Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will stand before kings; He will not stand before obscure men.
(Proverbs 22:29)The full feed. Prefer a quick overview? Browse the archive →
Periodically, web hyperlinks in Slack would stop working.
The fix is surprisingly quite simple: Restart Google Chrome.
The best way to restart Google Chrome safely and preserve your current open tabs is to type into the address bar:
chrome://restart
Yes, there is a huge engineering talent shortage in Silicon Valley. There are more companies trying to build disruptive technology that have greater hiring needs than the available supply of engineering talent.
I currently work at Iterable, and we are as of present a Series B company with around $30M raised total. We get hundreds of applicants a week, but few of them are qualified enough. I joined as the 3rd engineer of the company and now we are around 20 engineers; virtually every single engineering hire on our team has been an internal referral.
A company like Iterable is able to reward any qualified engineer quite handsomely; but for these top candidates, they are often like the proverbial kid-in-a-candy-shop and are highly sought after by multiple companies working on the most exciting, cutting edge technologies.
Iterable is poised to be a unicorn or deca-corn some day, as we are quickly becoming one of the essential, best-in-class tools for omni-channel growth marketing automation.
I love to reason and explain concepts using analogies. If you look at the world of professional sports, such as basketball or baseball, you will know that it seems every year, only a few teams consistently make it to the playoffs, semi-finals, and then finals. The teams that make it to the post-season are a small fraction of the total number of teams in the league; an even smaller fraction are serious championship contenders.
If you equate working at a software company in Silicon Valley to being an athlete that makes it to the MLB or NBA, then you will have a very good idea of what people are talking about when it comes to shortage of engineering talent. Many players are simply happy and consider it to be a life achievement to make it to the pro-leagues; only some of the players who are the hungriest and want to achieve greater success are willing to put in the hard work and dedication to reach the upper echelons of the game—whether it be basketball, or baseball, or software engineering.
Furthermore, just as you have specialist positions in basketball, the same also applies to software companies. To be a championship contender (e.g. IPO, $1B+ exit, etc), you need the absolute best, top-notch talent in each position — backend engineers, frontend engineers, infrastructure engineers, security engineers, mobile engineers, etc, and finding top notch talent to fill each of these positions is quite challenging and difficult. It takes years and years to hone and finely tune the skills in any particular area, such that for any position, there are only a few candidates who possess the skills, and then even fewer who are available and not already committed to another team, or working on their own startup.
Hence, it is quite safe to say that there is a huge shortage of engineering talent in Silicon Valley.
Edit:
Initially I did not think to make this a “recruiting” pitch for Iterable (seriously), but just to give an idea of how good we have it, here are some of our perks:
Here are some photos from the above mentioned team outings: Iterable
Even with all of these amazing perks, not to mention being able to work with some of the top minds and high achievers in the industry, we have been having such a hard time finding engineers that meet our bar for good talent and good culture and team players (you see, just like in sports, sometimes you have superstar athletes who are not team players, and these would be simply toxic to your organization).
Iterable is currently ranked at #1 on the SaaS1000.
If you’re out there, would you please DM me?
Edited Oct 27, 2017:
Someone just shared this article with me that describes the housing crisis not just in Silicon Valley, but in all of California: https://www.bisnow.com/national/…
There is a severe engineering talent shortage in Silicon Valley, and that goes hand-in-hand with the housing shortage in California.
By Jonathan Tsai (@jontsai | https://linkedin.com/in/jontsai)
Original Permalink (working Quip doc) : Communicating with Engineers: How to File Good JIRA Tickets
License: CC BY 3.0
This article was originally written as part of a mini-training for the customer success team at Iterable in July 2017. For the most updated version of this article, view the Quip version at the above permalink.
Edit: This article also got published on the GoodAudience Blog.
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” - George Santayana
Engineers build things, and also fix stuff when things break. Everyone’s time is valuable, so how can we effectively capture and document issues that come up, so that we make the product better, and learn as a team rather than “repeat the mistakes of history.”
This is one of the MOST IMPORTANT things you can do. You may not think it, but software engineers spend a lot of time reading every day. Reading code, reading tickets, reading Slack, etc. Therefore, choosing a good title for the ticket will have significant effect on comprehension and speed of delivery.
A good title:
Software engineers frequently have to deal with JSON and inspect or manipulate it.
There are two easy ways of pretty-printing JSON from command-line to aid in visual inspection. The first requires no installation, and the second requires a minimal installation but also provides syntax highlighting and manipulation capabilities.
Optional: Add alias to .bashrc
alias json=‘python -mjson.tool’
Example:
$ echo '{"cool": { "story" : { "bro" : [1, 2, 3] } } }' | json
{
"cool": {
"story": {
"bro": [
1,
2,
3,
]
}
}
}
Reference: http://www.restlessprogrammer.com/2013/03/how-to-pretty-print-json-from-command.html
Mac install via Homebrew: brew install jq
Ubuntu install apt: sudo apt-get install jq
$ echo '{"cool": { "story" : { "bro" : [1, 2, 3] } } }' | jq .
{
"cool": {
"story": {
"bro": [
1,
2,
3
]
}
}
}
Reference: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
I know of several people who start learning to code in their mid 20’s, and are doing fine now.
However, it’s very subjective what a “good living” is.
Compared to the rest of society, programmers (anyone who writes code) and software engineers (a subset of programmers, with more emphasis on “engineer”) might make a relatively higher salary.
However, just as with any field, there are different grade levels, and how well you do depends on what level you are able to attain, and that has a correlation to how much time you spend working on your craft.
If you work hard and dedicate yourself to software engineering now, you can probably make a decent living in 2–3 years. Whether that will exceed your earning capacity in whatever other endeavors you may try, or are currently in, varies widely depending on your individual background, circumstances, opportunities, and experiences (and ability to grow in all of those).
I think it may take 10–20 years of smart and hard work to get to the top tier of any field, software engineering included.
If you’re able to keep your head down and stay focused, go for it. If you’re easily distracted by others around you and are discouraged by others who seemingly effortlessly have more success than you, this may not be the path for you.
I have one friend who was working in the field of tech and executive recruiting, who was considering a switch to software engineering when he was already in his early thirties. I quoted to him a proverb, “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will stand before kings; He will not stand before obscure men,” and he decided to stay the course and excel in what he was already good at. Fast-forward two years and he’s now crushing it as an executive recruiter, making much more impact than he would have, compared to if he had switched his career to software engineering.