Alley | Developers (WordPress/PHP, React/Node JS) | Full Time | REMOTE (must be eligible for FT employment in the US or Canada) | https://alley.co
Alley is a full-service digital agency that creates web products for the media, nonprofit, museum, and higher education space. We form long-term relationships with important clients, acting as a partner in their business success rather than just a vendor. If you're excited about tackling some of the most interesting business and technical challenges in this space, you'll have fun on our team.
Our tech stack is WordPress (PHP 7+) and React/Node (ES6). We use a variety of associated tools like webpack, sass, postcss, etc. Our projects often involve React client applications hydrated by a REST API powered by WordPress.
We're currently looking for any seniority level. Prior media tech experience is a major plus. WP and React experience not strictly required, but you should be prepared to get up to full speed within a few weeks on them (so PHP and JS experience is a must).
We're hiring software engineers at all seniority levels. We're a full-service digital agency that focuses on the news media, non-profit, and higher education sectors. We work primarily with WordPress, React, Node, and associated tools and technologies (webpack, PostCSS, Redux, et al).
Our team is entirely located in the US and Canada, but we work remotely. Team members can work from home or take advantage of a coworking space stipend at their option.
The missing half of this article is the failure on the part of academic departments to even acknowledge this problem publicly in their recruitment process.
I was an astrophysics Ph.D student at a fairly well-known program until last year when I left with an M.S. to go full time for the web development shop I started. It was a good decision on my part, for sure, but what really struck me is that after I broke the news to my advisor, he was quite open with me about how poor the job market is (not that I wasn't already aware). He and many other faculty members in the department sung a very different tune to me and my classmates during the recruitment process, as did my undergraduate mentors. This is an endemic problem throughout astronomy (at least) and probably many other disciplines in the physical sciences as well.
Even the students often seem to have a sort of Stockholm syndrome about the problem. I still hear from lots of my former classmates that a.) they're well aware of the extreme shortage of jobs in astronomy, b.) they're not seriously expecting to get an academic job and are aware that there are virtually no non-academic jobs doing astronomy and c.) they'll figure out how to get a job "in industry" (i.e. what the rest of us call "having a job") when they finish.
Many students in these programs seen to labor under the assumption that if academia doesn't pan out, their programming skills or quantitative knowledge will make them good candidates for a software or finance job. This is not really as true as they think, since as most HN readers are aware, good developer jobs entail knowing about a lot more than just a programming language, and the sort of programming and quantitative analysis you do in Ph.D research is really pretty far from what those of us in the private sector do with our programming skills.
Nonetheless, a lot of these same classmates would go full-out with their encouragement of prospective students when they came to visit. In my last year at grad school, I remember going on a long rant at the prospectives about how bad an idea a Ph.D in astrophysics is, and the looks of horror on my classmates' faces.
Internet content that's meant for affluent, educated professionals will always skew heavily towards California and New York generally (including HN, but I work with a lot of media organizations and their Google Analytics profiles bear this out).
The surprise here is Washington and Massachusetts overtaking Illinois, which would seem to suggest that the large tech community in Seattle and Boston makes up for the much smaller population of those metro areas than the population of Chicago.
Thanks for sharing this, Nathan. I co-own a web development agency and share your consternation about accounts receivable. Our strategy has actually been to vet clients much more carefully and (as the agency has grown) to begin limiting the clients we take to larger, stable organizations where the accounting department and the product owner we're working are not the same person (so that a discussion about payment does not become a discussion about project status and vice versa).
Alley is a full-service digital agency that creates web products for the media, nonprofit, museum, and higher education space. We form long-term relationships with important clients, acting as a partner in their business success rather than just a vendor. If you're excited about tackling some of the most interesting business and technical challenges in this space, you'll have fun on our team.
Our tech stack is WordPress (PHP 7+) and React/Node (ES6). We use a variety of associated tools like webpack, sass, postcss, etc. Our projects often involve React client applications hydrated by a REST API powered by WordPress.
We're currently looking for any seniority level. Prior media tech experience is a major plus. WP and React experience not strictly required, but you should be prepared to get up to full speed within a few weeks on them (so PHP and JS experience is a must).
https://alley.co/careers/