10 Shapes of Dev | Hacker News Reader

10 Shapes of Dev

blog.workshape.io

87 pointsppj60626 comments

I'm sure this is wonderful and I'm just an idiot, but I can't really make much sense of this. I don't see why a shape diagram (not sure of the proper term) is more useful or applicable than a bar chart - in fact, it seems rather the opposite to me.

And perhaps it's just a limitation of the data that are being presented here, but the top skill of a CTO should never be JavaScript unless it's a tech team consisting only of the CTO (and yes, that is sometimes the situation in a fledgling startup, but really it's little more than self-aggrandisement to use that title in that case).

1300 samples? With JavaScript being the strongest skill across the board? I'm not sure I actually believe the word "senior" in any occurrence on this page.

It is not strongest skill we are communicating, but most popular/common. The seniority is something which the user themselves provide.

As for the sample size. 1373 profiles supplied job titles that fell into these buckets out of approximately 3500 at the time we generated the infographic.

I think the repeated use of "Top Skill" rather than "Common Skill" is giving the wrong impression. The impression that Javascript is the most desired skill for 60% of the titles/shapes.

Fair comment. We'll get on updating this. Thanks for your feedback.

We've updated the info-graphic to be clearer in this regard.

It takes strong personality and many years of practice to learn JavaScript well. Stuff like elegance, compiler checks, namespaces are for cowards. If one survives JavaScript, any other task will be easy.

Its also not been an especially popular skill to learn until the last 5 - 10 years I would say.

Its seems contradictory that the roles requiring years of experience (or they ought to) have JavaScript as the top skill. I would have expected an older less trendy language (like Java or C, or SQL) to be top in those positions.

Agreed on the "senior" designation. I'd prefer to see number of years developing software instead of an arbitrary title as the measure of experience.

The problem is, those title are just that - arbitrary. I've seen "senior" or "lead" developers with less than five years of experience. I don't necessarily have a problem with that if they're really that good, but how often is that the case?

Why is the most common job title "Software Engineer" at the top, but "Software Developer" is listed as the first job analyzed? Were they grouped together?

Oops, yea, typo there. For the sake of this analysis we have treated developer and engineer (and programmer - although a very uncommon term in our dataset) as interchangeable. It could be another interesting study to look at the differences between people who align themselves as an engineer or a developer.

Here at UT Austin there's a pretty big difference between the two (including pay - Engineer is higher). The Developer maintains the programs whereas the Engineer is the one who initial creates them.

They're state awarded titles, so it may be different in the private sector.

I saw a post recently about the difference between Engineer and Developer (I think on HN). It is definitely a contentious issue for some programmers.

There are places in the world (like here in Quebec, Canada) where the term "Engineer" is restricted. To call yourself an engineer, you have to be a member of the "Ordre des Ingénieurs du Québec".

I was wondering the exact same thing...

I read this as "50 Shades of Dev" and got really confused.

Curious that front-end engineers feel better about node.js than full-stack or back-end engineers (it doesn't even appear for the latter?!).

First guess: people only think Node.js is a good idea until they try it outside of quick samples.

Second guess: JS is the only ecosystem front-end devs generally know.

Third guess: back-end engineers avoid JS like plague - hence the separation into front- and back-end devs.

Leading skills for Software Architect and CTO is JavaScript. Is this based on companies made up of 20 year olds?

Question: how many years of experience you think it takes to be considered "senior"?

Is CSS really more popular than HTML5?

Its interesting that the only position with Ruby as a top skill was "CTO". Implies that Rails is quickly losing popularity.

I had to use Ruby on a couple of different projects and it left a really sour taste in my mouth. Granted some of it really wasn't fair to Ruby but it still did.

This gives me hope that I'm more in line with the development community rather than a curmudgeon :)

"...really sour taste in my mouth..." - have you tried JS? Sour is not the worst taste out there.

I understand JavaScript but in Ruby some of the syntax felt backwards to me. The worst part was rails though (hey I said it wasn't really fail to Ruby since Rails !== Ruby) as it has so many things that are practically "magic" where you name things certain ways and it does different things. It just rubs me the wrong way; I love everything to be incredibly explicit so I always can figure out what's going on.

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