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The Unemployable Programmer

unemployable.pen.io

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Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#331

Post by jcranmer »

octo_t wrote: post #129
fweespeech wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an absolutely baffling article. The job market for developers is not glutted by over-supply, it's one where marginally-qualified people get hired for salaries well above the national average because companies need SOMEONE to do the job. And virtually nowhere cares about degrees, especially for experienced devs. I've had about 40-50% of places reject me due to a lack of degree. A couple even sent me hopeful…

40%-50% rejection is really amazing, I don't think you quite realise how tough the job market is right now. I have a friend with chemistry PhD who has - with no exaggeration here - applied for at least 300 jobs with varying levels of success.

The chemistry PhD job market is generally considered oversupplied, particularly with the pharmaceutical industry in general retrenchment (see, e.g., " rel="nofollow">http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/01/07/the_phd_prob..., and yes I do realize the age of that link, but nothing much has changed since then).

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#332

Post by vpeters25 »

vonmoltke wrote: post #168
mkozlows wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have friends who are devs and hiring managers (several of whom have no degrees, even) in many cities -- Detroit, Columbus, Portland, Chicago, SF -- and the same thing is true in all those places. If you live in a small town, I can believe that the opportunities are limited, but in basically any metro area of any size, it's a developers' market.

Well, I live in Dallas. I have been fishing in Dallas and Austin over the past several months and can't get any interviews. I would like to know where all these "desperate" companies are and what domains they are in.

You must be doing something seriously wrong if you are a dev in Dallas and haven't found anything after a couple weeks.

I live in Fort Worth, I was in the market last month and I got flooded with offers for interviews from the North Dallas area (Addison, Plano, Frisco). Not talking about these "urgent requirement" emails from indian recruiters, this is actual local recruiters I have dealt with before.

My background is pretty much like OP: I learned to program BASIC on the C64 and dropped off college, the difference is I did all that in South America. Since I came to the US in 1999 I haven't had trouble finding a dev job besides being unemployed for 6 months after the dot-com bubble.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#333

Post by klibertp »

vonmoltke wrote: post #136
mkozlows wrote: post #82

This is an absolutely baffling article. The job market for developers is not glutted by over-supply, it's one where marginally-qualified people get hired for salaries well above the national average because companies need SOMEONE to do the job. And virtually nowhere cares about degrees, especially for experienced devs. And having a single development job at a big company for a decade isn't some kind of career-killing…

> This is an absolutely baffling article. The job market for developers is not glutted by over-supply, it's one where marginally-qualified people get hired for salaries well above the national average because companies need SOMEONE to do the job. And virtually nowhere cares about degrees, especially for experienced devs. What is baffling is this Valley-centric, web and mobile development-centric line being repeated c…

> outside the web and mobile fields in general

Why don't you just change the domain your working in? Why not web dev? If you're a programmer, you should be able to code anything, anywhere, with a bit of effort.

I skimmed your post (https://wmkrug.com/on-the-technical-skills-shortage-and-hiri...) and honestly I'm not sure. I mean, you're saying that requiring "years of experience" in "specific technology" makes "good candidates" to get rejected. But why do you think that someone without these years of experience would be a good candidate?

Experience and skill are necessary. People without experience have little skill by definition: you only improve your skills by doing and remembering what you've done (well and badly) is called experience. Such people are not worthless, but as employees they are worth significantly less than people who demonstrably have both experience and skill.

You seem to be thinking that the employers should let you learn your profession on the job because the college failed to do it. I don't think so. I believe you're the (like we all are) one responsible for teaching yourself enough to be a viable choice for at least an entry position. It's not that hard if you have a passion for the craft and patience to continue learning over the years.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#334

Post by nordic_nomad »

vonmoltke wrote: post #323
nordic_nomad wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I don't tend to use angular with pure .net stuff. Razor and Linq handle all the templating for a single page app and data piping. Really all I'd add to the standard environment is something like this ( https://github.com/SignalR/SignalR ) so you can get real time data and refresh the page without postback. For node work you really need it, but if you're using .net you're running a framework on top of your fr…

I designed the system as a set of (mostly) REST services, with the goal of keeping it as flexible as possible. Not only is the UI completely separate from the system, it is actually optional. The system is designed so that our current or future customers could slot it into an existing, larger analysis system if they wanted to.

Ah, yeah definitely need something like angular then. Very cool sounding project.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#335

Post by andywood »

vonmoltke wrote: post #136
mkozlows wrote: post #82

This is an absolutely baffling article. The job market for developers is not glutted by over-supply, it's one where marginally-qualified people get hired for salaries well above the national average because companies need SOMEONE to do the job. And virtually nowhere cares about degrees, especially for experienced devs. And having a single development job at a big company for a decade isn't some kind of career-killing…

> This is an absolutely baffling article. The job market for developers is not glutted by over-supply, it's one where marginally-qualified people get hired for salaries well above the national average because companies need SOMEONE to do the job. And virtually nowhere cares about degrees, especially for experienced devs. What is baffling is this Valley-centric, web and mobile development-centric line being repeated c…

I've never worked in the valley, and I usually don't have much to do with the web or mobile. I don't have a degree, and the subject has literally never once come up in an interview. In 17 years, I've never encountered anyone who cares. Also, the vast majority of job descriptions read something like "Degree in CS OR equivalent experience" and therefore explicitly do not require degrees.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#336

Post by stock_toaster »

zanek wrote: post #303
bitshepherd wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with fishing in Austin is that they love you when you're not in Texas. If you're in Texas, you don't exist to them, so you don't get an interview.

I put my resume online 10 days ago (I live in Austin). I've had over 200 companies/recruiters call me. There are a ton of software engineering jobs in Austin and all over. I've gotten over 30 calls for jobs in Dallas, San Antonio, Plano, etc. Anyone saying there are no jobs in this area has a crappy resume or no skills

Just curious, what kind of place did you put your resume online?

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#337

Post by alexdowad »

My experience with oDesk was completely different from the Unemployable Programmer.

Yes, there are plenty of "lowest-wage programmers" on those sites. I never bothered to compete with them on price. I simply charged what I thought I was worth, and ratcheted my price up and up as I discovered that the market thought differently. Interestingly, as my price went higher and higher, the constant noise of "crappy" job offers quieted down and was replaced by a small number of great offers.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#338

Post by nordic_nomad »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #254
monk_e_boy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I chose to write a hugely boring open source product that no one in their right mind would bother with. Old tech, competing with a ton of other similar projects. I focused on the documentation, make it as simple as 'cut and paste this code to get it working' every time someone had a question, bam - a cut and paste example. Did some serious SEO and soon was racking up a couple of thousand hits a week. This soon hits t…

If you're getting millions of hits per week, you might want to consider doing something to monetize the open source project...

That's what I was thinking. Find something 1 in 1000 would pay a dollar for and you're golden.

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#339

Post by School-Cotton »

brightball wrote: post #326
School-Cotton wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with poaching? You don't own your employees; this isn't 1850.

When you lose 5 people to the same place that's usually from insider recruiting. A lot of companies use No Raid clauses in both employee and client contracts specifically to prevent that type of thing. If you want to go work somewhere else, that is totally up to you but I'm more than allowed to have a policy stating that you're not allowed to recruit away my entire staff because that destabilizes the entire business,…

I still don't understand why that policy's fair.

I recently left one company and joined another, and am trying to convince all my former coworkers to apply here as well because I genuinely think it's a way better place to work.

If you can't compete on the labor market fairly, you deserve to lose employees. Policies like the one you describe are just a market inefficiency that doesn't have a real justification for existing (outside of your own interests).

Re: The Unemployable Programmer

#340

Post by aidenn0 »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #151
vonmoltke wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an absolutely baffling article. The job market for developers is not glutted by over-supply, it's one where marginally-qualified people get hired for salaries well above the national average because companies need SOMEONE to do the job. And virtually nowhere cares about degrees, especially for experienced devs. What is baffling is this Valley-centric, web and mobile development-centric line being repeated c…

Agreed, sometimes people aren't aware that HN is its own little echo chamber. I was talking to a recruiter recently for a managerial job and somehow got onto the topic of hiring. I asked him what's the hardest jobs for him to fill right now. He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers. Corporations have built their castles on these technologies, not FOSS/Mobile and need staff. Degrees were an i…

After I had landed my first job out of college (10 years ago), I got an offer from a company like that in the midwest.

It took them 9 months from the interview to get back to me with an offer (which is why I was already working somewhere else) and the offer was $30k for a one year contract.

If that's still typical of their hiring process, I'm not surprised they're having trouble hiring people.

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