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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Job markets, even in tech, are quite tied to geography. From which area and perspective are you writing this? Knowing might help us discuss this subject better.

I live in the Netherlands, where programmer salaries are way lower than in silicon valley, but I don't know of a single half-competent programmer without a job.

All the hiring managers are complaining here just as you describe, but the net effect is that everybody gets hired. Even the mediocre folks (note: I'm not referring to skill as in "decades of Swift experience" but "competent engineer, quick learner").

Maybe the exploded salaries of the bay area take away any financial space an employer might have for on-the-job training? People still have to create more value than they cost.

(note, I hope this is not the case, because I think programmers are grossly underpaid here in the Netherlands)

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>Maybe the exploded salaries of the bay area take away any financial space an employer might have for on-the-job training?

It's not like employers are keen on training anywhere else in the US either.

American business executives have become culturally short-sighted and the unwillingness to train is part of that.

> It's not like employers are keen on training anywhere else in the US either.

Although I do not live in the US, I gather that like many countries I have lived in is the view is that training is no longer such a large responsibility of the employer and is rather costly.

However in my travels and work in Asia, there is a concept of bonding in many countries where an employee is offered a job and training and in return agrees to work for a company for X amount of time or pays the employer. This reduces the overhead in regards to the cost of training.

This doesn't sound like the Asia that I live in.

> This doesn't sound like the Asia that I live in.

Well I have seen it in ; Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia. (note: when I refer to Asia, it is the SEA section)

Yup, that's where I live. Maybe you could let my employer know that's what he's supposed to be like.

> Yup, that's where I live. Maybe you could let my employer know that's what he's supposed to be like.

Hey it's your employer so maybe you should speak to them. It is not an unusual practice.

Trust me it is.

I live in Vancouver, Washington (the "Original Vancouver", not Vancouver, British Columbia), but am looking for work in Portland, Oregon.

However I have also lived in Vancouver BC, Truro, Nova Scotia, St. John's, Newfoundland, Santa Cruz, California and Silicon Valley.

The claim that there was a tech worker shortage started to appear during the dot-com boom, but never really went away, even when the economy contracted during the dot-com crash and later, the subprime meltdown.

I have worked for a few companies that were happy to train. That typically happened when engineers who were experienced with the technology were not to be found at all. For example I was taught Python by a shop that was all-Python, quite a long time before it became popular. I was also taught Smalltalk at another shop, but that came after Smalltalk had declined in popularity.

In both cases the expense of the training was really quite minimal: I was given my regular pay to read a book, then write some practice code, for about a week, after which I was able to code productively, then was as productive as the rest of the staff after a month or so.

Seriously, you claim it only cost the company a book and a week to get you up to speed in a new languages, but you can't be arsed to make that small investment in yourself before applying for a new job?

That inertia and lack of motivation is the reason I wouldn't hire you. Because besides languages, your job as an engineer entails constantly learning and trying new things in order to find the best solution for any given challenge. I need to trust you, the engineer to do that, because that is your job. The actual coding is just the formal expression of that job.

If you don't do that by your own volition, I might as well give the work to a much cheaper coder in an off shore sweatshop.

>Because besides languages, your job as an engineer entails constantly learning and trying new things in order to find the best solution for any given challenge.

Disagreed. Studying your way through a breadth-first search tree of available knowledge means you're trying to dip your toes into everything and your neck into nothing, probably just to impress prospective employers. Domain expertise requires focus, which requires going through some portions of the available-knowledge tree depth-first, or having sufficiently well-developed research abilities to select a goal node and search backwards to find the exact breadth and depth necessary to reach that node from your starting point.

Every company has it's own "books" they want you to read. At Facebook you work on a social network, at Google on a search engine. If you apply to 10 jobs, you need to read 10 different books.

"But you can't be arsed to make that small investment in yourself before applying for a new job?"

Bills don't pay themselves. Why can't you, the employer, be arsed to make that small investment in your new employee? You're the one with the capital.

"Your job as an engineer entails constantly learning and trying new things in order to find the best solution"

Exactly, job. As in getting paid for it. Not sure why you think it's a duty. A sacrifice that employees must make for you.

"I might as well give the work to a much cheaper coder in an off shore sweatshop."

Enjoy the results. :)

If you're needing to read 10 different books you are doing a very poor job of picking companies to apply to.

If you're a python developer, it wouldn't make sense for you to apply for a ruby job, a nodejs job, a C++ job, and a java job - thus requiring 4 books.

Instead, you should apply to 4 companies looking for python developers, then you need one book at most, unless you've already master the language in which case you don't need any books.

===

Coming from the companies perspective, if I have 10 applicants for a job, the first round of people to get cut will be those who don't have experience with our tech stack. If I have other applicants who already are familiar with it, it wouldn't make sense to hire someone who would need to learn a new language first.

> Why can't you, the employer, be arsed to make that small investment in your new employee?

If there is only one person applying for the job that would be the case. But that never happens. So it's your choice to have that opinion, but understand that not being familiar with the languages the company you are applying to uses will get you ranked last among all the applicants - the most qualified candidates will be interviewed first, and only if no one else panned out would it make sense to hire the candidate needing to learn a new programming language before they can actually start.

"Coming from the companies perspective, if I have 10 applicants for a job, the first round of people to get cut will be those who don't have experience with our tech stack. If I have other applicants who already are familiar with it, it wouldn't make sense to hire someone who would need to learn a new language first."

This approach to hiring sacrifices long-term productivity gains for short-term productivity gains. A really smart and experienced developer who doesn't know your tech stack may be less productive for the first few weeks, but after that time they could become far more productive than your "Python developers" by leveraging their superior thinking skills, debugging skills, CS skills, communication skills, etc. But if you never give them a chance, you'll never know what you're missing.

> A really smart and experienced developer who doesn't know your tech stack

I really question whether that exists or not. The kind of developer you are referring to by and large knows how good they are and has no problem finding a job with a tech stack they are already familiar with. Additionally, this kind of person wouldn't move to a new language without trying it out first and likely comparing its features to a handful of other languages before making a calculated decision to switch. And by this point in time they probably have enough experience with the language to be able to make it through an interview because most interview questions tend to be more algorithmic in nature than language specific.

I completely agree that the kind of person you speak of in the long term could be a much better hire, but in the real world I don't think it's applicable. Let's say this kind of person is 1/100 applications where the applicant doesn't have experience on the desired tech stack. For most companies it is not even remotely feasible to interview 100 people with little to no chance of getting the job to find the diamond in the rough.

Actually, I am that specific smart and experienced developer. I find that no one believes I have a clue anymore.

For example I was once asked whether I knew how to write Mac OS X Apps. I pointed out that I had been writing Macintosh code since 1986.

I did not get the job because the hiring manager did not believe me, when I claimed I knew how to write Mac OS X programs.

From time to time, while I don't come right out and say so explicitly, I make it plainly apparent that I regard the hiring manager as a damnfool idiot.

That's not to imply that one must understand computer programming to employ computer programmers. I've had lots of really good managers - consulting clients too - who really didn't have the first clue about computers.

However, there is quite a lot more to management, than understanding what your employees actually do.

"a tech stack they are already familiar with".

Like 16-bit assembly code?

PC-NFS?

How to diagnose a serial cable problem with a breakout box and an oscilloscope?

How to calibrate a CCD image sensor?

So how are today's iOS coders going to feed their hungry children when no one remembers what an iPhone even was anymore?

I quite commonly point out that I can debug anything. I'm also quite good at performance optimization as well as reverse engineering.

The API, programming language, platform or what have you - the tech stack - are all orthogonal to my being one of the very best in the business at debugging.

It's not like no one needs their code debugged, but they don't seem to recognize that until it's way too late.

What they ask for is "How many years of Python experience do you have?" If I say "Less than one" - which is what I actually have - I don't get an offer. Were I able to claim that I had five years experience, I'd have a job.

What I'd like to see, is an interview where someone handed me a buggy Python program, then asked me to fix it.

While that does happen, it is quite rare.

I'm a consultant, I take the work that the clients offer.

Most commonly I'm asked to write the Macintosh equivalent of some existing Windows program. While I know lots of stuff about Mac and Windows, it's quite common that I don't have a clue about anything else that that program requires, other than the core OS and standard library calls.

The way it commonly works is that I'll apply for a consulting gig. If I'm asked to interview, I'll buy the required book after I have agreed to interview, but before the interview takes place. That means I only have a few days to read the book.

You'd think that would not work but actually it works just fine.

What does not work at all is when someone wants to know how many years of experience I already have with a given technology. "None at all, but I can buy an O'Reilly book for just thirty bucks."

While I can understand your confusion, my gripe is that just having read a book won't get me a job, even if reading just one book is all I really require to do the job.

What I am always asked is how many YEARS of PAID experience I have with a given technology. No one ever asks what I actually accomplished during those years - whether the product was well received, whether the code I wrote crashed, whether I got any raises or positive performance reviews, what the reviews in the press had to say about the products I wrote.

Experience for which I was not paid also does not count. Especially galling, not long ago a recruiter was convinced that I had been unemployed for several years. "No, I own my own corporation. I'm self-employed. I develop products for retail sale." "Who pays you to do this?" "No one. I write applications that I sell myself." "So you've been unemployed for three years?"

At that point I just hung up on him.

Actually I invest roughly $1,500.00 per year on technical books, and deduct that money as a business expense, specifically so I can stay competitive. That really is all I require to do the work I'm asked to do.

What gets me down is that I can do all kinds of stuff a lot better than those who have many years of experience. Just because you were paid to write code for several years, does not mean you write code well. I've worked with many colleagues who were really quite clueless.

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