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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

#81

Post by revlolz »

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…

>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.

I think the flaw here is in the question framing. It implies from the get-go there is a definitive qualitative difference between having CS degree and not AND that it is the determinate factor of quality or risk mitigation when the reality is both of these candidate are going to have behavioral differences you discover conducting proper interviews.

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

#82

Post by topkai22 »

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

As plenty of others have said, they see just reporting actual findings, not pushing anything. The stackoverflow developer survey, which is completely unaffiliated the government as far as I know, suggests >80% of professional developers have some form of higher educational attainment. That definitely meets my definition of “typically”

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#education-ed-...

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

#83

Post by shagie »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #8
d883kd8 wrote: post #5

What did this look like in 2011?

https://web.archive.org/web/20121002002433/http://www.bls.go... The BLS predicted 30% growth, but it looks like growth in number of positions from 2010-2022 was 77%. The old figure only included software developers. The new figure includes QA and testers.

The way the buckets are structured over the years has changed.

Looking at the history of https://web.archive.org/web/20221003111240/https://www.bls.g... and the 15-xxxx set shows a change in how the BLS regarded the various fields. If you go far enough back, there were computer programmers, software developers (systems), and software developers (applications) as the three buckets.

The most interesting part (to me) has been how the web has been moved in and out of different buckets.

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

#84

Post by jamesgreenleaf »

I know it's silly, but I can't help using the ratio of replies in HN "Who is Hiring" to "Who wants to be hired" threads as a finger in the air for the current market. Right now it's the lowest I've ever seen it at 1.8, while a couple years ago I remember it being between 4 and 5.

Edit: I say it's silly, and then refresh the home page and see this is at #2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33083279

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

#85

Post by yrgulation »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #73
yrgulation wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Not having a degree doesnt mean you cant be great or better than someone with a degree. A lot of trades have people that simply have a “feel” of how things work. Its a bit like car mechanics vs mechanical engineers. No matter how good a mechanic is they will rarely be good enough to actually understand why things are the way they are. A mechanic can fix any part of the car but the engineer will build that critical thing that makes the car possible.

Similarly with software engineering. Memorising good practice and following it is not difficult. Understanding why it is good practice and why it can be challenged is. A lot of the self taught folks stare at you like a brick the moment you step out of their knowledge area.

I dont want to sound patronising. I also met plenty of great developers without a degree, some even high school drop outs. But they rarely understood whats beneath the bonnet. They were absolutely able to deliver work and architect systems but it was always obvious that knowledge was based on what some popular dude wrote on a blog instead of actual knowledge.

The survey you posted doesnt show a breakdown per language.

Again, nothing wrong with not having a degree but saying that having a degree is a negative thing is just silly.

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

#86

Post by entropicdrifter »

mywittyname wrote: post #55
spacemadness wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Webdev is the bulk of software positions now, isn't it? Javascript and HTML/CSS are the first and second most popular languages according to Stack Overflow' Dev Survey, and several other web or web-adjacent languages like Typescript, Java, and PHP are not far behind.

As a senior full-stack dev currently in a back-end position, I've grown into the (semi-serious) opinion that a large number of web-devs have their jobs just because of the sheer amount of bikeshedding[0] that occurs around front-end code, frameworks, and UI/UX. Companies wouldn't need bloated front-end teams if they weren't constantly rewriting their webpages/apps to catch the latest trends.

That said, I've never been the type of guy you should be asking about what's cool or trendy, so maybe I'm just out of touch.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

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

#87

Post by lotsofpulp »

mywittyname wrote: post #59
lotsofpulp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BLS projections about individual jobs and payrates are a joke. They had pharmacist as a growth career at +10% from 2010 to 2020, whole year after year, entry level and hourly payrates went down, easily verifiable by reading online forums. How can that be? Then in 2020, they finally changed it to -3% growth, but due to the pandemic measures and people quitting the field, payrates have actually gone up. They should be…

BLS salary data comes from surveys of employers. I would expect that data to be much more accurate than forum posts. Also, growth in number of jobs is not necessarily correlated with salary changes. You have to also consider the growth in the number of people entering that field. A PharmD used to be seen as an easy pathway to a guaranteed six figure salary (back when that was a much more rare and significant mileston…

> BLS salary data comes from surveys of employers. I would expect that data to be much more accurate than forum posts.

I would expect it to be more biased towards employers. For example, pharmacists were complaining about only getting scheduled for 32 hours per week of work. That is a 25% reduction in pay.

They have also had to accept drastic decreases in quality of life at work, increasing their own personal liability for malpractice.

These kinds of things would only happen if the supply of pharmacists was outstripping demand of pharmacists.

> Also, growth in number of jobs is not necessarily correlated with salary changes.

For the purposes of their “job outlook” section, I do not see why it would not correlate. And not just salary, but pay to quality of life at work ratio, which is hard to define as a number.

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

#88

Post by topkai22 »

rr888 wrote: post #4

25% growth in the next ten years? Isn't that a slowdown in growth? I seem to remember the Uncle Bob video where # of devs is doubling every 5 years or so. OTOH I feel we're at peak now, the investment money is drying up and management will force efficiencies going forward.

I like Uncle Bob’s writing, but that number is just wrong. On the same BLS site you can grab the numbers: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#15-0000

In 2000 there were 1.2M people working in programming or closely related professions by my count. In 2021 there were 1.8M. Things are a little weird because they changed some definitions, but I think that I’m taking the stronger case.

25% growth in the US is actually slightly faster than the last 20 years.

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

#89

Post by taolegal »

foobarian wrote: post #60
mywittyname wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent the first ten or so years of my career without a degree. And I can say with certainty that jobs are substantially easier to come by now that I have a CS degree. I'm not sure if this is still the case for people, but I faced a lot of discrimination from management over my lack of degree. Especially managers who "inherited" me. Some of it was petty too, like all the other devs on my team were software "engineer…

Is this in Europe? In some countries especially EE people tend to be very ornery with their papers.

> In some countries especially EE people tend to be very ornery with their papers

can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

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

#90

Post by topkai22 »

ericmcer wrote: post #69
icedchai wrote: post #33

The last few companies I've worked for had zero testers or QA analysts. Testing was a side job for developers and product folks.

QA never meshed well with me. Their job seemed to be gaining context on what I was working on and then testing it for me, but if they caught a bug it was on me. QA catching something was treated as a negative reflection on the dev, so we still exhaustively tested everything before it got too QA, which made them seem pretty redundant.

You just perfectly described an effective QA process.
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