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US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

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Re: US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

#71

Post by diob »

yrgulation wrote: post #57
lofatdairy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there was a comment on HN once to the effect of "Imagine you had 2 candidates, same work experience, both at a fairly prestigious company, one with a degree, one without, which do you hire? Personally, I think the fact that the non-degree holding one is more likely to be the better hire, just because of how much harder they had to work to get into that position". Not saying that not having a degree is somehow…

A lot of software development is just bricklaying. Issue tho is that reading on a forum about a design pattern or good practice doesnt make you a good engineer. Neither does a pdf certificate issued by a “bootcamp”. Thats why the webdev world has ended up with tons of poorly designed libraries and frameworks and each day there’s a new library coming out. Folks have no clue what they are doing, they just follow trends…

I think it's more due to Sturgeon's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law).

It's not unique to any one thing / field / area.

Re: US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

#72

Post by ReptileMan »

dc-programmer wrote: post #2

“Software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers typically need a bachelor’s degree in computer and information technology or a related field. Some employers prefer to hire developers who have a master’s degree.“ Interesting that the government continues to peddle credentialism for software developers. I personally think a CS degree is still a strong positive signal but it’s hardly a requirement anymore

And of course in the real world the problems most developers waste our time have nothing to with CS.

Like xaml live preview somehow disappeared in my visual studio... And everything short of windows reinstall - it is still missing. Without errors or nothing. Please Mr HR that wants people with CS - send one of those to help me.

Re: US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

#73

Post by entropicdrifter »

yrgulation wrote: post #57
lofatdairy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there was a comment on HN once to the effect of "Imagine you had 2 candidates, same work experience, both at a fairly prestigious company, one with a degree, one without, which do you hire? Personally, I think the fact that the non-degree holding one is more likely to be the better hire, just because of how much harder they had to work to get into that position". Not saying that not having a degree is somehow…

A lot of software development is just bricklaying. Issue tho is that reading on a forum about a design pattern or good practice doesnt make you a good engineer. Neither does a pdf certificate issued by a “bootcamp”. Thats why the webdev world has ended up with tons of poorly designed libraries and frameworks and each day there’s a new library coming out. Folks have no clue what they are doing, they just follow trends…

>Folks have no clue what they are doing, they just follow trends.

And you think that a degree helps with that? I've had coworkers with MS in comp-sci who had no idea how to implement stuff in a practical, efficient manner, and other coworkers with no degree who were able to grasp the best practices from the get-go. I don't think the degrees are the problem. The problem is that the demand for software engineers has wildly outpaced our society's ability to produce quality ones, regardless of their educational path.

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority (80%) of professional software developers already have a bachelor's degree or higher: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021/#education-ed...

Re: US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

#74

Post by ravenstine »

lofatdairy wrote: post #21
dc-programmer wrote: post #2

“Software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers typically need a bachelor’s degree in computer and information technology or a related field. Some employers prefer to hire developers who have a master’s degree.“ Interesting that the government continues to peddle credentialism for software developers. I personally think a CS degree is still a strong positive signal but it’s hardly a requirement anymore

I think there was a comment on HN once to the effect of "Imagine you had 2 candidates, same work experience, both at a fairly prestigious company, one with a degree, one without, which do you hire? Personally, I think the fact that the non-degree holding one is more likely to be the better hire, just because of how much harder they had to work to get into that position". Not saying that not having a degree is somehow…

Both could have worked just as hard, but a college education means a lot less than it did in the past, and even can come with negative connotations. In terms of computer "science", I would consider a degree mostly irrelevant to whether someone is qualified, though for junior developers I would have to consider the amount of unlearning that will need to be done in contrast to self-taught developers who didn't experience 2-4 years of indoctrination.

Re: US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

#75

Post by ghaff »

mitchellpkt wrote: post #51
chrisweekly wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"patio11s law"?

Patio11’s Law: The software economy is bigger than you think, even when you take into account Patio11’s Law. https://secondbreakfast.co/patio11-s-law

Although a lot of it probably isn't classic programming in isolation. I happened to be looking at my undergrad's course catalog a few months back for some reason. I was really struck by the number of non-CS engineering and science degrees that are basically something like Chemistry + Computers. This has long been true to some limited degree; I took a FORTRAN course as part of my mechanical engineering degree (though that was pretty much the only time I touched a computer undergrad). But it's certainly much more pronounced today.

Re: US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

#76

Post by rglover »

ericmcer wrote: post #66
rglover wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:wave: https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick (But I sincerely hope it's not a fad as I've designed it to be the antithesis to the rabbit chasing and dogmatic nonsense that's plagued JS the last decade or so).

Looks cool, I feel like comparing it to React/Vue isn't totally fair though, it seems closer to something like Next.js.

Thanks for taking a look. I agree, I'll add that to the comparison stuff soon.

Are there any others you'd like to see/think would be helpful?

Re: US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

#77

Post by shagie »

tcmart14 wrote: post #9
dc-programmer wrote: post #2

“Software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers typically need a bachelor’s degree in computer and information technology or a related field. Some employers prefer to hire developers who have a master’s degree.“ Interesting that the government continues to peddle credentialism for software developers. I personally think a CS degree is still a strong positive signal but it’s hardly a requirement anymore

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it is peddling. I am guessing they get a large part of this data from scraping job postings. Sure, companies will be willing to look at people who don't have formal education, which is great. But most job posting probably still have the wording "required or preferred or strongly preferred." If they are scraping data from job postings, then their statement is completely reasonab…

The BLS page on their data collection: https://www.bls.gov/oes/

> The Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program produces employment and wage estimates annually for nearly 800 occupations. These estimates are available for the nation as a whole, for individual states, and for metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas; national occupational estimates for specific industries are also available.

On this page is https://www.bls.gov/oes/mb3-methods.pdf

> Probability sample panels of about 180,000 to 200,000 establishments are selected semiannually. Responses are obtained by mail, Internet or other electronic means, email, telephone, or personal visit. Respondents report their employees’ job titles or occupations across 12 wage ranges. The job titles and descriptions are used to classify workers into occupations in the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system.

> Estimates of occupational employment and wage rates are based on six panels of survey data collected over a 3-year cycle. The final in-scope sample size when six panels are combined is approximately 1.2 million establishments. Total 6-panel unweighted employment covers approximately 80 million3 out of the total employment of over 140 million4.

They're not scraping. They are calling up a hundreds of thousands of companies and asking them "how much are you paying people with this classification?"

They occasionally redo the classifications based on industry trends.

Currently, the programmer related job listings https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm#15-0000

    15-1251 Computer Programmers
    15-1252 Software Developers
    15-1253 Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers
    15-1254 Web Developers
    15-1255 Web and Digital Interface Designers
(note that the OOH and OES can get out of sync)

Go back to 2020 and you'll see https://web.archive.org/web/20200508015238/https://www.bls.g...

    15-1251  Computer Programmers
    15-1256  Software Developers and Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers
    15-1257  Web Developers and Digital Interface Designers
And going further back, in 2014 https://web.archive.org/web/20140704000413/http://www.bls.go...

    15-1131  Computer Programmers
    15-1132  Software Developers, Applications
    15-1133  Software Developers, Systems Software
    15-1134  Web Developers
And even further back, you won't see the Web Developers https://web.archive.org/web/20060813114102/http://www.bls.go...

    15-1021 Computer Programmers
    15-1031 Computer Software Engineers, Applications
    15-1032 Computer Software Engineers, Systems Software
These classifications are buckets that the BLS creates trying to loosely get a single mode in the wage data (if there is a bimodal distribution of the wage data, then there are two different classifications).

When someone applies on a work visa, they have to fit into a bucket somewhere. The definition of that bucket determines which type of visa they may be approved for. If it requires a degree, then its the H-1B. If it doesn't require a degree, its likely a H-2B... and that in turn leads to other implications (the H-1B is dual intent and can lead to a green card while the H-2B isn't).

Re: US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

#78

Post by ticviking »

hebrox wrote: post #62
tra3 wrote: post #23

I've been startled to find out that the global population is stabilizing or is actually reducing [0]. To me that means that any shortages that are apparent now (and Software Dev shortage has been trumpeted about for years) will continue into the future. If you look at the demographics of US [1], you see that dip below the age of 30, so there are fewer folks coming online to take the jobs of the people retiring. Of co…

With a declining population, wouldn’t you expect less demand?

Retirement means that the decline in demand lags a great deal behind the decline in supply.

Re: US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

#79

Post by shagie »

spacemadness wrote: post #38
beckingz wrote: post #17

"Overall employment of software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers is projected to grow 25 percent from 2021 to 2031, much faster than the average for all occupations." Job Security. As long as you learn whatever new fad frameworks replace React.

For webdev. There are other areas of software than web. It’s hard to tell that’s true reading HN sometimes.

Incidentally, web developers are a different job classification. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... and https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151254.htm

Re: US Job Outlook for Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers

#80

Post by Melatonic »

lofatdairy wrote: post #21
dc-programmer wrote: post #2

“Software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers typically need a bachelor’s degree in computer and information technology or a related field. Some employers prefer to hire developers who have a master’s degree.“ Interesting that the government continues to peddle credentialism for software developers. I personally think a CS degree is still a strong positive signal but it’s hardly a requirement anymore

I think there was a comment on HN once to the effect of "Imagine you had 2 candidates, same work experience, both at a fairly prestigious company, one with a degree, one without, which do you hire? Personally, I think the fact that the non-degree holding one is more likely to be the better hire, just because of how much harder they had to work to get into that position". Not saying that not having a degree is somehow…

Not sure I agree with that. The non degree holder could be better definitely at certain specific parts of software engineering (mainly because they potentially had 4 more years and more time to dedicate to learning it) but the person with a bachelors degree will likely have had a more robust social network and broader general knowledge. In my opinion graduate degrees are when the utility drops off a cliff (except of course when you absolutely NEED that specific graduate knowledge - then it is essential). There is a ton you get with the added bachelors degree that is not at all related to your field and a network of friends in unrelated fields to your own also broadens your knowledge significantly. Software Engineers do not work in a vacuum just coding all day - they need to of course also be excellent general communicators and collaborators and there is real value in being able to translate high level technical concepts into language that less technical people can understand.

That being said the gatekeeping of jobs to only people with degrees (especially considering how expensive it is in the modern world) is absolutely a problem. But I think that is more down to the cost of education (in an ideal world higher education would be free just as high school is). My bachelors degree is not at all related to the field I work in now but it gives me a huge leg up compared to pre college me.

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