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What would a recession mean for developers?

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Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#101

Post by DeathArrow »

dorchadas wrote: post #63

This is something worrying me, looking for a junior role. I was a teacher for 5 years (math and physics) and recently went back to get a masters in Theoretical Physics and Applied Maths, mostly leaning towards the latter. Lots of data science-y stuff and mathematical modelling. Been applying to jobs for a while now, and no luck unfortunately. Wondering if I should just give up and go back to teaching, especially as I…

Why don't you search for jobs in the country you are living? It would be easier to find a job there than overseas.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#102

Post by DeathArrow »

If recession comes, wouldn't there be an incentive for companies to cut costly developer jobs in rich countries and move the development in countries with cheaper work force?

Having teams collaborating over borders, time zones, languages and accents does not work very good. Outsourcing to another company does not yield good results.

But big corporations can open subsidiaries in other countries, if they do not already have and move whole products there.

If that happens, the massive lay offs will push the wages down aggressively.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#103

Post by egfx »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #71
usrbinbash wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

> 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,

I don’t know how to do it. I would need dictionary.com to find out what a palindrome means and stackoverflow for the rest, but I’ve used and evaluated five different JavaScript frameworks in building full scale web apps. Would you hire me?

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#104

Post by b3morales »

DeathArrow wrote: post #93
BigJono wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lucked into my first job with a startup and never had to go through the job hunt as a junior candidate (other than through a few big company mass grad hire processes which were an absolute fucking joke, and thank god I didn't actually pass any of them), but this mirrors my experience with hiring juniors. Every time I've done it I've been inundated with candidates. You pretty much have the pick of the litter. Person…

>The problem is it's just not possible to train juniors the right way fast enough. I'm confident I can train almost anyone with basic programming aptitude to be a 95th percentile front-end dev, but it'll take a year or two, and my already average productivity will tank during it. Nobody taught me anything, apart my teachers at University. Nobody hand holded me. I was able to learn and grow by myself, by reading, appl…

I don't think parent was talking about hand-holding at all.

> You show them the application, you explain it to them, you give them time to look into it, you reply to their questions about the application and you give them tasks.

Exactly; this is the training. Choosing tasks that match the other person's level, and being available to give good guidance, takes time, effort, and some skill.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#105

Post by MisterBastahrd »

Silhouette wrote: post #34
TavsiE9s wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve heard the whole “money can’t be everything when deciding on a job” a couple of times when discussing salaries recently. Mostly from companies who realise they can’t or don’t want to compete with the market. Shrug and move on. They’ll learn eventually.

Money is at least understandable. It is a finite resource after all. What I really don't get is employers who are still pushing for other conditions that will deter good people from applying - things like annoying processes or insisting on hybrid working instead of allowing fully remote if there is no clear benefit to those policies.

It's true. We are based out of Dallas and we interviewed a great QA candidate this week from the East Coast who, when asked what the reason for looking for another job was, said that their employer had a hybrid policy, but after having experienced fully remote working, they never wanted to go back to that.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#106

Post by b3morales »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #96
vinyl7 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

If no one’s told you yet: the experience list on a job listing are a wish list, not a requirement list. Frequently it is a wildly unrealistic wish list. I have NEVER seen all of those requirements fulfilled.

This. Crucially, the actual interviewers/hiring committee may not have even read the job posting. They have the technical expertise and know what they are looking for; the HR/recruiters filtering at the front end are considerably less clueful. You do need to get past that filter, but after that, the bullet list is all but irrelevant.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#107

Post by DeathArrow »

vinyl7 wrote: post #100
DeathArrow wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of studies do you have? Do you know the basics of like CS, algorithms, data structures? Do you know a programming language at a decent level? For the field you are trying to get in, do you know some common used frameworks, libraries and tools? If the answer is yes to all, you shouldn't have trouble to find a job. If one of the answers is a no, then you have to solve that problem.

I'm mostly self taught. Been programming as a hobby for 10+ years, mostly focused on learning game development but have also done web development. I have "shipped" two Ludum Dare games done in C++, and I have a web app I recently developed with React/PHP/MySQL for an organization that is deployed. The only credential I have is a Full Stack Web development cert from a bootcamp at a big name university. The DSA stuff I…

Without formal education it is going to be a bit harder.

You can test yourself by seeing if you can answer typical interview questions which can be found online.

You can see if you can solve the stuff from Codility, Leetcode, Hackerranck in a reasonable amount of time.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#108

Post by redisman »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #87
viceroyalbean wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m hitting 15 years in the industry. I think I’m like 3x better at my job than 10 years ago when I first got my current title

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#109

Post by EduardoBautista »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #85
iLoveOncall wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s a basic data structure. I have been able to pass these questions without a formal University education just on logic alone. It’s just basic usage of objects in the case of a JavaScript implementation.

Re: What would a recession mean for developers?

#110

Post by kcartlidge »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #71
usrbinbash wrote: post #60

Earlier 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…

> My warm-up questions are usually something like "reverse a singly-linked-list" or "check if a string is a palindrome"

I've written sites, apps, ORMs, enterprise tools, code generators, FAAS platforms from scratch, exporters for DOCX and EPUB, etc etc for decades. I've been junior, mid, senior, lead of two teams. I've transitioned companies to cloud, created data warehouses, built BI universes. All sorts of stuff over the years.

Sounds like your hiring techniques would pass on me, as those whiteboard exercises would have me saying no thanks and ending the interview. Utterly pointless.

(and FYI that's from experience on both sides of the table as I've also been the recruiter interviewing from junior devs to team leads)

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