By 
Why wouldn’t a tech-loving programming wizard want to spend their time developing one of the fastest growing family of tech focused websites? Neverstill Media, parent company of Phandroid.com, is hiring a full-time web programming specialist to not only improve and optimize our existing network, but create new websites, features, integrations and opportunities from scratch. Applicant should have a proven, documented and wide-ranging experience with all things web and programming related. We want to find someone excited about taking a network of sites to the next level.
This position will require extensive PHP knowledge and use of the Zend Framework, in addition to daily development and integration with MySQL, WordPress, and vBulletin. Quick learners are a plus.
Required Technical Knowledge:
- PHP Guru
- Zend Framework Enthusiast
- MySQL expert
- HTML & CSS with experience in developing cross-browser compatible applications
- Javascript with emphasis on jQuery and/or Prototype
- WordPress: extensive knowledge
- vBulletin: strong knowledge
- ability to work with RSS, CSS, XHTML, AJAX, APIs and pretty much any other capitalized abbreviations we throw at you with the greatest of ease
- API development and integration
- portfolio of sites which demonstrate the above required skills
Not required, but appreciated:
- Android and mobile OS development capabilities (definite brownie points)
- Unix server administration knowledge
- Experience with data caching such as xcache, memcache, APC, etc…
- Affiliate Marketing knowledge
- CampaignMonitor.com and/or Bulk E-Mail related knowledge
- Location in Baltimore/DC area is a plus
Personal Characteristics:
- We’re looking for a TEAM PLAYER to contribute to a fun, dynamic and growing TEAM
- Motivated worker looking for an opportunity to shine and be rewarded for hard work
- Go-getter who doesn’t punch the clock, but instead sees a mission at hand and makes goals to reach and exceed
- Salary is competitive and negotiable based on experience.
Please send all applications to Rob (at) neverstill (dot) com and DO NOT include a resume or attach ANYTHING. Simply write a letter explaining why you want the job and why you’re a good fit (with links), and we’ll follow up with candidates in the next week or two. Due to the volume of responses we expect, we will not be able to follow up with all candidates.
I gotta ask, but do you hire anyone over age 40? I’m not interested but as an experienced developer of almost 30 years I’m often amused at the job listings.
First off anyone with C/C++ background won’t have any problem with languages like PHP, JavaScript and even Java. More experienced developers use the “cookbook” approach to these. These days instead of using an actual book you use the web and places like Stackoverflow and various blogs to get up and running quickly on some platform you’re not familiar with.
A lot of more experienced developers are not going memorize things like the elements of programming Android but rather look those up as needed. That’s what is really weird when it comes to experienced folks doing technical interviews these days with under experienced interviewers who expect such. There’s always the danger of becoming “too specialized” and then lost when that field goes away.
We don’t use age as criteria for hiring or not hiring applicants but find that typically younger applicants are more interested in the topics of our sites and a bit more in-tune with the overall direction and strategy of the web. But there isn’t any reason a person 40+ couldn’t/wouldn’t get the job if they were the best fit for the position.
Some interesting observations you make though!
That’s the problem I think that the “experienced” engineers are trying to elucidate. What do you consider when you’re looking for the “Best Fit” for the position.
Do you believe that someone that has only PHP development experience is a better fit for the position than someone that’s been developing software for 30 years?
You can look at my work experience as an example. My profile is on LinkedIn. http://www.linkedin.com/in/butler1970
Based on my experience, do you think I’m a better or worse fit for this position than someone that has only 5-10 years experience working with PHP & MySQL?
As a fellow developer of almost 20 years, I can’t agree more with your statement. By now, almost all coding languages look the same to me – it’s just a matter syntax.
yeah, those of us more “experienced” have too much stuff to remember in our heads. Its kinda full up there. We been there, done that. After a while you can call a new programming language/scripting anything you want but its all the same. Different flavors but they are all still ice cream. There have been a few periods of my career where I had to make serious transitions to avoid that “too specialized” pitfall. Its hard because the people you are working for don’t want you to do something else because you are good at that specialized field. But you know that field won’t last forever and its hard to convey to an employer “you need to train me in something else in case I want to go work somewhere else and stay relevant and marketable”.
And then you have dip chit project managers who want you to abandon java, .net, javascript/jquery for filemaker because he’s an apple fanatic….*sign*
Haha, I love this response. I’m right there with you. I’ve been developing software for 30 years also. I’m a veteran C/C++ developer but because of the flood of demand for PHP web developers have taken up PHP development as well.
The Zend Framework is the PHP 5.0 version of the Pear framework, which to my surprise is actually still around. Zend seems to be the preferred library these days because the company Zend offers a more well rounded set of tools including a full blown PHP debugger which looks pretty good. They are like the Microsoft of PHP development tools.
If you’ve never done any PHP development, Pear was a popular library of PHP scripts to augment native PHP 4.x language support and modules. PHP 5.x has actually raised the bar on application development for web sites using PHP as they’ve finally added object oriented programming features to the language. The funny thing is this has spurred a whole new generation of web development applications and programming practices which were previously impossible in PHP much like C++ spurred on new development paradigms.
The fact is that the language PHP is just now becoming something on par with the computer language C++ along with a lot of new comers that are not by any stretch of the imagination software engineers.
I think companies these days that think PHP developers are in a league of their own really don’t understand the whole software engineering industry or the history behind computer and web technologies.
You’re absolutely right that any experienced C/C++ developer with the basic understanding of HTTP and OSI can be a competent PHP developer much quicker and with less effort than any “web designer” trying to work backwards from web design to actual software engineering.
The whole concept of design patterns (both application and enterprise integration patterns) seems to be a foreign language to web designers and even the so called web developers today.
It’s pretty pathetic actually because I’ve interviewed with a couple of companies looking for experienced web developers who think because you’ve been developing desktop applications your whole career that you don’t understand web development or that your 30 years of experience developing desktop applications isn’t applicable. If anything, the truth is completely 180 degrees from the perception I think employers have of software & web development today.
The worst part of interviewing with a web development company I’ve found is being interviewed by some kid that’s 10 years younger than you and doesn’t know anything except web development and therefore has no real measure of your experience. These are the so called experts today in web development. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs if you ask me.
Well said bro, I think part of the problem we see today with software is because these young guys are taught how to code but they are never taught how to do it the right way. which is why you see functions that are 500+ lines long. they don’t even get the basics right. wish I could remember the article I read not too long ago that discussed this. it was a really good read.
Fred, if you dig it up, let me know. It’s a bit of a phenomena that I’ve been discussing lately as all of these new tech companies are being started by guys that have little to no software engineering foundation but they have great ideas.
The thing is today there are so many tools, working examples of scripts and a proliferation of languages to help people get started developing software that I see a lot of projects where “would be” programmers jump in head long and never get the job done right.
That’s not to say there aren’t great programmers out there with real software development talent but I think the percentage of what are called “programmers” versus actual software engineers these days are pretty low compared to the 80s & 90s. Of course the fundamentals of software engineering are those disciplines which started first in the work place and I have a sense that they’ve never really made their way to the class rooms.
I actually had a recent CS graduate tell me that software engineering is a waste of time. That software development doesn’t require SDLC. Of course the concept of RAD is nothing new, but you have to get past the prototype stage at some point. It seems like the perpetual Beta has become the norm these days.
Here’s a perfect example. I found this service online called, IFTTT. It stands for “If This Then That.” If you read the history of how this service got started you’ll laugh. Even the fact that they called their service IFTTT and never once reference the term, “Predicate Logic” is somewhat of a joke to me. But it’s really a great idea. I just think because it wasn’t started by an actual engineer they missed a lot of obvious features. Of course that’s just my opinion. There could be better reasons for the missing features which they failed to mention.
One example of a perfectly obvious feature would be, how about having more than one input event. They have a timer event, but no way to couple that with data for the timer event. It seems like the timer should have been an aspect oriented feature rather than a source event. Any reasonably competent engineer would’ve come to that conclusion years ago. But here we are two years later and they don’t have a way to trigger a timer event and get data from a source while processing the event.
http://www.ifttt.com
What is the typical salary for a web developer these days?
In silicon valley I think the average is well over $85K.