Why there is a shortage of software developers? | Hacker News Reader

Why there is a shortage of software developers?

3 pointsIndoCanada15 comments

What does the shortage of developers look like? Here are the most interesting statistics right now to highlight just how dire the shortage of talent is:

Around 40 million technical jobs go unfulfilled due to a lack of skilled talent. The US Labor Department estimates that the global shortage of software engineers may reach 85.2 million by 2030. By 2026, it’s estimated that there will be 1.2 million engineering job openings. Job openings for software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers are projected to grow by 22% year over year between 2020 to 2030. Globally, companies risk losing $8.5 trillion in revenue because of the lack of skilled talent.

What aspect of software development is difficult? Why is it difficult? Is there any relevant and credible reference on this topic?

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Poor training.

As a former JavaScript developer you need a moderately sized team of 4-7 people to do one person’s job because almost nobody knows what they are doing. Everyone is scared to death of the frontend compile target, the DOM, and they have no idea how to organize their thoughts or write original software. Fortunately there are large frameworks and billions of NPM dependencies to solve for that.

Really though, if they knew what they were doing one, maybe two, developer(s) are more than enough. I can assert that because I have proven it true at multiple employers during my 15 year career doing that work.

Consider the economics of this. A decent sized team of developers will cost their employer well over a million dollars per year irrespective of what they accomplish. Those one or two better trained developers can do the same work one time at a cost of about 20k-100k and then provide maintenance and bug fixes there after while moving on to different work for their employer.

In this respect the shortage of talent results in a choice for employers: hold out hope for a rare gem that knows what they are doing or set the baseline so very very low and just hire more people. The later is often the lower risk option when desired talent is tough to identify or is too expensive to produce internally.

> they have no idea how to organize their thoughts or write original software

Can you elaborate on this?

In my experience at multiple employers many developers struggle to communicate in writing. Everything has to be a call. Then half the time the communications on those calls is itself scattered and disorganized, which just leaves me wanting to hang up and tell them to send it to me in an email so that I can figure out what they are trying to tell me. When they are forced to put things in writing, such as writing an issue in Jira, its full of incomplete assumptions leaving people to guess at what they want without clarity on their desired end state.

My absolute best advise for all developers who cannot communicate is to become best friends with a QA.

This is really bad. Writing applications requires some vague notion of a plan or vision. Plans often fail at execution time and that's fine, because you can always revise your plan and refactor your code, but many developers absolutely cannot do any of this. You take the framework away and... they have absolutely nothing. No idea where to start, what to do, how things work. It is mind blowing.

In just about every other line of work shit rolls down hill. In software shit rolls down hill and up hill in complete defiance of gravity. So many developers are completely insecure, because they have spent their careers lost in a fog, and if you do anything to expose that insecurity, like take the framework away, shit rolls up hill. It has to because when that's all they have and its suddenly gone they have nothing left to lose. I suspect this is a good part of why senior developers not elevated to positions of authority simply don't want to do this work any more and increased compensation is not enough.

This is a huge business challenge. Developers don't communicate well enough, so they spend lots of time ($$$) doing "something", which might need rework.

This is a business challenge because it's hard for the business to see. Devs are working hard, they say they're making progress, but it's slow. The business looks anxious about time/money but they can't see the reasons things take so much time-effort.

Similarly, tech leads fail to, err, lead. They should clearly draw a line between business value and the team's output. Then they should review this connection again and again, e.g. monthly. Devs aren't stupid: if they repeatedly see the same goal and the same road towards the goal, they'll move towards it. The risk is that devs understand _more or less_ the goal and direction, and _more or less_ deliver code that is an approximation of the business goal. Sometimes this is fine, sometimes it needs rework, and occasionally it's a huge waste of time and energy. Code obsolete before it's even completed.

Difficult to have a sensible conversation about “shortages” without also talking about prices.

As a contrived example - If I want to hire an expert to design a data center. If I offer to pay $1000 for the job, I probably won’t get any takers. Does that mean there is a shortage of talent in this market? Is it actually rational to demand or expect that society/government produce more data-center designers until the cost of their labor falls to my liking?

Some numbers we do have in the post are $8.5tn revenue at risk and 40m unfilled jobs. $8.5tn / 40m = $212.5k of revenue per job. And keep in mind that is claimed _revenue at risk_ not profits after paying salaries, benefits, and taxes.

There's no shortage. These stories have been floating around since forever.

What the people who report these "shortages" mean is "I can get the developers, but I'd like them cheaper, so I'll pretend they're scarce".

I commonly see this response but it’s not based on anything more than than the person writing it wanting more money (which has nothing to do with this issue).

Contrarily, I have heard of many instances of extremely experienced senior developers of more than 10 years experience abandoning the profession for more fulfilling unrelated work at less pay. That includes me.

I know some very talented people (Ph.D.s from Berkeley in CS) in Silicon Valley or San Francisco who are "parked on the beach" to use a term from Marc Andreessen. Basically, in the Valley, as soon as people can stop coding financially, they often do. This seems to be because the money/power people who run the companies are so nasty to work for. I personally do not work at Google or Mozilla because of this. As a friend of mine said when he quit Google "yeah, it looks a lot shinier from the outside".

>>I know some very talented people (Ph.D.s from Berkeley in CS) in Silicon Valley or San Francisco who are "parked on the beach" to use a term from Marc Andreessen. Basically, in the Valley, as soon as people can stop coding financially, they often do. This seems to be because the money/power people who run the companies are so nasty to work for. I personally do not work at Google or Mozilla because of this. As a friend of mine said when he quit Google "yeah, it looks a lot shinier from the outside".

Apologize, I am new to this Please explain

IMHO where there are actual shortages it is because young people choose to study another domain in university or choose other jobs after university. Even those who choose software dev. tend to see that as a first step only.

It may depend on the country but in Western Europe I think it is because it is hard and if you're smart enough to go after hard subjects then there are better-paid, more prestigious options.

Job qualifications and requirements have gone crazy. Companies have unreasonable expectations and overwhelming interview processes.

Job qualifications and requirements have always been crazy.

Yeah, decades of credible research on the discipline of software development. Pretty easy to search for.

tl;dr: Complicated, takes years to go from zero to employable, requires talent and persistence, tools and languages constantly changing, employers generally not willing to train or mentor.

"Shortages" just mean companies don't want to pay market rates. It's almost always disingenuous when people talk about labor shortages.

There are a number of companies out there that pay well above market rates, and are unable to hire enough _sufficiently skilled_ developers. They literally hire every single one they can find and pay them at top-of-market--I mean, what they pay developers actually defines what top-of-market is at any given time--and they'll tell you they would hire more if they could, but there aren't any more, which is the definition of shortage.

The statement "there is a shortage of skilled software developers" is true and not disingenuous.

There is a glut of unskilled software developers. There are many companies that are unwilling or unable to pay market rate for talent. But, neither of those things changes the fact that there is a real shortage of skilled software developers, as the demand for them cannot be fulfilled.

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