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Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers”

76 points by champagnepapi 9y ago

kendallpark 9y ago
It amazed me how quickly the recruiter spam started flooding my LinkedIn after passing the one year mark. I am always greatful for the company that hired me freshly out of college based on my education and aptitude, not experience. I advise current students that the first job is hardest to get. After that you’ll have a wealth of opportunities knocking at your door.
devnull42 9y ago
I saw a company asking for 10 years OpenStack development experience. The initial release of OpenStack was 7 years ago. Cant make this shit up.
- tankenmate 9y ago
  It's up there with, we need a code ninja 10x developer at 60% of market rates.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Those ads make me want a 10x real ultimate power ninja to silently enter their offices and dose every last executive and HR employee with a combination laxative-emetic, video record the aftermath, then silently slip away. But I'm cheap too, so if that ninja could do it at 60% of the going rate for mass poisonings, that would be great. Their clan is also going to need 200 years of experience in undetectable infiltration, 300 years in poisons and venoms, and 500 years in absolute client confidentiality. Thanks.
- Zekio 9y ago
  I've seen the same thing multiple times, especially with NodeJS all those jobs require 10 years of NodeJS experience, even though NodeJS is only like 8.5 years old at this time
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  I've seen one company asking for Ph.Ds in Math for a non-Math/Data/Science position. They said they put that on there because they had a bad experience in the past from someone who couldn't code but looked good on a resume. They wanted to pay $75-85k for that position. But then decided to take the interview anyway, so it clearly wasn't an actual requirement. That's really the issue: job postings drive what developers "ought" to know because they should indicate some kind of business demand for individual skills. But there's no feedback to punish companies who scribble whatever they want on their job postings, so they continue to add new line items without verifying that what they're doing right now is working. It just leads to confusion and wasted time finding out what they actually want. If they can't find someone, they obviously go "Developer shortage! No one has the 50 skills w/ 5 years of experience on our job posting!" Compound that with resume prose (pushed by people charging for resume review) that sometimes goes overboard in its effort to make something out of very little and we have a system where no actual communication takes place until you're in front of someone.
- kirykl 9y ago
  I had a manager who had a job posting for a COBALT programmer. He couldn't find a single one
  - jajern 9y ago
    Did you mean COBOL or did he misspell it and that's why he couldn't find one?
    - cholantesh 9y ago
      From the context, I'd surmise it's the latter.
  - SatvikBeri 9y ago
    Yup, I had one who was looking for someone with "Mongoose DB" experience.
    - basedfahayek 9y ago
      Mongoose is the name of the NodeJS ORM for Mongo.
      - SatvikBeri 9y ago
        Yup, but trust me, he didn't know that.
thisisit 9y ago
I know this is targeted more towards student but I also find similar issues if someone with some work-experience wants to switch away from a dwindling tech towards a new tech. People say, well you don't have "relevant" experience.
- curtis 9y ago
  > People say, well you don't have "relevant" experience. I'm not sure they'll even say that. A lot of the time they won't bother to talk to you at all.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  Getting a job is about taking a ton of rejections until you don't get rejected any more.
Eliezer 9y ago
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.
- strictnein 9y ago
  Employees aren't fish or trees. If you train an employee and treat them well they stay with your company longer. Your training increases the value the provide to you. Unlike a fish, which is sold and consumed one day and needs to be replaced the next.
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    > If you train an employee and treat them well they stay with your company longer. That's a huge assumption.
    - K0nserv 9y ago
      Seems fairly rational. I recon two of the most common reasons people leave are boredom and unsatisfying career progression. So all you have to do is ensure people have interesting work and pay/promote them at a rate that is competitive with their option of switching jobs to achieve that goal.
      - vinceguidry 9y ago
        > So all you have to do is ensure people have interesting work and pay/promote them at a rate that is competitive with their option of switching jobs to achieve that goal. I think similarly. But these are also the two things that require companies to restructure in order to be able to reliably offer them to employees. I went through this two years ago with my last employer. When it came right down to it, I didn't really have a place there. When my job was made redundant, my departure was bittersweet. There was a time when they were open to expanding my role and giving me a direct report. But they decided to move in another direction. It's more than just "treating employees well." A lot more.
watty 9y ago
It's not abnormal for a company to have senior-level openings and no junior openings. My company for example is also "desperately" in need of a senior developer / architect to fill in a role.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- superb_herb 9y ago
  Does your company not have any junior devs who are ready to step up?
- dep_b 9y ago
  A company I worked for always was looking for senior devs. Not because they needed them, but if one would stumble in accidentally they would still hire the programmer (and fire one of us? I never saw this pan out!)
standupstandup 9y ago
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. I'm pretty sure most software companies are the same. Yes, the industry does not train people from absolute scratch like apprentice schemes do. It's very reliant on universities. But I don't see legions of unemployed students: they do get jobs and companies do take over their training to bring them from basic to advanced.
- gwright 9y ago
  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 Site Reliability Engineering is one example of a good resource in this area.
  - standupstandup 9y ago
    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.
delphinius81 9y ago
Junior devs finding an initial job and receiving mentoring is certainly an issue, but I think that the issue raised in the tweet is way more endemic to start-ups than more established companies.
pascalxus 9y ago
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 there. You do need one really good lead developer on the team, to help mentor people. This is the one area that is sometimes a bit lacking. Most leads are great engineers but aren't very good at leading, mentoring or any of the other people type work they need to do. But, all they really need is some training and a personality adjustment, in some cases.
- btilly 9y ago
  You underestimate the cost of communication overhead and rework. As a flat team scales, the cost of communication scales with the number of people squared. If you solve this with process, everyone's productivity is dropped. Data that you can find in Software Estimation: Demystifying The Black Art quantifies this. The overall productivity of a team increases until it has 5-8 people. Then it goes down. A team of 12 actually accomplishes LESS per month than it would if you fired half the people. However once you get to 20-25 people, productivity is back. And then increases fairly close to linearly. Going from 5-8 people all the way to 20+ with no increase in throughput is really, really painful. And those aren't cheap people. This provides companies with a huge incentive to figure out how to get a small team to be as productive as possible. And you don't get the most out of a small team by filling it up with junior to mid-level devs.
- xkcd-sucks 9y ago
  It's okay for front-line devs to think this, but when the people in charge of salary and hiring believe it, your team ends up a crew of fresh graduates herded by a senior dev who is exclusively occupied with making sure the junior devs don't make things worse. And most failures of junior devs (breaking stuff) are considered the responsibility of the senior dev managing them, so the senior dev bears just as much responsibility as before but now with less control and more unpredictability. It is certainly good to have juniors on the team, but managing them should not take the greatest part of your senior devs' time, and your product should not be written exclusively by juniors. Some CEOs deflect accusations of cheapness by claiming they don't want "rockstars/divas," but that's a personality trait, not a skill, and the crappiest of crappy junior devs are certainly capable of embodying rockstar arrogance. Most work is tweaking an existing codebase, and quick fluency in arbitrary code written by strangers is definitely not a junior-level skill. In fact, CS-heavy stuff with little external integration is perfect for fresh graduates, as they did learn it in school.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sixhobbits 9y ago
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-month coding bootcamps, and our grads have companies fighting over them even though they have zero "real world" experience and only 6-months of training (yes I've read the bootcamp vs theoretical CS degree flamewars to preempt anyone who believes that anyone who writes a line of code should have 3 years of CS theory to back it up). Know your stuff. Have a portfolio (minimal is fine). Talk to people (not recruiters or HR staff). There is almost no easier way to find work at the moment than by saying "hey I know what a for loop is", so I have limited sympathy for the people who claim they can't get jobs because of lack of experience in dev.
- escanda 9y ago
  I am assuming you are making an overstatement. Even then, you are really mislead if you really think someone who knows the basics of control structures is going to get a job in the industry.
- lovich 9y ago
  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
eecks 9y ago
The title suggests something very different to the content of the tweet even though it uses the same words. I think this is clickbait.
bitwize 9y ago
"We desperately need more developers that are exact cultural fits AND proficient in our exact stack AND will work for peanuts." In other news, the 10-year-old girl community "desperately needs more ponies".
OhSoHumble 9y ago
I always thought that this was a supply problem? There are a lot of junior developers out there and that has flooded the market, reducing demand for junior engineers.
tomc1985 9y ago
Then train them!
dcow 9y ago
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 later: after spending plenty of time interviewing and rejecting some wildly overqualified candidates because they're not culture fits, hiring manager brings in their "80% but can get the job done" (that is a quote no joke) friend from previous job. Or they bing on a far more expensive contractor. Meanwhile my five recommendations all get hired at competing or peer companies. This has happened in some form or another at most every place I've worked. To date I'm extremely disillusioned with the "tech" hiring process. I've seen everything from perfectly qualified candidates getting rejected because the interviewer woke up on the wrong side of the bed and, in the span of less than an hour, developed a vendetta against the candidate, to plain old nepotism. I've even seen people vote to pass because they wanted the job the candidate came in for and thought they could do a better job even though there were no plans for such an arrangement to ever happen. I've seen interviewers fail a candidate because they couldn't solve a problem the interviewer (who is in a marginally related domain) was having trouble with last week and wasn't making progress on because google didn't have a copy paste answer. Interviewing is entirely subjective. Humans are humans. They only person that truely matters at the end of the day WRT interviewing is the hiring manager and maybe their boss. Edit: I forgot my main point, excuse the rant. The point is I don't see how the industry is going to overcome this hurdle when it's neigh impossible for a front line engineer to bring in good people who wouldn't already appeal to whatever processes/humans are in place--which clearly isn't working because they can't find good engineers.
- purplezooey 9y ago
  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.
pascalxus 9y ago
If hiring were truely an issue for companies, then salaries would be going up or at the very least you'd see them make location decisions based on where the supply of labor is greater than the demand. You almost never see companies doing that. It's always, let's move the company to where-ever is most convenient for the founders or the VCs.
- pbecotte 9y ago
  Do you not see salaries going up?
throwaway79475 9y ago
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 knowledge base - and provide it for them. Incentivize them to stay. Train them properly and give them resources to succeed. Maintain an internal culture that properly cultivates their talents and gives them mentors to work with and aspire to. Compensate them when they've reached proper thresholds in their usefulness to the team, and provide honest and valuable feedback (positive and negative) as much as you can. Plus avoid the obvious pitfalls: don't abuse them or belittle them for basic questions or silly mistakes. Don't throw them into the deep end with little to no chance of success. Don't talk down to them or treat them as a substandard part of the team. Don't start firing the juniors the minute the workload starts winding down. These are all signs of disrespect for your own workforce and everyone can see obvious red flags, even juniors. Given the griping about tech interviews these days, does anyone really think that people actually like job hopping? They do it either to avoid poisonous situations, or out of obvious and necessary self interest, one that can be provided by a company willing to treat their junior hires with respect. There's no reason hiring a junior cannot be a win-win situation for everyone involved.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  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.
LaSombra 9y ago
Most companies have forgot the power of training. Hiring a junior dev to shadow a mid-level or a senior engineer trumps, almost all the time, the trouble of finding the unicorn candidate. Companies want to hire a silver bullet and forget all about the perfectly capable people that don't have "15 years of Java/C#/Python/whatever experience".
rabbite 9y ago
Yup. 45 applications, several face-to-face interviews and homework assignments since June. No offers. This is with over 6 years of development and 11 years of technical work and leadership. Hiring practices suck when the only advice my father can give me is "make sure to smile and be positive!"
- scarface74 9y ago
  I don’t know anything about you, so don’t take this as a personal insult, but have you thought after 45 applications and several face-to-face interviews over four months, it may not be the hiring practices that suck? In over 20 years of working, it has never taken me more than two weeks to get a job. My fastest turn around was quitting a job on a Monday at noon, with no job prospects and no applications submitted and getting an offer on Thursday from what was then a Fortune 10 (non tech) company. Could it be skill set, interview skills, location, etc?
jimmydddd 9y ago
I'm having a similar problem in buying a car. My Situation: I want to buy a brand new BMW for $20,000.00 and none are available. My Conclusion: There must be a shortage of BMW's.
NTDF9 9y ago
Also, We only hire devs who can traverse a tree with their eyes clsoed. Why? Is that what your devs do in day to day job? No, our devs add buttons and pass values from one module to another.
expertentipp 9y ago
Neither juniors, nor those experienced. Recruitment gatekeepers want always something else. Imagine a situation in which you release all your tech workforce and try to rehire, would they get the job? Might be eye opening.
sysdyne 9y ago
Javascript framework,Javascript framework,Javascript framework This is a must see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

76 points by champagnepapi 9y ago

It amazed me how quickly the recruiter spam started flooding my LinkedIn after passing the one year mark. I am always greatful for the company that hired me freshly out of college based on my education and aptitude, not experience. I advise current students that the first job is hardest to get. After that you’ll have a wealth of opportunities knocking at your door.

devnull42 9y ago

I saw a company asking for 10 years OpenStack development experience. The initial release of OpenStack was 7 years ago. Cant make this shit up.

tankenmate 9y ago
It's up there with, we need a code ninja 10x developer at 60% of market rates.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Those ads make me want a 10x real ultimate power ninja to silently enter their offices and dose every last executive and HR employee with a combination laxative-emetic, video record the aftermath, then silently slip away. But I'm cheap too, so if that ninja could do it at 60% of the going rate for mass poisonings, that would be great. Their clan is also going to need 200 years of experience in undetectable infiltration, 300 years in poisons and venoms, and 500 years in absolute client confidentiality. Thanks.
Zekio 9y ago
I've seen the same thing multiple times, especially with NodeJS all those jobs require 10 years of NodeJS experience, even though NodeJS is only like 8.5 years old at this time
FLUX-YOU 9y ago
I've seen one company asking for Ph.Ds in Math for a non-Math/Data/Science position. They said they put that on there because they had a bad experience in the past from someone who couldn't code but looked good on a resume. They wanted to pay $75-85k for that position. But then decided to take the interview anyway, so it clearly wasn't an actual requirement. That's really the issue: job postings drive what developers "ought" to know because they should indicate some kind of business demand for individual skills. But there's no feedback to punish companies who scribble whatever they want on their job postings, so they continue to add new line items without verifying that what they're doing right now is working. It just leads to confusion and wasted time finding out what they actually want. If they can't find someone, they obviously go "Developer shortage! No one has the 50 skills w/ 5 years of experience on our job posting!" Compound that with resume prose (pushed by people charging for resume review) that sometimes goes overboard in its effort to make something out of very little and we have a system where no actual communication takes place until you're in front of someone.
kirykl 9y ago
I had a manager who had a job posting for a COBALT programmer. He couldn't find a single one
- jajern 9y ago
  Did you mean COBOL or did he misspell it and that's why he couldn't find one?
  - cholantesh 9y ago
    From the context, I'd surmise it's the latter.
- SatvikBeri 9y ago
  Yup, I had one who was looking for someone with "Mongoose DB" experience.
  - basedfahayek 9y ago
    Mongoose is the name of the NodeJS ORM for Mongo.
    - SatvikBeri 9y ago
      Yup, but trust me, he didn't know that.

thisisit 9y ago

I know this is targeted more towards student but I also find similar issues if someone with some work-experience wants to switch away from a dwindling tech towards a new tech. People say, well you don't have "relevant" experience.

curtis 9y ago
> People say, well you don't have "relevant" experience. I'm not sure they'll even say that. A lot of the time they won't bother to talk to you at all.
tomjen3 9y ago
Getting a job is about taking a ton of rejections until you don't get rejected any more.

Eliezer 9y ago

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.

strictnein 9y ago
Employees aren't fish or trees. If you train an employee and treat them well they stay with your company longer. Your training increases the value the provide to you. Unlike a fish, which is sold and consumed one day and needs to be replaced the next.
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  > If you train an employee and treat them well they stay with your company longer. That's a huge assumption.
  - K0nserv 9y ago
    Seems fairly rational. I recon two of the most common reasons people leave are boredom and unsatisfying career progression. So all you have to do is ensure people have interesting work and pay/promote them at a rate that is competitive with their option of switching jobs to achieve that goal.
    - vinceguidry 9y ago
      > So all you have to do is ensure people have interesting work and pay/promote them at a rate that is competitive with their option of switching jobs to achieve that goal. I think similarly. But these are also the two things that require companies to restructure in order to be able to reliably offer them to employees. I went through this two years ago with my last employer. When it came right down to it, I didn't really have a place there. When my job was made redundant, my departure was bittersweet. There was a time when they were open to expanding my role and giving me a direct report. But they decided to move in another direction. It's more than just "treating employees well." A lot more.

watty 9y ago

It's not abnormal for a company to have senior-level openings and no junior openings. My company for example is also "desperately" in need of a senior developer / architect to fill in a role.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
superb_herb 9y ago
Does your company not have any junior devs who are ready to step up?
dep_b 9y ago
A company I worked for always was looking for senior devs. Not because they needed them, but if one would stumble in accidentally they would still hire the programmer (and fire one of us? I never saw this pan out!)

standupstandup 9y ago

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. I'm pretty sure most software companies are the same. Yes, the industry does not train people from absolute scratch like apprentice schemes do. It's very reliant on universities. But I don't see legions of unemployed students: they do get jobs and companies do take over their training to bring them from basic to advanced.

gwright 9y ago
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 Site Reliability Engineering is one example of a good resource in this area.
- standupstandup 9y ago
  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.

delphinius81 9y ago

Junior devs finding an initial job and receiving mentoring is certainly an issue, but I think that the issue raised in the tweet is way more endemic to start-ups than more established companies.

pascalxus 9y ago

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 there. You do need one really good lead developer on the team, to help mentor people. This is the one area that is sometimes a bit lacking. Most leads are great engineers but aren't very good at leading, mentoring or any of the other people type work they need to do. But, all they really need is some training and a personality adjustment, in some cases.

btilly 9y ago
You underestimate the cost of communication overhead and rework. As a flat team scales, the cost of communication scales with the number of people squared. If you solve this with process, everyone's productivity is dropped. Data that you can find in Software Estimation: Demystifying The Black Art quantifies this. The overall productivity of a team increases until it has 5-8 people. Then it goes down. A team of 12 actually accomplishes LESS per month than it would if you fired half the people. However once you get to 20-25 people, productivity is back. And then increases fairly close to linearly. Going from 5-8 people all the way to 20+ with no increase in throughput is really, really painful. And those aren't cheap people. This provides companies with a huge incentive to figure out how to get a small team to be as productive as possible. And you don't get the most out of a small team by filling it up with junior to mid-level devs.
xkcd-sucks 9y ago
It's okay for front-line devs to think this, but when the people in charge of salary and hiring believe it, your team ends up a crew of fresh graduates herded by a senior dev who is exclusively occupied with making sure the junior devs don't make things worse. And most failures of junior devs (breaking stuff) are considered the responsibility of the senior dev managing them, so the senior dev bears just as much responsibility as before but now with less control and more unpredictability. It is certainly good to have juniors on the team, but managing them should not take the greatest part of your senior devs' time, and your product should not be written exclusively by juniors. Some CEOs deflect accusations of cheapness by claiming they don't want "rockstars/divas," but that's a personality trait, not a skill, and the crappiest of crappy junior devs are certainly capable of embodying rockstar arrogance. Most work is tweaking an existing codebase, and quick fluency in arbitrary code written by strangers is definitely not a junior-level skill. In fact, CS-heavy stuff with little external integration is perfect for fresh graduates, as they did learn it in school.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

sixhobbits 9y ago

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-month coding bootcamps, and our grads have companies fighting over them even though they have zero "real world" experience and only 6-months of training (yes I've read the bootcamp vs theoretical CS degree flamewars to preempt anyone who believes that anyone who writes a line of code should have 3 years of CS theory to back it up). Know your stuff. Have a portfolio (minimal is fine). Talk to people (not recruiters or HR staff). There is almost no easier way to find work at the moment than by saying "hey I know what a for loop is", so I have limited sympathy for the people who claim they can't get jobs because of lack of experience in dev.

escanda 9y ago
I am assuming you are making an overstatement. Even then, you are really mislead if you really think someone who knows the basics of control structures is going to get a job in the industry.
lovich 9y ago
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

eecks 9y ago

The title suggests something very different to the content of the tweet even though it uses the same words. I think this is clickbait.

bitwize 9y ago

"We desperately need more developers that are exact cultural fits AND proficient in our exact stack AND will work for peanuts." In other news, the 10-year-old girl community "desperately needs more ponies".

OhSoHumble 9y ago

I always thought that this was a supply problem? There are a lot of junior developers out there and that has flooded the market, reducing demand for junior engineers.

tomc1985 9y ago

Then train them!

dcow 9y ago

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 later: after spending plenty of time interviewing and rejecting some wildly overqualified candidates because they're not culture fits, hiring manager brings in their "80% but can get the job done" (that is a quote no joke) friend from previous job. Or they bing on a far more expensive contractor. Meanwhile my five recommendations all get hired at competing or peer companies. This has happened in some form or another at most every place I've worked. To date I'm extremely disillusioned with the "tech" hiring process. I've seen everything from perfectly qualified candidates getting rejected because the interviewer woke up on the wrong side of the bed and, in the span of less than an hour, developed a vendetta against the candidate, to plain old nepotism. I've even seen people vote to pass because they wanted the job the candidate came in for and thought they could do a better job even though there were no plans for such an arrangement to ever happen. I've seen interviewers fail a candidate because they couldn't solve a problem the interviewer (who is in a marginally related domain) was having trouble with last week and wasn't making progress on because google didn't have a copy paste answer. Interviewing is entirely subjective. Humans are humans. They only person that truely matters at the end of the day WRT interviewing is the hiring manager and maybe their boss. Edit: I forgot my main point, excuse the rant. The point is I don't see how the industry is going to overcome this hurdle when it's neigh impossible for a front line engineer to bring in good people who wouldn't already appeal to whatever processes/humans are in place--which clearly isn't working because they can't find good engineers.

purplezooey 9y ago
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.

pascalxus 9y ago

If hiring were truely an issue for companies, then salaries would be going up or at the very least you'd see them make location decisions based on where the supply of labor is greater than the demand. You almost never see companies doing that. It's always, let's move the company to where-ever is most convenient for the founders or the VCs.

pbecotte 9y ago
Do you not see salaries going up?

throwaway79475 9y ago

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 knowledge base - and provide it for them. Incentivize them to stay. Train them properly and give them resources to succeed. Maintain an internal culture that properly cultivates their talents and gives them mentors to work with and aspire to. Compensate them when they've reached proper thresholds in their usefulness to the team, and provide honest and valuable feedback (positive and negative) as much as you can. Plus avoid the obvious pitfalls: don't abuse them or belittle them for basic questions or silly mistakes. Don't throw them into the deep end with little to no chance of success. Don't talk down to them or treat them as a substandard part of the team. Don't start firing the juniors the minute the workload starts winding down. These are all signs of disrespect for your own workforce and everyone can see obvious red flags, even juniors. Given the griping about tech interviews these days, does anyone really think that people actually like job hopping? They do it either to avoid poisonous situations, or out of obvious and necessary self interest, one that can be provided by a company willing to treat their junior hires with respect. There's no reason hiring a junior cannot be a win-win situation for everyone involved.

stephengillie 9y ago
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.

LaSombra 9y ago

Most companies have forgot the power of training. Hiring a junior dev to shadow a mid-level or a senior engineer trumps, almost all the time, the trouble of finding the unicorn candidate. Companies want to hire a silver bullet and forget all about the perfectly capable people that don't have "15 years of Java/C#/Python/whatever experience".

rabbite 9y ago

Yup. 45 applications, several face-to-face interviews and homework assignments since June. No offers. This is with over 6 years of development and 11 years of technical work and leadership. Hiring practices suck when the only advice my father can give me is "make sure to smile and be positive!"

scarface74 9y ago
I don’t know anything about you, so don’t take this as a personal insult, but have you thought after 45 applications and several face-to-face interviews over four months, it may not be the hiring practices that suck? In over 20 years of working, it has never taken me more than two weeks to get a job. My fastest turn around was quitting a job on a Monday at noon, with no job prospects and no applications submitted and getting an offer on Thursday from what was then a Fortune 10 (non tech) company. Could it be skill set, interview skills, location, etc?

jimmydddd 9y ago

I'm having a similar problem in buying a car. My Situation: I want to buy a brand new BMW for $20,000.00 and none are available. My Conclusion: There must be a shortage of BMW's.

NTDF9 9y ago

Also, We only hire devs who can traverse a tree with their eyes clsoed. Why? Is that what your devs do in day to day job? No, our devs add buttons and pass values from one module to another.

expertentipp 9y ago

Neither juniors, nor those experienced. Recruitment gatekeepers want always something else. Imagine a situation in which you release all your tech workforce and try to rehire, would they get the job? Might be eye opening.

sysdyne 9y ago

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