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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

#161

Post by devin »

spike021 wrote: post #109
Tossrock wrote: post #20

> 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…

I interviewed at a small company just for an internship several years back. It was an iOS position, but again, internship/jr. level. I said I wasn't an expert but wanted to learn and had spent some time developing some basic iOS apps on my own. Guy proceeds to seriously ask me about low-level memory management, i.e. ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) vs. other methods (this was roughly 2013 or so). I attempted to giv…

I have a feeling this will get me a downvote, but I grew up in a very blue collar town and the idea of paying one's dues is not crazy to me. I see a lot of people entering the tech market as if they don't have anything to prove, like their degree says it all. In any industry, you shovel some shit early on, IMO. I was a good programmer, but I got my start racking servers in a data center. I crawled under raised floor to run cable, replaced batteries, worried about cooling, and generally did a lot of work no one else wanted to do. I was a programmer already, and I think it was a waste of my ambition for $COMPANY to not give me a job writing software, but I don't mind the idea of people paying their dues, and I think I'm better for my experience. Careers aren't supposed to start with you having a big corner office. It is surprising to me how many people feel entitled enough that they truly believe they ought to start at the top.

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

#162

Post by KingOfCoders »

I think "developer shortage" depends on your expectations of developer skills. I currently recruit a lot for several different positions and there is no shortage of applications.

But 50% can't do FizzBuzz and many do not fit into our environment of a small team where we do not need (can't use) specialists (yet).

If you only want to recruit from the "best 20%" [1], you can only recruit the best 20% of the people who apply to your job offerings, which is different from the best 20% of the market - most founders I know want to recruit the best 20% of the market though and fail.

[1] It's unclear to me what "best" means.

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

#163

Post by MattGaiser »

splittingTimes wrote: post #115
colordrops wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on whether you care about the overall product or just the puzzles involved in the product.

I get my overall high level fix from outside of work activities, so work is enjoyable mostly for the little puzzles it generates every day. I am sure that there are some fascinating considerations for a mega e-billing system, even if it isn't all that interesting in itself.

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

#164

Post by tracer4201 »

JAlexoid wrote: post #102
tracer4201 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity what do you define as being paid well? What country and region or state and what’s the compensation? I had a recruiter try to lure me for a $130K “senior” role on the east coast in the US. I earn several times that.

NYC senior engineers typically earn $150k-$250k in salary. Unless you want to be a lifeless drone for a HFT fund. But then living expenses aren't that high in NYC, compared to Bay area.

Personally, I’d happily accept being a lifeless drone, at least for a few years. Save the extra income and invest it. Reap the dividends.

Having said that, I don’t know how bad those roles actually are. Obviously, it’s not worth it if it affects your mental health… and unfortunately yeah, that is an issue working in this field.

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

#166

Post by devin »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #107
015a wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once, 30 minutes into what was supposed to be a 1 or 2 hour phone interview, had an engineer at Google cut me off in the middle of their standard "write code in a Google Doc" with a "oh, I have a meeting I have to run to, good work we'll get back to you." I assume it was not, in fact, good work, as I did not progress to the next interview. I think a phrase like "typical" would be inaccurate; possibly "common" as we…

I had a Google research scientist telling me during an interview that they don't like their job and don't recommend it. At a different occasion, Google's VP showed up 15 minutes late, asked one question, and stopped paying attention for the rest of the interview too busy with their laptop. I understand that these are probably outliers but I will not be reapplying soon.

Shoulda called them out.

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

#168

Post by karmasimida »

Apocryphon wrote: post #143
dasil003 wrote: post #110

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?

It will be monopoly if you have no other choices but to work for FAANG, which can't be further from reality.

On the other hand, complaining about FAANG, only after failing their interviews makes it hard to take that person's intention seriously.

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

#169

Post by JAlexoid »

chirau wrote: post #91
bit_logic wrote: post #55

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.

I hear it gets a lot of flak. What's wrong with Leetcode or how does it distort the job market?

It's automated and mostly mindless. They are looking for "smart" solutions, that fail to account for testability and code maintanance.

I fail a lot of leetcode challenges, yet I've built a critical data platform for Grubhub, IBM, Expedia, etc... some are still in operation to this day.

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

#170

Post by pwdisswordfish8 »

JAlexoid wrote: post #119
speeder wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're all over this thread throwing out quick comments, some of them pretty dubious. Can you stop?
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