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

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

blog.usejournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 583 posts

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

#81

Post by austincheney »

I agree. Total bullshit.

I remember starting my career as a front end developer actually having to write code. Those days are long gone. Invented here syndrome is the reality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here

Code that written by anybody you actually know is not trusted. I actually saw a channel op in ##javascript of Freenode just this morning refer to people who write original code as a form of Dunning-Kruger over confidence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

I also remember earlier in my career people reading resumes. Those days evaporated early in my career. A good fix was having open source contributions as people would really look at those. Those days are gone too. Reading code is just too hard, so project readme files are the new resumes to ignore.

So now the industry is stacked with developers who can neither read nor write code, can’t evaluate candidates, and fear anything that isn’t externally prepackaged. It’s like watching that movie Idiocracy, and yet people complain about talent shortages.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

I find this somewhat counter intuitive because while many software developers seem generally of low confidence about actually doing the work of their jobs they seem generally over confident about security, as in information security. It’s weird because that confidence is the the most clear example of Dunning-Kruger and it isn’t based on anything.

Now, my learning from interviewing and reading job posts is this:

* Use React.

* Don’t bother with open source or a portfolio.

* Resumes are required but they are just weapons to be used against you at a later time. Include education, contact information, and job history only.

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

#82

Post by dheera »

imstate wrote: post #49
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…

Yes and no. A good programmer could learn it, but it exposes concepts that python and java abstracts from the programmer. C++ requires you to think quite a bit about memory. Modern C++ not so much. However the kind of job that requires C++ will probably require you to know some hardware / embedded which is a completely different domain than web devs and could make java / python transitions even more difficult.

Depends a lot on how you use it.

You can pass everything by value, write very child-friendly C++ code, using std::map like Python dict and std::vector like Python list, and still VASTLY beat the speed of an interpreted, weakly-typed language like Python.

But nobody does that. Chances are someone on the team takes a shit about unnecessary memory copies, the code will be littered with a smattering of pass-by-reference and pass-by-pointer, there will be std::shared_ptr, std::weak_ptr, std::unique ptr everywhere, and if you're lucky some intern will have committed some C-ish C++ code that will leave you gift of memory leaks, and now all of a sudden you need everyone to understand all the nuisances of the language and how memory works.

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

#83

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

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.

There is software out there for optimizing resumes to ATS. It basically is keyword matching. One tool will allow you to paste the Job Description and your Resume. You can give it a URL, and they'll detect ATS type, and give you further recommendations for file formats and things.

In any case, it's like an arm race for SEO. What was once a useful measure will lose meaning as everyone adopts these tools.

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

#84

Post by bigblind »

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…

I can't comment on whether this holds for C++, but I've experienced it at my current position with Elixir. While it's a high level language like most programming languages I know, it's still a large paradigm shift to a purely functional language. And yet, I could get to the level where I could make useful contributions to our backend within a few days. I went through Elixir's "Getting Started" guide, and afterwards, I just learned concepts as I needed them. Yes each language has its quirks, and I guess C++ has gained quite a few of them over the years, but you can get quite far with a basic understanding of a language, and an existing code base to learn common usage patterns from as well.

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

#85

Post by ZephyrBlu »

throwaway104076 wrote: post #63

This person sounded really experienced, so I looked them up on LinkedIn. 7 months at their first company. 9 months at their current company. That's it, aside from non-programming jobs before their bootcamp. The whole thing reads like inventing scenarios that didn't happen or embellishing them. > A bad interview is when you ask them the definition of some specific thing in some specific framework like “Tell me what a…

Knowing this, his perspective may be based off agencies rather than tech companies which would explain a lot of the things he's ranting about.

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

#86

Post by FpUser »

imstate wrote: post #49
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…

Yes and no. A good programmer could learn it, but it exposes concepts that python and java abstracts from the programmer. C++ requires you to think quite a bit about memory. Modern C++ not so much. However the kind of job that requires C++ will probably require you to know some hardware / embedded which is a completely different domain than web devs and could make java / python transitions even more difficult.

I develop business backend servers in C++, no problems there and no hardware / embedded is required. I also happen to be familiar with electronics and do develop firmware every once in a while but I mostly use plain C for that.

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

#87

Post by KittenInABox »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #45
duped wrote: post #32

If you've ever been on the other end of the pipe for hiring you'll understand the need for filtering. The alternative is to never list jobs and hire through networks, which has other problems.

I've never been on the other side of things, but it's always fascinated me that so many people who have say things like this. It's hard for me to fathom that such a large proportion of candidates are terrible.

A good number of people apply to positions that list "5 years in Java" with 1 year in Python, because it's impossible to tell if the role being fulfilled is specialized enough to justify needing half a decade of deep java knowledge or if it's something someone can learn on the job if they're clever. For hiring managers who really need that deeper knowledge that's a lot of filtering.

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

#88

Post by spankyspangler »

_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…

Paying that much for a tech worker doesn't mean there is a shortage of them, it means FANG companies are gambling on "rockstars" to try get an edge.

Flood the market with very good but not exceptional workers, and the top salaries won't change much.

Flood the market with exceptional workers and it probably won't change much either, FANG will just be even more selective with their top salaries.

Top devs have a lot of bargaining power not because companies need some "X amount" of development work done but can't find anybody who will do it. They have bargaining power because those companies are competing against one another and they're hoping the next billion dollar idea will come from one of _their_ employees first.

If you aren't playing this kind of roulette, I don't understand why you would try to compete in the same job markets. You can get developers for far less. And yes that may mean moving elsewhere, SV is obviously heavily selecting for such developers (people who can get those salaries will tend to move there, those who can't will tend to be pushed out).

If you are playing in that space but you just can't afford to pay for its inputs then it doesn't automatically mean those inputs are in a state of shortage, sometimes it just means your business does not create enough value to to pay for said inputs. This is the market's way of telling you to fold. Capitalism is a harsh mistress.

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

#89

Post by Animats »

JAlexoid wrote: post #60
Godel_unicode wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's not true. Go look at security advisories that mention "buffer overflow".

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

#90

Post by throwkeep »

Tossrock wrote: post #20

> 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…

It's not common at all. For that and other tells, it shows the narrator to be unreliable. A storyteller.
Post reply on HN