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First of all the shortage of devs is mostly a myth. Companies that know how to hire don't have problems hiring. the problem is most software companies don't k
by pascalxus 8y ago
First of all the shortage of devs is mostly a myth. Companies that know how to hire don't have problems hiring. the problem is most software companies don't know how to hire and thus have a lot of problems. Or they're located in some impossible location like palo alto or San francisco and try to low ball everyone with salaries under 200K in a location where housing costs 3million$ plus.
About hiring junior devs. You have to understand, most engineers that interview you don't understand or perhaps simply don't appreciate the concept of ROI. So, they're not thinking, geez we can get a guy with a few years less for 20k less and still come out way ahead. No they're simplying thinking, we want the best possible talent, regardless of cost. Very few people in the hiring process actually know how much that developer will cost, nor do most people care. This leads to a huge bias for more experience developers.
Furthermore, the engineers that interview you may be excellent engineers, great at programming and design but probably have very little experience or training in Hiring people. I know when I started interviewing people I made mistakes. It wasn't until I had a good 5-10 people under my belt that I really got good at hiring people. Most companies don't dedicate much resources to training devs to do hiring, partly because leads and managers often don't know how to do it well themselves. this leads to all kinds of mistakes.
My advice to you, is try not to take it personally and think any less of yourself. Failing an interview isn't necessarily your failure, it could be the ones who interviewed you that failed. But, it never hurts to learn everything you can and always expand your knowledge. There's nearly an infinite amount of Free tutorials and learning resources online, so learn as much as you can.
- atmosx 8y agoIs there any sort of training on how to go about hiring people? Other than experience of course.
- Fr3dd1 8y agoI guess the best training is experience (I know, maybe not the answer you are looking for). If you hire someone and closely check up on how that person is doing in your company, you can get some feeling about what technical and personal traits are really needed.
- sverhagen 8y agoI don't know about formal training, I can only imagine that something exists. But what also works is to get the company's recruiter more involved. Short of formal training, they can be a coach for those involved in the hiring process.
- kotapi 8y agoThis is definitely one of the best responses I've read on HN. I agree with this - "try not to take it personally and think any less of yourself. Failing an interview isn't necessarily your failure, it could be the ones who interviewed you that failed. "
- abhishekjha 8y agoThe thing is after failing for 8 months it kind of starts hurting.
- flexie 8y agoIt is far from a myth. If it was a myth, salaries wouldn't be increasing so much, while the number of developers also increase. The demand for developers exceeds the supply so much that this is possible. Do you know any other major industry, where people with little or no formal training can get in and up so fast? Where people in their early or mid twenties routinely make 6 figures? I don't. The median salary is now above 100,000. https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer/salary https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope... That's roughly on par with chemical engineers but whereas (almost) all chemical engineers have at least a bachelor's degree, an increasing amount of software developers have no other training than online courses and still make salaries that would make other professionals with 4-5-10 years of education envious. I love online courses, but try get a job as a chemical engineer (or any other engineering job) with just some online courses. As a software engineer that would only be an issue with some of the most sought after places, like Google. Yes, I am sure there are a few thousand petroleum engineers in Texas and other niches that make more than software engineers, but generally, engineers make less.
- growtofill 8y agoAre the salaries actually increasing in the US? In Ukraine, they have been mostly stale: https://jobs.dou.ua/salaries/dynamics/ https://jobs.dou.ua/salaries/dynamics/
- growlist 8y ago> an increasing amount of software developers have no other training than online courses and still make salaries that would make other professionals with 4-5-10 years of education envious When oh when are we going to get these salaries in the UK.. because I'm not seeing them.
- gammateam 8y agoAlso the devs are going to be there for less than 18 months so there is no reason to think in terms of ROI
- bayesian_horse 8y agoThe only measure for "shortage of devs", or rather lack thereof would be a pool of unemployed or underemployed developers who don't work at all or who work in a different field because they don't find unattractive jobs. If that pool is small, as I believe it is, there is no room for the idea that there are enough engineers. "Knowing how to hire", attractive benefits, locations etc are only ways to outcompete other employers, not a sustainable industry-wide mitigation of developer shortages.
- ownagefool 8y agoNot in the US but in the UK it depends if you do a quality check. Without quality, go to a consultancy and ask for Devs and you'll get them. After you get hacked you get someone to ask some basic principles around the job, especially anything around security, and you soon see the lack of devs problem. After a while you end up with the guys who glue code together, or the guys who call the MSP, in charge again and they don't understand the basics, so you no longer quality problem and you have an abundance of options again.