11 ms·

That is partially true, but it’s flooded with people who cannot code. I no longer believe this. I think “people who cannot code” is a myth perpetuated by thos

That is partially true, but it’s flooded with people who cannot code. I no longer believe this. I think “people who cannot code” is a myth perpetuated by those who gain something out of it. People who’s business or job is to filter candidates, people who’s business is to sell their own “improved” version of training, people in need of an ego boost and actually, mainly by people who just repeat it cause they heard it somewhere. I’m off that train. But, then again, I just might be old and wrong. I literally know 100 companies that will hire you today. As a self-taught engineer you have to convince them of that, which mostly means a solid portfolio, but there is insane demand. I’d like to test that. That’s my homesite: https://www.ronilan.com https://www.ronilan.com I’m in the market. Thanks, Ron

jspiral 8y ago
As a hiring manager, my experience has been that the average unsolicited resume belongs to someone who can't implement fizzbuzz. (this has a lot to do with the population that spams resumes though i believe) My experience has also been that most raw junior candidates need significant handholding to implement anything into a typical production system at first, and that the learning curve from there varies greatly. What do you think?
- catwind7 8y ago
  My guess is that he's taking issue with this argument that I'm not quite sure was made: "The market is flooded with people who cannot code, therefore it's easy to find a job as a junior engineer" The market could in fact be flooded with people who cannot code (I don't know for sure). Assuming that's true, that doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to get a job as a junior dev (speaking from someone on the interviewing side).
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    On the market being flooded, I think it varies greatly depending on where you are and whom you are with. With my current job I am part of a competent team of smart people but on my last job it seems that IQ was in short supply, for candidates, vendors, and even our "partners". Even though the last job ended months ago, I'm still trying to unconvince myself that everyone in this world is stupid and incompetent, because that was what it felt like.
    - catwind7 8y ago
      Yeah totally. I have a friend who mostly works with the IT in big banks and pretty recently he told me he had to explain what "Git" was to a more senior eng. That was shocking to me but then again maybe I'm too steeped in webdev.
      - profalseidol 8y ago
        This company I'm working in right now has recently migrated from CVS to Git. Still stuck in XML hell though. And nobody understand the ginormous Ant build script.
  - beefalo 8y ago
    The market being flooded with poor talent may even make it worse than it being flooded with good talent. Companies now need to invest a lot more time filtering out the people who can't code to hire junior candidates. Instead companies may just decide they will invest that money in the salaries for mid-level and senior engineers instead of time spent hiring juniors.
- tracker1 8y ago
  Last time I was involved in hiring I created a very simple coding challenge. I've seen far worse on the other side. The goal was to read in a CSV file, read and transform it to a different format (newline separated json) node.js preferred and put it on github. There were no restrictions on what libraries could be used, no requirements for unit tests, etc. It's something that literally took me about half an hour to write at the time. Only one candidate had a working example, even then there were a couple bugs in the transform, but at least the process worked. It's surprising to me how many junior devs cannot do a simple ETL in a scripting language.
  - dublin 8y ago
    Last year, I took a contract leading a dev team at a top company here in Austin. The team, largely educated in India, said doing substantial ETL-like cleanup of the pipe-separated 15GB input file would take then about 3 days: 1 day to write the Scala & Java code, and 2 days to process it through the Spark cluster. I shocked them when I called B.S.! I spent the rest of the afternoon showing what you can do with pipelines of grep, cut, paste, and awk. Took 2-3 hours to build the proper pipeline and only 15 minutes to run it on my local laptop hard disk. The sad thing is they were impressed, but still inclined to use the ridiculously complicated cluster pipelines instead, since that was "the way we were taught..."
    - mattmanser 8y ago
      This sort of stuff isn't taught anywhere though, you have to either be shown it by someone else in a previous job, or have it annoy you enough to figure it out with some serious google fu (and the freedom to follow that path). It's an unknown unknown, a lot of programmers will simply not know you can use quick and dirty scripts to process data if you're only going to do it once. I work mainly in .Net and the similar problem I see is devs who don't even know that console apps exist, let alone how to make them, which simplifies prototyping new code immensely.
      - vram22 8y ago
        >This sort of stuff isn't taught anywhere though, you have to either be shown it by someone else in a previous job, or have it annoy you enough to figure it out with some serious google fu (and the freedom to follow that path). Sure it is taught. It's taught by some people ( including me - plug here for my Linux and Python courses, with testimonials: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/p/training.html https://jugad2.blogspot.com/p/training.html ) in their Unix / Linux courses, as examples of how to really put the classic (and oft-quoted) Unix philosopy + command-line tools + shell scripting to good use, synergistically ("write small tools to do one job each, well, and connect them by pipelines and I/O redirection, etc. etc."). It's not even rocket science; bread-and-butter EDP/IT folks (programmers and even operators) (not just clued-in software engineers in product companies) have been using such scripts for decades, routinely, without thinking they are doing anything great or out of the ordinary. (And similarly for other OSs, I'm sure, such as Rexx on some platforms. Not sure what was used on Windows before PowerShell, maybe Perl and/or one of the Unix toolkit clones like MKS Toolkit or Cygwin or UWin - apart from clunky batch file language and DOS/Windows command-line commands). It's just that it is not so well known nowadays among the (often mainly JS-using) generation, who even write CLI apps in Node. >It's an unknown unknown, a lot of programmers will simply not know you can use quick and dirty scripts to process data if you're only going to do it once. It's their loss (and that of the industry), comes from not trying to learn about prior art. There's even a name for it: NIH syndrome [1], and heck, even that is not new :) Dates from early IBM days or earlier ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
apazzolini 8y ago
> I no longer believe this. You should try interviewing "software engineers" that claim to have 10 years of experience architecting and coding in various languages and cannot write a function that doubles the value of each number in an array.
- ticmasta 8y ago
  Well, it's pretty common to have 10 x 1 year of experience. Lots of jobs require the repetition of a relatively shallow set of skills. When I started my current job I remember the announcement said something like 15 years experience and I thought "I've been doing lots of things for a long time, but I don't feel like I have 15 years experience in any of them" at least no the same way someone in a more stable domain might...
- geebee 8y ago
  You should try interviewing as a software engineer with 10 years experience. They never ask you to double the value of each integer in an array. They ask you to find all matching subtrees in a binary tree, or to find all sub-matrices in an NxM matrix with a positive determinant in a matrix of arbitrary size, or find all words in a dictionary that can be constructed by concatenating other words in the dictionary. The easiest questions I've been asked are unimaginative but straightforward things (build a binary tree, print inorder, find all permutations of a string, code a hash map). There's also a particularly pernicious trend toward asking for on-line assessments or homework assignments, things that save the hiring company time but put an even greater time burden on the applicant. I'd say "cracking the coding interview" is a good reflection of the kinds of questions you need to be prepared to answer in an interview, and they are miles away from doubling the value of each integer in an array. I think this is why there's such a disconnect between us. You do see self-described software engineers with 10 years of experience who can't do fizzbuzz, I really do believe you. But we (the applicants) never see this, instead we see a vastly higher standard applied. Which would be fine if the companies acknowledged that they are having trouble hiring because they're extremely picky. But instead, we hear people claiming that there's a "shortage" and that they can't hire because all these supposedly senior people can't code fizz buzz.
catwind7 8y ago
I just want to thank you for your perspective. I'd also add that "junior" can mean very different things for different companies. A junior engineer at Google could very well be "mid level" or even "senior" at a different company. Maybe even a CTO at a startup. The industry is still relatively new and I think we're still in the early stages of grappling with how to best match programming expertise with company needs.
calibas 8y ago
I've personally worked with a number of "web developers" who can barely code HTML/CSS. They tend to fall into two categories, people who use Wordpress themes/plugins to take care of everything they need, and people who outsource cheap programmers to do all the coding for them. I don't know exactly how common either is, but I've run into both categories multiple times doing freelance work.
deaps 8y ago
I agree with you. I code a lot at my current job as a network engineer. I use logic in just about everything I do - that being said, I'm actually really good at what I do and I consider coding and evaluating really old code to be my strong suit, among other things. I certainly couldn't do some of these 'tests' I see people talking about - such as import a CSV and convert it to a JSON file then upload it to github...If I sat down for an interview and they asked me that, there's no doubt that I would fail. I guess I'm lucky that I like my current job.
sinker 8y ago
I'm skeptical of that trope also. I remember that stack overflow fizzbuzz post, but I never encountered a interview candidate so bad that they couldn't program fizzbuzz. I've also never been asked to do anything as basic as code a fizzbuzz example in an interview. Most people seemed to have workable skill levels. A pretty good portion of people seemed to still be in the novelty phase of programming where they would be slightly too excited and surprised at themself, and perhaps slightly unconfident, in answering a fairly basic question correctly.
- danellis 8y ago
  > I never encountered a interview candidate so bad that they couldn't program fizzbuzz Me neither, in the real world, but I have seen a couple of excruciating mock interview videos where the "candidate" was unable to complete the fizzbuzz task. I think this might be a result of people thinking that learning to be a developer involves following along with video tutorials on Udemy, and that as soon as some threshold is reached, they should be ready to look for work.
- koudos 8y ago
  By now, I think fizzbuzz has been around enough that people know it, have heard of it, and prepare enough to solve it. I have started using variations of fizzbuzz or additional questions that builds on it and I find myself catching people who only know the fizzbuzz portion.
- scarface74 8y ago
  I’ve done a version of the fizzbuzz test when zone I interviewed someone - write s function that returns true if a number is even false otherwise. Even after I explained what an odd number was they couldn’t do it.

jspiral 8y ago

As a hiring manager, my experience has been that the average unsolicited resume belongs to someone who can't implement fizzbuzz. (this has a lot to do with the population that spams resumes though i believe) My experience has also been that most raw junior candidates need significant handholding to implement anything into a typical production system at first, and that the learning curve from there varies greatly. What do you think?

catwind7 8y ago
My guess is that he's taking issue with this argument that I'm not quite sure was made: "The market is flooded with people who cannot code, therefore it's easy to find a job as a junior engineer" The market could in fact be flooded with people who cannot code (I don't know for sure). Assuming that's true, that doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to get a job as a junior dev (speaking from someone on the interviewing side).
- tomc1985 8y ago
  On the market being flooded, I think it varies greatly depending on where you are and whom you are with. With my current job I am part of a competent team of smart people but on my last job it seems that IQ was in short supply, for candidates, vendors, and even our "partners". Even though the last job ended months ago, I'm still trying to unconvince myself that everyone in this world is stupid and incompetent, because that was what it felt like.
  - catwind7 8y ago
    Yeah totally. I have a friend who mostly works with the IT in big banks and pretty recently he told me he had to explain what "Git" was to a more senior eng. That was shocking to me but then again maybe I'm too steeped in webdev.
    - profalseidol 8y ago
      This company I'm working in right now has recently migrated from CVS to Git. Still stuck in XML hell though. And nobody understand the ginormous Ant build script.
- beefalo 8y ago
  The market being flooded with poor talent may even make it worse than it being flooded with good talent. Companies now need to invest a lot more time filtering out the people who can't code to hire junior candidates. Instead companies may just decide they will invest that money in the salaries for mid-level and senior engineers instead of time spent hiring juniors.
tracker1 8y ago
Last time I was involved in hiring I created a very simple coding challenge. I've seen far worse on the other side. The goal was to read in a CSV file, read and transform it to a different format (newline separated json) node.js preferred and put it on github. There were no restrictions on what libraries could be used, no requirements for unit tests, etc. It's something that literally took me about half an hour to write at the time. Only one candidate had a working example, even then there were a couple bugs in the transform, but at least the process worked. It's surprising to me how many junior devs cannot do a simple ETL in a scripting language.
- dublin 8y ago
  Last year, I took a contract leading a dev team at a top company here in Austin. The team, largely educated in India, said doing substantial ETL-like cleanup of the pipe-separated 15GB input file would take then about 3 days: 1 day to write the Scala & Java code, and 2 days to process it through the Spark cluster. I shocked them when I called B.S.! I spent the rest of the afternoon showing what you can do with pipelines of grep, cut, paste, and awk. Took 2-3 hours to build the proper pipeline and only 15 minutes to run it on my local laptop hard disk. The sad thing is they were impressed, but still inclined to use the ridiculously complicated cluster pipelines instead, since that was "the way we were taught..."
  - mattmanser 8y ago
    This sort of stuff isn't taught anywhere though, you have to either be shown it by someone else in a previous job, or have it annoy you enough to figure it out with some serious google fu (and the freedom to follow that path). It's an unknown unknown, a lot of programmers will simply not know you can use quick and dirty scripts to process data if you're only going to do it once. I work mainly in .Net and the similar problem I see is devs who don't even know that console apps exist, let alone how to make them, which simplifies prototyping new code immensely.
    - vram22 8y ago
      >This sort of stuff isn't taught anywhere though, you have to either be shown it by someone else in a previous job, or have it annoy you enough to figure it out with some serious google fu (and the freedom to follow that path). Sure it is taught. It's taught by some people ( including me - plug here for my Linux and Python courses, with testimonials: https://jugad2.blogspot.com/p/training.html https://jugad2.blogspot.com/p/training.html ) in their Unix / Linux courses, as examples of how to really put the classic (and oft-quoted) Unix philosopy + command-line tools + shell scripting to good use, synergistically ("write small tools to do one job each, well, and connect them by pipelines and I/O redirection, etc. etc."). It's not even rocket science; bread-and-butter EDP/IT folks (programmers and even operators) (not just clued-in software engineers in product companies) have been using such scripts for decades, routinely, without thinking they are doing anything great or out of the ordinary. (And similarly for other OSs, I'm sure, such as Rexx on some platforms. Not sure what was used on Windows before PowerShell, maybe Perl and/or one of the Unix toolkit clones like MKS Toolkit or Cygwin or UWin - apart from clunky batch file language and DOS/Windows command-line commands). It's just that it is not so well known nowadays among the (often mainly JS-using) generation, who even write CLI apps in Node. >It's an unknown unknown, a lot of programmers will simply not know you can use quick and dirty scripts to process data if you're only going to do it once. It's their loss (and that of the industry), comes from not trying to learn about prior art. There's even a name for it: NIH syndrome [1], and heck, even that is not new :) Dates from early IBM days or earlier ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

apazzolini 8y ago

> I no longer believe this. You should try interviewing "software engineers" that claim to have 10 years of experience architecting and coding in various languages and cannot write a function that doubles the value of each number in an array.

ticmasta 8y ago
Well, it's pretty common to have 10 x 1 year of experience. Lots of jobs require the repetition of a relatively shallow set of skills. When I started my current job I remember the announcement said something like 15 years experience and I thought "I've been doing lots of things for a long time, but I don't feel like I have 15 years experience in any of them" at least no the same way someone in a more stable domain might...
geebee 8y ago
You should try interviewing as a software engineer with 10 years experience. They never ask you to double the value of each integer in an array. They ask you to find all matching subtrees in a binary tree, or to find all sub-matrices in an NxM matrix with a positive determinant in a matrix of arbitrary size, or find all words in a dictionary that can be constructed by concatenating other words in the dictionary. The easiest questions I've been asked are unimaginative but straightforward things (build a binary tree, print inorder, find all permutations of a string, code a hash map). There's also a particularly pernicious trend toward asking for on-line assessments or homework assignments, things that save the hiring company time but put an even greater time burden on the applicant. I'd say "cracking the coding interview" is a good reflection of the kinds of questions you need to be prepared to answer in an interview, and they are miles away from doubling the value of each integer in an array. I think this is why there's such a disconnect between us. You do see self-described software engineers with 10 years of experience who can't do fizzbuzz, I really do believe you. But we (the applicants) never see this, instead we see a vastly higher standard applied. Which would be fine if the companies acknowledged that they are having trouble hiring because they're extremely picky. But instead, we hear people claiming that there's a "shortage" and that they can't hire because all these supposedly senior people can't code fizz buzz.

catwind7 8y ago

I just want to thank you for your perspective. I'd also add that "junior" can mean very different things for different companies. A junior engineer at Google could very well be "mid level" or even "senior" at a different company. Maybe even a CTO at a startup. The industry is still relatively new and I think we're still in the early stages of grappling with how to best match programming expertise with company needs.

calibas 8y ago

I've personally worked with a number of "web developers" who can barely code HTML/CSS. They tend to fall into two categories, people who use Wordpress themes/plugins to take care of everything they need, and people who outsource cheap programmers to do all the coding for them. I don't know exactly how common either is, but I've run into both categories multiple times doing freelance work.

deaps 8y ago

I agree with you. I code a lot at my current job as a network engineer. I use logic in just about everything I do - that being said, I'm actually really good at what I do and I consider coding and evaluating really old code to be my strong suit, among other things. I certainly couldn't do some of these 'tests' I see people talking about - such as import a CSV and convert it to a JSON file then upload it to github...If I sat down for an interview and they asked me that, there's no doubt that I would fail. I guess I'm lucky that I like my current job.

sinker 8y ago

I'm skeptical of that trope also. I remember that stack overflow fizzbuzz post, but I never encountered a interview candidate so bad that they couldn't program fizzbuzz. I've also never been asked to do anything as basic as code a fizzbuzz example in an interview. Most people seemed to have workable skill levels. A pretty good portion of people seemed to still be in the novelty phase of programming where they would be slightly too excited and surprised at themself, and perhaps slightly unconfident, in answering a fairly basic question correctly.

danellis 8y ago
> I never encountered a interview candidate so bad that they couldn't program fizzbuzz Me neither, in the real world, but I have seen a couple of excruciating mock interview videos where the "candidate" was unable to complete the fizzbuzz task. I think this might be a result of people thinking that learning to be a developer involves following along with video tutorials on Udemy, and that as soon as some threshold is reached, they should be ready to look for work.
koudos 8y ago
By now, I think fizzbuzz has been around enough that people know it, have heard of it, and prepare enough to solve it. I have started using variations of fizzbuzz or additional questions that builds on it and I find myself catching people who only know the fizzbuzz portion.
scarface74 8y ago
I’ve done a version of the fizzbuzz test when zone I interviewed someone - write s function that returns true if a number is even false otherwise. Even after I explained what an odd number was they couldn’t do it.