I'm hiring for a new start-up in central London and we are having a hard time finding very good people because many candidates are deciding to hang on to the jobs they have. Most seem afraid to leave for something unknown when the economy seems to be tanking.

what are the roles you're looking for at the startup?

I'm looking for two people:

1. A Java developer who's done lots of back-end work. Ideally someone who's built a server in Java that's had to scale to either a large amount of data or a high number of transactions. Someone really familiar with multi-threading.

2. A UI developer who's done stuff in Ajax and/or Flex. Would be very interesting if there's done extensive work on data visualization in a web browser, or on web-based applications that do fast real-time updates.

Can you say what the general problem domain is? Doesn't seem to be on your blog?

No.

It's not on my blog because we are in stealth mode and not talking about what we are doing. Even interview candidates who get to the final stage have to sign an NDA.

I know it's a pity not to be able to talk about it, but we have very good reasons (mostly around not awakening some large competitors who might try to rush through a project to make it look like they are doing the same thing) and are planning to launch everything (including the company name, web site, product and initial customer stories) at the same time.

But if you are interested in doing Java server work handling terabytes of data, or really cutting edge Javascript work, or close to real time data visualization in a web browser using Flex then please contact me.

re: #2: got a degree in comp sci, I studied UXDA primarily -- good head for AJAX stuff (ruby background) and currently have serious interest in : a) data viz of data (Nytimes have gorgeous stuff) b) on the fly news processing and algo development for rapid filtration - project I've been toying with that filters a few hundred incoming RSS feeds and does magical organization with them.

no stuff on the web yet, but am deffo curious. Got a detailed spec? peter@omgponi <!dot> es

Sorry, didn't see this until you tweeted it. You can email your CV to me.

thats a .es tld btw, just trying to jinx any email harvesters. I'm based in Cambridge, UK fwiw.

Hiring is getting harder here in Brazil. Too many openings and too few available professionals.

Most companies, even the ones on consulting, have an increasing number of openings and it's only getting harder to find qualified people.

Quite a few companies will take English speaking only professionals, just in case.

If you are on a large city and have some marketable skills it's trivial to get a contractor position in less than a week.

I am currently working for what could be considered a startup based in the UK (I am in the US). It's a fairly interesting problem, but not normal "startupish" stuff.

I have no formal education, no credentials (other than code).

I landed this job by doing what I had been doing for a while: going to the bottom-of-the-barrel freelance sites like rentacoder, and skimming through the job postings each day until I found things that didn't look painfully boring, weren't asking for way too much for way too little, and weren't "OMG FIX MY PHP CODEBASE" - because I had done a few of those, and they are far from fun. That's another story though.

I did (and still do) have an ace up my sleeve - I live really cheaply. This meant that I could grab up the interesting projects that got put there because the company doing the interesting stuff overloaded one guy, or because they couldn't afford a "consultant", do them for cheap, and do them well - which gained me repeat customers.

My current employment happened when after finishing one project, the client asked me to do another, very similar project. I inquired about what he was doing, and it turned out that he was doing a bunch of these really similar projects, that would be better implemented as one kinda loose project.

Wheee.

I guess I don't have much experience with the actual "job market" - but I can say that if you're a person like me, the jobs are there. You just have to be willing to work for cheap, at least for a bit (I'm not even close to rolling in the dough, but I have enough to pay my rent and bills and save some money for trying to attend college next year).

With the bottom-of-the-barrel freelance sites, just communicating well and not being a bot puts you in the top 95% of bidders for a job. It's really that ridiculous. If you don't have much official prior experience, you'll probably have to do some real crap work real cheap - but once you've got a few "this guy is good" bits of feedback, you pretty much have your pick of the lot.

I recruit for some mid-size software companies, and they're getting really great people without trying too hard right now. Trying to get in touch with some startups (I convinced the higher-ups at my company that it makes sense to accept a portion of the recruiting fee in equity rather than cash).

Here in Waterloo, Ontario I still see a lot of hiring going on. RIM and other big names are still posting job listings. Small companies in areas like Montreal and Toronto are cutting, but others are hiring so it seems like a mixed bag.

Where did you get your info from ?

Job listings does not mean the company is hiring. This is especially not true for large companies. Their HR depts routinely have few generic job postings in rotation to keep internal candidate databases updated. This was the case after '01 burst and I'm sure it's still the case now.

My info was from my own general viewings. That's why I didn't give any raw numbers or anything. I follow various blogs and sites that post those jobs and it's just what I'm seeing in general.'

You're right though, I should have not said "hiring" and instead "job listings" .. Unfortunately I cannot edit my post anymore :)

I go to the University of Waterloo, and evidently, lots of co-op jobs are being cancelled. Some of which had already been matched up with students.

It got to the point where the co-op administrators sent out an e-mail advising people to try to hang on to the jobs that they have because they are afraid that there will be far less jobs for the next term.

Wow, that's very interesting to hear. Thanks for letting us know

I am helping a couple of my friends in India get a job, mostly Bangalore, some Mumbai & Delhi. Most of the companies have a hiring freeze, quite a few are laying off people (but don't publicize it), only a handful are hiring, those are all startups.

Here in Bangalore the big outsourcee companies (Infosys, Wipro) are cutting back/ going slow on recruitment. Companies like Yahoo are still hiring. It is hard (but not impossible) for folks just out of school to get a job.

Not odd at all - hedge funds thrive on volatility.

Here in NYC I'm seeing a tough market all around, but especially with large companies, banks, brokerages, etc. Most of the interviews I'm getting are with smaller companies and startups.

have you tried HUGE? I am considering applying there.

http://www.hugeinc.com/careers/

Start-up jobs in India http://www.venturewoods.org/index.php/venturejobs/?cp=all

What hedge funds are hiring? I would love an internship with one

Add Google to that list.

Not true, at least on the hiring freeze front. I just got an offer from them.

Most companies that are not publicly laying people off or frozen are still "hiring", but they are extremely selective and conservative in their hiring practices. This is true of all major US markets. It's a decent time to be an established programmer, but it's probably utterly terrible for a 22-year-old CS grad.

For aspiring hedge fund quants, it's bad (bad all around) but not nearly as bad as the financial news would have one think. Talentless, unskilled IBD/M&A kids are toast and will never earn that kind of compensation again, but quants and IT are still in high demand.

I feel very lucky right now - I got an offer after an internship this summer, before everything imploded. Am I glad I did that!

As for my anecdote: there were some rumors that the company I had the offer for wanted to renege on it, but that didn't end up happening. I'm still personally a bit worried, since they didn't knock down my pay, and maybe that puts me on the fast track when the layoffs start happening?

I can't imagine things would be so bad that companies would be eager to layoff interns. You'd have to layoff like 10 interns to equal one reasonably experienced employee.

Ah, my bad, they're not laying off interns, I got a full-time offer after concluding my internship.