411–420 of 553 posts
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Hmm what makes you think software developers are not abused? Maybe in your world they are not, but it regular to hear about devs working 12-14 hours a day. With bosses and clients harassing them even at off hours.
You hear about that in "high status" organizations. Most companies cannot get away with that, and treat their developers much better.
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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".
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> We can’t even push to a git repo unless it has a linked work item/story/task/bug Exactly the same where I work. The pace of getting things done is absolutely glacial compared to what you know you could achieve if you had any agency. I think the only reason this organization I'm temporarily a part of can even compete is that all its competitors must be equally inefficient.
But when something major breaks, and the answer to the question of "why?" is ... "well, I just thought i'd make that change, but nobody asked for it" what happens then? I wouldn't want to be accountable in that situation. Every change carries risk.
You can do the change work in a feature branch and propose the idea after the fact. If there's interest "I've already done it." Stakeholders get a bit of instant gratification like their request just materialized into thin air. If they're not interested, don't mention it and let the work go unused, rack it up as professional development time and work.
I do this fairly often. If a decision has a bunch of real risk associated with it I make sure to get sign off and create an appropriate evidence trail to pass risk back up when it's passed down. Much of work is just passing risk and liability around to PYA.
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This seems to be a perspective that's exclusively silicon valley (perhaps large parts of the US) based. Not at all true in Europe at the least. Not that it's a bad job by any stretch of the imagination, but even low six figures is really rare in the EU for Software Development. Easiest is also highly subjective, if your job is making wordpress templates/sites then sure. If you're working on complexer systems then thi…
My company has noticed that good developers in Germany are cheaper than in India. Good is key here, you can get bad developers in India for very cheap (this might be good enough). The highest paid software positions in Germany are non-union jobs and the majority are not willing to leave the union for more money, which means they are refusing to do the work of a senior engineer, and this in turn means we can't use the…
How does one identify a well paying non-union employer? Noname companies in almost all cases pay much less than union employers.
A fascinating premise, and matches what I saw as an engineering director. The best just get bored and move on. I think many teams are unaware how much extra value is possible by retaining existing employees vs hiring new ones. Each year I'd try to make sure I was "making them an offer they couldn't refuse" with new interesting challenges, new tech, plenty of personal research time, as much pay increase as I could pos…
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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".
To me that's noise and not much else.
Something I don't think a lot of folks realize is that there's two parallel industries (and pipelines to jobs in the industry). They almost never overlap.
One in which recruiting is largely done by non-technical folks who match keywords of frameworks, and where rote and learning whatever library is seen as the objective (bootcamps come to mind).
The other one where CS fundamentals are seen as the priority, and where hiring focusses on finding people who posses the skill of acquiring new knowledge.
You can guess in which one Google and FAANG or whatever the acronym is now and Stanford/MIT exists.
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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…
> It's a bit like asking a carpenter how many years of experience they have with DeWalt cordless nail guns rather than ask about their house framing skills. This kind of logic only works for tech organizations that already have enough in-house domain expertise to onboard new programmers. The other day somebody asked me how to find a programmer to implement something for them. From a programming standpoint there was v…
It is even harder if you don't even know how to verify that person really is experienced with specific tool set.
So it goes like "pick your poison", hire generic dev and account for learning curve or spend money on recruiting fees/time for finding an expert. Where I would not be so quick to say "expert shouldn't cost too much" - because I can imagine expert taking less time but costing orders of magnitude more than generic dev.
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…
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You hear about that in "high status" organizations. Most companies cannot get away with that, and treat their developers much better.
Amazon's AWS is known for long hard sink or swim overtime, and they're the first letter in FAANG
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My company has noticed that good developers in Germany are cheaper than in India. Good is key here, you can get bad developers in India for very cheap (this might be good enough). The highest paid software positions in Germany are non-union jobs and the majority are not willing to leave the union for more money, which means they are refusing to do the work of a senior engineer, and this in turn means we can't use the…
> highest paid software positions in Germany are non-union jobs How does one identify a well paying non-union employer? Noname companies in almost all cases pay much less than union employers.
All I know is a lot of great engineers at my company are internationally refusing more pay to non union jobs. I.have no idea if it applies to other companies, or what the benifits are