7 ms·

Interviews are so bad because there are too many capable programmers. If there really was a market shortage, companies would not interview like this.

Analemma_ 7y ago
If the problem was oversupply, we wouldn't be getting the cushy salaries and benefits we do. I think the issue is more that it's pretty easy for people with no programming ability to appear competent on a resume, especially to a clueless HR rep or headhunter. There are a lot of people out there whose backgrounds look good on paper who can't solve FizzBuzz...
- codingslave 7y ago
  I think the cushy salaries come from the fact that programming done right is extremely profitable. So the capitalists toss a chunk of money to the engineers.
- lkrubner 7y ago
  For most programming jobs wages are lower now than in 1995. Back then, I had many friends who were charging $100 an hour just to build VisualBasic apps and they had more work than they could handle. And Phillip Greenspan has written that his company, from 1996 onwards, offered $100,000 to recent college grads. That was really good money back then, especially if you wanted to buy a house. Wages right now only look good compared to where they were during the depths of the Great Recession. Over a longer time frame, wages look terrible, except for certain jobs at FANG companies.
  - ummonk 7y ago
    100k then would be 170k today, in line with (if not slightly lower than) entry level comp at FANG companies.
    - alteria 7y ago
      That's a TC number that includes vesting RSU right?
      - mrep 7y ago
        And? My stock vests monthly and I have it set to autosell at vest so I get cold hard cash direct deposited into my bank account monthly.
      - ummonk 7y ago
        Yes, but RSU vesting is as good as cash, aside from banks not fully counting it in your income for mortgage qualification.
    - lkrubner 7y ago
      That’s my point. Ars Digita (Greenspan’s startup) was a small startup. You don’t see small startups paying 170k as a base salary nowadays. All available evidence shows that wages have fallen for software developers. If the market for software developers was tight, then we would see very different behavior from companies.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Benjammer 7y ago
  I think this point is really key, more than the general idea that "there isn't really a short supply of good programmers." It's imminently easy for a rich capitalist to tell the difference between a factory laborer who works hard and one who does not, than it is for them to say the same about an engineer; the evidence is plain as day in front of you. Longer hours, more sweat, quantitatively more physical tasks done, period. For engineers of most sorts, the signals are actually counter intuitive, a lot of the time. There's the easy cliche story of two engineering teams tasked to the same project (not necessarily even software only). Team A has a slow and steady road map, no drama, everyone leaves at 5pm, they never make any noise, mostly hit their deadlines, even if the deadlines are unambitious, etc. Team B always is fighting fires, huddled around someone's desk talking, always working overtime burning to make aggressive deadlines that are never quite reached anyways, always communicating with the wider company about status of issues and problems, etc. Which is the more effective team? Team B will definitely be "known" more in the wider company, and might have more individuals who respect them and think they are hard workers. If you took a "peer survey," Team B might actually still come out ahead. But they may still be a much less effective team for the larger business in a lot of ways.
- bulatb 7y ago
  Hypothesis: There's such a flood of qualified labor that employers can afford to arbitrarily shrink the pool of applicants without significantly worsening their outcomes. Their behavior indicates that just the top N% of the market is enough to fill the needs of all selective companies. "Top" can be a semi-random filter, since the pool of basically competent people is much deeper than N. (There's also a much larger flood of people who aren't qualified, which definitely complicates the process.) All else equal, if employers simply stopped rejecting qualified applicants for arbitrary reasons, they could solve the "shortage" overnight and pay much lower wages that developers would still accept. But all else isn't equal. Their past decisions shaped the playing field, so now external-but-related factors like the housing market and competitors' responses limit their options in practice. They can't just take a bunch of people and drop wages, even though they "could", without disrupting other things that aren't worth disrupting. Edit: Too late to delete, but this is not a good analysis. Companies are clearly feeling some pressure to do something, but there are too many unknowns in this to draw the conclusion, and a ton of factors I've ignored.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    Not exactly. If every employer randomly threw out 80% of the resumes without looking at them, and then perfectly evaluated the remaining 20%, then you would expect that all qualified developers would have a job (they just might have to apply to several jobs to get an offer).
    - bulatb 7y ago
      I don't think the filter is literally random. It's a poor predictor of success, applied inconsistently. Just from what I've heard and experienced, I'd guess that if N = Q (percentage of qualified workers), everyone in N would find some job as you describe. Alice gets Apple and Google but not Netflix, Bob gets Netflix but not Apple. Could Alice do Bob's job at Netflix, or vice-versa? Absolutely. Does Apple care they could have had Bob? Does Netflix care they could have had both? Not really. Everyone in N lands somewhere, eventually, enough though a better process could have had a better outcome overall. Maybe Alice really wanted Netflix; maybe she picks Netflix-like projects at Apple that aren't Apple's best use of her skills. Maybe that rejection shook her confidence or maybe she's distracted getting ready for another Netflix interview next year. (She's learned she has to study really hard at who-knows-what to prove she's capable of doing a job she's already doing.) Does Apple care? Not really. Her manager might, but not Apple. Inefficient allocation is death by a thousand cuts. The greater problem is when Q > N and the difference keeps growing. If you take the Googler joke of PhDs as protobuf jockeys at face value, that's where we've been for a while. But I don't know if we are.
lkrubner 7y ago
This is the obvious point which needs to be repeated till it sinks in. We are not seeing the evidence we would expect to see if this was a tight labor market. As a point of contrast, consider American industry in 1942, as the nation mobilized for war. It doesn’t matter what profession you look at, the attitude everywhere was “Just show up and we can train you.” That applied to welders and bolt tighteners and also the engineers who designed tanks and aircraft. Every company was hiring and every company was willing to hire inexperienced workers and then train them.
- majormajor 7y ago
  I've gotten a couple of those "show up and we'll train you" jobs but with a catch - the hiring people didn't believe that "anyone" could be trained quickly to do it. But I convinced them that I could. Now that I've been on the other side of the table for a while, there's no shortage of candidates looking for job, but there's a (real or not) perceived shortage of quality candidates. And the thing that makes it really screwy is that we don't even know how to train developers very well. CS programs don't teach the "art"/"instinctual" part of it, bootcamps don't, even many jobs don't. Yet the difference between a bad codebase and a good one can have impacts a project that persist for years after those first developers have moved on...
  - dropit_sphere 7y ago
    >And the thing that makes it really screwy is that we don't even know how to train developers very well. I think this is a really important point. What does it mean to be a good developer? How do we know?
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  > We are not seeing the evidence we would expect to see if this was a tight labor market. The evidence of a tight labor market is in remuneration. If the appropriately skilled labor was so abundant, then there’s simply no way to explain the remuneration. You can use some pretty simple first principles to explain the hiring practices. If you were advertising a high salary position in a tight labor market, what would you expect to happen? I would expect a huge amount of low/no skilled applicants to apply, and a small amount of appropriately skilled ones. Anybody who’s tried hiring to a decently paid engineering position has seen this for themselves. How would you expect companies to deal with this? I’d expect to see rigorous evaluations being performed on candidates. The software industry also has some additional confounding factors, in that it’s filled with low quality products (although for which there is still plenty of demand). The average software product is low quality and poorly coded, because that’s the only kind of product that the average product manager, technical leader or software engineer knows how to make. Software is a very immature industry, and a result of that is it essentially has no consistent standards for quality. So if you want to implement your own standards, you have to content with the fact that a majority of the labor market won’t be able to meet them.
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
That's what I think every time I see one of these articles but tech companies still have a permanent door into every congressional office to plead the exact opposite while seeking to import more labor into the market.
- platz 7y ago
  When they say that, they want phds, not entry level candidates
  - heartbeats 7y ago
    Yeah, but the PhDs they're taking in generally got it from diploma mills. It's just ceremonial idiocy.
  - learc83 7y ago
    No they don't. They want more H-1B employees with 4 year degrees.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
sciencewolf 7y ago
As someone who interviews, you'd be shocked how many "senior engineers" can't write a function with two for-loops.
- umvi 7y ago
  I once interviewed a "senior engineer" who was nearly twice my age. I was very intimidated; his resume indicated that he should be the one interviewing me, not the other way around. We chatted for a while, and I felt really good about him. However, I had a gut feeling I should just check to make sure he could do the equivalent of fizz buzz. I said something like "Sorry for this formality, I know it might be seen as an insult to your experience... could we do a bit of coding?" His resume indicated nearly twice as many years of C++ experience than me. I took out my laptop and produced three function signatures - one passing by reference, one passing by pointer, and one passing a pointer by reference. I asked him to explain the difference between the three. With a completely straight face and unshakable confidence he replied "no difference, they are all three ways of doing the same thing". I asked some clarifying questions, trying to probe the difference between pass-by-reference and pass-by-pointer. Again, he answered extremely confidently and coolly (but incorrectly). "Err, no." I replied. "This ampersand here is a pass by reference, which means c++ handles the referencing and dereferencing of the pointer automatically. It's much safer than the other two, where you are ultimately dealing with a raw pointer and need to check for null pointers before dereferencing". Immediately he broke out into an uncontrollable sweat; it was really remarkable. Before asking the technical questions, I felt really good about him. I wonder how many companies he has fooled.
  - leftyted 7y ago
    My team hired a guy like this. At this point everyone knows he's a fake. He's not involved in anything technical despite being a "senior dev". It was quite uncomfortable when he was programming and we had to review his code but at this point he's just hanging out in the office and sitting in on meetings. I wonder about his psychological state. He doesn't seem happy.
  - 908B64B197 7y ago
    It's a story I've been told. Candidate is being interviewed for a senior position, there are three employees conducting the interview: one HR rep, one (non-technical) manager and one senior engineer. The engineer supposed to help with the interview arrived late so the HR rep and manager briefed him, basically telling him the interview was going well and that they were considering hiring him unless he had any objections. Going back, he asked the candidate a simple Fizz Buzz question, something like finding the largest element in an array. All hell broke loose suddenly. He was outraged and started telling them that, back in his country he was a university professor and that this was beneath him. The interview ended with the candidate arguing for 10 minutes that he shouldn't have to do this test. If I recall, at this point the senior engineer just left the room and didn't bother with the remaining 15 minutes of the interview. Needless to say they didn't hire him. HR was shocked as he seemed to be a great hire. Fast forward a few years later, I'm the one interviewing and I systematically get great resumes who can't implement a simple version of word count in 30 minutes.
SavageBeast 7y ago
My God - do we finally have a glut of developer talent now? According to some very simple logic, this really is the only explanation.
p1necone 7y ago
I think you'd be surprised at the sheer number of unqualified^ applicants that apply though. It's possible to simultaneously have more qualified applicants than you need and even more completely unqualified applicants trying to bullshit their way to a job. Filtering them out can be tricky. ^When I say qualified I mean the informal sense - is able to do the job, not has a university degree.
lr4444lr 7y ago
There are too many applicants. Not the same thing.

Analemma_ 7y ago

If the problem was oversupply, we wouldn't be getting the cushy salaries and benefits we do. I think the issue is more that it's pretty easy for people with no programming ability to appear competent on a resume, especially to a clueless HR rep or headhunter. There are a lot of people out there whose backgrounds look good on paper who can't solve FizzBuzz...

codingslave 7y ago
I think the cushy salaries come from the fact that programming done right is extremely profitable. So the capitalists toss a chunk of money to the engineers.
lkrubner 7y ago
For most programming jobs wages are lower now than in 1995. Back then, I had many friends who were charging $100 an hour just to build VisualBasic apps and they had more work than they could handle. And Phillip Greenspan has written that his company, from 1996 onwards, offered $100,000 to recent college grads. That was really good money back then, especially if you wanted to buy a house. Wages right now only look good compared to where they were during the depths of the Great Recession. Over a longer time frame, wages look terrible, except for certain jobs at FANG companies.
- ummonk 7y ago
  100k then would be 170k today, in line with (if not slightly lower than) entry level comp at FANG companies.
  - alteria 7y ago
    That's a TC number that includes vesting RSU right?
    - mrep 7y ago
      And? My stock vests monthly and I have it set to autosell at vest so I get cold hard cash direct deposited into my bank account monthly.
    - ummonk 7y ago
      Yes, but RSU vesting is as good as cash, aside from banks not fully counting it in your income for mortgage qualification.
  - lkrubner 7y ago
    That’s my point. Ars Digita (Greenspan’s startup) was a small startup. You don’t see small startups paying 170k as a base salary nowadays. All available evidence shows that wages have fallen for software developers. If the market for software developers was tight, then we would see very different behavior from companies.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Benjammer 7y ago
I think this point is really key, more than the general idea that "there isn't really a short supply of good programmers." It's imminently easy for a rich capitalist to tell the difference between a factory laborer who works hard and one who does not, than it is for them to say the same about an engineer; the evidence is plain as day in front of you. Longer hours, more sweat, quantitatively more physical tasks done, period. For engineers of most sorts, the signals are actually counter intuitive, a lot of the time. There's the easy cliche story of two engineering teams tasked to the same project (not necessarily even software only). Team A has a slow and steady road map, no drama, everyone leaves at 5pm, they never make any noise, mostly hit their deadlines, even if the deadlines are unambitious, etc. Team B always is fighting fires, huddled around someone's desk talking, always working overtime burning to make aggressive deadlines that are never quite reached anyways, always communicating with the wider company about status of issues and problems, etc. Which is the more effective team? Team B will definitely be "known" more in the wider company, and might have more individuals who respect them and think they are hard workers. If you took a "peer survey," Team B might actually still come out ahead. But they may still be a much less effective team for the larger business in a lot of ways.
bulatb 7y ago
Hypothesis: There's such a flood of qualified labor that employers can afford to arbitrarily shrink the pool of applicants without significantly worsening their outcomes. Their behavior indicates that just the top N% of the market is enough to fill the needs of all selective companies. "Top" can be a semi-random filter, since the pool of basically competent people is much deeper than N. (There's also a much larger flood of people who aren't qualified, which definitely complicates the process.) All else equal, if employers simply stopped rejecting qualified applicants for arbitrary reasons, they could solve the "shortage" overnight and pay much lower wages that developers would still accept. But all else isn't equal. Their past decisions shaped the playing field, so now external-but-related factors like the housing market and competitors' responses limit their options in practice. They can't just take a bunch of people and drop wages, even though they "could", without disrupting other things that aren't worth disrupting. Edit: Too late to delete, but this is not a good analysis. Companies are clearly feeling some pressure to do something, but there are too many unknowns in this to draw the conclusion, and a ton of factors I've ignored.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  Not exactly. If every employer randomly threw out 80% of the resumes without looking at them, and then perfectly evaluated the remaining 20%, then you would expect that all qualified developers would have a job (they just might have to apply to several jobs to get an offer).
  - bulatb 7y ago
    I don't think the filter is literally random. It's a poor predictor of success, applied inconsistently. Just from what I've heard and experienced, I'd guess that if N = Q (percentage of qualified workers), everyone in N would find some job as you describe. Alice gets Apple and Google but not Netflix, Bob gets Netflix but not Apple. Could Alice do Bob's job at Netflix, or vice-versa? Absolutely. Does Apple care they could have had Bob? Does Netflix care they could have had both? Not really. Everyone in N lands somewhere, eventually, enough though a better process could have had a better outcome overall. Maybe Alice really wanted Netflix; maybe she picks Netflix-like projects at Apple that aren't Apple's best use of her skills. Maybe that rejection shook her confidence or maybe she's distracted getting ready for another Netflix interview next year. (She's learned she has to study really hard at who-knows-what to prove she's capable of doing a job she's already doing.) Does Apple care? Not really. Her manager might, but not Apple. Inefficient allocation is death by a thousand cuts. The greater problem is when Q > N and the difference keeps growing. If you take the Googler joke of PhDs as protobuf jockeys at face value, that's where we've been for a while. But I don't know if we are.

lkrubner 7y ago

This is the obvious point which needs to be repeated till it sinks in. We are not seeing the evidence we would expect to see if this was a tight labor market. As a point of contrast, consider American industry in 1942, as the nation mobilized for war. It doesn’t matter what profession you look at, the attitude everywhere was “Just show up and we can train you.” That applied to welders and bolt tighteners and also the engineers who designed tanks and aircraft. Every company was hiring and every company was willing to hire inexperienced workers and then train them.

majormajor 7y ago
I've gotten a couple of those "show up and we'll train you" jobs but with a catch - the hiring people didn't believe that "anyone" could be trained quickly to do it. But I convinced them that I could. Now that I've been on the other side of the table for a while, there's no shortage of candidates looking for job, but there's a (real or not) perceived shortage of quality candidates. And the thing that makes it really screwy is that we don't even know how to train developers very well. CS programs don't teach the "art"/"instinctual" part of it, bootcamps don't, even many jobs don't. Yet the difference between a bad codebase and a good one can have impacts a project that persist for years after those first developers have moved on...
- dropit_sphere 7y ago
  >And the thing that makes it really screwy is that we don't even know how to train developers very well. I think this is a really important point. What does it mean to be a good developer? How do we know?
AmericanChopper 7y ago
> We are not seeing the evidence we would expect to see if this was a tight labor market. The evidence of a tight labor market is in remuneration. If the appropriately skilled labor was so abundant, then there’s simply no way to explain the remuneration. You can use some pretty simple first principles to explain the hiring practices. If you were advertising a high salary position in a tight labor market, what would you expect to happen? I would expect a huge amount of low/no skilled applicants to apply, and a small amount of appropriately skilled ones. Anybody who’s tried hiring to a decently paid engineering position has seen this for themselves. How would you expect companies to deal with this? I’d expect to see rigorous evaluations being performed on candidates. The software industry also has some additional confounding factors, in that it’s filled with low quality products (although for which there is still plenty of demand). The average software product is low quality and poorly coded, because that’s the only kind of product that the average product manager, technical leader or software engineer knows how to make. Software is a very immature industry, and a result of that is it essentially has no consistent standards for quality. So if you want to implement your own standards, you have to content with the fact that a majority of the labor market won’t be able to meet them.

Mountain_Skies 7y ago

That's what I think every time I see one of these articles but tech companies still have a permanent door into every congressional office to plead the exact opposite while seeking to import more labor into the market.

platz 7y ago
When they say that, they want phds, not entry level candidates
- heartbeats 7y ago
  Yeah, but the PhDs they're taking in generally got it from diploma mills. It's just ceremonial idiocy.
- learc83 7y ago
  No they don't. They want more H-1B employees with 4 year degrees.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

sciencewolf 7y ago

As someone who interviews, you'd be shocked how many "senior engineers" can't write a function with two for-loops.

umvi 7y ago
I once interviewed a "senior engineer" who was nearly twice my age. I was very intimidated; his resume indicated that he should be the one interviewing me, not the other way around. We chatted for a while, and I felt really good about him. However, I had a gut feeling I should just check to make sure he could do the equivalent of fizz buzz. I said something like "Sorry for this formality, I know it might be seen as an insult to your experience... could we do a bit of coding?" His resume indicated nearly twice as many years of C++ experience than me. I took out my laptop and produced three function signatures - one passing by reference, one passing by pointer, and one passing a pointer by reference. I asked him to explain the difference between the three. With a completely straight face and unshakable confidence he replied "no difference, they are all three ways of doing the same thing". I asked some clarifying questions, trying to probe the difference between pass-by-reference and pass-by-pointer. Again, he answered extremely confidently and coolly (but incorrectly). "Err, no." I replied. "This ampersand here is a pass by reference, which means c++ handles the referencing and dereferencing of the pointer automatically. It's much safer than the other two, where you are ultimately dealing with a raw pointer and need to check for null pointers before dereferencing". Immediately he broke out into an uncontrollable sweat; it was really remarkable. Before asking the technical questions, I felt really good about him. I wonder how many companies he has fooled.
- leftyted 7y ago
  My team hired a guy like this. At this point everyone knows he's a fake. He's not involved in anything technical despite being a "senior dev". It was quite uncomfortable when he was programming and we had to review his code but at this point he's just hanging out in the office and sitting in on meetings. I wonder about his psychological state. He doesn't seem happy.
- 908B64B197 7y ago
  It's a story I've been told. Candidate is being interviewed for a senior position, there are three employees conducting the interview: one HR rep, one (non-technical) manager and one senior engineer. The engineer supposed to help with the interview arrived late so the HR rep and manager briefed him, basically telling him the interview was going well and that they were considering hiring him unless he had any objections. Going back, he asked the candidate a simple Fizz Buzz question, something like finding the largest element in an array. All hell broke loose suddenly. He was outraged and started telling them that, back in his country he was a university professor and that this was beneath him. The interview ended with the candidate arguing for 10 minutes that he shouldn't have to do this test. If I recall, at this point the senior engineer just left the room and didn't bother with the remaining 15 minutes of the interview. Needless to say they didn't hire him. HR was shocked as he seemed to be a great hire. Fast forward a few years later, I'm the one interviewing and I systematically get great resumes who can't implement a simple version of word count in 30 minutes.

SavageBeast 7y ago

My God - do we finally have a glut of developer talent now? According to some very simple logic, this really is the only explanation.

p1necone 7y ago

I think you'd be surprised at the sheer number of unqualified^ applicants that apply though. It's possible to simultaneously have more qualified applicants than you need and even more completely unqualified applicants trying to bullshit their way to a job. Filtering them out can be tricky. ^When I say qualified I mean the informal sense - is able to do the job, not has a university degree.

lr4444lr 7y ago

There are too many applicants. Not the same thing.