Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Point Nine is looking for some talanted people.  They are working in the financial sector, and seeking Python and C++ programmers, as well as Linux system administrators.  They seem to be an interesting company, judging both by their technology stack and hiring techniques.   For example, I’ve spotted their job ad on The Daily WTF.  Cool stuff.  If I wasn’t working where I am working, I would have applied for the job already.

During the last six month or so, I’ve been looking to hire a PHP programmer for at least three companies.  I have spoken to quite a few people on the phone, reviewed a bunch of resumes, and even interviewed a few.  Out of all those candidates I recommended to hire exactly zero.

Before you start bashing my high standards, let me explain.  I wasn’t looking for a rocket scientist or anything remotely similar.  Not even a senior PHP developer.  Someone with enough knowledge to take over maintenance of a couple of projects, both of which are based on famous open source software - CakePHP and WordPress.

I can understand that not everyone have worked with or even heard of CakePHP or WordPress.  I can understand that getting used to that source code and going through documentation might need some time.  I can understand that not everyone is familiar with open source software development model and that not everyone has worked in groups, so familiarity with version control software, documentation tools, and bug tracking was never a requirement.

What I cannot understand is why a person who have (according to him) developed more than two dozens of web projects with PHP and MySQL cannot write the simplest piece of code with pen and pencil.  What I cannot undertand is how a “senior web developer” with years of PHP experience and team leading becomes useless when his Dreamweaver is taken away.  What I cannot understand is why people with more than one Bachelor Degree in Computer Science recommend using bubble sort.  What I cannot understand is why programmers start teaching the potential employer about the interviewing process instead of answering technical questions.  And what I don’t understand is why technical people with years of team work, get pissed off or burst into tears when you ask them a technical question, and a simple one at that, during the job interview.

If you are wondering what sort of questions I’ve been asking, here is an example.  A simple questions would be something like: “What is the difference between the stack (also known as FILO) and the queue (also known as pipe, also known as FIFO)?“.  Most of the answer is already in the questions, isn’t it?

Those of the candidates who were boasting about their years of experience and prevoius projects, were given a simple programming task, which could be something like: “Using PHP programming language, create a list to store information about people.  For each person you’ll need to store name, age, and gender. Populate the list with three sample records.  Then, print out an alphabetically sorted list of names of all males in that list. Bonus points for not using the database.“.  Each candidate was given a piece of paper, a pen, and unlimited amount of time.  And in the last six month I haven’t seen one candidate who could write the code to solve that problem.

We’ve been through all job sites, newspapers, local and foreign forums, and recruiting agencies, trying to find the candiate.  We haven’t found even one.  At least three are needed right now.  More will be needed in the nearest future.

Hopefully, by now you will agree with me on that the situation with the human resources on the island of Cyprus is disastrous.  There is more demand than there is supply, and it’s not getting any better.

Those of you who argue in favour of Cyprus being a small, unimportant country in the middle of technological nowhere, might want to wait.  Last year I’ve been in Greece at the Greek Blogger Camp.  This year I’ve been in Amsterdam at The Next Web Conference.  At both events I’ve chatted with a lot of people from all over Europe and the USA.  I’ve also been all over forums and job web sites both local and foreign.  And the feeling I’ve got is that the problem is not Cyprus specific, although, of course, Cyprus has it a bit worse than others, due to its position in the technology world, as well as geographical location.

While still spending a lot of time looking for a PHP programmer, I was thinking about the roots of the problem.  PHP seems to be quite a popular language.  So, why is it such a problem to find a good PHP programmer? (note: “good”, not “great” or even “very good”) Thinking about the roots of the problem, I got this theory, which isn’t even a theory yet, but rather a raw chain of assumptions and conclusions.  Here is how it goes.

PHP is an ugly language

I know a few good programmers personally.  I also read blogs and comments of a few more good programmes on the Web.  And even though many of them use PHP often, or even on a daily basis, I don’t remember anyone of them every saying that they enjoy PHP.  If given the choice of a programming language for a new project, they’ll pick anything - Java, C, Python, Perl, Ruby, Haskell… Anything, but not PHP. PHP has its pros, but being a beautiful or convenient language is not one of them.

PHP is newbie safe

One of the reasons for why PHP is so popular is because it is newbie safe.  You don’t need to know much about anything to start programming in PHP.  Most of the hosting companies will provide you with a PHP enabled hosting account for just a few dollars a month.  You can write PHP in any text editor, so you won’t need a high end machine or expensive IDE.  PHP.net web site has all the documentation and examples that you’ll ever need, so you don’t need to study hard in college or pay for subscription to developers’ network.  All of these make PHP very attractive to beginner programmers.

PHP avoidance

Most of the good programmers that I know, have learned PHP to some degree.   Most of the bad programmers that I know, have also learned PHP to some degree.  But for good programmers PHP was either not the first programming language under their belt, or they’ve moved forward to some other programming language.  Most of the bad programmers that I know, only know one programming language - PHP - and they don’t know it good enough.  So, for good programmers, learning and using PHP is more like a temporary state, while for the bad programmers using PHP is more like a constant state.

PHP is rich with secondary reasons

There are many reasons for why PHP is so popular.  It is free.  It is open source.  It is easy to setup.  Most hosting companies offer PHP-enabled packages, as well as a lot of PHP software pre-installed.

With primary technical reasons (execution speeds, required resources, development speed, etc) not being very different from many other programming languages, PHP wins a lot of popularity with its secondary powers.

PHP is getting mature

PHP started off as a handy Perl library for web development.  It grew and expanded over time.  And so did the projects which were written in PHP.  If, before, most of PHP scripts were doing the simplest of things, such as contact and registration forms, visitor counters and some templating, then now most projects are closer to full scale applications with user management, financial operations, high availability and load balancing setups, etc.

The moment of conflict

And here comes the moment of conflict.  The complexity of PHP applications is growing higher and higher (see above).  And the language is not beautiful enough to attract good programmers and make them stay (see above).  The result?  More and more applications are written by underqualified programmers, and it becomes harder and harder to find qualified personnel (the complexity of your own projects are growing too).

Questions?

How can we attract good programmers to PHP development?  What are really the reasons for using PHP all that often, if it shares the biggest problem with the other languages - impossibility of finding qualified personnel.  Is there any other programming language that can solve this problem?  Is there any solution at all?

Solutions

These, of course, I don’t have, as usual.  But.  I am looking with interest at hosted application services.  The ones like from Amazon and Google.  I think these will mature of the next few month and years.  And there will be a few more (Yahoo, Microsoft, and IBM maybe?).

The way I see hosted application services is like this.  They will split the programmers into two categories.  The first category will be all those novice programmers, who don’t know how or don’t have the resources to take care of everything.  They’ll be using hosting, databases, libraries, and programming interfaces provided by hosting application services. (Of course, good programmers will be using these too, but they will have a choice, not like the newbies).  Hosted application services will (not yet though) make it easy to cover the ignorance and help to make a few bucks here and there.  Exactly like PHP has been doing it for years now.  The good programmers though will mostly participate in in-house projects and customization developments, which won’t be fitting into hosted application services, and will require additional knowledge and experience.

Summary

If you are a PHP developer looking for a job in Cyprus, please let me know.

Here is a quote from the latest PrimeTel newsletter:

PrimeTel upgrades for even faster Internet speeds and provides 4Mbps / 512Kbps as an upgrade option for the PrimeHome and PrimeADSL2+ subscribers. The additional monthly fee for the PrimeHome subscribers is EUR65,92 while for the PrimeADSL2+ subscribers is EUR53,33. Read more

Anybody tried that already?

Note to PrimeTel : By the way, I’d much prefer an RSS feed from your site to those Greek emails that you send me. Thank you.

I’m far from honest myself, but at least I don’t charge for my lies. Plenty of people do, however. One of the commonly told lies that I come across rather often these days is the one of Cyprus web hosting. Some companies are telling lies out loud, others are just being overly silent about the truth. But the fact of the matter is that Cyprus web hosting is almost non-existing. There are only just a few companies providing web hosting in Cyprus (PrimeTel and CytaNet, for example), and in most of the cases, their offerings don’t make sense financially. That’s one of the biggest reasons for most of Cyprus web sites being hosted outside of Cyprus, in countries like USA, UK, Germany, and Netherlands.

Still, most of the web design and development companies in Cyprus offer “Cyprus web hosting”. Here is just one example, that I found (ironically, I found it through AdSense block on my own blog) - CyprusWebSpace.com . Here is a partial snapshot of their front page.

If you are using Firefox browser with Flagfox plugin, than you will immediately notice the United States of America flag in the bottom right corner of your browser window. If you don’t have the plugin or don’t trust the information that it provides, or use a totally different browser, here is how you can arrive to the same results:

1. Go to DomainTools.com
2. Type cypruswebspace.com in the Whois Lookup form at the top of the page and press the Search button
3. Scroll down the resulting page to where it says “Server Data”
4. Find the line with the American flag and a description “Texas - Dallas - Theplanet.com Internet Services Inc”.
5. Bonus point : look at the map, provided by GeoTool. The area you see is pretty far from Cyprus.

Now, there is always this argument, that the web hosting company runs its own web site on a different server from the one that it uses for its customers. It is a theoretically valid point, but the one I haven’t seen in practice just yet. Most of the web companies offering web hosting in Cyprus only have a single server (usually it is a shared or dedicated server, or a VPS account), which they use for all of their hosting needs.

There is also another argument to this point - what exactly is a Cyprus web hosting? Is it hosting on the web server which physically resides in Cyprus, or is hosting on a web server, which is assigned one of the Cyprus IP addresses? And it is, in fact, an interesting point. There is significant difference between the two. If the server is physically located in Cyprus, then chances are, that it will have a lower latency, meaning that web sites on such a server will appear to respond much faster to visitors who are also in Cyprus. This is what matters for many site owners. On the other hand, Cyprus IP address of the web server might be more important to other site owners, since some search engines use this information in scoring their search results (that is considering, for example, that web sites residing on servers with Cyprus IP addresses are more relevant to Cyprus related queries than web sites residing on other web servers).

Technically, it is quite possible for a web server to be physically located in one country, while carrying the IP address, which belongs to another country. But situations like this, aren’t so common, and that is specifically the reason why search engines (and other tools) utilize the information of IP address location.

So, back to the issue of Cyprus web hosting. How bad is it? Let’s see. Examine the first 10 or so results for each of these queries at Google, using the method above:

• cyprus web hosting
• cyprus webhosting
• cyprus hosting

Impressed? I am. Results:

• Companies with web sites physically located in Cyprus: 0 (zero).
• Companies with web sites hosted on a server with Cyprus IP address: 1 (one).

How do I know about this one company with Cyprus IP address that it doesn’t have the server physically located in Cyprus? Because I am an employee of that company (disclaimer and blah blah blah). And even if I wasn’t, finding this information is rather trivial with any traceroute tool (here is one, for example).

So, keep this stuff in mind before you pay for you Cyprus web hosting next time. Maybe this Cyprus offering is not so Cyprus after all. But then again, maybe you just don’t care…

Somehow I ended up connecting to the Undernet IRC network today and joining #cyprus channel.  Last time I did it was a good 10 years ago.  Maybe even more.  Back then IRC was a huge thing in Cyprus and all Internet clubs were full of kids chatting for hours.  I remember, it was so packed, that I had to buy a club membership to get some priority in queue for my HTML hacking.  And, of course, I did IRC too.  What was happening back than on #cyprus channel?  It was exactly as it is now.  Here is a screenshot for you (I won’t go as far as posting a log of this noise).

What is different about it now?  Well, it looks like they use a tiny bit less of colors.  And they have their own web site now.

Me? I’m living on the FreeNode these days.  That’s where most of the open source fun is happening (#fedora, #wordpress, #perl, #php, and others).