[Discuss] Interesting work in the industry?

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 08:35:32AM -0400, Charlie Bennett wrote:
> I'll bite.  Recruiter spam is uniformly useless.

The whole choir is singing that. I've only met two recruiters
I've ever had any use for. One was an internal headhunter at
BBN/GTE, and the other burnt out quickly and took up knitting.

>    WHAT DOES THE INDUSTRY LOOK LIKE THROUGH YOUR EYES TODAY?

I'll copy your format, but a little briefer.

Me: Pre-midlife-crisis IT generalist, with lots of experience
in networks and Linux systems administration. I tend to write
tools in shell and Perl rather than C and Ruby, but I've got
exposure to... a lot. 

A Craigslist ad in 2003 brought me to Smartleaf, where I've
grown into the role of Director of IT and Operations. I manage
two general sysadmins and a toolsmith-sysadmin. Smartleaf runs
a single SAAS: portfolio management and optimization for banks,
brokerages and registered investment advisors.

Everything is running on Linux: databases (Oracle, possibly
moving to Postgres), analytical engine (C++), web management
(Ruby) and utilities (Perl). Our first concern is security, then
availability, then features. People outside of my group don't
have to think about the first two much, as they work inside
well-defined security boundaries.

Who are we?

Linux sysadmins. We have our own configuration automation
system; it's called Tuttle and is GPL at http://dev.smartleaf.com . 
We expect sysadmins to be fast learners, at least minimally
competent programmers, with significant experience in Linux.
We do everything from frontline support to building racks to 
managing PBXs to writing monitors and startup scripts and...

DBAs. Performance, mostly.

Financial engineers: math-competent programmers. The engine is
in C++, but I hear R is pretty much mandatory for testing out
theories these days.

Application programmers: Ruby on Rails is what we're using, and
it certainly seems to have a development speed advantage. 

QA. We write tests for everything.

Tech writer.

Customer support -- none of which is low-level. We train
internal customer administrators, and support them. 

Sales.

Marketing.

Office management.

We are doing some Agile-like things, but we're tasting the
Kool-Aid, not quaffing it. It doesn't match well to a small
environment in which there are rarely as many as 4 people in a
homogeneous team.

We don't have product managers. This company isn't big enough to
have much hierarchy.

There are three open positions right now: customer support,
financial engineering, and applications programmer. The primary
required attributes are skills, followed closely by cleverness
and reasonableness.

Dealing with outside recruiters has been more or less useless.

-dsr-