
2018's Software Engineering Talent Shortage– It’s Quality, Not Just Quantity - justinucd
https://hackernoon.com/2018s-software-engineering-talent-shortage-its-quality-not-just-quantity-6bdfa366b899
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lovich
I like how all the problems with getting engineers are listed and then they
include "salary demands are too high". There's a higher demand for software
developers at a certain skill level than there is supply.

Either bid more than your competition, or invest in bringing people to that
skill level.

Whining about how you have to pay money to people so that you can make even
more money off of them is just childish

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aalleavitch
>Forcing every prospective engineer to attend 4 years of formal computer
science education isn’t a realistic answer — and ultimately it doesn’t even
solve the problem. Formal comp sci education is a foundation, but the
application of comp sci to problem solving is a skill that is learned by
experience and mentorship.

This is the thing that has been killing me and incredibly demoralizing as I've
been trying to find a position at a company, along with not having production
experience in the specific frameworks that they're looking for. I've started a
project from the ground-up with my bare hands that managed to make over
$500,000 in crowdfunding, but because I didn't do it in a framework that
modern companies want, and because my degrees are in Biology and Psychology
rather than Computer Science, even when I've trained myself in the frameworks
in question I'm a pariah to hiring managers.

I'm seriously beside myself now. I have no idea what avenues I even have left
open to me if I want to have a career at this point. The only way I see myself
getting a job is going further into debt by going through a bootcamp.

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dpweb
Maybe reevaluate your resume and interview skills also. There nothing
scientific abnout hiring decisions. so much is subconcious.. I like this
person. My experience, most hiring managers are not as smart as the
programmers that work for them are are not super analytical, they make
decisions on instinct.

I started on the IT support desk cause I had zero experience with nothing on
my resume except an Economics BA and pizza delivery job. Within a year I
transitioned into a programming job. My experience is in IT depts of large
companies, many have a good attitude with letting you change positions once
youve been an employee for a while.

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AdieuToLogic
This quote from the article really stands out and may become my 'go-to'
analogy for explaining being a software engineer:

    
    
      If you know a programming language, then
      are you an engineer? No. Knowing a language
      does not make you an engineer. The same as
      knowing how to speak elementary Spanish
      does not automatically make you a good
      Spanish teacher.

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expertentipp
The shortage of software engineerng talent exists only in media articles. When
I try to help these poor companies, shortly after declaring salary
expectations miraculously they discover abundance of talented candidates in
their recruitment pipeline. The location is central EU and the salary I’m
talking about is not even six digits in USD, in fact well below.

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megaman22
I haven't been at this that long, and already the bar of entry is so much
higher than it used to be. If you could sling some HTML and rudimentary
JavaScript, slap together some PHP or ASP backend, and knew what a database
was, that was enough to get in and hit the ground running, once upon a time.

I haven't seen that people coming out of college know anything more now than I
did then, which even then was based on best-practices and experience from the
mainframe and dawn-of-the-PC eras, and so was at least a decade out of date.

The complexity seems to be growing on a trajectory akin to Moore's Law, with
layers and layers of abstractions papering over the cracks and making this
labyrinthian mess barely manageable.

