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

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

#561

Post by randomswede »

philpem wrote: post #372
Nbox9 wrote: post #13

I think a lot of this is because our profession does not have an accepted universal bar everyone can jump over to be considered ‘qualified’. Every technical interview feels like rolling the dice in proving I am a competent developer. Giving me 50 minutes in a high pressure situation in an environment i am unfamiliar with and people I just meet will never product my best results, and then add to the fact that I could…

I had an interview with a company a few years ago -- on paper it looked like a perfect match. During the interview things seemed to go well, but things took a turn for the worse with the technical lead's interrogation. He asked five or six questions related to C and C++ undefined behaviour, a very open-ended one about a technology I'd never used. I answered as best I can, but always opened with "I'd be referring back…

I thought the actual thing with C (and probably C++) UB is that, well, pretty much ANYTHING is allowed to happen (by the standard)? Including, but not limited to, nasal daemons.

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

#562

Post by nsgi »

debarshri wrote: post #377
anonuser123456 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes, people who you think are not capable to do the job, often outperform expectations too. I think everyone, employers and employees get too caught up in requirements and forget that humans are very general purpose. And in particular, highly capable and intelligent humans can rapidly acquire skills. In particular, if you are hiring someone for a potentially lengthy career, capacity for change seems incredibl…

Key problem is software engineers are generally bad at hiring. Hiring is a skillset of it's own. For example, you are technical writer for writing user facing docs, similarly I think it is specialized job where you use cognitive abilities to make a judgement, use psychology to see how the person will be in various situation.

Unfortunately, the people who make a career out of recruiting people into jobs are even worse

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

#563

Post by Blackstrat »

Having recently retired, I suspect I’m a bit older than most of the people here. I began my career in the early 80’s as an entry level developer at a large company. Eventually, I chased the money into management. In those days, we tended to hire talented, motivated individuals. As time went on and the Internet became more prevalent, everyone who had ever built a family website in FrontPage was marketing themselves as programmers. As the Internet matured, the diversity of technologies proliferated. Now senior management was telling those of us in the middle ranks to hire specific skill sets, e.g. Rails. The problem was such resources tended to be scarce and expensive. And even graduates of boot camps and weekend warriors who had crunched through a couple of Dietel & Dietel or OReilly books thought they should be paid $100k+, regardless of experience or the local market. Enter the off shore providers: Infosys, Cognizant, et al. They offered senior management what they sought - specific skill sets at bargain basement prices. And senior management at many commercial firms went all in on the offshore/outsourced model. Disney is one of the most egregious examples. Up until the last two years of my career which were spent working at a startup, I was in management at a large Fortune 100 company. This company spent 9 figures, never delivered a product, and eventually sold off the division. At one point, we had 100’s of offshore developers. In the startup, we dealt with the same issues. Senior managers often read literature targeted to their level, i.e. marketing. Hence, micro services and the cloud were the big thing when I retired. At our startup, neither was necessary for the market size and scale that we were targeting. We hired a younger architect who had the lingo nailed and told the CIO what he wanted to hear. Finally, they bought me out and I retired. They still haven’t brought the product to market, now 18 months after my departure. So, at least here in the States, we have an expectations problem and a lack of engineering discipline. Is the technology proposal appropriate to the opportunity/problem? Often, it’s not and the failures are costly and all too frequent. Retirement looks better each day.

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

#564

Post by bmn__ »

xtracto wrote: post #332
_f1dq wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar interview with a different company last year. Three guys and me on a Zoom call with me sharing my screen trying to solve a coding problem that in no way resembled anything I have ever encountered in my 25 year career. When I got stuck they just stared at me. They would not give me any hints whatsoever. They just stared at me. When the interview was over I thought, "Is this how working with these guys…

Reading all of these accounts of horrors in HackerNews I feel my idea of creating a "TOEFL for Developers" would be perfect. (I am hesitant to describe my idea, but WTH, I'm currently not in a position to act on it, and they say ideas are dime a dozen so...): For those of you for whom English is not your first language, you surely know what TOEFL is: Test of English as a Foreign Language. The private company provides…

> my idea of creating a "[standard aptitude test] for Developers"

Already exists. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27662804 Don't you have apprenticeships in your country?

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

#565

Post by gmadsen »

jethro_tell wrote: post #195
ghaff wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone is equally good of course but I would be very cautious about making hacking since 12 a requirement for a developer job. It certainly doesn't have its equivalent in any other branch of engineering or indeed just about anywhere else other than the arts.

And yet finding someone competent for the job is like a needle in a hay stack. Having a base of expected/certified knowledge would take a lot of that away.

I'm not sure about other industries, but for me personally, my competency is in large part based on my ability to quickly pick up domain knowledge and apply it successfully.

I'm not really sure how you test for a base level of that, besides proven demonstration on your resume and doing semi-correlated coding quizzes.

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

#566

Post by Zelphyr »

andrekandre wrote: post #509
_f1dq wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar interview with a different company last year. Three guys and me on a Zoom call with me sharing my screen trying to solve a coding problem that in no way resembled anything I have ever encountered in my 25 year career. When I got stuck they just stared at me. They would not give me any hints whatsoever. They just stared at me. When the interview was over I thought, "Is this how working with these guys…

> We as an industry really REALLY need to figure out a better way of conducting interviews. maybe i'm naive but, how about just ask the candidate to make a mini version of what they would actually do irl? if your an app dev: make me an app that does x, you have 60 min if your a rails dev: make me a site that does y, you have 2hrs if your a pdm: make me a spec and tickets for a system that does z maybe i'm missing som…

It's all the potential criteria around the request that makes just that one piece more complex than it seems.

For example; "Make me a site that does x, you have 2 hours" Do I need to build the app in front of you? Problematic because how often does one build an entire web site in a couple of hours, while someone is standing over their shoulders scrutinizing every keystroke?

Do I take it home and do it? If so, how do I prove to you that I did the work?

Do you care what framework I use? Do you care if I use Open Source code?

What design should I use? Where do I get the site assets from?

If I'm building this site for you, are you paying me for that time?

Then there's the non-technical parts missing from an interview like that:

How does such an exercise tell you that I'm the kind of person you want to work with?

How does such an interview provide me an opportunity to ask you question? It tells me nothing about you or your company which is every bit as important as you finding out about me.

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

#567

Post by PoignardAzur »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #546
PoignardAzur wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the same system in France. As GP says, it's because taking an employee on an indefinite contract is a huge responsibility, and you basically can't fire them unless they set your office on fire. In France, there's a huge temp ecosystem that was built because of that. Companies don't hire developers, they subcontract to temp agencies for limited time. The advantage for them is if they need to downsize their tea…

Ok in Denmark the system is that you get hired, if they fire you in the first month you get 2 weeks severance, after which you have (IIRC) 3 months, this part is somewhat based on seniority / contract some times you might get a 4 month severance period. You can be fired for basically any reasonable reason though. I again have a hard time believing you need to set fire to the office before they fire you, don't French…

It's an hyperbole. Downsizing is allowed, but there's some heavy paperwork involved, you have to meet some guarantees, etc. The company can't do it at will. (Then again, I'm not a company owner, I don't know the details)

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

#568

Post by ozim »

xtracto wrote: post #332
_f1dq wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar interview with a different company last year. Three guys and me on a Zoom call with me sharing my screen trying to solve a coding problem that in no way resembled anything I have ever encountered in my 25 year career. When I got stuck they just stared at me. They would not give me any hints whatsoever. They just stared at me. When the interview was over I thought, "Is this how working with these guys…

Reading all of these accounts of horrors in HackerNews I feel my idea of creating a "TOEFL for Developers" would be perfect. (I am hesitant to describe my idea, but WTH, I'm currently not in a position to act on it, and they say ideas are dime a dozen so...): For those of you for whom English is not your first language, you surely know what TOEFL is: Test of English as a Foreign Language. The private company provides…

I am compelled to write all the list of things why it will not work :) unfortunately I don't have that much time in my life. Don't take it as putting you down, I would love to see such thing working and live in real world, so look at it as problems that would need to be solved while aiming for grand solution.

First, there are wrong incentives at play, good guys currently don't need that as they mostly are employed and look for jobs passively. Good guys don't care about certificates and you want to certify good guys so your certificates mean something and can build trust. Weak guys will be spending money to cheat their way around just to get passing grade, which will cost money to prevent.

Then you have hiring managers that will not use this exam as good enough just to hire a person unless there is big company that would do the same. So you have chicken and egg problem, because no one will trust your certification and to get the trust someone would have to use it.

My idea is that you cannot effectively hire at scale. I could hand pick maybe 5 devs/year for my company, getting to real numbers in my small company I can see that we can hire maybe 2 developers per year. When We hire someone it worked for me with simple questions and attitude check. I don't see a way to hire 100 good developers in 1 year, that is not possible. Maybe at a scale you can hire 10-20 good developers a year but you have to have 3-5 people involved full time - and ideally those 3-5 people should be nice and technical - where in the end you don't want to use them only for hiring because those are probably your best developers with soft skills.

For that competency matrix - that is something you can do when you have developers inside of the company and you can observe them for at least 6 months. Good luck getting that in practical testing setup for 2 or less hours. I also find those kind of matrices terrible and not useful for evaluating people or projects. I work on a project where we were not fitting in anything of what was in the matrix .. yet we were delivering good quality for business all the time, while teams that were stuck on their "competency matrix" trying to improve meaningless points ended up disbanded and not working anymore in the organization.

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

#569

Post by iamcreasy »

digitalmouse wrote: post #226
move-on-by wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In an environment I am unfamiliar with I had an technical interview with a company early last week, we did a shared session using VS Code. The interviewer wrote the function signature, and I filled out the implementation. I did great, according to the interviewer, and moved to the next set of interviews. The next interviewer, which turned out was also technical, ended up opening up a shared Google Docs to write cod…

reminds of of the systems design interview I had with Google, the interviewer had his webcam off, barely spoke English and had me trying to make diagrams of system architecture in google docs with no reference of what he was actually looking for it was like sitting in a confusing nightmare for an hour

I wonder if you are marked as never-interview-again if you leave mid interview citing reason X.

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

#570

Post by co2benzoate »

gscott wrote: post #497
tomkat0789 wrote: post #38

Slashdot had a post about this topic a few years ago that I thought was colorful enough to save for posterity: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/18/03/14/1428242/deman... The top comment seemed to capture the problem best: "What is in extremely high demand is programmers with 20 years of experience in a technology that has been around for 5, no older than 19 and working for 20k a year. And that demand will be hig…

This is often done to hire H1b applicants. You run the local applicants through an interview that ends up with them even if they are qualified not taking the job then go and hire the H1b that you really wanted because the H1b is then dependent upon you for staying the United States. You can now hold that over the person and anything you want they have to do like working 100 hours a week.

That is how labs hire postdocs on the cheap too.
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