For Software Developers, A Bounty Of Opportunity | Hacker News Reader

For Software Developers, A Bounty Of Opportunity

npr.org

35 pointschampion17 comments

People who think they can seduce a developer with a beer cabinet and a fuseball table don't deserve to get good developers.

What developers really want - and what they never get - is power, not free beer and a crappy football table. Power to decide what they are going to work on, power to decide what tools they want to use, power to decide whether they want to use a waterfall approach or the ubiquitous soul-destroying agile way.

One time developers were almost fully in charge of software projects. Nowadays, they are at the bottom of the wrung, further from the decision making process for software products than anyone else.

Give us some power over our work and maybe we'll think about working for you.

All I want is sane management and sane schedules.

The easiest way to get these is either to be in control of them yourself or for your manager to have an engineering pedigree (i.e. be a more senior developer) rather than just a manager by career.

Also: Having a female manager.

Maybe I shouldn't be generalizing, since my sample set is very small, but the female managers I've had were great, especially the more technically-inclined ones.

Or a non-technical manager that trusts your judgement.

If you are young and recently graduated with computer science you are hot in Boston. If you've been around a while and have a degree in anything else, or are self taught, companies like these will most likely just ignore you. That is their "hot market", I call it artificial scarcity.

Indeed. "Never trust anyone over 30" has become in our field "Seldom hire anyone over 30 and never hire anyone over 40" and most certainly 50. That you can get "Senior" prepended to your title after about 5 years of experience ought to be a warning sign.

Due to genes that make me look (and for the most part feel) quite a bit younger than I'm (I'm now 50 and am still mistaken for a early to mid-20s college student (dress and deportment make a difference, of course)) I was able to experimentally, as it were, see this when I was in my 30s.

Only good programmers have a ton of opportunity.

Where are all the jobs for bad programmers with CS degrees?

That sounds like a joke... but by Hacker News community standards I'm sure more than half of CS graduates would be considered mediocre programmers at best. The big companies would never try to train these kids - they just lobby for more H1Bs.

How else do you explain stories like this while we have a "talent shortage": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480749

My impression is that there are plenty of jobs for relatively mediocre programmers—just not the kinds of jobs that HN readers tend to aspire to. Someone has to write enterprise CRUD apps on a .NET or Java stack for large non-software companies, and they don't have to be rockstars.

Sadly, even companies that create .net crud apps only want the rockstar programmers. Or at least that's the way it seems in Los Angeles. I'm speaking from experience although perhaps I'm just a mediocre software developer.

Rockstars and / or Ninjas. </sarcasm>

Most are mediocre because they simply don't give a crap about the craft of software. Training doesn't fix that. The software world moves fast and you have to love it, or have serious discipline, to keep up.

Thanks, i realized i don't love software in that sense to keep up with it at the pace it moves. Your comment was the seed crystal to trigger the crystallization.

I hate articles like this.

(1) When did aspiring to a good life become wrong? The article seems to sympathize with Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot who whines about having to pay devs a middle class wage.

(2) Since I've seen this with the dude from seo moz and other places: To all of you whining about your inability to hire software engineers, what exactly are you doing to grow your own? Are you aggressively hiring interns so you get first shot when they graduate? Are you lobbying your state and national reps to fund universities? There are plenty of smart people entering college this fall; in 4 years, some of them will be cs graduates. It seems like on the margin a lot of smart people enter finance or law or other fields; what are you doing to attract them to software engineering? What are you doing about the rampant sexism that helps turn off a lot of women (that's 1/2 your potential engineers) to development as a career?

So whats your problem? The only pools of programming talent come from young interns or computer science graduates? You'd suggest political lobbying before looking outside the narrow focus of twenty something male comp-sci clones that colleges have been pumping out because of the dot-com bubble?

I think Earl is suggesting that more than whining is needed. Like, get smart people fresh and give them training so you can get them when they graduate

I guess his point was that catering to students is just one way to solve their own problems; basically, they need to stop whining and put in some effort: step up pay, or training, or process, or hire two people to do the job rather than having one guy work 80 hours. Hiring students was just one example where it requires extra effort from employers to get good employees, effort that (it seems) they aren't willing to put in.

I was especially disappointed seeing Shah on this bandwagon of whining, since I mostly like his blog and writing. But no, apparently he too prefers 40k wage slaves that make him rich but who he only needs pay enough to survive but not enough to become independent. (I have first-hand experience with how reporters twist and turn words so maybe the article misrepresents what he's saying, but even in the most favorable interpretation of his words I don't really see how that could have happened without the reporter straight out fabricating a quote).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com