251–260 of 495 posts
(1) companies complain about a shortage of programmers;
(2) angry commenters claim otherwise.
If there were few good programmers and many mediocre ones, this is what you'd expect to see.
The company I work for (which is fairly small) used to hire college interns and provide training, but to be honest, it just wasn’t worth it for us. Their turnover rate was too high, their work quality/quantity was too low, and they significantly distracted the more experienced developers. We also spent years cleaning up after them.
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It also depends on the culture. In Asia, it's not as cut throat as USA, where you shop around every 2-3 years. Japan they'll train you, and quitting isn't something that's easily done -- watch any Japanese netflix series about slice of life/normal life and you'll see the daily struggle or just read the news, or if you have the chance, go to Japan. Death by overwork is real and on the other hand, companies such as Rak…
Yes, this is common in India too. In fact, companies like TCS, etc are called 'mass recruiters' who recruit in bulk. There are satirical YouTube videos about them hiring by the kilogram. They hire indiscriminately, pay crap, in the the next 6 months people undergo on-the-job training. Some are kicked out, some are moved to better positions and offerings and the rest are contracted out to run-of-the-mill projects. Bac…
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The other replies touch on this, but I'm gonna get straight to the point: Does your friend give them actual, meaningful raises as they grow? Is he actually paying competitively to begin with? Because I think if you have this pattern that consistently, it's really likely that either you're underpaying to begin with or your raises suck or are not even present. I love working at small companies. It's by far my preferenc…
That's the weird thing — they (because there are two cofounders) were actually paying very competitive salaries (for the local market). I was impressed to hear what some of them were making. So it's not the money. I think what's going on is that after a year at any job you start to see the problems with the code base, and it starts to get repetitive. It will be like that both in big-co and small-co, but in a differen…
First of all the shortage of devs is mostly a myth. Companies that know how to hire don't have problems hiring. the problem is most software companies don't know how to hire and thus have a lot of problems. Or they're located in some impossible location like palo alto or San francisco and try to low ball everyone with salaries under 200K in a location where housing costs 3million$ plus. About hiring junior devs. You…
The only measure for "shortage of devs", or rather lack thereof would be a pool of unemployed or underemployed developers who don't work at all or who work in a different field because they don't find unattractive jobs. If that pool is small, as I believe it is, there is no room for the idea that there are enough engineers. "Knowing how to hire", attractive benefits, locations etc are only ways to outcompete other em…
After you get hacked you get someone to ask some basic principles around the job, especially anything around security, and you soon see the lack of devs problem.
After a while you end up with the guys who glue code together, or the guys who call the MSP, in charge again and they don't understand the basics, so you no longer quality problem and you have an abundance of options again.
I think the reason is simple: once the junior dev is trained, they will leave. To be clear, I am not saying that they are obliged to stay in the company that trained them or being ungrateful in any sense, I am simply implying this is a common outcome from such training. In software industry, the first job switch in 2 years seems pretty common and reasonable, and the dev by that time would be able to strike a better j…
And to be honest I hate having to look for jobs every 2 years. If someone offered me a job for life, job security, development etc, I'd take it.
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A friend of mine runs a web dev shop and I have seen him train at least six people from zero-to-pro (very smart, fast learners with a math background) and what you described is exactly what happens. Once they become medium/advanced-level proficient they often quit and move on to other, bigger companies. If there was some formal, or informal understanding that candidates "trained on the job" would stay for a few years…
> very smart, fast learners Well that is your friends first problem! For a smart fast learner your friend isn’t providing a benefit worth the cost of a couple of years of low job growth. Your friend should look for candidates who are average learners, want a steady paycheck, and don’t want to do anything tech related outside of work hours.
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In fact in the good big companies, they crave for employee growth. Time and money for training, meaningful career growth, and pay growth, major tech switches without changing jobs. I find that small companies are often much worse in all these metrics. As a jr employee they’ll never rise to chief architect - your friend, the cofounder, has that job. And is never giving it up. Plus thanks to cash crunch, making shortcu…
> As a jr employee they’ll never rise to chief architect Considering that only few people get to the top title at a big company (I think there is ~20 Technical Fellows in Microsoft world wide), I think that is a fallacy. If you work at a small company that grows, you're far more likely to become a chief architect. > Now tell me my experience would be better in a 12 person startup/shop. I dare you. Only applies to the…
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In fact in the good big companies, they crave for employee growth. Time and money for training, meaningful career growth, and pay growth, major tech switches without changing jobs. I find that small companies are often much worse in all these metrics. As a jr employee they’ll never rise to chief architect - your friend, the cofounder, has that job. And is never giving it up. Plus thanks to cash crunch, making shortcu…
> As a jr employee they’ll never rise to chief architect Considering that only few people get to the top title at a big company (I think there is ~20 Technical Fellows in Microsoft world wide), I think that is a fallacy. If you work at a small company that grows, you're far more likely to become a chief architect. > Now tell me my experience would be better in a 12 person startup/shop. I dare you. Only applies to the…
Senior/Chief Architect is an engineering/production position, with limited scope for game changing R&D. In a typical 10-20 man shop the position is usually taken by the CTO, who will be usually be in it for the long haul for both financial and technical reasons.
Very, very rarely a startup will turn into a unicorn with hundreds or thousands of employees. You can get some way up the ladder when that happens.
But the odds are against it happening in the first place. And at the higher levels you'll still be competing with talent hired from outside.
I have an answer to the paradox of how these can both be true: (1) companies complain about a shortage of programmers; (2) angry commenters claim otherwise. If there were few good programmers and many mediocre ones, this is what you'd expect to see.