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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

#561

Post by lazyasciiart »

mannerheim wrote: post #350
lazyasciiart wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is. People are not spherical cows who will forget that they wanted top tier engineers. Edit: here's the definition that everyone is using, which you posted earlier > In common use, the term "shortage" may refer to a situation where most people are unable to find a desired good at an affordable price, especially where supply problems have increased the price. "

In economic terms, there is no shortage. There's a shortage in common parlance terms, sure. There is an easy solution - pay market rates. When people say there's a shortage of engineers, they mean there's a shortage of engineers at the price they're willing to pay.

Yes. And when people say there is a shortage of food, they mean "at the price they are willing to pay". But new engineers and new foodstuffs will not spring into existence when you add a zero to the price - therefore there is a shortage. You might want to say but oh, more people will become engineers if salaries are higher! But that doesn't ship products this summer.

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

#562

Post by readonthegoapp »

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.

i now know of closures, and have actually used them intentionally, and rarely, and def not enthusiastically.

i lived mostly in the java world, and discovered closures when i was getting wacky results while playing around with a Clojure looping example.

then ran into similar situations about once a year when doing something in javascript -- usually passing some function for a callback, and needing access to 'this' in the original/calling scope - which only confused things when i needed access to 'this' in the (local?) function scope, too.

guess i'm not against closures -- they just seem mysterious to me.

ditto lambdas. they seem like a good way to write esoteric code, and write more error-prone/less-defensive code -- that, for instance, might be more likely to produce NPEs, and generally be less maintainable b/c of the focus on brevity instead of clarity, and be geared more towards expert users/coders instead of the generalists (like me) who are often brought in to maintain older code.

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

#563

Post by readonthegoapp »

dorgo wrote: post #552
brundolf wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

can confirm:

https://replit.com/@atlwellwell/EsotericJSInterviewQuestion#...

at this point, i'd love to know when the answer is just '12'.

i remember going at it with some dude back in the day who was 100% certain, and got visibly upset, when i stood my ground that java only used pass by value. i allowed that even object references were being passed, but that they were passed by value.

i didn't get the job.

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

#564

Post by readonthegoapp »

alanwreath wrote: post #484
sen wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just recently had someone ask me not to curse when I said “ah, damn” in relation to some trivial thing (from memory I was just expressing disappointment that a project wasn’t going ahead, or part of a project). It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever met someone (over 10yrs old) who considered “damn” to be cursing but apparently they do exist.

It is informal speech. Some people choose to use informal speech in work environments. Others believe it to be inappropriate. I'm in the latter camp but I don't push my language preferences on others - just as I don't push my coding style. So now you've met two people, but in reality you probably are familiar with many more who are silent.

i usually say 'darn' just to be safe, unless/until everyone knows each other, etc.

and i'm still surprised when an interviewer drops an S-bomb or F-bomb or whatever.

when i moved from north (US of A) to the south, back in the day, some religious folks would cuss by saying things like 'Dah-gommit' and things like that.

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

#565

Post by esrauch »

UncleMeat wrote: post #457
zmmmmm wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even so much that the footguns exist but that the consequence of hitting them is "undefined behavior" ie: anythign from core dump to reformatting your hard drive. Compare to Java where the consequence is one thing doesnt work right and someone has to debug it. Rarely it takes down a whole server side process but even then you get a lot of instrumentation and diagnostics to manage it and / or figure out what…

C++ is a nightmare language but this specific complaint is completely overblown. The compiler isn't going to format your hard drive (I know that one blog post exists - that is a deliberately constructed example). A C++ program with UB is just buggy. Same as a java program with bugs. The program does something you don't want it to do. That's what a bug is. The compiler isn't going to maliciously introduce code that yo…

I think there is a factor of UB that makes it have a steeper learning curve than the corresponding issues in other languages: with Java a lot of that category of bad code will throw exceptions and you'll get useful stack traces. UB often results in some seemingly nonsensical runtime state (eg something being null immediately after a null check, or a null dereference only leading to a segfault later in a place that locally has no pointers).

Compare mutating a container in a way that invalidates a live iterator: in java it's a specific exception that you can read on stack overflow, and in C++ it's just a use after free that might still appear to work correctly a random percentage of the time.

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

#566

Post by mannerheim »

rhacker wrote: post #560
mannerheim wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps, but regardless, the other companies could still attempt to bid up, and if they're unwilling to, then they can hardly complain about there being a shortage.

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

#567

Post by mannerheim »

imtringued wrote: post #546
username90 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they mean there is a greater lack of engineers compared to other occupations requiring similar levels of education and therefore we should put more effort into educating and importing engineers. Saying we shouldn't focus on getting more engineers in those cases is just dumb, the economy would greatly benefit, you just want to protect your currently privileged position at the cost of society as a whole.

>No, they mean there is a greater lack of engineers compared to other occupations requiring similar levels of education and therefore we should put more effort into educating and importing engineers. Importing engineers is just poaching engineers from other countries. It's the same thing. Educating engineers is a matter of compensation. Given a high enough salary people will get the necessary degree. The only other t…

To be fair, if engineers from other countries can earn more money in America, that's an indication that their skills are better put to use here than elsewhere.

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

#568

Post by jnxx »

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…

So, assuming this is all essentially right from the employers point of view, what can senior developers do to make the selection / hiring process more efficient for themselves? The thing is that there are a lot of spammy recruiters as well. And dealing with them costs a lot of time. At least if one does not want to do a shotgun approach to applications, one has to be really selective on where to apply, with very little solid information beforehand.

What I can think of:

* be selective where to apply

* prefer job advertisements on companies web pages, as they give often much more information on the role, than a typical recruiter will give out

* do not apply to job descriptions which are not at least a n 80% match with the own qualifications and interests

* a job offer is not entirely different from a requirements specification, so a good engineering company should be able to write something quite specific

* if one stated requirement is not matched in the application, explain and point to an equivalent qualification (say, no years of experience in Go, but 10+ years experience with each of Java, Python, and Ruby).

* as a reasonable coding task should not require preparation by experienced people, do not prepare for them

* Interviewers have a reasonable interest to learn about the candidate's skills in programming. But it is hard to measure that with coding interviews, especially since since like architecture and design decisions become much more important for actual senior work. It might be more efficient for the developer to put some personal programming projects on github, and put the URL in the resume - qualified interviewers can then ask about the code and gain insight from the reasoning behind it.

And, another question, how should one handle recruiters and interviewers which apparently have not read the resume? Or the ones which ask one to apply even if the specified required qualifications do not really match? (e.g., have never worked extensively on Windows, a lot of experience with embedded C++, but recruiter asks to apply for a C# job?).

For HR people it would certainly help them if there were more information about the company, tools, actual tasks, and some words on what the core of business is - and how software relates to that.

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

#569

Post by jnxx »

tshaddox wrote: post #153
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…

Okay, but I just don’t think it makes sense to say that companies who cannot afford to pay market rates for software engineers are experiencing a shortage of software engineers, unless there is something preventing market clearing.

Following that, wouldn't it be more efficient if companies said from the outset what their rate is? That would be a lot more efficient. Of course, the money the company is able to pay depends on the process and the business environment, and the company wants to hire as much qualification as it can afford. But nobody is helped if somebody goes through the interview process only to learn that the salary at offer will never match what he/she wants.

((BTW this is why in my case, I decided to leave the UK for mainland Europe - most job offers in the UK were at little more than half the compensation from what I had earned in Germany before. And the difference was even larger when factoring in the cost of housing!)

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

#570

Post by cupofcoffee »

unscaled wrote: post #520
cupofcoffee wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

It really isn't possible. Every single CS person I know of is doing LC.
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