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> This is an absolutely baffling article. The job market for developers is not glutted by over-supply, it's one where marginally-qualified people get hired for

> This is an absolutely baffling article. The job market for developers is not glutted by over-supply, it's one where marginally-qualified people get hired for salaries well above the national average because companies need SOMEONE to do the job. And virtually nowhere cares about degrees, especially for experienced devs. What is baffling is this Valley-centric, web and mobile development-centric line being repeated constantly in this thread. Most of the world is a different story. Outside the Valley and a couple other metros, and outside the web and mobile fields in general: 1) degrees are usually required; 2) employers are much pickier.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
Agreed, sometimes people aren't aware that HN is its own little echo chamber. I was talking to a recruiter recently for a managerial job and somehow got onto the topic of hiring. I asked him what's the hardest jobs for him to fill right now. He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers. Corporations have built their castles on these technologies, not FOSS/Mobile and need staff. Degrees were an issue but he said he could place people with two year degrees. We talked about pay, and it wasn't terrible impressive, but for someone straight out of community college it sounded pretty good to me and he also revealed that if the person wasn't a complete nightmare socially, he could expect to be promoted quick.
- mkozlows 11y ago
  HN may be an echo chamber, but look what you're saying: Employers are desperate for developers, including entry level ones, mostly using older tech stacks, and they'll pay solid money for them. It doesn't sound like you're describing a world in which someone with 10+ years of solid experience with techs is going to be struggling to find a job, right?
  - doktrin 11y ago
    > It doesn't sound like you're describing a world in which someone with 10+ years of solid experience with techs is going to be struggling to find a job, right? Overqualification (or the perception thereof) happens. The development world, like most others, is a bit of a pyramid. More experience doesn't necessarily translate to more positions being available. Some (many, even) are specifically targeted at young, entry level devs.
    - tracker1 11y ago
      And a lot of these companies should consider bringing on one more senior person instead of 2-3 junior ones.
- Bluestrike2 11y ago
  Companies like that would benefit from being more flexible on the degree issue; there are a huge number of programmers out there who are self-taught. It makes things seemingly more difficult in judging qualifications, but if you aren't filling the positions to begin with, that would seem like a good problem to have in the first place.
- outworlder 11y ago
  > He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers Why does he need so many entry level programmers? > We talked about pay, and it wasn't terrible impressive Is the recruiter trying to staff a company with mostly entry-level programmers, paying low wages? I've seen plenty of companies like that, including those who used mostly trainees. Usually, the work environment was the crappiest possible, and word gets around.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - sjcrank 11y ago
    In the interest of building an experience-diverse workforce employers need entry level, mid level, and experienced developers with skills in their core stack, which in many cases is Java or .NET. My theory is that technology trends are leading the entry level developers to learn Python, Ruby, and JavaScript rather than .NET or Java, thereby reducing the supply and putting these candidates in high demand.
    - tracker1 11y ago
      So, they could hire another senior person at 2.5x the pay instead of 3-4 junior devs. The problem is a lot of younger managers don't understand the different in ouput can vary a lot from developer to developer. And on top of that quality output can be far more maintainable. All they care about is # of jira/tfs tickets that are open, and the number of features, and how many warm bodies based on their averages they need. The smoothest project I ever worked on was staffed by all senior people, with relatively diverse and overlapping skills. That wouldn't be possible with 3x the developers if 2/3 of them were junior to mid level.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  > He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers. How many years of experience and how much demonstrated expertise did he require from these" entry-level" candidates that he supposedly can't find?
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    None. Straight out of community college were being placed.
- djKianoosh 11y ago
  what does "complete nightmare socially" mean? :)
  - tracker1 11y ago
    Well, my own quirk is I'm a later day starter... it's almost impossible for me to start consistently at or before 9am... outside of that, I tend to take more time to understand the problem and the desired solution than hacking away. Both of these have cause me a lot of issues in positions for companies that are more rigid in their desire for a homogenized work environment. On the flip side, I share knowledge and work to leave code better when I'm done than when I start. Others will show up/leave on time, but won't share anything and will leave very obfuscated code in place. Lets face it though... the personality traits that make one adept at somewhat technical and often mundane tasks have a pretty high correlation to some generally less than desirable personality traits. Programming is much more of a craft (or even art) than it is an engineering discipline in most places, but we have to interact with business roles where expectations and mindsets are vastly different.
- aidenn0 11y ago
  After I had landed my first job out of college (10 years ago), I got an offer from a company like that in the midwest. It took them 9 months from the interview to get back to me with an offer (which is why I was already working somewhere else) and the offer was $30k for a one year contract. If that's still typical of their hiring process, I'm not surprised they're having trouble hiring people.
- milspec 11y ago
  Oh my. I know somebody who needs that job. Probably the "Georgetown, KY" on his resume is the difficulty, but he's willing to move. He can do C#, Java, and C++. He even has a traditional 4-year computer science degree. Pass along his email if you can: markcahalan@yahoo.com
ScottWhigham 11y ago
If that were true, it would mean that The Valley hires, on average, lower quality developers than non-Valley employers. Is that what you are suggesting?
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  I don't think it means "on average", since I do think the average quality of a dev is higher in the Valley is better than elsewhere. However, I am saying that getting hired as a marginal dev is easier in the Valley than elsewhere, since there are not enough warm bodies in that area and Valley companies only seem to be willing to reach outside the area for really good people.
  - nordic_nomad 11y ago
    There aren't nearly enough warm bodies everywhere else. But you need to figure out what the term warm body actually means in your area.
- cgearhart 11y ago
  It may be more accurate to say that The Valley has different standards for software development on web & mobile than employers in other regions and in different categories. The quality of a developer depends on the overlap of their skills and the employer's needs; never judge a fish by how well it can climb a tree.
mkozlows 11y ago
I have friends who are devs and hiring managers (several of whom have no degrees, even) in many cities -- Detroit, Columbus, Portland, Chicago, SF -- and the same thing is true in all those places. If you live in a small town, I can believe that the opportunities are limited, but in basically any metro area of any size, it's a developers' market.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  Well, I live in Dallas. I have been fishing in Dallas and Austin over the past several months and can't get any interviews. I would like to know where all these "desperate" companies are and what domains they are in.
  - manyxcxi 11y ago
    I'm in Seattle and am getting lots of contact from recruiters in DFW and Austin, and not just the usual LinkedIn spam BS. My background is heavy on DevOps and I've got about a 50/50 split on .NET and Java.
    - eropple 11y ago
      I can corroborate this, though more from the LinkedIn side of things. Out of every twenty LinkedIn messages I get, probably six are SF, four are Boston (I'm local), two each are NYC and DC, and two or three are between DFW and Austin. (The last couple are usually Idaho or Nebraska or one of the other corporate-fief states.)
      - proksoup 11y ago
        What are the corporate-fief states? What does that mean, or what is that in reference to?
        HillRat 11y ago
        Roach-motel markets: you can get in, but you can't get out. More technically, monopsonistic or oligopsolistic factor markets, where the number of employers is small and thus control hiring in the local market. (Though I would expect Nebraska to be fairly competitive in hiring, given its surprisingly large number of finance and insurance companies.)
nordic_nomad 11y ago
So I'm self taught, no degree, and I get job offers and headhunters out of the blue from all over the central US. Denver, Kansas City, Omaha, Des Moines, Chicago, and small cities I've never heard of. The best thing I ever did was look at my friends early on who were getting found on linked in and organized my linkedin profile to look as similar as theirs as I could truthfully. The next best thing was taking 6 months off from freelance work to just build a portfolio of small projects that demonstrated the skills people were looking for, and it made interviews much simpler. I honestly refuse technical interviews at this point because they're a waste of time and I don't study the crap they ask for and it indicates technical leadership can't spot a good developer by looking at what they've built and talking to them about their methodology. If I really want a new job pronto, I email 5 recruiters who send me the most random postings and tell them what I'm looking for. Last time I did this I had 6 interviews scheduled that week and was in a new job that met my requirements in 2. This is in Kansas City, and while there is a fair amount of tech worker shortage here it's no where near what it is other places. Honestly the OP's story doesn't sound all that different from my own. Started a tech company in grad school, taught myself javascript and front end work, left just before what we started was sold for a small amount and didn't get anything out of it except exhaustion and credit card payments on top of student loans. But my "40 hour a week vacation" as I called it didn't work out and I got dumped in an executive reshuffling. Did one of those code bootcamps to learn back end C# .Net MVC work in 6 months and got my first developer job at $40k, got the next one at $60k 6 months later, $75k 6 months after that, and $100k 6 months after that. It's very doable anywhere in the country right now, but you can't just float down stream. You have to have a plan and actively work it and check yourself against the market and learn stuff people want you to know to get to the next level. Your skillset is not a constant, and it's up to you to demonstrate that you have it. If you leave it up to someone else to figure out how to do all that you're screwed, because if they knew how to do that they wouldn't hire so many developers who don't know what they're doing.
- thekingofspain 11y ago
  Um, whatever key you used instead of 'u' in 'fucked' made almost your entire message italicized.
jimbobimbo 11y ago
I'd say, it's opposite of (2). I keep reading horror stories about multi-day interviews with "take home tests" and other insanity, here on HN - and these are usually traits of the interviewing processes of newly minted startups. I had a bunch of interviews with "regular" companies on the East Coast and the process is way more sane and much less grueling. My advice to the OP would be to find and get in touch some of the older recruiting companies, the ones that exist more than 10 years on the market, and work with them. Steer clear from the startup scene. Normal companies still need the job to be done - why not by you?
- doktrin 11y ago
  > I keep reading horror stories about multi-day interviews with "take home tests" and other insanity 2 actual interviews that were offered to me early in my career : 1. The weekend hackathon (which actually ran from Friday until Monday) 2. The full-week trial I took #1, but not #2. I was working at the time, and in no way could justify taking a week of vacation just to work for free for someone else.
mindcrime 11y ago
What is baffling is this Valley-centric, web and mobile development-centric line being repeated constantly in this thread. Most of the world is a different story. Outside the Valley and a couple other metros, and outside the web and mobile fields in general: 1) degrees are usually required; 2) employers are much pickier. I haven't found that to be the case here in the Raleigh/Durham, NC area. I never finished my bachelors degree (although, I do have three different associates degrees), and I have never found it to be an inhibition to my career.
wiz21 11y ago
Agreed. We're pickier. I work on application that ditributes about 1E9 euros a year (so it's smaller than a bank but that's not exactly a small application either). We're maintenance-mode now. When I hire, I need : some who : - can actually code (many of the applicants can write code, but they don't know important things like : how does a hashtable work, recursivity, etc) - can write reliable code (i.e. ability to test, ability to imagine failure before they happen) - can write readable code (because you knw, we're working in a team) - can handle harsh customer (because when you fail, well, they're not happy) believe me, we don't have millions of those ready. Many can code, but code in "real" life where you don't have luch room to learn from mistakes, well, there ain't many...
- javajosh 11y ago
  >where you don't have luch room to learn from mistakes I enjoyed that.
- sargun 11y ago
  Why do you need to know how a HashTable works?
  - greenyoda 11y ago
    So you could predict its performance and know when it's not the best data structure to use?
    - analognoise 11y ago
      Because it's an easy canned interview question that can replace the effort to determine how a candidate thinks and see if their skills actually align with the role?
klibertp 11y ago
> outside the web and mobile fields in general Why don't you just change the domain your working in? Why not web dev? If you're a programmer, you should be able to code anything, anywhere, with a bit of effort. I skimmed your post (https://wmkrug.com/on-the-technical-skills-shortage-and-hiring-practices.html https://wmkrug.com/on-the-technical-skills-shortage-and-hiri...) and honestly I'm not sure. I mean, you're saying that requiring "years of experience" in "specific technology" makes "good candidates" to get rejected. But why do you think that someone without these years of experience would be a good candidate? Experience and skill are necessary. People without experience have little skill by definition: you only improve your skills by doing and remembering what you've done (well and badly) is called experience. Such people are not worthless, but as employees they are worth significantly less than people who demonstrably have both experience and skill. You seem to be thinking that the employers should let you learn your profession on the job because the college failed to do it. I don't think so. I believe you're the (like we all are) one responsible for teaching yourself enough to be a viable choice for at least an entry position. It's not that hard if you have a passion for the craft and patience to continue learning over the years.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  > If you're a programmer, you should be able to code anything, anywhere, with a bit of effort. Is that really true? I do database programming, and I feel like I would be absolutely screwed if somebody demanded I do, say, embedded programming for small microprocessors. I guess theoretically I could study up, but it would be at least a year or two before I could be competitive in interviews, right? Maybe I just suck and there are genius programmers who are equally competent at embedded systems, mobile development, distributed systems...
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - klibertp 11y ago
    > Is that really true? Yes, I believe so. And it has nothing to do with genius! First: of course you wouldn't be able to get senior dev positions in a domain you never worked in. You have to be prepared for this. Pay cut is obvious just after the change, and you need to decide if you can afford it. Second: it's a matter of how long you're going to stay junior in your new domain. In practice, this is a question of how solid your foundations are and how experienced you are already, and also how determined you are. I believe in what jwz said in "Coders at Work": different domains have different vocabularies, best practices, and myths, but deep down it's still just standard coding. There are variables and loops and branching constructs everywhere, no matter the domain. > there are genius programmers who are equally competent at embedded systems, mobile development, distributed systems... I doubt there are many people who are competent in many domains at once. There are such people out there and they're very expensive specialists. Still nothing to do with genius, but rather hard to achieve. However, you don't need to be like that: you just need to change the domain, not master a new one while retaining all your skills specific to the previous domain. The two most important things for making a switch are your foundations and experience. In your example - embedded dev - you'd need to have a good prior understanding of how CPUs work plus knowledge of C and Asm. Given this you're almost immediately ready to code, after maybe a week of reading the codebase, manuals, and refreshing AT&T asm syntax (for example). You - every programmer, really - should know at least the basics of such things from college or self-study. The experience is important because it gives you an intuition as to where the potential problems and hurdles in your learning would be. More than anything, experience provides you with an essential skill, a systematic (working for you) way of assessing and learning a new technology. It's much easier to change your domain for the fifth time than it is for the first time. Even if the previous areas you worked in have nothing to do with the one you're learning right now. For me, programming is a lifelong career choice. That means I have ~50 years of programming still ahead of me. I can't imagine working for such a long time in a single domain! In a bit more than a decade of my professional programming, I already switched domains four times. Despite the fact that I'm self-taught, and my foundations were lacking for quite some time. (I like to believe I fixed this after a couple of years.) It wasn't easy, but if I did it, then I'm sure almost anyone can :-)
andywood 11y ago
I've never worked in the valley, and I usually don't have much to do with the web or mobile. I don't have a degree, and the subject has literally never once come up in an interview. In 17 years, I've never encountered anyone who cares. Also, the vast majority of job descriptions read something like "Degree in CS OR equivalent experience" and therefore explicitly do not require degrees.
- tracker1 11y ago
  It will vary from company to company and culture to culture... I have a friend at a large aerospace company who was basically told he had 3 years to get his degree or he was out... He's now a mid-level project manager and does 2-3 the workload of his closest peers, but H.R. policy was that he shouldn't have been allowed into his current position without it.
s73v3r 11y ago
Employers are generally picker in companies who's primary service/product isn't software. But they're still among the loudest to complain when they can't find anyone to come work for them for peanuts.
LyndsySimon 11y ago
I completely disagree. I was working at FedEx as a programmer in 2012, and decided to make a move due to some internal changes. I made that decisions about two months before PyCon - at PyCon, I had two interviews, one of which landed me a great job at a significant pay increase. During those two months, I had phone interviews with two other companies, one of which I bowed out of the process because as I learned more I didn't believe in their mission, and the other I got turned down on. The sum total of my "trying to find a job" was making a profile on StackOverflow Careers and answering a Reddit ad. For what it's worth, I have no degree and am self-taught. In 2012, I had ~5 years of experience as a full-time dev, and none of it was in a traditional environment.
- pmelendez 11y ago
  You are still in the states aren't you? The story is very different outside of NorthAmerica. In several countries in Europe and in LatinAmerica, landing in a well-enough job can be a matter of several months depending of the skill-set.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

Agreed, sometimes people aren't aware that HN is its own little echo chamber. I was talking to a recruiter recently for a managerial job and somehow got onto the topic of hiring. I asked him what's the hardest jobs for him to fill right now. He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers. Corporations have built their castles on these technologies, not FOSS/Mobile and need staff. Degrees were an issue but he said he could place people with two year degrees. We talked about pay, and it wasn't terrible impressive, but for someone straight out of community college it sounded pretty good to me and he also revealed that if the person wasn't a complete nightmare socially, he could expect to be promoted quick.

mkozlows 11y ago
HN may be an echo chamber, but look what you're saying: Employers are desperate for developers, including entry level ones, mostly using older tech stacks, and they'll pay solid money for them. It doesn't sound like you're describing a world in which someone with 10+ years of solid experience with techs is going to be struggling to find a job, right?
- doktrin 11y ago
  > It doesn't sound like you're describing a world in which someone with 10+ years of solid experience with techs is going to be struggling to find a job, right? Overqualification (or the perception thereof) happens. The development world, like most others, is a bit of a pyramid. More experience doesn't necessarily translate to more positions being available. Some (many, even) are specifically targeted at young, entry level devs.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    And a lot of these companies should consider bringing on one more senior person instead of 2-3 junior ones.
Bluestrike2 11y ago
Companies like that would benefit from being more flexible on the degree issue; there are a huge number of programmers out there who are self-taught. It makes things seemingly more difficult in judging qualifications, but if you aren't filling the positions to begin with, that would seem like a good problem to have in the first place.
outworlder 11y ago
> He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers Why does he need so many entry level programmers? > We talked about pay, and it wasn't terrible impressive Is the recruiter trying to staff a company with mostly entry-level programmers, paying low wages? I've seen plenty of companies like that, including those who used mostly trainees. Usually, the work environment was the crappiest possible, and word gets around.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sjcrank 11y ago
  In the interest of building an experience-diverse workforce employers need entry level, mid level, and experienced developers with skills in their core stack, which in many cases is Java or .NET. My theory is that technology trends are leading the entry level developers to learn Python, Ruby, and JavaScript rather than .NET or Java, thereby reducing the supply and putting these candidates in high demand.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    So, they could hire another senior person at 2.5x the pay instead of 3-4 junior devs. The problem is a lot of younger managers don't understand the different in ouput can vary a lot from developer to developer. And on top of that quality output can be far more maintainable. All they care about is # of jira/tfs tickets that are open, and the number of features, and how many warm bodies based on their averages they need. The smoothest project I ever worked on was staffed by all senior people, with relatively diverse and overlapping skills. That wouldn't be possible with 3x the developers if 2/3 of them were junior to mid level.
ryandrake 11y ago
> He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers. How many years of experience and how much demonstrated expertise did he require from these" entry-level" candidates that he supposedly can't find?
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  None. Straight out of community college were being placed.
djKianoosh 11y ago
what does "complete nightmare socially" mean? :)
- tracker1 11y ago
  Well, my own quirk is I'm a later day starter... it's almost impossible for me to start consistently at or before 9am... outside of that, I tend to take more time to understand the problem and the desired solution than hacking away. Both of these have cause me a lot of issues in positions for companies that are more rigid in their desire for a homogenized work environment. On the flip side, I share knowledge and work to leave code better when I'm done than when I start. Others will show up/leave on time, but won't share anything and will leave very obfuscated code in place. Lets face it though... the personality traits that make one adept at somewhat technical and often mundane tasks have a pretty high correlation to some generally less than desirable personality traits. Programming is much more of a craft (or even art) than it is an engineering discipline in most places, but we have to interact with business roles where expectations and mindsets are vastly different.
aidenn0 11y ago
After I had landed my first job out of college (10 years ago), I got an offer from a company like that in the midwest. It took them 9 months from the interview to get back to me with an offer (which is why I was already working somewhere else) and the offer was $30k for a one year contract. If that's still typical of their hiring process, I'm not surprised they're having trouble hiring people.
milspec 11y ago
Oh my. I know somebody who needs that job. Probably the "Georgetown, KY" on his resume is the difficulty, but he's willing to move. He can do C#, Java, and C++. He even has a traditional 4-year computer science degree. Pass along his email if you can: markcahalan@yahoo.com

ScottWhigham 11y ago

If that were true, it would mean that The Valley hires, on average, lower quality developers than non-Valley employers. Is that what you are suggesting?

vonmoltke 11y ago
I don't think it means "on average", since I do think the average quality of a dev is higher in the Valley is better than elsewhere. However, I am saying that getting hired as a marginal dev is easier in the Valley than elsewhere, since there are not enough warm bodies in that area and Valley companies only seem to be willing to reach outside the area for really good people.
- nordic_nomad 11y ago
  There aren't nearly enough warm bodies everywhere else. But you need to figure out what the term warm body actually means in your area.
cgearhart 11y ago
It may be more accurate to say that The Valley has different standards for software development on web & mobile than employers in other regions and in different categories. The quality of a developer depends on the overlap of their skills and the employer's needs; never judge a fish by how well it can climb a tree.

mkozlows 11y ago

I have friends who are devs and hiring managers (several of whom have no degrees, even) in many cities -- Detroit, Columbus, Portland, Chicago, SF -- and the same thing is true in all those places. If you live in a small town, I can believe that the opportunities are limited, but in basically any metro area of any size, it's a developers' market.

vonmoltke 11y ago
Well, I live in Dallas. I have been fishing in Dallas and Austin over the past several months and can't get any interviews. I would like to know where all these "desperate" companies are and what domains they are in.
- manyxcxi 11y ago
  I'm in Seattle and am getting lots of contact from recruiters in DFW and Austin, and not just the usual LinkedIn spam BS. My background is heavy on DevOps and I've got about a 50/50 split on .NET and Java.
  - eropple 11y ago
    I can corroborate this, though more from the LinkedIn side of things. Out of every twenty LinkedIn messages I get, probably six are SF, four are Boston (I'm local), two each are NYC and DC, and two or three are between DFW and Austin. (The last couple are usually Idaho or Nebraska or one of the other corporate-fief states.)
    - proksoup 11y ago
      What are the corporate-fief states? What does that mean, or what is that in reference to?
      - HillRat 11y ago
        Roach-motel markets: you can get in, but you can't get out. More technically, monopsonistic or oligopsolistic factor markets, where the number of employers is small and thus control hiring in the local market. (Though I would expect Nebraska to be fairly competitive in hiring, given its surprisingly large number of finance and insurance companies.)

nordic_nomad 11y ago

So I'm self taught, no degree, and I get job offers and headhunters out of the blue from all over the central US. Denver, Kansas City, Omaha, Des Moines, Chicago, and small cities I've never heard of. The best thing I ever did was look at my friends early on who were getting found on linked in and organized my linkedin profile to look as similar as theirs as I could truthfully. The next best thing was taking 6 months off from freelance work to just build a portfolio of small projects that demonstrated the skills people were looking for, and it made interviews much simpler. I honestly refuse technical interviews at this point because they're a waste of time and I don't study the crap they ask for and it indicates technical leadership can't spot a good developer by looking at what they've built and talking to them about their methodology. If I really want a new job pronto, I email 5 recruiters who send me the most random postings and tell them what I'm looking for. Last time I did this I had 6 interviews scheduled that week and was in a new job that met my requirements in 2. This is in Kansas City, and while there is a fair amount of tech worker shortage here it's no where near what it is other places. Honestly the OP's story doesn't sound all that different from my own. Started a tech company in grad school, taught myself javascript and front end work, left just before what we started was sold for a small amount and didn't get anything out of it except exhaustion and credit card payments on top of student loans. But my "40 hour a week vacation" as I called it didn't work out and I got dumped in an executive reshuffling. Did one of those code bootcamps to learn back end C# .Net MVC work in 6 months and got my first developer job at $40k, got the next one at $60k 6 months later, $75k 6 months after that, and $100k 6 months after that. It's very doable anywhere in the country right now, but you can't just float down stream. You have to have a plan and actively work it and check yourself against the market and learn stuff people want you to know to get to the next level. Your skillset is not a constant, and it's up to you to demonstrate that you have it. If you leave it up to someone else to figure out how to do all that you're screwed, because if they knew how to do that they wouldn't hire so many developers who don't know what they're doing.

thekingofspain 11y ago
Um, whatever key you used instead of 'u' in 'fucked' made almost your entire message italicized.

jimbobimbo 11y ago

I'd say, it's opposite of (2). I keep reading horror stories about multi-day interviews with "take home tests" and other insanity, here on HN - and these are usually traits of the interviewing processes of newly minted startups. I had a bunch of interviews with "regular" companies on the East Coast and the process is way more sane and much less grueling. My advice to the OP would be to find and get in touch some of the older recruiting companies, the ones that exist more than 10 years on the market, and work with them. Steer clear from the startup scene. Normal companies still need the job to be done - why not by you?

doktrin 11y ago
> I keep reading horror stories about multi-day interviews with "take home tests" and other insanity 2 actual interviews that were offered to me early in my career : 1. The weekend hackathon (which actually ran from Friday until Monday) 2. The full-week trial I took #1, but not #2. I was working at the time, and in no way could justify taking a week of vacation just to work for free for someone else.

mindcrime 11y ago

What is baffling is this Valley-centric, web and mobile development-centric line being repeated constantly in this thread. Most of the world is a different story. Outside the Valley and a couple other metros, and outside the web and mobile fields in general: 1) degrees are usually required; 2) employers are much pickier. I haven't found that to be the case here in the Raleigh/Durham, NC area. I never finished my bachelors degree (although, I do have three different associates degrees), and I have never found it to be an inhibition to my career.

wiz21 11y ago

Agreed. We're pickier. I work on application that ditributes about 1E9 euros a year (so it's smaller than a bank but that's not exactly a small application either). We're maintenance-mode now. When I hire, I need : some who : - can actually code (many of the applicants can write code, but they don't know important things like : how does a hashtable work, recursivity, etc) - can write reliable code (i.e. ability to test, ability to imagine failure before they happen) - can write readable code (because you knw, we're working in a team) - can handle harsh customer (because when you fail, well, they're not happy) believe me, we don't have millions of those ready. Many can code, but code in "real" life where you don't have luch room to learn from mistakes, well, there ain't many...

javajosh 11y ago
>where you don't have luch room to learn from mistakes I enjoyed that.
sargun 11y ago
Why do you need to know how a HashTable works?
- greenyoda 11y ago
  So you could predict its performance and know when it's not the best data structure to use?
  - analognoise 11y ago
    Because it's an easy canned interview question that can replace the effort to determine how a candidate thinks and see if their skills actually align with the role?

klibertp 11y ago

> outside the web and mobile fields in general Why don't you just change the domain your working in? Why not web dev? If you're a programmer, you should be able to code anything, anywhere, with a bit of effort. I skimmed your post (https://wmkrug.com/on-the-technical-skills-shortage-and-hiring-practices.html https://wmkrug.com/on-the-technical-skills-shortage-and-hiri...) and honestly I'm not sure. I mean, you're saying that requiring "years of experience" in "specific technology" makes "good candidates" to get rejected. But why do you think that someone without these years of experience would be a good candidate? Experience and skill are necessary. People without experience have little skill by definition: you only improve your skills by doing and remembering what you've done (well and badly) is called experience. Such people are not worthless, but as employees they are worth significantly less than people who demonstrably have both experience and skill. You seem to be thinking that the employers should let you learn your profession on the job because the college failed to do it. I don't think so. I believe you're the (like we all are) one responsible for teaching yourself enough to be a viable choice for at least an entry position. It's not that hard if you have a passion for the craft and patience to continue learning over the years.

ForHackernews 11y ago
> If you're a programmer, you should be able to code anything, anywhere, with a bit of effort. Is that really true? I do database programming, and I feel like I would be absolutely screwed if somebody demanded I do, say, embedded programming for small microprocessors. I guess theoretically I could study up, but it would be at least a year or two before I could be competitive in interviews, right? Maybe I just suck and there are genius programmers who are equally competent at embedded systems, mobile development, distributed systems...
- deleted 11y ago
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- klibertp 11y ago
  > Is that really true? Yes, I believe so. And it has nothing to do with genius! First: of course you wouldn't be able to get senior dev positions in a domain you never worked in. You have to be prepared for this. Pay cut is obvious just after the change, and you need to decide if you can afford it. Second: it's a matter of how long you're going to stay junior in your new domain. In practice, this is a question of how solid your foundations are and how experienced you are already, and also how determined you are. I believe in what jwz said in "Coders at Work": different domains have different vocabularies, best practices, and myths, but deep down it's still just standard coding. There are variables and loops and branching constructs everywhere, no matter the domain. > there are genius programmers who are equally competent at embedded systems, mobile development, distributed systems... I doubt there are many people who are competent in many domains at once. There are such people out there and they're very expensive specialists. Still nothing to do with genius, but rather hard to achieve. However, you don't need to be like that: you just need to change the domain, not master a new one while retaining all your skills specific to the previous domain. The two most important things for making a switch are your foundations and experience. In your example - embedded dev - you'd need to have a good prior understanding of how CPUs work plus knowledge of C and Asm. Given this you're almost immediately ready to code, after maybe a week of reading the codebase, manuals, and refreshing AT&T asm syntax (for example). You - every programmer, really - should know at least the basics of such things from college or self-study. The experience is important because it gives you an intuition as to where the potential problems and hurdles in your learning would be. More than anything, experience provides you with an essential skill, a systematic (working for you) way of assessing and learning a new technology. It's much easier to change your domain for the fifth time than it is for the first time. Even if the previous areas you worked in have nothing to do with the one you're learning right now. For me, programming is a lifelong career choice. That means I have ~50 years of programming still ahead of me. I can't imagine working for such a long time in a single domain! In a bit more than a decade of my professional programming, I already switched domains four times. Despite the fact that I'm self-taught, and my foundations were lacking for quite some time. (I like to believe I fixed this after a couple of years.) It wasn't easy, but if I did it, then I'm sure almost anyone can :-)

andywood 11y ago

I've never worked in the valley, and I usually don't have much to do with the web or mobile. I don't have a degree, and the subject has literally never once come up in an interview. In 17 years, I've never encountered anyone who cares. Also, the vast majority of job descriptions read something like "Degree in CS OR equivalent experience" and therefore explicitly do not require degrees.

tracker1 11y ago
It will vary from company to company and culture to culture... I have a friend at a large aerospace company who was basically told he had 3 years to get his degree or he was out... He's now a mid-level project manager and does 2-3 the workload of his closest peers, but H.R. policy was that he shouldn't have been allowed into his current position without it.

s73v3r 11y ago

Employers are generally picker in companies who's primary service/product isn't software. But they're still among the loudest to complain when they can't find anyone to come work for them for peanuts.

LyndsySimon 11y ago

I completely disagree. I was working at FedEx as a programmer in 2012, and decided to make a move due to some internal changes. I made that decisions about two months before PyCon - at PyCon, I had two interviews, one of which landed me a great job at a significant pay increase. During those two months, I had phone interviews with two other companies, one of which I bowed out of the process because as I learned more I didn't believe in their mission, and the other I got turned down on. The sum total of my "trying to find a job" was making a profile on StackOverflow Careers and answering a Reddit ad. For what it's worth, I have no degree and am self-taught. In 2012, I had ~5 years of experience as a full-time dev, and none of it was in a traditional environment.

pmelendez 11y ago
You are still in the states aren't you? The story is very different outside of NorthAmerica. In several countries in Europe and in LatinAmerica, landing in a well-enough job can be a matter of several months depending of the skill-set.