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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

#151
post #114

I 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.

Yeah.

It looks like you presented yourself like someone who's looking coding job without human interaction.

A startup actually cares about building teams and cultural fit. If you're not interviewing them, then you probably don't care to fit into their team.

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

#153

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…

Okay, but I just don’t think it makes sense to say that companies who cannot afford to pay market rates for software engineers are experiencing a shortage of software engineers, unless there is something preventing market clearing.

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

#154

> The general rudeness is ridiculous. I once had an interviewer ask me if I was a wizard with GO, C++, Rust, and C over the phone. Then when I said I had some experience with rust, he immediately cursed at me and hung up. > This experience is fairly common. Is it? I've done a fair bit of interviewing on both sides of the table, and can say with complete honesty I've never heard a curse said in anger in any of them. I…

It's not common at all. For that and other tells, it shows the narrator to be unreliable. A storyteller.

What other tells do you see?

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

#155

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…

> It's easy to write a blog post about how companies need to pay more, but hard to reconcile the reality that if they don't have FAANG cash flows, "market rate" for developers may not be viable, regardless of management's good intentions or lack thereof. Is that a sign of monopoly? When a handful of corporations have vastly more resources than the rest of the industry?

No, that's just reality. There are vastly more small companies than large in every industry. They all find their niches. Swift Energy still exists even though Shell and Exxon are a million times larger. Do Shell and Exxon have more resources, throw their weight around more, etc? You bet. Are they monopolies? Not in any plausible way I've heard anyone describe.

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

#156
The things the writer complains about certainly happen, but thankfully haven't been the majority of my experiences. I don't have as much emotion invested into the hiring process, but I have been on both ends of it at various times in my career, and I can say both that (some) companies have ridiculous expectations and hiring gauntlets, and that it's hard to find decent developers. I think any hiring manager can tell you horror stories about devs with "ten years of experience" who can't write a for loop.

I take company complaints about worker shortages not to be literal, but to be part of public relations, marketing, and appealing to politicians. Annoying? Sure. But also part of the game. I understand the article is mostly about berating companies for being dishonest about hiring, but I don't think an appropriate counter is to be dishonest about being hired. The rest of my response focuses mainly on the perspective of a career dev looking for work.

Your mileage may vary with different tech scenes, but my take on these experiences:

"Problem no. 1: Companies rely too heavily on automated filtering." While true, if this is your first and major complaint, you rely too heavily on job submission pages. Get a decent recruiter, reply to some linkedin recruiters, and be open to possibilities. You should expect applying to a job board without an internal champion recommending you to have similar odds to cold calling someone to sell them insurance.

"Problem no. 2: The credentialism barrier." I can't speak to the author's experience with this, only to my own. No more than 20% of the time I've interviewed has not knowing a specific programming language or technology been any sort of problem in the interview or even mentioned. I have noticed this happens somewhat more often with Java shops, who expect you to be very experienced specifically with Java, but even there most of them are pretty understanding that you may have some catching up to do (again, in my experience).

"Problem no. 3: Education is inaccessible." This seems a fair complaint, though not specific to technology.

"Problem no. 4: Low Pay and Bad benefits." This is a surprising one to read in technology. Maybe I've just been lucky and in a good area, but tech jobs are pretty well paid, decent benefits, good vacation (not at AWS though, seriously guys, do better), and with a pretty low investment in learning some people skills and negotiating tactics you can drastically increase your earning power. Read "Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In." It's short and phenomenally helpful when negotiating salary and benefits.

I empathize with the author's annoyance about listening to what amounts to a PR campaign from tech employers, but again, I think the counter to that is pointing out that it's a lot of hot air, not complaining about how hard it is from a dev's perspective seeking employment. I am open to being wrong on this, however, and welcome dissenting opinions telling me how wrong I am!

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

#157

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.

The last place I interviewed at used leet code as a filtered. The code problems were fun and challenging. I score a 850 out of 900 points. I failed the next round of interviewing after mentioning something about enjoying writing original code, software shaves off stability concerns and tech debt the more portable it becomes, and seniors aren’t in a position to force juniors away from deliberately doing foolish things.

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

#159
post #32

If you've ever been on the other end of the pipe for hiring you'll understand the need for filtering. The alternative is to never list jobs and hire through networks, which has other problems.

I've been on the other side of hiring. It was in Europe and it wasn't an American superstar company. A long queue of folks after bootcamps and attempting to requalify from various non-IT industries...

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

#160

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…

Okay, but I just don’t think it makes sense to say that companies who cannot afford to pay market rates for software engineers are experiencing a shortage of software engineers, unless there is something preventing market clearing.

> companies who cannot afford to pay market rates for software engineers are experiencing a shortage of software engineers, unless there is something preventing market clearing

By definition, the market rate should involve zero shortage. That said, search costs and regulatory barriers are significant frictions. In the midst of an unforecasted surge in aggregate demand and you have an explicable event.

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