We have far too many.
The industry should better evolve to empower everyone to "code" tools for themselves.
We will never have enough software developers (2020)
311–320 of 553 posts
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely think "we do not do leetcode interviews" and maybe "we only have three interviews total" would be selling points on a job posting. People who are experienced in the field don't want to go through the same hoops that newbies do just to prove they know how to write basic algorithms.
You wrote: > I am constantly interviewing candidates for roles at my company. It seems like CVs are a complete gamble. Either some are lies, or wildy understated, and everything in between -- at all levels of experience! "[J]ust to prove..." and yet so many can not do the 2022 version of FizzBuzz. I am stunned how many senior (well, so they say!) hands-on technical applicants cannot do basic things like write a very…
...explain to me how a hash map works. For get about explaining the finer points of sorting algorithms
I've been in software development for 15 years and being able to explain either of these things has never come up and I probably wouldn't be able to give a decent answer without reviewing the topics specifically.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#313There isn't a shortage of software developers. The pay isn't great--the kids getting $300K packages out of Stanford are an exception; it's a marketing expense. In fact, if you control for the level of intelligence it takes to be any good, SWEs make less (and get far less autonomy--do you think lawyers work on Jira tickets?) than any other professional, and they hit a salary/challenge plateau quick... after which, the…
Cry me a river. Software development is some of the easiest, highest paid work in history. The majority of the population is grinding away in tough physical labor or abusive service jobs getting paid pennies while software devs moan about only making low six figures and getting a few boring jira tickets while they sit in their home office reading hacker news for half the day.
What they expressed is not contrary to what you express. They said the expected salary conditioned on intelligence for SWE is lower to that of other jobs, and I am inclined to agree. If you include game dev jobs in SWE then it goes even lower.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#314I think the problem of ageism wasn't mentioned at all and it should be. People who love the field have no problems keeping up to date. Sure some job posts will mention Hadoop or Kafka but whatever, a good dev will have no problem learning these in a few days. Does he get a chance though if he's 50?
I'm not disputing the fact that there is ageism, as I'm sure there are thousands of examples of it, but there's so much demand and so many different companies. I've worked with plenty of over-50's. Maybe there's a sweet spot for growing companies where you need the experience, which has been where I've worked. Small companies don't need structure, and maybe want cheap employees. Large companies put all that structure in management and a few super senior folks. (though I saw plenty of over 50s in my large company experiences) Medium growing companies need experience. I dunno, just guessing since certain companies I've worked for seem to have a higher concentration of older folks.
Here, this rando website says that 46% of software engineers are 40+
https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/
Now I'm curious, this stack overflow survey paints a grimmer picture:
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018
That's a survey though, I'm curious what biases are going to exist in the data. We might assume that older software developers move around less? May be less likely to respond to surveys? May be less likely to visit stack overflow, especially if they do less hands on coding?
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#315I think the problem of ageism wasn't mentioned at all and it should be. People who love the field have no problems keeping up to date. Sure some job posts will mention Hadoop or Kafka but whatever, a good dev will have no problem learning these in a few days. Does he get a chance though if he's 50?
I'm not disputing the fact that there is ageism, as I'm sure there are thousands of examples of it, but there's so much demand and so many different companies. I've worked with plenty of over-50's. Maybe there's a sweet spot for growing companies where you need the experience, which has been where I've worked. Small companies don't need structure, and maybe want cheap employees. Large companies put all that structure…
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Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
> keeping bad people out you seem very confident about that. In my experience LC/FAANG style interview don't keep bad people out.
Do they keep all bad people out? No. But I have never encountered a company that doesn't have a on-the-spot technical interview (involving coding or math) that has had more success keeping bad engineers out than FAANG.
You can implement all kind of interview processes, you will always end up hiring candidates that turns out to be not a good fit.
I am arguing that LC/FAANG interview does not do a better job at filtering them out.
The solution: accept that you will do bad hiring, but that you will let them go as well.
Instead, everyone want to be politically correct and the play safe. So people are hardly let go.
Also working at FAANG implying you are a stellar swe is a big time BS.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#317I think this article hits on some truths and gets a handful of things wrong. First, they are correct that we are in a dynamic profession that requires constant learning and expanding. No doubt the people who choose to stay in software are likely to be people who are curious, life-long learners where this is a benefit of the profession rather than a drawback. That said, one thing I noticed from teaching computer scien…
It's hard to blame students when they look at job postings and all that they see advertised is positions for programmers using languages X, Y and Z, or when they see tweets and blog posts by hotshot programmers about frameworks A and B. The entire industry focuses way too much on 'experience with tool X' as a proxy for 'technical skill Y'. It's a bit like asking a carpenter how many years of experience they have with…
Worse, industry is routinely bashing on CS degrees because they don't turn people into framework X-ready candidates. It's getting a little tiring just how little credit is given to the idea of "maybe these tools can be learned in a reasonable amount of time by people with a degree showing they can pick things up rather quickly".
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
You wrote: > I am constantly interviewing candidates for roles at my company. It seems like CVs are a complete gamble. Either some are lies, or wildy understated, and everything in between -- at all levels of experience! "[J]ust to prove..." and yet so many can not do the 2022 version of FizzBuzz. I am stunned how many senior (well, so they say!) hands-on technical applicants cannot do basic things like write a very…
...explain to me how a hash map works. For get about explaining the finer points of sorting algorithms I've been in software development for 15 years and being able to explain either of these things has never come up and I probably wouldn't be able to give a decent answer without reviewing the topics specifically.
Yes, companies are hiring for competency not tenure or years of life lived while holding job. If you want the latter, I have heard it is more structured that way in Japan and much of Europe.
I would expect most people I hire to be able to explain how a hash map works.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> has to be planned and approved It gets worse, too - as long as I've worked as a software developer there's been some sort of time tracking system in place, and it has to be planned up-front, and has to work out to at least 40 hours (after they "negotiate" your estimates down). Which leaves no time for the unplanned stuff that inevitably comes up. This always goes in a cycle like this: 1. Management demands that eve…
It feels bad too have a ton of structure, but the opposite is worse IMO. Single line tickets from the CEO that turn into months long projects with no guidance on the functionality. Engineers that burn down entire features because "it's bad code." Secret projects where you get berated for asking stakeholders to to clear up requirements because "you're scaring them." It's easy to look at a rigid structure and assume it…
You just gave a bunch of examples of problems that are in no way fixed by ticket bureaucracy, only hidden.
Re: We will never have enough software developers (2020)
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've worked at companies that tried to have explicit 20% policies, and it worked okay for some period of time, but then became difficult to prioritize. That said, I've typically been pretty successful at casually using 10 - 20% of my time to work on random low hanging fruit (dev ergonomics, performance, etc). For some reason using a quiet Friday afternoon, or time between tickets seemed to work better than an explici…
At my old place they just overestimated my tasks complexity by 200-300%. I wasnt going to be the one saying no... So i had plenty of time to fix whatever.
In my old workplace, I overestimated my tasks by 2x. Who was to question me? The PM who hadn't coded in 10 years? My manager who had never used Python before?