Comment by g9yuayon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by g9yuayon | Hacker News Reader

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> I think one of the chief challenges over the last 5 years is that “tech” became a fashionable, prestige job

This is especially interesting given that Americans used to mock nerds in pop culture and in schools.

A trajectory question that always puzzles me is how fast can we really supply software engineers. Is software engineering like other ordinary white-collar jobs where supply is as elastic as it can be, or software engineering is like math that requires a peculiar personality and certain talent? I draw this question from personal observation, so it's definitely not scientific: China has been big on math education. Math whiz kids are honed like superheroes in China. Teachers and parents put great pressure on students to excel at maths. Yet in the end, only a small percentage of students can truly learn high-school math or entry-level college math. If software engineering is like math, then the supply will stay tight until the demand drops, and techies will continue enjoying good pay after the recession.

I think 90%+ of people without a CS degree and a boot camp can easily outperform any genius dev just by caring, being focused and professional. I'm not kidding. I've seen it many times.

But this is also a byproduct of many tech companies valuing plumbing over good engineering and accepting or ignoring the cost.

But yes, I've met so many boot campers easily outperform their ivy college senior because the second one didn't care, barely worked and completed his daily tasks in one hour.

But in the end the first one churned more code, learned more about the business and people and was miles ahead in efficiency.

> I think 90%+ of people without a CS degree and a boot camp can easily outperform any genius dev just by caring, being focused and professional. I'm not kidding. I've seen it many times.

I don't think I've ever seen it. Maybe it's a location/caliber thing, where in some "best cost locales" there's a big brain drain to the valley. We just flat out stopped interviewing bootcamp grads at some point because the signal to noise ratio just became too low.

At one point, the most notorious bootcamp, Lambda (or Bloom Tech, they had to change names a few times to avoid litigation), was desperate enough they would "loan" you a new "grad" for free to try to get you to hire one [0]. And this was pre-pandemic when hiring was at it's peak.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138610

My main point was that the overwhelming majority of tech job is pretty simple repetitive mostly web-dev stuff where companies and their engineering organizations don't care that much about quality.

In such an environments education doesn't really make much of a difference when you're gluing APIs together. The biggest difference between workers productivity really becomes just straight up dependent on focus and professionalism.

People that are too skilled and educated for the job often go lazy mode and do their tasks quickly and then mind their own business and their motivation goes to hell. It is very simple for bootcampers to be more productive just by being focused and professional. In the long run bootcampers also tend to learn more about the business and have a higher impact.

Point is, in most jobs your skills are in the long run secondary to your willingness to learn and do stuff. The fact that people have done tons of algo exercises or system design is quite irrelevant when your job is writing forms, lists or connecting services to databases. It's no rocket science.

In my experience, it's been tough to find bootcampers who can actually code.

> secondary to your willingness to learn and do stuff. The fact that people have done tons of algo exercises or system design is quite irrelevant when your job is writing forms, lists or connecting services to databases. It's no rocket science.

Isn't that a good demonstration that someone can learn (mastering algorithms and data structures) more than rote-learning a framework?

Ok since it's anecdotal I will be more specific.

My previous company was involved in 3 to 6 months bootcamps and had the option to be the first to make offers to the best students. This put us in an advantageous position.

2 of the 5 we hired I think were already leaning to write software before starting the bootcamp (as in genuinely being interested in the field and having programmed some hobbyist stuff), 3 did not have such an experience.

All but one turned to be great additions, that one kept struggling but we knew he was weak since the beginning. The two hobbyists both turned great. But by far the best was a girl with no previous experience.

I was able to help her grow and push her to be curious all time to understand the whys. This combined with her huge drive, focus, and professionalism turned her in 18 months since starting to be one of the best devs in the entire org made of 100 devs. She just churned code (quality one), reviews and solved problems one after the other all day. I have been trying to convince her to join my current company 24/7 for a long time.

On the other hand many better programmers just didn't care. They spent days playing console or pc games, and just did subpar work enough to close their daily tasks asap. Hard to fire these people under Italian law, but they represented the overwhelming majority of devs.

Now, I understand this is anecdotak, the pool of talent was like a pyramid in the bootcamp, and the weakest or average ones weren't great, but the top and most motivated where better coworkers and juniors than most engineers I've met.

Hope this gives my opinion a context.

Out of a class of... 40 you got 4 good hires. Meaning the rest of the class was probably unemployable (and 10% would be pretty good for a bootcamp).

> On the other hand many better programmers just didn't care. They spent days playing console or pc games, and just did subpar work enough to close their daily tasks asap. Hard to fire these people under Italian law, but they represented the overwhelming majority of devs.

What's interesting here to consider is Italy's market for engineers.

I've met a lot of talented Italian engineers here in the valley, so the local market might already have suffered significant brain drain.

I think software engineering is like math that requires a peculiar personality and certain talent. However, there's actually a massive pool of these candidates who allocate themselves between different industries as demand ebbs and flows.

They end up in medicine, consulting, engineering, manufacturing, academic research, Wall Street, etc and often switch whole industries mid-career too.

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