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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

#341

Post by xlii »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #175
devin wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling this will get me a downvote, but I grew up in a very blue collar town and the idea of paying one's dues is not crazy to me. I see a lot of people entering the tech market as if they don't have anything to prove, like their degree says it all. In any industry, you shovel some shit early on, IMO. I was a good programmer, but I got my start racking servers in a data center. I crawled under raised floor…

>I don't mind the idea of people paying their dues, and I think I'm better for my experience. Careers aren't supposed to start with you having a big corner office. It is surprising to me how many people feel entitled enough that they truly believe they ought to start at the top. he is trying to pay his dues. its an intern position. at the very low level.

As usual - it depends. FAANG internship is way more valuable than other big names and big names are much more valuable than anonymous web shop hiring 3 people.

So if they went directly for big name that isn’t exactly paying their dues.

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

#342

Post by Rapzid »

Leherenn wrote: post #335
ramraj07 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, without knowing the term closure or lambda(which are not necessarily closures but could be as an implementation detail) I'm not sure how one would effectively communicate with others about code in a high-functioning environment using high-level languages. They are very widely used.

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

#343

Post by jhatemyjob »

ivalm wrote: post #298
efnx wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a VP of Engineering tell me once that 17 months is a standard tenure and that we should be happy with that. I think turnover was part of the strategy at that point though...

I don’t quite understand, switching is good for the employee but in what world is it good for the employer? On-boarding/institutional knowledge/etc all suffer.

He didn't mean "we should be happy with that" literally. It's a colloquialism.

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

#344

Post by vorhemus »

I once applied for a job where I knew the hiring manager already but of course I had to go through the whole interview process. The job description was rather generic with phrases like "3+ years of experience in C++/Java/C# that I think I fulfilled pretty well. Next day I got a standard rejection email from a "noreply" address without any explanation why. I called the hiring manager and asked if he could figure out what happened, I didn't expect to drop out at the resume stage already. He came back to me telling me that the keyword "C#" was not in there, so I was automatically filtered and rejected. I didn't know that "experience in C++/Java/C#" apparently means experience in ALL of them, all these languages/keywords must appear in the CV somewhere.

Two things I learned here: 1) If I didn't know already someone at that company, I would still be clueless why I wasn't accepted. 2) The first hiring stage at big companies is indeed a silly keyword filtering process.

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

#345

Post by ALittleLight »

Tossrock wrote: post #20

> The general rudeness is ridiculous. I once had an interviewer ask me if I was a wizard with GO, C++, Rust, and C over the phone. Then when I said I had some experience with rust, he immediately cursed at me and hung up. > This experience is fairly common. Is it? I've done a fair bit of interviewing on both sides of the table, and can say with complete honesty I've never heard a curse said in anger in any of them. I…

It reminds me of a recruiter I spoke to who asked me how much experience I had with "winforms". I said "None, I've never heard of that" and she couldn't believe it. She went into this tirade about how five years of experience with winforms was required for this job and how could I not know anything about it, and was I sure I didn't have at least some exposure somehow to winforms somewhere.

Very odd experience and the only time I've never had someone get angry in a context like that. I guess if you're a recruiter and recruiting for a job that lists winforms as a requirement you may think that's a super critical thing and not have any conception of the relative importance of knowing things like that.

I didn't go forward with the recruiter and I've never bothered to check what winforms are, but I assume it's some kind of library for creating GUIs in Windows and I further assume I could have been productive with it in a day or so.

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

#346

Post by brundolf »

chmod600 wrote: post #323
tshaddox wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stru…

Tangent: I've thought about this "bootstrapping dev hiring" problem before (you don't know which candidates are good because you don't have anyone technical to interview them)

I wonder if there's a business opportunity for a firm of experienced devs who do nothing but interview devs for other companies

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

#347

Post by nv-vn »

electrondood wrote: post #211
anchpop wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Last I checked the median salary for a fresh Stanford CS Master's grad was $105k, but that was a few years ago. I think the 200k figure is inflated by FAANG companies, basically.

I think you may be comparing salary to total comp here, though I'll admit I haven't looked for the source for your $105k figure.

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

#348

Post by lazyasciiart »

mannerheim wrote: post #325
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, there is. People are not spherical cows who will forget that they wanted top tier engineers.

Edit: here's the definition that everyone is using, which you posted earlier

> In common use, the term "shortage" may refer to a situation where most people are unable to find a desired good at an affordable price, especially where supply problems have increased the price. "

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

#349

Post by rmk »

The main thrust of the article is that companies should be open to hiring junior devs with no conventional credentials (degree, specific work experience). This is somewhat reasonable on the surface. But it ignores the question of how much time senior people will have to invest in order to train junior devs with no discernible credentials (which are a proxy for actual ability to deliver robust, maintainable code). Or how many such juniors can be hired in a given team without letting the product go to pieces. The amount of supervision untrained junior devs will need in order to get decent work output from them is quite high: it is often better to be picky and recruit a much smaller number of senior devs with proven work experience and/or credentials. Ditto with a mix of senior devs and junior devs who do have good credentials.

That being said, one thing I have noticed is the insane pickiness of companies these days. Series-A startups that are very likely to die expecting FAANG-level coding skills but with out FAANG-level compensation or career progression opportunities. Startups that run on AWS refusing to hire experienced developers who do not have AWS experience, but have delivered plenty of robust shrink-wrapped hardware/software product. Consumer-oriented startups turning up their noses at devs with enterprise backgrounds. Young, growing companies taking 6+ months to hire, waiting for the perfect unicorn candidate while they can be hiring more realistically and adding value (and going to market faster) much sooner.

The interview loops commonly run 5-6 hours, for even the smallest of shops, and time is wasted on banal 'culture-fit' interviews (read: we won't hire you if we feel like we can't hang out with you after work; we won't hire you if we don't feel like you are 'one of us'), ridiculously hard DP-type questions that almost always require one to have solved the problem prior, poorly-trained junior interviewers who are lacking in the background needed to properly evaluate interviewees' prior work experience, and so on. One is left wondering if such companies even intend to hire!

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

#350

Post by mannerheim »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #348
mannerheim wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, there is. People are not spherical cows who will forget that they wanted top tier engineers. Edit: here's the definition that everyone is using, which you posted earlier > In common use, the term "shortage" may refer to a situation where most people are unable to find a desired good at an affordable price, especially where supply problems have increased the price. "

In economic terms, there is no shortage. There's a shortage in common parlance terms, sure. There is an easy solution - pay market rates. When people say there's a shortage of engineers, they mean there's a shortage of engineers at the price they're willing to pay.
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