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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

This mentality keeps on going right up through high-paid white collar work. All job postings inflate the minimum requirements and everybody wants someone else to train their employees.

All junior software engineering jobs that could be filled by recent CS grads or bootcamp grads want 2-3 years of professional experience. The next level up that should require 2-3 years wants 5-10.

The unemployment numbers are crap. Ask anyone who has a middle of the road white-collar job how confident they'd be in quitting and getting a new one and they will laugh at you. Nobody is really hiring on fair terms. Everybody wants a new senior employee for the price of a junior one.

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Isn't that true of any market though? Everyone wants to pay less for everything, and will shop around and haggle and negotiate to find the best deal. I don't see how that alone is a problem, if you get an offer and the salary is lower than you want to work for, don't take it.

> Ask anyone who has a middle of the road white-collar job how confident they'd be in quitting and getting a new one and they will laugh at you.

Again, I'm not sure what to make of this. That could mean the job market is weak, or it could also just mean that transaction costs are too high (not the same thing), or maybe they're just perceived to be very high and scary. If we instead look at what people actually do instead of what they'd tell you they feel like doing, we arrive at the definition of the unemployment rate - number of people who are looking for a job and can't find one. And that is quite low.

Now I can't say for sure that you're wrong, but I have to say I find the traditional unemployment rate methodology a lot more compelling than your method.

I mean, if you can't see that there is something different about the current market space we are in now vs the one in the 70s/80s I don't know what to tell you other than to read more or talk to people who lived through it.

My father got hired on as a machine maintenance person almost immediately after he dropped out of college, with no previous training or experience whatsoever, and then bought his first house within two years. They trained him and he worked his way up on the job and held it for over 30+ years. Lets look to a quick Indeed listing typing in that same job title today and read a few off the top listing together that don't have 'senior' in the title.

Applicant must have 3 to 5 years’ experience

Three (3) years equivalent work experience required or a machinist/technical degree.

Technical degree/machinist certification or 4-6 years equivalent work experience required.

I mean if you are going to argue that this is the same way the market has always been, that is just completely incorrect, both anecdotally and statistically.

It is the same way the market has always been, everyone always want to pay the best bang for the buck. Back then college dropout is the best bang fror the buck, not many people has college degree. Now more people has college degree, why would company hire someone without degree if they can good hire those who has?

That's kinda dodging the issue though. Is the market still functioning with the same principles it always has? Yes, absolutely. But where does a market where employers generally have more resources and power than employees (even if it's just a little bit) necessarily slowly gravitate towards? A market where prospective employees try to qualify as much as possible to stand out (whether that is actually required or useful for the job doesn't matter, what matters is that it increases the likelihood of getting hired), and in a world where you can essentially "buy" qualification for a lot of money, and go into debt for that money, that results in a lot of (often unnecessary) debt.

> if you can't see that there is something different about the current market space we are in now vs the one in the 70s/80s I don't know what to tell you other than to read more or talk to people who lived through it.

A company I worked for in the 1980s went through some financial hard times, and they instituted an across-the-board 10% pay cut. One of the engineers there was furious about it, and we talked about it. He said how mean, cruel, and unfair it was. I suggested if he felt that way, he should quit and work elsewhere. He was angry at me for that suggestion, saying there was no way he could get another good job.

More generally, people in the 70s/80s were not secure in their jobs nor their job prospects.

I would be furious with you too. This idea that the only way you can make your job better is to quit is simply evil and heartless.

> or a machinist/technical degree

Two year certificate at a community college. I hate to break it to you, but I know a lot of people who take this route, buy houses, and live fulfilling lives with decent salaries for their area. In rural Minnesota, an electrician can buy a 4 bedroom house, new truck, and take 2 or 3 hunting trips a year to Canada. A machinist makes about the same, and can get a decent job in a 20-30 worker plant, as described in this article.

And yes, traditional high school has not prepared us for this, but the workarounds are there. Many community colleges will allow concurrent study for an associates, often at reduced or subsidized cost. In Saint Paul, MN, you can attend a local community college for free if you graduate high school.

I frankly have the opposite opinion. Parents pushed kids to get a bachelors, the gov pushed kids to it, and colleges played along, and kids who had no aspirations to white collar desk jobs ended up with degrees that didn't help them.

> Everyone wants to pay less for everything, and will shop around and haggle and negotiate to find the best deal. I don't see how that alone is a problem, if you get an offer and the salary is lower than you want to work for, don't take it.

The issue is that you can’t even get your foot in the door to haggle. And even if you get an offer, you’re not guaranteed a better one even if you think you’re “worth more”.

> you’re not guaranteed a better one

Jobs were never guaranteed in the US. If you were worth more, you still needed the salesmanship to convince an employer that you were worth it.

Spending effort learning how to write resumes, present yourself, and sell yourself in an interview is extremely worthwhile.

> Jobs were never guaranteed in the US. If you were worth more, you still needed the salesmanship to convince an employer that you were worth it.

Right, but from the thread for this post it seems like it’s much harder to even get to the point where you can talk to an employer, and instead you won’t even be able to pass the set of hard requirements that seemingly didn’t exist a couple decades ago. And that just makes it hard for people to really show what they’re good at. (Personal anecdote: I think every job I’ve had has little to do with what I’m actually good at, because I’ve found it hard to sell that sort of thing convincingly on a resume. So I never meet the people who’d be able to judge me appropriately in those topics.)

On the other hand, I go to nwcpp.org meetings, and there's always an outfit there stoning every tern looking for C++ programmers. I've been contacted by Symmetry Investments with 20 D programming positions to fill. Tech companies sponsor and attend tech conferences for the purpose of finding engineers to hire.

Giving an hour presentation is a fantastic way to sell your abilities. Tech conferences are often desperately looking for someone, anyone, to give a talk. Meetups, and nwcpp.org, are always looking for presenters. I often fill in at nwcpp and give a D talk because they couldn't find a C++ speaker. I often get contacted by conference organizers looking for speakers.

Employers will troll through github accounts looking for recruits. Want to get noticed? Contribute to a significant open source project. There is no gate there. Anyone can contribute.

Shotgunning out resumes is generally the most useless way to get hooked up.

> I often get contacted by conference organizers looking for speakers.

I can't help but think that the fact that you're Walter Bright may have something to do with that ;)

> Contribute to a significant open source project.

Operative word being "significant". I work on far too many smaller ones…

> Shotgunning out resumes is generally the most useless way to get hooked up.

Agreed.

I assume you mean “worthwhile” from the selfish perspective of a worker competing in the labour market. Overall, writing résumés and “selling yourself” is a waste of time that is necessary to deter bad actors. People who believe in the “signalling theory” of education think this extends to the whole education system.

Then why is everyone insistent on importing cheaper labor from India and China? They're more willing to do the work for less.

I will say, to get your foot in the door you need to be strategic and realistic with your salary expectations. You're not going to get a great an amount on your first entry level job.

Thinking you're going to be making >100k as a junior engineer outside of SF is optimistic and entitled. Having been in this field for a while at this point it's not unsurprising a lot of engineers are complaining about the skillset required to get the job done. The issue is startups can't afford to hire interns and juniors as they need to actually get work done and not have supervise them.

> And even if you get an offer, you’re not guaranteed a better one even if you think you’re “worth more”.

This isn't an issue, if you "think" you're worth more then you decline that offer and continue looking. If you're struggling for money you take it and keep looking.

> If you're struggling for money you take it and keep looking.

Exactly, which is why I brought it up as a response to why you wouldn’t just reject any offers that are below what you’d like.

> The unemployment numbers are crap. Ask anyone who has a middle of the road white-collar job how confident they'd be in quitting and getting a new one and they will laugh at you.

That's why there's so many unemployment numbers. They actually capture a pretty full picture when we find the right one for the conversation. In this case the rate of voluntary quits has been steadily improving and looks healthy:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR definition at https://www.bls.gov/jlt/jltdef.htm

We can even break it down by industry, but that gets noisier. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=JTU6200QUR,JTU510099QU...,

Thanks for pointing this out, and you're right that there is good information out there. I meant the popularly reported unemployment numbers which show things as "better than ever". They don't match people's actual satisfaction with the job market.

My company does a good job of recruiting college students as interns, and then converting them to junior engineers when they graduate. Unfortunately they all leave within a couple years and generally double their salaries when they do.

This has been happening for the five years I've worked here and likely longer. For whatever reason no one can convince HR and senior management that we need to give significant raises (%10-20) each year for the first couple years after they graduate in order to keep decent engineers. The last time I brought it up I got some bullshit response about loyalty.

Maybe that’s the business model? It may be cheaper to train than to retain.

There are a few possibilities in that situation:

(1) The engineers are not actually all leaving - it may feel like that, but maybe it's cheaper to hire a bunch of junior devs and filter out anyone that doesn't buy the loyalty bullshit and isn't content with 3% annual raises

(2) They don't need decent or senior engineers, hiring and managing cheaper juniors is effective enough and cheaper

(1) HR/Management are incompetent and the business is doomed to failure

Management doesn’t care, because they don’t spend day in day out training these engineers only to see them leave.

I mean, that’s an achievement in itself I guess, but ultimately you are mostly training them because you hope they will help you out later.

Are they doing exit interviews. I’m not talking about the day before or day of exit. But they should be done 30 days after to allow the employee to reflect.

Why on earth would anyone consider returning to a former employer a month later just to give an exit interview?

This is not true at all, every large Silicon Valley company hires new college grads by the boatload every year. Literally thousands and thousands every single year. It’s mostly only the smaller underfunded companies that refuse to hire new grads because they don’t have the resources to indulge someone who can’t hit the ground running and needs time to ramp up.

Yes that is true, although even those SV MegaCorps hire only a small percentage of the students from a small percentage of schools.

I was not trying to limit my statement to Silicon Valley, where the job market is very robust (although still far from perfect)

Salaries in programmer are really high compared to practically any other field that requires as little experience as programming does. If you want to verify this, put an ad in the paper for a junior position and say that you only require bootcamp experience, a related degree, or demonstrated experience with open source software. Offer the median salary for a software developer in your area. I bet you won't have enough time to interview even 1/10th of those people. And with the complete lack of credentials you are asking for, you will have practically nothing to help you narrow down the candidates. You might as well interview random selections.

We frequently say that there is a lack of talent out there. Anyone who has ever interviewed knows that this does not mean that there are a lack of applicants. It's just that you really, actually only want to hire one in 100 or one in 1000 of the people who apply. The vast majority of people applying for programming jobs want an easy job with a high salary, not a programming job.

If I'm hiring a junior, it really honestly doesn't matter if they are a new grad, just out of boot camp, a hobby programmer or have 2-3 years of experience. However, if they have 2-3 years of experience, you at least have some way of evaluating them. How do I evaluate new grads? Grades? How do I compare them against boot campers? I suppose with hobby programmers I can at least read their code!

Of course we ask for experience. Same thing goes at every level. People with a couple of years of experience are an absolute mixed bag. You'll get some who are awesome and you will get many who are horrible. At 5-10 years out at least they have opinions that they can talk about without resorting to "Well, I heard that X was crap and so I don't do that".

And this is broken record territory for me, but I'm old. I have something like 30 years of professional experience. Why are you talking about 5-10 years of experience like it's a ridiculous requirement? Why wouldn't you want at least 20 years of experience for a senior developer??? Even that is only half way through your career? Why are we hiring all these young, inexperienced, naive people into mission critical positions?

Are you sure people want "a new senior employee for the price of a junior one". To be very provocative: you've only even talked about experience levels that would be super junior in virtually every other professional career.

Hmm... Maybe I should conclude with "Get off my lawn" ;-) The above is really tongue in cheek, but I hope it provides a different perspective. I agree that we do not hire and train juniors properly, but I think that's mainly because we also do not hire seniors properly.

You are 100% right that my view is clouded by the relative youth of the software industry. Achieving seniority is a much longer road elsewhere.

My main point was that when you've just spent 4 years in college learning and accumulating debt, it's very disappointing to look around and find nobody willing to invest in you. I have friends and family graduating from good 4 year schools ending up doing email customer support for startups and making next to no money. That's employment, but it's not what you want/expect.

I agree with that. My best advice is to look for work where you are doing meaningful work and don't worry so much about salary until a few years in your career.

You are spot on about requirements. Businesses are unwilling to simply be honest a lot of the time with job posting sites. It is enough to turn to twitter DMs/networking just to avoid all of the bullshit.

>Ask anyone who has a middle of the road white-collar job how confident they'd be in quitting and getting a new one and they will laugh at you

Once you do have 1-2 years of experience in dev (nothing glamorous, I did maintenance mostly), it's actually pretty safe. All of my white collar jobs have been middle of the road and I took multiple, extensive breaks was still able to get something. There is a big initial hurdle, then you can sit nicely on a plateau. If you want to challenge yourself, there's always FAANG companies or starting your own business.

If the experience is not enough, networking can get you a position. Same for public side projects.

Selection effects. The job listings everyone sees are the ones going perennially unfilled.

Silicon Valley is full of new grads. People routinely make Senior in two years; at some companies, there's something wrong if you go more than two years between promotions (e.g. you must be senior by four years).

Ten years is Senior Staff / Principal territory.

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