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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

#551
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And footguns that an experienced person might hit. One family of such footguns is: const auto &foo = something(args); … other_thing(foo); Depending on exactly what you’re doing and what type something(args) returns, this can be entirely correct and idiomatic. In other circumstances it accesses a reference after its lifetime. One can debate whether the const belongs there and how many &’s to use, but, unless something…

The temporary's reference is valid until the temporary is destroyed by falling out of scope, swapped etc. Or have I missed something?

I think the point is just that unlike Rust there's no compiler enforcement that you only use refs in their lifetimes: you can easily accidentally cause a use after free.

Some times it can be pretty indirect: eg if the ref ends up pointing into some std container then it might need invalidated by making an otherwise unrelated change to the container.

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

#552
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

({}) + 12 evaluates to "[object Object]12" omg, I need to learn / start using typescript

You're right! Though the original question - '{} + 12' - is extra tricky and actually evaluates to 12 ;) I'll leave figuring out why as an exercise for the reader

It depends.

x = {} + 12;

x has the value "[object Object]12". So, it' not always 12 :P

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

#553
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what is "market rate"? Likewise, if "market rate" is above "value produced by the employee" it doesn't make any sense to pay that much. There are lots of companies out there that need some tech and some programming, but when the company revenue is only a few million that has to span a few score employees, and costs... its not possible to pay the small handful of devs six figures and keep everything in the black.…

>Likewise, if "market rate" is above "value produced by the employee" it doesn't make any sense to pay that much. It also means that somewhere out there is a business that can actually produce enough value to pay market rate and you should work for that company instead.

I still remain in the "there is a mismatch of expectations" camp. If there is blame to be placed somewhere, I would assign the majority of it to new grads (and boot campers and self taught devs).

With the dominance of tech in the mindshare of people looking for a job, they're only looking at well known tech companies. Apple, Google, Facebook, etc... and these are also the places that can afford to take a risk on a new dev as they've got the institutional inertia to help carry someone along.

The flip side of that is that many people entering the job market don't consider companies like Dominos (only pizza company with a software patent), UPS (that whole 'don't make left turns' navigation thing), Target (early leader in data science), or McDonalds (hiring for some neat stuff in AI drive throughs).

Next, new grads are often expecting that the wages that the big tech companies can offer are standard across the field. I've more than once seen on Reddit a new grad getting an offer (that they applied to) in the northern Great Plains and then backing out when they were offered 70k to work in Fargo.

Another version of the "where are you applying" is that they're only applying to companies in Seattle, SF, and LA and then complaining that they can't find a job.

The idea that seems to be consistent with these new grads is a "I am worth $100,000 and I won't accept anything less." There's a consistent statement that the person is worth that much rather than the work that they do is worth that much.

Spend some time in /r/cscareerquestions to get more of this.

Those trying to hire aren't blameless in this. Expecting developers to fit nicely into the same payroll box as everyone else who reports to a manager in the office with a white collar job could very well mean that the offer is well below what someone with the necessary skills would accept.

My rough ballpark for what a dev should get (with large error bars) is 2x per capita income for the area. That tends to get fairly close to acceptable.

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

#554
It is absolutely, without question, easier for a decent dev to find a job than for a non-tech giant to hire devs. I have done both and talk to companies as part of my current job about their hiring and attrition every month. We are in one of the most in-demand industries in the world.

If you are a decent developer, and you can't find a job, one of two things is happening:

1) You are being too picky: You're applying for jobs out of your league or that aren't a good fit for you (yet)

2) You need to fix up some skills. These could be coding, or they could be working with people, interviewing, presentation, etc.

When I applied for jobs, I fired out 140 applications in the space of 7 days and had multiple offers to talk (and then jobs) two weeks later, and I have no degree. But I didn't have fantasies about FAANG and driving a Tesla in two years, I applied at small companies that needed people like me. 5 years after that, I'm making very comfortable money from moving up gradually to better work and now have an hourly that is FAANG competitive. (I did freelance for 10 years previous to that, so the FAANG competitive compensation was 15 years in the making). People are impatient and don't want to look at their own assumptions and decisions critically.

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

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Off-topic) I was surprised to learn that in Northern Ireland, you are legally required to ask candidates whether they are Catholic or Protestant. If they decline answering, you must make an educated guess and document that. The goal is to ensure you are not hiring all Catholics or all Protestants. Northern Ireland is in a unique situation. The Troubles were horrible. I can’t imagine having to write regulations to pu…

What’s interesting is that of the other developed countries, the US actually sounds the closest to this. No other country that I know of (maybe Canada?) will ask you to describe your “race” when applying to university for example

Canada doesn’t do this either

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

#556

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…

Pretty strong disagree on this. I prefer working on teams that optimize for execution speed and just hire people who won’t go up in flames in that environment.

this so much.

Focusing on process and making the safest process will kill your team. Your best team members don't want to be hampered by a process that slows them down to protect them from their worst team members. The advantage you have as a startup is speed, don't throw it away so easily.

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

#557
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…

Is there a university nearby? Grad students and postdocs seem like a fairly untapped source for tech recruiting, especially outside of the CS department. Physics, neuroscience, econ, biology, and many other fields now involve lots of programming and data analysis, sometimes under demanding conditions (real-time or huge, noisy data sets). Many of the people are smart and highly-motivated, but making a tenth of the num…

From talking with my PhD and MS friends, it's mainly about time. PhDs work around 40-60 hours a week. Full time MS students are juggling courses, research, and part time work, also around 40 hours a week. That usually leaves little time and energy to apply for jobs and practice interviewing.

As a terminal MS student, most of the interviews and offers I've gotten were from professor recommendations to their industry colleagues. I researched computational linguistics and dynamical systems in my undergrad, and in grad school I researched HPC and distributed systems. I still interview poorly because I don't invest enough time practicing/applying compared to reading papers or doing grad student grunt work. On paper, having an MS can also be a negative signal.

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

#558
It ain't just the software industry. Industries across the board seem to be running into the same self-inflicted pain: "Woe is us, we can't find anyone who wants to work for us... What's that, pay better and not rely on Kafkaesque recruitment pipelines? lol nah, clearly the workers are lazy and entitled."

Employers won't change their behavior unless they're actually pressured via the ostensibly-free market to do so. In the short term, UBI would give workers vastly more ability to negotiate for better terms on an individual level; this extends to longer term proliferations of both labor unions (which can sustain longer strikes when UBI at least prevents strikers from going hungry or homeless) and ideally-cooperatively-owned startups (wherein the founders have a safety net in the highly-likely event that the startup doesn't make it past the front of its bathtub curve, and wherein the company is less reliant on outside investment just to keep the lights on).

But whenever such solutions get suggested, they of course get shot down as "eww socialism" and the problems persist.

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

#559
post #373
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 25 years experience and a CS degree. I even taught Java and C++ for 4 years at a college. Our top performing developer has this background: No software eng. experience 2015. 2016 Bootcamp 2017 Salesforce 2018 - today - our company: TS, React, Vue, NodeJS, Python, Main devops developer that brought up our docker infra. > Didn't happen. Yikes...

Bootcamp grads haven't been in the workforce long enough, so whether they can weather the fickle winds of the technology landscape is an open question. That's where the CS degree shows its worth: technologies change but fundamentals change less. Comparison-based sorting is still O(nlogn). You still have to partition and break down large data sets in order to work on them. Time and space tradeoffs will always exist an…

meh - I had basically 2 data structure courses, which is not a "year of classes" since the class met for 1 hour, twice a week for about 20 weeks, and times 2 for that second semester. So I have 20 * 2 * 2 or 80 hours of O notation and heap sorting.

The rest of my CS degree consisted of a lot of stuff I used in class (assembly programming) and maybe I got something out of that. I also took a functional languages course which was taught with Scheme (a lisp dialect) which is a little iffy on practical skills. A formal database class (which was an elective)

So I know boyce codd normal form and o-notation, is that really much of an edge over the bootcampers after a few years?

And to be honest because everyone brings up O notation every time we have this talk I'm pretty sure most bootcampers learn that by looking it up and probably binary trees. Yeah. so I'm really not very convinced from a practical level how much more they're pulling.

It seems to me I was in the wrong classes altogether - the real money at this point is in ML and there's not much a CS degree helps with in that area really - so yea, the fundamentals did kinda change, right?

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

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 1000 companies want to hire top tier experienced engineers and there are only 100 on the market, that is the definition of a shortage.

Are the 900 other companies are willing and able to increase their bids to poach the 100 engineers? They cannot all increase bids indefinitely - at some point, only 100 companies will be able to afford the 100 engineers, and at the point the market is cleared and there is no shortage.

Or more likely 5 companies will get about 10 - 30 each.
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