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everyone wants to underpay the talent and there's only limited amount of talent the price floor for really talented engineers is also high so high in the sense most startups can't afford those 300-400k salaries.
Outside of FAANG, who is paying $300k+ for a standard / non-management dev job?
everyone wants to underpay the talent and there's only limited amount of talent the price floor for really talented engineers is also high so high in the sense most startups can't afford those 300-400k salaries.
Outside of FAANG, who is paying $300k+ for a standard / non-management dev job?
This manifests inflated job vacancies because so many firms have an evergreen job posting for "Senior Full Stack". Because talent is scarce these roles rarely get filled (hiring managers expect million-dollar candidates to accept $100-200k compensation).
Also, because lots of software requires specific expertise, there are vacancies that can't be filled because of a knowledge gap (novel industries / projects, etc). For example, how could SpaceX possibly fill all their engineering roles? Surely money is not a limiting factor, but rather the limited supply of qualified expert rocket engineers?
everyone wants to underpay the talent and there's only limited amount of talent the price floor for really talented engineers is also high so high in the sense most startups can't afford those 300-400k salaries.
Outside of FAANG, who is paying $300k+ for a standard / non-management dev job?
It's hard to get a job because there are a lot of charlatans out there and it's often very hard to get rid of them once hired. Even worse is hiring someone merely mediocre and not actively harmful. That said of course the modern coding interview is I think only very loosely correlated with quality.
I have seen enough software projects that certainly didn't fail because the devs lacked ability, there was always another reason and mainly that is leadership not knowing about the problem they try to solve.
A bit of an exception might be more artistic topics like video games. Here marketing and chance play a larger role than management.
Sure, maybe you do cutting edge research, here ability is important again, but that is truly exceptional.
That said, I don't think it is hard to get a job currently.
It's hard to get a job because there are a lot of charlatans out there and it's often very hard to get rid of them once hired. Even worse is hiring someone merely mediocre and not actively harmful. That said of course the modern coding interview is I think only very loosely correlated with quality.
> Even worse is hiring someone merely mediocre and not actively harmful. What's so bad about... mediocrity? For obvious statistical reasons, most companies, most jobs, and most people are mediocre (or worse).
That's assuming companies exist on a one dimensional spectrum. The more prevailing wisdom is that companies will be mediocre or bad at many things, and good at a couple of particular things, and those couple of things are what make the company viable. This is the essence of a "unique selling point".
But to the point: most companies don't need great developers. Nowdays most medium sized businesses employ some tech staff, but IT is not core to their business.
It's hard to get a job because there are a lot of charlatans out there and it's often very hard to get rid of them once hired. Even worse is hiring someone merely mediocre and not actively harmful. That said of course the modern coding interview is I think only very loosely correlated with quality.
I get the feeling that mediocre business should be able to run just fine on mediocre people. So it can't be that bad. Of course, every business likes to pretend they're the top and can only hire top talent.
It's hard to get a job because there are a lot of charlatans out there and it's often very hard to get rid of them once hired. Even worse is hiring someone merely mediocre and not actively harmful. That said of course the modern coding interview is I think only very loosely correlated with quality.
I get the feeling that mediocre business should be able to run just fine on mediocre people. So it can't be that bad. Of course, every business likes to pretend they're the top and can only hire top talent.
Besides all that, mediocre literally means average. You (collective) should be fine with average and stop overloading terms making general life more difficult than it needs to be.