
Software engineers hard to find - sayemm
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-10-17/business/ct-biz-1017-out-technology-20101017_1_software-engineers-chicago-developers-tech-jobs
======
mahmud
And will continue to be harder and harder as long as utter morons do the
screening and hiring.

I made a local-startup an offer that no sane company could afford to refuse. I
was a core developer for their main behemoth of a competitor and my non-
competes have just expired. They could easily save millions of dollars in
marketing, research and development by JUST running decisions by me and having
me nod in approval if it sounds good. (I am not exaggerating; it's one of
those businesses that require 10k in daily AdWords sacrifices to grok; lead
generation)

Instead, they came back to me with the same two questions: do you know Django
and do you know Agile development.

You incompetent idiots.

Fast forward to today; it took me 4 hours this morning to go from cold-call to
interview at a research-oriented industrial planning company of <10 people
minting millions of dollars per year. Within 20 minutes, the guy and I were
talking about the history of Prolog, logics and finite-domain constraint
solving.

~~~
j_baker
I say this as someone who's been accused of having a poor attitude on many an
occasion, but when you say the following...

> And will continue to be harder and harder as long as utter morons do the
> screening and hiring.

> They could easily save millions of dollars in marketing, research and
> development by JUST running decisions by me and having me nod in approval if
> it sounds good.

> You incompetent idiots.

I have to ask... Are you 100% sure it was because of django and agile skills?

~~~
mahmud
If someone told me they worked for my major, and very successful competitor, I
would pause to ask them "doing what".

The guys didn't even bother.

~~~
bhoung
Classic case of thinking that being right should be all that matters? With
interviews and hiring it all comes down to the first impression...

------
Tangurena
I'm an older developer. I was eating lunch at a restaurant near my new
workplace. Sitting at the table next to mine, a college senior (at Colorado
School of Mines - which is a pretty decent engineering school) was talking
with her father about her boyfriend interviewing for a job as a software
developer. The BF had a 4 hour long programming test as part of the interview.

Something is very wrong with our industry. Most of the time that articles come
out like this, industry executives are trying to get more kids to go into
programming in order to lower the cost of employees: they want protection from
the free market.

The last company I worked for (for 5 years, and it was a Fortune 100 company)
was complaining publicly that they were unable to find developers - yet people
who quit over the past 2 years were never replaced, nor were we allowed to
interview candidates.

~~~
ck2
I think the secret is that part of good programming is an art, and not only
something that can be taught, like accounting, with just logical rules and
regulations (apologies to skilled accountants who feel there is an art to
their work).

That is probably why big business can't fulfill their desire for a large pool
of cheap but good developers. You can't just pour people into the college
machinery and churn out developers. At least I hope not.

~~~
rdtsc
> That is probably why big business can't fulfill their desire for a large
> pool of cheap but good developers.

It is interesting, this has been going on for a while. Initially many
companies went and got a lot of cheap and mediocre developers (mostly through
outsourcing) and replaced a couple good ones with dozens of average ones for
the same price. They saw it as a deal. Eventually they are realizing that
programming is not like picking potatoes -- "Just hire more for the same
price, they all sit and type all day anyway, so just get more for cheaper and
we'll get ahead faster". Well it doesn't work like that.

Once mediocrity starts to dominate, even the few good ones who are still
hanging around, will leave as their work turns to teaching others and
babysitting them full time.

In general it is not possible to replace a highly skilled programmer with an X
number of less skilled ones. Many hit that realization and we start seeing
lots of these types of articles even as unemployment is above 10%

------
ShardPhoenix
"JumpForward interviews three to five engineers a week as it tries to fill
four to six technology jobs, but most candidates don't have current skills or
they lack the passion to stay on the cutting edge"

In other words, there's no shortage of software engineers, there's a shortage
of perfect candidates. If these companies were actually willing to train
people, they'd have a lot fewer problems.

The trend seems to be that software development, like a lot of other
industries, is becoming increasingly winner-take-all, with huge demand for the
very best of the best, and a lot less for anyone else.

~~~
elliottkember
Unfortunately, it's also very easy for an engineer to jump ship after their
training - meaning a very expensive loss of time and effort. Personally, I
think the "shortage" has something to do with increases in job-hopping. If
there were some guarantee that an engineer were going to stick around for a
few years after training, perhaps training new recruits wouldn't seem so
unreasonable.

~~~
lelele
> Unfortunately, it's also very easy for an engineer to jump ship after their
> training - meaning a very expensive loss of time and effort.

Keeping your employees is your job, not theirs. No relationship lasts when one
partner starts neglecting the other and another interested partner comes in.

~~~
zeemonkee
Another reason for job-hobbing, especially among hackers, is that they don't
want to be pigeon-holed into a single job for too long. You can become too
complacent, too specialized, and too tied down to a specific system. After 5
years of maintaining a legacy ERP application how do you get a job working at
the hot new social networking company ?

------
brown9-2
Supply and demand. If you're having trouble finding people with what you're
offering, raise your offer.

~~~
fhars
But that raises the false positive rate of unqualified applicants that are
only in it for the money. Given that such a programmer may have net negative
productivity, underpaying qualified developers migth even be beneficial for
the employers, as they can be sure that the remaining pool of applicants will
only contain persons with a qualification level commensurate with the offered
wages (which can easily be filtered out) and people passionate about
programming. They may loose some of the best that way, but they loose all of
the duds, too. </cynic>

~~~
brown9-2
I'm not sure I'm following this line of argument but if they're intentionally
keeping what they're offering low, they lose the right to complain that they
can't find good enough candidates.

Besides the company on the article already claims to be able to seperate duds
from stars.

"What you're offering" includes more than just money as well n

------
ck2
I find it dubious someone can just decide to be a "software engineer".

You'd have to already have a personal interest in programming and be doing it
on your own as a hobby.

Are there people who seriously just go to college for 4 years and learn coding
like accounting and then just do a 9-5 job?

There are thousands of decent hackers out there, maybe just uptrain.

~~~
amock
There are lots of people who just went to college for four years and then got
jobs writing code. I didn't keep a track of many of them but none of the ones
I know of turned out to be good at it.

~~~
ck2
I'm jealous of anyone who can just "come home from work" and turn off their
brain about coding and do it as a regular job.

I'm constantly thinking of better ways to do something and find myself
rewriting code from years ago. I have at least one "regular job" experience
that taught me such behavior/attitude doesn't work well in a 9-5 business
environment.

~~~
amock
Do you really want to not care about the work you do? It's nice to be able to
come home from work and not worry about work, but I wouldn't want to work on
something that I wasn't interested in.

~~~
nostrademons
Dunno about the OP, but I'm worried about burnout. The road to being "world
class" anything is longer than you can imagine, and it'd suck to get 10 years
in and suddenly reach the point where I can't do this any more, no matter how
much I used to like it, right when I would otherwise be a big success.

It is apparently possible to care about your work and yet still leave it at
work - I know a few people that have managed it. I haven't had a whole lot of
success myself.

------
iwwr
If your pay is not high enough, or your standards are not low enough, you will
find yourself lacking "software engineers". There is no shortage, however,
just an unwillingness to pay the right price (either in money or lack of
skill).

------
anakanemison
The many trading companies in Chicago also offer software developers
interesting problems to solve and attractive compensation.

There's certainly a lot of web work being done in Chicago too, but the trading
companies offer developers the chance to focus on enterprise software systems
and proprietary high-performance trading applications.

~~~
thesis
I agree, my cousin is a software engineer for a financial company in Chicago.
I doubt this other company could afford him.

------
aaronblohowiak
"One good developer can do the work of three or four guys," Annerino said.
"Once a company finds them, they don't let them go."

We might get paid double what they do, but not 3x or 4x. Or maybe I'm not that
good ;)

~~~
patio11
I am gradually coming to the opinion that many 10X developers really do end up
being compensated fairly, but it rarely happens while they are still in the
"developer" box.

It doesn't necessarily just happen from taking on extra risk, either, though
starting your own company is one way to do it. Personal anecdote (I'm not a
10X developer but I know a few things about a few things): I previously built
CRUD apps and made $X, and I turned down a few offers this year to build CRUD
apps for [6 * $X, 10 * $X]. The big thing that changed? Improvement in
marketing myself and better selection of CRUD app genre. (A/B testing isn't
any harder technically than building university registration systems... it is
just worth orders of magnitude more revenue.)

There is a really good post on Quora about this, incidentally:
[http://www.quora.com/10X-Engineers/Why-are-the-best-
programm...](http://www.quora.com/10X-Engineers/Why-are-the-best-
programmers-10x-more-productive-than-mediocre-programmers-but-paid-only-3x-as-
much-Why-aren-t-they-paid-10x-as-much)

~~~
nostrademons
That was one of the things that really surprised me about the real world: that
big advancement only comes from big lateral jumps. Different companies,
different projects, different markets, or different customers.

There's this model of the world we're taught as schoolkids - at least where I
grew up - where you work hard at something, do as your told, and slowly but
surely you rise up. And maybe at one level it's true, but it's _very_ slow,
and you'll never become the sort of success you read about in the paper that
way.

Instead, I've found that what usually happens is that you join an organization
because you meet some minimum skill baseline that they're looking for. And
then as you practice and learn from the people around you, you end up picking
up a bunch of other skills and getting better at your job. But the people
around you generally won't notice. First impressions usually pigeonhole you
into a general category, and then people are blind to gradual changes.

So to reap the rewards of everything you've learned, you have to expose
yourself to new people. Jump ship, and suddenly you seem really valuable to
them, because all those skills you've picked up which your current
organization takes for granted are new and useful.

There's a leverage effect as well: people try to work with others of roughly
the same level. If you're diligent about practicing, you'll go from being
(hopefully) near the bottom of your team to the top of it. If you then repeat
the process, your new teammates better be higher skilled still, and so your
team as a whole can tackle more ambitious problems.

~~~
Dirk_R
Good post!

Unfortunately, it also works the other way: somebody works in a company until
they recognize how useless that person is, and before he or she gets fired
they jump ship to a new company where they are greeted with open arms as the
new guy/gal that will fix everything. Lather, rinse, repeat. If they are smart
they use the same argument you made to actually rise in the corporate
hierarchy with each step. This allows them to beat the Peter principle and
rise above their level of incompetence, leading us to totally incompetent
people at the top of the hierarchy.

So if you see somebody who changed jobs every couple years, be careful.

------
jwh
"The growing use of Ruby on Rails, a Web application framework, in recent
years has created developer shortages everywhere, said Rails creator David
Heinemeier Hansson...Many developers who were trained in Java or PHP simply
need to be retrained, he said."

=== "Hmm, PHP and Java are out, so what does someone with vested interests in
Rails think I should learn? Hang on, Rails isn't mentioned as out of date by
its creator so I'll retrain in that!"

I can't remember the exact articles from HN but there were two recently: one
was about a sysadmin that went for an interview at Facebook or Google and was
surprised that they wanted knowledge on low-level, performance critical
features rather than advanced bash programming; another was an example of why
it's often more cost effective to get twice the performance out of one server
(by investing more development time i.e. C/C++ over PHP) rather than buying
another server.

YMMV but I switched from PHP to C++ for my personal web projects and haven't
noticed it taking me exponentially more time to develop.

------
KevinMS
I'm not seeing anything like this, or maybe I'm just being forced out of the
industry.

I get screened out by HR because I don't have the words "computer science" on
my resume, even though I've been programming for the past 25 years, 15
professionally.

If I get this far I get a phone screen where I'm completely fluent in anything
they are talking about, but I don't have years of scrum experience, or I
didn't come from an "agile" shop, or I prefer the alternatives to Rspec and
cucumber, or whatever the new hotness is.

Then I get screened out by the developer interview because I'm not in my 20's
and probably can't relate to their hip young "culture" and they don't know
what to make of me, especially in the Ruby world - but Perl is not as bad and
I'll probably just give up on Ruby and go back to Perl.

Then I get flooded with calls from head hunters, all for the same one or two
jobs and its always a complete waste of time.

Its frustrating to read articles like this. Are they true or just compete
fabricated bullshit as a prelude to increasing H1B quotas?

------
gunmetal
At most companies the hiring process is severely broken. They are being too
careful and are so scared to train the right person.

------
Unosolo
What I can see is that most companies and especially these where software
developement is viewed as a necessary evil rather than a business model are
very bad at telling bad candidates from the good ones and don't really hire
based on merit. They might believe they do, but the outcome of the hiring
process is usually erratic as far as it comes to the actual abilities.

However once a developer is hired even a company with a flaky interviewing
process tends to recognise the actual worth of a given programmer fairly
quickly. Then an intresting thing happens - even though the developers might
be explicitly treated as a commodity resource the very same managers would go
far beyond the declared rules to retain the best: regularly up the package,
give a lot of slack, turn a blind eye on minor "breaches of established
rules".

As a result most good programmers I know after about five years in the
industry end up enjoying a package far in excess of what is being declared on
the job sites.

It's not uncommon for a hiring manager to moan about the lack of good
candidates whilst paying the best developers on their team 50% more than they
advertise when publishing the same job. What the management don't seem to
realise is that just about every other company does that: actually paying more
to the existing programmers than the declared range they would be prepared to
pay for the new hires.

As a result after a while there is little or no incentive for good developers
to put their CV's on a market. They're well above the market rates.

As a workaround sometimes companies hire good programmers as independent
contractors and carry on extending the contracts forever - paying double or
triple the rate they would pay their permanent staff. It's a funny game when
becoming "an independent" consultant with a single customer is one of the few
options for an experienced developer to help company management justify paying
them the true market worth.

There is no lack of good programmers, they just cost much more than most
companies are prepared to admit.

------
bugsy
So the article says the shortage is of "highly trained" workers only.

And a big problem is you can't lure them away since their current employer
might give them a counter offer, and there's apparently no way to deal with
that, it's the end of the world.

And the solution to all this is "a six-month retraining program for displaced
workers. Participants, who must be unemployed, will come away with skills in
one of eight tech-training areas" which trains people with no programming
skills how to become "highly skilled" in only six months. So highly skilled
that they will kick the butts of the guy with the 15 years useless C, C++,
Perl and PHP experience because what we really need is Ruby on Rails.

------
geebee
I'm a little suspicious when I read a line like this:

""I feel we're at 100 percent employment" for highly qualified software
engineers in Chicago, said Zach Kaplan, chief executive at Chicago-based
Inventables, an online marketplace for materials and technology. The company
gets flooded with applications when it posts nontechnical jobs, but it
struggles to find software engineers."

Mr. Kaplan hasn't quite defined a highly qualified software engineer as one
who has a job, but he's awfully close to saying that "100% of the software
engineers who have jobs, have jobs."

If "highly qualified" software engineers have no trouble finding jobs, I
suspect I could make an equally ambiguous argument that "highly desirable"
software companies have no trouble finding software engineers. This "shortage"
goes both ways.

------
thr0w4w4y
A related question:

What is the current hourly rate that a jr software engineer can expect?

I might be starting to work remotely for a company in the Boston area but have
no idea what the current salary situation for freelancers in the US is like

~~~
patio11
All over the map (sorry, bad pun). It depends on where you live, who you work
for, what technologies you work in, and (more than any of the above) your
skill in marketing yourself to the right clients.

I have personal knowledge of folks who do software development at a range of
price points between $25 and $200.

~~~
ido
I assume that rate is per hour?

For what's it worth, in Western Europe I'd say 75 euros/hour ±50% is what you
can expect for usual "Enterprise" fare.

------
pedanticfreak
I wonder if the dismal housing market and the rising demand for software will
finally force corporations to figure out how to manage remote developers.

It's not like wages for the common programmer are going to keep skyrocketing
until companies are buying your house to relocate your family.

~~~
zeemonkee
Exactly. I get a lot of job offers which insist on me moving to London. Since
I have (for a number of personal and practical reasons) no intention of ever
moving to London, I won't work for them, period.

On the other hand, I would be readily available as a remote worker - in the
same country. So what's exactly stopping these companies ?

------
GooseFlyFox
Only if you persist in looking in the wrong places.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Cool. Can you suggest where the right places are? My past searches for decent
software developers have been long, arduous and time-consuming, and I'd love
to know where all the good developers are hiding.

Out of interest, how many developers have you employed? I'm sure it's not
entirely relevant, but I'd be interested to know how you found them.

~~~
tomjen3
There are plenty of people here on hn who complaint about how hard it is to
get people willing to hire them remote. You could start there.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
There are plenty of software development jobs where remote working simply
isn't possible. Just as a single, simple example, there are very few
neighborhoods that would tolerate an 18 foot high-speed radar antenna on a
roof, and even fewer that would then have suitable objects to watch.

~~~
tomjen3
I am pretty sure they once said the same thing about people not working in
suits. If your company can't make it work, you shouldn't be surprised if you
have to look for a new job because your competitors can get people you aren't
able to hire.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
I've come back to this comment several times in the past few hours, trying to
write something to help you understand, yet at the same time, not sounding
condescending, and I've decided I can't do it. You simply can't connect
remotely to the kit we use - you have to be in the office for at least a few
days a week.

Other work we do involves data that we are contractually obliged not to allow
out of the building, and still other work involves teams of people working
together on algorithm design and implementation. We've tried, but the existing
on-line tools are simply not up to it. We've even worked at trying to create
better on-line tools, and come to the conclusion that it's currently not worth
it.

But you're a CS student, so no doubt you'll be working on solving the problems
we have, and by the time you're in the work place you'll have the solution
ready. We look forward with eager anticipation to being able to have people
work remotely. Getting more and better work for the same pay would be a great
business opportunity, which is why we still invest around 10% of our annual
budget trying to make it happen.

