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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

#301

Post by _delirium »

chris11 wrote: post #278
_delirium wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> They can double or occasionally triple my salary, but they can't offer me a private office. You might have more luck if instead you asked about working remotely full-time. It's not the same if you want to go into an office, but companies are seriously thinking about their post-covid office plans.

True, that's an interesting possibility with the current trend towards remote work. With enough of a pay raise, I could solve the private office problem by just renting the office myself out-of-pocket...

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

#302

Post by anitil »

sidlls wrote: post #145
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…

> Are any companies actually trying to recruit like this? And is it successful beyond just throwing up a hiring post and not getting anything? During an active season (spring, fall, usually) I get one of these a day, or every other day at least. Other times it slows to a trickle--1 a week or so. Usually it's some "I have an urgent requirement for a 6 months contract position for $45/hr. with (litany of skills/respons…

Is this one of those "We couldn't hire locally so we have to get someone in on visa" type situations? I know that happens here (Australia), at least pre-covid

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

#303

Post by why_only_15 »

JAlexoid wrote: post #179
karmasimida wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

In my understanding, Facebook and Google have centralized interviewing, whereas at Apple each team did its own hiring (my team of ~40 had their own recruiter, did all their own interviews, etc.). Amazon I believe is similar to Apple but the teams are larger? When I interviewed there it was all for the ads org, and there weren't people from other parts of Amazon.

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

#304

Post by 0xB31B1B »

Absolutely terrible developers exist, some have 5, 10, or 20 years of experience. I have worked with at least two of them in my career. One was a co worker at a startup. He seemed smart and confident but he just didn't do any work and focused on things like "optimizing code linting" and breaking our DNS, telling us it was fixed then laughing at us while we had to wait 24 hours for the new fixed DNS stuff to resolve. Due to a comedy of errors by our companies management, he was able to last 12 months and was fired on vesting day. More recently at a different company, we hired a guy with 4 years of tech consulting and free lancing experience and he nearly destroyed the company twice in two months and I then fired him. He did surprisingly well on our interview that we designed to be less crappy than the general tech interview loop, but in retrospect his success was clearly a sign that our interview loop was extremely broken. Having "false negatives" isn't great, but having a single false positive can literally destroy your company. People with multiple years of experience just may be the crappy developer that destroys your startup.

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

#305

Post by jasonshen »

netheril96 wrote: post #291
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…

> 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.

While property prices have definitely risen, consider that every other industry has not seen the same level of income growth. We are still privileged to command this kind of salary as tech employees. (Yes we worked hard etc but I also try to remember that the median household income in NYC, where I live, is $63k).

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

#306

Post by renesansz »

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…

harsh, but true. I also feel the author's struggle, in my opinion there are a lot of factors to consider why some of us don't get what we expect. The only thing we can do is to constantly improve and give our best in every interview we got

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

#307

Post by rorykoehler »

Peekhakhachu wrote: post #293
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…

There is no shortage of software developers. It is a rumor created to bring more people in https://youtu.be/6X-SG6bA4Zg?t=77

Brilliant!

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

#308

Post by lsh123 »

When I am hiring, for every ~30 post interview rejections I always get an angry follow up email explaining in details why my hiring process is bad and how I should fix it. I politely reply “thank you” and silently also thank my hiring process for correctly rejecting that specific candidate.

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

#309

Post by jurassic »

> ...this moronic interview practice would alienate an obvious asset

> The lack of faith in our fellow humans is disgusting.

This kind of catastrophizing and dismissive language makes me want to ignore everything the author says. If you think being evaluated in an interview setting is somehow unfair, I think you should consider whether your attitude is the problem. If you are actually good at leetcode and continue to fail onsites, you're almost certainly giving off red flags in some other behavioral category.

At my (FAANG-ish but not in the acronym) company, many of the candidates we fail are leetcode gurus who have a negative vibe. Maybe they're technically pretty good, but they have an ego on the level of Linus Torvalds. Or maybe they trash talk their current team or boss, or avoid giving straight answers to simple questions about their background. Or they've got 8 years of experience but can't talk about anything they did to grow the younger people on their team. Maybe they launch into brain-dumping a solution they memorized from a practice problem without explaining their approach. Or perhaps they are aggressive and stubborn when given corrective hints.

As a dev who will be on the same team as the candidate in the event an offer is made, my primary incentive is to vote no on any assholes I cross paths with in the interview. I don't give a shit if my no-asshole standard means the company needs to spend another 3 months and $100k on recruiting costs to get an equivalently skilled non-asshole candidate for my team. I consider those costs part of MY total comp.

Beyond the junior level, success usually means working well with others and bringing a growth mindset for yourself and others to each project. Mentoring others. Learning and teaching. Being a steward and doing unglamorous work for code health. Slinging feature code is a minor part of it in big companies, so you need to figure out how to signal all these other forms of value in the interview. And avoid sending out red flags.

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

#310

Post by throwaway210222 »

jasonshen wrote: post #305
netheril96 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

While property prices have definitely risen, consider that every other industry has not seen the same level of income growth. We are still privileged to command this kind of salary as tech employees. (Yes we worked hard etc but I also try to remember that the median household income in NYC, where I live, is $63k).

> the median household income in NYC, where I live, is $63k.

What's the median NYC houshold income for investment bankers and radiologists?

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