We spoke to Paul Downey, technical manager at AOL, who told us it’s a great time to be an engineer as the company expands and looks to bring some of Ireland’s best coders on board.
As AOL’s tech manager, Downey was at Career Zoo in the Convention Centre Dublin on 15 February to talk to graduates who would be interested in joining the company with strong experience in coding skills, such as C++, Java, Erlang and Ruby.
The company is one of the world’s largest web developers and processors of data, and can account for petabytes of data transfer each and every day so the demand for highly skilled programmers is one that Downey and AOL sees as leading a massive jobs boom in the sector.
“It’s a good time to be an engineer,” said Downey. “There are lots of engineering roles out there but the one thing is that when you have really interesting and challenging work, you can attract the best candidates, which is what software is all about.”
Aside from the technical skills being important to a job-seeker’s chance of getting a job, Downey puts great importance on a programmer who is effective in producing ‘clean code’ for projects, something AOL considers a highly prized asset in an employee.
