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Software engineers hard to find

articles.chicagotribune.com

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Re: Software engineers hard to find

#61

Post by rbanffy »

Natsu wrote: post #58
rbanffy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we, engineers, can help HR folks ask important questions that would prevent bad candidates from wasting our time as well as thinking up crazy ideas that could help lure good candidates. Yesterday, I suggested going EA-style and hand out laptop stickers on an upcoming hacker-ish convention with things like ''.join([chr(c) for c in [119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103]]) and (dolist (x (map…

Seems like we're seeing less of perl -e "@w = (119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103); foreach $c (@w) {print chr $c;}" these days.

Indeed. I don't think we have any actively maintained code written in Perl. I know a lot of plumbing written in it, but it's not in need of new features.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#62

Post by ig1 »

gaius wrote: post #21
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…

This is a problem that has been recurring for a long time in many technical/scientific professions, and there's really no-one "official" telling the truth. When I went to college in the 90s were were told - by even the IMechE, the body meant to represent engineers - that there was a desperate shortage. Truth is if it were desperate, that would be reflected in salaries, and despite the UK's heritage engineering is not…

It is reflected in salaries:

http://i26.tinypic.com/8ywawn.png

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#63

Post by KevinMS »

I'm not seeing anything like this, or maybe I'm just being forced out of the industry.

I get screened out by HR because I don't have the words "computer science" on my resume, even though I've been programming for the past 25 years, 15 professionally.

If I get this far I get a phone screen where I'm completely fluent in anything they are talking about, but I don't have years of scrum experience, or I didn't come from an "agile" shop, or I prefer the alternatives to Rspec and cucumber, or whatever the new hotness is.

Then I get screened out by the developer interview because I'm not in my 20's and probably can't relate to their hip young "culture" and they don't know what to make of me, especially in the Ruby world - but Perl is not as bad and I'll probably just give up on Ruby and go back to Perl.

Then I get flooded with calls from head hunters, all for the same one or two jobs and its always a complete waste of time.

Its frustrating to read articles like this. Are they true or just compete fabricated bullshit as a prelude to increasing H1B quotas?

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#64

Post by rmc »

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.

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?

Yep. I went to college with people who didn't like programming.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#65

Post by mahmud »

loewenskind wrote: post #47
mahmud wrote: post #19

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…

>and my non-competes have just expired. And you even honor parts of your contracts that aren't enforcable. They passed up a great deal. :) Seriously though, before you cost yourself job opportunities because of something you've signed, run it by a lawyer. You're going to be shocked at first.

I have had my own software development company since I was basically 22. Every few years I get a full time job and let the guys know I might go feral again. So I usually get the "2 years" clause on anything I touch. A very small price to pay for being my own job reference, really.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#66

Post by bhoung »

mahmud wrote: post #57
j_baker wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as someone who's been accused of having a poor attitude on many an occasion, but when you say the following... > And will continue to be harder and harder as long as utter morons do the screening and hiring. > 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. > You incompetent idiots. I have to…

If someone told me they worked for my major, and very successful competitor, I would pause to ask them "doing what". The guys didn't even bother.

Classic case of thinking that being right should be all that matters? With interviews and hiring it all comes down to the first impression...

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#67

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

tomjen3 wrote: post #27
RiderOfGiraffes wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am pretty sure they once said the same thing about people not working in suits. If your company can't make it work, you shouldn't be surprised if you have to look for a new job because your competitors can get people you aren't able to hire.

I've come back to this comment several times in the past few hours, trying to write something to help you understand, yet at the same time, not sounding condescending, and I've decided I can't do it. You simply can't connect remotely to the kit we use - you have to be in the office for at least a few days a week.

Other work we do involves data that we are contractually obliged not to allow out of the building, and still other work involves teams of people working together on algorithm design and implementation. We've tried, but the existing on-line tools are simply not up to it. We've even worked at trying to create better on-line tools, and come to the conclusion that it's currently not worth it.

But you're a CS student, so no doubt you'll be working on solving the problems we have, and by the time you're in the work place you'll have the solution ready. We look forward with eager anticipation to being able to have people work remotely. Getting more and better work for the same pay would be a great business opportunity, which is why we still invest around 10% of our annual budget trying to make it happen.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#68

Post by mahmud »

rbanffy wrote: post #54
gaius wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem there will be that the competent engineers - if they have any - will have been burned by too many dud candidates wasting their time, and have gotten HR to pre-screen the CVs...

I think we, engineers, can help HR folks ask important questions that would prevent bad candidates from wasting our time as well as thinking up crazy ideas that could help lure good candidates. Yesterday, I suggested going EA-style and hand out laptop stickers on an upcoming hacker-ish convention with things like ''.join([chr(c) for c in [119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103]]) and (dolist (x (map…

  (format t "~{~c~}" 
    (mapcar #'code-char 
       '(119 101 39 114 101 32 104 105 114 105 110 103)))

  => we're hiring
FORMAT is a turing complete DSL for formatting output; here you see ~{~} iteration directive.

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#69

Post by rbanffy »

mahmud wrote: post #68
rbanffy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we, engineers, can help HR folks ask important questions that would prevent bad candidates from wasting our time as well as thinking up crazy ideas that could help lure good candidates. Yesterday, I suggested going EA-style and hand out laptop stickers on an upcoming hacker-ish convention with things like ''.join([chr(c) for c in [119, 101, 39, 114, 101, 32, 104, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103]]) and (dolist (x (map…

(format t "~{~c~}" (mapcar #'code-char '(119 101 39 114 101 32 104 105 114 105 110 103))) => we're hiring FORMAT is a turing complete DSL for formatting output; here you see ~{~} iteration directive.

http://marcoil.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/format-fear.jp...

Re: Software engineers hard to find

#70

Post by jwh »

"The growing use of Ruby on Rails, a Web application framework, in recent years has created developer shortages everywhere, said Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson...Many developers who were trained in Java or PHP simply need to be retrained, he said."

=== "Hmm, PHP and Java are out, so what does someone with vested interests in Rails think I should learn? Hang on, Rails isn't mentioned as out of date by its creator so I'll retrain in that!"

I can't remember the exact articles from HN but there were two recently: one was about a sysadmin that went for an interview at Facebook or Google and was surprised that they wanted knowledge on low-level, performance critical features rather than advanced bash programming; another was an example of why it's often more cost effective to get twice the performance out of one server (by investing more development time i.e. C/C++ over PHP) rather than buying another server.

YMMV but I switched from PHP to C++ for my personal web projects and haven't noticed it taking me exponentially more time to develop.

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