10 ms·

Why Bad Jobs-or No Jobs-Happen to Good Workers

93 points by noonespecial 14y ago

tomjen3 14y ago
Interesting, but I don't really by his it arguments. All that is required to learn in our industry is a sub $1000 pc (and on a budget, sub 500) or a $1500 mac. Yet somehow we end up with people who cannot solve fizzbuzz. That seems like a talent shortage to me.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  > Yet somehow we end up with people who cannot solve fizzbuzz. Remember that those people (most likely) won't get hired. But they will keep fiddling with their resume/CV until they get called. So they'll keep showing up at interviews and be over represented. The talented folk will interview just a few times years apart so they are far less likely to be seen by interviewers. If you do end up interviewing someone who can't solve fizzbuzz then it is a very good indicator that the hiring process is broken. The usual solution is to keep adding extra requirements in an attempt to weed them out, but that also weeds out the talented people too since they are less likely to have the exact required set of acronyms. Hiring is hard - simple solutions like adding acronyms doesn't make it easier.
- glimcat 14y ago
  I have a hammer, but I have no clue how to get from driving nails into boards to building houses. I don't know what the road map should even look like, or what skills I would end up needing, or how to evaluate them along the way. Thus why software engineers often get a degree, buy books, pay for classes, and so forth. The self-education threshold tends to be even higher at the beginning. Most people have no clue how to get from owning a computer to Hello World, to FizzBuzz, to simple scripts, to a well-designed and documented program. The real failure is when people turn to university (etc.) to learn a skill, get a "QC Okay" stamp at the end - and then still can't FizzBuzz. You need shorter feedback cycles which focus on finding and correcting errors, not monolithic course grades and monolithic degree pass/fail stickers. You wouldn't expect it to end well if you tried code a major project that way. Why would it work any better as an education plan?
  - netcan 14y ago
    My instinct is to say that self education is hard & we still aren't good enough at it yet. On second thought I want to say that education is hard & our expectations are very high. One of my best friends has a 9th grade formal education, has done serious jail time and has still managed to succeed as a "professional" in the tech sector. I regularly listen to or read non degree people I would consider intellectuals. These aren't just brilliant edge cases anymore. Most of us know these people because there are lots of them. I have learned so much online. More than at work. More than at Uni. (Hard to compare it to school: learning to read & add was important). We are doing pretty well on self education. Lets pat ourselves on the back (or thank those people who made it happen) every so often. I think the reason my first instinct is to say we aren't good at self education yet is that we can see so much potential. There really is no reason someone couldn't get to bachelor level chemistry, biology, civil engineering or economics on their own. There are all sorts of problems that just go away and let everything go much quicker when you're self educating. People might be able to learn 4 year equivalents in 6 months.Who knows. Universities solve all sorts of problems in seemingly inefficient ways that we might see being superseded soon. A lot of the things they solve though are genuinely hard problems. Most people in an Econ2003 are not fascinated with Theories & Models of Supply Elasticity in A Recession. They are sort of interested in economics and have a general feeling that its something they should be studying. They might even be reading Why Keynes Matters. But, in a lot of cases they're cranky they have to take this stupid class in the first place. I'm not sure how that problem gets solved outside of a University. Maybe it doesn't need to get solved. Maybe the future is a word where students don't need to get dragged through material they don't want to learn. If it is, I'm excited. 35 year olds are looking back and thinking: "If I was 19 today I would do it like this..." But if you were 19, you'd be a different person, a 19 year old. You'd probably think like one. There are better tools than econ2003 out there a lot of the time. But they don't work for everyone all of the time. I think we have to accept some clunky systems that sort of get the job done.
  - brlewis 14y ago
    I have a hammer, but I have no clue how to get from driving nails into boards to building houses. I don't know what the road map should even look like, or what skills I would end up needing, or how to evaluate them along the way. If you could tear into existing houses to look at how they're built, and if building practice houses were cheap and easy, building houses would be more like building programs. The feedback cycle is great with DrRacket. And I don't think that's the only beginning-programmer learning environment.
- 7952 14y ago
  Why not just hire someone you like and expect them to learn on the job? You probably do this anyway, but wrap it up in complex requirements.
  - tikhonj 14y ago
    It's fine to have new hires learn the particulars of your technology and domain on the job. It's not fine to have them learn basic computer science on the job. Somebody who can't write fizzbuzz clearly does not have the fundamental CS background needed to do any sort of nontrivial programming. It takes most people years to get this background, usually in a university setting. You can't replace that with on-the-job training!
    - 7952 14y ago
      So it should be easy to find people to hire in a Country with such a world class higher education sector. Ignoring the financial implications; would you be adverse to teaching people CS on the job? It isn't inconceivable that the quality of the end result would be much higher.
- phaus 14y ago
  I'm a CIS student and a telecommunications professional, with aspirations of eventually being a professional programmer, so if this is a dumb question, please forgive me. If there are people who can't solve fizzbuzz that are getting programming jobs, what do they do at work? I can solve fizzbuzz easily, but I haven't ever built an application that I would consider useful. I've solved puzzles like fizzbuzz and completed lots of programming assignments (mostly involving stuff at the command line) and I feel like I know nothing when it comes to actually building something significant. I feel like it would be impossible for me to get an entry-level programming job right now, but from the sound of it, maybe not.
  - greyfade 14y ago
    > If there are people who can't solve fizzbuzz that are getting programming jobs, what do they do at work? http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean.aspx This is just one example, but it's a very accurate description of all of those people who can't solve fizzbuzz and yet still manage to get jobs.
  - vorg 14y ago
    > If there are people who can't solve fizzbuzz that are getting programming jobs, what do they do at work? The good news: They cause the programming messes which you'll eventually get hired to clean up, while they're off somewhere else making another mess for you. > I can solve fizzbuzz easily, but I haven't ever built an application that I would consider useful. The bad news: All you're ever do is clean up those frauds' messes. Anyone can build a system with 100k lines of Java code (incl comments). But only people like you can come along after it's up and running and make it work, so that's all you're ever be doing. Unfortunately, the employers will expect you to carry a cellphone around and solve those problems at 3:00am. It's cheaper to pay you 10% extra for wake-up calls than take your time away from other maintenance clean-ups in the daytime.
    - EvilTerran 14y ago
      "(incl comments)" Optimist.
- overgryphon 14y ago
  And all you need to be an olympic runner is a pair of shoes and some clothes. The tech industry, like many other industries, uses simple filters (such as work experience or a college degree) to pick the number of people they have time to interview. The skills required to be a talented programmer, and the skills required to get and keep a job (or earn a living programming without a job) are not equivalent.
  - ommunist 14y ago
    Right you are, and the metaphore is brilliant. You cannot demand from a programmer to be a nice speaking salesman, when you do, you are ending with a half baked software well sold.
- Spooky23 14y ago
  I think you're missing the point. The problem is that when you go to hire someone, you get swamped by thousands of applications from candidates who may or may not have any qualification. So what happens is you apply filters to screen out people. One method is to filter out colleges, GPA, lack of work experience, underqualification, overqualification, or anything that isn't legally protected to get to a workable candidate pool. Another method is to only hire people you know, or people you know people you know. Still another is to build barriers (Civil Service exams, grammar tests, math test). The problem is that if you are an unfortunate soul who doesn't get through the filter (ie. 2.9 GPA, state school, etc), doesn't operate in you social circle, or doesn't know about or cannot get through the barriers, you're screwed.
  - will_work4tears 14y ago
    Sadly, both the GPA and the school are so me. I actually ended up with a 3.0 but same deal. Which is why I am making 17/hr and no benefits (no health/dental, no paid time off at all). Also probably why I spent a year looking for any job at all before I landed this one.
    - Spooky23 14y ago
      Don't give up. For a variety of reasons, I ended up getting out with a 2.6. I was able to parlay one of my college jobs into a "real" job, and was able to go from there. Now I've "made it" from some people's POV. Some of the companies who wouldn't give me the time of day a decade ago would hire me in a minute now.
      - will_work4tears 14y ago
        Thanks for the words of encouragement. Unfortunately I feel my career is dead. I too feel that my lower GPA was due to a variety of reasons (no financial aid, working 40 hours a week, depression, health problems, etc), but at this juncture of life it is another set of seemingly insurmountable odds. Low pay, high debt, crappy job, new baby, demanding wife... Well, not to be self critical, but I don't see myself ever being a rockstar. I'll be lucky if I ever hit 60k+... Sadly even that isn't much here in the Seattle area. no scholarships anyway, plenty of student loans. Too many. I was 26 when I started college, and while my parents always told me they'd help if I went to college, all I got was co-signed loans. I'm 35 now.
tomjen3 14y ago
We have an issue here with basically two sides that keep blaming each other. What would it look like if we had a talent shortage instead of a skills gab? How would that effect our expectations?
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Actually they wouldn't change much, the best solution is still for each individual to see where he is most likely to find employment, with less priority given to areas where breaking in is more difficult and more to do what he is good at. So why have this debate?
blu3jack 14y ago
I think the interviewee made a very solid case that there is a hiring gap in the area of experienced specialists. He seemed to think that was the major chunk of the "skill gap" employers complain of. I have seen that. On the other hand, he described an army of job-hungry young people striving to get the right education for entry level work... but missing the boat on just the right tech -- again for overly-constrained hiring processes. That does not match my experience: I see students coming out of the educational system -- reputable universities -- with a huge gap in fundamental knowledge. I fear that universities, colleges, and vocational schools, in their effort to deliver workers with fashionable resumes, are failing to deliver the fundamentals. Yes, you can teach yourself the fundamentals if you know you need them. But if you've gone through 4-6 years of university under the theory that they are teaching you what you need to know, it may be harder to realize that, in fact, you have learned how to look good, but not how to be good.
- rmason 14y ago
  The problem he described with colleges has been going on for a very long time. I was interested in both engineering and Journalism when I started college. I vividly remember attending a lecture by a noted career counselor my first week in school. They had just laid off tens of thousands of engineers nationally when the space program wound down. He told us if we got the engineering degree and weren't in the top twenty percent of our class we wouldn't find work. But if we went the journalism route there would be four jobs for every graduate. I was more passionate about Journalism so that's what I majored in. So what happened? Four years later I literally couldn't find work in my chosen field. But my buddy with his engineering degree and 2.1 gpa had employers fighting over him. All of this happened in four years time.
countessa 14y ago
Getting hired is as much a skill as programming is. What many people never grasp is that learning to present yourself in your CV and your interviews in such a way that people want to employ you is a skill in and of itself.....which means that the ability to code well does not equal the ability to get a job that requires you to code well.
- rprospero 14y ago
  It's absolutely true that getting through the hiring process is a skill. So is miniature golf. The question is why companies are spending weeks on interviews and logic puzzles when they could just send all their candidates down to the mini-golf course and hire candidate with the lowest score. Unless there's evidence that the skill of resume writing is related to the skill of programming, your candidates will be just as qualified and you'll have saved everyone time and stress.
  - countessa 14y ago
    Not really. When we interview, we look at more than just technical prowess. We want to find people who fit well with the organisation. In fact, being the best possible coder in the world is just unnecessary in what we do. Our interviews reflect that, and I think it would be naive to assume that other organisations don't also tailor their interview process to find the candidates with the best skill set - that means, four our software dev team, coding well but also communicating and presenting well (we have close relationship with our users, seeing them practically daily), writing documentation, training users, writing code that the rest of the team can understand and debug when they are on vacation or sick, without having to disturb them etc. At the end of the day, it isn't just about who can write the most brilliant piece of code....I'll take an average coder with additional skill set over a brilliant coder who grunts in the corner any day.
jasonkester 14y ago
Have you ever noticed that some developers see the job market as a bleak and desperate place where jobs are scarce and exploitive, while others see this market and can't believe their amazing luck to have stumbled into such a fantastic career? We all know guys from both those camps, so something must be up. I think a lot of guys get trapped in this cycle between their own lack of confidence and predatory companies that look for that sort of employee to exploit. I mean, what better employee to have than one who's constantly in fear of losing his job in the next round of layoffs and will happily work long hours for "market average" wages in the quest for job security. That developer, when he hits the market, will hit it via a layoff. And he'll have four years of his last employee reinforcing his lack of value, so he won't expect much beyond a desperate search for somebody, anybody who will hire him. That's not the sort of dude who will network his way into coffee with your CTO. He'll pray and spray resumes at HR and endure half a year of being rejected by keyword filters. By the time the next exploitive company finds him and offers him another death march at a "market average" salary, he'll be so grateful that he'll never want to leave. You see that guy here from time to time (though more often at Slashdot and Reddit). I wish there were a way to get through to him to let him know that it's really not like that. Programming computers for money is the single greatest profession in the 21st century. If you're doing it and you're not happy, know that you can fix it.
- zeemonkee2 14y ago
  Maybe it's great if you live in a tech hub. Take the programmer who happens to live in Nowheresville, Nebraska. He lives there because his wife has a job there, or other family commitments, so he can't just up sticks and move to the Valley. So he's looking at the local job market, which is probably shitty death march or legacy VB projects or whatever. Moving to the Valley is only really practical for young, single people without kids and mortgages. Remote jobs are the answer, but they are still few and far between, even among supposedly "forward looking" startups. So for your programmer in Nowheresville the job market is to all intents and purposes a bleak and desperate place, no matter how experienced or talented he happens to be.
- patio11 14y ago
  Everything Jason says and then some. (Well, OK, I'd quibble about luck having anything to do with it. Nobody lucks their way into being a doctor - they correctly identify it is a good idea based on the scads of available evidence and then work hard on the obvious pathway to becoming one - and we should similarly avoid trivializing ourselves.) I have a folder in Gmail of comments thanking me for my negotiating advice articles. My running tally is folks are $214k a year wealthier literally just by asking for it.
netcan 14y ago
It's interesting that he mentions the software and doesn't really mention recruitment companies. To the extent that this guy is right, recruiters are getting paid a lot of money and doing a pretty crap job. They are supposed to be the ones saying to employers "The requirements are too specific, The salary is too low." They are supposed to be the ones qualifying borderline applicants with a low percentage out of a deep pile. It's a hard job, but its not like they're charging $100 for it. They charge a lot. enough to justify full days talking to lots of applicants, hundreds if necessary. It feels like HR "consultants" spend 60% of their budget chasing clients 30% advertising & 10% actually doing the job you want them to do. Anyway, this guy, or one of the good HR consultants should blow the whistle (I'm exaggerating) on what they actually do. Then, show us how to do it right. Make a video going over job descriptions and point out when/if they're absurd. Show us the CVs that come in. Let us see the pain from the employer side. Why is Joel Spolsky the best resource for this? Where is the industry?
ceras 14y ago
He touched on the "Silicon Valley model" of poaching employees from companies that handled the costly training. In a culture where loyalty to your employer is largely anachronistic, why should most companies -- and not just the top employers -- bear the costs? The risk of attrition to free riders seems high. I'm not disagreeing with his assessment so much as questioning the value to the typical employer. In aggregate it sounds like the right solution, but individually I'm not so sure.
- mcguire 14y ago
  Because you wind up in a position with a large number of underemployed people missing just the right skill and a large number of employers who can't seem to find anyone to hire.

93 points by noonespecial 14y ago

Interesting, but I don't really by his it arguments. All that is required to learn in our industry is a sub $1000 pc (and on a budget, sub 500) or a $1500 mac. Yet somehow we end up with people who cannot solve fizzbuzz. That seems like a talent shortage to me.

rogerbinns 14y ago
> Yet somehow we end up with people who cannot solve fizzbuzz. Remember that those people (most likely) won't get hired. But they will keep fiddling with their resume/CV until they get called. So they'll keep showing up at interviews and be over represented. The talented folk will interview just a few times years apart so they are far less likely to be seen by interviewers. If you do end up interviewing someone who can't solve fizzbuzz then it is a very good indicator that the hiring process is broken. The usual solution is to keep adding extra requirements in an attempt to weed them out, but that also weeds out the talented people too since they are less likely to have the exact required set of acronyms. Hiring is hard - simple solutions like adding acronyms doesn't make it easier.
glimcat 14y ago
I have a hammer, but I have no clue how to get from driving nails into boards to building houses. I don't know what the road map should even look like, or what skills I would end up needing, or how to evaluate them along the way. Thus why software engineers often get a degree, buy books, pay for classes, and so forth. The self-education threshold tends to be even higher at the beginning. Most people have no clue how to get from owning a computer to Hello World, to FizzBuzz, to simple scripts, to a well-designed and documented program. The real failure is when people turn to university (etc.) to learn a skill, get a "QC Okay" stamp at the end - and then still can't FizzBuzz. You need shorter feedback cycles which focus on finding and correcting errors, not monolithic course grades and monolithic degree pass/fail stickers. You wouldn't expect it to end well if you tried code a major project that way. Why would it work any better as an education plan?
- netcan 14y ago
  My instinct is to say that self education is hard & we still aren't good enough at it yet. On second thought I want to say that education is hard & our expectations are very high. One of my best friends has a 9th grade formal education, has done serious jail time and has still managed to succeed as a "professional" in the tech sector. I regularly listen to or read non degree people I would consider intellectuals. These aren't just brilliant edge cases anymore. Most of us know these people because there are lots of them. I have learned so much online. More than at work. More than at Uni. (Hard to compare it to school: learning to read & add was important). We are doing pretty well on self education. Lets pat ourselves on the back (or thank those people who made it happen) every so often. I think the reason my first instinct is to say we aren't good at self education yet is that we can see so much potential. There really is no reason someone couldn't get to bachelor level chemistry, biology, civil engineering or economics on their own. There are all sorts of problems that just go away and let everything go much quicker when you're self educating. People might be able to learn 4 year equivalents in 6 months.Who knows. Universities solve all sorts of problems in seemingly inefficient ways that we might see being superseded soon. A lot of the things they solve though are genuinely hard problems. Most people in an Econ2003 are not fascinated with Theories & Models of Supply Elasticity in A Recession. They are sort of interested in economics and have a general feeling that its something they should be studying. They might even be reading Why Keynes Matters. But, in a lot of cases they're cranky they have to take this stupid class in the first place. I'm not sure how that problem gets solved outside of a University. Maybe it doesn't need to get solved. Maybe the future is a word where students don't need to get dragged through material they don't want to learn. If it is, I'm excited. 35 year olds are looking back and thinking: "If I was 19 today I would do it like this..." But if you were 19, you'd be a different person, a 19 year old. You'd probably think like one. There are better tools than econ2003 out there a lot of the time. But they don't work for everyone all of the time. I think we have to accept some clunky systems that sort of get the job done.
- brlewis 14y ago
  I have a hammer, but I have no clue how to get from driving nails into boards to building houses. I don't know what the road map should even look like, or what skills I would end up needing, or how to evaluate them along the way. If you could tear into existing houses to look at how they're built, and if building practice houses were cheap and easy, building houses would be more like building programs. The feedback cycle is great with DrRacket. And I don't think that's the only beginning-programmer learning environment.
7952 14y ago
Why not just hire someone you like and expect them to learn on the job? You probably do this anyway, but wrap it up in complex requirements.
- tikhonj 14y ago
  It's fine to have new hires learn the particulars of your technology and domain on the job. It's not fine to have them learn basic computer science on the job. Somebody who can't write fizzbuzz clearly does not have the fundamental CS background needed to do any sort of nontrivial programming. It takes most people years to get this background, usually in a university setting. You can't replace that with on-the-job training!
  - 7952 14y ago
    So it should be easy to find people to hire in a Country with such a world class higher education sector. Ignoring the financial implications; would you be adverse to teaching people CS on the job? It isn't inconceivable that the quality of the end result would be much higher.
phaus 14y ago
I'm a CIS student and a telecommunications professional, with aspirations of eventually being a professional programmer, so if this is a dumb question, please forgive me. If there are people who can't solve fizzbuzz that are getting programming jobs, what do they do at work? I can solve fizzbuzz easily, but I haven't ever built an application that I would consider useful. I've solved puzzles like fizzbuzz and completed lots of programming assignments (mostly involving stuff at the command line) and I feel like I know nothing when it comes to actually building something significant. I feel like it would be impossible for me to get an entry-level programming job right now, but from the sound of it, maybe not.
- greyfade 14y ago
  > If there are people who can't solve fizzbuzz that are getting programming jobs, what do they do at work? http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean.aspx http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean.aspx This is just one example, but it's a very accurate description of all of those people who can't solve fizzbuzz and yet still manage to get jobs.
- vorg 14y ago
  > If there are people who can't solve fizzbuzz that are getting programming jobs, what do they do at work? The good news: They cause the programming messes which you'll eventually get hired to clean up, while they're off somewhere else making another mess for you. > I can solve fizzbuzz easily, but I haven't ever built an application that I would consider useful. The bad news: All you're ever do is clean up those frauds' messes. Anyone can build a system with 100k lines of Java code (incl comments). But only people like you can come along after it's up and running and make it work, so that's all you're ever be doing. Unfortunately, the employers will expect you to carry a cellphone around and solve those problems at 3:00am. It's cheaper to pay you 10% extra for wake-up calls than take your time away from other maintenance clean-ups in the daytime.
  - EvilTerran 14y ago
    "(incl comments)" Optimist.
overgryphon 14y ago
And all you need to be an olympic runner is a pair of shoes and some clothes. The tech industry, like many other industries, uses simple filters (such as work experience or a college degree) to pick the number of people they have time to interview. The skills required to be a talented programmer, and the skills required to get and keep a job (or earn a living programming without a job) are not equivalent.
- ommunist 14y ago
  Right you are, and the metaphore is brilliant. You cannot demand from a programmer to be a nice speaking salesman, when you do, you are ending with a half baked software well sold.
Spooky23 14y ago
I think you're missing the point. The problem is that when you go to hire someone, you get swamped by thousands of applications from candidates who may or may not have any qualification. So what happens is you apply filters to screen out people. One method is to filter out colleges, GPA, lack of work experience, underqualification, overqualification, or anything that isn't legally protected to get to a workable candidate pool. Another method is to only hire people you know, or people you know people you know. Still another is to build barriers (Civil Service exams, grammar tests, math test). The problem is that if you are an unfortunate soul who doesn't get through the filter (ie. 2.9 GPA, state school, etc), doesn't operate in you social circle, or doesn't know about or cannot get through the barriers, you're screwed.
- will_work4tears 14y ago
  Sadly, both the GPA and the school are so me. I actually ended up with a 3.0 but same deal. Which is why I am making 17/hr and no benefits (no health/dental, no paid time off at all). Also probably why I spent a year looking for any job at all before I landed this one.
  - Spooky23 14y ago
    Don't give up. For a variety of reasons, I ended up getting out with a 2.6. I was able to parlay one of my college jobs into a "real" job, and was able to go from there. Now I've "made it" from some people's POV. Some of the companies who wouldn't give me the time of day a decade ago would hire me in a minute now.
    - will_work4tears 14y ago
      Thanks for the words of encouragement. Unfortunately I feel my career is dead. I too feel that my lower GPA was due to a variety of reasons (no financial aid, working 40 hours a week, depression, health problems, etc), but at this juncture of life it is another set of seemingly insurmountable odds. Low pay, high debt, crappy job, new baby, demanding wife... Well, not to be self critical, but I don't see myself ever being a rockstar. I'll be lucky if I ever hit 60k+... Sadly even that isn't much here in the Seattle area. no scholarships anyway, plenty of student loans. Too many. I was 26 when I started college, and while my parents always told me they'd help if I went to college, all I got was co-signed loans. I'm 35 now.

tomjen3 14y ago

We have an issue here with basically two sides that keep blaming each other. What would it look like if we had a talent shortage instead of a skills gab? How would that effect our expectations?

tomjen3 14y ago
Actually they wouldn't change much, the best solution is still for each individual to see where he is most likely to find employment, with less priority given to areas where breaking in is more difficult and more to do what he is good at. So why have this debate?

blu3jack 14y ago

I think the interviewee made a very solid case that there is a hiring gap in the area of experienced specialists. He seemed to think that was the major chunk of the "skill gap" employers complain of. I have seen that. On the other hand, he described an army of job-hungry young people striving to get the right education for entry level work... but missing the boat on just the right tech -- again for overly-constrained hiring processes. That does not match my experience: I see students coming out of the educational system -- reputable universities -- with a huge gap in fundamental knowledge. I fear that universities, colleges, and vocational schools, in their effort to deliver workers with fashionable resumes, are failing to deliver the fundamentals. Yes, you can teach yourself the fundamentals if you know you need them. But if you've gone through 4-6 years of university under the theory that they are teaching you what you need to know, it may be harder to realize that, in fact, you have learned how to look good, but not how to be good.

rmason 14y ago
The problem he described with colleges has been going on for a very long time. I was interested in both engineering and Journalism when I started college. I vividly remember attending a lecture by a noted career counselor my first week in school. They had just laid off tens of thousands of engineers nationally when the space program wound down. He told us if we got the engineering degree and weren't in the top twenty percent of our class we wouldn't find work. But if we went the journalism route there would be four jobs for every graduate. I was more passionate about Journalism so that's what I majored in. So what happened? Four years later I literally couldn't find work in my chosen field. But my buddy with his engineering degree and 2.1 gpa had employers fighting over him. All of this happened in four years time.

countessa 14y ago

Getting hired is as much a skill as programming is. What many people never grasp is that learning to present yourself in your CV and your interviews in such a way that people want to employ you is a skill in and of itself.....which means that the ability to code well does not equal the ability to get a job that requires you to code well.

rprospero 14y ago
It's absolutely true that getting through the hiring process is a skill. So is miniature golf. The question is why companies are spending weeks on interviews and logic puzzles when they could just send all their candidates down to the mini-golf course and hire candidate with the lowest score. Unless there's evidence that the skill of resume writing is related to the skill of programming, your candidates will be just as qualified and you'll have saved everyone time and stress.
- countessa 14y ago
  Not really. When we interview, we look at more than just technical prowess. We want to find people who fit well with the organisation. In fact, being the best possible coder in the world is just unnecessary in what we do. Our interviews reflect that, and I think it would be naive to assume that other organisations don't also tailor their interview process to find the candidates with the best skill set - that means, four our software dev team, coding well but also communicating and presenting well (we have close relationship with our users, seeing them practically daily), writing documentation, training users, writing code that the rest of the team can understand and debug when they are on vacation or sick, without having to disturb them etc. At the end of the day, it isn't just about who can write the most brilliant piece of code....I'll take an average coder with additional skill set over a brilliant coder who grunts in the corner any day.

jasonkester 14y ago

Have you ever noticed that some developers see the job market as a bleak and desperate place where jobs are scarce and exploitive, while others see this market and can't believe their amazing luck to have stumbled into such a fantastic career? We all know guys from both those camps, so something must be up. I think a lot of guys get trapped in this cycle between their own lack of confidence and predatory companies that look for that sort of employee to exploit. I mean, what better employee to have than one who's constantly in fear of losing his job in the next round of layoffs and will happily work long hours for "market average" wages in the quest for job security. That developer, when he hits the market, will hit it via a layoff. And he'll have four years of his last employee reinforcing his lack of value, so he won't expect much beyond a desperate search for somebody, anybody who will hire him. That's not the sort of dude who will network his way into coffee with your CTO. He'll pray and spray resumes at HR and endure half a year of being rejected by keyword filters. By the time the next exploitive company finds him and offers him another death march at a "market average" salary, he'll be so grateful that he'll never want to leave. You see that guy here from time to time (though more often at Slashdot and Reddit). I wish there were a way to get through to him to let him know that it's really not like that. Programming computers for money is the single greatest profession in the 21st century. If you're doing it and you're not happy, know that you can fix it.

zeemonkee2 14y ago
Maybe it's great if you live in a tech hub. Take the programmer who happens to live in Nowheresville, Nebraska. He lives there because his wife has a job there, or other family commitments, so he can't just up sticks and move to the Valley. So he's looking at the local job market, which is probably shitty death march or legacy VB projects or whatever. Moving to the Valley is only really practical for young, single people without kids and mortgages. Remote jobs are the answer, but they are still few and far between, even among supposedly "forward looking" startups. So for your programmer in Nowheresville the job market is to all intents and purposes a bleak and desperate place, no matter how experienced or talented he happens to be.
patio11 14y ago
Everything Jason says and then some. (Well, OK, I'd quibble about luck having anything to do with it. Nobody lucks their way into being a doctor - they correctly identify it is a good idea based on the scads of available evidence and then work hard on the obvious pathway to becoming one - and we should similarly avoid trivializing ourselves.) I have a folder in Gmail of comments thanking me for my negotiating advice articles. My running tally is folks are $214k a year wealthier literally just by asking for it.

netcan 14y ago

It's interesting that he mentions the software and doesn't really mention recruitment companies. To the extent that this guy is right, recruiters are getting paid a lot of money and doing a pretty crap job. They are supposed to be the ones saying to employers "The requirements are too specific, The salary is too low." They are supposed to be the ones qualifying borderline applicants with a low percentage out of a deep pile. It's a hard job, but its not like they're charging $100 for it. They charge a lot. enough to justify full days talking to lots of applicants, hundreds if necessary. It feels like HR "consultants" spend 60% of their budget chasing clients 30% advertising & 10% actually doing the job you want them to do. Anyway, this guy, or one of the good HR consultants should blow the whistle (I'm exaggerating) on what they actually do. Then, show us how to do it right. Make a video going over job descriptions and point out when/if they're absurd. Show us the CVs that come in. Let us see the pain from the employer side. Why is Joel Spolsky the best resource for this? Where is the industry?

ceras 14y ago

He touched on the "Silicon Valley model" of poaching employees from companies that handled the costly training. In a culture where loyalty to your employer is largely anachronistic, why should most companies -- and not just the top employers -- bear the costs? The risk of attrition to free riders seems high. I'm not disagreeing with his assessment so much as questioning the value to the typical employer. In aggregate it sounds like the right solution, but individually I'm not so sure.

mcguire 14y ago
Because you wind up in a position with a large number of underemployed people missing just the right skill and a large number of employers who can't seem to find anyone to hire.