Mark Makary Blog

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The HackerX event is an opportunity for the employer to meet with a lot of developers or IT resources in a short time window, roughly 2 hours.

The way this works as follow, the candidates rotate through the employers’ stations every 5 minutes, however, there’s a free networking time slot at the end of the event, it might be a good idea to ask some of the candidates that you’re interested in expanding the conversation with to come by again during the free communication time slot.

This is a hectic networking marathon where you get to meet and network with a lot of good and smart people.

This is conventionally a recruiting event, right? What a CTO or a technology exec can get out of it?

The conversations I had, provided a wealth of information on both the technology landscape and on the personal experience sides.

Usually the executives’ events conversations focus on the high-levels aspects, while in such an event, you can meet the hands-on crowd, those are the people deal with the consequences of the major technology decisions we make on daily basis, no cosmetics or politics to make things pretty, just pure technologist view.

Here’s a summary of what I experienced on the technology landscape, assuming we have a representable sample,

• 80% or more of the .NET developers I met yesterday are working with monolithic .NET applications that were built in the last 15 years and those applications are maintenance overhead and can’t scale or adapt to new functional and system requirements along with other legacy problems. Accordingly, the companies they work for are considering one form of application modernization or another including opting for another technology stack and consequently and unfortunately shedding a lot of .NET developers in the process.
• Most of the Java or JVM resources I met are working with some homegrown frameworks that were built and maintained for the last 10 years or so. I can’t think of a logical reason on why a retail or commercial company would spend money, time and effort on plumping and wiring instead of focusing on business functions and time to market, apparently adamant job security is usually the main suspect, this’s a major architecture and business gap and with the gaps comes opportunity.
• Roughly, only 2 out of 100 interviewed recognized “Reactive Architecture and Programming” and was aware of the Microservices emerging technologies stacks, that is a stark comparison; compared to the people I usually meet at the technology summits, this is an alarm for the emerging technologies thought leaders on how we are reaching out to the software development communities, apparently, spending too much time within our own emerging technologies communities is obscuring the fact that we are not reaching out enough to the majority and we need to find out creative ways to do this.

How about the recruiting part?

You can get leads. However, that depends on the location, what you’re looking for and your interview strategy?

I think; the process would be more efficient if we can align the employers’ interest with the skillets and years of experience before the marathon starts.

Big shout to the HackerX organizers, the team and the sponsors for organizing such an event with a lot of logistics and that many people involved, thank you for your hospitality, also, I’m thankful for those who took the time and effort to attend the event.

Disclaimer

Those are my personal views and not representing the people I worked with, the companies I worked for, or my/our past and present customers in any shape or form. Any resemblance to real life use cases or situations is accidental and not intentional in any way, shape or form.

Hope this is helping some and again I understand other’s experience and views could be completely different than mine and I completely respect that.