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Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters

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Re: Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters

#121

Post by gigatexal »

strict9 wrote: post #15

Not a surprise. When senior devs leave an org due to mismanagement or other reasons, it creates more work for those left behind. And it's become extremely difficult to find replacement for the seniors that left. Senior devs are nowhere to be found through regular applicant pipelines. They seem to be leaving as a result of reaching out to friends/former colleagues. Also relevant: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Exactly this. Every time an org loses a senior dev not only with lots of valuable skill and proven productivity and knowledge about how the company works etc it should be affected in the stock price if the place is publicly traded. That’s how much I think it hurts. The replacement cost to bring up other team members or to skill up and train juniors takes a lot of time and energy and money.

Now if this dev left because he or she was an asshole and everyone hated working with them then it could be a net net positive or even if on the whole is negligible then that’s a win in terms of team morale and productivity.

Re: Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters

#122

Post by vonmoltke »

WorldMaker wrote: post #91
ravenstine wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghosting after a take home test really bites. Either provide feedback or give an expectation on how long it will take to make a decision. Don't make me do free work and leave me hanging. But yeah, it does happen. I used to advocate for take home assignments, but now I really don't know what the answer is for directly assessing skill. Leetcode sucks, but take home assignments have their own problems. Maybe the problem…

Lawyers take a Bar exam until they pass it and then never have to take it again. They just have to stay up-to-date/active with the associated Bar (so many hours of training a year; etc). Real Engineers take a Fundamentals of Engineering exam followed by the Professional Engineering exam in their discipline/focus. Then Engineers have to stay with the associated Professional Society (so many hours of training a year; p…

> Then Engineers have to stay with the associated Professional Society (so many hours of training a year; paying dues; etc).

Speaking for the US, they do not. Joining a professional society is not a condition of licensure, nor is licensure required to join (I have been a member if IEEE since I joined in undergrad in 2001 and never even took the FE).

Continuing education requirements are set by the state you are licensed in. Texas (where I would have been if I had pursued licensure) requires a mere 15 Professional Development Hours per year, of which five may be self-directed. That is far, far below what our industry expects.

Also, I worked for four years as an electrical engineer without even being an EIT. Not all "real Engineers" require licenses.

> There is a software PE exam

Not anymore. Every state that once offered it has dropped it, and NCEES no longer maintains such a test.

> if that meant never needing to do another leetcode or take home assignment or whiteboard exercise in an interview cycle

Considering how low the requirements for maintaining a PE are after passing the initial exams, I don't think that has a snowball's chance in Hell of flying in this industry.

Re: Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters

#124

Post by zackmorris »

zackmorris wrote: post #107
rhacker wrote: post #14

It points to developer apathy. I sometimes wonder if that's just the global feeling at the moment. Everyone that's working on widget X suddenly doesn't care because of all the crises going on. Rampant inflation, extreme inequality. By continuing to work on widget x they are just supporting more of the same. Think people want society to change a bit before moving forward with being happy.

Thank you for succinctly articulating what I was trying to say long-form. I wallow in the negative as a result of decades of troubleshooting and negative reinforcement loops making me risk-averse. I'm over 50% confident that I will find a fatal flaw within seconds of using any tech for the first time. This is the lens through which I see the entire tech community and all of its failings. Loosely, the tech community a…

After meditating on my rant here yesterday, I had a couple more insights:

* Human beings evolved as hunter-gatherers working 2 hours per day to meet their basic needs, or about 1-2 days per week. We're designed to work hard in short bursts and save for lean times, not every single day in overcrowded communities just to scrape by. Until modern tech (and civilization itself) can provide that level of affluence for everyone on the planet through automation, it's self-evidently a bill of goods.

* To accomplish this, "People" should be substituted for "Developers" in the list above, and resources to achieve self-actualization should replace the tech-related subject matter.

Re: Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters

#125

Post by ravenstine »

WorldMaker wrote: post #113
ravenstine wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would pay $1000 to take one test so that I don't have to do another one for at least a decade. There's some real money to be made in selling the idea of accreditation to employers.

Bar exam and MCAT exam prep industries do seem to make good money in some states some years. An appeal to capitalism isn't the worst idea for how to sell the idea to employers. (ETA: Though arguably it is exactly how we got multiple companies like leetcode that are building the worst of both worlds, the standardized testing and extremely spotty employer buy-in across a handful of non-federated competitors.)

Leetcode is just based on the wrong premise. No one has to be a good developer or engineer to do leetcode. Even the people who run Leetcode don't need to be good engineers. Hosting a bunch of reductive code puzzles is a lot easier than creating structured exams and proctoring them. This isn't to say that the latter isn't feasible, but the incentive is there to fool the industry into thinking that the ability to solve puzzles is a good metric for technical skills.

Re: Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters

#126

Post by PainfullyNormal »

_xrp0 wrote: post #112
PainfullyNormal wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can't find a job with a "proven track record" in this market, you're doing something horribly wrong. Can you define both what "horribly wrong" looks like and what "not horribly wrong" looks like? Because I can't. The problem with a "proven track record" is that nobody believes what you write on your resume and nobody wants to bother looking at your code. That leaves hiring on "feel" and I have no idea what s…

> nobody believes what you write on your resume That's nonsense. It's quite straightforward actually: go through the CVs of engineers working at top companies and look how their resume looks different from yours. Chances are that they're actually selling themselves properly, using lots of jargon, using strong action verbs, and following the advice that has shown to work for the last decade.

Can I see your resume? :) I'm not trying to put you on the spot and I'll understand if you don't want to share. I'm just curious.

If you're feeling generous, you can email it to me at soft.desk0874@fastmail.com. If not, no hard feelings.

Re: Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters

#127

Post by jongjong »

_xrp0 wrote: post #72
jongjong wrote: post #13

I don't get it. I have a stellar resume and a proven track record in the public domain (open source but I've been struggling to find work and have accepted short term work for half my normal rate. There are so few opportunities, I had to switch to teaching people how to code.

If you can't find a job with a "proven track record" in this market , you're doing something horribly wrong. I'm willing to bet $100 that your resume is not stellar. Many people are bad at evaluating themselves. I've seen countless posts by juniors apparently "grinding hard" to get a job, and you just take 1 look at their resume and everything makes sense. Zero research on how to write resumes, zero prep, projects ar…

I started coding at 14 years old and have 10+ years of software development experience in a range of companies; both startups and corporations in a range of industries. I have 10 years of experience with open source. One of my projects has almost 6K stars on GitHub and almost 100K downloads per week. I even worked for a Y Combinator-backed company for over a year which had tons of big name SV investors including the famous actor Ashton Kutcher and Michael Jordan. My last job was leading the P2P team at a top blockchain company. The scalable P2P network solution which my team developed is still used 3 years after launch and never encountered any issues once launched (no vulnerabilities or bugs which needed patching). It only took 6 months for my team of 4 devs to build it from scratch. I'm willing to bet that it's among the simplest and best designed P2P libraries in the industry.

My record is impeccable. I build highly reliable software fast both as part of a group or as a solo freelancer. Much of my work is in the public domain on GitHub so it's easy to verify all this and check my code quality, automated tests and PR review history.

Re: Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters

#128

Post by cableshaft »

everforward wrote: post #82
Sevii wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really don't talk about landslide risk enough. A project with a high tech debt or operations burden is at high risk of losing enough people to zero out the project. Lose one or two people at the same time and suddenly the rest of the team is in an untenable situation. Maybe they were thinking casually about leaving before, but now that their burden has increased by 30% its more serious. Then you just keep losi…

I don't think that's unavoidable, but businesses typically fail to correctly reassess the value of those employees. If the business responded appropriately, I think people could be convinced to stay. E.g. if they offered: 1: An instant promotion with raise for anyone not at the max level for an IC, to acknowledge that they are now the most knowledgeable people on that product. 2: Double pay until those slots are fill…

> What usually gets offered is pittances. A 10% raise to work 30% more hours.

At least in my instance, I've never seen the 10% raise, just the 30% more hours bit.

Re: Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters

#129

Post by _xrp0 »

jongjong wrote: post #127
_xrp0 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't find a job with a "proven track record" in this market , you're doing something horribly wrong. I'm willing to bet $100 that your resume is not stellar. Many people are bad at evaluating themselves. I've seen countless posts by juniors apparently "grinding hard" to get a job, and you just take 1 look at their resume and everything makes sense. Zero research on how to write resumes, zero prep, projects ar…

I started coding at 14 years old and have 10+ years of software development experience in a range of companies; both startups and corporations in a range of industries. I have 10 years of experience with open source. One of my projects has almost 6K stars on GitHub and almost 100K downloads per week. I even worked for a Y Combinator-backed company for over a year which had tons of big name SV investors including the…

Well, that's an insane background, so that can't be the issue.

One question though: how many of those years 10 years have you worked in a full-time position?

Re: Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters

#130

Post by jongjong »

EarthLaunch wrote: post #71
jongjong wrote: post #13

I don't get it. I have a stellar resume and a proven track record in the public domain (open source but I've been struggling to find work and have accepted short term work for half my normal rate. There are so few opportunities, I had to switch to teaching people how to code.

Maybe it's due to syntax errors?

Haha good one! Unfortunately the edit button on HN disappears after some time. Missing brackets are among the easiest issues to find while coding.
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