I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages • Hacker News Board

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

#491

Post by Copernicron » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

jrsj wrote: post #40

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…

Yeah this sounds more like a crazy anecdote to me. I once had a new CTO come in at a place I’d been working at for about a year and a half, and he refused to interview any candidates that weren’t Muslim (as existing staff were replaced 1 at a time). While this is extremely fucked up, I would be surprised if I could find another tech company in the state where this happened. Cursing at someone for having experience in…

It may sound crazy but I’ve seen something similar happen at a startup I used to work at. The founders (Muslim) very clearly preferred to hire people of similar backgrounds. All their recruiting efforts were focused on Muslims and they went so far as to hire clearly incompetent developers over much more qualified applicants simply because they were Muslim. I’m talking about hiring someone fresh out of school vs someone with years of experience simply because the new grad was Muslim. One guy on my team dared to speak up about it and was accused of being racist. He had to do cultural sensitivity training as a result.

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

#492

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 19, 2021, 6:52 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#493

Post by machello13 » Wed, May 19, 2021, 7:04 PM UTC

the_arun wrote: post #17

Another broken thing is LeetCode style of programming exercises asked for a job asking 15+ yrs of experience. Not saying we do not solve complex stuff on a day to day basis, but foundational problems are already solved & we have patterns/solutions/libraries available. We do not do DFS/BFS on a day to day. We do have Stackoverflow, Google to figure things out. FAANG companies - filtering candidates by asking tough Lee…

> If someone can solve hard LeetCode problems why would they join Startups?

Uh, what lol? Is this really what it's like to have HN brain? Not everyone in the tech industry is just working their way up to a FAANG.

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

#494

Post by dominicjj » Wed, May 19, 2021, 7:33 PM UTC

tsukikage wrote: post #429

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…

> "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." ...that statement looks kinda sus. In a code review I'd maybe get you to simplify it or break it up to confirm the negatives end up meaning what you wanted them to mean.

He's always succeeded (never failed) at not finishing his coding work because he didn't know things. Probably not what was meant.

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

#495

Post by belter » Wed, May 19, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #110

Hard to take this seriously with all the straw men and broad generalizations. Reality check: there has never been a hotter seller's market for software engineering talent. The fact that you have not landed a job does not mean that supply is not short in general. Rather than blowing your stack at some recruiter who you heard on a podcast interview, you might want to reflect on yourself and how you might be coming off…

You are underestimating the stupidity of most interview processes...

The Interview (By Doug Milford) https://youtu.be/9fvyAqWfPtk

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

#496

Post by kixiQu » Wed, May 19, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

pedrosorio wrote: post #487

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…

“ I personally know many people at great companies like Google and Twitter who are _desperate_ to change, but they are too afraid to interview. They feel they got lucky and got through the process once and are unlikely to be able to repeat it” Is this just a perception issue or have they actually tried interviewing a few times with negative results?

I mean, there's a real investment in prep that most people seem to agree is necessary, so it's expensive to test.

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

#497

Post by scruple » Wed, May 19, 2021, 7:58 PM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #345

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…

Had something similar happen to me but it was WPF instead of WinForms. Told them to never contact me again.

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

#498

Post by JAlexoid » Wed, May 19, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

mLuby wrote: post #329

JAlexoid wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "top performing"? I've seen some "top performing" code, that I had to just trash... because making any changes to the hack job of top performing "just ship it" people is a nightmare.

I'll give the benefit of the doubt to someone with 25 years experience that they know the difference between a true 10Xer and one who 10Xes by leaving 20X of tech debt in their wake.

Unless a person becomes omniscient after 25years of experience - you can easily miss horrible work.

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

#499

Post by JAlexoid » Wed, May 19, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

anonymous_HFT wrote: post #379

JAlexoid wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. You don't. The difference between both taxes and the "next in line" isn't large enough. Hedge funds pay as much as Google/Facebook, but work and life balance at SV companies is much better. Compare my two offers from a few years ago - well known hedge fund in CT vs a food delivery tech company. Well known hedge fund paid $250k+50k bonus for expected minimum 50hour weeks and 20 days of vacation time. Food delive…

maybe try going to actual top firms: JS, HRT $400k new grad TC, Free food, 40 hour work weeks, great company culture (many events) Facebook this year had many intern events trying to convince people that FB > Quant, evidently the brain drain is there

They are the minority with a VERY small staff, compared to most others. (Also HRT engineers work a lot, not leasurely 40 hours per week)

Pointing to extreme outliers is not giving your opinion much credence. Because I can point to some people who work in crypto, that earn $600k+ without breaking a sweat - in Singapore with Singaporean taxes(which blows HRT salaries with US taxes out of the water)

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

#500

Post by pm90 » Wed, May 19, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

burntoutfire wrote: post #462

jurassic wrote: post #309

> ...this moronic interview practice would alienate an obvious asset > The lack of faith in our fellow humans is disgusting. This kind of catastrophizing and dismissive language makes me want to ignore everything the author says. If you think being evaluated in an interview setting is somehow unfair, I think you should consider whether your attitude is the problem. If you are actually good at leetcode and continue to…

For me, leetcoding people is basically asshole behavior, on the part of the company. The whole idea of "let's have a tournment where we have candidates grind on arbitrary problems for months as a part of preparation, mhwahaha (evil laughter)" sounds like something out of Donald Trump's playbook. No wonder it tends to select for (often, money-driven) assholes who see it as par for the course, while many mature and rea…

I feel like unless there is an alternative and the labor pool is large enough companies are not incentivized to look at other ways of evaluating engineers.

I’m glad that there is a “shortage” of engineers. Likely this isn’t a problem that can be solved anytime soon. The past 2 decades were a brief time when FAANGs could provide a ton of benefits (both financial and non financial, such as eg dev tools) which attracted hordes of people to them. They successfully shaped the industry and now most tech firms are expected to provide great benefits. The number of startups and unicorns is large enough to stem the flood of engineers that they used to get before, and now they will be forced to use different strategies.