I don't think, excluding some scenarios at well-disciplined firms that anything like "engineering" exists in programming.
The processes surrounding development often strike me as haphazard, cargo-cult like behavior, and entirely subjective.
Regarding people not remembering stuff--yeah that's probably true, but there's a lot a typical developer has to jump between--do people really get to "specialize" in JUST like writing Java CRUD or something anymore?
Feel like there's always also troubleshooting some Docker thing, some cloud provider, some build system, some pipeline etc etc.
When there's no stability and moving targets, maybe you're not incentivized to be a "specialist" on a language or whatever (this might also be painting oneself into a corner for their career) given how easy information retrieval is today?
RE: the scenario
Is this real?
I've never been employed at any sort of fancy role but I've never encountered this kind of thing (publicly) involving me, and I generally get on well with others, so I assume I'd have seen it by now
I'm sure plenty of programmers pasta from LLMs constantly now, but I've never had bizarre low-hanging "what do" inquiries.
Most people have some discipline and structure when asking questions:
- I'm attempting to integrate library x into the project
- I've done the following and the build fails in CI with $ERROR
- I've checked x, y, z
- Have you encountered something similar?
This indicates some level of actual understanding of how things work, or prerequisite research prior to asking.
Also, where can I get a job where they hire people this minimally competent? I'm seriously burnt out and this seems like a nice change of pace.
I've worked mostly in Silicon Valley. At bigger tech companies I found that the minimum level of competence is a bit higher, maybe because of the aggressive stack ranking and PIP/firing pressure. At small companies either low bar is very high, or it's nonexistent, I've seen both.
The weird thing is, at a high performing organization it's relatively straight forward to get a job: be very good at what you do and practice for their hiring process.
At a dysfunctional organization there's not really a way to get hired (apart from an internal recommendation). This is almost by definition, as their hiring process doesn't measure anything reliably. Being physically attractive or charismatic helps a lot.
Actually this gives me an interesting idea, can you measure the quality of an engineering team purely by how ugly they are? My hypothesis is that a dysfunctional team has a low ability to measure aptitude, and so things like physical attractiveness will have a higher impact on hiring decisions.
I don't blame you for wanting a nice stint in one of these dysfunctional companies, I think I could have worked an hour a week and been praised as a top performer at the ones I unfortunately spent time at. I think if you do go this direction you should get 2 or 3 such jobs. It's only a tiny bit more work, and these companies tend to just stop existing some random Tuesday.
I too have been nothing short of perpetually shocked at how dysfunctional a large part of the software industry is. This is why I'm never able to take the "engineering" moniker seriously when people talk about programming.
The hiring process is so maddening and I'm glad you said that.
I get that resume scanning and what not is fully automated and makes no allusion to being a useful nor functioning process, but I'm perpetually amazed as I submit resumes (where I meet or exceed every "requirement") to companies I know are not well-functioning organizations only to be rewarded with an automated rejection email minutes later.
The processes surrounding development often strike me as haphazard, cargo-cult like behavior, and entirely subjective.
Regarding people not remembering stuff--yeah that's probably true, but there's a lot a typical developer has to jump between--do people really get to "specialize" in JUST like writing Java CRUD or something anymore?
Feel like there's always also troubleshooting some Docker thing, some cloud provider, some build system, some pipeline etc etc.
When there's no stability and moving targets, maybe you're not incentivized to be a "specialist" on a language or whatever (this might also be painting oneself into a corner for their career) given how easy information retrieval is today?
RE: the scenario
Is this real?
I've never been employed at any sort of fancy role but I've never encountered this kind of thing (publicly) involving me, and I generally get on well with others, so I assume I'd have seen it by now
I'm sure plenty of programmers pasta from LLMs constantly now, but I've never had bizarre low-hanging "what do" inquiries.
Most people have some discipline and structure when asking questions:
- I'm attempting to integrate library x into the project - I've done the following and the build fails in CI with $ERROR - I've checked x, y, z - Have you encountered something similar?
This indicates some level of actual understanding of how things work, or prerequisite research prior to asking.
Also, where can I get a job where they hire people this minimally competent? I'm seriously burnt out and this seems like a nice change of pace.
I'm totally serious with that question.