Welcome to the Jungle (Redux)

This week I have visited the ESOC (The European Space Operations Centre) as part of my new job in The Server Labs. It has been a long time since I was in Germany last time, in the Due Diligence for the acquisition of JobPilot by Adecco (I was staff of Adecco). I think things have not change a lot: Germany is a good place to work if you are in technology: there are good companies, cutting edge research and development, multicultural environment, and people are really, really nice at work. This is also something I felt when I was working in Consors , and I have felt the same in the ESOC.
In Spain people the attitude of people is more 'defensive' and it can sometimes hurt the relationship between client and customer from the early beginning. And it's not possible to compare the number of technological companies in Spain and in Germany.
Still, I really missed something: the colours. May be it's because of the weather, or because of the functional mentality of the people, but I missed the colours and the sun of Madrid.

Last years have been a wonderful time in Amplía Soluciones S.L., but nothing is forever and I think it's time for a change. I will continue as a partner of the company but I will look for new challenges and adventures out there. You can read my public linkedin profile if you want to know a bit about my skills and experience.

Last week I was talking with a friend of mine about my post Sometimes to interview developers can be funny. We commented how most of the developers do not prepare the interview, and how they come without even visiting the website of the company. So, here goes some basic stuff you should do before attending to an interview. May be it can sound too basic, but believe me if I tell you that some developers do not care about this five topics:

1. Visit the web site of the company and learn what's the main business of the company. It's incredible the amount of people who have not visit the web site of the company. The excuses vary from 'I was in a hurry' to 'I don't have Internet at home (!?)'.
2. Find information about the employees of the company. Use Linkedin, Xing, Facebook... may be you can find a partner or a colleague at the university that can give valuable information about the company. And may be you can be recommended before the interview!
3. Bring an updated CV/resume on paper and give it to the interviewer. Job boards information can be outdated, and you can always point some new cool stuff you are working on that can help you to start the conversation and bring it to your interests.
   
4. Dress code. Try to balance your personal taste and the kind of company you are attending. If the company is traditional, then shoes and a suit, or at least a tie and a jacket will always help. If it's a start up may be you can relax the dress code, but it can be risky. It's always better to overreact the first time. It's obvious that you must wear clean clothes and shoes. It's also obvious that personal hygiene is important when you leave the virtual worlds. It's hard to stay in a room for more than an hour with somebody that stinks, even being a super-ruby-on-rails master or a mega-oracle-dba hero.
5. If you are going to arrive late phone the company and inform of your delay. You can always say you are in a traffic jam, it always works and people will understand. If you decide not to attend to the interview -the job does not interest you anymore- phone them too and tell them whatever you want (the truth almost always works). You don't know what can happen in the future, but if your absence is unexpected they won't call you anymore.
   

I have received information about open positions in Linkedin for Grails developers. This is very interesting because it seems that big companies have realized of the potential of Grails.
I think Linkedin is the biggest professional network site with more than 14 million users (Via wikipedia).
It sounds like a very interesting place to work, a pity I'm not in the Bay Area. :-(

A few days ago I made a search in Infojobs.es (the most popular Job Board in Spain) for open positions for Ruby On Rails developers. The result was... one! I was very surprised. Only one? With all the hype around RoR? Only one job offer?
It's obvious that USA is more developed regarding technology than Spain, but the question is: How far are they? Can we measure the distance? Honestly I think it's very difficult and probably comparing two countries is not the right way. But anyway I did the following exercise. I selected a list of key words of software development, and I compared the number of open positions found in dice.com for USA and infojobs.es for Spain. Since absolute numbers are not comparable, I summed the number of open positions per key word and compared the percentages.
These are the key words and the number of open positions:

Keyword	dice.com	dice.com %	infojobs	infojobs %
JAVA	17098	32.87%	1682	32.41%
JAVASCRIPT	6437	12.38%	581	11.19%
J2EE	8304	15.96%	1077	20.75%
.NET	13269	25.51%	935	18.02%
PYTHON	1224	2.35%	49	0.94%
RUBY	602	1.16%	12	0.23%
PHP	2262	4.35%	459	8.84%
RUBY ON RAILS	257	0.49%	3	0.06%
ROR	34	0.07%	1	0.02%
STRUTS	2502	4.81%	391	7.53%
GRAILS	10	0.02%	0	0.00%
ERLANG	3	0.01%	0	0.00%
GROOVY	13	0.02%	0	0.00%
	52015	100.00%	5190	100.00%

I'm not going to talk about the absolute numbers, but the number of open positions in USA for that key words is ten times the number in Spain. Spain is 45 millions and USA is 300 millions. It means that there is an open position every 8000 Spaniards, and one open position every 5800 Americans.
I think we get the following stuff:

1. Java is about 32% in both countries. Does it mean that a mature technology is deployed everywhere in the same way?
2. Javascript 12%. Same thing.
3. J2EE is 21% in Spain and 16% in USA.
   
4. .NET 18% in Spain and 26% in USA. From points 3) and 4) we can conclude that Spaniards are smart guys ;-)
5. Python is not popular in Spain compared to USA. 0.95% vs 2.35%.
   
6. Spain doubles USA in PHP popularity: 8.84% vs 4.35%
7. Ruby, 1.16% USA vs 0.23% Spain. Ruby On Rails 0.49% USA vs 0.06% Spain. RoR 0.07% USA vs 0.02 Spain. Ruby is 5 to 6 times more popular in the States.
8. Struts popularity almost doubles in Spain: 7.53% vs. 4.81%
9. Grails, Erlang and Groovy are nonexistent in Spain, and almost insignificant in USA.

• Mature technologies seem to be deployed all around the globe equally.
• Python is not popular in Spain. Why? Can anybody explain it?
  
• PHP is popular in Spain. I guess PHP popularity is not declining yet because the hype of the new scripting languages has not arrived yet, plus the Python thing.
• Ruby and RoR have not caught Spanish developers yet. I guess the problem is the barrier of the language. It takes some time to translate manuals, tutorials and may be the community of Spaniards developers is not big enough to provide good support. Also, RoR is the language of choice of a lot of start ups companies because its productivity. Spain does not have a lot of 'start up' culture (same thing for Python?).
• Struts is still very popular. But in Spain is more dominant. Again, Struts is a mature technology compared to RoR, and RoR is not relevant in Spain yet.
  
• Grails, Erlang and Groovy are almost irrelevant on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. But it's a good idea to follow the trends.