Hiring software engineers

[noahgibbs]

My employer wishes me to remind everybody I talk to on a regular basis that we're hiring software engineers. So if you are one, or you know any, and you'd like to work in Palo Alto with a startup doing cool software, we're an option.

Speaking based on my own two days of experience - everything's really just starting out here, so if you wish to make a major impact in a company's code organization, IT infrastructure, corporate culture or other bedrock bits of how the company runs, this would be a really good time to do it.

Anyway, I've gotta go back to doing that. But I figured this qualified as a nice work-related post.

Comments

[tg2k.livejournal.com]

Are you seriously looking for MFC talent for Windows? I'm not looking for a job, but I know way more about MFC than most engineers should, and certainly enough to tell you to use .NET if you possibly can. If you are that early on and you need some rationale or have issues of legacy C++ interoperability, feel free to follow up with me, because there usually is a better way than dealing with a lot of MFC.

If you're just asking for MFC talent because you want experienced Windows developers and think that's the best way to ask for them (since if you ask for .NET talent you'll get more junior resumes), then I certainly understand that tactic.

[tg2k.livejournal.com]

Oh, as long as I'm nitpicking--and having just peeked at your home page--while it sounds like your project fills a very useful niche (I could see myself using it someday), the line about syncing mp3's between computers is bunk. Get a copy of SyncBack and you'll have little enough trouble synchronizing files. Opaque, database-like data is a different animal.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Well, bear in mind that we're targeting the consumer market first and foremost. There are other products than can do some of this, but we're suggesting that third-party software fills a need here.

So telling me that you know of software that does this is, y'know, kinda proving the point.

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

Damn, I finally learn MFC, and (like all other programming skills) the second I learn it it has become out-dated.

I still haven't learned Java, and am somewhat afraid of graduating into a world where the only people who still use C/C++ are people hacking on operating systems.

Actually, I know just enough MFC to
get some buttons up and plop down an openGL widget, while I'm guessing most companies couldn't give a shit about the OpenGL widget and want multiple documents and such.

[tg2k.livejournal.com]

Get used to it; it seems to me that the industry is headed towards higher-level languages for speedier development of more complex programs. As long as they can interoperate with lower-level code, I don't see the trend going away.

By the way, the MFC document-view architecture is pretty awful. It looks as though it was designed to make earlier Office-like applications, but it was never good enough for even that. This is probably why most complex applications really leaned towards other technologies: VB (easy forms and simple DB access), raw Win32, other Windows class libraries, Delphi, etc. Microsoft never internally adopted MFC, as far as I know, which really tells you something, given that MFC is over 10 years old now. There are a very few things they did decently in MFC, and even those are better in .NET.

I recommend learning Java if you think you will do heavy cross-platform work on servers, websites, embedded systems, or maybe UIs. C# is also an excellent language, IMHO. They're both very similar, with slight edges in different areas; Java's internal classes are great, while C# has superior reflection and interop. Disclaimer: My Java experience is now nearly 4 years out of date.

[lrc.livejournal.com]

I'm seriously looking for work right now. The job listed as "software engineer, server" looks like it could be a good fit. I much prefer working at early stage startups too. My resume is at: http://www.red4est.com/lrc/resume.html

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Last I heard, mikz was looking for work. He's a java progammer.

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, congrats on the new job!

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

Since they probably wouldn't give me an offer to refuse in the first place, I'll just have to pre-emptively turn them down.

Either there is something I am missing about this company, or you and I have different tastes in software employment, or the "cool jobs" out there are much harder to find then I thought. Or maybe the "cool jobs" just work you to the bone and excuse it by being a "cool job".

[(Anonymous)]

Or maybe the "cool jobs" just work you to the bone and excuse it by being a "cool job".

The only exceptions I know to this rule is that certain jobs don't work you to the bone, but pay slave wages. That's kinda the result of a free-market system: good people will work cheaper if the job is cool, so cool jobs pay less.

There *is* presumably an exception to that for jobs that are *extremely* picky (think, like, RenderMan R&D team) where there's not enough competition from good people to amount to anything. That is, jobs where the number of people good enough for the job is about the same as the number of worldwide job openings.

Incidentally - we *do* have different tastes in cool companies, and I suspect this wouldn't qualify as being nearly as cool a job from your point of view as mine :-)

[(Anonymous)]

What I actually like about the job, by the way, is the startup factor, the "distributing random stuff over the 'net" factor, the fact that it's simple graphics work (I'm learning at least one interesting new bit of image-processing for this), and a number of fairly incidental things along the same lines.

[r-transpose-p.livejournal.com]

I apologize for the obnoxiousness of the previous post, but I figure it'll get enough of a rise out of you where you'll explain what interests you about this job.