A Really Cool Opportunity For A Rails Developer In NYC

I can't say what company this is for but I can assure you its one worth joining.

Here's what they are looking for:

NYC start-up looking for a ruby/rails developer who enjoys working up and down the application stack. You'll have a huge impact on the expansion of our platform and the growth of our small engineering team. Your time will be split between iterating on the product, developing new areas of functionality, and applying a maintainability and scaling-aware mindset to our core architecture. 

Help us solve interesting problems, from adding location features, to looking for interesting patterns in our data, to assessing and implementing new technologies like MongoDB. We encourage contribution to open source projects and appreciate diverse backgrounds in and out of technology. Experience with payment platforms, faceted search, and building content management tools is nice but not a must.  

Interested? Get in touch at [email protected] (pls link to your github profile, if you have one).

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#Listings

Comments (Archived):

  1. William Mougayar

    Interesting! We’re looking for 2 slightly similar positions in Toronto. It seems there’s a shortage of experienced Ruby developers. When we posted the jobs 2 weeks ago, we received very few applications versus 5X as many for another marketing position.And when we interview co-ops from university, less than 20% have touched Ruby whereas more than half have Java or PHP. I think more Ruby should be taught at universities.

    1. Joe Siewert

      From my experience, universities tend to focus on teaching programming concepts and are less concerned about a specific language. The idea being that if you know the concepts you can code with any language. What you wind up with is college grads that get the main ideas, but are not able to just jump into any language and go at a startup pace. With so many languages out there, I’m not sure how you go about bringing one or another into the college curriculum without bumping another.

      1. kenberger

        That’s exactly right, and I also fully expected William’s findings.Our group is slowly but surely perfecting a process for top outsourced agile software development, and we really go for the “Best Athlete” approach. We don’t require any Ruby experience, and we train– paired programming helps. Some folks that wind up being great developers don’t even hold a computing degree.

      2. William Mougayar

        I agree with your observation on basics vs. languages 100%, but what I meant to say better is that- I wished there was more awareness of Ruby in universities so that more students end-up jumping into it.

    2. Mark Essel

      My cofounder and I picked Ruby pretty fast he was somewhat familiar, I was brand new to it last year. Less than a year later plenty of docs and a couple of books later I feel very comfortable in Ruby syntax. I’m surprised you can’t find more developers willing to dig into this language. It’s may favorite syntax, and I hope to design my own programming language inspired by much of it.

      1. William Mougayar

        Thanks Mark. We have been lucky actually now. I was reflecting on the fact that I received more applications for 1 marketing job than 2 Ruby devs, and only 20% of University students interviewed had prior Ruby experience. So, I’d like to see RoR adopted more widely and earlier in the career cycles.

        1. Mark Essel

          Same here William. It’s a beautiful language.

  2. falicon

    You are totally selling this job on the fact that Fred Wilson thinks it’s cool (which probably is enough to get some good candidates)…other than that, this post is the equiv. of “I’ve got this great business idea, but please sign my NDA before we talk about it”…

    1. CJ

      Well Fred thinking it’s cool is enough for an application, I’m sure if it gets far enough then the company would be disclosed. In any case, I’ve applied for jobs in the past where I’ve never heard of the company so having the name effectively meant nothing. Not sure how this is much different.

      1. falicon

        The name missing isn’t a big deal, but there really aren’t any details in there either (everything listed is pretty much the same as every other generic job posting out there)…so you don’t know what kind of project you’re actually working on or what the business as a whole is trying to solve (eg. are you going to be changing the way people volunteer their skills, are you going to be changing the way people shop online, are you going to be building the first ever online sprocket maker, etc.).Yes, it’s a tech. position they are trying to fill…but I don’t think it should ever really be sold as just that (at least not in the startup world where none of us are doing it just as a day job that pays the bills)…people, even us tech types, join startups because of the interesting problems and grand visions (the specific technologies and challenges are just the sugar that sweetens the opportunity).It’s also a little strange to me to be asked for proof of my contributions to the tech. community via my github link [which is http://github.com/falicon btw :-)] when the company itself isn’t open enough to share who they are or how they are being active/building momentum in whatever community they are trying to be in…I understand this is stuff that might be worked out after I’ve shown interest to them…My point is just that, IMHO, the ‘best’ candidates aren’t going to show initial interest in something like this because they have enough other opps. out there that they can take and are giving them more meat to digest…

        1. CJ

          It’s also a little strange to me to be asked for proof of my contributions to the tech. community via my github link [which is http://github.com/falicon btw :-)] when the company itself isn’t open enough to share who they are or how they are being active/building momentum in whatever community they are trying to be in…I understand this is stuff that might be worked out after I’ve shown interest to them…Totally agree. They are asking a lot for a company that is hiding behind the veil of secrecy. But, as a whole, this posting is an example of the power of passed links. The company (or Fred) is banking on his reputation to attract the best and the brightest with little hard details to entice them other than Fred Wilson thinks this is a great job and great place to work. IMHO, I don’t need anything else to get me to apply. Sure, as the process gets deeper I want more concrete information but I’m satisfied trusting Fred enough for at least an initial application.

    2. fredwilson

      i understand the issue around keeping the company name out of the postit’s not ideal but it’s what the company wants right now

    3. Matt A. Myers

      I don’t even tell my current programmers what my projects are! Just kidding (mostly..)!

    4. kenberger

      Fair point.Few people can pull off a “just trust me on how cool this is” thing.Fred is definitely someone who can.

  3. Nedo Balkan

    Wow!

  4. onsip

    Cool – Passing along to our community.

  5. ShanaC

    that person is lucky (if only cause i’m learning ruby and it is a cool language…)

    1. Mark Essel

      I can see you <3ing Ruby Shana. It’s a really wonderfully designed language.

  6. Steve Williams

    The secrecy is lame because the NYC tech community is very small. There’s a big chance a rails developer already knows the people at this company, and may not want those particular people to know about their job search. It might even be the same company he or she is already working at!The other thing is that it might be someplace uber lame like Pivotal.

    1. kenberger

      Pivotal is uber cool ! And a nourishing node in the nyc tech community.

    2. fredwilson

      that’s a good point about not wanting people to know about their job search

    3. fredwilson

      that’s a great point

  7. Gg

    Hmmm… the company is Square … ?

  8. Guest

    Hope my developer doesn’t see this post ! Probably is an exciting gig.

  9. Matt A. Myers

    Hey Charlie! You and I can just have own little a conversation in here! 😀 What shall we talk about…

  10. fredwilson

    Sure. What would you like me to talk about Charlie?

  11. Scott Carleton

    I vote String Theory….. Just a thought

  12. ShanaC

    education…

  13. Matt A. Myers

    String theory’s a fun one.Did you know 10 miles is the farthest distance so far where we’ve been able to transport information via entanglement?By this I mean, they take two particles, entangle them, and then they moved one of those particles 10 miles away. Then they switch the state of one particle, and the state of the other particle immediately switches its state to the same. 🙂

  14. Matt A. Myers

    Formal, informal? Things society should be teaching to everyone but doesn’t – like self-awareness?

  15. Scott Carleton

    I think schools need to bring back simple classes such as home economics or other basic street smarts. For instance: illustrating what 50 dollars a month into a Roth IRA will do over 40 years.

  16. Matt A. Myers

    ;-(

  17. Scott Carleton

    Don’t ever cross the streams….. Unless you’re dealing with State Puff

  18. ShanaC

    I vote things society should be teaching but doesn’t- like self awareness.

  19. ShanaC

    Stop kicking yourself about the parents. You can lead a horse to water and can’t make it drink. You need to find alt-parenting structures.Next question: As a society, (since a community raises kids, not little family bloblets alone), where do we get fill in alt-parents for various tasks (even if it is only one task, like hiking, and one person for reading, don’t make one person do it all)

  20. CJ

    Longer school days. If you can get the kids in school from 7-7 then you have a chance to counter the bad influences that they are likely to find on the streets. In a environment like this the streets tend to be one of, if not THE major influence in a child’s life and the child’s ability to stay away from that life is the single most determining factor on how they’ll end up 10 or 20 years in the future.Keep the kids in school for 12 hours, let them go home to eat and sleep and maybe you can instill a sense of caring into them so that they can combat the influences of their life that combine to bring them down. If the parents don’t care, remove them from the equation. I don’t know if this is feasible, and I’m not suggesting school days should be 12 hours, but if the end of the school day goes into some form of recess, which then goes into supervised homework time with tutoring, then you’ve added those few hours and accomplished a lot. The kids actually do the homework and get the reinforcement, they get exercise and they are safe from the potentially bad environment of their home life for a few hours more each day. The flip side is that they are also exposed to more positive reinforcement and role models for a few more hours each day. The kids then develop a sense of caring about what happens to them, regardless of if anyone else at home does and that makes all the difference in the world.But the key to dealing with bad parenting is to remove it from the equation. If you can do that, you can make almost any kid in that situation a success.

  21. Matt A. Myers

    Input: You don’t need money to do yoga.Yoga will improve mental clarity (therefore intelligence, learning ability, memory improved, ability to make better decisions, etc), strength, increased self-awareness, help deal with emotion, make it easier to manage life and stress.Too many benefits that affect every part of anyone’s life to list including increased intake of nutrients because of increased oxygen and bloodflow through intestines.I want to go into politics – at least in Canada – and put into place the proper systems to make it so everyone ends up doing yoga – it needs to be a leading metric for people’s health. It’s social, it’s fun, you feel fantastic afterward (or you’re calm and feel where you need to work on, or blocked emotions and thoughts come up that you’ve been suppressing). You can push yourself and make it challenging for the adrenaline junkies. It will improve your sports and concentration, … so many reasons. So many. Healthcare costs will go down too. People will become more self-aware and take care of themselves for minor illnesses, and their body will be able to handle a lot more. Less downtown = more productivity, happier lives, etc.. I can could go on and on and on.Conclusion: All you need is space. Having an instructor / teacher who is good at queues is beneficial, and perhaps if they do adjustments, but not completely needed for starting out in a regular practice. Having people who can demo it properly is pretty beneficial though. Mirrors can be a good way to start except many young people (and old) will have issues with their ego (self-image, etc), so doing yoga without mirrors is eventually good, but using as a tool occasionally I’ve found helpful for body alignment.Even if you ONLY taught yoga every day for a year to these 11,000 students, in a year’s time they would be better offer at handling life than most people I know who don’t have a lot of money.Yoga instructors are so inexpensive to train compared to doctors, and the benefits are huge – not easily measurable, but you won’t need to measure them to see the benefits.Free yoga for everyone. I would like to help that happen. For now I have to focus on business and improving my skills.

  22. Scott Carleton

    Something I don’t get. Considering what I know of entanglement, why does the distance matter? Or is it a problem of moving one particle without upsetting the entanglement that’s in place? It was my understanding that entanglement had nothing to do with the actual distance between two particles because of those bizarre quantum concepts which allow your entire body to teleport – it’s just very improbable.

  23. leeschneider

    Malcom, good luck finding teachers that will be able to survive teaching kids from 7 to 7! My wife teaches high school and has a hard enough time teaching 7 – 3. I’d be horrified to see what happens adding another 4 hours to that.

  24. andyswan

    Sounds like a great way to make 100% sure that only poor and poorly parented kids end up in the same place.TRY keeping my kids in a school for 12 hours lol.The schools we’re looking at are around 14-18 hours/week for K-2 and they dominate.Not sure how they compare with “listening to yourself breathe” and other “baseless esteem/awareness” categories though.

  25. Joe Siewert

    Agreed. Personal finance along with basic PC and auto repair.

  26. Dave Pinsen

    The financial media is full of articles espousing that conventional wisdom. The problem is that that conventional wisdom is flawed. Given the parlous state of our country’s finances, and the need for our government to raise taxes to shore them up, it’s a real leap of faith to assume that withdrawals from a Roth IRA decades from now will be tax free. Better to get your tax break up front with a traditional IRA (if you qualify for the deduction).More generally though — and not to put too fine a point on it — many people who don’t save don’t give a fig about your hypothetical projections about what their money will be worth in 40 years. They want the money now, often because of one of the following reasons: 1) They want to buy something with it; 2) They are afraid that if they accrue assets they will become ineligible for government benefits; 3) They aren’t future time-oriented; 4) They don’t like delaying gratification.Even more generally, there is a tendency among the educated classes to assume that education is a panacea for social issues like this, e.g., that people don’t save because they don’t know about compounding, or that they don’t use condoms because they have never heard of STDs or unintended pregnancies. In reality, people often are aware of the consequences of anti-bourgeois activities and engage in them anyway.

  27. CJ

    It shouldn’t be the same teacher. The day shift teacher should go home at 3 per normal, the evening shift teacher relieves and teaches for the next 4 hours. And it really doesn’t need to be teaching as much as study, homework help and mentoring. The key is to provide an alternative for the kids to keep them out of the bad situation at home for as long as possible. Community centers are nice, but this sort of thing organized in school has a much better chance of success IMHO.

  28. ErikSchwartz

    Passion, tempered with ability.How do you hire them? Be working on a problem that they want solved.

  29. ErikSchwartz

    Can you teach self awareness?

  30. Scott Carleton

    I think you are taking too strong of a pessimistic view here. I may be of the educated class, but I am also aware of the time when I thought hmm, complicated sounding accounts like Roth IRA aren’t for me, that type of thing is for people with a lot of money. Once you are educated it is hard to remember what it was like to not be in the know. At that point you can view the populace as idiots because hey, shouldn’t they be doing A or B to help themselves? Yes, some are acting with full knowledge of the consequences anyway, but I would argue that the majority have no clue of the impact.The point is to make sure people are aware of the consequences, don’t just assume it.

  31. Matt A. Myers

    Yup. Indirectly, but yes. It’s more via facilitating the person to become more self-aware. Paying attention to the feelings in one’s body is the first part, and giving them the words and ability to help oneself cope with oneself..

  32. Matt A. Myers

    7-10 am should be physical activity related learning. Sports, yoga, etc.. and can include breaks for food, etc. Brain only wakes up around 10am for learning anyway, and this way you guarantee everyone’s eating.

  33. leeschneider

    Malcolm,That makes a tremendous amount of sense. To split the teaching/mentoringduties would be a great solution.

  34. Matt A. Myers

    I believe the issue is as you said, moving it without upsetting the entanglement.One practical use of this is encrypted communication. Ex: No signal is being sent, so no one can intercept it, I guess unless you steal the other particle. 😛 But I imagine they’d stop using that entangled pair and move onto another….Another future use is voting machines.And, concepts to let your entire body teleport.. well, they’re still a bit immature. We theoretically know how, but technology isn’t there yet, including how to keep the body together in some form of a ‘capsule’ … I have some theories on this too, but that’s for another blog. 🙂

  35. Scott Carleton

    I would imagine that the first use could be a simple on/off switch without any direct line. Of course we could then extend that to 1s and 0s which would yield a completely different type of quantum computer.

  36. Matt A. Myers

    They’re working on quantum computing too. 🙂 They’ve made a logic gate so far I believe. I’ve not followed New Scientist lately though.

  37. Dave Pinsen

    Not a pessimistic view, but a realistic one. Years ago, I worked a contract job providing basic financial planning to participants in a major state’s defined benefit and defined contribution retirement plans. Those participants ranged from judges and physicians to crossing guards, teaching assistants, DMV clerks, etc. I spoke to hundreds of participants in that role, and, invariably, the low income ones would cash out their state-funded plans (they never participated in the voluntary contribution 401k-like plans available to them).We were required to tell participants cashing out that they would have to pay taxes on their money in addition to an IRS penalty for early withdrawal (if time permitted, we’d also give a compounding spiel). In every case, the answer was along these lines, “I don’t care. Just send me my check.”

  38. Dave Pinsen

    Not a pessimistic view, but a realistic one. Years ago, I worked a contract job providing basic financial planning to participants in a major state’s defined benefit and defined contribution retirement plans. Those participants ranged from judges and physicians to crossing guards, teaching assistants, DMV clerks, etc. I spoke to hundreds of participants in that role, and, invariably, the low income ones would cash out their state-funded plans (they never participated in the voluntary contribution 401k-like plans available to them).We were required to tell participants cashing out that they would have to pay taxes on their money in addition to an IRS penalty for early withdrawal (if time permitted, we’d also give a compounding spiel). In every case, the answer was along these lines, “I don’t care. Just send me my check.”That’s reality.________________________________

  39. andyswan

    That comment has a huge lead for “most ironic comment of 2010”.

  40. andyswan

    Your premise is wrong.

  41. Matt A. Myers

    Hm, I don’t follow at all? Why?

  42. Matt A. Myers

    Ah, I see you have a bias now for some reason re: something being ironic with my long post. :)I’m in.Let’s discuss.You can pick the thread.. 😛

  43. CJ

    Well the stated issue was that 80% of the kids are poverty stricken with uninvolved parents, removing them from that situation for more hours a day and placing them in a positive environment can only help. These kids might excel in a school that’s 14-18hours/week but the group as a whole will have a higher rate of kids choosing street life over school life. What do you think happens if you give a poverty stricken kid with uninvolved parents that much extra free time a day? The streets happen. These kids need more structure not less, I assure you that their home life is vastly different from the home life of your kids.I don’t believe Education is a ‘one fix for everyone’ deal. Different techniques will get the best out of different groups of students.

  44. ShanaC

    what should the premise be then?

  45. ShanaC

    oddly enough I’ was thinking about what I would say to Erik…you gave a much better answer.

  46. Mark Essel

    Flagging this one a spam

  47. andyswan

    Good point. I missed the threading and thus the premise. I was incorrectlyreacting to what I thought was a general suggestion.It’s all about the parents. I don’t know what to do about kids with parentsthat don’t care about their future.They’ve got to learn the value and esteem of creating. Building somethingof value. Building their body. Creating art and music. The addiction towinning and the momentum that accompanies it.We’ve got to bring a profit incentive to the people who can provide thosekinds of programs….who can actually INSPIRE kids to DESIRE to do forthemselves what their rotter parents will not.In any event, sorry for the misplaced criticism.

  48. CJ

    No worries Andy. 😀 I agree with you here, but with Education being a largely public affair, I’m not sure how to do what you suggest on a large scale without making it a social mandate rather than a capitalistic endeavor. Unless the idea is to blow up the system and remake it in the private sector? But then I’d counter that parents who don’t care won’t care enough to seek out these programs for their kids.