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Speaking as someone currently in that position (developer with two years of experience) my personal experiences seem to align quite well with the data they coll

Speaking as someone currently in that position (developer with two years of experience) my personal experiences seem to align quite well with the data they collected. When companies say 'entry-level', they seem to be referring to around 2-3 years of working experience. Not just college + internships, but actual professional experience. It's an extremely silly market to be in right now if you're a fresh grad. All this talk about passion or numbers aside, I've had the opportunity to experience things from the other side and see how many senior-level developers with 10+ years of experience couldn't write an if-statement in their choice of language to save their lives, or even elaborate on basic design choices/decisions.

cutler 9y ago
Can you please elaborate? Honestly, I'm interested to hear how anyone with such a low level of technical skill managed to get anyone to believe they were anything more than a junior. It also interests me because recently I've had a number of recruiters try to convince me that I'm a senior just because I've been programming for a living for 12 years. I'm honest enough with myself to admit that although I've used several languages during that time the jobs were all similar, freelance/sole developer CRUD jobs which didn't really challenge me so there was no continuouse progression technically. Sometimes testing was an afterthought so on that basis I wouldn't even qualify as mid-level. The thing is that "senior" means something completely different to a recruiter and maybe also to a manager?
- fzeroracer 9y ago
  The reason why they were able to seem like they were senior was because they had the work history. Even though their technical skills were lacking, the sheer amount of development history automatically made them a potential candidate worth interviewing. Once you have guaranteed interviews, from there it's just a matter of finding a company with the most lax interviews or one where you can fake it the easiest. At least that's my best guess; I don't fully understand how someone can work for a company for over a decade yet can't understand basic OOP or fizzbuzz-level challenges. It became a serious issue at my company because most of the senior-level candidates we got were utterly useless.
  - cutler 9y ago
    Most of them? This is getting more bizarre. Surely code tests would weed out anyone lacking decent technical skills? At one extreme we're told that a senior works on open source projects and knows the languages he/she uses inside out. At the other end we hear about seniors who can't even code? Is this really so common?

cutler 9y ago

Can you please elaborate? Honestly, I'm interested to hear how anyone with such a low level of technical skill managed to get anyone to believe they were anything more than a junior. It also interests me because recently I've had a number of recruiters try to convince me that I'm a senior just because I've been programming for a living for 12 years. I'm honest enough with myself to admit that although I've used several languages during that time the jobs were all similar, freelance/sole developer CRUD jobs which didn't really challenge me so there was no continuouse progression technically. Sometimes testing was an afterthought so on that basis I wouldn't even qualify as mid-level. The thing is that "senior" means something completely different to a recruiter and maybe also to a manager?

fzeroracer 9y ago
The reason why they were able to seem like they were senior was because they had the work history. Even though their technical skills were lacking, the sheer amount of development history automatically made them a potential candidate worth interviewing. Once you have guaranteed interviews, from there it's just a matter of finding a company with the most lax interviews or one where you can fake it the easiest. At least that's my best guess; I don't fully understand how someone can work for a company for over a decade yet can't understand basic OOP or fizzbuzz-level challenges. It became a serious issue at my company because most of the senior-level candidates we got were utterly useless.
- cutler 9y ago
  Most of them? This is getting more bizarre. Surely code tests would weed out anyone lacking decent technical skills? At one extreme we're told that a senior works on open source projects and knows the languages he/she uses inside out. At the other end we hear about seniors who can't even code? Is this really so common?