8 ms·

Software engineers hard to find

51 points by sayemm 16y ago

GooseFlyFox 16y ago
Only if you persist in looking in the wrong places.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  Cool. Can you suggest where the right places are? My past searches for decent software developers have been long, arduous and time-consuming, and I'd love to know where all the good developers are hiding. Out of interest, how many developers have you employed? I'm sure it's not entirely relevant, but I'd be interested to know how you found them.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    There are plenty of people here on hn who complaint about how hard it is to get people willing to hire them remote. You could start there.
    - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
      There are plenty of software development jobs where remote working simply isn't possible. Just as a single, simple example, there are very few neighborhoods that would tolerate an 18 foot high-speed radar antenna on a roof, and even fewer that would then have suitable objects to watch.
      - tomjen3 16y ago
        I am pretty sure they once said the same thing about people not working in suits. If your company can't make it work, you shouldn't be surprised if you have to look for a new job because your competitors can get people you aren't able to hire.
        nostrademons 16y ago
        There is a very big difference between what clothes someone is wearing and what their physical location is. In half a generation, perhaps, when all the kids have grown up with zero distinction between online and offline life and VC equipment is so good that it's just like you're there, large-scale remote working might work. But right now, there is so much high-bandwidth communication that you're missing out on.
        RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
        I've come back to this comment several times in the past few hours, trying to write something to help you understand, yet at the same time, not sounding condescending, and I've decided I can't do it. You simply can't connect remotely to the kit we use - you have to be in the office for at least a few days a week. Other work we do involves data that we are contractually obliged not to allow out of the building, and still other work involves teams of people working together on algorithm design and implementation. We've tried, but the existing on-line tools are simply not up to it. We've even worked at trying to create better on-line tools, and come to the conclusion that it's currently not worth it. But you're a CS student, so no doubt you'll be working on solving the problems we have, and by the time you're in the work place you'll have the solution ready. We look forward with eager anticipation to being able to have people work remotely. Getting more and better work for the same pay would be a great business opportunity, which is why we still invest around 10% of our annual budget trying to make it happen.
  - bhoung 16y ago
    Can't remember where I read it but the good developers are hiding in good jobs and not actively searching...
pedanticfreak 16y ago
I wonder if the dismal housing market and the rising demand for software will finally force corporations to figure out how to manage remote developers. It's not like wages for the common programmer are going to keep skyrocketing until companies are buying your house to relocate your family.
- zeemonkee 16y ago
  Exactly. I get a lot of job offers which insist on me moving to London. Since I have (for a number of personal and practical reasons) no intention of ever moving to London, I won't work for them, period. On the other hand, I would be readily available as a remote worker - in the same country. So what's exactly stopping these companies ?
anakanemison 16y ago
The many trading companies in Chicago also offer software developers interesting problems to solve and attractive compensation. There's certainly a lot of web work being done in Chicago too, but the trading companies offer developers the chance to focus on enterprise software systems and proprietary high-performance trading applications.
- thesis 16y ago
  I agree, my cousin is a software engineer for a financial company in Chicago. I doubt this other company could afford him.
ck2 16y ago
I find it dubious someone can just decide to be a "software engineer". You'd have to already have a personal interest in programming and be doing it on your own as a hobby. Are there people who seriously just go to college for 4 years and learn coding like accounting and then just do a 9-5 job? There are thousands of decent hackers out there, maybe just uptrain.
- amock 16y ago
  There are lots of people who just went to college for four years and then got jobs writing code. I didn't keep a track of many of them but none of the ones I know of turned out to be good at it.
  - ck2 16y ago
    I'm jealous of anyone who can just "come home from work" and turn off their brain about coding and do it as a regular job. I'm constantly thinking of better ways to do something and find myself rewriting code from years ago. I have at least one "regular job" experience that taught me such behavior/attitude doesn't work well in a 9-5 business environment.
    - amock 16y ago
      Do you really want to not care about the work you do? It's nice to be able to come home from work and not worry about work, but I wouldn't want to work on something that I wasn't interested in.
      - nostrademons 16y ago
        Dunno about the OP, but I'm worried about burnout. The road to being "world class" anything is longer than you can imagine, and it'd suck to get 10 years in and suddenly reach the point where I can't do this any more, no matter how much I used to like it, right when I would otherwise be a big success. It is apparently possible to care about your work and yet still leave it at work - I know a few people that have managed it. I haven't had a whole lot of success myself.
aaronblohowiak 16y ago
"One good developer can do the work of three or four guys," Annerino said. "Once a company finds them, they don't let them go." We might get paid double what they do, but not 3x or 4x. Or maybe I'm not that good ;)
- patio11 16y ago
  I am gradually coming to the opinion that many 10X developers really do end up being compensated fairly, but it rarely happens while they are still in the "developer" box. It doesn't necessarily just happen from taking on extra risk, either, though starting your own company is one way to do it. Personal anecdote (I'm not a 10X developer but I know a few things about a few things): I previously built CRUD apps and made $X, and I turned down a few offers this year to build CRUD apps for [6 * $X, 10 * $X]. The big thing that changed? Improvement in marketing myself and better selection of CRUD app genre. (A/B testing isn't any harder technically than building university registration systems... it is just worth orders of magnitude more revenue.) There is a really good post on Quora about this, incidentally: http://www.quora.com/10X-Engineers/Why-are-the-best-programmers-10x-more-productive-than-mediocre-programmers-but-paid-only-3x-as-much-Why-aren-t-they-paid-10x-as-much http://www.quora.com/10X-Engineers/Why-are-the-best-programm...
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    That was one of the things that really surprised me about the real world: that big advancement only comes from big lateral jumps. Different companies, different projects, different markets, or different customers. There's this model of the world we're taught as schoolkids - at least where I grew up - where you work hard at something, do as your told, and slowly but surely you rise up. And maybe at one level it's true, but it's very slow, and you'll never become the sort of success you read about in the paper that way. Instead, I've found that what usually happens is that you join an organization because you meet some minimum skill baseline that they're looking for. And then as you practice and learn from the people around you, you end up picking up a bunch of other skills and getting better at your job. But the people around you generally won't notice. First impressions usually pigeonhole you into a general category, and then people are blind to gradual changes. So to reap the rewards of everything you've learned, you have to expose yourself to new people. Jump ship, and suddenly you seem really valuable to them, because all those skills you've picked up which your current organization takes for granted are new and useful. There's a leverage effect as well: people try to work with others of roughly the same level. If you're diligent about practicing, you'll go from being (hopefully) near the bottom of your team to the top of it. If you then repeat the process, your new teammates better be higher skilled still, and so your team as a whole can tackle more ambitious problems.
brown9-2 16y ago
Supply and demand. If you're having trouble finding people with what you're offering, raise your offer.
- fhars 16y ago
  But that raises the false positive rate of unqualified applicants that are only in it for the money. Given that such a programmer may have net negative productivity, underpaying qualified developers migth even be beneficial for the employers, as they can be sure that the remaining pool of applicants will only contain persons with a qualification level commensurate with the offered wages (which can easily be filtered out) and people passionate about programming. They may loose some of the best that way, but they loose all of the duds, too. </cynic>
  - brown9-2 16y ago
    I'm not sure I'm following this line of argument but if they're intentionally keeping what they're offering low, they lose the right to complain that they can't find good enough candidates. Besides the company on the article already claims to be able to seperate duds from stars. "What you're offering" includes more than just money as well n
Tangurena 16y ago
I'm an older developer. I was eating lunch at a restaurant near my new workplace. Sitting at the table next to mine, a college senior (at Colorado School of Mines - which is a pretty decent engineering school) was talking with her father about her boyfriend interviewing for a job as a software developer. The BF had a 4 hour long programming test as part of the interview. Something is very wrong with our industry. Most of the time that articles come out like this, industry executives are trying to get more kids to go into programming in order to lower the cost of employees: they want protection from the free market. The last company I worked for (for 5 years, and it was a Fortune 100 company) was complaining publicly that they were unable to find developers - yet people who quit over the past 2 years were never replaced, nor were we allowed to interview candidates.
- ck2 16y ago
  I think the secret is that part of good programming is an art, and not only something that can be taught, like accounting, with just logical rules and regulations (apologies to skilled accountants who feel there is an art to their work). That is probably why big business can't fulfill their desire for a large pool of cheap but good developers. You can't just pour people into the college machinery and churn out developers. At least I hope not.
  - j_baker 16y ago
    I think you might be confusing accounting with bookkeeping. Bookkeepers are the people who determine what column to put data in and crunch numbers. Accountants make financial decisions. Accountants probably feel the same way about developers: we deal with just logical rules and mathematical theorems. The thing is that you don't just put anyone into college and expect a productive member of society to come out. It takes so much more than that.
  - rdtsc 16y ago
    > That is probably why big business can't fulfill their desire for a large pool of cheap but good developers. It is interesting, this has been going on for a while. Initially many companies went and got a lot of cheap and mediocre developers (mostly through outsourcing) and replaced a couple good ones with dozens of average ones for the same price. They saw it as a deal. Eventually they are realizing that programming is not like picking potatoes -- "Just hire more for the same price, they all sit and type all day anyway, so just get more for cheaper and we'll get ahead faster". Well it doesn't work like that. Once mediocrity starts to dominate, even the few good ones who are still hanging around, will leave as their work turns to teaching others and babysitting them full time. In general it is not possible to replace a highly skilled programmer with an X number of less skilled ones. Many hit that realization and we start seeing lots of these types of articles even as unemployment is above 10%
thr0w4w4y 16y ago
A related question: What is the current hourly rate that a jr software engineer can expect? I might be starting to work remotely for a company in the Boston area but have no idea what the current salary situation for freelancers in the US is like
- patio11 16y ago
  All over the map (sorry, bad pun). It depends on where you live, who you work for, what technologies you work in, and (more than any of the above) your skill in marketing yourself to the right clients. I have personal knowledge of folks who do software development at a range of price points between $25 and $200.
  - ido 16y ago
    I assume that rate is per hour? For what's it worth, in Western Europe I'd say 75 euros/hour ±50% is what you can expect for usual "Enterprise" fare.
mahmud 16y ago
And will continue to be harder and harder as long as utter morons do the screening and hiring. I made a local-startup an offer that no sane company could afford to refuse. I was a core developer for their main behemoth of a competitor and my non-competes have just expired. They could easily save millions of dollars in marketing, research and development by JUST running decisions by me and having me nod in approval if it sounds good. (I am not exaggerating; it's one of those businesses that require 10k in daily AdWords sacrifices to grok; lead generation) Instead, they came back to me with the same two questions: do you know Django and do you know Agile development. You incompetent idiots. Fast forward to today; it took me 4 hours this morning to go from cold-call to interview at a research-oriented industrial planning company of <10 people minting millions of dollars per year. Within 20 minutes, the guy and I were talking about the history of Prolog, logics and finite-domain constraint solving.
- gaius 16y ago
  The problem there will be that the competent engineers - if they have any - will have been burned by too many dud candidates wasting their time, and have gotten HR to pre-screen the CVs...
  - rdtsc 16y ago
    The job of a good HR department is to at least be able to screen the really dumb ones and pass the rest up the technical chain for evaluation. The good engineers might be burned out but if they know that not spending time interviewing and reviewing resumes will result in having to deal with a dud that gets hired, having to babysit them, teach them the basics of programming and watch them slowly destroy the code base, they would be quite happy to assist with evaluations.
    - bugsy 16y ago
      If anyone in HR had the capabilities to tell the difference between a qualified candidate and one who is lying, then that HR person is also qualified to transfer to engineering and start coding.
ShardPhoenix 16y ago
"JumpForward interviews three to five engineers a week as it tries to fill four to six technology jobs, but most candidates don't have current skills or they lack the passion to stay on the cutting edge" In other words, there's no shortage of software engineers, there's a shortage of perfect candidates. If these companies were actually willing to train people, they'd have a lot fewer problems. The trend seems to be that software development, like a lot of other industries, is becoming increasingly winner-take-all, with huge demand for the very best of the best, and a lot less for anyone else.
- elliottkember 16y ago
  Unfortunately, it's also very easy for an engineer to jump ship after their training - meaning a very expensive loss of time and effort. Personally, I think the "shortage" has something to do with increases in job-hopping. If there were some guarantee that an engineer were going to stick around for a few years after training, perhaps training new recruits wouldn't seem so unreasonable.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - sgift 16y ago
    This works both ways - the concept of one job for a whole life (or at maximum two jobs) was really common for the parents (or grand-parents, depending on their age) of many. Then the companies started with hire-and-fire. And now they wonder why their employees have no loyalty in face of a good offer from another company.
  - lelele 16y ago
    > Unfortunately, it's also very easy for an engineer to jump ship after their training - meaning a very expensive loss of time and effort. Keeping your employees is your job, not theirs. No relationship lasts when one partner starts neglecting the other and another interested partner comes in.
    - 16y ago
gunmetal 16y ago
At most companies the hiring process is severely broken. They are being too careful and are so scared to train the right person.
bugsy 16y ago
So the article says the shortage is of "highly trained" workers only. And a big problem is you can't lure them away since their current employer might give them a counter offer, and there's apparently no way to deal with that, it's the end of the world. And the solution to all this is "a six-month retraining program for displaced workers. Participants, who must be unemployed, will come away with skills in one of eight tech-training areas" which trains people with no programming skills how to become "highly skilled" in only six months. So highly skilled that they will kick the butts of the guy with the 15 years useless C, C++, Perl and PHP experience because what we really need is Ruby on Rails.
iwwr 16y ago
If your pay is not high enough, or your standards are not low enough, you will find yourself lacking "software engineers". There is no shortage, however, just an unwillingness to pay the right price (either in money or lack of skill).
KevinMS 16y ago
I'm not seeing anything like this, or maybe I'm just being forced out of the industry. I get screened out by HR because I don't have the words "computer science" on my resume, even though I've been programming for the past 25 years, 15 professionally. If I get this far I get a phone screen where I'm completely fluent in anything they are talking about, but I don't have years of scrum experience, or I didn't come from an "agile" shop, or I prefer the alternatives to Rspec and cucumber, or whatever the new hotness is. Then I get screened out by the developer interview because I'm not in my 20's and probably can't relate to their hip young "culture" and they don't know what to make of me, especially in the Ruby world - but Perl is not as bad and I'll probably just give up on Ruby and go back to Perl. Then I get flooded with calls from head hunters, all for the same one or two jobs and its always a complete waste of time. Its frustrating to read articles like this. Are they true or just compete fabricated bullshit as a prelude to increasing H1B quotas?
jwh 16y ago
"The growing use of Ruby on Rails, a Web application framework, in recent years has created developer shortages everywhere, said Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson...Many developers who were trained in Java or PHP simply need to be retrained, he said." === "Hmm, PHP and Java are out, so what does someone with vested interests in Rails think I should learn? Hang on, Rails isn't mentioned as out of date by its creator so I'll retrain in that!" I can't remember the exact articles from HN but there were two recently: one was about a sysadmin that went for an interview at Facebook or Google and was surprised that they wanted knowledge on low-level, performance critical features rather than advanced bash programming; another was an example of why it's often more cost effective to get twice the performance out of one server (by investing more development time i.e. C/C++ over PHP) rather than buying another server. YMMV but I switched from PHP to C++ for my personal web projects and haven't noticed it taking me exponentially more time to develop.
Unosolo 16y ago
What I can see is that most companies and especially these where software developement is viewed as a necessary evil rather than a business model are very bad at telling bad candidates from the good ones and don't really hire based on merit. They might believe they do, but the outcome of the hiring process is usually erratic as far as it comes to the actual abilities. However once a developer is hired even a company with a flaky interviewing process tends to recognise the actual worth of a given programmer fairly quickly. Then an intresting thing happens - even though the developers might be explicitly treated as a commodity resource the very same managers would go far beyond the declared rules to retain the best: regularly up the package, give a lot of slack, turn a blind eye on minor "breaches of established rules". As a result most good programmers I know after about five years in the industry end up enjoying a package far in excess of what is being declared on the job sites. It's not uncommon for a hiring manager to moan about the lack of good candidates whilst paying the best developers on their team 50% more than they advertise when publishing the same job. What the management don't seem to realise is that just about every other company does that: actually paying more to the existing programmers than the declared range they would be prepared to pay for the new hires. As a result after a while there is little or no incentive for good developers to put their CV's on a market. They're well above the market rates. As a workaround sometimes companies hire good programmers as independent contractors and carry on extending the contracts forever - paying double or triple the rate they would pay their permanent staff. It's a funny game when becoming "an independent" consultant with a single customer is one of the few options for an experienced developer to help company management justify paying them the true market worth. There is no lack of good programmers, they just cost much more than most companies are prepared to admit.
geebee 16y ago
I'm a little suspicious when I read a line like this: ""I feel we're at 100 percent employment" for highly qualified software engineers in Chicago, said Zach Kaplan, chief executive at Chicago-based Inventables, an online marketplace for materials and technology. The company gets flooded with applications when it posts nontechnical jobs, but it struggles to find software engineers." Mr. Kaplan hasn't quite defined a highly qualified software engineer as one who has a job, but he's awfully close to saying that "100% of the software engineers who have jobs, have jobs." If "highly qualified" software engineers have no trouble finding jobs, I suspect I could make an equally ambiguous argument that "highly desirable" software companies have no trouble finding software engineers. This "shortage" goes both ways.

51 points by sayemm 16y ago

GooseFlyFox 16y ago

Only if you persist in looking in the wrong places.

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Cool. Can you suggest where the right places are? My past searches for decent software developers have been long, arduous and time-consuming, and I'd love to know where all the good developers are hiding. Out of interest, how many developers have you employed? I'm sure it's not entirely relevant, but I'd be interested to know how you found them.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  There are plenty of people here on hn who complaint about how hard it is to get people willing to hire them remote. You could start there.
  - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
    There are plenty of software development jobs where remote working simply isn't possible. Just as a single, simple example, there are very few neighborhoods that would tolerate an 18 foot high-speed radar antenna on a roof, and even fewer that would then have suitable objects to watch.
    - tomjen3 16y ago
      I am pretty sure they once said the same thing about people not working in suits. If your company can't make it work, you shouldn't be surprised if you have to look for a new job because your competitors can get people you aren't able to hire.
      - nostrademons 16y ago
        There is a very big difference between what clothes someone is wearing and what their physical location is. In half a generation, perhaps, when all the kids have grown up with zero distinction between online and offline life and VC equipment is so good that it's just like you're there, large-scale remote working might work. But right now, there is so much high-bandwidth communication that you're missing out on.
      - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
        I've come back to this comment several times in the past few hours, trying to write something to help you understand, yet at the same time, not sounding condescending, and I've decided I can't do it. You simply can't connect remotely to the kit we use - you have to be in the office for at least a few days a week. Other work we do involves data that we are contractually obliged not to allow out of the building, and still other work involves teams of people working together on algorithm design and implementation. We've tried, but the existing on-line tools are simply not up to it. We've even worked at trying to create better on-line tools, and come to the conclusion that it's currently not worth it. But you're a CS student, so no doubt you'll be working on solving the problems we have, and by the time you're in the work place you'll have the solution ready. We look forward with eager anticipation to being able to have people work remotely. Getting more and better work for the same pay would be a great business opportunity, which is why we still invest around 10% of our annual budget trying to make it happen.
- bhoung 16y ago
  Can't remember where I read it but the good developers are hiding in good jobs and not actively searching...

pedanticfreak 16y ago

I wonder if the dismal housing market and the rising demand for software will finally force corporations to figure out how to manage remote developers. It's not like wages for the common programmer are going to keep skyrocketing until companies are buying your house to relocate your family.

zeemonkee 16y ago
Exactly. I get a lot of job offers which insist on me moving to London. Since I have (for a number of personal and practical reasons) no intention of ever moving to London, I won't work for them, period. On the other hand, I would be readily available as a remote worker - in the same country. So what's exactly stopping these companies ?

anakanemison 16y ago

The many trading companies in Chicago also offer software developers interesting problems to solve and attractive compensation. There's certainly a lot of web work being done in Chicago too, but the trading companies offer developers the chance to focus on enterprise software systems and proprietary high-performance trading applications.

thesis 16y ago
I agree, my cousin is a software engineer for a financial company in Chicago. I doubt this other company could afford him.

ck2 16y ago

I find it dubious someone can just decide to be a "software engineer". You'd have to already have a personal interest in programming and be doing it on your own as a hobby. Are there people who seriously just go to college for 4 years and learn coding like accounting and then just do a 9-5 job? There are thousands of decent hackers out there, maybe just uptrain.

amock 16y ago
There are lots of people who just went to college for four years and then got jobs writing code. I didn't keep a track of many of them but none of the ones I know of turned out to be good at it.
- ck2 16y ago
  I'm jealous of anyone who can just "come home from work" and turn off their brain about coding and do it as a regular job. I'm constantly thinking of better ways to do something and find myself rewriting code from years ago. I have at least one "regular job" experience that taught me such behavior/attitude doesn't work well in a 9-5 business environment.
  - amock 16y ago
    Do you really want to not care about the work you do? It's nice to be able to come home from work and not worry about work, but I wouldn't want to work on something that I wasn't interested in.
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      Dunno about the OP, but I'm worried about burnout. The road to being "world class" anything is longer than you can imagine, and it'd suck to get 10 years in and suddenly reach the point where I can't do this any more, no matter how much I used to like it, right when I would otherwise be a big success. It is apparently possible to care about your work and yet still leave it at work - I know a few people that have managed it. I haven't had a whole lot of success myself.

aaronblohowiak 16y ago

"One good developer can do the work of three or four guys," Annerino said. "Once a company finds them, they don't let them go." We might get paid double what they do, but not 3x or 4x. Or maybe I'm not that good ;)

patio11 16y ago
I am gradually coming to the opinion that many 10X developers really do end up being compensated fairly, but it rarely happens while they are still in the "developer" box. It doesn't necessarily just happen from taking on extra risk, either, though starting your own company is one way to do it. Personal anecdote (I'm not a 10X developer but I know a few things about a few things): I previously built CRUD apps and made $X, and I turned down a few offers this year to build CRUD apps for [6 * $X, 10 * $X]. The big thing that changed? Improvement in marketing myself and better selection of CRUD app genre. (A/B testing isn't any harder technically than building university registration systems... it is just worth orders of magnitude more revenue.) There is a really good post on Quora about this, incidentally: http://www.quora.com/10X-Engineers/Why-are-the-best-programmers-10x-more-productive-than-mediocre-programmers-but-paid-only-3x-as-much-Why-aren-t-they-paid-10x-as-much http://www.quora.com/10X-Engineers/Why-are-the-best-programm...
- nostrademons 16y ago
  That was one of the things that really surprised me about the real world: that big advancement only comes from big lateral jumps. Different companies, different projects, different markets, or different customers. There's this model of the world we're taught as schoolkids - at least where I grew up - where you work hard at something, do as your told, and slowly but surely you rise up. And maybe at one level it's true, but it's very slow, and you'll never become the sort of success you read about in the paper that way. Instead, I've found that what usually happens is that you join an organization because you meet some minimum skill baseline that they're looking for. And then as you practice and learn from the people around you, you end up picking up a bunch of other skills and getting better at your job. But the people around you generally won't notice. First impressions usually pigeonhole you into a general category, and then people are blind to gradual changes. So to reap the rewards of everything you've learned, you have to expose yourself to new people. Jump ship, and suddenly you seem really valuable to them, because all those skills you've picked up which your current organization takes for granted are new and useful. There's a leverage effect as well: people try to work with others of roughly the same level. If you're diligent about practicing, you'll go from being (hopefully) near the bottom of your team to the top of it. If you then repeat the process, your new teammates better be higher skilled still, and so your team as a whole can tackle more ambitious problems.

brown9-2 16y ago

Supply and demand. If you're having trouble finding people with what you're offering, raise your offer.

fhars 16y ago
But that raises the false positive rate of unqualified applicants that are only in it for the money. Given that such a programmer may have net negative productivity, underpaying qualified developers migth even be beneficial for the employers, as they can be sure that the remaining pool of applicants will only contain persons with a qualification level commensurate with the offered wages (which can easily be filtered out) and people passionate about programming. They may loose some of the best that way, but they loose all of the duds, too. </cynic>
- brown9-2 16y ago
  I'm not sure I'm following this line of argument but if they're intentionally keeping what they're offering low, they lose the right to complain that they can't find good enough candidates. Besides the company on the article already claims to be able to seperate duds from stars. "What you're offering" includes more than just money as well n

Tangurena 16y ago

I'm an older developer. I was eating lunch at a restaurant near my new workplace. Sitting at the table next to mine, a college senior (at Colorado School of Mines - which is a pretty decent engineering school) was talking with her father about her boyfriend interviewing for a job as a software developer. The BF had a 4 hour long programming test as part of the interview. Something is very wrong with our industry. Most of the time that articles come out like this, industry executives are trying to get more kids to go into programming in order to lower the cost of employees: they want protection from the free market. The last company I worked for (for 5 years, and it was a Fortune 100 company) was complaining publicly that they were unable to find developers - yet people who quit over the past 2 years were never replaced, nor were we allowed to interview candidates.

ck2 16y ago
I think the secret is that part of good programming is an art, and not only something that can be taught, like accounting, with just logical rules and regulations (apologies to skilled accountants who feel there is an art to their work). That is probably why big business can't fulfill their desire for a large pool of cheap but good developers. You can't just pour people into the college machinery and churn out developers. At least I hope not.
- j_baker 16y ago
  I think you might be confusing accounting with bookkeeping. Bookkeepers are the people who determine what column to put data in and crunch numbers. Accountants make financial decisions. Accountants probably feel the same way about developers: we deal with just logical rules and mathematical theorems. The thing is that you don't just put anyone into college and expect a productive member of society to come out. It takes so much more than that.
- rdtsc 16y ago
  > That is probably why big business can't fulfill their desire for a large pool of cheap but good developers. It is interesting, this has been going on for a while. Initially many companies went and got a lot of cheap and mediocre developers (mostly through outsourcing) and replaced a couple good ones with dozens of average ones for the same price. They saw it as a deal. Eventually they are realizing that programming is not like picking potatoes -- "Just hire more for the same price, they all sit and type all day anyway, so just get more for cheaper and we'll get ahead faster". Well it doesn't work like that. Once mediocrity starts to dominate, even the few good ones who are still hanging around, will leave as their work turns to teaching others and babysitting them full time. In general it is not possible to replace a highly skilled programmer with an X number of less skilled ones. Many hit that realization and we start seeing lots of these types of articles even as unemployment is above 10%

thr0w4w4y 16y ago

A related question: What is the current hourly rate that a jr software engineer can expect? I might be starting to work remotely for a company in the Boston area but have no idea what the current salary situation for freelancers in the US is like

patio11 16y ago
All over the map (sorry, bad pun). It depends on where you live, who you work for, what technologies you work in, and (more than any of the above) your skill in marketing yourself to the right clients. I have personal knowledge of folks who do software development at a range of price points between $25 and $200.
- ido 16y ago
  I assume that rate is per hour? For what's it worth, in Western Europe I'd say 75 euros/hour ±50% is what you can expect for usual "Enterprise" fare.

mahmud 16y ago

And will continue to be harder and harder as long as utter morons do the screening and hiring. I made a local-startup an offer that no sane company could afford to refuse. I was a core developer for their main behemoth of a competitor and my non-competes have just expired. They could easily save millions of dollars in marketing, research and development by JUST running decisions by me and having me nod in approval if it sounds good. (I am not exaggerating; it's one of those businesses that require 10k in daily AdWords sacrifices to grok; lead generation) Instead, they came back to me with the same two questions: do you know Django and do you know Agile development. You incompetent idiots. Fast forward to today; it took me 4 hours this morning to go from cold-call to interview at a research-oriented industrial planning company of <10 people minting millions of dollars per year. Within 20 minutes, the guy and I were talking about the history of Prolog, logics and finite-domain constraint solving.

gaius 16y ago
The problem there will be that the competent engineers - if they have any - will have been burned by too many dud candidates wasting their time, and have gotten HR to pre-screen the CVs...
- rdtsc 16y ago
  The job of a good HR department is to at least be able to screen the really dumb ones and pass the rest up the technical chain for evaluation. The good engineers might be burned out but if they know that not spending time interviewing and reviewing resumes will result in having to deal with a dud that gets hired, having to babysit them, teach them the basics of programming and watch them slowly destroy the code base, they would be quite happy to assist with evaluations.
  - bugsy 16y ago
    If anyone in HR had the capabilities to tell the difference between a qualified candidate and one who is lying, then that HR person is also qualified to transfer to engineering and start coding.

ShardPhoenix 16y ago

"JumpForward interviews three to five engineers a week as it tries to fill four to six technology jobs, but most candidates don't have current skills or they lack the passion to stay on the cutting edge" In other words, there's no shortage of software engineers, there's a shortage of perfect candidates. If these companies were actually willing to train people, they'd have a lot fewer problems. The trend seems to be that software development, like a lot of other industries, is becoming increasingly winner-take-all, with huge demand for the very best of the best, and a lot less for anyone else.

elliottkember 16y ago
Unfortunately, it's also very easy for an engineer to jump ship after their training - meaning a very expensive loss of time and effort. Personally, I think the "shortage" has something to do with increases in job-hopping. If there were some guarantee that an engineer were going to stick around for a few years after training, perhaps training new recruits wouldn't seem so unreasonable.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- sgift 16y ago
  This works both ways - the concept of one job for a whole life (or at maximum two jobs) was really common for the parents (or grand-parents, depending on their age) of many. Then the companies started with hire-and-fire. And now they wonder why their employees have no loyalty in face of a good offer from another company.
- lelele 16y ago
  > Unfortunately, it's also very easy for an engineer to jump ship after their training - meaning a very expensive loss of time and effort. Keeping your employees is your job, not theirs. No relationship lasts when one partner starts neglecting the other and another interested partner comes in.
  - 16y ago

gunmetal 16y ago

At most companies the hiring process is severely broken. They are being too careful and are so scared to train the right person.

bugsy 16y ago

So the article says the shortage is of "highly trained" workers only. And a big problem is you can't lure them away since their current employer might give them a counter offer, and there's apparently no way to deal with that, it's the end of the world. And the solution to all this is "a six-month retraining program for displaced workers. Participants, who must be unemployed, will come away with skills in one of eight tech-training areas" which trains people with no programming skills how to become "highly skilled" in only six months. So highly skilled that they will kick the butts of the guy with the 15 years useless C, C++, Perl and PHP experience because what we really need is Ruby on Rails.

iwwr 16y ago

If your pay is not high enough, or your standards are not low enough, you will find yourself lacking "software engineers". There is no shortage, however, just an unwillingness to pay the right price (either in money or lack of skill).

KevinMS 16y ago

I'm not seeing anything like this, or maybe I'm just being forced out of the industry. I get screened out by HR because I don't have the words "computer science" on my resume, even though I've been programming for the past 25 years, 15 professionally. If I get this far I get a phone screen where I'm completely fluent in anything they are talking about, but I don't have years of scrum experience, or I didn't come from an "agile" shop, or I prefer the alternatives to Rspec and cucumber, or whatever the new hotness is. Then I get screened out by the developer interview because I'm not in my 20's and probably can't relate to their hip young "culture" and they don't know what to make of me, especially in the Ruby world - but Perl is not as bad and I'll probably just give up on Ruby and go back to Perl. Then I get flooded with calls from head hunters, all for the same one or two jobs and its always a complete waste of time. Its frustrating to read articles like this. Are they true or just compete fabricated bullshit as a prelude to increasing H1B quotas?

jwh 16y ago

"The growing use of Ruby on Rails, a Web application framework, in recent years has created developer shortages everywhere, said Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson...Many developers who were trained in Java or PHP simply need to be retrained, he said." === "Hmm, PHP and Java are out, so what does someone with vested interests in Rails think I should learn? Hang on, Rails isn't mentioned as out of date by its creator so I'll retrain in that!" I can't remember the exact articles from HN but there were two recently: one was about a sysadmin that went for an interview at Facebook or Google and was surprised that they wanted knowledge on low-level, performance critical features rather than advanced bash programming; another was an example of why it's often more cost effective to get twice the performance out of one server (by investing more development time i.e. C/C++ over PHP) rather than buying another server. YMMV but I switched from PHP to C++ for my personal web projects and haven't noticed it taking me exponentially more time to develop.

Unosolo 16y ago

What I can see is that most companies and especially these where software developement is viewed as a necessary evil rather than a business model are very bad at telling bad candidates from the good ones and don't really hire based on merit. They might believe they do, but the outcome of the hiring process is usually erratic as far as it comes to the actual abilities. However once a developer is hired even a company with a flaky interviewing process tends to recognise the actual worth of a given programmer fairly quickly. Then an intresting thing happens - even though the developers might be explicitly treated as a commodity resource the very same managers would go far beyond the declared rules to retain the best: regularly up the package, give a lot of slack, turn a blind eye on minor "breaches of established rules". As a result most good programmers I know after about five years in the industry end up enjoying a package far in excess of what is being declared on the job sites. It's not uncommon for a hiring manager to moan about the lack of good candidates whilst paying the best developers on their team 50% more than they advertise when publishing the same job. What the management don't seem to realise is that just about every other company does that: actually paying more to the existing programmers than the declared range they would be prepared to pay for the new hires. As a result after a while there is little or no incentive for good developers to put their CV's on a market. They're well above the market rates. As a workaround sometimes companies hire good programmers as independent contractors and carry on extending the contracts forever - paying double or triple the rate they would pay their permanent staff. It's a funny game when becoming "an independent" consultant with a single customer is one of the few options for an experienced developer to help company management justify paying them the true market worth. There is no lack of good programmers, they just cost much more than most companies are prepared to admit.

geebee 16y ago

I'm a little suspicious when I read a line like this: ""I feel we're at 100 percent employment" for highly qualified software engineers in Chicago, said Zach Kaplan, chief executive at Chicago-based Inventables, an online marketplace for materials and technology. The company gets flooded with applications when it posts nontechnical jobs, but it struggles to find software engineers." Mr. Kaplan hasn't quite defined a highly qualified software engineer as one who has a job, but he's awfully close to saying that "100% of the software engineers who have jobs, have jobs." If "highly qualified" software engineers have no trouble finding jobs, I suspect I could make an equally ambiguous argument that "highly desirable" software companies have no trouble finding software engineers. This "shortage" goes both ways.