

For Software Developers, A Bounty Of Opportunity - champion
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/05/140194803/for-software-developers-a-bounty-of-opportunity

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alexkearns
People who think they can seduce a developer with a beer cabinet and a
fuseball table don't deserve to get good developers.

What developers really want - and what they never get - is power, not free
beer and a crappy football table. Power to decide what they are going to work
on, power to decide what tools they want to use, power to decide whether they
want to use a waterfall approach or the ubiquitous soul-destroying agile way.

One time developers were almost fully in charge of software projects.
Nowadays, they are at the bottom of the wrung, further from the decision
making process for software products than anyone else.

Give us some power over our work and maybe we'll think about working for you.

~~~
pagekalisedown
All I want is sane management and sane schedules.

~~~
arctangent
The easiest way to get these is either to be in control of them yourself or
for your manager to have an engineering pedigree (i.e. be a more senior
developer) rather than just a manager by career.

~~~
Kavan
Or a non-technical manager that trusts your judgement.

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KevinMS
If you are young and recently graduated with computer science you are hot in
Boston. If you've been around a while and have a degree in anything else, or
are self taught, companies like these will most likely just ignore you. That
is their "hot market", I call it artificial scarcity.

~~~
hga
Indeed. "Never trust anyone over 30" has become in our field "Seldom hire
anyone over 30 and never hire anyone over 40" and most certainly 50. That you
can get "Senior" prepended to your title after about 5 years of experience
ought to be a warning sign.

Due to genes that make me look (and for the most part feel) _quite_ a bit
younger than I'm (I'm now 50 and am still mistaken for a early to mid-20s
college student (dress and deportment make a difference, of course)) I was
able to experimentally, as it were, see this when I was in my 30s.

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super-serial
Only _good programmers_ have a ton of opportunity.

Where are all the jobs for _bad programmers_ with CS degrees?

That sounds like a joke... but by Hacker News community standards I'm sure
more than half of CS graduates would be considered mediocre programmers at
best. The big companies would never try to train these kids - they just lobby
for more H1Bs.

How else do you explain stories like this while we have a "talent shortage":
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480749>

~~~
mtinkerhess
My impression is that there are plenty of jobs for relatively mediocre
programmers—just not the kinds of jobs that HN readers tend to aspire to.
Someone has to write enterprise CRUD apps on a .NET or Java stack for large
non-software companies, and they don't have to be rockstars.

~~~
aninteger
Sadly, even companies that create .net crud apps only want the rockstar
programmers. Or at least that's the way it seems in Los Angeles. I'm speaking
from experience although perhaps I'm just a mediocre software developer.

~~~
pagekalisedown
Rockstars and / or Ninjas. </sarcasm>

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earl
I hate articles like this.

(1) When did aspiring to a good life become wrong? The article seems to
sympathize with Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot who whines about having to pay devs a
middle class wage.

(2) Since I've seen this with the dude from seo moz and other places: To all
of you whining about your inability to hire software engineers, what exactly
are you doing to grow your own? Are you aggressively hiring interns so you get
first shot when they graduate? Are you lobbying your state and national reps
to fund universities? There are plenty of smart people entering college this
fall; in 4 years, some of them will be cs graduates. It seems like on the
margin a lot of smart people enter finance or law or other fields; what are
you doing to attract them to software engineering? What are you doing about
the rampant sexism that helps turn off a lot of women (that's 1/2 your
potential engineers) to development as a career?

~~~
KevinMS
So whats your problem? The only pools of programming talent come from young
interns or computer science graduates? You'd suggest political lobbying before
looking outside the narrow focus of twenty something male comp-sci clones that
colleges have been pumping out because of the dot-com bubble?

~~~
roel_v
I guess his point was that catering to students is just one way to solve their
own problems; basically, they need to stop whining and put in some effort:
step up pay, or training, or process, or hire two people to do the job rather
than having one guy work 80 hours. Hiring students was just one example where
it requires extra effort from employers to get good employees, effort that (it
seems) they aren't willing to put in.

I was especially disappointed seeing Shah on this bandwagon of whining, since
I mostly like his blog and writing. But no, apparently he too prefers 40k wage
slaves that make him rich but who he only needs pay enough to survive but not
enough to become independent. (I have first-hand experience with how reporters
twist and turn words so maybe the article misrepresents what he's saying, but
even in the most favorable interpretation of his words I don't really see how
that could have happened without the reporter straight out fabricating a
quote).

