I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by mannerheim » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:04 AM UTC

shagie wrote: post #297

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.

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.…

Market rate is whatever employees will take and employers will pay. If employers are having trouble finding employees at their rates, their rates are below market rates. If employees are having trouble finding work at their desired rates, their rates are above market rates.

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

#332

Post by Loranubi » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:04 AM UTC

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?

Senior devs in my country make around 35k in international companies. Even FAANG is maybe 50k.

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

#333

Post by winrid » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:05 AM UTC

Remember that a lot of job postings aren't in fact real, but companies trying to "prove" they can't replace their H1B workers.

I have nothing against said workers, but the way the US manages H1B visas is broken IMO.

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

#334

Post by namdnay » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:07 AM UTC

nxpnsv wrote: post #239

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…

If you can’t pay market rate salaries, your business is not working... EDIT: It seems people took this to mean I think everybody should get maximum salary, when what I meant was you should get a fair salary. Maybe I don't understand what market rate means in the US.

That’s like saying that if you can’t pay Ronaldo’s salary you shouldn’t be running a football team

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

#335

Post by Leherenn » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:07 AM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #296

jmknoll wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 producti…

You probably won't need merge sort in your day to day programming, but closures (sometimes called lambdas), definitely. Every time you create a function that captures some variables outside its scope, congratulations, you've just used a closure.

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

#336

Post by Mehdi2277 » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:08 AM UTC

splittingTimes wrote: post #115

colordrops wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved from a 2/5 to a 4.5/5. Doesn't mean it was necessarily a satisfying move. There's 6 - great mission and product, which the first one had and the new job is weak in, but it factors for a lot more than the other 5 in attractiveness of the job, at least for me

This. I never understood The attractiveness of working for Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, etc. other then money. How is the Dev work there helping society at large? Once, I got approached for a job at Amazon to help "build the next big e-billing system"... What an uninspiring thing to do.

I care little about what the product/impact is and mostly care about how interesting the work is on a technical level. I am pretty fond of theoretical research even when practical usage is very unlikely and did a math major mostly for fun. One thing the companies you listed share is large amounts of data and as I work in ML having large datasets is really nice to play with. Also large tech companies tend to have better data infrastructure and more time can be spent focused on ml tasks vs data engineering tasks. What the model actually does is of little interest to me and I've worked in a couple different ml areas now.

I do have an eventual interest to do research focused role, but interesting impactful research I think requires either high management (professor leading a large lab/research director) or making your own thing. The first I lack the experience for and the second doing a startup feels too risky to me today. If I was wealthy enough I would probably try making a research themed ai startup.

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

#337

Post by brundolf » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:08 AM UTC

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.

Adding to this, I think even a little bit of genuine esoterica is okay in an interview process so long as:

1) You're looking for someone with deep knowledge of that subject

2) You don't treat it as an automatic fail when they get it wrong

If I'm interviewing for a senior role, and I ask them a few super obscure questions about the language/framework/platform I need them to be an expert on, that serves as a litmus test for their overall depth of knowledge. Those facts individually may not be required for the job, but they give a read on how deep the person's knowledge goes in general.

But, as you pointed out, I wouldn't really even put closures in that category. For JS it would be something more like, "What does '{} + 12' evaluate to?"

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

#338

Post by KingOfCoders » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:09 AM UTC

wting wrote: post #328

cupofcoffee wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I will try that one in my interviews.

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

#339

Post by zmmmmm » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:09 AM UTC

Not sure how much sympathy I have with this specific set of complaints, but what I do think is that if tech companies still don't have enough staff by now (several decades in after software has become one of the worlds largest professions) - well, it's their own fault. Industries need to foster the creation of the workforces they need to survive. That means occasionally not rejecting every resume that doesn't have 5+ years of experience with your exact tech stack and being willing to invest in cross-learning and education. It also means investing in your own staff as they progress to ensure they can climb in experience and skillsets to become the experienced staff you need.

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

#340

Post by warent » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:09 AM UTC

I empathize with your frustration and how it looks from the side of a candidate/developer, and frankly you and I share many of the exact same views. It wasn't long ago that I was in the same position. That being said, I've been fruitlessly stuck in _hiring hell_ (seeking like 10 to 25 devs) for too long, and would love to vent _my_ frustrations by addressing each of these directly.

> Companies rely too heavily on automated filtering

We use minimal to no "automated filtering"--certainly no AI that I'm aware of. Instead, we just focus on pipelines that we perceive as having generally higher quality candidates (e.g. angel.co, Hired.com) and review them all by hand.

As a result, we move more slowly and have a smaller pool. Sadly, this hasn't been working because apparently the candidates are only of marginally higher quality or there's not enough in particular roles. Probably the only way we could ever hope to expand to broader talent pools is by using AI, because we simply do not have the manpower to keep up with the _mountains_ of application.

> The credentialism barrier > Expecting to find a developer who has 10 years of experience in a specific tool is insane. If you’re trying to find a rust developer and you will only accept them if they have been exclusively coding in rust since its conception you won’t find it. What you’ll get is a receding, inbred hiring pool.

I agree with this (frankly, only big old businesses with McKinsey managers still do this BS). In most scenarios ~2+ yrs is plenty. Sadly, even with this flexibility on my end, we're still in a huge shortage.

> I can get cooking with a programming language I’ve never seen in my life in a matter of days because most programming languages are either very similar to each other or they’re similar to some paradigm most of us already know like functional programming. > Developers are creative. They try new things. They’re not going to be droning in one language forever. If you think these are normal, average traits, you have a misunderstanding of the value of your talents. _Most_ developer applicants I see cannot do these things.

> Most developers I know will comfortably do coding challenges in a variety of languages. They do actual work in a variety of languages too.

"Most developers you know" are very far removed from "most developers in general". The developers you know were already hired through a grueling hellfire walk of filtering _countless crowds of candidates_ who struggle to spit out a basic print statement in Python while someone yells from the other room asking if they need help with the interview.

> The credentialism barrier pt. 2/3/4

You won't hear me argue with any of this. Any company that practices this has flawed leadership and hiring practices. Again, we are actually very proactive in avoiding these toxic practices, but sadly still have a shortage problem.

> Education is inaccessible

I can't really speak to this problem. Am I understanding this correctly? If you're turning down jobs because there is no education stipend, that just sounds like a personal decision I've never even heard of before. My engineering career has steadily advanced from junior to upper management, and this thought never once crossed my mind.

> Low Pay and Bad benefits

We offer normal market rates and solid benefits. Do we compete with Google or Facebook? No, but who can? At least we're fully remote, so the compensation is going to be insanely higher than average for some people, and perhaps average-ish for people living in, say, Manhattan.

Anyhow, all this is to say that I hear your frustrations; they strike very close to home for me. I work tirelessly to uphold high standards in my hiring and interviewing practices. But the reality still stands that _there is a shortage_. Next time you find encounter a company with hiring practices you hate, pause for a moment and consider that maybe they're just completely burned out from an endlessly fruitless search just like you are.

(I wrote all this with "anti-procrastination mode" enabled so won't be able to edit it to correct any potential mistakes for a couple hours.)