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Comment by Tangurena | Hacker News Reader

I'm an older developer. I was eating lunch at a restaurant near my new workplace. Sitting at the table next to mine, a college senior (at Colorado School of Mines - which is a pretty decent engineering school) was talking with her father about her boyfriend interviewing for a job as a software developer. The BF had a 4 hour long programming test as part of the interview.

Something is very wrong with our industry. Most of the time that articles come out like this, industry executives are trying to get more kids to go into programming in order to lower the cost of employees: they want protection from the free market.

The last company I worked for (for 5 years, and it was a Fortune 100 company) was complaining publicly that they were unable to find developers - yet people who quit over the past 2 years were never replaced, nor were we allowed to interview candidates.

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This is a problem that has been recurring for a long time in many technical/scientific professions, and there's really no-one "official" telling the truth. When I went to college in the 90s were were told - by even the IMechE, the body meant to represent engineers - that there was a desperate shortage. Truth is if it were desperate, that would be reflected in salaries, and despite the UK's heritage engineering is not a well paid nor prestigious profession, and even our own professional body was in the pocket of employers.

And we've got it easy compared to physicists and chemists.

Some years ago people joked SAP was an acronym for "Sammlung arbeitsloser Physiker" (Some Unemployed Physicists).

It is reflected in salaries:

http://i26.tinypic.com/8ywawn.png

I think the secret is that part of good programming is an art, and not only something that can be taught, like accounting, with just logical rules and regulations (apologies to skilled accountants who feel there is an art to their work).

That is probably why big business can't fulfill their desire for a large pool of cheap but good developers. You can't just pour people into the college machinery and churn out developers. At least I hope not.

I think you might be confusing accounting with bookkeeping. Bookkeepers are the people who determine what column to put data in and crunch numbers. Accountants make financial decisions. Accountants probably feel the same way about developers: we deal with just logical rules and mathematical theorems.

The thing is that you don't just put anyone into college and expect a productive member of society to come out. It takes so much more than that.

> That is probably why big business can't fulfill their desire for a large pool of cheap but good developers.

It is interesting, this has been going on for a while. Initially many companies went and got a lot of cheap and mediocre developers (mostly through outsourcing) and replaced a couple good ones with dozens of average ones for the same price. They saw it as a deal. Eventually they are realizing that programming is not like picking potatoes -- "Just hire more for the same price, they all sit and type all day anyway, so just get more for cheaper and we'll get ahead faster". Well it doesn't work like that.

Once mediocrity starts to dominate, even the few good ones who are still hanging around, will leave as their work turns to teaching others and babysitting them full time.

In general it is not possible to replace a highly skilled programmer with an X number of less skilled ones. Many hit that realization and we start seeing lots of these types of articles even as unemployment is above 10%

You can teach art. They have schools for it. Hitler went to one...

>apologies to skilled accountants who feel there is an art to their work

Although not an openly advertised role, "Creative Accountants" are abound.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the 4-hour test anecdote. But I think most people here would agree a warm body has more potential for harm than a cold seat when it comes to software developers. However you want to ensure you don't get a problem employee, whether it's with 4-hour tests or whatever, it is definitely a good practice regardless of how badly you need to hire someone.

Also, I completely believe that it's too hard to find good developers. I'm not sure if I've just been unfortunate due to industry or geography, but I know very few people I can recommend with confidence. And I have seen all kinds of mediocrity trying to pass as software developers. The places I have seen are the stuff TheDailyWTF is made of.

The point he was making with a 4 hr programming test is that it is a complete waste of time. It doesn't take a 4 hr test to separate the wheat from the chaff unless the interviewer knows nothing at all.

A multiple choice test isn't the best way. But asking someone to write a real piece of software over a 4 hour period (a 'test' if you will) would be an extremely good interviewing method. Especially if you did it in something like EtherPad and can review the person's thought process afterward.

Regardless, I completely disagree that you can completely vet someone over a cup of coffee. Especially for highly competitive positions. That might be a good screening interview, but that is not enough to make a final hiring decision unless the person is already recommended.

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