381–390 of 583 posts
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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
That’s very close to what Triplebyte does.
I literally can’t relate to this on any level. I’m an HM at a company that pays on the order of a FANG and at best matches one of these credentialist barriers and yet we can’t come close to hiring targets on devs. I don’t get how people can see the plethora of individuals under 10yrs experience in SWE and other tech roles in SV/NYC/SEA with incomes of $250-600k/yr and think this happens without a “shortage” of talent…
> devs have a lot of bargaining power Employees don't seem to have enough bargaining power to meaningfully control working conditions, though. Maybe these are worth a ton of money to the company, or such desires are an outlier. But here is my experience: I'm a professor of computer science, and frequently get recruiters trying to get me to jump ship to industry. I'm open to it in principle. I'm reasonably happy in my…
One was at a euro stoxx 50 telco. They had a desk with a single plate that 10 people sat at. I had to sit with the project team I was working with who, unfortunately, weren't all the same height. But the plate could only be adjusted to one height for everyone which was way too low for me. Every day at the office, it felt like working at a coffee table and my back and knees hurt like crazy. I was fighting the corporate system for half a year, including making a fool of myself in front of the global director of human resources and company medical officer. This was ultimately unsuccessful as I was a freelancer, not an employee, and earned me the scorn of my direct manager. The whole experience was so undignified and humiliating that it was ultimately one of the main reasons I quit that gig. After all I was just trying not to have to endure physical pain.
The other occasion was at a well-known Wall Street investment bank back in 2010. They put the computers in the space under the desk that should normally be legroom and every day at the office felt like a long haul flight in economy class.
My boss's boss, a partner at that firm, privately owned a floor in a highrise residential building in Tribeca. Yet, during the work week, he still basically never got to see daylight. Our business unit wasn't high enough in status to be able to swing a work area on the outside of the building that had daylight. He had an office but still no privacy. One of the walls of his office, facing his underlings' open plan space, was made of glass. Glass walls is something that these firms do these days even for very high-ranking executives to create witnesses in cases of allegations around what may or may not be happening behind those walls between colleagues of opposite gender (or preempt those kinds of goings-on or allegations).
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…
>50% can't do FizzBuzz How can someone possibly call themselves a programmer (let alone a developer applying for a job) when they can't even pseudo something like fizzbuzz ? How can they use any API, tool or even copy code from SO without knowing how to write a foreach and a conditional inside?
Agreed. On the other hand, I can count the number of times I've used modulo professionally on one hand, so I wouldn't be too shocked to encounter a competent programmer who had't heard of it.
> 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…
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Yeah, hiring someone with no c++ experience and expecting them to OJT is a great way to farm memory corruption vulnerabilities...
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?
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…
>50% can't do FizzBuzz How can someone possibly call themselves a programmer (let alone a developer applying for a job) when they can't even pseudo something like fizzbuzz ? How can they use any API, tool or even copy code from SO without knowing how to write a foreach and a conditional inside?
This one guy we interviewed had 15 years of C# experience. I thought great, he might not know Java, but he can pick it up quickly with that much experience. I was a little concerned that someone this senior was applying for such a junior role, but so far he was much better than any of the other candidates.
Just as a sanity check, I asked him to write something similar to fizzbuzz. It was actually even easier. He couldn't do it. And I thought that maybe he thought I expected him to do it in Java, so I said he can do it in C#, pseudo code or any language he likes.
He couldn't even write a single line of code. I ended the interview right there.
I don't know how deluded this guy was. Or if his CV was made up. Or if he just conned his way into his previous roles. There are countless people like this. It is surprising what you'll find out there.
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Cost of living is also wildly different since 2010 though too.
Widly? I don't think there's ever been a decade of lower inflation. It's certainly not 4x as expensive as then
> Furthermore, if you really want a C++ developer you can just expect a developer to learn C++ on the job if they have any adjacent experience with any other language. Is this really accurate? C++ is a very different language than even Java, not to mention Python or JS. Languages have their own quirks and attributes that often matter at some point. Especially C++. I am on a team where we are constantly building stuff…
People undervalue other people’s skills and contributions and overvalue their own skills and contributions. I notice this more and more in hiring process. Teams expecting new member to perfect fit wrt hard skills over soft skills. Frankly, hard skills can be taught, soft skills can’t be taught and take long time to modify behavior.
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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. "