Jobs – Cocoanetics https://www.cocoanetics.com Our DNA is written in Swift Fri, 24 Mar 2017 14:55:15 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 39982308 One Month since XcodeJobs Relaunch https://www.cocoanetics.com/2017/03/one-month-since-xcodejobs-relaunch/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2017/03/one-month-since-xcodejobs-relaunch/#comments Fri, 03 Mar 2017 16:15:14 +0000 https://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=10462 Time flies. It’s already 4 weeks since we relaunched XcodeJobs.com on February 1st. At this point it is reasonable to inspect some of our metrics to determine how it is going so far.

XcodeJobs had a running start on Twitter because at the time of the relaunch we had already 2914 Followers. The reason for that is obvious: Twitter was our only channel and we had 5 years to reach this number.

The number of followers grew like a rocket during the first two weeks and returned to the previous solid growth. On average we gained around 7 new followers per day and – at the time of this writing – arrived at 3140.

Twitter Analytics tells us that our 79 Tweets during this period gained 200,000 Tweet-Impressions. We have no idea how this number is calculated, but it indicates that quite a few people see what we post.

The new philosophy of XcodeJobs.com is that we want great job descriptions that users can browse and filter. We didn’t have time yet to implement geographic filtering, but this is definitely on our roadmap. Also, to allow filtering by remote and/or onsite jobs.

How much traffic can you expect for your job post?

To answer this question we turn to Google Analytics. The following chart shows page view versus unique page views.

The initial peaks were a result of us drumming up interest in the relaunch by any means we could think of. The first two weeks surpassed everything the website had ever seen before. The second full week saw 4549 page views of which 3248 were unique.

While it was clear to us that we couldn’t ever hope for traffic to remain at this high level we are still pleased to have an average traffic of around a thousand unique users per week now.

Our make-or-break target for this number is to achieve 10k in one of the next few months. We are cautiously optimistic about that, since we are already almost half way there.

The 11 Most-Viewed Jobs in February

It’s probably a good case study for anybody writing job postings to look at these jobs which had seen the most traffic in our first month.

Congratulations to the Winners!

  1. Senior iOS Engineer at ezhome (365 views)
  2. Senior iOS Developer at Twitch (331 views)
  3. iOS Swift Developer at Utiful (242 views)
  4. Intern iOS Framework Developer at Airbyte (202 views)
  5. Senior iOS Engineer at Tooploox (196 views)
  6. iOS Developer at Toptal (192 views)
  7. Senior iOS Developer at Shopgate (192 views)
  8. iOS Developer at UnifyID (183 views)
  9. iOS Developer at Eversport (123 views)
  10. Junior iOS Engineer for Mindnode (122 views)
  11. iOS Mobile Developer at Tractive (115 views)

XcodeJobs.com was responsible for 100-300 additional views of your job offerings. Chances is high that this resulted in several applications that these jobs would not have gotten otherwise.

A Word on Philosophy

We had gotten some negative feedback about a few jobs. Most controversial was the following paragraph which you could find on any company that is owned by Amazon.com, in this case by the Twitch job ad:

“I understand and agree that if I am employed, I will be employed on an at-will basis.  As an at-will employee, I understand and agree that either Amazon or I can terminate our employment relationship, at any time for any reason, with or without advance notice and with or without cause.”

Such clauses don’t shed a good light on a company and we can understand why people would not want to apply for such jobs. Having said that, Twitch still made it to second place.

We also were on the fence about whether or not we would want recruiting agencies to post jobs without mentioning which company applicants would end up working for. But – for the time being – we decided in favor of recruiters to see what kind of feedback we would get about those jobs.

However, we cannot afford to judge the merit of job postings or a company’s employment philosophy. Not yet. At this time we are happy about each and every job that is posted.

Jobs E-Mail Digest Every Friday

Since not everybody is on Twitter, we also added the possibility to subscribe to a weekly digest of new jobs. You can do so right on the home page of XcodeJobs.com.

When we asked people on which day of the week they would like to get their weekly jobs digest the overwhelming majority voted for Friday afternoon. Most often the reason given was that – I am paraphrasing – people are fed up enough at the end of the week to be looking at new opportunities on Friday and the weekend.

Let’s look at some numbers there…

  1. Week 1: 116 subscribers, 64% opening rate, 21.1% clicked on jobs
  2. Week 2: 138 subscribers, 67.4% opening rate, 10.1% clicked on jobs
  3. Week 3: 163 subscribers, 78,4% opening rate, 27.8% clicked on jobs
  4. Week 4: 167 subscribers, 66.9% opening rate, 25.9% clicked on jobs

We are pleased with the very high opening rate, which tells us that the content really interests subscribers. The clicking rate is also remarkable.

The growth in e-mail subscriptions compares quite favourably with new Twitter followers: 5 new subscribers versus 7 new Twitter followers, daily average growth. We are still a long way off our milestone goal of 1000 subscribers.

Which do you prefer? Twitter, E-Mail or maybe an entirely different means of learning about new job postings?

Conclusions

The jury is still out whether or not XcodeJobs will be a runaway success. We have seen an great initial interest in the first 2 weeks and have seen it drop to ok average numbers after that.

We launched a minimum viable product a mere month ago and so far the metrics seem to suggest that there is indeed a market and need for what we want to offer. But we will have to give it a few more months before we can decide its fate.

Our plans to monetize the service depend on us being able to achieve several important growth milestones within reasonable time. Because, it would be hubris to be asking anybody for paying for ads if we cannot provide their money’s worth.

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XcodeJobs v2 https://www.cocoanetics.com/2017/02/xcodejobs-v2/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2017/02/xcodejobs-v2/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2017 17:29:40 +0000 https://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=10368 In 2012, when I had been working full time in iOS development for 2 years, I used to frequently see tweets about companies looking for Apple developers. This is why I established the @XcodeJobs twitter account because I felt it would make most sense to retweet those job offers with a dedicated channel.

My thinking was that if you were looking for your next iOS gig you would just follow this channel and – once you found it – you could simply unfollow it. At the same time I wouldn’t spam people who are not looking for a job with these job offers.

The second philosophy behind this Twitter account was to filter out spam tweets by recruiters and other job platforms. All job postings were usually by either a company’s official twitter account or by somebody working for this company. I felt that this would make these requests more personable.

Feeling Like a Valuable Individual

For a while I even worked on a side project that would help me find iOS postings via the Twitter search feature, while removing these spam tweets by hiding tweets with Linked In, Bullhorn Reach, Jobvite and many more, particularly those from head hunters. My philosophy was to discarded everything where you would feel like you are within a mass of people inserted into a giant job website funnel.

And believe you me! There are literally dozens of websites competing for traffic and eyeballs. I wouldn’t ever want to directly compete with companies that make their money off companies backs who are desperately seeking to fill iOS and Mac development positions. Especially because my own best skill is to develop software for Apple platforms.

You should always do what you love and I love code: back then Objective-C, today mostly Swift. This is the main reason why you wouldn’t see anything exciting going on at XcodeJobs, the Twitter account and much less so on XcodeJobs.com. I didn’t have the time to keep publicizing this free service.

My thinking regarding the website was that you would usually link to a job description on your own company website for the details. For companies that didn’t have such a careers page, you could go to the Xcode Jobs website (then a WordPress blog) and post your job description there. Then a tweet would link to this new post as well.

A few companies posted something on there, but the website soon fell into oblivion.

Over the past 5 years the followers of this Twitter account grew to almost 3000. I began to retweet postings not of companies offering jobs, but also of people looking for work, mostly freelancers looking for opportunities to work on in the comfort of their own homes. I would retweet almost everything, except some spammy messages, where @xcodejobs was at-mentioned.

Once More With Feeling

After these several years of sleeping beauty-like slumber, I was ready to do something about it. My iOS development work caused me to meet and work with Lukas and Stefan who are now my partners in the new Xcode Jobs venture. Lukas is a great backend developer. Stefan is both great with design as well as marketing. And myself, I have a worldwide audience of developers on Apple platforms and a feeling that this is and can be a worthwhile service to offer.

For the past several months we have been secretly working on relaunching the XcodeJobs service. The website will now be the central place for companies to post their jobs and links to these jobs will then be tweeted and otherwise publicized. If you are looking for a job, you can subscribe to the weekly newsletter which aggregates the prior week’s job postings.

To keep things fresh and the website from turning stale we are going to take postings off after 30 days. And we have some more ideas how we can allow you to better filter jobs based on your interests or by geographic location. Or whether telecommuting (“remote ok?”) is acceptable. But before we start working on such enhancements we wanted to launch a minimum viable product to see if there is actually a market for it.

Initially it will be a free service, but we reserve the right to start charging a moderate fee for postings in a couple of months, provided that it takes off. We will personally check and approve each job posting. This fee might also serve to keep the quality of postings high and valuable of your time.

Call to Action

So, if you are looking for your next project or fixed staff position, head over to XcodeJobs.com and subscribe to the e-mail newsletter. If you use Twitter, then you should follow @xcodejobs.

If you are working for a company that is searching for developers on Apple platforms, then you should post your positions/projects on XcodeJobs. There is a simple questionnaire to fill out. A small price to pay for qualified applications as compared to what a head hunter would charge (typically 1-3 monthly salaries).

The underlying philosophy of XcodeJobs remains the same:

Helping Apple Enthusiasts do what they love, for fabulous companies, since 2012.

This new version that we launch today puts a new tool into your hands for this express purpose.

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We’re Hiring https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/11/were-hiring/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/11/were-hiring/#comments Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:16:25 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=5665 Our business has outgrown our capacity. Cocoanetics has 2 large clients with long-term projects plus is successfully selling components that need to be polished and maintained. Add to that our visibility and you can imagine that we get frequently approached with interesting projects that we have to often turn away. “We” refers to myself, Oliver Drobnik and my partner Rene Pirringer. We love to develop and polish apps and are having a blast.

As it currently looks the momentum of the markets we are in is speeding up, not slowing down.

So we are looking to hire …

Junior Developer (iOS/Mac)

This is an entry-level fixed staff position in our Weistrach office.

Law requires us to tell you that payment will be according to the Austrian IT Collective Agreement (“Kollektiv-Vertrag IT”). As your confidence and competence grows, so will your salary. If you prove yourself becoming a partner in our company is a long term possibility.

You will be working with us on our external and internal projects. We’ll start with internal ones (our apps and components) first, then move to external client projects and finally let you develop contract projects all by yourself.

Requirements:

  • some form of IT education so that we don’t have to start with teaching you how to turn on a Mac. (HTL, University, FH, BSc., etc.)
  • a passion for Software development in general and Apple platforms in particular.
  • must speak and be able to express himself in English, German an advantage.
  • experience developing in object-oriented languages. It’s ok if all you know is Java, we’ll get you straightened out in no time.
  • if you developed for iOS or Mac before, then that’s great. But if not, we’ll get you up and running quickly if you’re smart and a fast learner.
  • sorry, no remote work initially as we need to personally train you and introduce you into our projects. We can talk about telework depending on the projects at hand and once an acceptable level of self-sufficiency is reached.

If you read until here then this is probably because you found my blog while looking for a solution about an iOS development problem (i.e. you are a developer). It also means that you can read and understand English. And most likely you’re on a Mac or iOS device right now, because that’s what Google Analytics says about you.

That means you’re qualified! Mail us: jobs@cocoanetics.com

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Working Remotely – Remotely Working? https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/10/working-remotely-remotely-working/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/10/working-remotely-remotely-working/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 07:41:00 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=5611 We at Cocoanetics love to hear your thoughts on any and all topic related to iOS development. Today’s guest post is by  Cory Wiles on facing the challenge of  businesses not yet seeing the light of a remote workforce.

I am an iOS/PHP developer, lover of all things mobile, Apple and BMW. I try to live by the Art of Simplicity.

My contract with my current employer is soon to end so I have been putting my resume out on the “internets” and searching for what I would like to do next as far as employment. I get about 2 – 3 calls/emails a day about job openings, especially with contract gigs. I have a few big companies that I have interviewed with that I am really psyched about.

When conducting my initial evaluations of a company I look for three main things.

  1. I want to work for an organization that is LEADING innovation in its field and holds a brand that I can be truly proud to represent.
  2. I want to work in a role where I can really help people and have a positive measurable effect on the organization’s mission.
  3. I want to work with people I would hang out with even if no one were paying me to.

One thing however, that has greatly surprised me is that most employers do not want to let their employees (contract or FT) to work remotely. A few of the positions that I am considering I completely understand why they want to have on-site. It is just the nature of the role, however 98% of what is required from the others I could definitely do remotely. I have no problem coming on site fairly often since the majority of the companies that I would be working for are within 5 hours of where I live, but for them it is a deal breaker. I get the standard, “Well, right now we really want someone on-site, but if the requirements change we will let you know.” I sigh when this happens because with today’s current technologies it is a no brainer to have remote employees. FaceTime, Skype, GoToMeeting, VPN, Email, IM, cellphones, widespread availability of broadband to homes and most “social” businesses (bars, coffee shops, libraries, etc).

Here are my thoughts on why working remote should be a consideration for most companies:

  1. You are hiring me for a contract position that is usually between 4 – 6 months, can’t guarantee a full-time position afterwards, but aren’t going to pay for any relocation costs.
  2. I already own a home and like most Americans can’t sell it for a fraction of what it is worth and I really don’t feel like paying rent and my mortgage.
  3. I have a wife who works so she would have to give up her job as well. Not too enticing. See reason #1.
  4. I have a child who is in school. See reason #1.
  5. It is cheaper for a company to have me work remotely considering they wouldn’t have to provide a PC, desk, phone, pens, magic markers and free Red Bull.

I have strong opinion that, in general, as a country, managers/HR are still stuck on the notion that if they can’t see you work then you aren’t. If they let you work remotely then you will spend the entire day watching TV, drinking, playing HALO while taking the Lord’s Name in vain. The truth is that the same people who are great/productive employees on-site will have the same productivity at home and vice versa. Individuals who screw off while working from home are the same people who are wasting company time on-site. It is a personnel issue.

As recently as May 11th, 2011, Microsoft published it’s study “Remote Working Now a ‘Business Imperative’”.

Interesting Facts

  • On average, information workers nationwide say they work remotely only half as many days as they would prefer.
  • Remote workers surveyed cite a better balance between work and home priorities as number one reason for wanting to work remotely.
  • Being more productive than in the office and having fewer distractions rounded top five reasons

With the issues that are listed above, the state of the economy and financial issues that most of the American workforce has to deal with, relocation isn’t always a realistic option.

There are a lot of tech jobs out there that still remain vacant because of this and those companies are missing out on a lot of really great talent.

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iOS Jobs Rundown https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/05/ios-jobs-rundown/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/05/ios-jobs-rundown/#comments Fri, 13 May 2011 07:24:28 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=5005 When I saw this creative job advert I figured, why not pull together the most interesting iOS jobs into an article. I keep telling you that more companies are hiring than there are iOS software engineers looking to be hired. Now here’s the proof.

I was contemplating several forms of establishing a platform that you could refer to. Should I put it on a dedicated Jobs page on Cocoapedia? Make a jobs page on this here blog? Write about it?

All of the above. So far 7 companies have sent me links to their job specifications. Since this is a large enough first sample to call that “many companies” here’s a quick rundown and commentary on the jobs.

The first company that I was telling you about was scribd in San Francisco, California. They have several full-time recruiters on staff dedicated to find talent. Generally they have to rely on any and all hints that you possess some skills and they do that by scouring GitHub, StackOverflow and relevant forums. GitHub was also how they found me, via my NSAttributedString+HTML Open Source project. But I cannot move to the USA, I’m too old and too married for that. But for anybody else they offer relocation assistance.

Love your iPhone? Have little or no experience building iPhone applications, but want to learn? You may have just found a perfect opportunity.

They make it sound so easy. Who needs experience these days? Further down in the job description they still require some fundamentals. You should have worked at least one year as a software engineer and possess a Computer Science degree or equivalent experience…. whatever that means. I love that they specifically put “understanding of memory management” there. Expect to be questioned about retain/release/autorelease in your job interview.

Ah, and if you get asked, tell them I told you to tell them that I sent you. Ok?

While we are in San Francisco, let’s also pay a visit to ngmoco who is looking for several software engineers. Their jobs are not strictly iOS however.

We are broadening our focus from iPhone to all major smartphone operating systems with the release of our ngCore and Mobage products, which allow developers to write their applications once and deploy them seamlessly on iOS, Android and Flash.

This company is a known behemoth and I interpret the above statement in two ways: 1) they cannot find dedicated iOS developers, so they built a multi-platform system so that Android and Flash developers can play too. 2) They are not willing to bet on iOS alone.

Personally I would not consider working for a company that hedges it’s bets like that. But then again, ngmoco is well known and any CV can definitely profit from a couple of years working at such a major game development company. They too are requiring a B.S. degree in Computer Science or equivalent, which makes me think that this is short for Bull Shit, because I have yet to meet somebody with such a degree and being a prolific iOS developer at the same time. But hey, big companies have to have at least SOME form of hurdle, or else they’d be swamped by candidates.

Speaking of large companies, Google is hiring as well, but this time in London, UK. Of all statements that are designed to whet your appetite Google’s is the most optimized.

You are a software engineer who can write client-side code for iOS. You are also a well-rounded developer who knows how to create robust high-volume production applications, and can also develop prototypes quickly. The work is challenging, creative, fast paced and intellectually stimulating.

Google goes even further with raising the level of entry, again there’s the BSc (this time abbreviated correctly), but they state that an MSc or PhD (or equivalent experience) “would be an advantage”. As a reader of the Cocoanetics blog you are definitely qualified. Just tell them you are a Doctor of Cocoanetics. You’ll get hired off the spot.

On a more serious note, the requirements are full of EXes. EXtensive iOS EXperience. EXtensive EXperience programming in ObjC. EXperience with multi-threading and network programming. EXperience as architect or technical lead a strong plus. To get access you need EXes it seems.

Google, too, has dedicated recruiters, I can get you in contact with their guy in charge of Europe.

Again, we stay in Great Britain, the second company of interest there is Lightbox. They don’t have this job motivation paragraph but instead did interweave the fun and good humor into the requirements. I found it to be a great example of how to make a non-boring job offer:

You …

  • Think that Objective-C is a beautiful language.
  • Are eager to learn from your teammates.
  • Don’t have “this can’t be done” in your vocabulary.
  • Have a university degree in Computer Science or equivalent and 1+ years experience building high quality iOS apps, or alternatively:
    • You’re Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates and you’ve been writing code since you were a kid and don’t need no stinkin’ university degree.
    • You can point us to something badass that you’ve built recently (e.g. an app with 50k+ users and 5 star ratings).
    • Your StackOverflow reputation is greater than 10,000.
    • Your Github repositories are followed by more than 100 developers.

Here’s another good reason to have some open source code on GitHub, preferably something useful. Here the degree is kind of embedded, but at least this company is friendly enough to share their standards on “equivalent experience” with us. They lose a couple of points because these exact humorous points are also present on their Web, Android and generic Software Engineer job postings. Good job with the copy&paste guys!

Further east we leave we enter the European main land and the first job there is in Copenhagen with Shape in Denmark.

If you are passionate about beautifully crafted software and if you would like to work in a young aspiring team with a flat hierarchy, then Shape might be a perfect fit for you.

Do you see the trend as well? While the focus in USA and UK was on Objective-C being beautiful, now for the first time we hear about “beautifully crafted software”. Shape’s job page is also the first one I see with at least a bit of design. Ok, nothing too fancy, just a screen shot of Instruments and rotated by a few degrees to the left. Could this be a hint of socialism? You know, those countries in the northwest of Europe are famous for their rampant socialism…

Another thing that strikes you as odd is that this is the first offer that does not mention BSc or equivalent experience. Or maybe it does, in code: “…a theoretical background in computer science or software engineering”. One could argue that theoretic backgrounds are only available at university. Because in real life all computer science backgrounds are practical, not theoretical.

And there’s one thing that disturbs me here: “You will be programming in Objective-C, Java and maybe Ruby or something even cooler.” There is NOTHING cooler than Objective-C, you HEAR ME?

While we are in Europe, let’s stop over at NOUS, located in Vienna, Austria, incidentally my birthplace and wonderful location to work at. Their job page is in German, which is a bit off target as I am certain that language skills in English and Objective-C should be sufficient. But they specifically mention that German is required, probably because you will either have to communicate with external clients or some internal types that don’t want to switch to English just for you.

NOUS, too, omits the motivational paragraph and goes right into the tasks and requirements. They stress that you’ll be responsible for carrying out the software development in a self-reliant fashion. You’ll work with backend developers. You’ll support other departments when it comes to judging which of their fancy ideas can actually be programmed.

In short, this might be an interesting job, in a great city, but their job page needs a major rewrite first. PS: they are looking for interns as well.

Did you know that New Zealand is what’s left of a now submerged continent of Zealandia? They don’t even belong to one of the modern accredited continents, so developers from there answer the question which continent they are from with “Oceania”, but that’s a region, not a continent.

Last but not least we come to New Zealand and the company whose job ad has inspired me for this article: Polar Bear Farm. Apple tells us that 60% of app development is design. That’s why this company gets the trophy for the best designed most targeted and most fun job advert I have ever seen.

Doesn’t that make you want to eat them up? Hey, it even makes MY palms sweaty in excitement, and I don’t plan to move to New Zealand. This is the only catch I can see there: they are located in Christchurch which has recently been devastated by major earthquakes. Even yesterday their CEO tweeted about the earth trembling.

Besides of the fantastic design they seem to get two important things about iOS developers that the other companies did not get. 1) Academic training does not matter, but only real life experience counts. 2) Ideally you’d be based near the company’s HQ, but they are officially open to the idea of remote working as well. The latter is smart because there are few iOS developers to go around and of these even fewer might want to move to an out-of-place island like NZ, let alone an earthquake region.

Conclusion

I think this proves sufficiently that my article claiming that there are too few iOS developers holds true. Let’s summarize the main topics that companies mentioned as important for aspiring iOS software engineers. Those are the areas where you might want to bulk up your knowledge before going to an interview.

  • OO design
  • memory management
  • multi-threading
  • network programming
  • OpenGL
  • OpenCV and computer vision algorithms
  • Getting apps successfully through the Apple App Store approval process
  • Agile Software Development (SCRUM)
  • Testing
  • Documentation
  • Xcode 4
  • C/C++, Objective-C and COCOA
  • rapid prototyping

From now on I’ll keep listening for tweets that are announcing jobs and will report on the most interesting ones periodically. If you represent a company that’s hiring, please get in touch.

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