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Ask HN: What roles have you had the most difficult time filling?

by ropman76 on 1/19/18, 3:40 PM with 9 comments

I am not personally looking for work but I was having a conversation with a friend and he was talking about a particular position he was having a hard time filling due to a lack of local people who have experience in that skill set. So I am curious, what roles are you having a hard time filling on your team?

  • by chollida1 on 1/19/18, 6:17 PM

    People who know how to clean and work with large disparate datasets.

    I guess its not surprising given how Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies fame indicated that of his first 10 employee's almost half were cleaning data.

    It's alot more difficult than people realize and you know right away that someone has no real idea of the scale and difficulty of the problem when they suggest that a shell script can solve most of the data issues.

    I think Renaissance Technologies actually illustrates just how much a good data cleaning and back testing platform is a real competitive advantage.

    A couple of former RenTech people left for Millennium partners and for a couple of years.

    Even though these employees were good enough to work at RenTech and had insights into the strategies employed there, they weren't able to be successful on their own without the huge backtesting and data cleaning framework at RenTech.

  • by souprock on 1/20/18, 4:38 AM

    Low-level hacker roles are hard to fill. For example, my posting on the "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2018)" thread is this:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057016

    We get a little bit of luck with people who started hacking back when it was normal to care about assembly language. For example, somebody on our team used to write cartridge-based games for the Atari 800XL computer, which was an 8-bit home computer system. There are not a lot of people like that though, and many of them don't want to move because they have settled down with houses and family.

    We get a little luck with people fresh out of high-end engineering schools like Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech. Those schools still prepare students for dealing with low-level hacking.

    I think much of the trouble is that many people entering college have a focus on games, web sites, and phone apps. Writing low-level code (hypervisor, emulator, exploits, boot loader, OS kernel, compiler back end...) isn't something that seriously enters the mind of the typical student. People pass (or avoid?) their "Computer Architecture CS351" course with MIPS code, and their "Operating Systems CS302" course with Minix, and then they forget that stuff as fast as they can.