Profits are 40% of revenue, enough to plough investment back into numerous new product development and R&D projects. The ‘cash cow’ is a third-generation (mature) application that continues to generate substantial new sales and deliver a reliable stream of lucrative annual support fees. The firm's strategy so far has been to drive sales in new markets. They have achieved this by being close-to-the-customer, putting skilled engineers and sales people on site or in-country.
The first item on today's agenda is hiring. Andrew, Chris and Charlie reviewed a proof copy from HR of the job advertisement for next Friday's job section (see below) but are undecided about the value of 'yet another' advertising led recruitment initiative. For all the effort of the last six months of advertising, rounds of interviews and eventual job offers little has changed; not enough software engineers for the volume of work that needs to be done. In some ways the problem has become worse, of the last 25 job offers; 18 had rejected, preferring to take up positions in start-ups or larger American multinationals. The problem of attracting, hiring, and retaining talented software engineers is a major issue at all the firm's offices (New York, Boston, Houston, San Francisco, Sydney, Perth, Tokyo, Munich, Geneva, Dublin). Salary inflation reflects a tightening of the supply of qualified personnel and increasing costs are having an impact on the firm’s profitability and stock price.
In-house engineer turnover and burnout is also a big issue. The fact is that the firm is struggling with a limited supply of IT professionals in local markets and is finding it difficult to convince the firm's own engineers to work on essential product porting and maintenance, or support on existing products. Turnaround and resolution times for escalated support issues has grown and the quality of patches and service packs released to customers is suffering as more experienced senior engineers prefer to work on 'more interesting' new-product projects.
Proof Copy: Job Advertisement for FIRM
Area: Engineering/Product Development
A Web 2.0+ engineering team focused on solving tough problems delivering highly usable solutions that build and leverage social networks.
Role & Responsibilities: Software Engineer
- You will help to design, implement, and improve our Ruby-on-Rails based web platform, developing data intensive responsive cloud hybrid web applications.
- You will be working with a modern toolkit on really exciting projects that you will help define, refine and deliver.
- You love learning, learning with others, teaching and learning, listening (learning) and creating things.
- You like to get things done, up and running and finished, with just enough polish.
- You take responsibility for your own work, help others, and willingly receive help.
- You will (as does everyone else) also contribute to essential porting, maintenance, and support for existing applications on platforms like OS/390, some mobile devices and ancient legacy systems.
- You will work with Git, svn, or other cvs for code management; lighthouse for issue tracking and collaboration/communication tools such as Skype, Basecamp, blogging, and especially *wiki for team communication and project management.
- Experience! (or BSc or Masters in Computing, Informatics, Engineering etc.)
- Excellent team skills working with other engineers, non-engineers, and especially users/customers.
- Open-source participation and server admin know-how (*nix and MS) a big plus.
- Ruby-on-Rails, interfacing apps with 3rd party services like Twitter API via OAuth
- Postgresql but also accept MySQL or similar framework and DB system.
- Comfortable with agile software development practices but appreciative of waterfall rigor for deployment and delivery.
