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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

#291

Post by netheril96 »

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…

> When I graduated with my CS degree, I was _thrilled_ to be offered 50k. Now new grads feel lowballed at 200k TC.

It might have something to do with increasing property prices.

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

#292

Post by anm89 »

Aeolun wrote: post #67
anm89 wrote: post #39

> I am sick and tired of Is this style of discourse really what Hacker News is about? I come here specifically because it is one of the few places where vague sentimental ranting is discouraged over directness and constructing thought out arguments for points. It's disappointing to see something make it to the top just for having an aggressive "hot take" and not because the content is well presented.

If it happens too often people don’t like it, but this particular topic hasn’t been seen in a while, and it’s something people feel fairly strongly about, so it makes sense that it keeps coming up once in a while.

This is one of the most harped on topics on HN.

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

#293

Post by Peekhakhachu »

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 is no shortage of software developers. It is a rumor created to bring more people in

https://youtu.be/6X-SG6bA4Zg?t=77

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

#294

Post by dahart »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #45
duped wrote: 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 never been on the other side of things, but it's always fascinated me that so many people who have say things like this. It's hard for me to fathom that such a large proportion of candidates are terrible.

> It’s hard for me to fathom that such a large proportion of candidates are terrible.

It’s not that most candidates are terrible, it’s that most job applications are 90% mismatched. Don’t forget many many people are applying to multiple jobs, and most of them are great candidates for something, just maybe not the high paying lead role as the first job out of college.

As someone who’s done a lot of hiring and mentoring, I often tell people to apply lots of places and punch above your weight class, a little, for some of it. This is just like applying for college - you put in the app to Harvard on the wild off chance you’ll get in, you put in the app to your state school so you have a safety, then you apply for a range of schools, half of them long shots. Turns out, Harvard rejects more than 90% of their applications... because they get a lot of them, and most of them are long shots. This does mean they have some filters in place, for better or worse.

I see this same advice play out among applicants - many of them are applying for jobs that they might have only half or a third of the qualifications for. But maybe that’s okay, especially for junior positions. Many companies hire people who don’t have 100% of the listed qualifications, so as an applicant, it might be worth checking if you pass their filter, and as a hiring manager, it might be worth learning how to avoid interviewing people who are obviously more hopeful than qualified.

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

#295

Post by hnfong »

EE84M3i wrote: post #64

>A bad interview is when you ask them the definition of some specific thing in some specific framework like “Tell me what a closure in javascript is.” then treat them like they’re stupid if they don’t know. Is this a good example? Isn't "what is a closure?" more of a smell test "do you know the language" question? Maybe asking "oh you know python? Tell me how to implement and use a metaclass" without access to the do…

Damn. I've been coding in Python for 10+ years and never came across this "metaclass" thing. Starts wondering whether I'm rusty and un-hireable. Curious what it is, I read the first result on Google, which goes through an example that I don't understand the point fully, and it concludes with "metaclasses can easily veer into the realm of being a “solution in search of a problem.”"

Oh well, good luck hiring python devs :)

I'd agree more on the closure part in javascript though.

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

#296

Post by ramraj07 »

jmknoll wrote: post #172
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…

Somewhat relevantly, a closure isn't a "specific thing in a specific framework." Its a concept that exists in many languages, and has no real relation to frameworks. I would never treat someone like they're stupid in an interview, but being completely unfamiliar with common programming concepts and treating them as irrelevant or trivial things is definitely a red flag.

I know approximately what a closure is, and I am sure I have used such constructs instinctively in my work many times. I don't have a formal Cs education, but have never failed to not be able to finish my coding work because I didn't know stuff.

Once a guy asked me to write out merge sort on a whiteboard and I couldn't. I didn't get the job. Surprisingly I'm doing just fine in my current position and am very productive (as much as I may say so myself) and have never heard complaints from anyone that I don't know what I'm doing.

So if you don't see a CS degree in the resume then don't ask what a closure is or to implement a merge sort in the interview. Ask them to solve a real problem. The top computer scientists didn't discover the merge sort for years or decades and you want me to figure it out on the spot? Or you just expect me to memorize useless shit like this? Give a problem a programmer would encounter on a day to day basis that wouldn't need a lot of googling. Let them figure out how to solve it and see if it works for you.

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

#297

Post by shagie »

nradov wrote: post #233
pas wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are different markets. It's easy to hire full remote juniors on upwork for next to nothing. Hiring a senior staff superhero full-cyber stack-ninja who happily relocates to where you are... now that's not that easy. And thus on the low end you have a market glut and on the high end you have a shortage.

But that's still not a shortage. The government hasn't imposed a wage cap. Employers can just increase wages to the market rate.

But what is "market rate"?

Likewise, if "market rate" is above "value produced by the employee" it doesn't make any sense to pay that much.

There are lots of companies out there that need some tech and some programming, but when the company revenue is only a few million that has to span a few score employees, and costs... its not possible to pay the small handful of devs six figures and keep everything in the black.

Likewise, there are new grads that are scoffing at working for 2x per capita income for the area in the midwest when that's less than 100k (and then complaining that they can't find any jobs).

There is a mismatch of expectations - possibly on both sides of the table.

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

#298

Post by ivalm »

efnx wrote: post #246
bern4444 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

I had a VP of Engineering tell me once that 17 months is a standard tenure and that we should be happy with that. I think turnover was part of the strategy at that point though...

I don’t quite understand, switching is good for the employee but in what world is it good for the employer? On-boarding/institutional knowledge/etc all suffer.

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

#299

Post by wutbrodo »

JAlexoid wrote: post #60
Godel_unicode wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, hiring someone with no c++ experience and expecting them to OJT is a great way to farm memory corruption vulnerabilities...

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?

Leaving aside the hyperbolic fringe, I'd guess that what you've heard is that it's possible for a team with discipline and experience to develop in such a way that they sidestep C++'s memory pitfalls. The situation being discussed here is the exact opposite.

For example, while I'm not particularly fond of Python as an engineering language, I've never worked on a team with poor enough process that we deal with (eg) production runtime failures due to typo-ed variable names that would have been caught by the compiler. And yet I'd never claim that it's impossible for such a problem to exist, given arbitrary levels of talent composed in arbitrary teams and processes.

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

#300

Post by unnouinceput »

MattGaiser wrote: post #23

> Furthermore, if you really want a C++ developer you can just expect a developer to learn C++ on the job if they have any adjacent experience with any other language. Is this really accurate? C++ is a very different language than even Java, not to mention Python or JS. Languages have their own quirks and attributes that often matter at some point. Especially C++. I am on a team where we are constantly building stuff…

Coming from Pascal/C/C++ to Java in early 00's I really hate it the style of non-existing global variables. To use global variables I had to declare another class? Such heresy!! To this day I still hate Java, personally, but when it comes to a real challenge I really don't care the programming language. Programming languages are tools, each fits better for a particular problem and my clients pay me to solve their problems, not to bitch why one language is better than other.
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