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Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 8:53 am
by tonefuse
I am having the hardest time trying to find and hire an experienced PHP developer.

I have tried Dice, craigslist, and phpclasses.

Does anyone have any advice? It is a really good job.

Maybe it is the listing. Please take a look.

Must be a permanent US resident preferably living in the tri-state area.
However, we are open to pay reasonable relocation expenses to NY/NJ.

Full-time position for a fast growing online music marketing company.

Responsibilities:
Developer will be responsible for daily tasks such as designing and integrating innovative ad creatives, optimizing data tracking and reporting for large sets of data, enhancing and tweaking ad servers, designing and developing new products, testing, debugging, and quality control.

MUST be skilled in:
* LAMP Development (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP)
* HTML + CSS
* Javascript/AJAX

Skilled in is a plus:
* Graphics design
* Server administration (Linux)
* SEO
* Working with large sets of data and large amounts of traffic, writing very efficient code
* memcache
* Manipulating raw data files such as XML, CSV, JSON, etc.
* Experience setting up and managing clusters
* Experience working with GoGrid, Amazon ec2, Rackspace Cloud, etc.
* ASP/SQL Server/Windows Server/IIS
* Flash

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 8:59 am
by AbraCadaver
Unless they are already there, no one wants to move to NY/NJ :-)

You can try here: php-general@lists.php.net

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 10:20 am
by Reviresco
Sounds like my kind of job... but I ain't movin' to NY/NJ!

Actually I'd consider it if I lost my current job, but even then... my ties to this area are too strong. Family responsibilities, etc.

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 9:18 am
by josh
"Developer will be responsible for daily tasks such as designing and integrating innovative ad creatives"
Sounds like you want a designer. Try posting an opening for "graphic artist".

"Experience setting up clusters"
That usually requires someone who specializes in system administration. It seems like you want 1 person to be super man.

As a potential applicant, it seems like every job is out of our league because so many people go overboard on the requirements like this. I would consider myself to be an experienced developer, but I would consider myself under qualified for this job and would probably ignore it.

You may find better luck working with multiple individuals on a freelance basis, so you can get highly specialized individuals.

"It is a really good job"
It's a trap guys!

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 10:19 am
by alex.barylski
+1 josh...

You want experienced or a jack of all trades, in which case code quality will suffer significantly. Way to many wildly different responsibilities for a skilled developer to accept, IMO.

Cheers,
Alex

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 10:23 am
by alex.barylski
Just wanted to add...asking for a skilled developer and system administrator with strong graphics design skills and keen eye for SEO...is like asking your family Doctor to fix your car, while having the Plumber baby sit your child, while requesting the Mail person to do your taxes. :P

Cheers,
Alex

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 10:57 am
by Benjamin
PCSpectra wrote:Just wanted to add...asking for a skilled developer and system administrator with strong graphics design skills and keen eye for SEO...is like asking your family Doctor to fix your car, while having the Plumber baby sit your child, while requesting the Mail person to do your taxes. :P
Except the Doctor, Plumber and Mailman are all the same person. I agree with most of what's been said so far. Programmers are pretty logical so a majority of the time they aren't very artistic. So Programmer != Designer.

Also, living in the midwest, I would not accept any positions on either coast. I worked in Chicago for a while as a contractor, that was enough big city for me!

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 1:14 pm
by alex.barylski
I wouldn't mind moving if the price was right, but one thing that remains rock solid is my incredible distate for 'jack of all trades master of none' positions.

Certainly we as developers are logical, so problem solving at an analytical level is what we prefer to do, but I for one occassionally dabble in graphics, SEO, marketing, etc. In fact anyone who has freelanced at one time or another probably has.

It's more a question of efficiency, for me. I can write code effectively, but I struggled with advanced regex or SQL so I turn to forums for help.

I can even carry out most SEO practices to improve a web site ranking, but it's boring unfufilling work for me. Design is another story, that actually takes a unique talent I have never seen an excellent developer have (look at all those well known name developers: Gof, Beck, Fowler, Evans, etc) their web sites are functional but not pretty.

I would take me weeks or months to produce something I was happy with, so the time wasted is extrmely frustrating, if not futile.

Cheers,
Alex

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2010 7:45 am
by josh
I worked at a place my boss hired some guy. My boss was looking for a jack of all trades. She hired someone who told her "I am familiar with all these trades" (it was video editing, building websites, graphic design, etc..).

The first 3 weeks all he had done was installed the $1,000+ Adobe suite my boss bought him, drew some rectangles and bothered me about a piece of invalid HTML. lol.

The problem comes with the boss assumes "familiar" == "proficient". In most cases, it does not. I dabble in design too, but since I am responsible I would never reply to this posting. By putting that in your posting youre weeding out the honest people. You might as well make a job posting that says hey come slack off at my company :D

Also on the project I'm working on now the designer was sacked as soon as I signed a contract. Then every week my client opens BUG reports that we need style down the font-size on the xyz form. I can also tell most developers would NOT appreciate being cornered into doing a task outside of their job description (end user support, fielding sales calls, system administration, etc..)

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2010 6:58 pm
by alex.barylski
e first 3 weeks all he had done was installed the $1,000+ Adobe suite my boss bought him, drew some rectangles and bothered me about a piece of invalid HTML. lol.
That so true/typical. :lol:

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2010 9:00 pm
by volomike
Responsibilities:
Developer will be responsible for daily tasks such as designing and integrating innovative ad creatives, optimizing data tracking and reporting for large sets of data, enhancing and tweaking ad servers, designing and developing new products, testing, debugging, and quality control.

MUST be skilled in:
* LAMP Development (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP)
* HTML + CSS
* Javascript/AJAX

Skilled in is a plus:
* Graphics design
* Server administration (Linux)
* SEO
* Working with large sets of data and large amounts of traffic, writing very efficient code
* memcache
* Manipulating raw data files such as XML, CSV, JSON, etc.
* Experience setting up and managing clusters
* Experience working with GoGrid, Amazon ec2, Rackspace Cloud, etc.
* ASP/SQL Server/Windows Server/IIS
* Flash
Phew, that's a mouthful. No wonder you haven't found someone. This isn't one job, it's 3 or 4.

I'd say only about 20% of PHP devs out there do Flash -- just a guess. PHP devs also typically only "pretend" to do graphics design, if even that, and usually outsource that. This is slimmed down even more by asking for people who know about web farms (you call "clusters"). I can do web farms, but I just want to let you know that you're shaving off about 50% to 60% of devs right there. Next, you don't make mention of the salary and I'm guessing this is probably one of the biggest issues right there -- you might want to check with the US Dept. of Labor stats on what web developers earn on average, as well as other well-known salary surveys, and then average them a good bit together. Last, you say NY and NJ, but wow, bad news there on the tax front if you listen to the latest news from those governors and state senates.

To me, one item I didn't like as the ASP/SQL Server/Windows Server/IIS requirement. If I can do LAMP, why would I go anywhere else? It's just so suitable, you see. I mean, in the PHP world, guys who start on Windows and migrate to Linux usually don't go back -- just an observation I have made on the whole over the years.

The other thing I'm thinking is that the job is so broad, that if any senior PHP guy is worth his own weight and can do all those things, he has to ask himself why he needs you? If he can do all those things without a hitch, why wouldn't he simply form his own company and make a mint without you? You should check the latest numbers about guys forming startups -- I hear it's climbing right now because of the economy and because things are really starting to solidify with great technologies. I mean, a couple years ago, we were all fighting with Javascript and AJAX was hardly used or understood. But now we have jQuery, AJAX is a snap through that, we don't have to fight with Javascript anymore, and we're just so darned effective now than we were two years ago. As well, WordPress is here and we can twist and tweak it into a gazillion different ways for rapid development. And there are about 10 really useful PHP MVC frameworks now that can help improve our productivity. These new efficiencies are going to have an impact on the number of guys wanting to form web startups.

And that, my friend, is why you're having trouble finding someone.

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 4:04 pm
by JNettles
I would agree with what is said about the job being too broad. Technically my job is solely backend development but because of staff shortages (and that we're so busy) I've been having to waste a good part of my time styling forms and other monkeying with the site's css. This is an unbelievable time-sink, one that I'd say all of us probably hate with a passion. We're programmers not markup writers.

Trying to toss in server management (both Apache and IIS!) and database management and graphic design isn't helping your situation. Hire DBAs and network support. If you're having your programmers handling the lifting in these departments you have greater issues to deal with than recruitment.

Re: Where to find and hire a PHP developer full-time in USA

Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2010 11:56 pm
by alex.barylski
This is an unbelievable time-sink, one that I'd say all of us probably hate with a passion. We're programmers not markup writers.
I wouldn`t say I hate it (sometimes I would when I can`t figure something out) but its not my area of interest. I can waste a great deal of time tinkering with CSS, time I could spend writing tests, etc.

I frequently get roped into server admin positions as well, but that I do not mind so much as its more my interest than anything design. At least with server admin, if you keep the setup simple (literally LAMP and thats it) its fairly easy to keep updated, etc. Its when I have to start tweaking setups, installing & configuring postfix, firewalls, complex network topologies, etc...thats when server admin becomes a nightmare for me.

Cheers,
Alex