In the spirit of my previous review of Buffer, I thought that I’d try to do a review of New York tech. Absurd, I know. But let’s do it anyway.
our protagonist
So, for the purpose of this story, I’m going to be the viewpoint character. Who am I? 24601 ! Sorry, force of habit.
Well, at a zeroth level,
I’m just another bearded vegetarian in skinny jeans who needs to get a goddamn job.
Specifically, I’m a dev. With some fairly real world data science/machine learning experience. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some very smart people, but I’m really just a hacker with good taste and a lot of persistence, at heart.
the setting
For more background, not too long ago, I returned from hacking on some seriously hairy problems in Hong Kong, to come back to the States. I’ve spent the vast majority of my career working for startups, but I’m now senior enough to be shooting for a role with some real opportunity for impact at a place with a strong team and a real chance of success.
the city
The word around town from my buddy Anthony is that NYC tech is hot. Like super, super hawt. From your MangoDBs to your Fumblrs, the city is full of fruit and football companies. Hmmmmm…
Seriously, the number of exciting companies in NYC is really awesome. People like to point to thinks like Google and Facebook having big offices out here as a sign that the city has somehow "arrived". I think this does short shrift to hugely innovative companies like Bloomberg that came well before the current trend. The fact is that NYC has been doing the important stuff in the American economy for a long, long time.
The upside of that is that this latest tech boom has gotten to take advantage of there already being a world class city here full of everything it takes to have the life and career of your dreams.
the hoods
A lot of people talk about Union Square as being the hub of tech in the city, giving it the title of Silicon Alley. This is true enough to a point. There are plenty of tech companies in the neighborhood. But of course, Chelsea is just next door, and the boundaries between the two can seem a bit arbitrary, with tech companies in both.
Further to the south, SoHo is still going strong too, with some serious advantages, like less tourists and cooler lofts. It’s also more convenient to walk to if you live in the village.
Some people will make a big deal about Brooklyn being where the real, exciting tech startups are at, but I’d say nope, hipster nonsense.
update: after posting this originally I found this awesome map which makes it far more straightforward to empirically assess my more qualitative impressions about the distribution of activity in the city.
stack ‘em up
How about tech stacks? Is every on living on the bleeding edge, running the nightly builds of the latest libraries in production? Well, there is some very cool stuff in use, but don’t think that it’s all Haskell and Julia. Java is still as huge here as everywhere else. Real companies, even real startup companies are using lots of mainstream things like Python, Ruby, and even shudder, BASH.
But there’s tons of considered experimentation going on. Scala has seemingly been at least considered everywhere. People are doing cool things in Go and Clojure. Moreover, there’s a ton of work going on in the so-called big data technologies and piece them together into something that makes money today. People are using Scalding, Storm, Cascalog, Spark, and so on to solve problems in their actual businesses. It’s not just Hadoopy things. There’s some very cool work being done with queueing technologies and of course, NoSQL is everywhere. Polyglot persistence is de rigeur, and I like it.
demand
Whoa buddy, does New York need devs! I mean, the community here is great and huge, but the appetite for more engineering talent is substantial and insatiable. Basically nobody I talked to in my epic job search was looking for just a single role. Essentially everybody who is hiring is hiring for at least one more of whatever they currently have, if not one more whole team. Of course, the challenge then becomes finding the right people.
supply
I really have no view into who else is looking for jobs in NYC right now. My feeling is that good organizations are having a seriously tough time finding people as good as they already have and are choosing to sit on their open reqs, instead of bringing in the wrong people. That’s probably wise, but I think that there may be a bit of a logical inconsistency in this attitude.
Here’s my proposition:
If everyone’s hiring for the same guy and can’t find him, then he might not exist.
What do I mean by that? Well, there seems to be a ton of companies looking for devs who can write high quality code, know enough math to understand analytical problems, have experience and interest in distributed systems, etc. Whether it’s framed in the context of big data, quant development, data science, or machine learning, it still seems to boil down to the same set of core skills. But if you simply count up the number of open reqs and look around, the math doesn’t seem to work out. There’s just no sign that anywhere near the number of people being hired for actually exist. So those "open" reqs are really aspirational reqs in my opinion. Many of them don’t look like they’re ever getting filled.
my job and yours
In the end, I did find a great job at a great company (that you should totally check out, because, you know, we’re awesome and we’re hiring). It was a lot of work to get my head around the situation and make a considered choice. Now that I have, I’m super relieved to be done, excited about the opportunity, and humbled to be working in such an awesome city full of great engineers and great companies.
If you have any questions or feedback on tech jobs in NYC, please hit me up on Twitter ; I’d love to help.
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One final tip that I’d like to throw out: if you want to work in New York tech, particularly in tech startups, then you really couldn’t do better than to try to get into a Hired auction. In a nutshell, it’s a great way of getting a lot of interesting opportunities that you might not find any other way.