The Blog

May 31, 2007

The Regrettable State of Corporate IT Hiring in Orlando, FL 

by Maxim Porges @ 11:21 PM | Link | Feedback (5)

I can't understand the situation we're faced with when it comes to hiring developers at CFI.

Earlier this year, we finally got the approval to do something we knew we needed to do for a while: massively staff up to meet our business's needs for their internal software applications. For the first time since I have been with CFI, we had 26 openings across every software team for development positions.

In two months, we've filled four of them.

Unfortunately, the Java developer market is "hot" right now. What does this mean? I roughly translate it (from several years of hiring experience) to a bunch of worthless developers expecting stupidly high money for their lackluster skills. We've received resume after resume of people with 10+ years of industry experience, who (after a thorough screening) clearly don't give a shit about their work in terms of passion, and can't string a line of code together that one of our junior developers six months on the job wouldn't laugh at.

Don't mistake my blunt tone for harshness or shades of jade. I only wish I were exaggerating the situation.

In the past, we've been lucky to find a core group of people who actually care about their profession and have some passion and ownership for what they do; developers who gently push the envelope by sharing their knowledge with each other, bringing the fruits of extracurricular pet projects and self-study to the table every day. These are the guys that I get up every day to work with, and without whom I'd have been long gone from CFI around Q4 of last year. It's these peers that allow me continue to learn, have fun, and take interest in my work.

What frustrates me is how few and far between these sort of developers are. From my experience interviewing candidates spawned from all sorts of local shops, corporate IT seems to churn out a relentless stream of garbage developers.

Frankly, it pisses me off.

Does nobody really care about quality product or clean design aesthetics? How the hell do you guys look at yourselves in the mirror when you get home from work? Is it really more important to fill a seat with a guy whose only qualification is that he can spell "Java" and fog a mirror if you hold it up to his mouth, but he can't even tell you why he likes being a developer or what the core principles of his chosen technology are?

I'm over it. The sheer number of clock-punching numbskulls out their diluting the development community simply infuriates me. You guys are a discredit to the people who make this profession worth being a part of, and I'd be glad to see you doing something else. As a suggestion, I'm sure there's currently high demand for those proficient in the custodial arts; after all, somebody has to clean up the mess that you created in your tenure filling whatever position you recently vacated.

God bless our recruiters; at least, the ones who have delivered for us in the recent weeks. We demand what appears to be a rare calibre of developer, with nothing to offer except a techie-friendly work environment and fair industry salaries in a market that is currently ripe with extortion by hapless buffoons.

I've got to admit that I've completely lost faith in the ability of our local market to support our needs, to the point where I'm almost convinced that our only hope is the college grads and the internship program we drafted last year. Sica can claim "told ya so" rights on this one; he called this the middle of last year, and while I loved the idea, I felt that we'd be able to find what we wanted in the local market if we were patient and persistent. We've held true to both of these virtues, and have been left bleeding with minimal relief to our staffing woes as a result.

Shame on me.

Sorry to be so depressing. I'm going to log in to our VPN server and look longlingly at our Flex apps in development, reminding myself that the situation will eventually get better, and that the goals we've been fighting for over the last few years still hold a chance of having their day in the sun.