If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a job?

> Workers would rather not move around.

I really disagree. These junior engineers you're talking about are mostly in their early 20's (even if they're older and switching from a different career track, they're by definition new to the industry and still have a lot to learn). In my experience, they definitely do want to move around. And even if there is a great track for internal promotions and the compensation is going to be the same whether they stay or leave, it honestly is usually in their best interest to move around every couple of years anyway early in their career. They'll meet more new people to grow their professional network faster, work on new problems, see different ways of how teams operate and what works better/worse, and gain more experience faster.

I do think that for the very top performers, most companies should probably be much more aggressive than they are. If someone is really crushing it, like in say the top 1-5% of performers, be ridiculously proactive and promote them from junior engineer to Staff Engineer within 18 months or something. I've seen a couple of people over my career that actually were performing at that level, and no external company is going to give them that big of a boost, so it's a good chance to use your inside information to be more competitive. Otherwise, for the majority of folks that are learning/advancing at a more normal pace, I don't think there's really much a company can do to keep them longer. (Not that you shouldn't even try, it's still a continuum and if you do a really bad job at career growth internally you'll lose even more people faster. But you shouldn't expect to be able to keep most people beyond 2-3 years).

A real credential with teeth would likely eliminate plenty of the "Does this person know anything at all" element of current tech interviews. I've interviewed people who didn't even know what a for loop was or the difference between the stack and the heap. If there was a piece of paper which said that the candidate knows at least the bare minimum about software development, you could at least start the interview at a more advanced (or domain-specific) level.

I doubt hospitals interviewing senior doctors need to ask them basic anatomy questions, or law firms needing to ask candidates the difference between tort and criminal law. Tech could benefit from this minimal minimal bar.

I actually disagree with this (if you’re aiming to work at a company between Unicorn and FANG size), I think there’s 2 parts to getting hired as a new grad or getting an internship as a student.

The first part is the University Hiring recruiters determining whether out of the 1000+ resumes they have read you are likely to have the basic skills required to learn to be a FANG engineer. In this part they don’t actually care much about what you did at your internships or what technologies you’re interested in all they care about is whether you know how to code in a language, know how to manage time and be managed by a superior, and know how to learn to do your job independently. If you pass this, great now you’re off to the races that was the hardest part due to the volume.

Then there’s a second part in every FANG university pipeline where University Recruiting and different hiring managers bounce around your application to find an intern for their team. In this part your demonstrated interests, prior work, and skills are important you’re way more likely to get a deep learning internship if you have deep learning on your resume at this part.

I posit that most university hiring advice focuses on the second part whereas the first part is the most difficult to pass. Think about it is the person with 4 hackathon awards and 3 deep learning side projects more likely to grow into a FANG software engineer than someone who has 2 internships?

Do your side projects involve reporting your progress to your team? Writing design docs and getting feedback from your team? Thinking about maintaining the code base and providing documentation to your coworkers? Those software engineering skills are learned not taught and you learn them on the job even though to other software engineers we would value the candidate with hackathons and side projects more than the one with 2 internships in terms of ability to grow.

I’m probably going to write a blog post or something about this cause I feel quite strongly about this after my experience following everyone’s advice.

Seems to me it's just so much in demand that it pays more than companies are comfortable and they almost never want to introduce any applicants to higher pay levels than they have experienced in the past.

> decade ago my region of the country would produce maybe 50 fresh CS candidates a year, now it’s closer to 500 spread across multiple different educations.

A degree is not the same as “talent”. The degree doesn’t even mean you really “learned” the fundamentals, so much as you were able to regurgitate information and pass exams.

I’m a Principal at Amazon. One issue I see among CS graduates is a lack of understanding in very basic CS fundamentals. On paper, these candidates have CS bachelors degrees. On the other hand, they struggle to pick the right algorithmic approach when something is clearly a graph or tree traversal problem.