Ask HN: Reasons to stay in Software Engineering

hardware jobs pay less. many times, much less.

I'd be willing to take either side of a debate for "is there a shortage of people who, when given tight specifications for a piece of software (write a function that takes X as input and provides Y as output) that enumerates all of the corner conditions can produce a program in a language that they are familiar with."

At the same time, the "person who can work with the business user on the software, think about the architecture of it, identify the design necessary, come up with the estimate that actually matches the time frame that it will be done in with a reasonable error... and produce software that takes X as input and provides Y as output while being aware of where the edge conditions may exist and ask for clarification on how it should work"... I believe there is a distinct lack of that portion of labor.

Furthermore, there is also a lack of people who are able to move from the first labor pool to the second, and a lack of mentors who have the time and ability to help that group move to the second.

I don't think its incredibly difficult to hire an entry level person as long as one sets the bar low enough and has people within the origination who are capable of providing the design. On the other hand, it is very difficult to find the people who can give the necessary instruction to the entry level people to allow them to become productive within their ability.

As an aside, I also find that within the entry level group... there are a sizable portion that have the attitude of "I learned language X and that was hard enough, I'm going to stick with it and not learn anything else." That X can be found for all languages and none have the monopoly on it. However, it is disconcerting for me to see those individuals... I started out as a C programmer, and then Perl (full stack web - some JavaScript in there) and then Java (enterprise), and then Java stand alone (swing application)... and while I'm still a Java programmer, I can see other languages looming on the horizon. Java will become the COBOL, and while there are still COBOL programmers out there, its not something that one wants to get stuck in for another two or three decades waiting for that last app server to be turned off before they can retire.

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At the "anything past entry level", I still find that the number of qualified applicants drops off substantially. For entry level, the applicant pool is very, very large. I am now despairing that many of that pool don't have the necessary skills to move beyond following someone else's design.

> "For some reason, companies do highly mistrust my skills and degree. Other jobs, equally well paid, do not require this."

I think if other jobs were able to directly test your technical skills in an interview they probably would. I personally hate whiteboard style interviews as well but, having sat on both sides of the interview process over the years, I see a lot of value in seeing people's code. Personally my preference is a take home coding test, but interactive coding is fine too if the problem isn't too tricky. Probably this is because I am self taught and don't have a degree to lean on that colors my opinion so take my words with a grain of salt I guess.