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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

#191

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…

> > ask (...) “Tell me what a closure in javascript is.” then treat them like they’re stupid if they don’t know.

> Not that believable, but okay.

To me, it sounds very believable. I have been asked about defining what closures are multiple times.

I switched a couple of times between backend, frontend and mobile, and I had to learn bunch of interview questions that never came up in real life.

In different communities, there are different concepts that they love to ask, even if in the end at your day job, you rarely use them.

The JavaScript interviews are always about quirks very specific to JavaScript that the interviewer learned last week. They then act like without that knowledge you can't possibly contribute to their Angular dashboard.

JavaScript people always go through some examples of the "you don't know js" book, and they ask about the quirks of the language. My opinion is that the code they ask about would be rejected at most companies PR review process, because they are tricky, unclear, surprising. The "You Don't Know JS" book is a great book, and you shouldn't use 95% of the code in there if you want to scale your team without very-hard-to-find bugs.

Java and Android people love their design patterns and clean architecture questions, and they would be floored if you told them that you don't need 13 layers of classes just to call your backend and build a plain old Java object from a JSON.

People also love asking questions they themselves could barely answer. Yesterday, the team lead of my team had to accidentally clarify the event loop in a technical meeting, he was squirming, his clarification was terrible, yet we expect juniors to nail the question, and if they don't explain it exactly like we would, we act like the candidate is a "script kiddie".

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

#192
What's not emphasized in the article is that these days nobody wants generalists anymore. Companies don't even want front-end/back-end devs. They are specifically looking for React/Angular/Vue; or "GraphQL proficiency"; or Spring/Django/Node/etc.

On the one hand, recruiters spam you with emails without a single mentioning of any language stack. At the other end of the spectrum - "at least 10 years of experience working with X is a must".

It makes it difficult for experienced developers to hop from one language stack to another. And then we see comments on HN like "I love Clojure/Rust/Haskell/Julia/Elm/etc., but I'm getting paid to write ... in something else"

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

#193
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's not paying your dues. Being a software engineer forced to work as a network technician (not even a network engineer) is akin to having the junior accountant just get everyone coffee.

Maybe writing tests is paying your dues, because it often feels like a thankless job. Building UIs in a JS framework... Those could be "paying your dues", or more precise getting real world development experience.

But there's a lower limit to that "paying your dues", when it comes to educated professions.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"By definition" if you believe in the Free Market religion. There ain't no such thing in the real world.

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

#195

I am sick and tired of people using Medium. Why should I have to sign up to something to read your post?

It is easily blocked with ublock origin. Custom rule:

  ! 8/7/2020 https://medium.com
  medium.com###credential_picker_container

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

#196

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 a…

I think everyone who's complaining about how the developer shortage is fake should spend some time sitting on the other side of the interview table. Author's faith in people's innate goodness won't last beyond the 3rd interview/screen. I've been on both sides of bad interviews: sometimes it's a mismatch, or the interviewee is having a bad day, but sometimes, the interviewee is just bad.

Filtering out bad candidates are the best outcome, the absolute worst time-sink for everyone involved is getting a bad hire. In a past life, I joined an organization, and my cohort included a bonafide conman with no prior experience, or requisite skill. The man could talk himself into (or out of) anything. It took a surprisingly long time for the team to realize he was getting other team members to do his work for him in the guise of "needing help" (several weeks).

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

#197

I can get cooking with a programming language I’ve never seen in my life in a matter of days because most programming languages are either very similar to each other or they’re similar to some paradigm most of us already know like functional programming. The companies looking for 5 or 10 years of experience with a language aren't looking for someone to "get cooking" and learn as they go. It's true that most experienc…

Try scala and implicits!! or c++ template metaprogramming in late 90s and early naughts.

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

#198
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…

[deleted]

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

#199
post #132
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could you please explain this? I remember something about rvalues but it was as ages ago apparently :)

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

#200
post #73

> 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 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…

Well... There are cases when you just need to cut the interview off.

Google is purely consensus company, where one "outlier" can literally block staffing of a whole department. So if that one person was against you - you had 0 chance.

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