Sounds like you should find better candidates....
What is wrong with new generation of programmers?
31–40 of 60 posts
Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?
#32I see the same with new guys. When they need to calculate the intersection area between a few rectangles they spend hours looking on GitHub instead of writing 50 lines of code. And they have no idea how even a simple linked list implementation could look like. There seems to be something in the training that tells them it's not cool to implement things themselves, instead only libraries are OK.
I have had the same experience. Give them an API and they glue things together like there is no tomorrow, dealing with edge cases I probably couldn't have come up with on LSD.
Ask them to fix a bug in a procedure using call/cc, and in the best case they will rewrite without call/cc 3 times as long.
Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?
#33How well do you understand an internal combustion engine? Do you know it well enough to be able to diagnose an issue ad then fix it? Can you listen to it, identify when it's not performing well, and then make the tweaks to it in order to get the most efficiency? If you say yes, I would be very surprised, and yer every day, people all over the world rely on these things to get them to the place they need to go. There…
I think that's fine for developers starting out. But once you start writing software professionally that is for "the enterprise", it's important to understand the underlying stack. Knowing how your kernel's plumbing of pipes actually works (for example) is invaluable in certain cases. Knowing how your framework's black boxes work is very useful when you run into performance problems or find bugs. Yes, abstractions are good. But the higher you go up the stack of abstractions, the less you know about what's actually happening and thus the less you'll be able to do to actually debug it.
EDIT: Sorry, I didn't read the OP. Yeah, his requirements don't make much sense (unless he can do the whole industry a favour and explain what he means by "full stack" developer).
Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?
#34I think this generation shift isn't new, and I think it's "standing on the shoulders of giants." It's what makes each generation more effective than the last.
Specifically, I've worked with very smart individuals who grew up working on ARM processors and when tried to transition to javascript had difficulty with something like Ajax. I being one generation younger, am somewhat oblivious of ASM, hard disk sectors, etc, but since the abstractions aren't leaky it actually let's me focus on more theoretical stuff.
Moreover, I think one generation from now things like caching will automatically be decided at the storage-engine level, and things that are now manual-work will become abstracted away allowing engineers even greater productivity.
edit: clarity
Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?
#35Ten years ago the stack was much smaller than it is today. If this is the "new generation", they probably have little experience. And you want "full stack" developers -- that's a really tall order, most people will work in a team where some people do one side and others do the other. So you're looking for people who have little experience, and are still more about all aspects of this huge stack than just how to use i…
Exactly. I was concentrating on backend the last few years and didn't have much frontend tasks. I recently switched to a new project that was developed by a generally younger team, and it's way more complex.
Instead a JSP / ASP / Rails template files with a single CSS and JS page, along with JQuery and a few libs, there is a whole build process with dependency hell and a dozen tools to master - bower, grunt, npm, karma, etc.
Writing the frontend with promises and async patterns is actually more difficult than the backend which has been slimmed down to basic Rest -> Service - DB calls. Honestly, I'd probably do pretty poorly on an interview too, these days, if a 'Ninja Full Stack' dev. was desired.
Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?
#36I do not believe you have to know what happens inside. And concept of blackbox in engineering actually comes from this insight. But the approach to solve a problem is more important. That is why debugging a code is blamed in testing.
Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?
#37You hear very often that the programmer industry is "age-ist", in other words, the older programmers have a hard time getting hired. This post is the other side of the coin: older programmers think that when they entered the industry it was "the golden era", and everything since then has gone downhill. This is akin to someone in the late '90s asking all entry-level programmers "you mean, you don't regularly disassemb…
Pretty much everything the OP mentions is reasonably basic "core IT" concepts. Depending on what he means by "intermediate sql" that might or might not fit into that category.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a "full stack" dev to have at least a basic understanding of things like DB indexing, singletons, http get vs post.
Where I would agree with you is to become proficient with these concepts it does involve spending some time in the industry so the age thing might be the factor here as well.
Personally I would strongly prefer these types of questions to the "recent CS graduate" type questions some companies are notorious for and not just because I can answer these :)
Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?
#38[deleted]
Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?
#39You hear very often that the programmer industry is "age-ist", in other words, the older programmers have a hard time getting hired. This post is the other side of the coin: older programmers think that when they entered the industry it was "the golden era", and everything since then has gone downhill. This is akin to someone in the late '90s asking all entry-level programmers "you mean, you don't regularly disassemb…
> Also, this is a personal pet peeve of mine: if you are asking what a singleton is in a job interview, you are interviewing for the wrong thing, so no wonder you are getting the wrong interviewees.
I have to agree.
The database indexing "how" also seems to fall into this; Maybe you understand what the limitations of the decision are, but even this is moving more into Architect or DBA roles.
Re: What is wrong with new generation of programmers?
#40"How do you deliver software your users/clients want?" is really the only technical question you should need to ask the 10+ crowd.
The highly-experienced type of dev who could easily walk out of the interview and become your next competitor is the one you want to hire.
So, would you ask a competitor questions about one pattern, inner vs. outer joins, and naming conventions? Or would you use that time to actually learn/discover info about your (potential) competitor?