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Software engineers hard to find

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Re: Software engineers hard to find

#11

Post by patio11 »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #6

"One good developer can do the work of three or four guys," Annerino said. "Once a company finds them, they don't let them go." We might get paid double what they do, but not 3x or 4x. Or maybe I'm not that good ;)

I am gradually coming to the opinion that many 10X developers really do end up being compensated fairly, but it rarely happens while they are still in the "developer" box.

It doesn't necessarily just happen from taking on extra risk, either, though starting your own company is one way to do it. Personal anecdote (I'm not a 10X developer but I know a few things about a few things): I previously built CRUD apps and made $X, and I turned down a few offers this year to build CRUD apps for [6 * $X, 10 * $X]. The big thing that changed? Improvement in marketing myself and better selection of CRUD app genre. (A/B testing isn't any harder technically than building university registration systems... it is just worth orders of magnitude more revenue.)

There is a really good post on Quora about this, incidentally: http://www.quora.com/10X-Engineers/Why-are-the-best-programm...

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#12

Post by ck2 »

amock wrote: post #9
ck2 wrote: post #5

I find it dubious someone can just decide to be a "software engineer". You'd have to already have a personal interest in programming and be doing it on your own as a hobby. Are there people who seriously just go to college for 4 years and learn coding like accounting and then just do a 9-5 job? There are thousands of decent hackers out there, maybe just uptrain.

There are lots of people who just went to college for four years and then got jobs writing code. I didn't keep a track of many of them but none of the ones I know of turned out to be good at it.

I'm jealous of anyone who can just "come home from work" and turn off their brain about coding and do it as a regular job.

I'm constantly thinking of better ways to do something and find myself rewriting code from years ago. I have at least one "regular job" experience that taught me such behavior/attitude doesn't work well in a 9-5 business environment.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#13

Post by ck2 »

Tangurena wrote: post #10

I'm an older developer. I was eating lunch at a restaurant near my new workplace. Sitting at the table next to mine, a college senior (at Colorado School of Mines - which is a pretty decent engineering school) was talking with her father about her boyfriend interviewing for a job as a software developer. The BF had a 4 hour long programming test as part of the interview. Something is very wrong with our industry. Mos…

I think the secret is that part of good programming is an art, and not only something that can be taught, like accounting, with just logical rules and regulations (apologies to skilled accountants who feel there is an art to their work).

That is probably why big business can't fulfill their desire for a large pool of cheap but good developers. You can't just pour people into the college machinery and churn out developers. At least I hope not.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#14

Post by amock »

ck2 wrote: post #12
amock wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of people who just went to college for four years and then got jobs writing code. I didn't keep a track of many of them but none of the ones I know of turned out to be good at it.

I'm jealous of anyone who can just "come home from work" and turn off their brain about coding and do it as a regular job. I'm constantly thinking of better ways to do something and find myself rewriting code from years ago. I have at least one "regular job" experience that taught me such behavior/attitude doesn't work well in a 9-5 business environment.

Do you really want to not care about the work you do? It's nice to be able to come home from work and not worry about work, but I wouldn't want to work on something that I wasn't interested in.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#15

Post by tomjen3 »

RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #8
GooseFlyFox wrote: post #2

Only if you persist in looking in the wrong places.

Cool. Can you suggest where the right places are? My past searches for decent software developers have been long, arduous and time-consuming, and I'd love to know where all the good developers are hiding. Out of interest, how many developers have you employed? I'm sure it's not entirely relevant, but I'd be interested to know how you found them.

There are plenty of people here on hn who complaint about how hard it is to get people willing to hire them remote. You could start there.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#16

Post by thr0w4w4y »

A related question:

What is the current hourly rate that a jr software engineer can expect?

I might be starting to work remotely for a company in the Boston area but have no idea what the current salary situation for freelancers in the US is like

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#17

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

tomjen3 wrote: post #15
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. Can you suggest where the right places are? My past searches for decent software developers have been long, arduous and time-consuming, and I'd love to know where all the good developers are hiding. Out of interest, how many developers have you employed? I'm sure it's not entirely relevant, but I'd be interested to know how you found them.

There are plenty of people here on hn who complaint about how hard it is to get people willing to hire them remote. You could start there.

There are plenty of software development jobs where remote working simply isn't possible. Just as a single, simple example, there are very few neighborhoods that would tolerate an 18 foot high-speed radar antenna on a roof, and even fewer that would then have suitable objects to watch.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#18

Post by j_baker »

ck2 wrote: post #13
Tangurena wrote: post #10

I'm an older developer. I was eating lunch at a restaurant near my new workplace. Sitting at the table next to mine, a college senior (at Colorado School of Mines - which is a pretty decent engineering school) was talking with her father about her boyfriend interviewing for a job as a software developer. The BF had a 4 hour long programming test as part of the interview. Something is very wrong with our industry. Mos…

I think the secret is that part of good programming is an art, and not only something that can be taught, like accounting, with just logical rules and regulations (apologies to skilled accountants who feel there is an art to their work). That is probably why big business can't fulfill their desire for a large pool of cheap but good developers. You can't just pour people into the college machinery and churn out develo…

I think you might be confusing accounting with bookkeeping. Bookkeepers are the people who determine what column to put data in and crunch numbers. Accountants make financial decisions. Accountants probably feel the same way about developers: we deal with just logical rules and mathematical theorems.

The thing is that you don't just put anyone into college and expect a productive member of society to come out. It takes so much more than that.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#19

Post by mahmud »

And will continue to be harder and harder as long as utter morons do the screening and hiring.

I made a local-startup an offer that no sane company could afford to refuse. I was a core developer for their main behemoth of a competitor and my non-competes have just expired. They could easily save millions of dollars in marketing, research and development by JUST running decisions by me and having me nod in approval if it sounds good. (I am not exaggerating; it's one of those businesses that require 10k in daily AdWords sacrifices to grok; lead generation)

Instead, they came back to me with the same two questions: do you know Django and do you know Agile development.

You incompetent idiots.

Fast forward to today; it took me 4 hours this morning to go from cold-call to interview at a research-oriented industrial planning company of <10 people minting millions of dollars per year. Within 20 minutes, the guy and I were talking about the history of Prolog, logics and finite-domain constraint solving.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#20

Post by [deleted] »

Tangurena wrote: post #10

I'm an older developer. I was eating lunch at a restaurant near my new workplace. Sitting at the table next to mine, a college senior (at Colorado School of Mines - which is a pretty decent engineering school) was talking with her father about her boyfriend interviewing for a job as a software developer. The BF had a 4 hour long programming test as part of the interview. Something is very wrong with our industry. Mos…

[deleted]
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