Some interesting jobs

27.May.2008
The recent release of FogBugz 6.0 is about, doubled our sales, and even though I fully agree that the often small teams, not more than big teams, we have a lot of interesting work to be performed here and there never seem to be enough to the people, so we looked at some areas where adding more people should not slow things down.

We came up with three fairly interesting new places that could be a perfect fit for you or someone you know. It is relatively rare in the Fog Creek hired full-time and engineers, many of the people we hired in the past were former summer practice is relatively small (20 people), and we do not recruit seriously, so this is a rare opportunity to obtain at the door and take advantage of the fact that Clear Creek was designed from the ground that the kind of company where the best software developers want to work (about Fog Creek).kři

First place in the management system. Normally, I am quite happy to hire inexperienced, but clearly people and let them learn on the job. Even at a relatively important jobs, such as the President of the United States.

But for the management system is one of those things where experience is really important. You do not want to your new system administrator to learn how to create a secure and robust online services on the building of something uncertain and unrobust and learn from experience. So at our first system administrator, we hired Michael Gorsuch, because he knew how to operate our systems on one day.

This is a dilemma for smart people who want to learn how to world class system administrators. If everybody is asking for x years of experience, as you have had the experience? You can take an entry-level work in large companies, such as, say, junior DNS administrator, writing on the changes in the DNS configuration files, but you will not learn very much.

Here is the place where Fog Creek comes in. Michael and I talked about it and decided that our second rental in this department, could be totally inexperienced management system, if they were smart, what I do, and had personal characteristics that has become a major system administrator (attention to detail, šílená curiosity, a constant need to be learning new things, a strong ability to remain levelheaded and well organized in the most chaotic situations, there is no land pants in fear when presented with the command line, thinks that " RTFM "It's a great response, etc.) This is a once-va-lifetime chance to learn the field and gain significant experience in an interesting, mixed environment, including Unix and Windows desktops and servers, Internet hosting and internetworking, open source and Microsoft are all kinds of interesting moving parts. And you'll be learning from a real master, one on one, in an environment with large zero corporate BS, management believes that you have to order equipment, you need without having to undergo somehow 6 months of the financial committee process during which the company blatant lawyer who somehow became a "head of the capital infrastructure committee" is nervous about using open source software, hippie, because it seems to be a kind of "communist", and she had terrible experiences in the village in the 60s when it really rough guy who never bathed and nosila flip systems in the winter ... no, anyway, I abandonment of the topic. At Fog Creek, where you need equipment to you. That's really all it is.

Are you interested? The administrator of the Fog Creek

Our Another interesting point is the Linux Guru. It is a hybrid position for someone who really loves Linux, wants to a lot of coding, but also wants more diverse problem-solving type of work.

Here's a theory for this position. Our main product, FogBugz is a server product, which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. On Windows servers, each has almost the same minimum Affairs. So our installer usually works from the shelf.

On Linux, though there is much more diversity. People have different distributions are different versions of various major components, such as MySQL, PHP, and Mono, and not all immediately compatible. Many Linux administrators went through their server, if set it to remove things that were not think I need to "security" reasons ( "if you are going to use / bin / ls, delete it - - it 'is just waiting for the security hole To be found, they said), and now, here it is, three years later, and they will install FogBugz, and not get why ls does not work. Bottom line: it takes a bit to hammering FogBugz to get to work in many Linux systems.

So this position is for Linux coder who will also be responsible FogBugz working to get our customers' systems. Darling My theory is that if a person who to call when a customer is missing, say, the Pear Mail module, if this person is the same person who submits the installation code, it will eventually acquire the ill sshing to customers' websites and entering a "pear install Mail" for them and they will only repair in the code once and for all. And I think many people would find a job, which combines solutions to the problems with the new software will be quite interesting, especially if, as I said, you love Linux.

On the development side, you've also got to handle any Linux-specific code. Right now, it is a combination of PHP, Mono, and various scripting languages. Most FogBugz is written in our own portable language, Wasabi. You will be responsible to maintain the Linux-specific parts of the code, and will work to maintain Wasabi for Linux at the same level as Wasabi for Windows.

Are you interested? Linux gurus in the Fog Creek

Finally, we were able to use extreme internal Windows guru. I do not have a "Access / VB" kind of guru. I mean Win 32, COM. Net, GDI programming, low level of computers running Windows things in C + + and C # kind of guru. And when I say. "Net" I do not have in mind "Ooh look, I made ASP.NET websites with GridView, which shows a list of customers." Uh-uh. Let the other league for the boss (me). For this work, you work directly on the native. NET programming language, CLR bytecode generation and integration with Visual Studio debugger. You solution obscure threading model problems in other people's code. You hacking GDI to improve the performance of our Remote Desktop Service, the second pilot. Will to why the trivial things that used to work do not work in any other 64-bit Vista. This is a perfect job on the type of developers who are doing the Windows API, programming for years, who are reading MSDN Magazine, it was called, MSJ, who actually means what thou Box is talking about who can explain how the example of a COM Objects of DLL without touching the registry, and who can determine the jerky Microsoft documentation on how to play the first four bars Gaudeamus IGITUR on a computer without a sound card.

Are you interested? Windows Home gurus in the Fog Creek

Do not use small teams can do more things than the big teams? Did not The Mythical Man Month convincingly prove that you should have the smallest possible team? Do not startups with two children run circles around the large companies? Fog Creek is not available large and bureaucratic? Why hire more people?

No, no, no and no. It's a little more complicated than this. The 20 people we are still fit around one table lunch, and we're far from being unable to get what. And what MMM argued that the only people in the late addition of the project is a project at a later date. The more people you have, the more communication you need, which counterbalances the added productivity of the extraordinary people - this is the end of MMM - and so when we add people are always trying to figure out how to do it in a way that is efficient. But the bottom line is that we have a long list of things that we wanted to do, and also our small-team is forced to do things in the series that could be done in parallel with a few more people. So in the long term I think we'll continue hiring carefully and discreetly, keeping each of the teams small core of (our largest dev team right now is, ehm, three people), and I think that we are still on the move from worrying about Fog Creek.