31–40 of 93 posts
All the candidates are either "cloud security experts" who will run through a checklist of AWS best practices while remaining wilfully ignorant of the application itself, or on-prem dinosaurs who want to talk to us about the ports on our corporate firewall.
Self-starting generalists
Am a self starting generalist. Every company I've worked for has desperately tried to beat it out of me. They think they want this but what they actually want is someone who will turn pre-chewed tickets into code on whatever platform they have without attempting to fix underlying issues as they identify them.
Once I realized that, it made a lot more sense why I wasn't (and shouldn't!) be the one calling the shots on priority, UX, tempo. Even for things like tech debt, it really needs to be baked into the ability to deliver new value to a customer or it's very often not worth addressing.
Ultimately, I tried to get closer and closer to the users, so I could be in a position to know what they want, but as I did that, I found myself coding less and less.
It's a tradeoff. If you really love to code, you must accept you need help figuring out what to code. If you would rather build things people like, you must accept that means spending a lot of your time talking to and working with users.
You can't be a one man band.
Self-starting generalists
Am a self starting generalist. Every company I've worked for has desperately tried to beat it out of me. They think they want this but what they actually want is someone who will turn pre-chewed tickets into code on whatever platform they have without attempting to fix underlying issues as they identify them.
If you're chafing there due to the lack of autonomy, I promise there are places hiring people whose strong suit is tackling ambiguity in addition to software development.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My last org just wanted one senior software engineer. Just one. They couldn't find one as the salary sucked, despite interviewing about a dozen over 6 months.
> despite interviewing about a dozen over 6 months Did they really want one? I'd wager that if they took those six months of interviews, job ads and recruiter time and instead took that money, added it to the salary they are planning on offering (say divided by the average tenure in that role at your company) and threw up a post on the monthly "Who is hiring" thread here they could've found someone. A common tactic i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My last org just wanted one senior software engineer. Just one. They couldn't find one as the salary sucked, despite interviewing about a dozen over 6 months.
> despite interviewing about a dozen over 6 months Did they really want one? I'd wager that if they took those six months of interviews, job ads and recruiter time and instead took that money, added it to the salary they are planning on offering (say divided by the average tenure in that role at your company) and threw up a post on the monthly "Who is hiring" thread here they could've found someone. A common tactic i…
"The explosive growth of the tech sector keeps average age down and depresses average wages. Compared to industries which existed in materially the same form in 1970, we have a stupidly compressed experience spectrum: 5+ years rounds to "senior." This is not a joke." [1]
So companies routinely comb for a "senior" person but the salary is always a mismatch. I have 25+ years under my belt but the companies that approach me expect a 5-year compensation arc and can't understand what the problem is.
[1] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html
I sort of understand where this question is coming from, but as someone who's spent a fair amount of time browsing software job postings recently, the real question isn't specialization, it's seniority . I routinely have found organizations that have, literally, dozens of open listings for "Senior Software Engineer, Sub-field", but few (if any) explicitly non-senior positions available. My very non-scientific estimat…
Should SRE and DevOps be grouped together? I thought they were separate.
I sort of understand where this question is coming from, but as someone who's spent a fair amount of time browsing software job postings recently, the real question isn't specialization, it's seniority . I routinely have found organizations that have, literally, dozens of open listings for "Senior Software Engineer, Sub-field", but few (if any) explicitly non-senior positions available. My very non-scientific estimat…
I sort of understand where this question is coming from, but as someone who's spent a fair amount of time browsing software job postings recently, the real question isn't specialization, it's seniority . I routinely have found organizations that have, literally, dozens of open listings for "Senior Software Engineer, Sub-field", but few (if any) explicitly non-senior positions available. My very non-scientific estimat…
My last org just wanted one senior software engineer. Just one. They couldn't find one as the salary sucked, despite interviewing about a dozen over 6 months.
Oh, boo hoo, cry me a river. That shotgun blast to the foot is ENTIRELY self-inflicted.
If a company can’t pay the going rate for a mission-critical employee, then they have a shitty business plan and deserve to fail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My last org just wanted one senior software engineer. Just one. They couldn't find one as the salary sucked, despite interviewing about a dozen over 6 months.
> They couldn’t find one as the salary sucked Oh, boo hoo, cry me a river. That shotgun blast to the foot is ENTIRELY self-inflicted. If a company can’t pay the going rate for a mission-critical employee, then they have a shitty business plan and deserve to fail.
My comment on the main post is that the most in demand type of engineer is one that is cheap.