
Tech Industry: “We desperately need more developers” - champagnepapi
https://twitter.com/ootoovak/status/928394833718231040
======
dcow
First day: "Hey welcome to the team hope you got everything setup when you
have a minute do you mind going through your contacts we cannot find any good
engineers lately."

Me: "Ookaay.. thanks? Sure here are 5 people I've studied and/or worked with.
They're literally rockstars. I personally vouch for them and I know most of
them are in the market and interested."

"Hmm they look too junior thanks anyway."

One month later: after spending plenty of time interviewing and rejecting some
wildly overqualified candidates because they're not culture fits, hiring
manager brings in their "80% but can get the job done" (that is a quote no
joke) friend from previous job. Or they bing on a far more expensive
contractor.

Meanwhile my five recommendations all get hired at competing or peer
companies.

This has happened in some form or another at most every place I've worked. To
date I'm extremely disillusioned with the "tech" hiring process. I've seen
everything from perfectly qualified candidates getting rejected because the
interviewer woke up on the wrong side of the bed and, in the span of less than
an hour, developed a vendetta against the candidate, to plain old nepotism.
I've even seen people vote to pass because they wanted the job the candidate
came in for and thought they could do a better job even though there were no
plans for such an arrangement to ever happen. I've seen interviewers fail a
candidate because they couldn't solve a problem the interviewer (who is in a
marginally related domain) was having trouble with last week and wasn't making
progress on because google didn't have a copy paste answer.

Interviewing is entirely subjective. Humans are humans. They only person that
truely matters at the end of the day WRT interviewing is the hiring manager
and maybe their boss.

Edit: I forgot my main point, excuse the rant. The point is I don't see how
the industry is going to overcome this hurdle when it's neigh impossible for a
front line engineer to bring in good people who wouldn't already appeal to
whatever processes/humans are in place--which clearly isn't working because
they can't find good engineers.

~~~
purplezooey
Agree. At all 3 of my previous companies, most hires we're often a buddy of
the manager who usually wasn't very good or a fit for the role. There's
usually no process. One thing you can do that's a low hanging fruit is just
take a day with your interviewers and come up with 5-10 quality questions and
a short way to make sure the same questions are asked to every candidate and
nobody asks the same question. That alone will increase the quality of your
interviews.

~~~
dcow
I actually think we've had really quality interviews everywhere I've been.
That's the weird thing. It's not the interviews that are the problem. It's the
pre and post filtering that just feels so arbitrary.

------
Eliezer
Nobody in this Twitter thread seems to know or understand what a commons
problem is. Training up new devs is good for the industry, sure. But your own
company doesn't capture all of that value.

If you are trying to solve this problem by yelling at companies to be more
altruistic, then, as previously stated, you don't know or understand what a
commons problem is.

~~~
strictnein
Employees aren't fish or trees.

If you train an employee and treat them well they stay with your company
longer. Your training increases the value the provide to you.

Unlike a fish, which is sold and consumed one day and needs to be replaced the
next.

~~~
vinceguidry
> If you train an employee and treat them well they stay with your company
> longer.

That's a huge assumption.

~~~
K0nserv
Seems fairly rational. I recon two of the most common reasons people leave are
boredom and unsatisfying career progression. So all you have to do is ensure
people have interesting work and pay/promote them at a rate that is
competitive with their option of switching jobs to achieve that goal.

~~~
scarface74
_I recon two of the most common reasons people leave are boredom and
unsatisfying career progression. So all you have to do is ensure people have
interesting work_

My current job is very interesting - I’m leading a team building a brand new
green field system and building a modern software development shop
simultaneously (CI/CD, automated testing, newest version of everything), I
have almost complete autonomy in how things are architected and the resources
(money, people) to make it happen.

But once I get done, I don’t see anything the company can do to keep my job
“interesting”.

If you were on the iPhone team in 2006 at Apple, what could Apple possibly do
to keep you from getting bored?

------
pascalxus
Alot of companies think they need senior devs, when in reality what they
really need is more junior or mid-level devs. Most developers aren't
architecting whole new apps, or building out massive feature requests. Most of
the time, it's fixing bugs, maintenance, adjustments to existing features, and
other work that mainly requires navigating existing code and infrastructure,
with the occasional new feature here and there.

You do need one really good lead developer on the team, to help mentor people.
This is the one area that is sometimes a bit lacking. Most leads are great
engineers but aren't very good at leading, mentoring or any of the other
people type work they need to do. But, all they really need is some training
and a personality adjustment, in some cases.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
It's okay for front-line devs to think this, but when the people in charge of
salary and hiring believe it, your team ends up a crew of fresh graduates
herded by a senior dev who is exclusively occupied with making sure the junior
devs don't make things worse.

And most failures of junior devs (breaking stuff) are considered the
responsibility of the senior dev managing them, so the senior dev bears just
as much responsibility as before but now with less control and more
unpredictability. It is certainly good to have juniors on the team, but
managing them should not take the greatest part of your senior devs' time, and
your product should not be written exclusively by juniors.

Some CEOs deflect accusations of cheapness by claiming they don't want
"rockstars/divas," but that's a personality trait, not a skill, and the
crappiest of crappy junior devs are certainly capable of embodying rockstar
arrogance.

Most work is tweaking an existing codebase, and quick fluency in arbitrary
code written by strangers is definitely not a junior-level skill. In fact, CS-
heavy stuff with little external integration is perfect for fresh graduates,
as they did learn it in school.

~~~
scarface74
_It 's okay for front-line devs to think this, but when the people in charge
of salary and hiring believe it, your team ends up a crew of fresh graduates
herded by a senior dev who is exclusively occupied with making sure the junior
devs don't make things worse._

Why is that bad thing? I'm in that position now more or less - senior Dev
(official title architect) working with mostly with inexperienced but smart
junior developers and legacy developers. I'm just not expected to do too much
actual coding.

------
devnull42
I saw a company asking for 10 years OpenStack development experience.

The initial release of OpenStack was 7 years ago.

Cant make this shit up.

~~~
kirykl
I had a manager who had a job posting for a COBALT programmer. He couldn't
find a single one

~~~
jajern
Did you mean COBOL or did he misspell it and that's why he couldn't find one?

~~~
cholantesh
From the context, I'd surmise it's the latter.

------
kendallpark
It amazed me how quickly the recruiter spam started flooding my LinkedIn after
passing the one year mark. I am always greatful for the company that hired me
freshly out of college based on my education and aptitude, not experience.

I advise current students that the first job is hardest to get. After that
you’ll have a wealth of opportunities knocking at your door.

------
throwaway79475
This mentality is also related to the insane idea that junior developers are
just glomming onto companies to get the training and then leave, taking
advantage of the hard work these companies put into them. This is not a
strawman, this is a true fear that I've hear several executives utter out loud
with no self awareness.

Treat the junior developers like anyone else - someone who wants the best for
their career and knowledge base - and provide it for them. Incentivize them to
stay. Train them properly and give them resources to succeed. Maintain an
internal culture that properly cultivates their talents and gives them mentors
to work with and aspire to. Compensate them when they've reached proper
thresholds in their usefulness to the team, and provide honest and valuable
feedback (positive and negative) as much as you can. Plus avoid the obvious
pitfalls: don't abuse them or belittle them for basic questions or silly
mistakes. Don't throw them into the deep end with little to no chance of
success. Don't talk down to them or treat them as a substandard part of the
team. Don't start firing the juniors the minute the workload starts winding
down. These are all signs of disrespect for your own workforce and everyone
can see obvious red flags, even juniors.

Given the griping about tech interviews these days, does anyone really think
that people actually like job hopping? They do it either to avoid poisonous
situations, or out of obvious and necessary self interest, one that can be
provided by a company willing to treat their junior hires with respect.
There's no reason hiring a junior cannot be a win-win situation for everyone
involved.

~~~
stephengillie
These are what I call "training companies". Engineers join them and find a
miserable state of affairs. Being productive individuals, these people try to
improve the state of the company - in technology, in process, or in other
areas. But the business, in its infinite waterfall, resists the change.

After about a year, most engineers realize the futility of their efforts, and
start to either look for a better company, or try to build a better company.
This often takes about a year, thus the 2-year churn cycle in many modern
resumes.

------
pascalxus
If hiring were truely an issue for companies, then salaries would be going up
or at the very least you'd see them make location decisions based on where the
supply of labor is greater than the demand. You almost never see companies
doing that. It's always, let's move the company to where-ever is most
convenient for the founders or the VCs.

~~~
pbecotte
Do you not see salaries going up?

------
thisisit
I know this is targeted more towards student but I also find similar issues if
someone with some work-experience wants to switch away from a dwindling tech
towards a new tech. People say, well you don't have "relevant" experience.

~~~
curtis
> _People say, well you don 't have "relevant" experience._

I'm not sure they'll even say that. A lot of the time they won't bother to
talk to you at all.

------
watty
It's not abnormal for a company to have senior-level openings and no junior
openings.

My company for example is also "desperately" in need of a senior developer /
architect to fill in a role.

~~~
dep_b
A company I worked for always was looking for senior devs. Not because they
needed them, but if one would stumble in accidentally they would still hire
the programmer (and fire one of us? I never saw this pan out!)

------
jimmydddd
I'm having a similar problem in buying a car.

My Situation: I want to buy a brand new BMW for $20,000.00 and none are
available.

My Conclusion: There must be a shortage of BMW's.

------
rabbite
Yup. 45 applications, several face-to-face interviews and homework assignments
since June. No offers. This is with over 6 years of development and 11 years
of technical work and leadership.

Hiring practices suck when the only advice my father can give me is "make sure
to smile and be positive!"

~~~
scarface74
I don’t know anything about you, so don’t take this as a personal insult, but
have you thought after 45 applications and several face-to-face interviews
over four months, it may not be the hiring practices that suck?

In over 20 years of working, it has never taken me more than two weeks to get
a job. My fastest turn around was quitting a job on a Monday at noon, with no
job prospects and no applications submitted and getting an offer on Thursday
from what was then a Fortune 10 (non tech) company.

Could it be skill set, interview skills, location, etc?

------
bitwize
"We desperately need more developers that are exact cultural fits AND
proficient in our exact stack AND will work for peanuts."

In other news, the 10-year-old girl community "desperately needs more ponies".

------
LaSombra
Most companies have forgot the power of training. Hiring a junior dev to
shadow a mid-level or a senior engineer trumps, almost all the time, the
trouble of finding the unicorn candidate.

Companies want to hire a silver bullet and forget all about the perfectly
capable people that don't have "15 years of Java/C#/Python/whatever
experience".

------
standupstandup
Tweets are news now? Really.

Anyway. I run a largeish software team and we have a mix of very experienced
devs along with some newer devs who definitely have holes in their skills. We
run training in certain areas with the goal of upskilling the team. Especially
for security and secure coding practices which aren't taught in universities.
There's also a lot of training around good engineering practices and the like.
I'm pretty sure most software companies are the same.

Yes, the industry does not train people from absolute scratch like apprentice
schemes do. It's very reliant on universities. But I don't see legions of
unemployed students: they do get jobs and companies do take over their
training to bring them from basic to advanced.

~~~
gwright
Do you have any links to good resources on "secure coding practices" or more
generally "good engineering practices"?

I feel like there are lots of resources about specific programming skills
(language and library details) but it is difficult to find good resources
about more higher level concerns; security, maintenance, tooling, operations,
availability, authentication/authorization, scaling, automation.

Google's Site Reliability Engineering is one example of a good resource in
this area.

~~~
standupstandup
Yes, I'd suggest starting there (I used to be an SRE).

I don't know of any books that handle all those topics off hand. I was
thinking more of secure coding for engineers, rather than system architecture
in general.

------
delphinius81
Junior devs finding an initial job and receiving mentoring is certainly an
issue, but I think that the issue raised in the tweet is way more endemic to
start-ups than more established companies.

------
OhSoHumble
I always thought that this was a supply problem? There are a _lot_ of junior
developers out there and that has flooded the market, reducing demand for
junior engineers.

------
sysdyne
Javascript framework,Javascript framework,Javascript framework This is a must
see
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs)

------
expertentipp
Neither juniors, nor those experienced. Recruitment gatekeepers want always
_something else_. Imagine a situation in which you release all your tech
workforce and try to rehire, would they get the job? Might be eye opening.

------
NTDF9
Also,

We only hire devs who can traverse a tree with their eyes clsoed.

Why? Is that what your devs do in day to day job?

No, our devs add buttons and pass values from one module to another.

------
eecks
The title suggests something very different to the content of the tweet even
though it uses the same words. I think this is clickbait.

------
tomc1985
Then train them!

------
sixhobbits
This is true for developers applying through job ads. patio11 has a written
millions of words of advice, many of which talk about how to land work (hint,
don't apply through job ads), so I'm not going to try rephrase that, but if
you're a developer (even without experience) and you're good at what you do,
you really shouldn't have any issues finding work.

(shameless plug) I'm working with hyperiondev.com. We offer 6-month coding
bootcamps, and our grads have companies fighting over them even though they
have zero "real world" experience and only 6-months of training (yes I've read
the bootcamp vs theoretical CS degree flamewars to preempt anyone who believes
that anyone who writes a line of code should have 3 years of CS theory to back
it up).

Know your stuff. Have a portfolio (minimal is fine). Talk to people (not
recruiters or HR staff). There is almost no easier way to find work at the
moment than by saying "hey I know what a for loop is", so I have limited
sympathy for the people who claim they can't get jobs because of lack of
experience in dev.

~~~
lovich
For Boston at least that is patently untrue. Every company wants to run you
through the whiteboard hazing. Knowing what a for loop is, is going to get you
shit.

Also, don't apply to companies? That may be fine for a small percentage of
people who can get ahead of the pack or luck out but that's not doable for the
whole industry. Is every junior dev supposed to constantly troll meetups and
cold email more senior devs to get into the industry? Networking like that is
good advice now because it makes you stick out but if everyone does it then
the senior devs are going to start treating newcomers like we treat recruiters
and just blanket ignore them until we need something from them. It's not
feasible for the entire industry to be growing in demand and still only be
willing to grow the supply of devs through the old boys club style of
networking

