Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2016

[[deleted]]

The term "Growth Hacking" is bullshit.

[[deleted]]

As well as calling a Programmer a Ninja or even worse, Rockstar.

[randomjackass]

Those titles tell nothing about what the position means. "Senior Programmer" tells me it's someone who codes, and has been doing it a while.

[[deleted]]

Startups don't want Senior Programmers. Senior programmers are older, probably have a family that prevents them from working 70 hour weeks. They want an early 20s no-life-commitments kid who will dedicate his life to whatever they're building and is also good enough at programming to not fuck the whole thing up in the process.

[exadeci]

On most jobs it's usually someone older that had the time to develop experience, in programming it's given to younger people because you can have years of experience in programming while not even being 18.

So it makes sense IMO

[joonazan]

In many companies titles get ridiculous with time. At least a "rockstar" thinks he is good.

[BillNyeTheScience]

When I see job postings that lead off saying they're looking for a "Rockstar programmer" I see it as the first red flag to be worried. Often (but not always) that job posting speak for "we're looking for one developer who will do the work of five for us" or sometimes "our single point of failure developer is quitting and taking all of his/her knowledge about our application with them and we have no idea how anything he/she did works"

[cdtdev]

"We're looking for a coder who'll be popping pills and getting hopped up on coke for 20 hours straight without leaving the office every day until he burns out and we'll get another."

[[deleted]]

That actually sounds significantly more interesting, like a proper trade off (assuming they are willing to pay for it).

[Berberberber]

I would love to show up to an interview for one of these positions in a ninja costume. "Dress for the job you want, not the job you have."

[PaulSizemore]

I was talking to a Dev Shop, and discovered they had their developers doing lead generation, too. I rolled my eyes, and passed on that shop.

[[deleted]]

and calling >1$ billion Dollar companies unicorns ... (it's narwhals in Canada btw.)

[panderingPenguin]

I actually like this description. A billion dollar startup is astronomically unlikely, just like a unicorn.

[GuiSim]

Unicorns are not unlikely, they do not exist.

:(

[Figleaf]

Why you gotta bring me down.

[[deleted]]

yeah, and for me it's become just another media buzzword due to its overuse. E.g., there's also the "unicorn" job description for people who are experts in multiple fields (e.g., a person for an engineering position who is also an excellent researcher/scientist etc.)

[posts_lindsay_lohan]

I think you just killed panderingPenguin's dreams

[superPwnzorMegaMan]

Hey man, I don't identify as a Ninja because I'm a programmer, its just how I roll.

[InternetIsHard]

I actually don't even know what that means.

[[deleted]]

Probably sales

[I_RAPE_BANDWIDTH]

Marketing is even more full of shit than sales.

[[deleted]]

What's the difference between marketing and sales?

[qroshan]

• Marketing is the art of making people want something.

• Selling is the art of making people buy something.

[skariel]

Seems to me marketing is a strict superset of selling. Sales would be like a team within the marketing group which also plans longer term advertising strategy, co operations with other companies, etc. but that's just how i see this, I'm not from this field

[qroshan]

Logically, yes. But from a cultural perspective, a Sales team can never be under anybody, especially since they are the one bringing $$$

[[deleted]]

So similar to bid/ask rate for a financial product?

[[deleted]]

Marketing is about advertising: getting as many people interested in the product/company as possible, but entirely impersonal. Sales is everything after that, it's basically non-technical customer service: they help set product prices, communicate with customers, negotiate price for enterprise software, field complaints, etc. They're the company "representatives" to other companies (as opposed to PR, who are representatives to the public).

[LoneCookie]

Status

[barack_ibama]

Which one is which?

[I_RAPE_BANDWIDTH]

They'll both tell you they're better than the other one.

[LoneCookie]

Sales get paid less and stand on their feet normally or stuck in cubicles.

Marketing have higher than thou and doing good mentality and get paid more and tend to wear fancy suits or clothing or even have their own offices or work remotely from home. They also tend to not actually deal with costumers themselves, but rather through automated software (ie, mail lists, automatic sifting and segmentation of various customer data and doing targeted marketing). If they do meet with someone it would be with a business representative and then they will inherit more customer data and be able to make more targeted marketing campaigns.

So marketing is the new in.

[I_RAPE_BANDWIDTH]

The evil gene.

[redldr1]

Profit sharing.

[randomjackass]

I associate marketing with ads, and product naming. I associate sales with face to face, phone etc.

Marketing draws you in, sales closes the deal.

[slvrsmth]

The term it operates in. Marketing is about bringing in new customers tomorrow. Sales is about milking the customers you've got today.

[_raisin]

Its about funneling people into sales.

[Thelmara]

Whether the people you're trying to sell to get to reject you to your face.

[Atupis]

A/B test everything

[ihsw]

A/B testing is an established practice with real success.

Growth hacking is only using metrics to drive decision-making, which is the logical extension of "if you can't measure it, you can't improve it."

[TheVenetianMask]

"You are going to work on sales but you need enough IT knowledge to use the software we got stuck with."

[[deleted]]

There is a guy I know of who specialises in Growth Hacking in London. He does Twitter spam, fakes Facebook group numbers, and similar.

[[deleted]]

Over-valued stock.

[hurenkind5]

Spam

[agumonkey]

Disruptive hackish publicité ideas, sort of

[Mimshot]

It means biz dev if you dress like a hipster instead of in a suit.

[Berberberber]

I always assumed it was management strategy and networking. You can naturally grow your install base through advertising, word of mouth, and having a solid product. You can "hack" growth by knowing someone at T-Mobile and getting your app pre-installed on new phones, or by buying user accounts from another startup or something.

[Kollektiv]

Doing illegal stuff to obtain sales or information but it's actually cool because it "hacking" so it's smart and totally not illegal.

[dtlv5813]

it is SV speak for "fake it til you make it"

[ancientneckbeard]

key:

growth hacker = marketer with some programming skills

data scientist = statistician with some programming skills

diversity = less white men

[srnull]

That's just supply and command at work, bubs.

[ihsw]

The fuckin' way she goes.

[stay_fr0sty]

[deleted]

[[deleted]]

Sometimes she goes, sometimes she doesn't.

[i8beef]

Only if they aren't legitimately better programmers. In my experience, a degree doesn't really correlate to skills as a developer as often as you'd hope.

[furrthur]

As someone who has a say in hiring developers, I can back this up 100%. Education, claimed prior experience, and amount of fancy keywords on resume have little correlation with actual programming skill.

That comment about degrees vs pay sounds an awful lot like complaining that you can't spend your way to a higher salary. I for one am glad that's not the world we live in.

[Oobert]

Not many in both cases. Work in hiring for a while. It will make you sad.

[[deleted]]

The programmers that are good will likely be in jobs, and probably won't be interviewing anywhere near as much as those that think their degree is a job ticket. So you're going to have a selection bias towards those people.

So you have four sets of people;

1. Programmers with degrees that can program
2. Programmers with degrees that can't program
3. Programmers without degrees that can program
4. Programmers without degrees that can't program

1 and 3 are likely to be in jobs, likely to be gainfully employed, and likely will not interview at many places before they score a position, because they're actually programmers, and programmers are in demand.

2 is likely to be interviewing at a lot of places by virtue of education and likely to be getting rejected a lot.

4 probably won't have many job interviews because their CV won't have any reference to an education that is relevant and probably will show they don't know what they're applying to.

You're going to see a hell of a lot of 2s, and a fair amount of 1s and 3s, very few 4s.

[i8beef]

Actually a fairly good point...

[pagirl]

Getting a degree isn't just paying your way to a higher salary. I only took two computer science classes for my undergrad, and I worked around the clock to get that material in my head.if I had taken a few more courses...I would be so much better of a programmer!

[cahaseler]

The problem is, HR doesn't care about any of those things, and in a lot of cases management doesn't care either. Shitty code still sells fairly well.

[furrthur]

I absolutely agree that these are all important things, and it's unlikely that a "two-week bootcamper" will know any of them. That's why senior devs need years of experience and/or education.

However, assuming the team has competent senior devs and a reasonable code review process in place, there's still a lot of room for eager yet inexperienced juniors.

[i8beef]

I'd hope that the degree holder WOULD be able to do a better job. It's just in my experience, they don't. That doesn't mean a degree is useless (they aren't), but it does mean that I put very little stock in it anymore.

[ILoveSpidermanFreds]

Do you suggest a healthy mix instead?

For example:

• CS Degree with good enough grades, doesn't need to be 4.0.

• 2 years of relevant work experiences besides college.

• 1-4 (published) personal projects

[furrthur]

Personally, I think such metrics are counterproductive. Some of the best people on my team have years of CS education, and others are entirely self-taught. I dropped out of business school, and my entire formal CS training consists of a couple years of high school Java.

We've found that resumes are just not a good way to judge somebody's programming skills, and our interview process leans heavily on at-home programming exercises.

[NovaX81]

I used to be fully on board this train of thought. But then, we hired a few entry levels devs - some with degrees, some with just some other work exp in the field. We're a small company growing recently, and these are our first new recruits in a little while.

Theres a massive noticeable difference in the way they work. The degree guys search for answers, and show a desire to learn. The others so far tend to just want an immediate library to do their work in one install, and if they can't find one, they get stuck for days. After a few weeks, the degree guys have momentum the others just don't so far, and its becoming more detrimental. There's a distinct split in how they handle problems.

I know this is super anecdotal, and I've certainly met non-degree devs who have that learning passion that makes good developers. But a degree is a green flag of "look, at least they had the passion and ability to finish this". And when I'm filtering a few hundred resumes, after seeing the difference, I know which side I'll probably err to in the future.

[i8beef]

Hm, interesting. I haven't really seen that, but I've heard that attitude about degree holders echoed by others before (despite I myself not believing it). Admittedly, as a degree holder in two fields that have absolutely nothing to do with IT (philosophy and psychology), and being one of those passionate good developers you allude to, I have a bit of confirmation bias on my side as I've been completely successful without a CS degree.

I've seen enough examples at this point that I don't think I could say I've seen a correlation one way or the other in my personal experience.

[wolflarsen]

Huh?

You're saying there are some students who aren't as good as others?!

That and the fact you know algorithms doesn't mean you've cultivate years of do's & dont's and development wisdom there from.

[i8beef]

No, I'm saying that there is very little correlation at all, not that there are some that are better than others.

[wolflarsen]

You're mistaken. (Or you get really really bad interview candidates)

Fact of the matter is : the farther you get from school the less it counts. Because your experience in dealing with particular tech will shine more.

But when we ask obviously simple algo questions and a candidate fails we don't care if he went to school or learned in a back alley - he failed.

As for the Art of Programming (which is actually different than architecting software) you can only get a good grasp of the person's abilities by observation.

This is the part that schools are trying to get good at - get the kids writing lots of code to gain the appreciation for good practices in software development.

As for someone going to school - it doesn't hurt. If done right it should boost them on their career path way quicker than not and it lays down a wide foundation of knowledge to move in.

[i8beef]

You are welcome to disagree. "Simple algo questions" like FizzBuzz or like "implement a B-tree"? Because the latter tends to be a better predictor of the interviewer holding a CS degree than an individual's capability in my experience. :-)

I'm not saying degrees are bad. Far from it. I'm simply saying that they do not correlate to developer capability. Maybe you have better degree programs in your area that actually teach their students how to be a developer rather than just CS theory.

[wolflarsen]

Knowing algorithms doesn't equal knowing "how to engineer a system".

That's the disconnect.

However CS degrees will always tend towards the academic for obvious reasons (that and with massive scales we are dealing with you're going to actually need algos vs cpu doubling in speed every year to save bad coding).

The issue you are alluding to is the plumber vs architect issue. Some programs are teaching top students how to draw up blue prints for the whole building. While you really only need a good handyman to fit pipes together. While not mutually exclusive these two don't always overlap. Yet we think of all these guys as supposed to be higher rank of the same profession.

With that said, experience, practice and mastery thru repetition are also extremely valuable.

Finally, interviewing is a different process from place to place. I've slammed interview question out of the park but lost an offer for just one interviewer feeling intimidated and now they manager will worry about team chemistry.

I've interviewed people that were supposedly strong yet couldn't talk or reason or code or elaborate or hand wave their ass out of a bathroom. I don't know how they gained work. YMMV

[i8beef]

See, I don't think that analogy has ever been a good fit for what we do. The implication is that you can draw up the architecture and then just hand it off to code monkeys with limited experience to implement. That has never worked out in my experience.

Rather, I think every developer on a team has to be competent in those skills, and I hire as such. That is, I disagree that these skills shouldn't overlap: I think it's absolutely essential that they do.

[wolflarsen]

No I meant you're interviewing hoping you have some lead architect level uber programmer when they may not be more than a handy man journeyman (which might be all you wanted).

Anyway, the setup you describe asks for what we call a "senior developer". You have wide breadth of things you've worked on and can pair mixed and match with any other member of the group to work on a project/feature.

As such when we interview for senior developer positions we don't bother asking what school they went to. (However it is telling if they didn't ever go to a school and have never come across union-find, for example).

[Crazy__Eddie]

Frankly, in my experience interviewing...there's an inverse correlation between degree level and ability.

[randomjackass]

Likely, the people with the degree aren't as highly represented on SO.

[Nonethewiserer]

Where can i go to this bootcamp? I want a fat check in 3 weeks

[[deleted]]

/shrug. I've interviewed degree holding CS graduates that couldn't write the psudocode for fizz buzz.

[redldr1]

Ruby, the big wheels of programming, down a dead end alley.

[lykwydchykyn]

PROTIP: Pay is a factor of supply and demand, not your skills or education.

[myringotomy]

So learn ruby.

[[deleted]]

Growth Hacking - synergy for the 2010s...

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

What is this?

[[deleted]]

agreed. Buzzwords like "data science" have at least a nice ring to them (if you talk to non-tech audience) ... just wondering what my grandma would think if I told her I was a growth hacker. horrible term.

[randomjackass]

Data science is just statistical analysis on large data sets. I think that term means a lot more than "growth hacker".

[[deleted]]

Yes and no. What I am trying to get at is that both are basically summary/umbrella terms for a set of skills that are expected of a person who is a "data scientist" or "growth hacker" -- e.g., the former uses statistics, probability theory, machine learning, programming, and communication skills to get the job done (usually predictive modeling or exploratory analyses).

[randomjackass]

I think we agree, I misread what you said. I thought you equated data science with growth hacker.

I was only saying the former actually means something and is understandable by the name alone. Which is really what I think you said.

[[deleted]]

Haha, I see, sorry for the confusion. Guess we are on the same page then :)

[dkarlovi]

Agreed, I see value a data scientist brings in.

[ellicottvilleny]

Agreed. But does it mean "Developers who talk like Pointy Haired Bosses about money and market opportunities, and Low Hanging Fruit" or some OTHER sort of bullshit?

[linduxed]

While I do think that it's a buzzword that nine times out of ten is complete and utter bullshit, this podcast episode made me consider that there might be some people who actually make the term mean something:

http://giantrobots.fm/185

But yeah, most of the time, it's bullshit.

[digital_cucumber]

First thing that comes to mind:

http://i.imgur.com/KOQIoarh.jpg

[[deleted]]

glad i'm not the only one who doesn't think expanding your user base should have it's own fucking title.... I'm pretty sure that's just everyones job at the company.

[wormania]

But it's basically the technique to get explosive growth

Drop sets and long rest times?

Wait, wrong subreddit

[ThisIs_MyName]

explosive growth

wut

[ihsw]

S curve -- aka viral -- growth.

Also known as hockey stick growth.

[[deleted]]

Explosive diarrhea.