People who think they can seduce a developer with a beer cabinet and a fuseball table don't deserve to get good developers.<p>What developers really want - and what they never get - is power, not free beer and a crappy football table. Power to decide what they are going to work on, power to decide what tools they want to use, power to decide whether they want to use a waterfall approach or the ubiquitous soul-destroying agile way.<p>One time developers were almost fully in charge of software projects. Nowadays, they are at the bottom of the wrung, further from the decision making process for software products than anyone else.<p>Give us some power over our work and maybe we'll think about working for you.
If you are young and recently graduated with computer science you are hot in Boston. If you've been around a while and have a degree in anything else, or are self taught, companies like these will most likely just ignore you. That is their "hot market", I call it artificial scarcity.
Only <i>good programmers</i> have a ton of opportunity.<p>Where are all the jobs for <i>bad programmers</i> with CS degrees?<p>That sounds like a joke... but by Hacker News community standards I'm sure more than half of CS graduates would be considered mediocre programmers at best. The big companies would never try to train these kids - they just lobby for more H1Bs.<p>How else do you explain stories like this while we have a "talent shortage":
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480749" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480749</a>
I hate articles like this.<p>(1) When did aspiring to a good life become wrong? The article seems to sympathize with Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot who whines about having to pay devs a middle class wage.<p>(2) Since I've seen this with the dude from seo moz and other places: To all of you whining about your inability to hire software engineers, what exactly are you doing to grow your own? Are you aggressively hiring interns so you get first shot when they graduate? Are you lobbying your state and national reps to fund universities? There are plenty of smart people entering college this fall; in 4 years, some of them will be cs graduates. It seems like on the margin a lot of smart people enter finance or law or other fields; what are you doing to attract them to software engineering? What are you doing about the rampant sexism that helps turn off a lot of women (that's 1/2 your potential engineers) to development as a career?