Barracuda Looking for Geeks Who Love Software
Posted on | June 15, 2011 | No Comments
Are you proud to call yourself a geek? If so, Barracuda Networks in Ann Arbor could be looking for you.
Sean Heiney, director of new product initiatives for this software security company, is trying to fill a dozen open positions, and complaining that he can’t find people who are “geeky enough.”
He won’t say what the jobs pay, but the U.S. Department of Labor reports that the median income for software engineers is $90,000 a year or $42 an hour. For that, lots of people could learn to be geeky.
The three kinds of positions he’s trying to fill are software engineers, quality assurance engineers (who generally don’t write software and can be recent graduates) and high-tech sales and marketing people who typically have MBAs.
All of these salaries are “truly competitive,” Heiney says.
The trouble that he’s having filling the jobs is not a lack of people who look good on paper. The problem is that when they come in for the interview they don’t exude the kind of enthusiasm for high-tech fun and games that Barracuda expects.
“We look for people who are are passionate about geeking out,” Heiney says. “We want people who love software and are really into it. . . . Some people like to garden in their spare time. We look for software developers who like to write code in their day job and then go home and write some more. We’re a company of a lot of those people. That’s the foundation on which Barracuda has grown and those are the kind of people we want to hire.”
Previously, Barracuda has been casual about its hiring, advertising mostly on Craigslist, but that hasn’t gotten them the kind of tech lovers they want. So they’re ramping up the search, looking for people at universities other than the University of Michigan.
Barracuda’s not paying for relocation, but if you’re going to make $90,000 a year, you can probably afford to rent a U-Haul.
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