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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

#51

Post by tomc1985 »

yosito wrote: post #19
MisterSandman wrote: post #2

As a college student, 1. is the one that worries the most. Automatic filtering is scary, and there's no way to test how these ATS systems are viewing my resume.

Automatic filtering is annoying, but there are plenty of tools that will scan your resume and tell you what keywords they find. I once spent weeks crafting a catchy looking resume with a fixed width font and ascii art. It didn't get any responses, and I didn't understand why until I put it through one of these scanners and realized that the program I had used to save the PDF had strangely encoded all of the text in r…

It sounds like you could have just opened the PDF that was generated to double-check it too. Sending off a derivative file without proofing seems like a big YOLO move to me

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

#52

Post by _2d30 »

speeder wrote: post #27
_2d30 wrote: post #14

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…

If you accept non-US people, tell me what company you work for so I can send my resume. Because all the issues the guy pointed out I am on receiving end of them right now. And although I've been in leadership roles before and started programming when I was 6 years old (my dad taught me), I started lately to see if sending my applications to junior developer roles will get me any replies (people don't even tell me the…

I'm pseudonymous for a reason but here's a list of companies, none of which I am employed at, that have similar pay and issues with staffing:

Uber, Doordash, Asana, AirBnB, Pinterest, LinkedIn and literally so many more. Especially if you are willing to accept mature but not yet liquid equity and then there's Stripe, Airtable, Robinhood and so many more.

Post your resume. Tried to go to your personal website but it wouldn't load.

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

#53

Post by Aeolun »

_2d30 wrote: post #14

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…

As a perfectly competent dev having immense difficulty getting anyone to consider me for any position, I cannot see this as anything other than false.

I have a job now (and by all accounts my employer is really happy with me), but the interview gauntlet I had to run to get here was absolutely ridiculous.

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

#54

Post by srswtf123 »

yosito wrote: post #19
MisterSandman wrote: post #2

As a college student, 1. is the one that worries the most. Automatic filtering is scary, and there's no way to test how these ATS systems are viewing my resume.

Automatic filtering is annoying, but there are plenty of tools that will scan your resume and tell you what keywords they find. I once spent weeks crafting a catchy looking resume with a fixed width font and ascii art. It didn't get any responses, and I didn't understand why until I put it through one of these scanners and realized that the program I had used to save the PDF had strangely encoded all of the text in r…

Could you recommend a scanner?

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

#55

Post by bit_logic »

The article doesn't mention the #1 problem with tech hiring: leetcode. Some advice for recruiters: try starting your emails with "NO LEETCODE" in the subject line and watch your response rate from senior experienced engineers skyrocket! There is an artificial "shortage" caused by this barrier.

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

#57

Post by speeder »

vsskanth wrote: post #13

I just want to know which company cried on NPR about skilled labor shortage that made this person so angry.

Dunno about that particular case.

But I have a story myself: A certain company that is probably in the top100 biggest of the world, one time attempted to hire me, but their hiring process was a mess and they forgot me in the middle.

Then I noticed they kept complaining on media about not finding anyone for that job. 2 YEARS later, after they posted another complaint, I decided to apply again, and even mentioned the previous hiring process.

The HR department said they were sorry, explained that the previous time it was a contractor and they were bad at their job and got fired. So I thought this time I would get hired.

Went through their entire process... and then HR sent me a sad letter, that the headquarters in the company home country, blocked my hire because it would violate policy.

The policy in question, is that for that job, people needed experience. But also, they needed a local. But... they were the first company offering that particular job in the country, ever. So you have this company trying to be the first company to hire for a particular job in the country, but wants someone with experience, complaining endlessy about it on the media. I felt bad for the employees that were dealing with that bullshit.

(the job in question was Game Producer, I have a bachelor degree for it, but back then this company was the only company in the country with such job opening. Some other game companies DID exist in the country but all of them imported producers from their other studios, so for example there was some french and canadian producers in the country)

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

#58

Post by latch »

colordrops wrote: post #28
latch wrote: post #8

Things companies control: 1 - Pay 2 - Work life balance (incl. remote work) 3 - Strong peers 4 - Control in _how_ things are done for senior developers 5 - Efficiency I'm pretty sure that most companies are, at best, 1/5.

I moved from a 2/5 to a 4.5/5. Doesn't mean it was necessarily a satisfying move. There's 6 - great mission and product, which the first one had and the new job is weak in, but it factors for a lot more than the other 5 in attractiveness of the job, at least for me

Yes! But that isn't something that all (or even most?) companies have full control over.

Most people aren't going to be passionate about building, oh, I dunno, software for insurance companies, but it still needs to get done. There might be a handful of "disruptive" companies doing something in the space, but 99% aren't.

There's a lot more "boring" software (even in the startup world) that needs to be built than anything else. The problem is really that these companies don't seem to be self-aware and they don't adjust #1-#5 (especially #1) accordingly.

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

#59

Post by _2d30 »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #24
_2d30 wrote: post #14

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…

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…

> I think the author is talking about pretty large, well-known companies (e.g., FAANG -- see his first point).

Except almost nothing outside of some amount of resume filtering fits his points. Seriously, go to levels.fyi and look at the pay of the FANGs (ex. Amazon). You think his bad pay point is a problem for them?

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

#60

Post by JAlexoid »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #43
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…

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?
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