Hiring software developers is difficult

Except it's not.

Obviously making job ads with any sort of "ism" is stupid, but lets not kid ourselves, EVERYONE eliminates people as being potential hires after interviews show they might not fit in, regardless of ability. Is choosing someone equally or slightly less skilled, but with more potential, and hunger with them being 26 vs 56 worse than not hiring someone because they seem to be a bit of a douche? Ageism vs personalitism.

this does not mean I personally am closed to hiring people over a certain age. If there is a candidate, who is amazing for the position, and happens to be 60, then joy to us all. Unfortunately, I have probably been poisoned with my experience with oracle consulting, where everyone I dealt with with 20-30+ years experience were rubbish

So every single person was rubbish, yup think I found the common cause here and it is you. But hey thanks for this laugh at least one company I can remove from ever applying to if I would want to move (but then I am over 40 so rubbish in your eyes). That job ad reads like an infomercial, "not only do we want to mould you but for the cheap cheap price you will work with BIG DATA!!!".
 
Wow 300k? Isn't that a bit low ?

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/csharp.do

I know I'm coming from a UK perspective and it equates £20k which is ridiculously low for a C# dev over here.

I was in SA recently and the place is not as cheap as it used to be.

You have to be living with your parents to able to cope.

Not sure. I get a large 3 bedroom house, with a huuuuge garden and a big pool in an upmarket neighbourhood for R8000 a month. Under 800 pounds. How much would that cost in the UK?
 
So every single person was rubbish, yup think I found the common cause here and it is you. But hey thanks for this laugh at least one company I can remove from ever applying to if I would want to move (but then I am over 40 so rubbish in your eyes). That job ad reads like an infomercial, "not only do we want to mould you but for the cheap cheap price you will work with BIG DATA!!!".

clearly you have a problem with reading and comprehension, so you are correct, I wouldnt hire you anyway :)

but yes, I worked on 2 particular "enterprise" integration projects for 2 large retailers, where corporate policy/"knowhow" dictates that they also bring in these so called experts from these consulting firms (oracle, ibm, eoh, those ilk), and these "enterprise architects/integration specialists" were really crap, so yes "So every single person"
 
Last edited:
IME, you will start seeing quality coders at ~450k+, be prepared to pay quite a bit more if you want top 10th percentile coders.

I think your problem is what you offer vs what you expect.

Agreed. While not a programmer myself, the rest of my department is.

300k will get you a guy that knows nothing, 450k a guy that knows something, 600k will get you a decent guy.
 
ok. so now the arb numbers have upper bounds also. my friend earns 300k annually, contributes to **** loads of open source projects, has a stack over flow score over 30k, blogs regularly and podcasts about advanced agile and bdd topics.

but because he doesn't fit your completely arbitrary numbers i guess he knows nothing.

wtf is wrong with you people
 
ok. so now the arb numbers have upper bounds also. my friend earns 300k annually, contributes to **** loads of open source projects, has a stack over flow score over 30k, blogs regularly and podcasts about advanced agile and bdd topics.

but because he doesn't fit your completely arbitrary numbers i guess he knows nothing.

wtf is wrong with you people

Do I really need to add "In General" to everything?
 
ok. so now the arb numbers have upper bounds also. my friend earns 300k annually, contributes to **** loads of open source projects, has a stack over flow score over 30k, blogs regularly and podcasts about advanced agile and bdd topics.

but because he doesn't fit your completely arbitrary numbers i guess he knows nothing.

wtf is wrong with you people
MyBB residents seem to be either very lucky, very hooked up or both. That and many of them actually run companies. So I'm not so sure any of them have a concept as to what junior anything pays.
 
ok. so now the arb numbers have upper bounds also. my friend earns 300k annually, contributes to **** loads of open source projects, has a stack over flow score over 30k, blogs regularly and podcasts about advanced agile and bdd topics.

but because he doesn't fit your completely arbitrary numbers i guess he knows nothing.

wtf is wrong with you people

Obviously, I know nothing about your friend's situation in particular, but one pattern I have seen periodically is an almost addictive behaviour for community projects, blogs, tweets and obsessive score climbing on sites like stackoverflow. While these people are generally very bright, they also tend to earn less, because they're really fairly s&$tty employees, due to all their regular distractions.

I once had a moderator for a very well known US technical forum work for me. He aced the interviews, but he literally didn't want to do anything he didn't think was news worthy and even blogged a bunch of things that were company confidential. He's gone now. ;)
 
Last edited:
Obviously, I know nothing about your friend's situation in particular, but one pattern I have seen periodically is an almost addictive behaviour for community projects, blogs, tweets and obsessive score climbing on sites like stackoverflow. While these people are generally very bright, they also tend to earn less, because they're really fairly s&$tty employees, due to all their regular distractions.

I once had a moderator for a very well known US technical forum work for me. He aced the interviews, but he literally didn't want to do anything he didn't think was news worthy and even blogged a bunch of things that were company confidential. He's gone now. ;)


aka "Fiddlers". You need one or two of them in the office to fiddle with stuff and figure things out so the other guys can build a system with it.

A bit harsh maybe, but we've had and have guys like this in the office. Give them a piece of work to do and they ace it. Give them a project to run with...not so much.
 
aka "Fiddlers". You need one or two of them in the office to fiddle with stuff and figure things out so the other guys can build a system with it.

A bit harsh maybe, but we've had and have guys like this in the office. Give them a piece of work to do and they ace it. Give them a project to run with...not so much.

This sounds like me. :o
 
I wonder how old the programmer/s are who coded the Joburg council systems ;)
 
clearly you have a problem with reading and comprehension, so you are correct, I wouldnt hire you anyway :)

but yes, I worked on 2 particular "enterprise" integration projects for 2 large retailers, where corporate policy/"knowhow" dictates that they also bring in these so called experts from these consulting firms (oracle, ibm, eoh, those ilk), and these "enterprise architects/integration specialists" were really crap, so yes "So every single person"
...as I said I have my doubts (this post doubled that position).
 
omg this is like 5 times more than I earn pa, and I actually work in a similar field Q.Q

If you don't mind my asking, what field is similar and earns R5K/month? If you are doing something like support work in IT, maybe it makes sense to do a dev course or such. It sounds as though you may have some lowing hanging fruit.
 
but yes, I worked on 2 particular "enterprise" integration projects for 2 large retailers, where corporate policy/"knowhow" dictates that they also bring in these so called experts from these consulting firms (oracle, ibm, eoh, those ilk), and these "enterprise architects/integration specialists" were really crap, so yes "So every single person"

Why did they bring in the expert, why didn't you just do it?

Obviously if these guys are so terrible then you could just do it and save the company a ton of money.
 
Why did they bring in the expert, why didn't you just do it?

Obviously if these guys are so terrible then you could just do it and save the company a ton of money.

+1

@ RossJones - Varsity students are struggling to get a job. You should try there, but you must be smoking your socks to think that you can find someone with such a wide skill set and in depth knowledge at that age.

and secondly, the "ism" ish of yours, dude...seriously, it makes the ad come off as if you are not easy to get along with, which makes me think that everyone at your company is stuck up and don't want to be bothered by people that unfortunately don't have the knowledge and experience as the rest of the staff. There already I can pick up a cultural problem in your company.
 
Last edited:
R300,000 for an intermediate developer with two or three years of experience sounds about par for the course. As for the age thing - I do believe that employees have the right to hire people who they think will fit into the corporate culture of the company. I'd say that is one of the most important factors. You can teach most people new skills but finding a bunch of people who fit in and work well together is hard.

My advice to the OP is to keep plugging away at it. Hiring new developers is difficult because the pool of talented developers is small.
 
As for the age thing - I do believe that employees have the right to hire people who they think will fit into the corporate culture of the company. I'd say that is one of the most important factors.

Yes, employers can choose to hire or not hire based on fit. However, equating a particular age range to be a fit or non-fit, is not a right. The right is to treated equally regardless age. This is an actual right in the legal and constitutional sense.
 
Why did they bring in the expert, why didn't you just do it?

Obviously if these guys are so terrible then you could just do it and save the company a ton of money.

You do know how multi team corporate projects work right? Sometimes people who make these decisions, have meetings with sales guys from "oracle/insert name here" and automatically give that weight and decide, rightly or wrongly, we will use these guys too.

Maybe they weren't rubbish but just average? I just don't think average is a very high level

For what it is worth, within a year they left, and their implementations removed and replaced. But whatever, I don't really care :)

Back on topic. The job ad says 15-20k pm, so you obviously looking for a junior. People hire people as investments too, surely a younger person is better long term investment than an older person, for a very junior position? (Obviously I have no idea what the upper bounds of a "younger" person is).

Also no one is really saying, don't hire old people. Everyone should be treated equal, but there is also a weighting system to attributes an employer deems advantageous
 
Last edited:
Back on topic. The job ad says 15-20k pm, so you obviously looking for a junior.

There are actually 2 jobs under discussion here: The one posted on myBB, which states 15-20k, and the one on the Trackmatic website that is "+/- 300k" per annum, which also has the 24-30 age clause. See here.

People hire people as investments too, surely a younger person is better long term investment than an older person, for a very junior position?

Why? Given that all you know about these two individuals is their age, how could you possibly say that the younger one is a better investment and hire?

Also no one is really saying, don't hire old people. Everyone should be treated equal, but there is also a weighting system to attributes an employer deems advantageous

Actually Trackmatic is saying that they don't want to hire old people, and they have publicly stated that they are ageist, and do not treat or regard older people equally (I really hope the OP wasn't using his real name :p, the internet remembers...)

Yes, there is generally a weighing up of a whole swath of attributes, but from a fundamentally ethical, legal and constitutional perspective, they are not allowed to "deem" age as such an attribute, in the same way as they are not allowed to discriminate by religion, gender, disability, etc. These are all explicity protected. The fact that not everyone adheres to this is no secret, but it is a mentality that needs to be routed out wherever possible. As I said before, bigotry isn't a right.
 
Last edited:
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X