Comment by chrisseaton
6 years ago
> Good luck hiring an engineer with advanced compiler courses knowing any of this.
Have you tried raising the level of compensation you offer? There are engineers elsewhere doing this at other companies you could presumably get if you put your hands in your pockets?
“We can’t hire for x” almost always means “we can’t hire for x for what we’re willing to pay”
I'm normally fairly laissez-faire about the morality of "exploiting" employees, but that works both ways - if you can't find people for the amount of money you're charging then tough shit
Yeah, we can argue about the merits of capitalism vs socialism, but what some companies want is "socialism for us, capitalism for our employees".
We pay very very well, all my peers from NVIDIA are above 700k. Why would you presume anything about salary?
It's not true that there aren't engineers with these skills - there are thousands of them in the US and more worldwide - so if you can't hire them then either:
* you aren't looking (seems unlikely)
* there's something toxic about your team that means they'd never work for you and you should fix that (hopefully unlikely)
* you aren't paying enough to make the move worthwhile for them (seems likely as people never want to pay the going rate)
That's why I presumed salary. Double your salary and you may suddenly find you're being flooded with contacts from the compiler engineers at places like Google. If that's the case then your only problem was the compensation you were offering and not a problem with education.
Consider making that more widely known.
Until reading this, it would never have occurred to me that a compiler tech at Nvidia would get anything remotely like that figure.
To be honest, as someone interested in compiler tech roles, it never occurred to me to even consider Nvidia until reading this discussion.
Check out https://github.com/mgaudet/CompilerJobs
> We pay very very well, all my peers from NVIDIA are above 700k.
That's... an impressive number.
> Why would you presume anything about salary?
Because that's usually the reason, especially when speaking of what universities teach. "We can't find people who know $TECH" is, under those circumstances, almost always corp-speak for "We can't find new grads who already know $TECH to fill our entry level positions for what we're willing to pay in order to replace the employees that learned it on the job and then leave when we don't give them raises after a couple of years."
Have you posted the positions you're trying to fill here on the monthly "Who is Hiring?" thread?
As an out of the box suggestion, consider sponsoring the creation of an online course (like a Udacity nanodegree, perhaps) that covers the curriculum material you consider missing. A comprehensive set of 'build your own programming language and tooling' courses would probably be quite popular.
Are you hiring massive programming language design & implementation enthusiasts familiar with the whole stack (parsing, type systems, verification, compilation, runtime, GC, ...) including all kinds of different parsing algorithms?
Please don't... your hobby proglingo... will go unmaintained... :-D