You can't git clone a team

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.

I think I'm pretty similar; I don't have great advice, more or less my first real job I got the attention of my skip level boss (he was one of my interviews and also I did a couple projects with him), and he's hired me to two more places since then, so I'd say be sure to network. Bonus points if your network gets you a job where you don't have to work again.

I've also done a couple sessions of peek at a problem in production and fix it / tell people how to fix it based on reputation, which is networking.

Oh, and one more thing: never ever mention any experience with mail handling, or you'll get roped into doing it again. People remember, even if you only said it once. :P

> You're not going to find me on a university campus or in a research lab because I'm at a FAANG trying to pay my mortgage.

Make sure you are demonstrating it to the people on your team so that when they leave and go somewhere else, they can hit you up. This takes some time.

And, sorry, you have to get out and hit some gatherings in person (hackerspaces, meetups, professional meetings, etc.)--online-only isn't going to cut it anymore. With the AI garbage clog of inline interactions, your professional network is back to who you know in-person.

A sibling comment said to repeat what you just said in an interview. Don't do that.

Demonstrating that you are a stable hire who will fit well with the team is almost all that matters. You wouldn't be having an interview to begin with if you didn't technically qualify-ish. Even when speaking to technical interviewers, you will intimidate them. Actually selling yourself comes after your first 90 days of acclimation.

I think it's just not possible, because you're stuck with the reality that it's some combination of a machine and HR sorting through resumes.

Even past that step, it's a bit random. I fully admit I ignore the resume when doing interviews, as it's a bias for the interview role I get, which is typically working through some coding problems.

Go for robotics or specific robotics subtype (UAV, ROV, vehicles, etc..). If there is a "platform team", that would be your best fit, but some companies don't have separate platform team, or they don't advertise team name in the job postings.

People like that are in demand. Our company just filled few position like this, and hiring was hard. Some people were rejected because of not enough low-level knowledge, some people were rejected for not having enough high-level knowledge.

Agree with the TFA's author though, people with all the skills are super rare.. We were lucky to end up with few hires like that, but most of the people don't have all skills at once, and they have to learn on the job.

>because I'm at a FAANG trying to pay my mortgage.

Let's rephrase that:

I'm at a company with top of the line talent in many different domains and I prefer the compensation of this company over networking to find someone who knows the hiring manager of a team like this.

You have the easy way into this. For people without this networking, the best advice is to make them come to you. You gotta share that knowledge out there and get regards in various communities online if you can't stand out in a batch of resumes (and no one these days can, for reasons entirely the fault of HR and ATS). Do that and your newfound network will connect you.

On the right team at a FAANG to a large SaaS, because the places that need all of that kind of work are few and far between. Eg somewhere among the teams that make the Oculus firmware would be close enough to the hardware to need all that sort of work in order to ship to the tight latency specs they're looking for. Or early employee at a startup making a product that's going to need those sort of problems solved on a consistent basis, that's well funded enough that you can have enough time to solve problems like that in ways that aren't a total hack (because we all know those are going to be removed Real Soon Now).

> Companies have decided they don't want to train juniors. They want seniors who already have the skills.

It got worse in last two years. Now Senior Engineers must have exact combo of the weird tech stack and tools with N years of experience exactly as the existing employees, else gtfo, you don't even get screening calls. You don't have something from nice to have list? Lol, why are you wasting our recruiter's time even? She needs to use GenAI to write her next rejection email.

Also, your 15yoe does not matter, unless you are coming from direct competitor, in which case your 1.5yoe with internship is also excellent.

I think it is important to acknowledge that it takes much longer to train juniors in systems software today than a couple decades ago because the nature of the problems have changed. It now takes several years to get someone to an acceptable level for a lot of systems software work. In many cases that’s longer than the entire development cycle — a junior would never really be productive on the project. And yes, this is creating a vicious feedback loop where we are no longer producing many new people with these skills despite a lot of demand.

The minimum level of sophistication required to be effective in systems software has increased dramatically since the 1990s, when I first started doing systems software. The kinds of systems software we were putting in production in back then would be considered a trivial toy today. This shift has placed an enormous amount of upward pressure on the minimum level of experience and skill that would allow someone to become productive within a useful amount of time.

It is no longer feasible in many cases to have companies effectively subsidize the development of highly skilled systems software people. The training time has become so long that companies will never recoup the investment. It is easy to see how the incentives have created the current situation and it is not clear how to address the shortage. Even before the current situation, it was widely noted that most systems software developers were self-taught over many years rather than trained up in a structured environment.

I agree but it was always like that. Also there isn't any incentive anymore in growing juniors if they're going to immediately take the next better offer that comes around when they know enough, and you have such thing being offered on a daily basis (at least until a couple years ago).

I would love to work on low-level, systems stuff (anything as close to the hardware as possible), that's even my education and area of expertise. BUT SaaS companies in reality:

- pay better

- have lower costs

- are way easier

- don't have that many (or any at all) geographical restrictions (e.g. importing hardware prototypes).

People follows the money.

This just means the market is saturated. When there aren't enough people they'll accept less experience

I’m a lead consultant on a gig where the CTO outright told us that he’s not really interested in growing their (frankly, under qualified) engineers, just wants them to get on with the job - it’s very short-sighted and sad.

That said, in my previous job in a startup we hired very junior engineers and gave them plenty of opportunity and support for growth and several people did stunningly well. Pity the company didn’t do very well (IMHO due to focusing more or this sort of thing rather than making money).

The truth is bound to be somewhere in the middle.

Hi!

It's not a promotional piece of something, it's my personal experience as a CEO and co-founder of a company using Xen as the core of our stack. I like to share my views in a transparent fashion on how it's hard to do very technical stuff, not just for technical reasons, but due to the lack of people trained for.

It is a promotional piece - for Xen-based stack (the most popular hypervisor decades ago). That author laments that few people are interested in bare-metal hypervisors, like Xen.

But hypervisors did not disappear, they just got replaced. When we run virtual machines, they are usually backed by KVM (low-level) and qemu (higher layer). Sometimes there is libvirt on top of it too, but running qemu directly is not that hard.

And there is plenty of exciting research about this stack, for example KVM can be driven by things like firecracker and crosvm, and there are some rust projects targeting it too. There is also BSD's bhyve which

My impression is that it's not that people find hypervisors in general are boring, but just Xen specifically (or maybe all classic Type-1 ones? hard to tell with Xen being the only open-source representative).

If you find that to be the case when you use ChatGPT, maybe you should quit using ChatGPT.

Sometimes, probably most of the time, it is better to work through it and understand an issue than to blindly copy pasta.

> No learning is happening. Does not bode well for new folks coming in.

Recently got into a completely new language/framework and used Copilot to understand what was going on. I still made all the big decisions and wrote most of the code myself.

You can definitely use AI to avoid learning though (up to a point).

doesn't bode well for you either

> If it's difficult to find kernel developers then wouldn't it help to not require them to also know web UX?

That means hiring two people, and in $current_year, companies expect one person to know everything. Sysadmin, backend programmer, frontend programmer, designer and a DBA used to be different people not that long ago, now they expect one person to do all that... + it seems they want kernel development experience now.

Sure, let me explain it a bit better. It's more like in the sense of the "stack" is very deep now. Clearly, we have/hire Xen/hypervisors specialist, and we do not ask them to be CSS experts. However, deeper in the stack (at lower levels) harder it is to find them, because of the lack of expertise in universities and/or appeal of doing such job.

And if you find or train those low-level/system-oriented people, they also need to understand how a feature they build will be exposed functionally to a user (and why they need it in the first place). Because things are not make into thin-air but required to work in a bigger picture (ie: the product).

Because we cannot afford that, we aren't Google, and still a relatively small company vs the task of building a full-stack virtualization solution. Luckily, we have other strong points helping a lot (remote first, no micro-management, a great culture promoting human values and so on etc.)

That's entirely true (yeah I'm biased), frankly that's one of the best place in France for IT. And a lot cheaper/less stressful than Paris :p

I agree. If it's already hard for simpler stacks, you can imagine how hard it is for more critical or complex ones. And it's even worse if you inherited some of it (ie collecting technical debt that's not yours, which is the case here as some part of the stack are the result of a fork).

Sometimes it's even a catch-22 situation, where the technical/generic knowledge is already hard to find, but you absolutely need it to train more junior people. Luckily we found such experimented people, but then you also need to use their expertise to actually fix stuff and not just mentor juniors. A very very delicate balance to find, especially in a timed market.

My boss is about to learn this lesson the hard and painful way. Retention has fallen to the point where I am the only person who groks the full stack. I'm making an attempt to document what I can, but they're going to be fucked when I leave. I would feel bad about it, but CEO has tried to fuck me over many times-- for no apparent reason.

They shoutout a city in France, so I assume western EU.