[turaw]

> most programmers I know receive several offers a month

:'|

Could you take a look at how they're receiving offers and perhaps put some suggestions together on how to duplicate that effect? Most programmers I know have had extreme difficulty getting a job, especially one that would pay at-or-above the average rate (per Glassdoor).

[WalterBright]

Programmers can do very well by becoming contributors to high profile open source projects and standards committees. Post pull requests on github, write tech articles, answer tech questions on reddit and hacker news, and do it under your own name. Register yourname.com and put your resume there. Essentially, make a name for yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you.

[anonymous41]

Open source involvement is overrated. Yes, companies say they value it, but you can't listen to what they say; instead, you must look at what they actually do.

Are candidates with copious open source contributions getting hired primarily because of those contributions, or at the very least being spared the indignity of the white board and trivia questions during interviews? In my experience, no. Interviewers generally don't care, or perhaps their process is too rigid to admit the deviation that caring would require. In fact, when pressed, many will even admit outright that they don't care, claiming (as I've seen here on HN) that they have no way of knowing for certain that you're the true author of your purported contributions or that your contributions alone can't really demonstrate how you write code (like a white board presumably can).

The only reason they value open source contributions is that it amounts to free labor, and it demonstrates "passion"--a quality that they associate with susceptibility to exploitation.

[dkersten]

The way I see it is that its about exposure.

If you contribute to open source, your name and work are out there. People can find out about you and see some of your work.

There are other ways than contributing to open source too. For example, I've got a number of offers because I run a local programming language meetup.

Basically anything that puts your name out there will help get offers. If nobody knows you exist, they can't offer you jobs. That, I think, is where open source can help a lot.

[kod]

The job I'm at currently, the CTO skipped standard technical interviewing and went right to culture fit. He said explicitly that was because he had seen me giving a technical talk and read through my Github.

Some of that may depend on company size, but in my experience (mostly small startups) it has been a huge benefit.

[WalterBright]

I'm reminded of the old joke of the advertising executive who said: "I know I'm wasting half the money I spend on advertising, the trouble is I don't know which half."

[gaius]

Can you think of any other profession that does anything like this? No doctors or lawyers or accountants or civil engineers or pastry chefs find work by posting on Reddit.

And besides, that is very specific to web jobs. There's an awful lot more to the industry besides.

[prions]

As a non software person (civil engineer but going in for a CS masters), this is my biggest gripe when it comes to speaking with developers about their jobs: they lack perspective.

I can assure you that the bar for entry into my field is much higher than software. Like medicine and law, engineering requirements are strictly set by state law and professional boards. You need at minimum a bachelors in engineering to get a foot in the door. There is no self studying or civil engineering bootcamps. Afterwards, you need to become an engineer in training (EIT) by taking an entrance exam. Four years of experience later, you can sit for your professional engineers exam to become a licensed PE.

So now you're 8 years down the hole, finally licensed and ready to actually practice in a professional role. The kicker is that you're still probably making less than a fresh CS bachelors student working at <foo> corp in a tech hub.

I'll stick to posting on Reddit and contributing to projects.

[krolley]

If I am looking for a surgeon for an operation, it's enough for me to know that he was trained at a good school and has enough experience -- for that a bio online is already decent. I trust his education, after all the field of medicine is one of the oldest in existence.

There is no such trust in the education of software developers, perhaps because software development is such a new field. I've worked with great ones without a formal education and terrible ones that graduated from good schools. The way to 'prove' yourself to someone when they can't work with you (e.g. first stages of a hiring process) is to demonstrate your work by using technical articles, GitHub commits etc. Also, that stuff is not specific to web devs, I'm sure you can find every kind of project under the sun on GitHub.

[davidsong]

> Can you think of any other profession that does anything like this?

Photographers, graphic designers and musicians.

[nommm-nommm]

Photographers, graphic designers, and musicians are expected to work for free in order to get hired?

[klibertp]

Aren't they? I don't know much about musicians, but graphic designers are expected to bring their portfolio with them to the interview. There's no interview at all without the portfolio... and you're not always lucky enough to have all your best works paid for by someone, especially if you're just starting.

EDIT: and, come to think of it, don't musicians need to practice for a long time before even getting a chance to perform for pay?

[WalterBright]

They sure do, and they often play for years for free in the hope of building a brand and being discovered. Like The Beatles.

[jwdunne]

Hrm. Musicians play because they enjoy it. Know many a people who, despite or regardless of success, will play just for the enjoyment of it.

Programming is similar. You hear the stories about how some tech founders focused their energy on programming, it took off and they dropped out of wherever.

I'd argue that for every one of those, there are scores of people who do it just for fun like they did, get nowhere but do it anyway because they like it. Just like there are scores of guitarists for your Clapton, Hendrix, etc.

Open source contributions to me look a lot like people, for the most part, enjoying themselves and getting better at a hobby.

[dkersten]

Having family members who are all three of those... yes. They, unfortunately perhaps, are. They all have to have portfolios of some kind to prove their ability.

It perhaps depends on the specifics of the jobs you go for. For example, if you're a musician producing audio for eg film, then you definitely are expected to have a portfolio, but if you go out and play for an audience, then you probably don't.

[WalterBright]

Any business that spends $0 on marketing will likely reap $0 in sales. Think of it like marketing.

[eitally]

I can't think of any profession where this kind of personal brand management and contributions to the public corpus of [whatever domain] knowledge wouldn't be a boon.

[howeyc]

Perhaps not by posting on reddit, but they have other ways to raise their profile.

Doctors have conferences, Chefs have "Chopped", and those are only the "mainstream" ways the general public knows about. Most others you mentioned have industry/trade magazines for example.

[WalterBright]

I've seen a lot of artists and craftsmen post their work on Reddit, and they're clearly marketing their names.

I suspect the other professions would benefit as well, it probably simply hasn't occurred to them yet. It reminds me of when I was watching a bodybuilding competition in the 80's and thought the posers could really use some advice from a professional dancer. Sure enough, this occurred to one of them, they did a routine that blew away the others, and then the rest of them did.

[TheCoelacanth]

I think you are just not very familiar with some of those professions. Lawyers frequently take on pro bono cases to get themselves publicity. Pastry chefs give out free samples of their work all the time to get customers. In basically any competitive profession some people will take on some non-paying work if they think it will benefit their career.

[gaius]

But there is not the expectation in those professions that they will give up all their free time to it. No lawyers are suing people on their own time just for their own entertainment, I guarantee it. But programmers are expected to do their day jobs then go home and do more programming...

[WalterBright]

In any profession, to rise to the top tiers of pay, it is necessary to devote yourself to it.

[gaius]

You're not comparing like with like, partner in a law firm vs someone whose actual job it is just to crank out CRUD websites.

[TheCoelacanth]

If lawyers want to rise to anywhere near the top they need to meet such stringent billable hours requirements that they will have essentially no free time in which they could sue people.

[klibertp]

> No doctors or lawyers or accountants or civil engineers or pastry chefs find work by posting on Reddit.

Is it good (for lawyers, accountants, etc.) or bad in your opinion?

It's true that the widespread expectation that a programmer will be programming (or doing related things) in his spare time is slightly unusual compared to other professions. Personally, however, I find that expectation natural and I would do it - write code in my spare time - anyway.

[WalterBright]

I also know for a fact that many companies go to programming conferences to look for people to hire. Attending those conferences is a great way to network. Even better is to present at a conference.

[bcook]

You seem to be well aware of this aspect of the job market; do you have blog or something with more in-depth musings on this topic?

If not, then can you share some tips on how to concisely include a job applicant's open-source contributions in their resume?

[JanezStupar]

Just list them under your projects category on your website.

Also that is what your github account is for.

[d2p]

I've also seen a lot of recruiters going through GitHub and contacting people that way lately. People with public source on GH tend to be really passionate devs because they're frequently spending time outside work doing dev.

[jwdunne]

Thank you. This is perhaps the most succinct guide to marketing your skills I've read.

[petra]

Maybe the difference is between just contributing to open-source, and contributing highly-differentiated stuff to open-source, such that your name(or your creation's name, and not something that you just helped in a bit) gets passed around ?

[ryanobjc]

Honestly, the first step is: have a job at a well regarded company.

There is no stronger signal that you're a good developer than already having a job at a company that has stringent hiring standards.

I get multiple serious recruiter contacts a week. Mostly via Linkedin, but also via direct email for the enterprising recruiters. All from companies most people would kill to work for. I even get linked-in email from linkedin recruiters.

I ignore most of them. They know it's part of the game. One day in the future I may need them, and there's no point in pissing them off - they're only doing what they can. You gotta have a huge funnel to hire even 1 person (it's probably 1000:1 for contacts/hire)

[ufukbay]

This is absolutely true and was how I found my dream job or more like how a recruiter found my dream job for me. I'm using Xing since I live in Germany but I think it should work similar on LinkedIn.

I can understand that if you are starting fresh you won't be able to be already employed by a well known company. However you have to start somewhere and it's important that you get some experience in the field you want to work in. Obviously this depends on the job you are applying for whether it's a junior or senior position etc.

I think it's important that you don't have big gaps in your CV and can show or present strong social/soft skills. One of the most important things for me is to be honest. Be absolutely honest about what you can do and not. Don't flood your profile with all the latest buzzwords and technologies if you never worked with these before. This might attract couple recruiters but it will be most likely the black sheep amoung them.

Be serious, honest, friendly, open minded and just yourself. :)

[nfriedly]

Thanks for mentioning Xing - I might be looking for something new around the beginning of next year, and while I enjoy working remote (in the US), my wife and I were just talking about how a job Europe might worth moving for :)

But of course, I'd only ever heard of linkedin as "the" professional networking site - I didn't even realize they had competition!

[ufukbay]

You are welcome. https://www.xing.com/ is very popular in Germany at least. Sadly I don't have any numbers on how they do in Europe.

[GoToRO]

True. I interviewed once and they told me flat out that they didn't really read my CV but they saw I was hired at a big company and they liked that.

People are just people no matter what role they have in that moment and most people are susceptible to be impressed by superficial things (like your current company name).

Also most interviewers failed the interviews I was in... :)

[qznc]

Makes you want to give them a joke CV with a section "Companies I have not worked at yet" and just list some buzzwords like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.

[_pmf_]

> have a job at a well regarded company

This is already highly contentious. Some consider startups who produce write-only code fast to be a joke, some consider slow moving behemoths like Microsoft, Apple or IBM as less than ideal.

[ahlatimer]

1. Where are you/they? I got a ton of recruiter spam when I lived in SF and a fair amount now that I live in Austin (the majority of which are companies that want me to relocate back to SF). I received 0 when I lived in El Paso, TX (where I'm from). If you're in an area that doesn't have a hot tech market, you're likely going to have a harder time finding a tech job.

2. What technologies do they specialize in? I see lots of job posts for Rails and React and relatively few for COBOL. I see a lot of jobs for Java, but a higher percentage of those are of the lower paying variety. This is likely location dependent and is a bit of a catch-22.

3. Are they any good, but perhaps more importantly, are they able to demonstrate that they're any good in an interview setting? There are a fair number of truly bad programmers out there. There's also a fair number of programmers who may be good but are unable to demonstrate that in an interview. Interviewing is hard to get right -- everyone has their own take on it, and it's rarely backed up back actual data.

The people you see getting tons of offers probably have the right combination of location, resume, and interview ability. If I had to pick the single most important factor in getting a lot of offers, it's location. If you are in an area with limited tech jobs, the number of offers you can get is obviously going to be limited as well.

[Chris2048]

In my hometown, I couldn't even get a job in a computer store, let alone software development. :'-/

Getting a career at all without a CS degree required moving away..

[mostlystatic]

Maybe I'm being overly literal, but do some people just receive offer letters without going through an interview process?

Sure, I get lots of recruiter emails, but almost all of them are sent identically to 100 other people as well.

Most emails I get come from external recruitment firms, only sometimes does someone at a company reach out to me directly. But even then it's only an invitation to apply, it doesn't mean I'm actually especially likely to get the job.

[briandear]

I got a no-interview, no resume offer for a contracting gig simply off the basis that my LinkedIn showed that I worked at "reputable company." I couldn't believe it -- but the contract worked out and everyone was happy. Social proof often means more than a resume or even Github.

[nfriedly]

It happened to me recently, the offer was from someone I had previously worked with who just knew and trusted me.

(I also get about 1-2 recruiter spams a week and occasionally one that seems genuinely tailored to me specifically. This might be what the OP was calling "offers".)

[fleitz]

Yes. I was taking my wife out to dinner once and a recruiter stopped us (me) in the street to get me to work for their company, technically I interviewed but it's kinda just a formality when they want you that badly. Apparently a former co-worker said I was a genius.

As others have mentioned, it's social proof.

[codingdave]

In my community, most programmers receive several inquiries a month (or week, or even day)... but saying there are several offers a month would imply they are actively interviewing enough for inquiries to become offers. The "several offers a month" is an exaggeration of reality that I hear often, but when you really dig into it is just that... exaggerated.

[mgkimsal]

Thank you for the clarification - this is exactly my experience too, and that of most others. I don't think I've known anyone in the past 20 years of working who consistently received multiple job offers per month, especially when they weren't interviewing.

Most of the inquiries I know of (for myself and others) are generic recruiter spam, or word of mouth referrals by people looking for really cheap work. So yeah, there's lots of work out there to be done, but much of it is in far less than ideal situations.

[Kurtz79]

It's my experience as well.

I do receive several "inquiries" per week, mostly due the fact of having left my CV (obviously now very outdated) in many job sites when I was looking for a job in London, almost 10 years ago.

They are of the type "Dear [Name], I hope you are well. Would this role be of interest for you in your current situation ? [role description]. If not, do you know some friend of yours that would ? Best regards, [name of person totally unknown to me]."

This is not even a serious inquiry, much less an "offer".

[Raticide]

I get random recruiters poking me on LinkedIn. Only about 1 every couple months. But I'm not looking for work and not a big user of LinkedIn. I'm in Auckland, New Zealand and have a bunch of experience if that matters.

[nathan_f77]

Hey, from what I can tell, Auckland is still not a great place to work as a software developer. I would probably recommend looking at some companies in Wellington or Christchurch, or becoming a freelancer for clients in the US.

[beatpanda]

I don't have a big name on my resume (unless you count freelancing for EFF). All I have is a public portfolio and a well-manicured LinkedIn profile, and I get several cold calls or emails from recruiters per month.

[fleitz]

Post on LinkedIn, add recruiters as friends (or whatever they are called on linkedin), look for what jobs they are looking for, add those skills to your linked in profile. Wait for them to find you.

[Iv]

the only programmers that I know that have a hard time finding a job are those who only have a very narrow specialization, typically on some web technology.

People who focus on solely ASP.Net without an understanding of the underlying tech will have a harder time finding a job than someone who knows several language and understands how a computer works.

[nommm-nommm]

This is highly geographic specific, there are no absolutes.

[not_kurt_godel]

The programmers you know aren't very good, sorry.

[bpchaps]

Or, I dunno, they live in a place without a condensed, ego mad, hyper-inflated job market?

[nommm-nommm]

Or are over 30?

[briandear]

I live in the South of France and my LinkedIn profile says so.. I get at least 10 recruiter emails a week with 3 or them being for remote positions. Geography is not a huge factor, it's about the skill match.

[bpchaps]

And I've received 17 this week with difficulties finding jobs still. Mostly within Chicago, but a lot are remote - what's your point? You're still oversimplifying the issue.

[marmaduke]

Do you work remotely or for a local company? Most jobs I find seem to be in Paris.

[nikofeyn]

i am very good at what i do but when software engineers try to act like they know how to hire people, you have problems. i have been interviewed by a company that prided themselves on hiring smart, diverse people who weren't necessarily experienced in a certain field and language. they literally called this out in the job description.

the interviewer proceeded to ask me a deluge of very specific questions about said language, including implementation details of the language itself! all of the questions could have been looked up by an intelligent person online within minutes. and this was a well established, small, but well known company.

all of my software interviews can be summed up with two words: algorithm questions. but yet, my skills lie in architecture, writing bug free code, general design skills, testing, UI dev and client feedback, etc. none of these skills have never had the chance to be discussed in an interview. i came from another field and haven't spent a lot of time in the algorithm space. i can work through them as needed in interviews just as i do in a job, but that is rarely cared about in interviews. people want binary answers.

[WalterBright]

It's often possible for you to drive the interview rather than waiting for the interviewer to ask your questions. Bring up and expound on your skills if they're not asking the right questions.

[mgkimsal]

Whether or not I get an offer, I tend to the enjoy the process more when I try to be collaborative in an interview process, vs waiting to be asked questions. I naturally want to show off some stuff and ask questions - if even that doesn't go well, it's probably not going to be a good culture fit, regardless of whether I can do the raw work.

[kybernetikos]

I've worked with programmers from many of the big names (amazon, apple, facebook, google), and I've met quite a few programmers at least as good in little out of the way companies. I think recruiters massively overvalue having one of the big names on a cv.

[Joeri]

Then again, if you do have a big name on your resume, it lets the recruiter reasonably safely assume you can program well enough. That sort of confidence in a candidate is hard to overvalue.

[kybernetikos]

There are lots of things that can give you as good or better confidence that a candidate can program well enough, and a big name on a CV is no guarantee either.

[fsloth]

I think the correct conclusion is that their profiles are not visible for recruiters.

To my knowledge there is no proven way of finding out how talented one is except working with them for a while.

The best way to gauge ones skill level, IMO, is to observe how their code survives contact with the end user for a couple of years.

[turaw]

How do you signal goodness, though? I wound up with a cushy position (largely by luck), but practically everyone else is barely scraping by. Side projects? Prestigious internships? l337 hax0r skillz? Maybe the 80/20 rule [1] applies and there are only a few, key factors that make some applicants stand out?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle In case you didn't know this but srs you're on hn