Hacker News Reader

Comment by mostlysimilar | Hacker News Reader

> Unless you have a lot of flexibility in terms of where you work, this type of advice is becoming less relevant in an IT job market that's in free fall. > Much fewer devs can just jump ship at will than between 2003 - 2022.

Citation needed. Good developers are just as in demand now as they have ever been.

View on HN

The demand might be there, but if you have a proven way to get recognized as a "good developer" during the hiring process I'd love to hear it.

References. Ask the good devs you have for someone good they know.

I think the parent commenter was asking from the point of view of a person looking to be employed, not a business or hiring manager looking for devs.

Anecdata incoming: a company I worked for had such a referral. They bombed the interview. The referring employee was incredulous. I was asked to re-interview them. They did seem good, they got an offer. The experience delayed things, put a bad taste in the candidates mouth, they took a different offer.

My point, the result of interviewing a good developer is potentially random. There is perhaps less probability of a bad developer having a random outcome as well, but certainly can happen.

Though.. define "good". Some people are incredible only when in the right team and environment.

I have seen a few situations like this:

Company says "looking for an expert on X"

Expert on X walks into the room.

Interviewer: "How good are you at Y?"

Expert on X: "I know a little about Y, but not too much. I mostly use X for my work; I could show you how to solve the problem using X."

Interviewer: "Thank you for your time; goodbye."

When I tried to figure out why this happens, the answers are usually something stupid like: "HR posted the job announcement, they have no idea what we really need", or "yeah, we are still looking for an expert on X, but we need an expert on Y more urgently". (The latter still does not explain why they rejected the expert on X without asking him anything about X, but to the person who said this it seemed to make perfect sense.)

None of the FAANGs or even tier 2 companies work on references, unless you invented the internet or something.

And even then, there is a famous story of the dev of the popular MacOS FOSS package manager, Homebrew, failing his interview at Apple.

I don't get the point why a maintainer of a popular package failed his interview. Having a popular package has nothing to do with coding ability and much more to do with writing the right thing at the right time.

He wasn't the "maintainer of a popular package".

He was the creator/designer and main dev of Homebrew, the OSS <<package manager>> almost every dev on MacOS uses.

He took an idea to completion, made it production ready and used by probably millions of users.

I don't care about raw coding ability (Carmack style), if building such a large project doesn't prove at least development abilities, nothing does.

It's supply and demand. Demand is lower (less jobs.) Supply is higher (more layoffs, people looking for work.) Even if you are "good", there's a lot of other "good" people looking, too. Some even may be better than you! Or at least better at marketing themselves.

Marketing yourself is more important now than ever. The advent of AI has created a noise problem at the hiring level on both sides: applicants are leveraging tools to generate necessary documents (targeted resumes, cover letters, social profiles), recruiters are using scanning tools to weed out anything that doesn't contain the magical keywords or phrases.

Hard to compare the time period. I'm still coming to grips what it means when 95% of jobs I apply to are remote.

There are other data points to consider:

- higher interest rates and less VC money equates to less startups and less hiring

- large tech layoffs

To your point of demand for 'good' developers - I suspect that is likely true. I don't know how to decouple that from the problem of interviews not able to identify good developers. A 'good' developer is a function of the individual, what is happening in their life, the team, the codebase, leadership, process, tech debt, etc..

"Good developers are just as in demand now as they have ever been."

Citation needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com