Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 81 posts

Re: Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

#71

Post by johngalt »

pascalxus wrote: post #13

Alot of companies think they need senior devs, when in reality what they really need is more junior or mid-level devs. Most developers aren't architecting whole new apps, or building out massive feature requests. Most of the time, it's fixing bugs, maintenance, adjustments to existing features, and other work that mainly requires navigating existing code and infrastructure, with the occasional new feature here and th…

Whenever people ask for fullstack do-it-all seniors with part time devops responsibilities, I assume that means "We have no idea how to create or manage a functioning technical team, and instead want a tech-wish granting genie."

You don't need 10 rockstar ninja genius senior engineers. You need five devs, three Ops, one PM, and an intern. Ideally you can divide it up further where certain devs are more back-end and others front-end, one dev is more of a database pro, one ops is metrics focused etc...

Then you have to manage this team of people. Which means solving difficult trade-offs, mediating disputes, finding gaps, removing obstacles, etc...

Re: Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

#73

Post by lovich »

sixhobbits wrote: post #15

This is true for developers applying through job ads. patio11 has a written millions of words of advice, many of which talk about how to land work (hint, don't apply through job ads), so I'm not going to try rephrase that, but if you're a developer (even without experience) and you're good at what you do, you really shouldn't have any issues finding work. (shameless plug) I'm working with hyperiondev.com. We offer 6-…

For Boston at least that is patently untrue. Every company wants to run you through the whiteboard hazing. Knowing what a for loop is, is going to get you shit.

Also, don't apply to companies? That may be fine for a small percentage of people who can get ahead of the pack or luck out but that's not doable for the whole industry. Is every junior dev supposed to constantly troll meetups and cold email more senior devs to get into the industry? Networking like that is good advice now because it makes you stick out but if everyone does it then the senior devs are going to start treating newcomers like we treat recruiters and just blanket ignore them until we need something from them. It's not feasible for the entire industry to be growing in demand and still only be willing to grow the supply of devs through the old boys club style of networking

Re: Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

#75

Post by stephengillie »

throwaway79475 wrote: post #45

This mentality is also related to the insane idea that junior developers are just glomming onto companies to get the training and then leave, taking advantage of the hard work these companies put into them. This is not a strawman, this is a true fear that I've hear several executives utter out loud with no self awareness. Treat the junior developers like anyone else - someone who wants the best for their career and k…

These are what I call "training companies". Engineers join them and find a miserable state of affairs. Being productive individuals, these people try to improve the state of the company - in technology, in process, or in other areas. But the business, in its infinite waterfall, resists the change.

After about a year, most engineers realize the futility of their efforts, and start to either look for a better company, or try to build a better company. This often takes about a year, thus the 2-year churn cycle in many modern resumes.

Re: Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

#76

Post by finnthehuman »

Eliezer wrote: post #6

Nobody in this Twitter thread seems to know or understand what a commons problem is. Training up new devs is good for the industry, sure. But your own company doesn't capture all of that value. If you are trying to solve this problem by yelling at companies to be more altruistic, then, as previously stated, you don't know or understand what a commons problem is.

But your own company doesn't capture all of that value.

That will never happen as long as we pay wages. Look at all that value going out the door as payroll.

The benifit of on the job training is to hire a $X dev at <=$X and turn them into $Y devs at even less than a $Y would cost to hire.

Re: Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

#77

Post by purplezooey »

dcow wrote: post #40

First day: "Hey welcome to the team hope you got everything setup when you have a minute do you mind going through your contacts we cannot find any good engineers lately." Me: "Ookaay.. thanks? Sure here are 5 people I've studied and/or worked with. They're literally rockstars. I personally vouch for them and I know most of them are in the market and interested." "Hmm they look too junior thanks anyway." One month la…

Agree. At all 3 of my previous companies, most hires we're often a buddy of the manager who usually wasn't very good or a fit for the role. There's usually no process. One thing you can do that's a low hanging fruit is just take a day with your interviewers and come up with 5-10 quality questions and a short way to make sure the same questions are asked to every candidate and nobody asks the same question. That alone will increase the quality of your interviews.

Re: Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

#78

Post by purplezooey »

Eliezer wrote: post #6

Nobody in this Twitter thread seems to know or understand what a commons problem is. Training up new devs is good for the industry, sure. But your own company doesn't capture all of that value. If you are trying to solve this problem by yelling at companies to be more altruistic, then, as previously stated, you don't know or understand what a commons problem is.

Yeah it does, you just need to take a 5 year horizon and not a 1 year one.

Re: Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

#79

Post by dcow »

purplezooey wrote: post #77
dcow wrote: post #40

First day: "Hey welcome to the team hope you got everything setup when you have a minute do you mind going through your contacts we cannot find any good engineers lately." Me: "Ookaay.. thanks? Sure here are 5 people I've studied and/or worked with. They're literally rockstars. I personally vouch for them and I know most of them are in the market and interested." "Hmm they look too junior thanks anyway." One month la…

Agree. At all 3 of my previous companies, most hires we're often a buddy of the manager who usually wasn't very good or a fit for the role. There's usually no process. One thing you can do that's a low hanging fruit is just take a day with your interviewers and come up with 5-10 quality questions and a short way to make sure the same questions are asked to every candidate and nobody asks the same question. That alone…

I actually think we've had really quality interviews everywhere I've been. That's the weird thing. It's not the interviews that are the problem. It's the pre and post filtering that just feels so arbitrary.

Re: Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

#80

Post by standupstandup »

gwright wrote: post #48
standupstandup wrote: post #10

Tweets are news now? Really. Anyway. I run a largeish software team and we have a mix of very experienced devs along with some newer devs who definitely have holes in their skills. We run training in certain areas with the goal of upskilling the team. Especially for security and secure coding practices which aren't taught in universities. There's also a lot of training around good engineering practices and the like.…

Do you have any links to good resources on "secure coding practices" or more generally "good engineering practices"? I feel like there are lots of resources about specific programming skills (language and library details) but it is difficult to find good resources about more higher level concerns; security, maintenance, tooling, operations, availability, authentication/authorization, scaling, automation. Google's Sit…

Yes, I'd suggest starting there (I used to be an SRE).

I don't know of any books that handle all those topics off hand. I was thinking more of secure coding for engineers, rather than system architecture in general.

Post reply on HN