I think there's a bit of an "eternal September" where people are promoted to management, asked to hire a bunch of people for some niche role, and blog about their inability to hire good people.
Hate to break it to the author, but there are plenty of people who can write a driver, bootloader, distributed systems, PAXOS, etc. but there's NO JOBS DOING THAT so they all work for <generic SaaS company> making <generic NodeJS app>.
The author mentions their grand strategy is fishing for talent out of universities, which is probably smart. Pulling people out of generic web dev world to go write "container orchestration logic" (or some other niche) is going to be a hard sell - most of those people were burned before by straying too far from the lucrative web dev jobs. Nothing like going into job interviews and telling the hiring manager that your last job was some ultra-obscure niche.
My first job out of university was working on an embedded Java runtime, with a group of peers from said university. Which sounds similar to what Virtualise.sh is doing.
Now, 20 years later? Tech lead on a Typescript/Flutter/AWS internal system.
In some ways I'd be excited to write container orchestration logic, or hack on a hypervisor. There's precious little of that work available, especially so in a small country like mine (NZ). My CV is crazy enough: being burnt isn't the issue, just finding the work is.
The cynical part of me wonders if the other reason to hire people straight out of university is that they're cheap...
cheap, moldable, and not distracted by families will always be a strong combination for niches you can't really learn otherwise. Not a lot of people will take a "downgrade" in their career to work on some passionate or cutting edge tech.
Also the usual botched hiring process, where even if one has the knwoledge, just because it wasn't what one was doing the last five years, it doesn't count, even if one has portfolio from side projects to show.
Or the dumb leetcode stuff because "we are going to be cool like Google over here".
So many gravitate to companies with more sensible hiring practices, and that is how a company loses candidates, if it is one of those unicorns that the whole planet wants to work on.
> Also the usual botched hiring process, where even if one has the knwoledge, just because it wasn't what one was doing the last five years, it doesn't count, even if one has portfolio from side projects to show.
So many times this. It doesn't even have to be five years to disqualify so many applicants these days. If you aren't working on it currently, there's already so much bias against you in the hiring process at large (e.g. the "I don't consider anyone that isn't currently employed" mantra that pops back up now and then).
Pretty much matches my experience. I'm an EE, I started out writing an LLVM backend for a custom DSP. Pretty good understanding of hardware, compilers and general low level things.
Now I have a generic web dev job working on a generic nodejs app. There are many more jobs available and in general it's much easier to have a remote web dev job.
Hate to break it to the author, but there are plenty of people who can write a driver, bootloader, distributed systems, PAXOS, etc. but there's NO JOBS DOING THAT so they all work for <generic SaaS company> making <generic NodeJS app>.
The author mentions their grand strategy is fishing for talent out of universities, which is probably smart. Pulling people out of generic web dev world to go write "container orchestration logic" (or some other niche) is going to be a hard sell - most of those people were burned before by straying too far from the lucrative web dev jobs. Nothing like going into job interviews and telling the hiring manager that your last job was some ultra-obscure niche.