Maybe next time people will build something more productive than imaginary coins, rehashed dot-com ideas, and outright frauds.
What would a recession mean for developers?
81–90 of 143 posts
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#82The weird part of this advice to me is all the "CS fundamentals" biz. It's admittedly been quite a while since I've felt the need to go out for "junior" roles, but I have a lot of close friends who are recent boot camp grads, and it seems to me that most success in an interview boils down to interpersonal skills and confidence in problem-solving. There's a significant backlash at least in the startup space to "whiteb…
> There's a significant backlash at least in the startup space to "whiteboard coding" Good. Whiteboard coding is probably one of the least useful methods I have ever seen to evaluate candidates. It tells me nothing about the persons actual qualification and can be gamed.
“I think I’d respect your opinion more, if you could write some code to evaluate all possible tic tac toe games in c++ on that whiteboard over there in around 45 minutes. Sound ok?” - whiteboard hiring managers probably
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#83I have worked through three recessions as a software analyst, or tech entrepreneur. The investment climate gets worse in a recession (we had to shut down a company after the dotcom crash), but the job market never seemed an issue for me or those around me that worked with IT or software development. There where always jobs. None of my colleges ended up without a job for any longer period. There is a huge skills short…
The dot-com crash was very difficult for a lot of people in tech generally. Maybe it was a bit better for developers specifically. But I was laid off pretty much as a direct result of the crash. As it turned out I was able to get a job pretty quickly from someone I knew. Subsequent times got a bit lean but I was basically employed the whole time. I considered myself very lucky though. Aside from the job I ended up with, which took about a month to come through, I wasn't seeing anything remotely like a nibble.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#84The weird part of this advice to me is all the "CS fundamentals" biz. It's admittedly been quite a while since I've felt the need to go out for "junior" roles, but I have a lot of close friends who are recent boot camp grads, and it seems to me that most success in an interview boils down to interpersonal skills and confidence in problem-solving. There's a significant backlash at least in the startup space to "whiteb…
Some startups are still requiring weird whiteboard questions sadly. Interviewed for a role recently and was asked to navigate a maze of obstacles and teleports with possible infinite loops, saying the minimum number of steps to leave the maze if it’s possible. That was for a test engineering role so… WTF.
They wanted to know if you can traverse a graph, which is something pretty simple.
I don't see a need for outrage here.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's a significant backlash at least in the startup space to "whiteboard coding" Good. Whiteboard coding is probably one of the least useful methods I have ever seen to evaluate candidates. It tells me nothing about the persons actual qualification and can be gamed.
While I agree that it won't tell you if a candidate is good, it will often show very quickly that a candidate is absolutely terrible. My warm-up questions are usually something like "reverse a singly-linked-list" or "check if a string is a palindrome", and you would be surprised at how many people have just no clue on how to do it, even with a lot of help (and I work in a FAANG so we should be getting decent candidat…
I haven't worked with a linked list since first or second year university, more than 10 years ago, nor have I had much of a reason to do character by character string analysis.
I could probably work these problems out, but I might not seem too confident about it.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#86The weird part of this advice to me is all the "CS fundamentals" biz. It's admittedly been quite a while since I've felt the need to go out for "junior" roles, but I have a lot of close friends who are recent boot camp grads, and it seems to me that most success in an interview boils down to interpersonal skills and confidence in problem-solving. There's a significant backlash at least in the startup space to "whiteb…
> try stuff you don't already know how to do
I've seen this used as justification for implementation of shiny third-party things that were both a fundamentally unfit solution and permitted those pushing it to avoid understanding the root cause of their current problems.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of the problem is perhaps that you were looking for titles explicitly coded 'junior' at all. Title inflation basically means that many devs that would basically be juniors in real engineering companies are considered senior. It's a weird market where the difference between 0 and 1 year of experience can be so dramatically reflected in salaries and opportunities.
I saw a job posting recently looking for senior developers with 3 years of work experience. I mean, I have 3 years of full time experience + a little more experience working part time and internships, and I would consider myself a junior dev.
I’m in over 10 years now and I find the deeper I go, the less I like this senior title. I mean, what will I be in another 10 years? In 15? These titles are meaningless, really.
I agree though, at 3 years I was still fairly junior in the scheme of things. I was doing full stack work and building money-making applications from scratch, but it wasn’t great work. It wasn’t going to scale well, the front end was based on an ad-hoc framework because I was afraid of learning and implementing new tools like backbone.js, there were very few tests, not great internal tooling to aid workflows, I wasn’t a great mentor, etc. A lot of what I did was because it worked once before, and not because I knew exactly how and why. My fourth year was when I got my first senior title, though.
I like when companies distinguish engineering levels by capability. E1 through E7 for example, where E5+ would be approximately what people imagine when they hear the term senior. Unfortunately everyone uses different leveling, so it’s hard to adhere to that. Our industry would benefit from standards.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#88I'm someone who qualifies as a junior developer even though I have a minor in CS, a BS in math, and a BS in mechanical engineering. My career has been an interesting journey. I've worked in sales, taught high school mathematic and computer science, and led technical SEO for multiple successful startups. I left all that in January to pursue my dream of becoming a full-time frontend developer. My wife and I have two da…
If you’re willing to “out” yourself publicly here, and assuming it’s not against any rules, you could post a link to your GitHub profile if you’ve got some open source work out there. Can’t promise it’ll help, but a lot more people read these comments than comment themselves… …a LOT more.
and/or an email address — would love to reach out!
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some startups are still requiring weird whiteboard questions sadly. Interviewed for a role recently and was asked to navigate a maze of obstacles and teleports with possible infinite loops, saying the minimum number of steps to leave the maze if it’s possible. That was for a test engineering role so… WTF.
I assume they wanted more than a DFS or BFS or similar with loop detection? The teleports sound like a fun twist, although I'm not sure they change that much since from a graph perspective presumably they're just another edge?
Yeah, but does that kind of problem really exist on a regular basis for a test engineer on that team? I doubt it.
Re: What would a recession mean for developers?
#90The market being harder for juniors seems correct from what I’m seeing. I’ve been looking frequently for the last month to see what’s out there, and virtually no one I’ve noticed is seeking junior developers.
I've been searching for my first junior/entry level position for 4 months now. There's very few junior/entry positions, and the ones that are posted are asking for 2-3 years experience, and a Bachelors/Masters/PHD...for web development. The market is either asking for senior developers at senior pay, or mid-senior level developers at entry level pay.
I'm not the kind of person who would job hop every 2 years like what seems to be common in the industry. If a company is willing to take me on and help train me and bring me up to speed, I'd stay with them for 4+ years. I'd think that would be very valuable to a company, but at least what I read on the internet...companies have come to expect a high turnover for developers and thus are unwilling to put in any effort into a new employee.