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On the Market for Programmers

4 points by jseliger 4y ago

lifeplusplus 4y ago
only if we had a way to determine how good you are at programming with some sort of standardized testing. In my opinion programming is host of activities some of which is: speed of learning, ability to debug, spot bugs, read documentation, systematically rule out possibilities, using understanding of underlying system, understanding fundamentals of how your language works, covering edge cases.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  I would add: Ability to communicate (in code, in comments, and in external documentation). All these skills form a fairly high-dimensional vector space. If we had independent, objective metrics for programmers' skills along these axes, and employers could accurately judge their own needs along the same axes (and if switching costs weren't too high, on either side), then we could get a functioning market. But that's pretty much a pipe dream...
gregjor 4y ago
The article doesn’t acknowledge that “programmer” and “software developer” or whatever describe not only aptitude and technical skill, but also specific areas of focus and domain expertise. A competent web developer would probably struggle changing to a systems programming or enterprise application development environment. I have friends who work in machine learning and data science and other than Python syntax our skills have almost no useful intersection. Experience may not matter a whole lot in terms of reciting algorithms or language syntax, but those are the necessary but not sufficient skills for a programmer in the jobs market. This point is illustrated by the comment about endianness. Yes, that’s irrelevant trivia for web developers, but crucially important for compiler writers. I mostly work in web development. I wouldn’t expect a database expert or data scientist to answer “Explain what request, response, and stateless mean in the context of HTTP.” I would expect a web developer to know that. Sadly my experience actually interviewing web developers tells me that few can explain HTTP.

4 points by jseliger 4y ago

only if we had a way to determine how good you are at programming with some sort of standardized testing. In my opinion programming is host of activities some of which is: speed of learning, ability to debug, spot bugs, read documentation, systematically rule out possibilities, using understanding of underlying system, understanding fundamentals of how your language works, covering edge cases.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
I would add: Ability to communicate (in code, in comments, and in external documentation). All these skills form a fairly high-dimensional vector space. If we had independent, objective metrics for programmers' skills along these axes, and employers could accurately judge their own needs along the same axes (and if switching costs weren't too high, on either side), then we could get a functioning market. But that's pretty much a pipe dream...

gregjor 4y ago

The article doesn’t acknowledge that “programmer” and “software developer” or whatever describe not only aptitude and technical skill, but also specific areas of focus and domain expertise. A competent web developer would probably struggle changing to a systems programming or enterprise application development environment. I have friends who work in machine learning and data science and other than Python syntax our skills have almost no useful intersection. Experience may not matter a whole lot in terms of reciting algorithms or language syntax, but those are the necessary but not sufficient skills for a programmer in the jobs market. This point is illustrated by the comment about endianness. Yes, that’s irrelevant trivia for web developers, but crucially important for compiler writers. I mostly work in web development. I wouldn’t expect a database expert or data scientist to answer “Explain what request, response, and stateless mean in the context of HTTP.” I would expect a web developer to know that. Sadly my experience actually interviewing web developers tells me that few can explain HTTP.