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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

It’s a whole new world now for junior devs from what it was 10 years ago. The market is absolutely flooded with young CS grads, and self taught/bootcamp devs are facing unimaginable competition for entry level roles as a result.

We are still hiring plenty of juniors, but they are almost exclusively CS grads at this point. I honestly worry that software is going the way of law and finance, where credentialism is rampant.

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Every person and their dog is headed to bootcamp now or is taking Udemy courses.

One of my companies gets people who don’t know what Git is interviewing.

After a while, yeah, trying to filter through all the crap becomes too much work and we rely on degrees and other hard to obtain stuff.

It really depends on what types of problems you’re looking the devs to solve. Sometimes having a self-taught or bootcamp junior is not going to cut it. They lack so much theoretical knowledge that they will need constant supervision and guidance to not screw things up or make really bad decisions. Knowing a programming language is the least of the problems. I’ve seen so many self taught devs not even understand something basic like what a race condition is or trying to do something stupid like parse XHTML with a regular expression (XHTML is not a “regular language” you’d immediately know this is impossible if you studied CS and wouldn’t even attempt it).

Which is odd, because a reasonably intelligent person could spend a month on the first part of Sipser[1] and get all the theoretical computer science they'll probably ever need to work in tech. The latter half is quite interesting too, but not only has knowing what EXPSPACE is and what its properties are never come up in my career, I've never even heard of it coming up in industry at all.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/400716.Introduction_to_t...

On average, the CS grads we hire are so much further along in their journey than a bootcamp dev, yet the starting salary asks are about the same. I know there are some organizations that are a bit more desperate for anyone who has the capacity to learn to code, but we also have been exclusively hiring CS grads with far better results.

you're absolutely correct. a colleague working on getting all the certifications he can get was telling me how his boss explained that is what the consultancy actually sells.

this seems to always happens, is this the commoditization of skills?

All work is done with some kind of a redundancy: no particular individual's skills are permitted to really move the scale/balance. All work is done by teams; only the whole team matters such that the individuals are replaceable across all teams.

Any team member can fuckup, drop the ball, get hit by a bus such that the work carries on unimpeded.

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