
New Kids on the Block: Understanding Developers Entering the Workforce Today - chrisaycock
https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/12/new-kids-block-understanding-developers-entering-workforce-today/
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mmjaa
We go through this, generally, every 4 years. I don't know why it feels like 4
years is the 'period' of new-school-hacker-on-the-scene, it just feels like it
from the perspective of industry/capitalism out here in the workforce.

Perhaps its because it seems like 4 years is the mean time between start and
end of the new-school; i.e. it takes at least 4 years for the group who have
forgotten how to do the old stuff to be replaced by the group who don't know
anything about the old stuff, and just re-invent it all again, with bells and
whistles, and .. y'know .. youth'y cool.

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bluetwo
Hey new developers:

A fully funded retirement = Freedom

I know it doesn't seem important now, but if you focus on this early in your
career, you'll have a lot of flexibility later in your career.

~~~
virmundi
The problem is that many investment products in 401ks under perform. At my
last company the best fund netted on 4%. Since I now manage my own IRA, I get
15-20%.

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ProAm
> Since I now manage my own IRA, I get 15-20%.

I hear this a lot from people who invest and I simply don't believe it. If you
are able to consistently get 15-20% you should stop your normal career and
just become a investment advisor/broker as for you'll make WAY more money in
life.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
>you should stop your normal career and just become a investment
advisor/broker as for you'll make WAY more money in life.

I don't think you can just walk into a respectable brokerage firm and just
apply to be an investment adviser or broker based on how well your personal
portfolio does. It's probably gated by a 4 year math/science/finance degree
and other extra-academic examinations.

If you can, I'd like to know how. I'd much prefer finance over healthcare.

~~~
ProAm
Just start small, do this for 1 or 2 friends for a few thousand dollars. If
you can show this kind of return consistently you'll be managing a billion
dollars in no time. 15-20% is a really good return, I still dont believe it,
but if you can do this it'd be easy to take 1.5% and earn for clients.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
I guess the onus is on the length of time he means by consistent, because
yeah, that could be 10 months or 10 years.

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patrick_99
They say $40k is the median salary for new developers in Canada, this is much
lower than I've observed and it makes me question the quality of the entire
dataset. Are these really professional software developers who answered the
survey?

~~~
uiri
The salaries for the US also look weird to me.

Canadian new grads tend towards $60-70k with larger American companies paying
closer to $80-90k in the same location. My sampling is heavily biased towards
Ontario. I expect Greater Vancouver to be similar but perhaps the rest of
Western Canada, along with Quebec and the maritimes are dragging the average
down.

~~~
sotojuan
The US is not Silicon Valley or NYC. Between the coasts, a lot of developers
get <$70k per year salaries.

Maybe it's the same for Canada?

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OedipusRex
I graduated in May from a Big 10 college with a computer technology degree.

As much as remote work seems great, I still need a senior level developer I
can walk over to and ask questions of.

As well, the program I was in was in a constant state of flux, and the
incoming freshmen are able to choose a lot of targeted tracks like Cyber
Security, Forensics, High Performance Computing, etc. When I started there
were too options: one focused on the business side and one on the engineering
side.

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pkamb
I'm surprised to see "desktop applications developer" in front of "mobile
developer". Where are these desktop jobs, and desktop applications? The work I
see in the Apple world is _mainly_ iOS, with some macOS. Do Windows developers
make up the difference?

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kasey_junk
Yes. There is a whole world of windows applications out there doing central
line of business work for all the unsexy but more common businesses throughout
the country.

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hackernewsacct
This report (and others) suggest companies are hiring those with non-CS
degrees. If this is the case, then how do self-taught or non-CS majors get
hired when the bar to entry is solving medium to hard level leetcode problems?

~~~
khalilravanna
A part of the puzzle might be that being good at solving interview questions
is orthogonal to having CS coursework under your belt. I can speak anecdotally
from my own experience in that I didn't get good at those types of problems
until I spent my own time working on them.

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austincheney
A have worked most of my career all over the travel industry and there is a
huge shift I have noticed in the past couple of years. First of all the
companies in this space are massive having thousands of developers and
secondly these companies typically have an old industrial mindset of never
firing or retiring people and absolutely never making hard transitional
decisions that impact the work force. All of these companies are shifting as
much as they can, if they aren't there already, to conduct as many
transactions as possible over a website.

Most of these companies have been around forever and have been engaged with
selling online, in some capacity, since the 90s. The problem with that is that
until about 9 years ago web technologies were slow and nobody took them
seriously. Even now formal training in web technologies is rare.

This is problematic because more is continually demanded from web technologies
and the majority of the work force is completely lost. The universal
technology in every one of these companies is Java and it dominates nearly all
aspects of development at every stage. Java isn't a web technology. The result
of that problem differs by company due to internal perceptions of technology
and company culture.

One company I worked with was growing its revenue and market incredibly fast
outpacing their peers and historical norms. This group had the freedom to make
candid decisions about their future and reality in general. They had the most
bench-warmers of any group I worked with, but they also realized the future is
in JavaScript instead of Java. The challenge is that legacy developers wanted
to learn this "new" way, but transitioning is hard, especially if you aren't
doing that work in your job. There was a lingering fear of obsolescence here.

One company I worked for refused to figure it out. They were confronted by all
manners of technology decisions they could not agree upon resulting in
different layers of management doing their own things without agreement. The
only strong part of that business was marketing. The company folded and
somebody bought the brand for super cheap with a skeleton crew.

One company I worked for waited very late to accept this reality and struggled
to figure it out. There is a JavaScript layer, which is largely a vanity
architectural layer over and reliant upon the legacy Java layer. This group
has done well by cornering large areas of the marketing and acquiring
competition. The technology is slow compared to their competitors, expensive
to maintain, and very painful to work on. Many of the developers refused to
abandon doing as much as possible in Java and will often block new code
submissions that could be better served in Java. There was no fear of
obsolescence because nobody in a decision making capacity was willing to do
things in a new ways.

I cannot imagine what this industry will look like 10 years from now as the
technologies and developers continue to age and new blood continues to either
burn out or grudgingly conform to the old technologies.

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bigtex
Do you have the right stuff?

~~~
bigtex
Man, a tough crowd here today. So no one remembers the New Kids on the Block
craze back in the late 80's? Girls writing NKOTB on their book covers?

~~~
juliasilge
Oh, _I_ remember.

