STOP REQUIRING DEGREES AND HIRE PEOPLE THAT HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO OPEN SOURCE
I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
511–520 of 583 posts
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#512I 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.
This can be flipped around too. Companies have tools to incentivize people to stick around too: vesting schedules, accrued leave, even regular cash-money raises. Why don't they use them?
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#513> 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…
I once, 30 minutes into what was supposed to be a 1 or 2 hour phone interview, had an engineer at Google cut me off in the middle of their standard "write code in a Google Doc" with a "oh, I have a meeting I have to run to, good work we'll get back to you." I assume it was not, in fact, good work, as I did not progress to the next interview. I think a phrase like "typical" would be inaccurate; possibly "common" as we…
They were probably going through the motions to hire an H1-B.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#514I 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…
Yes, this is what he's really missing. I think he has a lot of good points (but not all--sorry, but while you can get the basics of a new language quickly the main time cost is learning the library) but he utterly overlooks all the trash.
The companies doing the hiring see a lot of trash applying and take all sorts of steps to filter it out. The trash keeps applying everywhere, the companies try even harder to filter it. The companies see the filters as saving them time on interviewing trash, they don't see the good ones being filtered out.
I'd like to see some sort of meaningful certification of developer skills, but it would be awfully hard to do without being subject to being gamed.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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?
> How can someone possibly call themselves a programmer… when they can't even pseudo something like fizzbuzz? 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.
You can do fizzbuzz without it, it's just not as efficient.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#516Remember that a lot of job postings aren't in fact real, but companies trying to "prove" they can't replace their H1B workers. I have nothing against said workers, but the way the US manages H1B visas is broken IMO.
Definitely. Last time I was looking at least 80% of job postings obviously had no job behind them or were duplicates. H1-B setups, recruiters simply trying to build a list of clients, multiple ads for what was obviously the same underlying job, a few that continually posted the same ad but didn't look like recruiters etc.
I suspect the actual garbage rate was at least 90%.
Admittedly, I do not live in a tech hub and relocation is not an option.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#517I was kind of following along and agreeing in many aspects with the article, until I got to the following: >You should be giving people obscure algorithms in interviews. For example, ask a candidate to make a playable game of Japanese GO, and ask them to use flood-fill. In my opinion, asking algorithmic questions in interviews for say a front-end development position is one of the core fundamental problems of hiring…
I fully agree about algorithms--that's what Google is for.
However, I can see merit to making a playable game of Go. I would think a playable game of chess or checkers would be a better option, though, as people are much more likely to know the rules.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#518Yes, tech hiring is entirely broken. I’ve had so many interviews and have been turned down a lot. It sucks but you can’t take it personal. You have to realize interviewers are dealing with time shortages, incomplete information and therefore looking for cues you’re a good fit. Most of those boil down to personality. Whenever I start interviewing, it takes a few fails before I finally realize: my talents are not (at a…
This is hilarious. But maybe somewhat reflects on the simple reality that everyone wants to work with personable people.
Well, can you blame them? :)
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#519I 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've mentioned this on HN before, but I have 10+ years experience, a BS in CS from a top 10 school, worked as SWE at Google for over 3 years, I've done 100+ leetcode questions, studied grokking the systems interview/designing data intensive applications, I live in the Bay Area, and I've _still_ failed 90% of my onsites last few years at the top tech companies (Stripe, Lyft, AirBnB, Square, Dropbox, etc). Reasons for…
Interviewing is a skill of itself for sure. Random offer, if you want to get some honest no-consequence feedback dm me and we’ll do a mock interview. Have hired a lot of people and want to pay it forward for all the people o have rejected not because they err bad but because I was bad at interviewing. Send me a message.
Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
#520I 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…
I honestly doubt that 50% of applicants can't do FizzBuzz.
Joel Spolsky has explained how it's possible before:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/