.net developers required Dundee

[cstrachan]

If it is that bad it must be time to put my rates up again. There was very little in the way of Scottish contracts in the middle of last year then it went mental just before xmas.

[Lazydonkey]

For me specifically i'm looking for Netezza, Terradata, Ab initio, Informatica and Unix skills and i'm struggling.

I know my colleagues are struggling for java too - so much so that we're running competitions in the contact centres to develop code with the winner getting a 6 month secondment. We're even running "come work for IT" workshops.

Yet the meeeja keep telling us there are no jobs. I've got 5 i'm trying to fill !

[cstrachan]

For me specifically i'm looking for Netezza, Terradata, Ab initio, Informatica and Unix skills and i'm struggling.

I know my colleagues are struggling for java too - so much so that we're running competitions in the contact centres to develop code with the winner getting a 6 month secondment. We're even running "come work for IT" workshops.

Yet the meeeja keep telling us there are no jobs. I've got 5 i'm trying to fill !

It could be you are discounting people that could do the job(s), a decent programmer should be able to pick these skills no time. When looking for a coder I do not really care what languages / packages etc they used, I look for them to have learned new ones quickly and can adapt to new things that come along. I have never been disappointed with anyone I have had on the books.

Anyone that has a CV full of buzz words does go straight in the bin too

[PhilA]

hmmm maybe opportunities for me here!
15 years experience, i can do anything when i put my mind to it.... am the goto person for solving issues here. (blowing my own trumpet there, which isnt something i do, must be the lack of food!)

produced the most scalable publishing system for a cms, tho its not being used to its potiential (to my frustration).

have been thinking of starting a company, so the pennies come to my pocket and i can influence the direction.
hmmm....

[robin]

It could be you are discounting people that could do the job(s), a decent programmer should be able to pick these skills no time. When looking for a coder I do not really care what languages / packages etc they used, I look for them to have learned new ones quickly and can adapt to new things that come along.

Agreed. We took on somebody we had worked with years ago - skills from those days not particularly relevant and he had been doing loads of other non-programming stuff - still learned most of what's needed to maintain one of our massive Java programs in a couple of months.

Donkey, apart from Unix, I don't even know what those other things are Not that I should be your benchmark as I'm a dinosaur

[Lazydonkey]

Don't disagree but we've had to replace 13 programmers in the last 5 months and as such we need some people who can hit the ground running..... So they can support my newbies!

At one point I basically said "as long as they know sql ill interview them" but even then we still struggled to find good people.

[mckeann]

Have you sacked them or have they left???

[cstrachan]

Don't disagree but we've had to replace 13 programmers in the last 5 months and as such we need some people who can hit the ground running..... So they can support my newbies!

At one point I basically said "as long as they know sql ill interview them" but even then we still struggled to find good people.

Had the same argument with someone recently and I basically said give the guy a chance he is knows how to code just not in the languages you want, 3 months in and he is far and away the best guy on the team. That is why agencies etc really P me off they just don't understand a good software engineer is one that can pick up skills quickly and not 1 that has X years experience in some fad language. I hear hit the ground running constantly and no one does that unless they have worked with the exact same team and same systems.

Rant for the day over

[puffin]

I don't see nightly builds as being universally a necessary or even worthwhile thing.

We don't make them ... we have 250,000 lines of code in one project, for example, and it takes a few seconds to build. We don't check in code that won't compile and we generally review any check in that is complex.

Is this best practice? Probably not.

Does it work? Yes.

Cheers,
Robin

I don't think anyone is specifically saying nightly builds are required, just that having a central build server with the ability to build an entire solution at once is.

For example, we tend to do the following:

- Continuous Integration builds that run after every commit to version control. These check that someone hasn't checked in code that doesn't compile (how do you enforce this with any size team otherwise?) and also run the unit tests.

- Nightly builds are used to run the longer integration tests and then pushing builds to test servers.

- Staging and Release deployments are run on demand and produce the entire web application in a single folder that can then be deployed by simply overwriting the current version.

[puffin]

Is it something we said ... or are the number of developers looking for jobs in Scotland at an all time low ?

We're having the same experience in Glasgow. The agencies aren't sending anything decent and the good candidates are few and far between. It's mad because we have enough work to employ two or three more developers but there just doesn't seem to be anyone local.

[Lazydonkey]

Don't disagree but we've had to replace 13 programmers in the last 5 months and as such we need some people who can hit the ground running..... So they can support my newbies!

At one point I basically said "as long as they know sql ill interview them" but even then we still struggled to find good people.

Had the same argument with someone recently and I basically said give the guy a chance he is knows how to code just not in the languages you want, 3 months in and he is far and away the best guy on the team. That is why agencies etc really P me off they just don't understand a good software engineer is one that can pick up skills quickly and not 1 that has X years experience in some fad language. I hear hit the ground running constantly and no one does that unless they have worked with the exact same team and same systems.

Rant for the day over

The agencies are useless but for me I don't have three months and I don't have anyone to train them! I've got two grads who are three months in and doing well, three call centre guys who are two months in and doing ok but my developers and seniors are struggling to keep them afloat! They would lynch me if I hired anyone else without BI experience!

But in principle I agree 100% - my best grad has a degree in games design!

[BiggestNizzy]

Its the same for cnc machinists, cant get then for love nor money . Well maybe money but its hard to compete when you could make £70k in Aberdeen.

P.s. Donkey i know a little sql goes a job

[PhilA]

i studied electronics and then mechatronics.
assembly, basic, c...

since then ive developed in sql, html (language?), javascript, vb6, asp, asp.net (webforms, vb and c#, bit of mvc), sql service broker (basically sql), ajax, jquery, silverlight; analysis with lots of tools (firebug, fiddler, sql profiler, wire shark, iis debug diag); cross browser work (opera, safari, chrome, firefox (moz, from netscape from long ago), ie (since ie4));
no way someone could hit the ground running with that.
I interviewed one guy few years ago, he was a grad, but I could tell without him writing any code and only through asking how he would approach something, that he was thinking on the same lines as me - and so it proved in his job, hes now a senior. its all about how to learn, because technology is just getting faster and faster developed.
imho, engineering is about how to do something, not tools that trained in.

[robin]

I don't think anyone is specifically saying nightly builds are required, just that having a central build server with the ability to build an entire solution at once is.

Don't get me wrong - I'm sure they are useful in some or even many scenarios, but to award 1/12 marks in some bogus metric to whether or not you run them rather assumes that they are always a requirement, which they are not. Why do I need a central build server? I can checkout and build my code from scratch on any machine in less than a few minutes; on any machine that hasn't previously been configured, our build system configures a suitable environment first, then builds the code. There is always more than one way to skin a cat

We enforce the no-broken-code check ins with a baseball bat ... but we're a relatively small team - totally agree that if we had 20 developers we would need something like that.

Cheers,
Robin