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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

#211

Post by electrondood »

anchpop wrote: post #204
ditonal wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Last I checked the median salary for a fresh Stanford CS Master's grad was $105k, but that was a few years ago.

I think the 200k figure is inflated by FAANG companies, basically.

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

#212

Post by [deleted] »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #162

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…

[deleted]

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

#213

Post by Cheecheepoopoo »

sangnoir wrote: post #196
KingOfCoders wrote: post #162

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 a…

> The man could talk himself into (or out of) anything

Why is he in the tech industry?

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

#214

Post by alephu5 »

jrsj wrote: post #40
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…

Yeah this sounds more like a crazy anecdote to me. I once had a new CTO come in at a place I’d been working at for about a year and a half, and he refused to interview any candidates that weren’t Muslim (as existing staff were replaced 1 at a time). While this is extremely fucked up, I would be surprised if I could find another tech company in the state where this happened. Cursing at someone for having experience in…

Why didn't you report this? It's open-shut unlawful.

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

#215

Post by topkai22 »

> Education is inaccessible Full-time undergraduate tution at University of Washington is $11,745 for residents. Washington State University's online program is $10616/year for residents (and only slightly more for non-residents.) Community College is something less than $3000.

All that is before any financial aid, and MOST students receive grant money (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rec.as...).

There are a lot of people make bad financial decisions around education (I was one of them at one point), but if one is willing to constrain their decisions to in-state options and are able to get some of the financial aid then college education (espicially in STEM or Health careers) remains a good tradeoff. Going to an out state school or a private school without huge financial incentives to go... well, understand you are buying a luxury good and status, not making an investment.

Besides, if the author is proposing that companies pay for education, poo-pooing $8-10k in grants is insane. It is easily 100% for some part time program, and is a huge chunk of the cost for even brand name in-state programs at the undergrad level.

Edit- I'm not saying student debt isn't a major problem, it is. However, it remains unnecessary for most students to go into horror story levels of debt to get a degree, especially if they are able to work while going to school or live rent free with relatives. After all estimated costs for housing, food, and other living expenses dwarf the tuition costs ($18k/year at UW).

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

#216

Post by pm90 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #184
dr_kiszonka wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I interviewed for a company that was (maybe still is?) the leader in industrial cameras. I was being vetted for a EE role by a bunch of non-EEs until I got to the one poor woman who was the only EE left in the company after they had gutted their in house development and switched to using fancy enclosures around SZ commodity cameras. I was asking probing questions and had her on the verge of tears during the interview…

Oh man, I feel bad for that poor woman. If she didn’t leave there must be other reasons why she’s trapped in such a terrible environment.

The psychological tax of seeing your team dissolve and not be replaced seems brutal.

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

#218

Post by vagrantJin »

devin wrote: post #161
spike021 wrote: post #109

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…

I think you are talking over the post. Interns do the grunt work no one else wants to touch, up to and including making coffee.

No one really expects much from them.

But I personally like that blue collar work ethic.

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

#219

Post by _delirium »

_2d30 wrote: 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…

> devs have a lot of bargaining power

Employees don't seem to have enough bargaining power to meaningfully control working conditions, though. Maybe these are worth a ton of money to the company, or such desires are an outlier. But here is my experience:

I'm a professor of computer science, and frequently get recruiters trying to get me to jump ship to industry. I'm open to it in principle. I'm reasonably happy in my job, but there are certainly things I don't like about academia, and the pay is not industry-level. But it's generally a rewarding job, and has various perks, like private offices and considerable control over your own schedule.

A question I ask recruiters: I have a private office... could you match that? So far, the answer has always been no. They can double or occasionally triple my salary, but they can't offer me a private office. I am not sure what to make of that. They are willing to offer me $100k+ over my current salary, but are absolutely unable to offer me an office with a door.

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

#220

Post by JAlexoid »

rhacker wrote: post #95
throwaway104076 wrote: post #63

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…

I have 25 years experience and a CS degree. I even taught Java and C++ for 4 years at a college. Our top performing developer has this background: No software eng. experience 2015. 2016 Bootcamp 2017 Salesforce 2018 - today - our company: TS, React, Vue, NodeJS, Python, Main devops developer that brought up our docker infra. > Didn't happen. Yikes...

What do you mean "top performing"?

I've seen some "top performing" code, that I had to just trash... because making any changes to the hack job of top performing "just ship it" people is a nightmare.

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