Where am i likely to end up working?

Hey,

I just graduated with a first class honours and 2 things:

1. Have a portfolio of your work outside college - i.e. set-up a github account.
2. Get work experience when you get the chance.

Most companies want experienced graduate believe it or not. Majority of jobs in web development and testing.

Good luck and keep up the good work.

CuLT wrote: »

Don't bother talking to recruiters; all the interesting jobs are ones you'll get by going to developer events, meeting other people building software.

Yup, and those people building software will have outsourced their recruitment to a 3rd party, because it makes business and financial sense.

CuLT's advice is romantic but not very practical. Its also absurd to claim that you can judge how pleasant it will be to work in a company without any understanding of the internal structure and processes.

CuLT wrote: »

No company I've ever worked for, or would want to work for, outsources their recruitment to a "third party." Why bother working for a company where you're not treated as one of their most valuable people?

Ask Eamon Leonard (VP Developers, Engine Yard).

Ask Ciaran Lee (CTO, Intercom).

Ask Ciaran Maher (former CTO Daft.ie, Boards.ie, Adverts.ie).

Ask Justin Mason (creator of SpamAssassin, lead developer at Swrve).

Ask anyone running a team at Google or Amazon.

And if you think you can judge how pleasant it will be to work at a company simply based on "internal structure and processes" (what does that even mean?) then you're having a laugh.

If you've given up, fine, but don't inflict your pessimism on new graduates. It's unpleasant to see.

"Why bother working for a company where you're not treated as one of their most valuable people?" - I'm not referencing the difference between a contractor and permie, as you appear to be?

Google doesn't do their own recruitment, its handled by contractors on site! My brother in law is a recruiter there.

Internal structures and processes are exactly what they sound like. Does the company have a largely flat or hierarchical management structure etc. Does the development team use TDD,SCM,CI, etc etc

Regardless of all of that, the most important thing is for someone starting out is to not restrict their opportunities, which is the reason I disagree with your post.

The thread has wandered into discussing whether or not to use recruiters.

Some part of the argument arises because developers are not a homogeneous group of people.
They aren't even tightly distributed. Its important to acknowledge that the best strategy for one developer might not be the best for another.

Recruiters, who are typically not highly technically skilled themselves, are thus not very good at assessing technical ability.
This results in an information asymmetry between the developer looking to get hired, and the recruiter attempting to assess them. Certain things tend to happen in markets with information asymmetries.

Different developers are affected in different ways; probably those with most to lose try and find alternative ways of getting hired.


Example: lets say you are one hundred times better than everything else at Algol. You dropped out of school and spent 25 years in your parents basement coding it, and are now brilliant at it.
And now you really want to get paid really well for all those years you spent unemployed on your own mastering Algol.

Whatever hope you have about getting paid for your skills if you are interviewed by an Algol expert, there's pretty much no way a recruiter would decide to pay you commensurately with your skills.

Honestly, the recruiter will probably not even put you forward for an interview, because all your signals look so bad.

We all kind of know this. Probably, if you are a small Irish Algol shop, and really need to hire someone to write Algol for you, you aren't even going to bother with a recruiter.


Its like cars.
If you are trying to sell a second hand car, and you're car is in brilliant condition because you've driven it really carefully, and you want its value, you've got a problem.
If you are trying to sell a car that you've driven pretty hard, you'll probably get close to its value.


How useful recruiters are for an individual developer depends on a whole bunch of factors.
How common is the job?
How similar or different are they from the market average?
Whats the correlation between the developer's signals and their skill?
etc.


Basically, you can't really give 'one size fits all' advice that says either 'use recruiters' or 'ignore recruiters'.
It depends a lot of the developer and their interests.

ChRoMe wrote: »

Yup, and those people building software will have outsourced their recruitment to a 3rd party, because it makes business and financial sense.

CuLT's advice is romantic but not very practical.

Hiring an employee is one of the most leveraged things a business can do.

Consider if an employee stays with the company for a couple of years. If it takes weeks of founder time to get a slightly better employee, then thats probably a good tradeoff, right, because of that leverage?

Also, that employee is probably going to be leveraged in turn - they'll end up hiring other employees, making key technical decisions etc.

ChRoMe wrote: »

Google doesn't do their own recruitment, its handled by contractors on site! My brother in law is a recruiter there.

Obviously, if you are Google, with 50k employees, it doesnt scale to have Larry and Sergey still interviewing everyone. They still have an expensive interviewing process, though; I am guessing that they are using recruiters just to get 'input flow' of candidates, rather than to do much of the discrimination?

I guess it depends on the size of company you are talking about.

Chana Big Cartoonist wrote: »

generally speaking, the recruiters will be given a list of credentials that the potential candidate must have, i.e. a 2.1 L8 degree, and or x number of years experience.

Yes, recruiters have to be told to look for signals, because recruiters are unable to evaluate quality directly.

Chana Big Cartoonist wrote: »

You can say you have been coding for 20 years in your parents basement, but at the end of the day, thats just your word, how does an employer know you are not lying on your cv?

I don't really see how 'candidates may lie on their CV' is used as an argument in favour of recruiters.

Sure, candidates who lie outrageously on their CV are a problem.

But they are a bigger problem with recruiters, because recruiters are not in a position to realize a candidate is lying.

In reality, probably only few people will actually lie outrageously, if they know they will be caught out at interview, and basically get themselves blacklisted.

As such, the cost of interviewing them, say with an initial phone screening, isn't so high.

How does involving recruiters help solve that problem?

If anything, you still have to do the phone screening, and you lose the upside from the people who are highly skilled, but have poor signals, who would do very well in the phone screening, but who the recruiters have discarded.

Chana Big Cartoonist wrote: »

They would soon find out in an interview that you are lying, but why take that risk?

You take the risk in order to find someone good.

Its an economics problem.

If you are willing to pay 1 million dollars a year per programmer, you can easily get very good programmers.
Just put an ad in the newspaper saying 'hiring 10 algol programmers at $1m/year each' and the best programmers will find you.

But that's not what employers are trying to do.
Employers are trying to find programmers of a certain quality, at a certain price range. Employers want to maximise the value they get, which is a function of quality and price.

Sometimes the best way to do this will involve using recruiters, and some times it wont.


If you want to find a particularly good value programmer then you are trying to find people who are mispriced by the market.

Good developers with poor signals are often underpriced, because recruiters aren't able to tell how good a developer is.
That's why you risk interviewing them, to get good value, because good developers are worth so much to your company.

Chana Big Cartoonist wrote: »

from experience, if you are under qualified for a job, you have a better chance of getting it through a recruiter, as they will know more about you than the person in the company that sees that you dont meet the credentials for the job based on your cv.

If a tech company is doing a worse job than the recruiter at selecting people for interview, the company is probably pretty stupid.
The company should have vastly more information than the recruiter about how to select candidates, as the company knows the domain.

It makes some sense for a company to use recruiters in order to increase the number of candidates the company is exposed to.
Or, if the company is looking for staff of a particularly standard value.

(Although probably the company is being stupid here, too, as its relatively cheap to increase your exposure to candidates, vs. paying recruiters.)

But if a tech company, who are presumably experts at the thing they are hiring for, are doing a worse job at selection than recruiters, then they are probably doing something very wrong.

Its a different scenario, of course, if its not a tech company, who are perhaps hiring outside their core competence.