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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

#131
post #97

The article doesn't mention the #1 problem with tech hiring: leetcode. Some advice for recruiters: try starting your emails with "NO LEETCODE" in the subject line and watch your response rate from senior experienced engineers skyrocket! There is an artificial "shortage" caused by this barrier.

>senior experienced engineers Companies use Leetcode because they don’t want to pay for experience.

There are also a lot of engineers out there with 1 year of experience x 10 (or even 20 times), or even 20 years of experience with some narrow niche technology that no longer applies - but want to be paid like they have been keeping on top of things and learning broadly for 20 years.

A solid experienced engineer is worth their weight in gold. A lot of folks consider themselves solid experienced engineers who couldn't program a hello world in any modern computing environment. This is quite unfortunate, and more chaff to sort through.

Not defending leetcode. At least it shows someone is trying?

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#132
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been told multiple times by C++ advocates, that C++ (whatever year is latest) doesn't have memory management issues... Is that not true?

It can be pretty safe, but it requires restraint and selecting a good subset of the language. There's still plenty of footguns that an inexperienced person might hit.

And footguns that an experienced person might hit. One family of such footguns is:

    const auto &foo = something(args);
    …
    other_thing(foo);
Depending on exactly what you’re doing and what type something(args) returns, this can be entirely correct and idiomatic. In other circumstances it accesses a reference after its lifetime.

One can debate whether the const belongs there and how many &’s to use, but, unless something has changed dramatically in the last couple years (I’ve been focused on things that aren’t C++), there is no answer that is universally safe and efficient.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#133
post #6

Not enough full stack developers with 10 years of experience willing to work for 75k, “possible equity”, and catered lunches on a “fast-paced high-growth” project that just completed a series A. (actually saw this description)

Everyone should run far away from those kind of posts.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#134

This 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…

> Are any companies actually trying to recruit like this? I get some very crappy spam offers like that every few weeks. 35K to be a Java dev in Atlanta kind of thing. They do happen.

I had a few like this particularly when I was first entering the field professionally, but not so much anymore. I had one that wanted me to move out to some random town outside myrtle beach for around $17/h iirc.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, hiring someone with no c++ experience and expecting them to OJT is a great way to farm memory corruption vulnerabilities...

I have been told multiple times by C++ advocates, that C++ (whatever year is latest) doesn't have memory management issues... Is that not true?

That greatly depends on use case.

I think if you're looking to write a simple HTTP server with some API functions that talk to some RDBMS at less than 100 requests per second, yeah, C++ is pretty hygienic and safe these days.

If you need to play around with memory management strategies like non-default allocators then yeah, the knives are still very sharp and will cut you if you're not careful. This comes up a lot when writing C++ extensions for scripting languages like PHP, Python, etc and you have to interact with objects managed outside of your C++ code.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#136
post #53
post #14

I literally can’t relate to this on any level. I’m an HM at a company that pays on the order of a FANG and at best matches one of these credentialist barriers and yet we can’t come close to hiring targets on devs. I don’t get how people can see the plethora of individuals under 10yrs experience in SWE and other tech roles in SV/NYC/SEA with incomes of $250-600k/yr and think this happens without a “shortage” of talent…

As a perfectly competent dev having immense difficulty getting anyone to consider me for any position, I cannot see this as anything other than false. I have a job now (and by all accounts my employer is really happy with me), but the interview gauntlet I had to run to get here was absolutely ridiculous.

You're in Japan, yeah? Seems like that might be a barrier if you're applying for SV jobs.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#137

Hard to take this seriously with all the straw men and broad generalizations. Reality check: there has never been a hotter seller's market for software engineering talent. The fact that you have not landed a job does not mean that supply is not short in general. Rather than blowing your stack at some recruiter who you heard on a podcast interview, you might want to reflect on yourself and how you might be coming off…

This

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#138

This 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…

Knowing this, his perspective may be based off agencies rather than tech companies which would explain a lot of the things he's ranting about.

I own an agency. Yes there are shitty agencies, but there are also _plenty_ of shitty companies hiring directly. We have shared our developers' bafflement at how poorly they get treated by Internal Recruiters at the hiring company several times (and generally never worked with the hiring company again).

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, hiring someone with no c++ experience and expecting them to OJT is a great way to farm memory corruption vulnerabilities...

I have been told multiple times by C++ advocates, that C++ (whatever year is latest) doesn't have memory management issues... Is that not true?

[deleted]

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#140
post #82
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. A good programmer could learn it, but it exposes concepts that python and java abstracts from the programmer. C++ requires you to think quite a bit about memory. Modern C++ not so much. However the kind of job that requires C++ will probably require you to know some hardware / embedded which is a completely different domain than web devs and could make java / python transitions even more difficult.

Depends a lot on how you use it. You can pass everything by value, write very child-friendly C++ code, using std::map like Python dict and std::vector like Python list, and still VASTLY beat the speed of an interpreted, weakly-typed language like Python. But nobody does that. Chances are someone on the team takes a shit about unnecessary memory copies, the code will be littered with a smattering of pass-by-reference…

> But nobody does that. Chances are someone on the team takes a shit about unnecessary memory copies

It’s not just performance. In any moderately complicated C++ program, you will want a function to mutate its argument, and this falls apart.

Sure, you can write in a pure functional style with immutable data structures, but I wish you luck implementing an immutable data structure with asymptotically reasonable performance without using pointers of some sort.

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