Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway4345 | Hacker News Reader

> As a software engineer, I feel like the market is flooded with workers, and that it is an easy job

I think you overestimate the quality of median software engineer. Even at a company like Amazon, I think something like 20% engineers can barely code. Add to that industry expectation to work independently with little guidance and not that many people who will fit the bill.

There are lots of junior engineers, who with guidance and mentoring can actually flourish but your average "move fast" startup won't invest in them.

View on HN

Genuine question as I'm surprised by the Amazon comment given their well known interview process, are there really programmers there who can't program very well?

Anytime I interview I get that impression, but when I work with teams of varying talent levels, there are a lot of people that can write good code it just takes a long time. In the long term these people are more useful than people who write ok code quickly, because they, slowly, reduce the amount of tech debt.

One problem is that it is extremely hard for management to tell good devs apart from bad devs. So that puts a huge randomness in as far as who is given authority and interesting projects and so on. Some of the best devs I have worked with, the best bosses I have worked for would not rehire. It is quite odd.

It is not always the case that slow-high-quality is better than fast-low-to-medium quality.

Managers tend to want people at both ends of the spectrum.

High quality is sometimes not worth paying for (in engineering time) if you don’t know if you’re building the right thing yet.

Yes, I've interviewed several AWS SWEs and was shocked at the lack of basic proficiency / competence. It's not just Amazon, though. This is everywhere.

Interviewing is it's own skill, and even then some complete head scratcher cases get through (who can't code and interview poorly).

Anecdotally I would say that standards are going down for Amazon hires. Recently I've seen some average and below-average people move there. They also seem to be expanding their hiring locations geographically. IMO the reason for all this is because they have grown to such a size that they are exhausting the supply of talented developers in the world.

> I think you overestimate the quality of median software engineer.

Even these people make out pretty good. I know educated people who say they'd kill for $60k, and I've seen plenty of braindead programmers pulling that in.

They didn't say flooded with good workers...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com