon Valley and other tech hubs such as New York City and Seattle altogether. The analysts at 451 Group have analysed where skills for Hadoop and also NoSQL congregate: by a huge margin, engineers with these talents live in Silicon Valley. But given the open-source nature of these technologies, it is possible to find them elsewhere, including the Ukraine and (gasp!) Middle America.

_=_

Actually Matt you are dead wrong on this point.

Companies like JPM and Target can build the tech competence in house.

The issue is that it takes time and effort that doesn't directly reflect on a tangible ROI. You first have to build the skills and then build the solutions using this tech. It takes about 6 months to train senior developers and architects to the point where they are capable of going off on their own. Of course one could argue that one could use pig or hive to reduce that runway. You can but you still need a core team who can lead. The lower the quality of skilled resources, the longer the runway.

The problem in the non-tech companies like the ones mentioned is in how they view their tech staff and how they treat their tech staff. For these companies to succeed in using Hadoop, they need to start and rethink their organization. Tech savvy companies can more easily adopt this technology and hold the advantage....

But hey, what do I know? ;-)

Toby Parkins

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For us, however, we're encapsulating a further value: Quality of living. Allowing people to be able to live outside of a city, a few minutes from the beach, overlooking beautiful rivers and being surrounded by nature is a major factor in attracting high quality applicants.

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