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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)

#521

Post by trashtester »

lmm wrote: post #482
trashtester wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe some HR managers believe that empathy and "EQ" are more important than IQ? Maybe they even think that intelligence is a social construct invented by the Patriarchy for the purpose of oppressing people who are not "cis white males"? Who knows, maybe for some, these ideas may even have been part of their education....

> Maybe some HR managers believe that empathy and "EQ" are more important than IQ? > Maybe they even think that intelligence is a social construct invented by the Patriarchy for the purpose of oppressing people who are not "cis white males"? Are you agreeing or disagreeing with the person you replied to?

Neither, I simply don't see how it is relevant (or even very "intelligent") to stick a categorical "stupid"-label on HR.

HR is a bit like IT support. Some companies will have a lower standard when hiring for such roles, others will have as high or possibly higher standards when hiring SRE's than when hiring developers.

And even if it should be correct that SWE's score a few points higher, on average, than HR managers, I see no utility in making a fuss about that. To the extent that it has a market value, salaries will reflect that.

Now, should HR staff start to act unprofessionally themselves, things change. For instance, if individuals within HR start to advocate for lower wages to or other actions against individuals or groups they feel resentment against, then that is a problem.

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

#522

Post by jacobyoder »

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…

> I hadn't understood how the people on the team thought about web development and it wasn't a better fit for them. They didn't feel like there was a problem, so a solution didn't make sense.

There's got to be a limit to this line of justification though. Lots of people have just plain wrong ideas about 'web development', so catering to their ideas doesn't serve anyone well (except, perhaps, those people, who in the short term don't have to learn anything correctly).

A colleague shares stories of his team who don't grasp the difference between GET and POST, don't understand the term idempotency, believe that 'web dev' testing only means 1 thing, etc. There's... 5 of 6 of them, and only one of him, so... much stuff ends up staying 'wrong', and the 'wrongness' in each section of the code ends up compounding 'wrongness' in other systems/features as they're being added. This matches how this team thinks about web/software development. But it's not in any way beneficial.

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

#523

Post by papito »

DantesKite wrote: post #360
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…

> No doubt the people who choose to stay in software are likely to be people who are curious, life-long learners The article showed the opposite effect though. Curious, life-long learners stop working in software development because they have to constantly learn new skills and believe they can get more bang for their buck when they can invest in skills that don’t lose their value over time.

I once got excited about ExtJS, the way it created a desktop-like experience in the browser, and I said to myself, "I will learn this, all of it, I will become an expert. Tips and tricks, best practices, the works".

After six months of this, ExtJS 4 came out, which was essentially a totally new framework. Everything I learned was not only not applicable, it had to be actively unlearned.

The lesson here is: become good and proficient at something, but don't focus on becoming a ninja in one particular transient tech. There is value in becoming a Jedi of Unix build-in tools, or more persistent technologies like Git, for example.

Also, this is a bigger problem in the Javascript echosystem, where the hype cycles are more intense than in, say, Python. I checked out my Flask project from seven years ago and it's ready to rock.

I get the thing about constant learning, but learning in this industry used to be cumulative. Now it's a hamster wheel. You are learning how to solve the same problems, in a different, presumably in a "new" way.

People seem to be spending more time coming up with catchy names for their projects than making sure this is all sustainable.

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

#524

Post by mwcampbell »

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…

Where do you think your understanding went wrong initially? You said you realized that doing anything in the old system was slow. Was it not actually slow? Was the slowness not relevant because there weren't actually that many routes? Were your coworkers resigned to having some minimum level of tedium in web development? Or something else?

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

#525

Post by highwaylights »

Valakas_ wrote: post #517
mettamage wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need data for this. More importantly, we need data for how tough it is to get certain jobs. That means stuff like: * Time spent on finding a job * Time spent on studying in order to attain a job * Actual amount of hours worked (hard to get accurate data on it) * Actual amount of effort per hour (hard to operationalize) It's a very tough discussion to have, but I have a gut feeling that you're simplifying too much…

SWE is easy as fuck for the amount of money it gives. Compare that to physics, chemistry, bio or mechanical engineering. When I see SWE saying they know 10 different languages I see someone who is bragging that they know how to sum 1+1 1+2 1+3 (...) 1+10 No wonder people with no degree can learn how to code in a few months and get a nice paying job. Try that with any of the others I mentioned and you get nothing. Not…

Unsure if the conclusion here naturally follows your premise.

Doctors require lots of qualifications which is a barrier to entry into the career. This significantly drives up compensation.

Are most doctors really more than human frontends to webmd? Probably not.

Source: my doctor told me this (really).

Extending this to SWE. A degree may not be necessary to enter the field anymore, but I don't see how it should be less of a requirement than for a regular consulting GP. Both are expected to understand fundamentals well, and both can cause harm if they do their job badly - I'd argue the SWE can cause a lot more harm to be honest.

If it seems like I'm suggesting qualifications should be mandatory for SWEs, I'm not. I'm saying other professions are revered in a way that we aren't - and I don't see the evidence it's especially warranted.

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

#526

Post by Chris2048 »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #513
Frost1x wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you consider such behavior 'AWOL' then you've bought into modern development micromanagement and may be part of the issue. That perspective doesn't believe any degree of autonomy and desires drone teams who just crank out on orders. I would never work in such a role or environment, but to each their own I suppose. There's also an assumption buried in there that any time spent working is somehow owned by you, your…

> Part of the issue What issue? My projects are delivered on time, on budget and to the customers expectations without undue risk or unpredictability. That's my job. Nobody on my teams would say I micromanage them, everyone has a large degree of autonomy within a framework of shared goals and shared values that keeps efforts working towards cohesive results. With autonomy comes responsibility to the team, business, c…

> Nobody on my teams would say I micromanage them

Perhaps that's b/c you are apparently in a position to get rid of people who "go AWOL" despite maintaining "a large degree of autonomy".

If autonomy is prefixed on "within a framework of shared goals and shared values" then why do you think individuals can't do work based on their own conception of those shared goals/values, rather than requiring signoff first? Autonomy is being able to make (and execute) decisions on your own (possibly based on shared information/value/etc) - requiring signoff is not autonomy, it's merely the ability to participate in decision making.

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

#527

Post by Chris2048 »

glouwbug wrote: post #411
bluGill wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Second letter? Unless you meant to say Facebook.

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

#528

Post by djvdq »

klausa wrote: post #300
djvdq wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about moving to Germany from Poland. I was surprised that devs there has such low wages in comparison to cost of living. I abandoned the idea after it turned out my QoL will decrease quite a lot even I'd get more money than I've now

I'm curious what numbers you've heard, my quality of life here is significantly higher than it was in Warsaw, but I was making relatively much less back then.

I'm the "worse" type of developer - I'm working with test automation so salary is a bit lower than for "normal" devs. But what I've heard 60k EUR is what I can get (I was reading about Berlin - I've also read that e.g. Dresned has the same wages as I have now). But this money will be for my whole family (wife is staying home with childrens right now and for some more time before they'll go to the kindergarten) so I also will need bigger appartment (=more expensive). And after my rough calculations it turned out that our QoL will probably drop. Not that it will be _bad_ but visibly worse than it's now.

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

#529

Post by Chris2048 »

sirsinsalot wrote: post #254
fmakunbound wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why is it any better if someone further removed from the change is accountable instead? Major breaks shouldn't be avoided by avoiding change, They should be avoided by having strong QA process & support - it shouldn't be a single-person accountability.

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

#530

Post by Chris2048 »

voxic11 wrote: post #196
dubswithus wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if you do it anyway and don't put it on the board?

In my company it depends on the repo but worst case is you get arrested for making unapproved changes to regulated sports betting systems.

In the unlikely event that such a repo gets deployed to prod without any oversight?
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