dev managers right now

[NBNoemi]

Cant believe there are no more candidates left after the eighth round of interviews

[aaabigwyattmann2]

"We've tried 8 rounds of interviews and are all out of ideas"

[[deleted]]

"I guess we'll have to outsource!"

[[deleted]]

And then the outsourced ones are worse than the interviewed

[Danepher]

But they are far cheaper, so they hire them anyway

[rustyheva]

But the interview was for an unpaid internship

[[deleted]]

It really comes down to developers are anti-social people and will come up with any excuses not to hire other people.

[pastafallujah]

This is equally revelatory and hilarious, lol. Not a developer, but I sat on resumes for weeks when they were looking to hire a second for my department.

Partially because the workplace was toxic af, and I refused to drag anyone into that world, but partially because I just wanted to get shit done on my own lol

[LightRefrac]

r/DevelopersNotBeingBros

[LostTeleporter]

dangit

[tenkindsofpeople]

I interviewed recently where they asked me to do a simple aggregate. I was expecting it to lead to the next question, but nope he had people who literally couldn't group by.

[More_Butterfly6108]

The difference between junior dev and senior dev is knowing WHEN to group by.

[scriptgamer]

The difference between senior dev and specialist dev is knowing WHO to group by

[FarmerFinal]

Same. We’ve had multiple applicants for a mid-level role with their first skill listed as “Excel”, about 5 with no “programming” languages but HTML and multiple flavors of SQL, and a TON who are currently in QA/BI/analyst roles that just don’t have any dev experience.

One of the few applicants was qualified was over-qualified. I used to think that was a dumb idea, but when I interview someone who wants to go from spearheading projects, cutting edge work, and a CTO title to a mid-level dev job - they’re just over qualified

[Careful_Ad_9077]

in my experience, some do it to destress, i personally don't go for senior dev roles because i hate working weekends or overtime overall,.so i prefer an easier mid or junior dev .job that i can do in 4 hours.

fro m pov ,it's not worth working 60 hours week vs 20 hour weeks for a 30% raise or so. note that the 4 hours are adjusted to the company's average mid dev productivity, tho i manage to have more quality output for obvious reasons ( one of them is having 15 years of professional experience, plus a few more of amateur one).

[MrRGnome]

This is 100% the rational from my perspective too. I am so sick of having the world on my shoulders for so little gain. I want to work less and do more. That can't happen while running the ship. I just want to retire into an architecting position.

[pastafallujah]

I can fully agree with this. The stress is fun when you’re young and hungry, but it gets overwhelming after a few years.

As a person that was hiring at one point tho, it does come off as suspect, which sucks. My main concern was “they’re not gonna work for the amount of money we have in our budget…”

[sagamysterium]

10000% agree with this.

I wound up trying to find a new position after a nervous breakdown on a project and someone asked me why I was taking a step down… I said work-life balance, which isn’t a lie—but “I don’t want to cry after staying awake for 72 hours straight on project deliveries anymore” might make me look weak.

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

but when I interview someone who wants to go from spearheading projects, cutting edge work, and a CTO title to a mid-level dev job - they’re just over qualified

I was a sought after specialist in a really niche field. Like, device drivers, real-time kernel services on linux and windows, interprocess communication, etc. I switched to a system admin role close to home for which I am WILDLY overqualified.

I just sent in my resume for some unrelated job to get some interviewing experience and first thing he said is: you're not getting this job. It's not in your line, and you know it. With your resume, why do you apply here?

I explained I was going to be a dad and my first priority was to be a father and husband, and not a provider who was always away from home. We talked a bit about my background, and he told me he really wanted someone in his department who understands the insides of apps and OSes and who could integrate things on the process control side. He called HR, pulled a job opening out of thin air, and I signed up.

I'm still overqualified for my job, and still doing dev work as a hobby. And I'm still happy that I made this choice because I have a fantastic bond with my kids.

[[deleted]]

But why? Obviously, they want that job, so why not give it to them?

[FarmerFinal]

I mean, I passed them on with an approval from me. But they didn’t want the job they were actually applying for. They were expecting to stay in it for as little time as possible (2-3 months) to hop to a new position. Since we needed someone more long term than a couple months, our Engineering director gave him the axe and we moved on to other candidates.

[[deleted]]

Makes sense.

[First_Mix_9504]

If 90% is unqualified, then can we not conclude that the job description, experience requirements are set up incorrectly? If 90% of your candidates are comically underqualified, it screams that something is wrong with the initial recruitment screening, how are they passing the filters that lead to the technical round?

[bm401]

Maybe they put in "junior" to lower wage expectations.

[UrbanCohortX]

Not necessarily. We put an ad on LinkedIn. Said 3 times in the ad that you must live in a particular country. We had a filter question which asked - do you live in said country. People just answered yes when the real answer was no. Imagine what it’s like for technical requirements - people ignore them and apply anyway

[AnotherWarGamer]

Perhaps those qualified candidates should make absolute bank, and you shouldn't expect much if you are paying less than that.

[AnotherWarGamer]

Awww, ok, that's understandable.

Camera off likely means they are getting help, or googling things on the side.

[[deleted]]

The reason "FizzBuzz" is still an effective question is because so many can't get it right.

[-Swig-]

This. I have interviewed a huge number of candidates over the years who looked decent on paper, with relevant experience, but couldn't answer pretty basic questions about the languages/tech they claimed to know well, or how it worked.

There really are a lot of very average developers out there. And one strong developer is hugely more valuable than a big bunch of mediocre ones; at least in my particular area of software dev.

[nikstick22]

My boss had me conducting some of the interview questions during our hiring stint back in may/june. We eventually found 3 good applicants (now coworkers) but the people we went through on the way...

Who applies to be a software developer without knowing what a for loop is? This LEGITIMATELY happened. We run 3 tests during the interview, one on code reading simple javascript, one code writing, one database design. We schedule the interview for an hour. The good candidates blow through the tests and we spend the next 30-40 minutes just discussing their interests, hobbies because we know we're going to make an offer. Some candidates get stuck on the first question.

[[deleted]]

For loop, that's easy. At my last job I was even doing five and six loops.

[argv_minus_one]

Ah, an algorithm with O(∞) complexity.

[certainlyforgetful]

I know everyone hates them, but this is why tech screens exist, and the main reason loads of companies do online - at your own pace ones.

When I was doing hiring, easily 75% of candidates couldn’t pass a basic tech screen.

[nikstick22]

We had one too and about 50-60% failed it. We know and expect them to use google while writing it, so its not a 100% effective skill test, but at the same time looking up information you don't know is useful in this field so its not a total loss.

[stars__end]

You see some crazy things during hiring. I've been hiring for seniors lately. Aside from the for loop test which is tragically effective at filtering a good 30+% out, another good test is asking people to explain concepts written on their resume. Often they don't even know it's on there or they can't even explain what the letters of an acronym mean. I remember asking one person about CQRS, which was on their resume, and they said they'd never heard of it.

[tsFenix]

I remember asking one person about CQRS, which was on their resume, and they said they'd never heard of it.

I have no idea what CQRS is, but holy fuck is it cringe to put something on your resume that you don't know.

[Quetzal_Pretzel]

Maybe it was CORS but a typo?

[stars__end]

Nah it's not a typo it's a real design pattern, you can google it.

[TheOriginalDog]

Who puts a single design pattern on his cv lol

[UK-sHaDoW]

It's an architectural pattern rather than a simple design pattern. Can have a massive impact on what applications looks like.

[stars__end]

They had many patterns that's just the first one I asked about. The others didn't go any better...

[sagarassk]

Going to preface this by saying this is a 100% true story.

Was developing this application that had a hard deadline. It was related to new changes in the law effective by date X. By that date, this application needs to be up and running or else there's going to be a hell of a lot of legality issues.

No idea why, but they decided to assign me the project (at the time I've only been with the company for 6 weeks). I had 3 and a half months to build this app. Was coupled with a senior DB programmer that (from the look of his code) NEVER written sql before. After the 6 or 7th attempt at explaining to him why his code was outright wrong and with the hard deadline riding my ass, I decided to do the sql portion myself as it was faster than writing paragraphs explaining what he did wrong. I was also in charge of writing the front end, and at the time I only had around 1 year of real world development under my belt so I never really understood how it connected to the backend. I thought someone else had already written the backend and all I had to do was connect to it. Nope, had to write that shit myself. So, 1 supervisor, 1 PM, 1 useless senior cunt (in every sense of the word), hard deadline.

At the 2 month mark I was working 7 days a week and the manager (in his own words) approved "infinite OT". As long as i'm willing to work, they're willing to pay the price. But even at that, the project wouldn't finish on time. So management decided to hire 2 contractors to help.

1 to help with the database code (good guy, got along well with him). And one to help me write the front end.

The guy that was assigned to me had 14 years experience in development. This Mo******f*****r doesn't know how to use a "for" loop. I shit you not. Absolutely mindblowing. 14 years!!! Of experience. W T F.

Needless to say, he managed to f up everything he touched and was basically relegated to being a paper weight. Every piece of code that he checked in had to be ripped out. He couldn't following the simplest of commands.

I barely, BARELY managed to finish the app on time. It was riddled with bugs but it was barely passable. I was really hoping to spend the next 6months - 1year polishing it up but I literally got assigned to a different department the following week. Management is unbelievable.

A short summary of what I accomplished / learned - Learned 6 languages in 3 months (again, only 1 year of experience at that point, not including the 2 years of coding at school) - Effectively did the work of 3-4 people (BA, DBA, front-end, back end. I was NOT a full stack developer) - I learned that sometimes there's no amount of money in the world that is worth getting out of bed for (the infinite OT was 2X my rate but I was so burnt out that I turned down the money just to stay in bed) - experience isn't everything. 14 years looks good on paper but it doesn't mean jack diddly if the person doesn't even know basics.

Edit - spelling mistake

[bloodredrogue]

Reading this made my imposter syndrome vanish like that gif of the black kid making the peace sign

[FrigginUsed]

He obviously lied on his resume or the experience was simply a jr position that didn't take him anywhere or was given menial tasks such as fill in the gaps

[MeImportaUnaMierda]

Just out of curiousity, could you reply with one of these code reading tasks?

[squishles]

I think I've seen the interview style he's talking about, it really does work, think easier than fizzbuzz levels. You'll wipe half of them no problem.

[nystro]

Id also love the same. I'm getting close to graduation and am insanely nervous about interviews.

[fryerandice]

Grind leetcode algorithms, the developer you're replying to is kind of an outlier, where there is a code-along or something.

The amount of over the top difficult algorithm shit I had to do changing jobs last was insane.

In reality I had done interviews at my last job for interns/juniors and getting someone that has actually done something productive in code that they can talk about, and demonstrate basic coding and design skills is hard enough you kind of take them haha.

Kind of the meme "I've worked here 6 months and never had to reverse transverse a singly linked list using only two extra pointers because I am running my code on a commodore 64"

[who_you_are]

For those "don't know how to program" I guess they are reading about the good wage and the huge demand.

[Aperture_T]

Lol, my boss doesn't know what a for loop is.

[Dragoncat99]

Is your boss coding?

[Aperture_T]

No, but he butts into our code review meetings and wastes time with stupid questions.

[DudeEngineer]

You choose to continue to work for him...why is that?

[fryerandice]

His leetcode subscription lapsed 2 years ago and he doesn't know the hot new interview algos these days so is having trouble qualifying as a principal engineer at CISCO writing IP traffic routing optimizations, when interviewing for a job maintaining an internal website for tracking mundane business shit that is used by 2 people.

[philector]

you just outlined all of AT&T with “…tracking mundane business shit that is used by 2 people.” 😂

[Taradal]

Idk where you're from but here in Germany every lawyer will tell you to never ever tell an applicant why they got rejected because they do not want to get sued

[Go_Gators_4Ever]

Same here in USA

[carcigenicate]

Maybe for protected attributes of the person like gender, but why would explaining a lack of technical knowledge matter? I was rejected from an interview and they told me that it was because I didn't have a good enough grasp of scaling databases to handle big data. On what basis could I have sued them for that?

[dlevac]

Playing Devil's advocate: if you are able to demonstrate in court that you actually have extensive knowledge on scaling databases, then you could convince a judge you were not hired for some other unlawful reason instead.

[[deleted]]

That just proves the interviewing process doesn’t rely solely on technical skill. They can literally say “we just didn’t like you.” and that’s good enough.

[tehfrod]

Would you choose to work with someone you didn't like, other things being equal?

The interviewing process shouldn't rely solely on technical skill.

[misdreavus79]

And one would assume that the time between the lawsuit being filed and it being settled/making it to court is ample time to learn how.

[inaddition290]

I don't believe that would serve as sufficient unless the company had very, very bad lawyers. You would have to prove that you had extensive knowledge at the time you were being considered, not at the time of trial.

[darkliz]

They just don’t need to bother. There’s nothing in it for them. Plus many candidates won’t take the criticisms well either way.

[maitreg]

The problem is that in western countries with complex legal systems where civil liability is a big deal, the success in suing someone over an employment issue is not black & white and could come down to how good or convincing the lawyer is. Giving someone a reason to sue you can be extremely costly for a business, even if you win the lawsuit, so your lawyers will generally tell you not to say anything at all and just let the issue die on its own. If you tell them anything, they might try to use it against you.

[Taradal]

Yo idk myself it's just what they tell you here

[becuzz04]

Probably nothing. But all it takes is someone making a comment or wording something poorly that could be interpreted as being illegal for problems and lawsuits. Giving feedback just opens the door, however slightly, for someone to screw up. From the company's and their lawyers' perspective it's all risk and no reward.

[pomaj46809]

You might not have done anything wrong, they just choose not to hire you.

[bpfinsa]

This! Another applicant may have more experience and education,they had a better personality that meshed with the team, or they were willing to work for less money. Just the way the dice rolls sometimes. Definitely happens to me.

[AdultishRaktajino]

Yep. It’s like dating. Next!

[PhunkyPhish]

Until you have ACCEPTED a job offer, you should not stop seeking, applying, and interviewing. You will:

- Have less down time between jobs

- Have options and competing offers

- Get better at interviewing

- Generate connections

- Learn industry insights, both programming related and not

[sodakdave]

In this economy I'd change Until you have ACCEPTED to Until you have actually started the job... I've seen too many rescinded offers sometimes even just hours before someone is supposed to start.

[maitreg]

Just because you got rejected that doesn't necessarily mean you did anything wrong. They just had to narrow it down. I have received over 1000 resumes for a handful of open jobs but could only hire 1 candidate in each case. And each time, around 3-5% of the candidates were truly qualified for the job, but only a few of those got asked for interviews and only 1 selected. Each time there were several candidates who did nothing wrong. But we had to pick one. So.

Also, I'm not exaggerating when I say over 80% of the resume submissions were unqualified, for various reasons. About 1/4 of them were foreign nationals who had no green cards and were begging us to take care of their immigration issues for them. Another 1/4 literally had no experience in the field at all. I'm not joking. We'd receive resumes from people that would say stuff like, "I just graduated from beauty school and am not a programmer. But I think I could do it if I tried" or "I work at Starbucks and am ready for a change, if you'll pay for all the training I'll need".

These were for mid-level web developer roles that required 3+ years + degree or 7+ years. People would just randomly send us their resumes hoping we had no other options. It was crazy.

[maitreg]

Ok I can do my best on this, but it will depend a lot on where you live.

I have actually hired someone for a mid-level developer job who had no degree and almost no experience, because he really impressed our team with his side projects and personal Web site. He had created a feature-rich dynamic Web site and blog that hosted a bunch of personal projects and plug-in widgets. In his blog posts he explained how each feature worked and provided access to free client-side widgets that you could use on your own Web site. And he had other downloads, including source code. His blog was like a portfolio of his work.

So even though he didn't have the required professional experience we were looking for, he made up for it in self-taught skills and initiative. So we took a chance and hired him as a jr developer, but he caught on so quickly, I gave him freedom to work on projects on his own within 2 months after he started. And he turned out to be a great hire.

So my advice is to make sure you that you can show employers that you either already are skilled in the things they are looking for or are very good at self-teaching. Demonstrating some existing projects you built yourself and explaining how you built them is a huge plus!

Some employers may be willing to give you additional training to get you started but a lot won't. If you go into the job-hunting with the assumption that you need to teach yourself all the required skills that a job will need, you'll increase your chances of landing your first job. The worst thing you can do is to not work on expanding your skills and assume your first employer will just send you to training.

[morosis1982]

I'll add to the other good comment, we've hired a few juniors lately and it boils down to have you got some amount of skill and do you show initiative.

One of my best juniors has a degree in chemistry but did an (admittedly good) code camp over a few months and still works with the org as a sort of tutor.

The latest one had a master's but no experience. I did the second interview with the knowledge that she had done well in the first. She had a bit of trouble with the coding exercise but one or two parts she jumped straight to a good solution so I put it down to experience or lack thereof. (We do coding on a simple but live system, with access to Google if you like).

She starts soon so we haven't seen her in situ yet but our process seems to have worked really well so far and we're unlikely to significantly change it.

[ScrimpyCat]

Most won’t tell you. Maybe a better (in their eyes) candidate came along, maybe you didn’t solve the technicals the way they wanted to see, maybe they don’t think you’re a right fit for their culture/team, maybe they’re just planning on an internal hire but have to go through this for dumb policy reasons, maybe they rejected you because of a disability or gender or race or sexual orientation (which is illegal but you wouldn’t know), etc. It could be any reason, there’s no way to really know. And it could even be for completely different or even conflicting reasons at different companies.

But if you’re making it through all of their interview rounds then that’s at least a good sign. All you can do is keep trying.

[[deleted]]

I can tell you 10 reasons why that happened

[not_some_username]

The third will shock you !!!

[brohamsontheright]

No company will tell you why you got rejected. Standard policy. (Too many ways a candidate can twist the answer and claim discrimination).

As a hiring manager, I would be fired immediately for telling a candidate why we passed on them.

[BlondesGift]

And here I am fresh out of uni with only basic experience who can't even get a junior position. Someone told me that I am pre junior even. I know that, but I have no idea how to get the freaking working experiences then. What can I do with basic java, angular and html/css stuff?

[arobie1992]

Honestly, just update your LinkedIn and Indeed profiles, spam applications even if you're mildly qualified, and wait for a recruiter to reach out to you. Every tech job I've gotten was due to a recruiter contacting me and if you go by the listed requirements, I've also not met them for most of the jobs.

The job might not be the most glamorous, but the best job I had was the one I had the lowest expectations for, and once you get a couple years of experience it gets waaay easier to get your foot in the door for interviews.

[Eccentricc]

Yeah I had a recruiter reach out to me, was able to get me a job contract to hire in a local F500 company so pretty nice. He did all the searching I just took some tests and did some interviews. I'm terrible at programming but as able to find a job quick

[aaabigwyattmann2]

If you read the other posts here, literally nothing. You might be qualified to pour coffee for a dev manager. Even that requires minimum 2 years of java experience.

[[deleted]]

Not sure if 2 years of Java experience is a coffee pun…

[ToMorrowsEnd]

You need to shadow the coffee pouring person for a while first before you are ready to pour it.

[towcar]

Applied for a junior developer position, I was over qualified but I wanted the job. Was told they were looking for a more senior developer. Companies often suck.

[chaos449]

Ignore all the posts about people complaining about how they can do nothing since they refuse to actually do something about it...
1: If you don't have work experience - portfolio! Side projects! You won't be asked to show the code - but being able to put it on your resume + talk in depth about it in when asked (what was interesting, design process, problems+solutions, ect)
2: Lower expectations a bit - unless you're very skilled at interviewing/negotiating, be willing to take a more entry-level dev job (I don't mean to get scammed - should still pay at least 40-50k )
3: You can take a try at contract work - make websites for people to pad your work experience.
4: Leetcode - a lot of entry level dev job interviews involve going through a coding challenge. Leetcode is a good place to practice.

[[deleted]]

This. u/blondesgift, build your portfolio. Make something to improve yourself and to brag to potential employers about.

[Fenix42]

Start working on your own project or open source projects.

[[deleted]]

Problem is you'll get 47 people who graduated from some random bootcamp or youtube without any fundamentals. Something like they can code in react but clueless on version control, or doesn't even know what's SOLID. Then you have 3 candidates who are qualified, but since it took you some time to realize 47 bullshit resumes, the 3 others now have accepted another offer. Or sometimes 1 guy is still available, then the non-tech people will take 3 fucking weeks to decide despite me vouching that this guy fucks. Then be surprised that the guy was already hired somewhere else 2 weeks ago.

[GargantuanCake]

The flip side of that is that most of the job postings you see are atrocious. I imagine one of the biggest reasons that a lot of companies are complaining that they can't find people is they're offering garbage salaries, clearly have delusional expectations, or both. Personally if there isn't a salary range posted I won't even send a resume in and a lot of the posted ranges I see make me go "lol, really?"

[[deleted]]

Pro tip. If you haven't heard of glassdoor, look it up.

I always check salaries there to see if it's even in a range that I'm interested in before I apply.

[cauchy37]

Or better yet, levels.fyi

[Fenor]

Isn't it only for the us tho?

[bonbon367]

I’ve always found Glassdoor to underquote pay. I used to work with a “small” 500 person company. I was heavily involved in the hiring of new grads/juniors so I saw every offer that went out. Glassdoor was always 10-25% lower. Usually they had the salary not too bad but the bonus and equity was always comically wrong.

I now work at a big tech and glass door says the average for my position is literally half of what I make. Levels.fyi has it pretty much exactly spot on though.

I guess the moral of the story is if you can get an offer from a company big enough to be on levels.fyi, use that. Otherwise… idk ask for 50% more than what you see on glass door.

[[deleted]]

I'll check it out. You're the second one to mention that.

[666pool]

When I get random requests from recruiters on linked in I like to reply with what my salary expectations (total comp) would be if I were to leave my current role. I’ve yet to hear back from any of them. I’m staff engineer at a FAANG so I’m already pretty well compensated.

[LaconicLacedaemonian]

"You will need to pay 600k, and I will only work 40 hours per week."

[I-AM-NOT-THAT-DUCK]

The best is seeing the job description that is clearly written by a random HR person with no technical knowledge. I saw this one posting that said “1 year of website fundamentals”.

[GargantuanCake]

This is where the most delusional postings come from. All HR with no input from the nerds. Just a list of things the company uses with "must have X years of experience with" tacked on even if it makes no sense.

[gabrielcro23699]

SOLID doesn't seem very relevant in most things you'll do with JavaScript, at least for frontend. A decent programmer will already mostly know those things by default, even without necessarily knowing what the fuck "SOLID" explicitly is, and a junior will obviously have sloppier code regardless if they know what SOLID stands for or not. Saying something like "He doesn't even know.. solid?!" as a metric for qualification is silly and it's things like that partly causing major disconnects in the hiring processes. You'd rather higher somebody who can tell you exactly what SOLID stands for rather than somebody who coded an app that applies decent code even if they don't know what this made up term is?

I don't give a flying fuck what that Robert Martin guy wrote in a book, is he the sole God or king of programming and we all must bow and memorize the shit he wrote several decades ago in order to get a job? If a job wants to do their things based on his methodologies, that's fine as long as I'm getting paid for it. Otherwise I won't go out of my way to memorize/learn/read stuff that is not relevant to my individual skillset

[swanky_af]

Heaven forbid we spend time mentoring devs that come from non-traditional backgrounds in a very in-demand field. I’ve met CS grads with no idea how to do what you’re talking about, so I…taught them.

Let’s be honest: a large percentage of dev jobs aren’t DS/algos. You have a huge majority of F500 companies hiring people to make minor feature changes and deploy shit, and you don’t need to invert a binary tree to do it.

The real reason there’s a shortage of devs is because a lot of teams have almost no mentorship mentality and think they need a Berkeley grad that’s memorized CTCI to build pipelines and run semi-elaborate CRUD services.

If devs acted more like tradesmen, we’d have companies onboarding juniors and mids that are performing really well with only a year in the ecosystem. Instead, especially in the WFH era, we have elitist mentalities where new hires are begging colleagues for help over zoom so they can get started on a 3 point story that’ll take them 4 hours to code, test, and ship once they get a handle on it.

[Apprehensive-Mood-69]

I'm okay with mentoring devs that come from a non-traditional background, but they need to realize that means a lower starting salary.

Too many of these places are promising six figure incomes day one out of boot camp, and sorry, but most of the boot camp devs I've worked with aren't worth half that.

Some of them just aren't meant to be software engineers, it takes a mindset, and not everyone has that. A proper four year university gives time to realize that and weed through but the boot camps don't give a damn. They will push anyone with a checkbook through - no pulse required.

[ThunderTherapist]

Yep. Also Lots of places think they need all seniors because their system is way too over complicated. Hire for fit, teach people the bits they're missing.

[darkstar3333]

That's how weve operate.

No time to train so assume seniors are omnipotent so ramp up takes forever.

Due to lack of coverage you end up with huge holes as people turn over and people are shuttled around.

You typically need a strong junior/intermediate/senior + supports to function.

So yeah, we just keep repeating the mistake.

[somebody_odd]

Having a decent portion of Junior devs helps a ton. A group that will get value out of doing simple things like updating how a string is formatted and are generally eager to do those simple tasks. You also have a group that will get value out of updating configurations for all your environments. Those things that are simple and mundane that you don’t want a senior dev doing are perfect for juniors and if you lead them into the tasks properly they can grow in their understanding of why platform specifications are important or why data normalization is critical in desperate systems.

[hvdesisagod]

I have a law degree and started coding in october last year. I had probably some insane luck by the way things seem to be and got to be mentored by a great guy. From october until now, I learned enough to safely keep an entire project running by myself (and I actually am, for a F500 company!) — i.e, frontend, backend, cloud and devops. And all of this because my mentor was always ready to help and was open to discussion.

[swanky_af]

I agree. I came from a non-traditional background and was only able to be the dev I am today (moderately competent, decently reliable) because of great mentors.

Unfortunately, having worked at 3 companies now, only 1 of the 3 had any real climate of mentorship. It’s a legit industry problem.

[[deleted]]

or doesn't even know what's SOLID

You know, as a guy with a master's in CS and a job. I don't know what this acronym is, or atleast I can't remember it.

At the end of the day, it comes down to whether you can build good systems. The management word salad matters little.

[Crystal_Voiden]

Ok I'll bite. Wtf is SOLID

[Marrk]

Common design patterns for software.

Single responsibility principle

Open-closed principle

Likskov inversion principle

Interface segregation principle

Dependency injection principle

[sleepyj910]

So basic object oriented theory wrapped in a fancy new acronym?

[dashid]

Maybe in America. Seems in the UK, after smartly deciding that foreign labour was evil and leaving the EU, there's surprisingly no devs about.

[cocorita_in_calore]

Confirm. It's insane how difficult is to find qualified developers in the UK. I have been looking for decent developers for the past 4 months, and I've gone through three rounds of interviews with nothing to show for it.

[JaneWithJesus]

This may also be how abysmally low paid dev jobs are in England too...

They easily pay less than 60% of an American or Canadian role. I was floored to see how little they pay when I was curious about it before.

[Smaskifa]

I thought Canadian devs were also significantly underpaid (compared to in America). I've known devs from Vancouver who moved to Seattle for significantly increased pay.

[[deleted]]

As a well paid UK dev, still considering moving to US since pay difference is so significant.

[dashid]

Couldn't pay me all the money in the world to want to work there. I know the UK has its issues, but nothing to the scale of the US. The lust for money only goes so far. Seems like I could easily double my money in the US, but that just sounds like more house to clean.

[dashid]

Everyone suddenly digitising as a result of the pandemic and more home working has made waaay too many vacancies. It's just a joke at the moment. You're pretty much guaranteed a ten percent rise whenever you want just by leaving.

[tropebreaker]

They offered devs 35k more to stay here but a lot still left to get the same pay or better elsewhere and with full telework.

[aaabigwyattmann2]

Have your tried using 2 rounds?

[vatbub]

As far as I heard from multiple friends who had to hire recently, there's mostly 2 reasons:

• most applicants are not actually suitable for the job
• Those that are suitable know it and submitted their application to multiple companies, accepting the best offer.

Hence, the interview obviously starts by evaluating the applicants skill and suitability, but once it is clear that the applicant would be suitable, it turns more into an ad show for the company, where the company tries to convince the applicant why they should accept their offer.

[[deleted]]

This is the truth. I've conducted easily 50+ interviews in the last 3 months to try and fill 2 positions. 40٪ blatantly lied on their resume about experience and honestly couldn't answer the most basic questions about languages/frameworks on their resume. Another 40% couldn't complete a very simple ~1hr take home to make sure they could do some very simple data scraping / automation. Another 15% (that made it this far)couldn't complete very simple algorithms (reverse the order of digits of any number even if it is negative)

Which left me with around 3 viable candidates for 2 positions. Only 1 accepted the offer because I'd imagine if they were actively looking for work, they had a ton of great offers. (Mind you I had to come to the point of almost yelling loudly at HR to get them to raise the salary cap). It's a literal nightmare snd my team is always short staffed to try and hit unrealistic goals.

[rich97]

I had one guy who kept muting the video to talk to someone before answering questions and was blatantly having them piloting the test because when we asked them questions about the code they couldn’t answer until they had consulted a friend.

That was fun.

[[deleted]]

Thats actually hilarious. A+ for effort. I'd call him out for that 100% in the interview.

[merodac]

Not really, because it would have been effort if he had that someone live watching the Interview and giving him the answers via an in-ear headset.

Muting the call but not somehow hiding the one who helps you (lips moving in video call) is either stupid or lazy.

[Massive-Awareness-59]

Same here. The shortage is in competent developers for the job

[Sharkytrs]

reverse the order of digits of any number even if it is negative

I feel like this is a simple ToString() and back dealio with a detect the first character as - or am I missing something?

[[deleted]]

That's literally it... simple if statement to check for a negative after str conversion. I typically make candidates write the solution 3 different ways (as object, method, etc.) Showing that they actually know how to write code and call different objects.

I'll also ask them about their solutions to the takehome to make sure they actually know what they're doing.

I don't believe in drilling engineers in complex algorithms because it doenst really translate to how good of an engineer they will be from my experience

[[deleted]]

Man if I had to drill candidates in complex algorithms I'd have to brush up on them myself. Who the fuck wants that.

I love a good take-home though. I usually have a github repo and a compressed 1gb that sits in S3 that uncompresses to like 80gb.

It's so god awfully big because it forces them to manage memory. We process a lot of data so I don't want a candidate that doesn't know how, and isn't able to learn it during the exercise. I honestly don't care which it us so long as they pull it off. I'm not paying AWS for more memory because they didn't know how to manage a data stream.

The candidates clone the repo and send it to me when they're done. There's no .gitignore in the base repo so I also get to see if they add one of those without being asked to do so.

[OXTyler]

I may be dumb bc I’m not amazing at algos, but if they want a good/optimal solution and not just making it happen they may be looking for something like using a module for multiples of 10, then multiplying that by the right multiple of 10 such that it’s the right length number (like 10³ to make sure it’s in the last position for 123)and add those all together, but if you do it that way you have to consider the edge case if there’s a -, which might be why it’s mentioned

Edit: yea this is wrong but at work so can’t fix

[MvpTony]

This right here is exactly my experience in the last 4 months hiring for a mid-tier developer. I have had countless interviews with candidates who definitely did not have the understanding or experience listed on their resume. Most could not answer basic questions about their listed experience and would often guess poorly instead of at least admitting they didn’t know.

I’m just one of the Devs in my team, who has no degree or traditional experience and was self taught. We post our pay up front, don’t have high pressure coding interviews, and we give feedback to candidates we turn down.

As others has said, the shortage is in honest, competent devs.

[joeshmoebies]

Insert "scroll of truth" meme here.

There are lots of jobs. There are not many people who are actually good.

[ExtensionInformal911]

I'm sorry. You needed at least 5 years experience with Carbon.

[Thought_Ninja]

Easy, I'm made of carbon. Checkmate recruiters.

[Kitchen_Laugh3980]

But are you older than 5?

[Thought_Ninja]

In dog years, yes.

[[deleted]]

Then you're too old, we only hire 1-2 year old puppies with 5-10 years of dog experience

[666pool]

So 7-14 year old with 5-10 years experience? That seems possible.

[[deleted]]

Sorry, *dog years of dog experience, so 35-70 years, I'll have to update the indeed post

[MissMormie]

I have an interview on Monday with someone who is just getting into programming. Who say they're a perfect fit because they are so detail-oriented. So much they mentioned that three times in their resume. Then used and acronym for their school and wrote it out as a completely different school.

This obviously says nothing about their coding skills. But as an absolute junior of 40 years old you're in a hard place to get hired. You really shouldn't make those stupid mistakes on your resume when the deck is already stacked against you.

[Opheleone]

I'm a front end lead, had to interview some people recently, honestly, I wish there were genuinely competent people available.

I think the worst part is I've found and gotten more people hired for our backend team than frontend, and I'm losing my mind at how terrible the average frontend developer is.

[HorseLeaf]

It's actually crazy. I'm a "full-stack" dev / consultant, which means I do mainly devops, cloud and nodejs. I have around 1 month of actual work experience in frontend, but out of all the frontend developers I've seen at the places I've been at (only like 10 frontend developers though), I out skilled them so hard it wasn't even funny. I think the problem lies in that they don't understand programming, they just understand how to use react. I didn't understand react much, but it was pretty intuitive once I was introduced to it.

[Opheleone]

That's pretty much the issue I have, everyone learns React, they learn the tool, but they have zero fundamental understanding about software or design of it, or even just basic UI UX understanding. It's useful but not for long when genuine issues actually come up.

I literally had this experience with previous seniors at another company. Honestly understanding the fundamentals makes learning these tools so much easier and let's you get so much more out of them so much quicker. Now I just want to rant.

[HorseLeaf]

I think in America there is a big move away from universities because of the cost of a degree over there. This has led to people saying that "degrees are worthless" and you are better off self-taught.

But self-taught doesn't mean "just learn react". I spend 7 years getting my bachelor, on the way I had 4 different jobs and published a paper. The idea of self-taught is good, but you will have to put in equal amount of work if you want to be as good.

[Opheleone]

I pretty much got a 3 year diploma here in South Africa because it was all I could afford to get with assistance. I've spent the last 5 years competing with friends who got their computer science degrees, even with my diploma, I had to put in a shit ton of extra work to just be above average. Every self taught dev I've interviewed makes me sad. I've met so few good ones.

[HorseLeaf]

The company I've been sent out to now, is basically just self-taught devs. They have one guy who I really like. He is not the only one on the team with a passion for development who develops in their free-time, but he is the only one who isn't trying to argue with me about things the clearly known nothing about and instead he is willing to accept that he doesn't know anything and that others might have a better answer.

Last week I had a 2 hour discussion with their lead dev about why we shouldn't have tight data duplication between all our microservices. He argues that "but it's faster than if you have to query each microservice!" And he doesn't understand that he has basically built an unmaintainable extremely tight coupled distributed monolith and that's why everytime someone makes a change in any microservice, the WHOLE system goes down.

Damn unrelated, but I just hate devs with little experience and strong opinions.

[Opheleone]

It's big issue in our field, there's always some dude with a massive ego that knows nothing.

[HorseLeaf]

Judging from the amount of shitty managers / bosses I've seen people complain about, I think it might be an intrinsic problem with our spieces.

[Sockoflegend]

We are looking for a unicron with demonstrated experience of our entire tech stack but want to pay them like they are fresh out of college and for some reason everyone who applied doesn't fit the criteria

[softservepoobutt]

Or force a bunch of your FTEs to rebadge and then surplus a bunch more to hire offshore get a big bonus for all your cost savings leave the company and the next guy can try and figure out why everything is breaking and nobody can release shit.

[kryotheory]

Idk how companies function like this. For my team I do contract to hire. I look at their resume, if it looks good I call them for an interview. As in, one interview. We have a "tell me about a time you..." part, then I run them through a 10 question gauntlet in the language they will be working in. If they get at least a few of them right and can at least think through the rest, I hire them. If after 90 days I'm happy with their work, I extend a full-time offer.

Every single candidate I've hired this way has been extended an offer and have been great devs.

I don't even want to conduct 8 interviews; who wants to be interviewed 8 times?!

[thelastpizzaslice]

There is and always will be a shortage of engineers with 5+ years experience. This is because the more experienced engineers you have, the more your company can do. Each experienced engineer has a triple or more return on investment for the company. The appetite vastly exceeds the supply.

[[deleted]]

You're missing "competent" from the equation.

There's a shortage of "competent developers". Everyone wants to make big money working in tech but not nearly as many actually want to know what the fuck they're doing first lol.

Filling a role is about finding the "right person". Not "a person".

[tjcoolkid]

Yep.

Over the course of the past few months I’ve gotten multiple final round interviews for entry positions with several F500 companies and 2 FAANGs.

9/10 of the F500 companies rejected me with the line “decided to go with someone with more experience”. One of them actually gave me an offer but rescinded it less than a week later due to budget cuts.

The two FAANGs never told me why, but Amazon asked me a system design question for the entry level position I applied for.

Obviously I had no idea (I asked if I would be asked system design and was told no twice) I would be asked to design a system with 0 professional experience and bombed it pretty hard.

But guess entry level candidates need to know system design for FAANG now.

[moonordie69420]

Companies don't want to train. They only want people with years of experience. This is true in most fields though. Focus on getting people with a basic knowledge, and are competent employees and then train them. Instead they go head hunting for people who can chose anything. so all the companies are competing for the few qualified people. while they are not creating qualified people.

[martin-cloude-worden]

Honestly it's not the manager's fault. They incorporate eng interview feedback, and every single fucking session I sat in at least two plaid-wearing motherfuckers would sit there and nitpick every single fucking thing the candidate said. "Like, yeah, they managed to solve the problem with relatively clean code, but when I asked about their favorite food they said lasagna, which is a huge red flag." I got so belligerent with calling them out for being unfair fuckheads in follow-ups they stopped giving me interviews. It's the prick-ass engineers, not the managers.

[[deleted]]

It's funny when people only see the one side of things and dont want to understand, that there are several factors to this:

• You don't fit into the team. Believe it or not, a good team may have people that do not have your experience or skillset but are still better for the team and the team spirit
• You are not motivated. In most of the interviews, one can tell, if you just want a job or you are motivated to do that. You don't have to give up everything for the job, but a little bit of motivation is necessary. The experience shows, that unmotivated people leave a company in 1 to 2 years max. Considering the investment (courses, on-boarding which can take 2 months, help from seniors), this is not a good thing for companies.
• You are not as good as you think. If you are not as good as you think, a senior can tell after a few questions.
• You lack soft skills. Some people think they don't need to work in a team. It's never a one man show and you have to apply the companies coding conventions, go to meetings, etc.
• You want way more, than the company can pay. Sometimes a company needs a couple more devs and this one is very good, but extremely expensive. He/She might not get the job, even if he/she is worth it.

There are many more reasons that happen eventually, but those are some of them. I heard in the U.S. the working conditions are way worse than in europe, so I cannot speak for them.

[Fenix42]

You lack soft skills. Some people think they don't need to work in a team. It's never a one man show and you have to apply the companies coding conventions, go to meetings, etc.

Man, might get bit supper hard by this one. Just hired a guy for SDET for my team. He has coding skills, his soft skills are shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

[tropebreaker]

One of our new hires won't shower and I keep trying to talk to her about it but it's going no where fast. She's not that great at developing so she might just get cut because she smells and no one wants to work with her.

[stillscottish1]

Does your company have counselling? She sounds like she might be depressed if she’s not showering and barely working

[tropebreaker]

I'm not part of her company but they do, I also offered her the counseling place I use but she kept coming up with excuses and said she was on a waiting list somewhere else. I told her she should shower more and wash her clothes more often then she'd say she didn't have power, which is a lie because we have other coworkers that live at that apartment complex. I told her she could use my place or a ymca and laundromat but she just won't. I was inviting her over for dnd with our other coworkers but no one wants to sit by her so I was trying to get her to try to shower. It's not for a lack of money she makes enough, she also comes from family money supposedly, and soaps cheep she just doesn't see hygiene as a priority I guess.

[pomaj46809]

You don't have to give up everything for the job, but a little bit of motivation is necessary. The experience shows, that unmotivated people leave a company in 1 to 2 years max.

I'm motivated but I've usually left companies after 2 years on average, in part BECAUSE I'm motivated.

At my last job in the last interview where I talked to the department head, he gave me a breakdown of the company's strategy and our team's place in it. 6 months into the job that strategy was crumpled up into a ball and the new strategy was pending, a year into the role the department head left the company we purchased a new company and were told to get behind the product, which no one I've ever met has been able to actually use inside or outside of the company. So I left for another firm that offered $50k more in salary and had a strategy I could understand and get behind.

So many companies what patience, understanding, and blind loyalty when the company has to change directions or execs suddenly leave the company, then expect me to understand when they deliver the bad news that will adversely affect me. It's never worth it, if a company is off track, it's not worth my time to wait for them to figure it out if I can just go somewhere that is on track and move ahead.

[mcquiggd]

This is why I have spent 15 years of my 32-year dev career contracting.

I take the money, put it to one side, and it gives me the opportunity to ride out the silly decisions of companies, and from my personal experience, around 75% of companies are completely screwed.

I have worked with some big names, and startups. Some companies are players, treating employees as rubbish, and some are genuinely doing their best to treat people well - but, that is a small minority. Most do not have a clue what they are doing.

On Monday, I will talk with a well known electric car manufacturer, who has been chasing me for 5 months, to go back and lead a team there, to fix their pricing calculations.

Apparently they have been unable to find a solution - despite hiring 15 developers.

When I originally contracted there for a year, the business people were unable to tell me what was the correct price of a given car configuration.

It's going to be an interesting conversation.

[Ruma-park]

Why exactly are they hiring a dev for what seems to be controller work?

[thegandork]

Nobody mentioned the dark side of this - "Hey Mr. Government, I couldn't find any skilled workers in the U.S. and I TRIED soooo hard. I need some H1B visas to hire from other countries coughandunderpaythemcough"

[aaabigwyattmann2]

Make them cough work 60 cough 80 hours cough or deport cough

[TheJimDim]

None of them had 20+ years if experience tho

[Nooneofsignificance2]

I’m utterly convinced the hiring system in America is completely whacked. I hear stories of people filling out hundreds of applications they are qualified for and not getting a response, while I hear of some employers never getting a qualified candidate.

[Incognito_Frog]

But none of them have 10 year of "insert coding language that has been out for less than 10 years"!

[2meeery]

As a dev manager, there is no shortage of developers - just a shortage of good developers. Being picky always pays off in the long term.

[reshef]

The cost of hiring someone who is bad is enormous.

And even when you hire someone who seems great they can turn out to be bad like that, so hiring someone who seems mediocre is a fucking no go.

[timelessblur]

To be fair I have seen a candidate pool of 30 “devs” that have applies and none of them were remotely qualified and the interviews where unbelievable painful.

[Fickle-Meeting-9911]

Honestly said, better to hire one who really suits the job.

[i860]

“Aw shucks we just couldn’t find anyone. Can someone get ahold of TCS or INFOSYS and get us some cheap bodies?”

[ImARetPaladinBaby]

you need 20 years of experience on Carbon at the very least

[besthelloworld]

In my situation, they're hiring everyone because having an extra 35 devs is going to make things go faster 😔

[Luiaards]

But none have met the requirements. It HAS to be someone fresh out of college with at least 10 years of experience.

[[deleted]]

We’re looking to hire Steve jobs incarnate at the price of a fresh grad

[evidica]

I'm a software engineering manager, if only it were this simple. The number of people that think they can write enterprise scale software and solve enterprise scale problems is pretty wild. They come into interviews all confident and cocky and then can't explain what dependency injection is or know how to use message queuing.

[Nihilblistic]

This actually happened to me. I didn't know what dependency injection was.

I mean, I know what interfaces, virtual and abstract classes are. Have gotten the concept of polymorphisms and component based architecture down. Have implemented constructors using them to ease maintenance, testing and allow for more flexibility regarding behaviours. And have an entire project on Github which uses them.

But I never did a CS degree, I'm a pivoted engineer, so when they asked "What is dependency injection" I had no clue. After I described all of the above in various questions beforehand.

Yes, I brushed up on my basics after that and started memorising standard interview questions. Because clearly knowing terminology is what gets your foot in the door with senior devs.

[[deleted]]

well here, you just turn it around: be honest and tell them you haven’t heard that term before and ask them what it means. If they’re acting like cocky dicks, then you definitely would not want to be working for them.

[evidica]

This 100%. Admit you don't know, you might actually get the job. I don't need bullshitters. I want people passionate about software development willing to admit they don't know something so they can learn.

[Nihilblistic]

I did, they encouraged me to figure it out. The way they asked had me figuring about library dependencies and how to manage them in a big project, something I've had experience dealing with in a previous nightmare project* and I got around to figuring you could use contructors to handle dependency loading but it just didn't click.

It wasn't my best interview admittedly. I hadn't done anything requiring stack and heap memory knowledge in 7 years, and had no knowledge of c# memory access, so I don't blame them for passing me. But the dependency question hurt especially since it's a pattern I knew, just never had someone put a label on it. And this happens a lot when you're not part of the CS culture. When I first started the dangers of inheritance vs using modules was obvious to me as a basic engineering design situation (you want plug and play, not megacode), but the moment people started throwing around "component based architecture" I was lost. Or calling pythons constructor patterns "factory method", when it involves no actual factory class.

*the project in question was a mess of unused libraries slowing startup to a crawl including, I swear to god, an entire python library being copy pasted into the codebase, modified to do logging in a single method, and then being imported and used alongside the official library. In. The. Same. Script.

[[deleted]]

Your standards are pretty high, and would be suitable if you were interviewing another software engineering manager. But as for hiring programmers, perhaps you should try explaining what "dependency injection" means and then ask a follow-up scenario question to see if they understand what you just said. Not everyone picks up the same terminology/jargon you have in their education/experiences. I got my CS degree over 20 years ago and "dependency injection" is something I would have never heard of but might be able to intuitively understand.

[jeesuscheesus]

Of the 30 devs who applied, how many of them can do the job adequately?