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Comment by pinaceae | Hacker News Reader

We can't even get enough qualified resumes. Pay doesn't even come into play. And my associate engineers make more dough than my parents ever did.

You should try hiring once, before dropping such simplistic statements.

The upcoming H1B squeeze won't help. White CS grads do. not. want. to work in boring tech such as QA, etc. Remove Eastern Europeans and Asians and we're back to outsourcing whole departments to their home countries.

That's reality.

The US is utterly failing in creating enough homegrown talent, university education is far too expensive, everything below is useless as there is no good education available below.

Just a little bit more and some other country/region will take that whole business, that's how the economy works. Unlimited salaries never happens.

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I'm finding it's not a lack of qualified resumes, but a lack of qualified interviewers. I've encountered:

- the I've done this too many times to bother detailing what I'm asking code challenge

- the obscure hack I came up with, can you guess it? code challenge

- "You're excellent at UI code (for a UI role), but we're not sure you'll pass the code challenge because it's sorting algorithms, etc"

- backend coder as dev team manager doubting the need for proper UI/UX code for their 1.9 star-rated mobile app ("good product is a luxury")

- "we don't hire unicorns" (I have 15+ years of code experience, but I've designed for 20+)

- "Where do you see yourself in the future? Product manager? Engineers can't do that, so nevermind."

- "You shouldn't say you're here to learn the industry so you can start your own company someday. I mean, I'm cool with it, but other managers might not like it."

I'm not posting this list to complain, only to point out bugs. FWIW, I have also had very good interviews that didn't work out for rational reasons.

QA is a function that is distinct from development and both are distinct from operations. SRE and DevOps are merging development and operations. QA is disappearing because of automated testing. It is a separate career track altogether and is usually significantly less lucrative than development.

People have weird feelings about certain markets. Examples include housing, labour, health care, and education. These weird feelings result in irrational behaviour and irrational claims like "there is a tech shortage" when prices aren't rising to compensate.

Comparison to your parents salary or the salary of any other industry is a red herring. The market always clears if participants are willing to pay market price. Your refusal to pay market price might be why you have trouble filling your resume funnel.

QA is disappearing because of automated testing.

They are, and frankly it shows. Someday we're going to realise that (especially for tools that the developers can't or won't dogfood extensively) it's a terrible loss.

It is.

Functional QA is the very first user of a new feature.

Automation handles the rest of the work.

But not having a human go through the software as it is intended is a mistake.

There's a reason CS (race not relevant) won't do borning "tech". They have a computer science degree. If you want to pay someone to do a low skill task, hire a low skill person. There's a glut of humanities majors that would probably do better at QA type tasks than CS people just because they're more skilled at soft-skills like communication. They cost half as much to boot.

The credential fetish is the blight poisoning the tech industry. You don't need the best and the brightest to build and test your basic CRUD app.

I have hired. I allow remote work though and pay going rate for devs. I understand however that hiring remote isn't a realistic option for all.

"We can't even get enough qualified resumes" Why? What are your qualification requirements? Where are you located?

A lot of devs won't waste their time applying if pay isn't listed and if your qualifications requirements are steep.

I agree with CS grads. Out the gate many want to work in a start up or a Google. Let them go through that for a few years.

I also agree with "university education is far too expensive". I actually like the bootcamp concept to get new developers started. That coupled with a year or 2 of hands-on experience can be a good investment imo. Problem is, I see many companies trying to hire for senior dev skills but at bootcamp grad pay.

Developers and 'QA' were the same people at the best companies I've worked at.

That solves that ridiculous 'prestige' problem you mentioned which is really just diva-developer behavior of a different flavor. If someone can't/won't write a test for a feature they've developed or fix the test suite when it breaks, I don't want to work with them.

> We can't even get enough qualified resumes.

What do you define as "qualified"? We're swimming in qualified resumes. I'd say about 50% of the 200 or so applications we have received in the past few months are passed on to a phone screen. A disturbing number fail there, but the pipeline isn't the problem.

> A disturbing number fail there

That's the problem. :) This has been beaten to death, but I'll say it again: the interview process of most companies are designed to weed out all but the top 1% of applicants nation wide. If you're not paying as much as Amazon and Google are, but you're recruiting and interviewing exclusively from the same candidate pool, then you're going to have a bad time finding 'qualified' candidates.

How much are you paying? Where is a link to your openings?

> White CS grads do. not. want. to work in boring tech such as QA, etc.

Speaking as a longtime QA professional, if engineering teams want to interest and retain good people in QA, then stop. crapping. on. QA. people.

That means equal pay for equal talent. That means building career growth paths for testers to become SDETs or other QA specializations. That means any dev who talks down to QA gets to have a nice little conversation with their manager and HR about professional respect in the workplace.

Outside of a few die-hards, the software industry is not going to get good QA people until that happens.

"We can't even get enough qualified resumes."

Says who? It might be you are bad at promoting your openings or you have a bad reputation on Glassdoor. It also might be that you use the word 'qualified' without knowing what it means. If you expect someone else to have done all the training for you so you just buy the finished product, you're the problem. Do you look at universities as the produce aisle or the bakery?

> We can't even get enough qualified resumes. Pay doesn't even come into play

So you aren't stating the salary range on the job ads? If you want to entice people to move from their current job you have to pay better and they have to know that.

But that violates the narrative they're pushing, that 'passion' should matter more than money. Another clever way they keep dev salaries down.

> And my associate engineers make more dough than my parents ever did

That's an odd metric to choose.

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