Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's my belief. At my company we don't have them (or I would be applying to those roles). It's seems most companies know they can save money by combining that with the developer role. I don't see postings for them.
To be honest engineers's earn so much because they're doing multiple jobs. They're also usually doing project management if there's no dedicated project manager.
Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
61–70 of 93 posts
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#62The hardest "engineer" to find "nowadays" is the same as it was 10, 20, 40, 100 years ago: the one who can communicate what [s]he wants to do in a way that non-engineers can grok And, the flipside of that: the one who can take what [s]he is given in magic, hand-waving, bafflegab statements from non-engineers and convert it into something someone else can actually use If you can communicate to and understand from othe…
That's not my experience. I'm consistently told that communication is my strong point, that I'm good at interpreting statements into wanted functionality, and that my professional opinions are very thorough and well-thought out. I'm told I'm slow. When I do code screens, usually in a language that I have limited experience in due to my diverse background in technologies, I don't get the job because others are faster.
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not my experience. I'm consistently told that communication is my strong point, that I'm good at interpreting statements into wanted functionality, and that my professional opinions are very thorough and well-thought out. I'm told I'm slow. When I do code screens, usually in a language that I have limited experience in due to my diverse background in technologies, I don't get the job because others are faster.
I feel you pain. And whenever I do get hired, after 6 months, I have a deeper understanding of the architecture than most of those "fast" coders. I'm a diesel. But that's not what gets you through jobinterviews nowadays.
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest engineers's earn so much because they're doing multiple jobs. They're also usually doing project management if there's no dedicated project manager.
I would agree, if I were making 6 figures. I'm DevSecOps, so I'm definitely doing multiple things. I don't earn "so much".
Hope you get a position in the future that pays you what you're worth.
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#65These bootcamps will also advertise as having covered backend stuff, but its very rarely in any level of depth beyond "spun up an express NodeJS app as a razor-thin layer in front of Firebase" or something; thirty minutes of interviewing will expose this gap, and they get hired on as a FE.
BE/DevOps is in higher demand, thus harder to find. DevOps is a weird one, because its a field that's extremely striated between platforms. Whereas a Java BE engineer could ramp up on NodeJS or whatever very quickly, an Azure specialist will take longer to match their skillset to AWS, not to mention the large body of individuals coming in with traditional linux server maintenance experience that will have a hard time matching their skillset to cloud-native serverless-like roles. It shouldn't stop a hire, but it does make finding well-matched qualified candidates more difficult.
Actually, I'll give props to a lot of the modern Azure skills DevOps peeps can develop; they're very big on their state-of-art being open source CNCF stuff; ex, Kubernetes, DAPR, KEDA, etc. So, a skillset there can transfer to a ton of places (including a GCP-esque shop, or even an AWS shop on less managed tooling). Glad to see some modernization/standardization in this space, but AWS is very antiquated and stuck in their ways.
Less from a hiring manager angle and more from an engineer angle: bonafide actual full stack devs are insanely valuable. Every once in a while you get a candidate that can apply to any role, but will apply to a specialized role; then they meet the engineering manager and the manager realizes, they're a candidate among a pool of candidates who are specialized enough for the role, but they also bring that full stack experience. Very few teams/roles are actually "100% backend" or "100% whatever"; the team may settle for someone who meets the job description, but will prefer breadth over depth, in nearly all cases.
Rarest quality: seniority. Not skill based. Just time, and more-so a demonstrable breadth of experience on a handful of projects, tech stacks, etc. Can't fake it. Can't stress how many roles we've posted at a Senior level, then settled for someone more mid-level because there's no-one. We're remote; competitive salary; small team; cool tech; cool product; maybe one in fifty candidates feels demonstrably senior.
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#66I 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.
Company needed to "prove" that no American Engineers are available to fill the position to then justify sponsoring a visa. Then they'll go to the elected officials and whine that there's a "shortage" of engineers to try to get higher immigration quotas for H1Bs.
So they put a junior’s salary and senior experience requirements, then proceed to hire someone with “5 years of experience” at a famous foreign consulting firm (real or not). The experience is then used to justify why new grads have to be paid lower (he’s a senior, we can’t pay new grads the same as a senior) and to qualify for the visa.
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#67Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would agree, if I were making 6 figures. I'm DevSecOps, so I'm definitely doing multiple things. I don't earn "so much".
DevSecOpsBizProj is prob more like it. Hope you get a position in the future that pays you what you're worth.
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#69Security Engineers that know how to secure applications running on a cloud platform are rare as hen's teeth. We've tried and failed to hire one for almost two years now. 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 fi…
I think they are rare to find since corporates mostly prefer checkbox insecurity and not a well rounded security professional, better to grow your own in-house talent.
I worked one place with competent DevOps, enough app-level holes to drain spaghetti, and willful ignorance from leadership.
Compliance is a joke, and real security is for companies who deal in it — they get to have the security experts, and companies get some security by chance.
Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?
#70Self-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.