This reads more like a whiny “I didn’t get the job and i hate the ceo i saw on tv” rant than an honest critique of tech hiring. I can’t believe Medium expects people to pay this.
I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
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Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#112Well, there are some problems that make it hard to hire.
- Being in Outer Nowhere. It may be a nice place to live, but if you go there, you're trapped. No other employer unless you move.
- Being in an obscure technology niche. If you spend five years working on railroad locomotive motor control, you have a hard time getting a job afterwards.
- Going to a company that's in a mess and has no one with a clue. This is a setup for either overwork or failure.
- A staff job, rather than a line job. At a "tech" company, developers contribute to revenue. At a company that just has an in-house IT unit, developers contribute to cost.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#113As a college student, 1. is the one that worries the most. Automatic filtering is scary, and there's no way to test how these ATS systems are viewing my resume.
If you're a college student, you should be single minded on having at least one (and ideally two, since the first will be lower caliber) internships under your belt. This will get you past every single new grad filter screen. If you can do this and handle junior dev algorithm questions, you will have plenty of new grad offers.
Also, if you are even vaguely talking to a recruiter (e.g. via career fair) then they are not going to screen you using an automated system.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#114I was rejected by a startup because I didn't aks a question about the company and they thought that I was not interesting in the company.
RIP: All the time I took for completing the application writing a cover letter for the job.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#115Things companies control: 1 - Pay 2 - Work life balance (incl. remote work) 3 - Strong peers 4 - Control in _how_ things are done for senior developers 5 - Efficiency I'm pretty sure that most companies are, at best, 1/5.
I moved from a 2/5 to a 4.5/5. Doesn't mean it was necessarily a satisfying move. There's 6 - great mission and product, which the first one had and the new job is weak in, but it factors for a lot more than the other 5 in attractiveness of the job, at least for me
This. I never understood The attractiveness of working for Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, etc. other then money. How is the Dev work there helping society at large?
Once, I got approached for a job at Amazon to help "build the next big e-billing system"... What an uninspiring thing to do.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#116> Furthermore, if you really want a C++ developer you can just expect a developer to learn C++ on the job if they have any adjacent experience with any other language. Is this really accurate? C++ is a very different language than even Java, not to mention Python or JS. Languages have their own quirks and attributes that often matter at some point. Especially C++. I am on a team where we are constantly building stuff…
I think if you want somebody to learn the syntax of C++, and more/less understand some code, then that would work.
But many places are using C++ only because something about the problem domain requires it, often performance. Understanding C++ and cpu architectures well enough to write high performance code is a completely different beast than just understanding c++ well enough to write code.
Understanding C++ syntax is a long ways from writing C++ that's not full of memory corruptions, as others have mentioned.
So it's not just "train somebody in C++", it's "train somebody in C++ and writing memory-safe C++ and writing fast C++".
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never been on the other side of things, but it's always fascinated me that so many people who have say things like this. It's hard for me to fathom that such a large proportion of candidates are terrible.
Why is that hard to see? With a lot of simplification about "good" and "bad" candidates... It's the natural outcome of there being a very small group of bad candidates who apply for a lot of jobs, and a very large group of good candidates who don't apply for jobs very often. What if there's only 50 bad candidates in a particular region, but they all apply for every posted job opening? That's a lot of chaff to get thr…
Really good point. The really good candidate/engineer/whatever might end up only doing 3-10 interviews over 10 years, or less. They do well and get rewarded where they are at, and get picked up quickly when they do interview - and with a good offer.
The really badly interviewing candidate might end up doing 50 a month for a year before they stop looking - and be on the market in another 6 months to a year, where they do it all again.
You'll see the bad pennies a whole lot more often than the good ones.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#118This person sounded really experienced, so I looked them up on LinkedIn. 7 months at their first company. 9 months at their current company. That's it, aside from non-programming jobs before their bootcamp. The whole thing reads like inventing scenarios that didn't happen or embellishing them. > A bad interview is when you ask them the definition of some specific thing in some specific framework like “Tell me what a…
If he had only that much experience and he applied for some senior position that required years of knowledge, I'm not sure I would curse at him, but I would definitely be really angry at him and whoever let his resume turn into an interview.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pseudonymous for a reason but here's a list of companies, none of which I am employed at, that have similar pay and issues with staffing: Uber, Doordash, Asana, AirBnB, Pinterest, LinkedIn and literally so many more. Especially if you are willing to accept mature but not yet liquid equity and then there's Stripe, Airtable, Robinhood and so many more. Post your resume. Tried to go to your personal website but it w…
I updated recently my LinkedIn profile, seeing if changing the wording of stuff helps. https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamedesigner
Your profile lacks clear coding experience.
And your highlighted recent experience as a game designer would just make me disqualify from any engineering role.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#120> Furthermore, if you really want a C++ developer you can just expect a developer to learn C++ on the job if they have any adjacent experience with any other language. Is this really accurate? C++ is a very different language than even Java, not to mention Python or JS. Languages have their own quirks and attributes that often matter at some point. Especially C++. I am on a team where we are constantly building stuff…
I can't comment on whether this holds for C++, but I've experienced it at my current position with Elixir. While it's a high level language like most programming languages I know, it's still a large paradigm shift to a purely functional language. And yet, I could get to the level where I could make useful contributions to our backend within a few days. I went through Elixir's "Getting Started" guide, and afterwards,…
normally i would agree with you but no. not for C++. having worked with C++ in the past I would not venture to say I know C++ today (it’s been a while) or have high hopes that I would just pick it up in a few weeks like any other normal language