About 5 years ago, I moved to another city across the country to work for a small startup. The city was small, candidates were few locally, and maybe fewer still wanting to move there (Lubbock, but my inlaws are nearby, and I liked the idea of my kids getting to see their grandparents).
It was the funnest job I ever had, moreso than I could describe. I was hired on as a web developer, but about 3 weeks in they started asking me to help work on firmware written in C for pic microcontrollers. Soon after that, they asked me if I thought I could produce comparable products with commodity hardware, and I found myself trying to write linux drivers for a packet radio (the usb development kit that the chip maker sells... but only provides Windows drivers for).
A few weeks in, I had that working. With a dozen other projects on the backburner too, all of them interesting and challenging. They were buying whatever hardware I said I needed, and if I ordered something that turned out to not be so useful, no one ever complained.
It was easy to be excited doing all of this. So of course the day after I managed to get a working prototype of the biggest challenge yet, I was shitcanned. Startups run out of money.
Now I write stupid web apps for a university. They pay me better ($20,000 more a year, not including benefits, probably more like $35,000 more with those). But it's boring as hell. And it's not the university's fault. The world needs alot of boring stuff to keep running.
My point is, if you've found alot of enthusiastic people, it's not your HR department's competence that gets the credit. It's not really those people's credit either. You just have a rare job that's actually fun.
That's an interesting story. Did you have experience writing firmwares and drivers in C before joining that startup? Did they ask you about it or it came on the spot? I am quite curious.
I had never written C before that, not on the job. Not much hobby-wise, just maybe tweaking shitty open source code to fix syntax errors or whatever. Never submitted a patch.
First time I had to write a makefile too. Ouch.
It had memory leaks, but nothing I couldn't have fixed given more time. It was userland, libusb, hadn't had time to get it anywhere near ready for a kernel driver.
I don't even know that I've ever properly learned any programming language... I get syntax Alzheimer's quite a bit. Other than novelty languages, how can you not look at code and not have some idea of what's going on though?
It was the funnest job I ever had, moreso than I could describe. I was hired on as a web developer, but about 3 weeks in they started asking me to help work on firmware written in C for pic microcontrollers. Soon after that, they asked me if I thought I could produce comparable products with commodity hardware, and I found myself trying to write linux drivers for a packet radio (the usb development kit that the chip maker sells... but only provides Windows drivers for).
A few weeks in, I had that working. With a dozen other projects on the backburner too, all of them interesting and challenging. They were buying whatever hardware I said I needed, and if I ordered something that turned out to not be so useful, no one ever complained.
It was easy to be excited doing all of this. So of course the day after I managed to get a working prototype of the biggest challenge yet, I was shitcanned. Startups run out of money.
Now I write stupid web apps for a university. They pay me better ($20,000 more a year, not including benefits, probably more like $35,000 more with those). But it's boring as hell. And it's not the university's fault. The world needs alot of boring stuff to keep running.
My point is, if you've found alot of enthusiastic people, it's not your HR department's competence that gets the credit. It's not really those people's credit either. You just have a rare job that's actually fun.