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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

#321

Post by Rapzid »

calt wrote: post #238
speedgoose wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During an interview?

Yes. If you're ever talking to someone one on one and they're not paying attention find a way to address it.

It wasn't an interview but when I was first starting my engineering career I was in a little three-way meeting with my manager and the department director in a tiny break-out room presenting some automation I'd developed to save time provisioning DC infrastructure.

The director was not paying attention at all and was pecking at their iPad. iPads had just come out and every VP/director was carrying them around and chicken-pecking them during meetings.

I stopped presenting and said I would wait until they weren't busy anymore ;D Was a bit irritated as they were the entire reason we were in that room.. Luckily I had quite a bit more tenure than that director haha(and a lot of political cover).

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

#322

Post by mLuby »

serial_dev wrote: post #191
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…

> > ask (...) “Tell me what a closure in javascript is.” then treat them like they’re stupid if they don’t know. > Not that believable, but okay. To me, it sounds very believable. I have been asked about defining what closures are multiple times. I switched a couple of times between backend, frontend and mobile, and I had to learn bunch of interview questions that never came up in real life. In different communities,…

> People also love asking questions they themselves could barely answer.

Somewhat similar to hazing (itself an extended "interview" process). "I had to get through it, so you have to too."

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

#323

Post by chmod600 »

tshaddox wrote: post #153
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…

Okay, but I just don’t think it makes sense to say that companies who cannot afford to pay market rates for software engineers are experiencing a shortage of software engineers, unless there is something preventing market clearing.

Let's say you are a forward-thinking manager in a company making artisinal flowerpots. You know tech is the future and will set your company apart, and you want to build a top-tier team to take you there. You are willing to pay twice the compensation per engineer as google.

Now a deluge of engineers show up for interviews. How do you tell which ones are top-tier and which ones are third-rate? Even tech companies struggle with this problem; surely you'll have no chance.

You know you'll get mostly third-rate, because those are the ones looking for jobs. So instead of overpaying, you adjust your pay downward to compensate.

So it looks like there's a shortage to the company (because the top-tier engineers aren't appearing even though they are willing to pay), but to top-tier engineers it looks like they are underpaying.

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

#324

Post by Aperocky »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #304

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.…

From what I heard I think your company also have a problem with code review and operational safety.

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

#325

Post by mannerheim »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #272
nradov wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If 1000 companies want to hire top tier experienced engineers and there are only 100 on the market, that is the definition of a shortage.

Are the 900 other companies are willing and able to increase their bids to poach the 100 engineers? They cannot all increase bids indefinitely - at some point, only 100 companies will be able to afford the 100 engineers, and at the point the market is cleared and there is no shortage.

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

#326

Post by zmmmmm »

esrauch wrote: post #94
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?

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.

It's not even so much that the footguns exist but that the consequence of hitting them is "undefined behavior" ie: anythign from core dump to reformatting your hard drive. Compare to Java where the consequence is one thing doesnt work right and someone has to debug it. Rarely it takes down a whole server side process but even then you get a lot of instrumentation and diagnostics to manage it and / or figure out what happened.

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

#327

Post by onion2k »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #251
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…

we hired a confident 2 year out bootcamp grad that was able to pass our interview process and he nearly destroyed our company, twice. There is a reason the interview is difficult to pass, being a dev is a job with an insane amount of responsibility, you do not want bad people in there.

you do not want bad people in there

It sounds more like your company has failed to implement robust processes to catch mistakes before they're big problems to me. No individual should have the power to destroy the company except maybe a CTO or a lead sysadmin. For everything else important there should be layers of security and QA checks, with automated sanity checks on config and data for really important stuff. If a new hire can deploy stuff without multiple people seeing it before it gets to production then everyone in the company is responsible for accepting a process that can lead to serious issues.

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

#328

Post by wting »

cupofcoffee wrote: post #187
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 honestly doubt that 50% of applicants can't do FizzBuzz.

At a previous company we asked candidates to calculate the median value given an array of numbers. We also gave them test cases that covered 100% of what we wanted.

23% of applicants could not produce a working solution.

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

#329

Post by mLuby »

JAlexoid wrote: post #220
rhacker wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'll give the benefit of the doubt to someone with 25 years experience that they know the difference between a true 10Xer and one who 10Xes by leaving 20X of tech debt in their wake.

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

#330

Post by sk0g »

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.

We were hiring for a front end dev, and had 40 applications in a few days. Majority were either still in uni, in another continent, or just had 0 experience/ education that was directly relevant, not even a portfolio at times.

Majority of 'decent' applicants that passed the filtering step very obviously followed some tutorial once, and promptly listed it under their skills. Many didn't have much, if any, work on GitHub. During the interview process a few were clearly fabricating their experience, and would get very uncomfortable if we asked for any more details.

I don't get it - it's disrespectful of our time, and a waste of theirs, to lie. Do they just hope they will get that first job without any relevant knowledge, train on the job for a year, and be a proper dev then? Like, we're hiring for a business not a bootcamp. If you can't be semi-productive within a few months, who knows if we ever do get some return on the investment, both in terms of other dev's time, and in terms of compensation.

Ended up filtering more on ability to communicate, parse requirements, and how well they could pick new skills up, than what they already knew. This was for a lower/mid range dev, in terms of experience.

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