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We will never have enough software developers (2020)

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Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#331

Post by xwolfi »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #317
alephxyz wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to blame students when they look at job postings and all that they see advertised is positions for programmers using languages X, Y and Z, or when they see tweets and blog posts by hotshot programmers about frameworks A and B. The entire industry focuses way too much on 'experience with tool X' as a proxy for 'technical skill Y'. It's a bit like asking a carpenter how many years of experience they have with…

Worse, industry is routinely bashing on CS degrees because they don't turn people into framework X-ready candidates. It's getting a little tiring just how little credit is given to the idea of "maybe these tools can be learned in a reasonable amount of time by people with a degree showing they can pick things up rather quickly".

Yes but I interview for a role where we dont have set languages: we're a small optimisation team working across system when they reach capacity bottleneck and we do JS, C#, Java, C++, PL/SQL fixes completely transparently, we've slowly learned that languages really dont matter all that much for performance tuning as much as programmers mishandling which are identical in all of them (hash map loops, abusive recursion, over abstraction leading to extreme indirection, serialization laziness producing giant message transfers, database transaction mismanagement, zero profiling skills, and the main one: please stop frigging saying it's the garbage collector and look at your crap for real lol).

When we recruit we ask "if we tell you no more Spring and we'll work on any language as long as there's a problem to solve, how do you feel". Most either say they d feel horribly sad, or dont even comprehend how it's possible. Some are indifferent because they need the job. Still looking for the guy that says "anything can be learned in a reasonable amount of time" so it s not that obvious I suppose :(

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#332

Post by kansface »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #246
dt3ft wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can’t even push to a git repo unless it has a linked work item/story/task/bug. So, in order to say, upgrade packages or refactor difficult to read code, the work item needs to be approved by a non-tech PO. Guess how much gets done outside of planned/micromanaged? Answer: next to nothing.

I get why bureaucracy is a total pain, getting work approved by stakeholders constantly ... But the actual ticketing/PR system? Change requires control. The actual issue is not _using_ that control tool to get the right things done. If basic technical debt issues are not an easy sell in your org, that's the real problem and one that should be handled by senior/dev manager. A big red flag for me is any org that doesn'…

> But the actual ticketing/PR system? Change requires control.

The ticket system isn't for engineers. If it were for the engineers, they wouldn't be continually forced to use it. The ticket system is for the legibility of management or sometimes compliance (other flavors of management). This visibility is at the expense of the productivity of the engineers themselves.

> Change requires control

No, fundamentally, change is gated by control. The more control, the less the change, with sufficient levels of "control" leading to no change.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#333

Post by cupofpython »

alephxyz wrote: post #302
goldenshale wrote: post #240

I think this article hits on some truths and gets a handful of things wrong. First, they are correct that we are in a dynamic profession that requires constant learning and expanding. No doubt the people who choose to stay in software are likely to be people who are curious, life-long learners where this is a benefit of the profession rather than a drawback. That said, one thing I noticed from teaching computer scien…

It's hard to blame students when they look at job postings and all that they see advertised is positions for programmers using languages X, Y and Z, or when they see tweets and blog posts by hotshot programmers about frameworks A and B. The entire industry focuses way too much on 'experience with tool X' as a proxy for 'technical skill Y'. It's a bit like asking a carpenter how many years of experience they have with…

>The entire industry focuses way too much on 'experience with tool X' as a proxy for 'technical skill Y'

Strongly emphasizing this. This is HIGHY applicable to the analytics environment. As a business analyst who specialized in mostly ad-hoc development because it was the most value-add area at the companies I worked with.. I had a lot of trouble finding new work because I didnt use Tableau, or Power BI, or Looker, etc. I was some sort of fool for doing everything in SQL, Excel, and Python.

IMO the tools are great, and you need a much lower level understanding of analytical concepts to get value from them. But for some reason people kept getting the impression I would somehow be less effective with them because I dont use them. And I had trouble correcting them with the limited bandwidth that exists to communicate with a single applicant in the hiring process. If I tried to get right to the point, I felt myself appearing arrogant.

The carpentry analogy is very similar to how i described it. "I am currently using a ruler and screwdriver, and these tools provide lasers and power drills"

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#334

Post by plutonorm »

onion2k wrote: post #308
plutonorm wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like needing to ask to go to the toilet. It's degrading. Utterly disrespectful. You expect people to stick around?

Updating a dependency, refactoring some code, or just making a 'simple' change sets off a chain of events that affect other people. The other devs need to review the code, the QA team need to test it, and then regression test the rest of the app, the devops team need to deploy it, the legal team need to update the legal documentation that lists the licenses for the dependencies the code has, the technical writers nee…

Once you have technical decisions being taken by non technical managers you are sunk. It's hugely insulting to experienced engineers and it's a major reason that people leave. People crave respect and if they perceive that they aren't getting it, they will do what they can to get out. You cannot micromanage engineers in this fashion and expect to have good retention.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#335

Post by kerblang »

goldenshale wrote: post #240

I think this article hits on some truths and gets a handful of things wrong. First, they are correct that we are in a dynamic profession that requires constant learning and expanding. No doubt the people who choose to stay in software are likely to be people who are curious, life-long learners where this is a benefit of the profession rather than a drawback. That said, one thing I noticed from teaching computer scien…

Not to be rude, but did you finish reading the article? The whole point was that high-aptitude learners give up. In fact I don't agree that re-learning the same tasks over and over with the zillionth framework iteration is a rewarding learning experience. It makes perfect sense to change careers instead.

And as music goes, you sound like the record companies that thought everyone should listen to disco for the next 50 years...

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#336

Post by daveslash »

svachalek wrote: post #329
62951413 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last 20 years I have seen mostly ultra-fast depreciation of SE _interviewing_ skills. After the first ten years software development becomes quite intuitive and you internalize all those best practices. You can be trusted to start a new service from an empty git repository. Later it gets incremental, there's a lot of path dependency in languages and frameworks and few things come out of the blue. Those that do…

Very true. This stuff started at places like Google and Facebook and it makes a sort of sense for them as right or wrong they're very focused on hiring new college grads. With no real work experience to speak of you can do a lot worse than hire the ones that show they can apply their CS coursework to leetcode problems. But doing the same to workers with 10 years of real world experience doesn't make nearly as much se…

Yeah. I agree. I have "Cracking the Coding Interview" on my bookshelf. There's a lot of very good stuff in it. I enjoy thumbing through it. But I keep waving it at my boss saying "I will _not_ do this to people with several years of experience ~ This book is _not_ going to be my blueprint for interviewing"

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#337

Post by InefficientRed »

cs137 wrote: post #10

There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to be any good, SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional, and they hit a salary/challenge plateau quick... after which, the…

> do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?

LOL Jira has nothing on billing in 15 minute increments.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#338

Post by xwolfi »

eropple wrote: post #197
dgb23 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a junior become a senior? By trying stuff that cannot do well yet and making mistakes.

This is really important. At my first job, in 2010 or so, we were using Servlets. Not just Servlets, but Servlets with some home-rolled shims to make it act like Servlets 1.0 in a distinctly post-1.0 world. Doing pretty much anything in there was slow, and I realized it at the time. So during a hack week I built an MVC layer on top, with routing that didn't involve XML files and just--made it generally better . Or so…

That s the problen with juniors yes, you have to drive them towards productivity while not killing their enthusiasm.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#339

Post by csomar »

whimsicalism wrote: post #318
Goronmon wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...explain to me how a hash map works. For get about explaining the finer points of sorting algorithms I've been in software development for 15 years and being able to explain either of these things has never come up and I probably wouldn't be able to give a decent answer without reviewing the topics specifically.

Yes, companies are hiring for competency not tenure or years of life lived while holding job. If you want the latter, I have heard it is more structured that way in Japan and much of Europe. I would expect most people I hire to be able to explain how a hash map works.

Depends on what exactly your company is doing? Why do you care if an applicant understand how a hash map works; and what's particular about a hash map?

I'd care more about an applicant understanding the concept of a hash; or hashing in general. If an applicant shows that he understands that a hash is a magical and fascinating mathematical concept; and it can have uses in Information/Computers, that would be more interesting (to me) than someone who memorized a hash map definition.

He can always learn about a particular application of hashing (hash map, for example). But the latter shows aptitude and capacity to learn these later on the job.

Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)

#340

Post by InefficientRed »

rootusrootus wrote: post #92
pojzon wrote: post #18

Brother is teaching at the University among other things and from the stories he sometimes tells me: I do not worry about agism or work at all. Lets just say that when we were studing, most ppl were not the brightest tool in the shed. Now its supposedly many many times worse.

Agreed. I hire interns every year, and I am continually astounded at just how incompetent so many people are who are months away from finishing a master's in computer science. On paper, I wouldn't expect a shortage of software developers. But as a practical matter, more than half of everyone I talk to who is about to finish their CS degree is very clearly not going to last long in this field. Not just because they ar…

> so many people are who are months away from finishing a master's in computer science

Because by hiring masters degree interns you're not exactly scraping the cream off the top...

Masters degrees in Computer Science -- unless used as an immigration thing -- make no sense.

The make no sense for the research route -- in CS in the USA, you go straight to a (zero tuition + living wage stipend) PhD from undergraduate. No reason to pay for a master's degree.

The make no sense for the SWE route either.

Masters students are mostly in it for either a domestic degree or because they couldn't find a (good enough) job out of undergraduate.

Most departments know this and treat their MS program as a total cash cow.

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