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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

#201

Post by sldksk »

lazide wrote: post #131
sldksk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I’m not one to do the boss’s work for them, but you’re observations aren’t wrong. Your expectations are. Personally, I am thankful to be young, single, and have a lot of free time to keep up with things myself. But I have no interest in the society you seem to desire. This business of expecting constant self-education from workers alienated from the product of their labor or any reason to appreciate the daily grind they’re tasked with is asking for a spiraling mess of societal consequences that I am starkly against. I don’t know any simple solutions. I’m afraid socialists might be right.

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

#202

Post by pas »

cupofcoffee wrote: post #76
imstate wrote: 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.

In any decent CS school they actually teach you low-level stuff. Transitioning from Java to C++ for such a person is trivial.

Certainly not trivial if all you have is school Java experience.

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

#203

Post by pm90 »

ditonal wrote: post #182
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 basically both. When I graduated with my CS degree, I was _thrilled_ to be offered 50k. Now new grads feel lowballed at 200k TC. So hard not to say that the market hasn't adjusted somewhat. At the same time, part of the reason companies even have to pay so much is because they've made interviewing so damn hard. I personally know many people at great companies like Google and Twitter who are _desperate_ to change…

There are very good reasons why developer compensation has swelled to the levels that we are seeing today.

Technology firms have grown astronomically. They’ve also built processes and systems to onboard new developers and enable them to generate a lot of value. Developers are being compensated higher to reflect the efficiency gains made my technology firms.

Is it unfortunate that firms that are unable to generate that much value suddenly can’t hire developers? Must be for those firms.

But there’s nothing wrong with compensation growing astronomically and nothing moral in it being low.

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

#204

Post by anchpop »

ditonal wrote: post #182
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 basically both. When I graduated with my CS degree, I was _thrilled_ to be offered 50k. Now new grads feel lowballed at 200k TC. So hard not to say that the market hasn't adjusted somewhat. At the same time, part of the reason companies even have to pay so much is because they've made interviewing so damn hard. I personally know many people at great companies like Google and Twitter who are _desperate_ to change…

> Now new grads feel lowballed at 200k TC

As a new grad, was I supposed to feel lowballed at getting an offer quite a bit less than that? I know senior devs who make less than that. Is this just for stanford/mit grads?

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

#205

Post by bern4444 »

ditonal wrote: post #182
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 basically both. When I graduated with my CS degree, I was _thrilled_ to be offered 50k. Now new grads feel lowballed at 200k TC. So hard not to say that the market hasn't adjusted somewhat. At the same time, part of the reason companies even have to pay so much is because they've made interviewing so damn hard. I personally know many people at great companies like Google and Twitter who are _desperate_ to change…

IME, yes people are hesitant to leave sometimes out of a fear of the interview process, but I think this is no different than other industries where people generally are hesitant to take action that has a chance of of 0 payoff with a lot of upfront investment.

I don't think that's unique to software engineering, and I don't think its more pronounced in our industry.

The standard tenure of most engineers is about 3 - 5 years, a very short amount of time. People try and leave all the time. How long it takes someone to leave is likely a good proxy for their risk aversiveness. But people do switch a lot.

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

#206

Post by Cheecheepoopoo »

JAlexoid wrote: post #127
opportune wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Senior" is just a title. It doesn't mean anything unless it's at a big company with known standards.

Em... I just interviewed someone with a "senior" in their title from a big company, that was more like a junior.

You do realize adding a title is as simple as typing a few words right.

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

#207

Post by [deleted] »

amluto wrote: post #132
esrauch wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#208

Post by sarsway »

I think there's also a power struggle. I've seen so many shitty job offers, where a company thinks it can hire developers like a commodity and have them implement whatever crap idea they have come up with.

Unless they have a truly great product at hand, the only ones applying will be the ones desperate for money. But no good developer wants to work on some potential shovel ware that's dead on arrival.

There's so much software being made these days, and most of it isn't all that useful to be honest. There are also so many old century companies still failing to adapt to the internet age, trying to force their way into it with half baked copy cat strategies. I'm not going to put all my passion into someone else's dubious pipe dreams or some vision-less experimental venture.

Good developers know they are valuable, and that their work carries the whole product. Jobs at companies that make beneficial, useful software are usually highly contested, but for companies that struggle to attract developers the issue might be more then just the job market.

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

#209

Post by virgilp »

alaties wrote: post #135
JAlexoid wrote: post #60

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?

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 wh…

> C++ is pretty hygienic and safe these days.

C++ these days still supports all the syntax and programming style of C++ in the 70s. You probably mean "you can program in a hygienic and safe way in C++", which is true, but also is not necessarily a feature of the language but of the programmer (just a few years ago I interacted with some theoretically senior C++ programmers who claimed mixing raw pointers with smart pointers is fine because they're senior and know what they're doing).

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

#210

Post by JAlexoid »

karmasimida wrote: post #186
JAlexoid wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google - Apple's interview process is actually quite gentle. It's definitely the most human focused out of all of them. I flipped the bird at Facebook and Google, and got frustrated with Amazon's to cancel my interview mid process.

I actually had quite the opposite experience, Apple absolutely grilled me at the spot for its interview, even though I did pass it, but I didn't take their offer.

They definitely grilled me... It's just that they actually had humans talk to me and answer questions, not just throw a website with an automated judge and intentionally confusing problems. (My first language isn't English)

Facebook was very robotic in their process, with a lot of demands for preparation. Google and Amazon aren't that far off.

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