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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

One thing to point out - there are hundreds of thousands of fully capable programmers out there who could easily be trained in the languages of the day in the right environment or business, but there are next to no places willing to train someone.

Whether thats a jr. frontend job or a senior backend job but Java instead of C# (or vice versa), people would rather spend months with a position unfilled than take a risk on training someone to do better. Its hilarious with all the "right to work" states that you could basically just try someone out and get rid of them if they don't work out that it always seems like too much trouble to invest in someone's learning and get a good and usually pretty loyal engineer out of it.

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Why do people need someone to train them? Can they not teach themselves? 20 years ago we had books and CD-ROM magazines, now we have websites, youtube, and e-learning. The resources are and have been out there...

I started programming at age 11, so I taught myself a lot of stuff. To this day, nobody believes I know anything I haven't done inside a for-profit company. Self-teaching as a kid? Nah. Self-teaching as an adult? Still nah. Things I worked with in uni and grad-school? Hell naw.

> To this day, nobody believes I know anything I haven't done inside a for-profit company

I have this same issue. I'm a PM who has been trying to move into a dev role for some time. For 6 years now I've self-designed, developed, and published several reasonably polished mobile apps and games that have decent reviews, and even some press. Interviewers always thank me for my time and tell me they are impressed with my projects, but "unfortunately we are looking for candidates with professional experience".

I went through the same path. I started with some personal projects. I used them to get part-time programming jobs in a university hospital. I used that to get a job at a desperate startup. I used that to get a job at a larger company. And so on. It is easier to move up gradually than in big leaps.

How many hours over those 6 years?

I'd have no problem looping you but you probably wouldn't end up at the level you wanted based on your pm experience.

Also coding solo and coding on a team are different. We spend a lot of time trying college hires or the few so developers we hire to work on teams and think about how others will intact and maintain your code.

Feel free to email me. No idea what city you are in.

> "unfortunately we are looking for candidates with professional experience".

Just develop something on your job. Any role in a tech company, or beyond, has lots of opportunities for developing code. Bosses won't get in your way, they are hungry for automation. Then, once you have spent even a little time coding, your role as described in your resume accurately includes coding.

You have to show stuff that's impressive. If they go "wow!" then I've found it doesn't matter where it came from (provided you actually made it)

>Why do people need someone to train them?

You should be asking the other question. People don't realize how poor professional IT training is.

All APS[1] registered psychologists have to do 10 hours of formal training a month. It's mandatory to keep your accreditation. Employers give them the time off, and pay to send them to seminars on the latest developments in the field.

About a quarter of a specialist doctors job is to stay up to day with the field. Hospitals bring in experts to lecture and send their staff to conferences. They have to, especially in the USA where healthcare income is proportional to success rates.

The same is true for lawyers. Good lawyers must keep up to date with the latest developments in their countries case work, and again, legal firms that hire their lawyers on a salaried basis expect them to spend 30-50% of their time just reading case reports.

It's pretty much only IT that expects it's employees to keep track of a fast-developing field in their spare time. So a) I don't think we're due anything less than anyone else and b) you're inevitably going to see some pretty serious attrition if you ask people to choose between a family/social life and their career.

[1] http://www.psychology.org.au/

The answer is simple. Developers are victims of their own success. Talented developers are in such high demand that book publishing cannot compete with what they can earn. Conferences and training vendors cannot afford to pay them properly based on the current industry model.

Instead, you get a selection of developers at conferences who write and teach because they enjoy doing so. The training vendors only get what's left... People who need the job.

That's actually a super-persuasive theory, I'd buy that.

I was told by the PayPal founder/CTO that a good programmer can program in any language, and that they will learn as they go. So far I hired about 12 programmers and this was verified empirically.

That's the very definition of anecdotal, but yes, any programmer worth their salt should be able to program in any language. Many programmers however, aren't.

"Let's write it in FOO because BAR programmers are hard to find."

"Why would you hire FOO programmers that felt they couldn't learn BAR?"

> "Why would you hire FOO programmers that felt they couldn't learn BAR?"

Did they really feel they couldn't learn it or were there factors in them not wanting to learn it? What if I was worried about future job prospects after a few years of BAR development?

No hire.

Personally, I'm pretty elitist when it comes to programming. I think about nine out of ten people who are being paid to write software today should be shown the door.

Most of the industry is a scam (however inadvertent.)

Now, in 2017, most folks software needs could be met by picking and configuring canned components from a library. There really isn't a lot of requirement for real programming.

But we just keep going. Another JS framework. Another chat app.

But I'm starting to rant now. I'm close the window and back away slowly. ;-)

i think on paper everyone will agree with you. i've hired for [insert specific language] and struggled with the same contradiction.

the hard part is there is no obvious cost/reward outcome. the ideal scenario is hiring someone with the relevant knowledge immediately. so you shoot for that. a month in you're saying "we're close now, though...". when do you cut your losses?

hiring someone who doesn't know your stack comes with some extra risk, and compared to alternatives, seems like settling.

> hiring someone who doesn't know your stack comes with some extra risk, and compared to alternatives, seems like settling.

Is that risk significant in the grand scheme of things? Especially considering how many have used a particular stack incorrectly for years. I have an MVC project around here that is very much a webforms project in MVC clothing.

depends on the project. and your hiring timeline. and a lot of other things...

i mostly agree with you. i did try to soften it by saying "some" extra risk. as in, the net risk is > 0.

> hiring someone who doesn't know your stack comes with some extra risk...

Have you considered you may be waiting too long to hire.

yes, that's half my point. :)

If a position goes unfilled for months, are there really any alternatives?

1. if you've let it go on for months you can probably afford to wait A Little Longer.

2. because everything is relative i take "for months" to mean "for a dangerously long time". and this is what i mean by cutting your losses: it's hard to know in the moment when to fall on plan b.

everyone agrees they could train any decent programmer- no one really does it. i'm not trying to defend any practice, just trying to reconcile the contradiction.

Give me an experienced programmer who doesn't know the stack over a junior who does any day.

Knowing the stack is often syntax related and doesn't take long to learn. Knowing best practices does take longer to learn, but its easy to point experienced people in the right direction. Knowing how to write elegant solutions and how to do high level architecture takes longer still, thats where experience comes in.

I learned front end dev on my own with no classical CS training... if I can do it, any Java or C dev certainly can.

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