Erm, no. That may be just great for a spotty kid in his first or second job, but someone seasoned with a wife and kids isn't really going to be thrilled with putting in startup hours for an iPad2, or the kind of stock options startups are offering. This is another reason why they're having trouble recruiting: the small pool of young people with few responsibilities that have the right skillset.
"primary focus of your life" intitle:jobs
and you get:
Quora: "You should be ready to make this startup the primary focus of your life"
Udemy: "You should be ready to make this startup the primary focus of your life"
GoPollGo: "you should be ready to make working on GoPollGo the primary focus of your life."
Bubbli: "you should be ready to make Bubbli the primary focus of your life."
So yeah, probably not a good fit for someone with a wife and kids.
I remember one of the promises my manager made me at IBM in the early 90s crisis was that he couldn't necessary be competitive in compensation but I would always have access to the coolest equipment and people... Yes he actually kept that promise, I managed to get one of almost every RS/6000 before they were publicly released in my lab...
That seems a little demeaning to portray a computer science education as one of languages and syntax. It's not about learning PHP or Ruby; it's about learning programming paradigms, concepts, algorithms, etc to make better software.
Perhaps the author of the article isn't particularly versed on how the CS => Software jobs process works. But to suggest that many engineers can't find jobs because they weren't taught PHP in school is grossly incorrect.
Does anyone actually know of academic programs that teach PHP?
If you aren't interested in programming, you aren't going to take the time to play around with new languages. You won't spend thousands of hours outside the classroom, hacking on your own projects just for the sake of creating something you think is cool.
The end result is that there are two strata of programmers; those with passion, and those without. In my experience, it's easy to spot the difference with one question during the interview process: "What's the coolest thing you've ever built?"
If the answer to this question is something they built because they were told to, they lack passion. If, on the other hand, they built something because it scratched an itch (at school, work, or otherwise), then that's something else entirely.
My best hires have always been programmers with less on-paper experience, but a ton of hours building stuff because they wanted to.
The coolest thing I've ever built was indeed something I was "told" to create as a part of my job. That doesn't dilute the fact that what I created took lots of creativity, careful thought and developed into an elegant, scalable solution for the problem at hand. I was very passionate about building it.
I think your litmus test is correct, but I think that regardless of _why_ someone built something, it's fairly easy to tell if they're passionate about having done it.
That said, the good ones almost always build things to scratch their own itch. Those things just may not be the coolest things.
On the other hand, there is a class of 'rockstar' developer who are actually not very good. The best way I can explain this is by giving an example.
I was hiring for a new higher-level dev, a Rails role. I was referred to a developer whos name I knew by somebody internal. I thought 95% of the task would be me convincing him to join us, and his profile was lots of twitter followers, a good following on HN and other forums, a high profile as a developer, attached his name to a lot of open source projects and spec work etc.
Turned out he knew none of the basics. He had 'C' on his resume yet he could skype chat me the simplest C routine. I asked him to scp a file up to a dev server, and he said 'I had no idea that you could FTP over SSH' - which he said after a 3-4 minute pause where it was obvious that he was googling. I learnt then that a public profile and being involved in such projects sometimes also isn't the best indicator.
I was desperate, so I took it. Man, was it terrible. I learned more from two weeks of part-time self study.
(It's also kind of funny hearing Zynga complain about unqualified candidates - I haven't exactly heard good things about their hiring practices.)
That's a pretty remarkable stat.
This seems like it would be the biggest problem in finding top talent.
I think a lot of entrepreneurial engineers just want to be CTO or VP of Engineering or Product. There's a lot of selling and all that goes around that I think many entrepreneurial engineers are not predisposed to even when they can be good at it.
I know a lot of startup execs and enterprise execs step back after a while to rejoin the ranks of individual contributors for a while to catch their breathe. It was worse during the IPO dotcom boom where I had friends that really felt that as execs they were forced into ethical compromise in handling the finances and misleading analysts when they were running public companies.
This observation does not give me confidence that the other claims are true.
