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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

#471

Post by wanderer2323 »

overeater wrote: post #361
wanderer2323 wrote: post #68

Author's thoughts on what is broken are: 1. Too much reliance on automated filtering of resumes 2. Companies asking for too much years of experience with specific tech/language/stack 3. Developers dismiss other developers (for using javascript, apparently?) 4. The 'asking about language trivia' interviews are bad, it would be much better to make candidate solve a small task from scratch 5. Restatement of (2) but with…

What's the O in FAANGMO? It's not Oracle is it? That wouldn't make any sense.

Oracle Cloud is pretty FAANGM-ish, it looked like a cross between Amazon and Microsoft when I interviewed there

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

#472

Post by nasalgoat »

missedthecue wrote: post #270
bradlys wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you bought a gallon of milk or any beef lately?

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

#473

Post by baetylus »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #251
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…

we hired a confident 2 year out bootcamp grad that was able to pass our interview process and he nearly destroyed our company, twice. There is a reason the interview is difficult to pass, being a dev is a job with an insane amount of responsibility, you do not want bad people in there.

How can one person come close to destroying your company twice? Don't you have security measures in your pipeline to prevent this?

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

#474

Post by ahel »

noodlenotes wrote: post #256
KhoomeiK wrote: post #225

I honestly don't think pay is an issue in tech, but most of the others the author brings up are valid points. The crux of the issue in my opinion is the fact that NO ONE HIRES JUNIOR DEVELOPERS . Companies don't want to take on the burden of training junior devs and then complain when there aren't enough senior devs to go around. Obviously it makes sense from a business perspective, but taking a step back, training j…

When developers change jobs after about 2 years at a company, what's the incentive for any individual company to take on the burden of training junior talent? By the time they've got the experience to contribute on their own, they're gone.

Because the compensation raise doesn't stay synched to the market.

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

#475

Post by ahel »

KhoomeiK wrote: post #320
noodlenotes wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When developers change jobs after about 2 years at a company, what's the incentive for any individual company to take on the burden of training junior talent? By the time they've got the experience to contribute on their own, they're gone.

Totally agree and I thought about mentioning this in my comment. Yeah, part of the blame for this problem is on us as developers for creating a culture that encourages constant company hopping.

> on us as developers for creating a culture that encourages constant company hopping

lol. It's not like _us developers_ like the stress of interviewing every 2years. It's just that we know that we're undervalued and underpaid and have the luxury to prepare for job hopping. It's a matter of _fair_ talent retention, not of _developer encouraging a culture of company hopping_ (???). Or give me example to change my mind, maybe I've not understood what you meant by that.

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

#476

Post by josephg »

yoyonamite wrote: post #461
josephg wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't agree at all. Pre pandemic I worked as a professional software engineering interviewer for a largish recruiting company. I did 400+ ~2hr interviews over about a year. We did not put forward the vast majority of people I interviewed. Lots of people on HN, and certainly lots of people who…

What was the placement rate for the candidates that you put forward? Based on your statements, I would expect this number to be very high, but from my understanding of the industry, including recruitment companies that do technical assessments, I would be surprised if it was that high.

Sorry, but I won’t / can’t answer that.

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

#477

Post by [deleted] »

josephg wrote: post #397
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…

> 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 don't agree at all. Pre pandemic I worked as a professional software engineering interviewer for a largish recruiting company. I did 400+ ~2hr interviews over about a year. We did not put forward the vast majority of people I interviewed. Lots of people on HN, and certainly lots of people who…

[deleted]

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

#478

Post by ivalm »

nradov wrote: post #460
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…

What point are you trying to make? None of those artificial constraints apply in the real world.

Yeah I made a simplification so you can explicitly compute expectation values and see that there is no ZOPA, but in the real world there is a thing called opportunity cost and people do choose to stay unemployed while looking for job because some jobs pay too low. This is essentially what I tried to demonstrate in my simple example.

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

#479

Post by ackfoobar »

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…

Here's what I expect will happen when an average developer is "to learn C++ on the job":

The inexperienced developer will write code that is subtly wrong. The senior developers will spend more time debugging than the time would take to write the code themselves. The new hire will effectively have negative productivity. And when the new hire has learned enough, s/he will get a new job. The comapny will not have recouped the investment on the developer.

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

#480

Post by throw5away »

ditonal wrote: post #244
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?

Yes, a new grad "feeling lowballed by 200k" was hyperbole because I waste too much time on Blind. But FAANG new grad TC is pushing that number, which is a stark contrast to my new grad numbers ~2010. But it was probably confusing for me to phrase it that way.

I had $200k+ TC new grad offers from FAANGs in 2013, and one of them wasn't even for a role in the Bay Area. It's not a stark contrast at all. The market has been consistently willing to pay strongly for new talent.
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