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For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited having 14 years of experience and being up to date with development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc. I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis
The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and they’re correcting for that.
For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited having 14 years of experience and being up to date with development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc. I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis
In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position. Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI a…
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Not the parent commenter but I've performed a lot of resume reviews for people and also done a lot of hiring. Most resumes are not very good. Beyond the obvious problems like typos, there is a lot of bad advice on the internet that turns resumes into useless noise. Screen a lot of resumes and you'll get tired of seeing "Boosted revenue by 23% by decreasing deploy times by 64%." This communicates nothing useful and we…
> Screen a lot of resumes and you'll get tired of seeing "Boosted revenue by 23% by decreasing deploy times by 64%." This communicates nothing useful and we all know that revenue going up 23% YoY was not attributable to this single programmer doing anything at all. This is the "quantify everything" mantra career coaches have been repeating for decades. As the story goes, no company is going to care that you refactore…
It's the useless quantification that turns resumes into noise, combined with making claims that you changed revenue by yourself.
> You have to only write down things that moved some quantifiable business needle like revenue or signups, even if the link to that needle is tenuous. Obviously, this ends up penalizing hard working, talented devs who don't happen to be working in areas where wins are easily quantifiable.
Every hiring manager knows this game and sees right through it. You can't read 1000 resumes with claims of "Increased revenue by 13% by" followed by something that clearly was not the reason revenue increased 13% to become numb to it.
Nobody believes these.
The somewhat useful quantifications are things like "Reduced cloud spend by 50% by implementing caching". This can spark a conversation about how they diagnosed they issue, made a transition plan, ensured it was working, and all of the other things we want to hear about.
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I think some of this is probably attributed to being maintenance devs who don't build a lot of greenfield stuff. I got this way in one of my past jobs. I think us as devs really need to practice creating things from scratch from time to time. Working out those kinks is a good skill (less with AI) but also good practice for those baby components you'd need to make in an interview.
When I did tech interviews, I used to think I could just jump right in with an intermediate level question and go from there. But the reality is that most of the candidates I interviewed couldn't even answer a trivial question that just required a basic for-loop with an if-statement inside it. These are not pressure-cooker interviews where they need to balance a binary tree while having Baby Shark blasted at them on…
I've been around the block for over 3 decades. I've had a number of high level positions across both IC and management tracks. These days I'm very hands on keyboard across a number of clients. If you asked me to write a basic for loop or if statement, there's a small chance I'd flub the exact syntax if writing on a whiteboard. Both because I bounce between languages all day and wires get crossed on the fly, but also the standard interview pressure type arguments. Whereas if the test is "does this person understand what a for loop is and how it works?", then yes, I can easily demonstrate I do.
In real life I'm not going to take an interview where there's not already that degree of trust so if that questions comes up something is already wrong. But I'm sure there are interviewers in the world who'd fail someone for that.
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The equivalent of about $20/hr today for those wondering
Housing is the ultimate decider so I’d say that’s equivalent to at least 50 bucks today.
For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited having 14 years of experience and being up to date with development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc. I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis
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I generally tend to interview every year to see what's out there in the world (sometimes I find something worth switching for, other times not). I'm not even looking very hard but have had 4 interviews in the last month. Personally I think it's a bit more nuanced than senior vs junior (though it is very hard for juniors right now). What I've seen a lot of hunger for is people with a track record of getting their hand…
Shipping is only hard when you have to deal with all the loose ends "builders" leave lying around.
Large companies tend to over specialize and that’s where I see the “I’m a builder” types fall apart. That takes away agency, lowers skills, and removes variety from work. That’s when it stops being fun to me.
I would hope most people with the builder architype are otherwise fine to keep building and maintaining.