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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

#401

Post by mathgladiator »

vagrantJin wrote: post #218
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 think you are talking over the post. Interns do the grunt work no one else wants to touch, up to and including making coffee. No one really expects much from them. But I personally like that blue collar work ethic.

When I was at Amazon, interns got to do greenfield work because that was how senior engineers got their projects off the ground without a six pager.

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

#402

Post by cableshaft »

JAlexoid wrote: post #314
trainsplanes wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discarding applicants for game dev experience and claiming there's a dev shortage is completely bizarre. It's like starting a restaurant and banning chefs with baking experience.

Do you know what a game designer is?

I was a professional game designer (still a designer, but more a hobbyist now) with extensive (>10 years) game, mobile, full stack web and enterprise development experience, and all of that is current, as I'm developing games, including mobile games, in my spare time. It's very possible to do both.

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

#403

Post by ArnoVW »

MattGaiser wrote: post #37
ARandomerDude wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author is talking about pretty large, well-known companies (e.g., FAANG -- see his first point). Many people applying to these well-known companies are auto-filtered by resume software, which artificially decreases supply. Small and mid-size companies have a different problem: people haven't heard of them and don't know to apply. My company is in this situation. We have a good culture, I think, and pay ve…

Is this auto filtering happening at the senior level for FAANG? Amazon keeps reaching out to me (a junior who already failed one of their interviews) on LinkedIn. Google did as well at one point. If I am somehow worth personal attention as a not terribly impressively pedigreed and inexperienced developer, are they really dumping seniors through crappy filtering software and missing them there?

The stakes are lower. As a CTO (hypothetically) I get to hire 4 junior devs, 2 senior, and 1 architect.

Hire the wrong junior? No biggy, he'll be less effecient but we may yet turn him around. Anyway, I get three more tries. Anyway, he'll leave after 2 years. They always do.

Hire the wrong architect? I'm stuck with him, for a very long time. Moreover, I now have the wrong guy for a high-impact job. And one that is very visible.

So you betcha I'm going to be much more picky, the more senior the job becomes.

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

#404

Post by bobthepanda »

namdnay wrote: post #365
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 really don’t see what you went through as “paying your dues”. Would it be normal for a doctor to start their career as a vet, and work their way up to humans? Would it be normal for a car mechanic to be asked to start on lawnmowers and work up? Not really And being a junior programmer isn’t “having a big corner office” or “being at the top”. It’s literally the bottom of the software engineering ladder

The doctor analogy doesn't quite make sense, since doctors do have to complete residency.

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

#405

Post by ivalm »

tshaddox wrote: post #393
ivalm wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, sometimes there is no zone of possible agreement (value produced is below market rate). In this case you can both have shortage and unemployment at the same time. Example, you have labor force of 10 people. All jobs have mandatory stay of 2 years. 6 companies have an opening each that pays 1 mil/year. The openings are staggered so 3 jobs are available on odd and 3 on even years (and last 2 years). 50 jobs are pos…

If the value produced to my company by a software engineer is below the market rate for a software engineer doesn’t that just mean I shouldn’t want to hire a software engineer? Like if I run a performing orchestra I probably don’t want to hire an anesthesiologist at market rates because they will provide very little (if any) value to my business.

No, you can be existentially important to the company and still not produce market rate worth of value.

Example: Virtual Widget Co has one employee. The company makes $120k/year in revenue (and so max cap for compensation is ~100k/year because of whatever other costs). If the employee leaves, the company would not be able to continue and will fold. However, the employee is one of the 10 from my previous example, to minmax their own income they should leave the company despite being indispensable to it/the company folds after they leave. No other qualified person would apply for this job either. In fact, it might even be that the average unqualified person’s wage is far below 100k but even that doesn’t help.

A better statement would be “Virtual Widget Co shouldn’t exist because it doesn’t have a viable business proposition”. But this can be counterintuitive in the context of 40% unemployment (4 out of 10 in my example). A more real-world analogy would be “lots of businesses are viable only in the presence of slave labor.”

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

#406

Post by blihp »

MattGaiser wrote: post #23

> 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…

Yes, for typical corporate development tasks which is the bulk of the tech job market. As long as they are reasonably seasoned vs what you need done and you don't throw them in to the deep end on day one. Every language has quirks and corner cases but after you've learned enough of them, the oddities don't tend to trip you up for very long. Learning the specific frameworks and business knowledge tends to be the lions share of the learning that needs to happen... takes longer but also not a big deal.

Realistically, the majority of developers spend their days doing rather mundane work with CRUD/data-munging probably being a good description for most of it (regardless of whether it's server/desktop/mobile/web) which isn't rocket science. Now if you need an expert to write a memory management system for language X on OS Y, that's a different story.

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

#407

Post by onion2k »

adwn wrote: post #392
onion2k wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is what I call the "Perfect World Fallacy". Yes, in a perfect world, you'd be absolutely right. But that's not the reality we're living in – in particular, that's not the reality small and young companies are living in. When you're scaling up, or when you're short on staff, and there are fires to be put out everywhere , you just don't have the capacity to design and test those perfect processes. Where are they s…

Yes, in a perfect world, you'd be absolutely right.

A lot of companies choose not to do process oriented work, and just wing it instead because they believe they can go faster. That's fine. It's a choice driven by resources.

What's not fine is complaining that someone you hire is "bad" because they get stuff wrong when you're forcing them to work without a process-based safety net. People will always make mistakes. If your belief is that everyone should be perfect because you've chosen the no-safety route then you don't get to complain when someone nearly sinks the company. Expecting people never to get things wrong is unreasonable, and it's the exact reason why we have processes to catch problems.

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

#408

Post by onion2k »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #368
onion2k wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, we have a bad process, show me a company with < 8 devs and traction that has a good process lol.

You recognise this and you didn't implement processes to catch problems after the first mistake (obviously, because there was a second mistake). If there's a third mistake I think you're going to have to accept it was partly your fault.

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

#409

Post by johnnyanmac »

nxpnsv wrote: post #355
johnnyanmac wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

market rate =/= "most extreme salaries from the largest tech companies". By statistical definition, the highest salaries can't be the median income for newgrads.

Both of these statements are true. Neither of them is what I meant.

As a follow up to your edit: I think we agree on what market rate is, but what market rate actually is for tech is subject to a wide variety of answers. So that may be where the discrepancy comes from.

that and the article in question giving questionable numbers like:

>50-70k is a junior’s salary. Your people with 10 years of experience with C++ or whatever should be paid closer to 300k

50-70K out of school is normal in the US, but not necessarily all of US (70K in expensive areas like San Fransisco would be low balling, even as a new grad). 300K, even after 10 years, is not normal, not unless you started at a top company and/or have been aggressively chasing pay raises, internally or through job hopping.

BUT, while abnormal it's also not a surprising number to hear either. It depends on so many factors.

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

#410

Post by ALittleLight »

namdnay wrote: post #369
ALittleLight wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds more like the recruiter was frustrated and panicked that they still couldn’t find anyone suitable, and was trying to nudge you into inventing some winforms experience in order to get to the next round

"Ohhhhh, WINforms! Yeah, I have 6 years of experience with that."
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