I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages (opens in new tab)

Reality check: there has never been a hotter seller's market for software engineering talent. The fact that you have not landed a job does not mean that supply is not short in general. Rather than blowing your stack at some recruiter who you heard on a podcast interview, you might want to reflect on yourself and how you might be coming off in job interviews.

As far as low pay goes, yeah, welcome to the labor market. It's easy to write a blog post about how companies need to pay more, but hard to reconcile the reality that if they don't have FAANG cash flows, "market rate" for developers may not be viable, regardless of management's good intentions or lack thereof.

And with regard to bad interviews, remember interviewers are individuals, with skillsets all over the map. Once you get more senior it gets even more frustrating to be judged by someone who has a fraction of your experience. Trust me when I say there is no value in dwelling on this or getting your undies in a bunch. Suck it up and figure out how to play the game (read CtCI, practice on interviewing.io, ask for feedback) and land the job, then do the best work you can every day. Angry screeds will not change anything about the industry and will not help you.

The whole thing reads like inventing scenarios that didn't happen or embellishing them.

> A bad interview is when you ask them the definition of some specific thing in some specific framework like “Tell me what a closure in javascript is.” then treat them like they’re stupid if they don’t know.

Not that believable, but okay.

> I once had an interviewer ask me if I was a wizard with GO, C++, Rust, and C over the phone. Then when I said I had some experience with rust, he immediately cursed at me and hung up.

Didn't happen.

> Nobody in their right mind is going to move to San Francisco, California to be a “Lead developer” for only 70k with zero equity.

Are any companies actually trying to recruit like this? And is it successful beyond just throwing up a hiring post and not getting anything? I put in a limit buy of $3000 for 1 BRK/A on a whim once.

> This experience is fairly common.

Is it? I've done a fair bit of interviewing on both sides of the table, and can say with complete honesty I've never heard a curse said in anger in any of them. I've also never heard of it happening from a co-worker or friend.

Is this really accurate? C++ is a very different language than even Java, not to mention Python or JS. Languages have their own quirks and attributes that often matter at some point. Especially C++.

I am on a team where we are constantly building stuff with new technologies that nobody on the team has learned, so a certain extent I understand the sentiment, but we are under no impression that we are doing that good a job at it.

Whenever I start interviewing, it takes a few fails before I finally realize: my talents are not (at all) what interviewers care about. Talent is just the icing on the cake. Once I remember that, I focus on being personable and start getting multiple offers. It’s always been like that.

I don’t get how people can see the plethora of individuals under 10yrs experience in SWE and other tech roles in SV/NYC/SEA with incomes of $250-600k/yr and think this happens without a “shortage” of talent.

Shortage in quotes because it’s hard to define in context of supply/demand but it’s clearly the case that devs have a lot of bargaining power.

FAANG companies - filtering candidates by asking tough LeetCode questions, which is understandable. But what is with Startups? If someone can solve hard LeetCode problems why would they join Startups? They will join FAANG. Startups are blindly copying FAANG before becoming FAANG themselves.

> The lack of faith in our fellow humans is disgusting.

This kind of catastrophizing and dismissive language makes me want to ignore everything the author says. If you think being evaluated in an interview setting is somehow unfair, I think you should consider whether your attitude is the problem. If you are actually good at leetcode and continue to fail onsites, you're almost certainly giving off red flags in some other behavioral category.

At my (FAANG-ish but not in the acronym) company, many of the candidates we fail are leetcode gurus who have a negative vibe. Maybe they're technically pretty good, but they have an ego on the level of Linus Torvalds. Or maybe they trash talk their current team or boss, or avoid giving straight answers to simple questions about their background. Or they've got 8 years of experience but can't talk about anything they did to grow the younger people on their team. Maybe they launch into brain-dumping a solution they memorized from a practice problem without explaining their approach. Or perhaps they are aggressive and stubborn when given corrective hints.

As a dev who will be on the same team as the candidate in the event an offer is made, my primary incentive is to vote no on any assholes I cross paths with in the interview. I don't give a shit if my no-asshole standard means the company needs to spend another 3 months and $100k on recruiting costs to get an equivalently skilled non-asshole candidate for my team. I consider those costs part of MY total comp.

Beyond the junior level, success usually means working well with others and bringing a growth mindset for yourself and others to each project. Mentoring others. Learning and teaching. Being a steward and doing unglamorous work for code health. Slinging feature code is a minor part of it in big companies, so you need to figure out how to signal all these other forms of value in the interview. And avoid sending out red flags.

The industry is rife with credentialism--but it's more due to the extremely self-centered approach developers use. I don't mean self-centered as a colloquialism for "arrogant," I mean it as in they tend to hire people who resemble themselves (i.e. their skillsets) rather than who is best for the job. And the credentialism changes in different regions/tiers of tech companies. That's why FAANG tend to target elite private school grads, and why line-of-business shops tend to target Programmer/Analyst III types.

There are gatekeeping algorithms in resume filters that lead to a sort of hivemind in the community. On the other hand, a ratio of 5:10,000 could just as likely indicate a poorly presented resume as bad algorithms.

Interview questions are problematic. The author has a big miss on the rest, though. Asking a person to implement Japanese Go (or anything, really, for which it is applicable) with flood-fill is exactly the same as asking them what a closure in Java is. It's just a pig with lipstick on. And that is a problem, of course. And completely omitted: the criteria that establish just what progress toward a solution counts as acceptable at a given level.

Education is inaccessible, probably the only point of the author's I can't really quibble with too much. Companies are being exceptionally short-sighted here, and doing themselves a disservice.

Can't argue with the last bit about pay and benefits, either, really. It gets better the higher tier of company one goes to, but even at FAANG engineers are undercompensated (though arguably perhaps not suffering from poor benefits).

But 50% can't do FizzBuzz and many do not fit into our environment of a small team where we do not need (can't use) specialists (yet).

If you only want to recruit from the "best 20%" [1], you can only recruit the best 20% of the people who apply to your job offerings, which is different from the best 20% of the market - most founders I know want to recruit the best 20% of the market though and fail.

[1] It's unclear to me what "best" means.

Companies don't want to take on the burden of training junior devs and then complain when there aren't enough senior devs to go around. Obviously it makes sense from a business perspective, but taking a step back, training junior talent in this field should be a top priority for everyone.

Any programmer with enough experience can become competent in any programming dialect fairly quickly. But it's the level of knowledge of specific frameworks relevant to projects that is what we really should be a measure of competence.

Having gone through the job hunting process recently i did find this a bit frustrating.

Ok, you want a 'JavaScript' developer... Thats like walking into a restaurant and saying 'I'll have some food please'. At least some places made the distinction of throwing in React or Vue or Angular somewhere in the posting. Sometimes all three!

What does it mean to have X years experience in node ? I use npm all the time, does that count ? I assume they mean the express framework or it's cousins, but almost no job listing mentioning node spelled that out.

Same applies to Java - probably the most widely varied language in terms of use cases and contexts. I've built some web stuff in Spring and Hibernate but I know nothing about its use in embedded systems.

- Being in Outer Nowhere. It may be a nice place to live, but if you go there, you're trapped. No other employer unless you move.

- Being in an obscure technology niche. If you spend five years working on railroad locomotive motor control, you have a hard time getting a job afterwards.

- Going to a company that's in a mess and has no one with a clue. This is a setup for either overwork or failure.

- A staff job, rather than a line job. At a "tech" company, developers contribute to revenue. At a company that just has an in-house IT unit, developers contribute to cost.

1. Too much reliance on automated filtering of resumes

2. Companies asking for too much years of experience with specific tech/language/stack

3. Developers dismiss other developers (for using javascript, apparently?)

4. The 'asking about language trivia' interviews are bad, it would be much better to make candidate solve a small task from scratch

5. Restatement of (2) but with individual engineers instead of companies

6. Companies don't comp the employees education enough

7. Lowballing everyone's offers by default to save on labor costs is bad

What is interesting to me is that this is NOT a FAANGMO criticism. The point that applies the most to FAANGMO is probably 7, but even there the lowballs are not that low. Also fairly amusing is the suggestion to stop asking programming language trivia in interviews. Made me double-check the year of the article.

That being said, one thing I have noticed is the insane pickiness of companies these days. Series-A startups that are very likely to die expecting FAANG-level coding skills but with out FAANG-level compensation or career progression opportunities. Startups that run on AWS refusing to hire experienced developers who do not have AWS experience, but have delivered plenty of robust shrink-wrapped hardware/software product. Consumer-oriented startups turning up their noses at devs with enterprise backgrounds. Young, growing companies taking 6+ months to hire, waiting for the perfect unicorn candidate while they can be hiring more realistically and adding value (and going to market faster) much sooner.

The interview loops commonly run 5-6 hours, for even the smallest of shops, and time is wasted on banal 'culture-fit' interviews (read: we won't hire you if we feel like we can't hang out with you after work; we won't hire you if we don't feel like you are 'one of us'), ridiculously hard DP-type questions that almost always require one to have solved the problem prior, poorly-trained junior interviewers who are lacking in the background needed to properly evaluate interviewees' prior work experience, and so on. One is left wondering if such companies even intend to hire!

Unless they have a truly great product at hand, the only ones applying will be the ones desperate for money. But no good developer wants to work on some potential shovel ware that's dead on arrival.

There's so much software being made these days, and most of it isn't all that useful to be honest. There are also so many old century companies still failing to adapt to the internet age, trying to force their way into it with half baked copy cat strategies. I'm not going to put all my passion into someone else's dubious pipe dreams or some vision-less experimental venture.

Good developers know they are valuable, and that their work carries the whole product. Jobs at companies that make beneficial, useful software are usually highly contested, but for companies that struggle to attract developers the issue might be more then just the job market.

1 - Pay

2 - Work life balance (incl. remote work)

3 - Strong peers

4 - Control in _how_ things are done for senior developers

5 - Efficiency

I'm pretty sure that most companies are, at best, 1/5.

At some point there just aren't enough qualified, talented, experienced, good developers left to hire, because they were already hired. Some companies simply have too many developers, and the bar already isn't high. They think that just because they can afford to pay a developer, that that's what they should be doing, rather than reorganizing and utilizing their existing resources better.

Want to become a plumber? You'll have to apprentice for 4-5 years (at minimum wage) and work 2,000 hours and/or 250 classroom hours. You can then take a state-accredited exam and become a licensed journeyman plumber, renewing your license periodically.

Want to become a software developer? Go to 130-440 hours of boot camp classes with no on-the-job training. Congrats, here's your insane starting salary, now go struggle to make a rudimentary web app with no idea why somebody keeps asking you to run this thing called the "ping command".

If they’re totally unfamiliar with the problem, and yet they make significant progress in just one hour that should be interpreted as a good sign this person would provide a lot of value to your company """

I think this is extremely important. A developer that can make a lot of progress on something they haven't seen before is often times just as good as a developer who can tell you the big-O efficiency of reversing a red-black tree off the top of their head. Although the latter may indicate a very interested systems-level hobbyist, which is also an excellent value in terms of an engineering quality but impossible to tell from a whiteboard interview if they're a hobbyist or if they just studied.

I have never been cursed at for anything by an interviewer. I have never heard anyone I know tell me they were cursed at.

The older guy who had his school paid for? Guess what? College was insanely cheaper back then. Also, it was extremely rare. Today, all the education you need to learn any language is available for free in any medium you like. Even CS fundamentals.

The companies looking for 5 or 10 years of experience with a language aren't looking for someone to "get cooking" and learn as they go. It's true that most experienced developers can quickly pick up the syntax of a new language and start writing code quickly, but every language has its nuances and pitfalls and you're not going to know them all after a month or two of writing code.

Two things I learned here: 1) If I didn't know already someone at that company, I would still be clueless why I wasn't accepted. 2) The first hiring stage at big companies is indeed a silly keyword filtering process.

I’m now in upper management. I’m told I can hire as many Indian developers as I want (based in India) but must limit my US development team. Why? Cost of course. There is no real shortage, just an attempt to clamp down on real wages.

On the one hand, recruiters spam you with emails without a single mentioning of any language stack. At the other end of the spectrum - "at least 10 years of experience working with X is a must".

It makes it difficult for experienced developers to hop from one language stack to another. And then we see comments on HN like "I love Clojure/Rust/Haskell/Julia/Elm/etc., but I'm getting paid to write ... in something else"

All that is before any financial aid, and MOST students receive grant money (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rec.as...).

There are a lot of people make bad financial decisions around education (I was one of them at one point), but if one is willing to constrain their decisions to in-state options and are able to get some of the financial aid then college education (espicially in STEM or Health careers) remains a good tradeoff. Going to an out state school or a private school without huge financial incentives to go... well, understand you are buying a luxury good and status, not making an investment.

Besides, if the author is proposing that companies pay for education, poo-pooing $8-10k in grants is insane. It is easily 100% for some part time program, and is a huge chunk of the cost for even brand name in-state programs at the undergrad level.

Edit- I'm not saying student debt isn't a major problem, it is. However, it remains unnecessary for most students to go into horror story levels of debt to get a degree, especially if they are able to work while going to school or live rent free with relatives. After all estimated costs for housing, food, and other living expenses dwarf the tuition costs ($18k/year at UW).

You can say "oh you're an aspie. Oh you have gaps in your resume". Ahh... exactly how desperate are they if they can pick and choose while having such terrible in-house talent? The pay at these places was pretty terrible. Looking at their history, they often resorted to using off-shore people. Most of their upper management are really just family members making a passive income from the company. None of this suggests to me any real crisis or shortage in labour, just people wanting to keep raking in easy money.

However: "Furthermore, if you really want a C++ developer you can just expect a developer to learn C++ on the job if they have any adjacent experience with any other language."

C++ is an exception. Too many foot guns.

I once applied for CEO of Microsoft and got told I was overqualified because I ran small businesses.

I have nothing against said workers, but the way the US manages H1B visas is broken IMO.

Is this a good example? Isn't "what is a closure?" more of a smell test "do you know the language" question?

Maybe asking "oh you know python? Tell me how to implement and use a metaclass" without access to the documentation would be a better example.

If you are a decent developer, and you can't find a job, one of two things is happening:

1) You are being too picky: You're applying for jobs out of your league or that aren't a good fit for you (yet)

2) You need to fix up some skills. These could be coding, or they could be working with people, interviewing, presentation, etc.

When I applied for jobs, I fired out 140 applications in the space of 7 days and had multiple offers to talk (and then jobs) two weeks later, and I have no degree. But I didn't have fantasies about FAANG and driving a Tesla in two years, I applied at small companies that needed people like me. 5 years after that, I'm making very comfortable money from moving up gradually to better work and now have an hourly that is FAANG competitive. (I did freelance for 10 years previous to that, so the FAANG competitive compensation was 15 years in the making). People are impatient and don't want to look at their own assumptions and decisions critically.

The work you do at a FAANG is generally much simpler than what you prepare for the interview. If I were them I would just split the streams: hard interviews and high pay for incredible talent and just pair programming / entry level pay for entry level developers.

I have senior engineer friends who got hired at Google for basically doing overpaid crud API all day. You could have that for a fraction of the price and without wasting a senior's time on that crap.

FAANGs complaining about lack of developers have only themselves to blame. I rarely heard it's a problem for them, though: the high salaries attract a never ending stream of talent willing to prepare for whatever interview they can think of.

Smaller companies with lower compensations and less valuable stock have much bigger problems. Finding people who are able to code is not trivial if you don't have FAANG's money.

You have no idea how many people I've seen coming to mid / senior interview (no algorithms, just pair programming) lacking basic programming skills.

Looking forward to reading the article they write afterwards, but I can tell you it won't look like this one ;).

I'm in a position to interview candidates. It is indeed very difficult to find quality developers, both junior and senior.

Also, what company is only paying 50-70k to Juniors but 300k to Seniors? It seems like most companies that pay well do it across the board, not just for Seniors.

1) Most companies don't want to do training - like General Motors etc did in the 40s/50s

2) Most companies don't want to pay doctor/lawyer style salaries

3) As most software is closed source as an industry we over produce and throw away a lot.

4) Ageism is rampant - doctors or mechanical engineers can find jobs after 45

5) Can use this to lobby for easier visas for immigrants to lower salaries

Well, here I am. 11 years of PHP and counting

>You should be giving people obscure algorithms in interviews. For example, ask a candidate to make a playable game of Japanese GO, and ask them to use flood-fill.

In my opinion, asking algorithmic questions in interviews for say a front-end development position is one of the core fundamental problems of hiring right now. Asking someone who will be spending their time taking Figma prototypes and making them work with your API or backend is what most front-end/web developers will be doing.

If anything, algorithmic questions are exclusionary and do not tell you anything about a developers ability to solve problems. Oh, you remembered an algorithm from your compsci classes or you went to one of those GitHub interview prep repositories and memorised some of the things companies ask: well done. I have friends who work for companies like Facebook and Google, they all "prepped" for their interviews like they taking an exam.

What about the self-taught developers? You know the ones who did coding bootcamps, courses that Twitter developers are flogging for a few hundred dollars to help you get better at Javascript and CSS. Algorithm questions are biased towards academically taught developers, not the ones who taught themselves (and in web, there are so many self-taught developers).

The honest truth is the times that you do need an algorithm, you are going to look it up. I can't think of a developer that I have worked with in my 13 years as a front-end developer whoever solved a problem with an algorithm they just knew off of the top of their head. Problems in web land are solved with Google and trying things until they work.

Part of being a good developer is knowing what to type into Google, not the ability to recall everything like a robot.

I can do a basic sort, I can do a FizzBuzz and that's really it. Unless the job specifically requires writing algorithms on a day-to-day basis, you can use StackOverflow, lift the code from a blog post or install an Npm package.

Part of this post seemed to be pieces of truth sprinkled with what are clearly exaggerated claims and lies. I seriously doubt the following quoted situation happened:

>The general rudeness is ridiculous. I once had an interviewer ask me if I was a wizard with GO, C++, Rust, and C over the phone. Then when I said I had some experience with rust, he immediately cursed at me and hung up.

An interviewer didn't curse the author because he said he only knew a little bit of Rust. This just seems completely fabricated to me.

All of the problems when it comes to being unable to find developers or perceived skill shortages usually come back to the hiring and interview process. Why companies feel the need to subject a developer with 10+ years experience to a multi-stage interview full of traps designed to make you slip up so whoever is interviewing you can feel superior defies belief. If someone has been working for 10 years, I think you can accommodate them with a more streamlined interview process that doesn't waste hours, weeks and sometimes months of their time.

It reminds me of the time I interviewed at a company. At that point, I had close to 10 years experience (a few months off) they were hiring for a front-end role. I attended the interview, the interviewer was sick (red flag #1) this was pre-COVID obviously. I went to a small meeting room, we spoke for a few minutes. He boasted how he had been at the company for a little over a year and had just been promoted to lead developer (red flag #2).

He pulled out some sheets of paper with questions, there were 20 of them. He then explained this is a written interview, to write the answers on blank sheets of paper to the questions. I had an hour. Some of these questions were coding questions, as in, I had to write code on sheets of white paper (red flag #3).

Instead of leaving the room, the person interviewing me sat across from me on his phone, occasionally glancing over at what I was writing (red flag #4). He kept sneezing and coughing, it was terrible. The whole thing made me nervous, I blocked up on simple questions.

One of the questions was to swap values in an array without introducing a third variable. Array destructuring was new then, but valid. I used that as the answer, he tried telling me that it wasn't a valid solution to the question and that he wanted another solution. I explained how destructuring was an up and coming part of the ECMAScript specification, but he continued to say it wasn't a valid solution. My answer was `[a, b] = [b, a]` which was very much valid.

It is people like the person who interviewed me causing these perceived skill shortages, not the lack of skilled developers.

Don't get me started on companies who don't even know what they are hiring for. Some of the job descriptions I have seen in front-end/Javascript are confused and often at odds with themselves. Asking for candidates with 3+ years experience in Javascript and then saying things like, "Experience with PHP or Python preferable" for what are being advertised as front-end positions, not full-stack or general web developer.

I am the lead front-end engineer for the company I work at, I am part of the hiring process. I refuse to ever ask algorithmic questions, coding puzzles or anything that will not relate to the average day to day job. I am honest and upfront when I say to candidates, "Sometimes a ticket will come through and it's to rename a text value on a button" or, "Fix some padding on a modal for tablet sized screens because it's cutting off the edge"

I also refuse to take up the precious time of candidates with take home exercises. More often than not, just sitting down and talking to someone, treating them like a human and asking about the things they have done is enough to know if they are a good fit or not. We need to stop treating developers like robots who don't need sleep and can solve complex exaggerated puzzle problems in the space of an hour while being watched and not being given access to the tools they have in the real world.

As a whole, I found this "article" really difficult to read. It reads as though the author is struggling to be hired and has written an angsty article throwing daggers in many different directions and making a lot of assumptions (don't get me started on the grammar and spelling mistakes).

> Furthermore, if you really want a C++ developer you can just expect a developer to learn C++ on the job if they have any adjacent experience with any other language.

Yeah nope

Any language takes at least 3-5 years to fully master. Sure, the "10 years in X technology" posts are sometimes insane, but... also, there is a real, factual difference between "I worked with technology X once" and "I am working with it for 5 years".

In tech we do not have a shortage of developers but an excess of dispensable jobs.

Employers won't change their behavior unless they're actually pressured via the ostensibly-free market to do so. In the short term, UBI would give workers vastly more ability to negotiate for better terms on an individual level; this extends to longer term proliferations of both labor unions (which can sustain longer strikes when UBI at least prevents strikers from going hungry or homeless) and ideally-cooperatively-owned startups (wherein the founders have a safety net in the highly-likely event that the startup doesn't make it past the front of its bathtub curve, and wherein the company is less reliant on outside investment just to keep the lights on).

But whenever such solutions get suggested, they of course get shot down as "eww socialism" and the problems persist.

Nothing Marx wrote says that you can't pay one person more than another.

I take company complaints about worker shortages not to be literal, but to be part of public relations, marketing, and appealing to politicians. Annoying? Sure. But also part of the game. I understand the article is mostly about berating companies for being dishonest about hiring, but I don't think an appropriate counter is to be dishonest about being hired. The rest of my response focuses mainly on the perspective of a career dev looking for work.

Your mileage may vary with different tech scenes, but my take on these experiences:

"Problem no. 1: Companies rely too heavily on automated filtering." While true, if this is your first and major complaint, you rely too heavily on job submission pages. Get a decent recruiter, reply to some linkedin recruiters, and be open to possibilities. You should expect applying to a job board without an internal champion recommending you to have similar odds to cold calling someone to sell them insurance.

"Problem no. 2: The credentialism barrier." I can't speak to the author's experience with this, only to my own. No more than 20% of the time I've interviewed has not knowing a specific programming language or technology been any sort of problem in the interview or even mentioned. I have noticed this happens somewhat more often with Java shops, who expect you to be very experienced specifically with Java, but even there most of them are pretty understanding that you may have some catching up to do (again, in my experience).

"Problem no. 3: Education is inaccessible." This seems a fair complaint, though not specific to technology.

"Problem no. 4: Low Pay and Bad benefits." This is a surprising one to read in technology. Maybe I've just been lucky and in a good area, but tech jobs are pretty well paid, decent benefits, good vacation (not at AWS though, seriously guys, do better), and with a pretty low investment in learning some people skills and negotiating tactics you can drastically increase your earning power. Read "Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In." It's short and phenomenally helpful when negotiating salary and benefits.

I empathize with the author's annoyance about listening to what amounts to a PR campaign from tech employers, but again, I think the counter to that is pointing out that it's a lot of hot air, not complaining about how hard it is from a dev's perspective seeking employment. I am open to being wrong on this, however, and welcome dissenting opinions telling me how wrong I am!

I remember starting my career as a front end developer actually having to write code. Those days are long gone. Invented here syndrome is the reality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here

Code that written by anybody you actually know is not trusted. I actually saw a channel op in ##javascript of Freenode just this morning refer to people who write original code as a form of Dunning-Kruger over confidence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

I also remember earlier in my career people reading resumes. Those days evaporated early in my career. A good fix was having open source contributions as people would really look at those. Those days are gone too. Reading code is just too hard, so project readme files are the new resumes to ignore.

So now the industry is stacked with developers who can neither read nor write code, can’t evaluate candidates, and fear anything that isn’t externally prepackaged. It’s like watching that movie Idiocracy, and yet people complain about talent shortages.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

I find this somewhat counter intuitive because while many software developers seem generally of low confidence about actually doing the work of their jobs they seem generally over confident about security, as in information security. It’s weird because that confidence is the the most clear example of Dunning-Kruger and it isn’t based on anything.

Now, my learning from interviewing and reading job posts is this:

* Use React.

* Don’t bother with open source or a portfolio.

* Resumes are required but they are just weapons to be used against you at a later time. Include education, contact information, and job history only.

* Many company start software projects as greenfield projects which are written by young, inexperienced, and cheap developers.

* These projects, when successful, grow, and become complex legacy projects.

* Some companies do not realize that it requires far more experience and knowledge to develop such a legacy project further, and expect to be able to hire young, inexperienced, and cheap developers, which pick up work exactly where the former developers were when they left.

* And then they might realize or not that it requires far more experience and skill to read, understand, an maintain such a project, then to start a small new project from the scratch. Yet the amount of work required to understanding and maintaining a legacy project can be a significant part of all the summed work of writing it over the years.

* And then, the companies might be in denial on how much skill they require, or they might not be transparent about the amount of work needed, in an effort to get new developers cheap.

* And in my experience, this is often with a general lack of appreciation of what the developers have actually created.

What comes to my mind is that I experienced an extreme case of this, many years ago when I was a young poor student. I found a leaflet announcing a job opening in an university from a company which sold a kind of embedded product. In the interview, they asked me if I knew how to write C, and if I had any experience with 8-bit assembly (which I had). When I came to my desk the first day, I found an 11-inch stack of 500,000 lines of print-out listings for Z80 (at that time, code was printed out in fan-fold paper). It was mostly generated from C code cross-compiled into assembly, an modified from there. It was commented in Japanese (a beautiful language, but I don't speak it). It didn't had documentation. It did not even have a Makefile. In the following weeks and months, I learned that a much more knowledgeable fellow student had offered his work for four times of my own salary. He was furious at me. The company was apparently not aware that he, being an assembly and embedded expert, was much more capable than me for doing this job. The company made tons of money with selling a specific kind of hardware, and the software, which had initially been reverse engineered from the hardware product, was a necessary companion product to their main offering. I also learned that the previous developer had worked as a contractor, and had left the business relationship after negotiations on his compensation failed. He had died shortly after that, and his widow was unwilling to provide any further information or notes he might have had. In the end, I could only achieve so much at that job - it was not that I wasn't smart but it was just way above my level of experience and knowledge (which was actually not bad). And it would have been years of work anyway. The company would have been far, far better off if they paid ten or even twenty times my salary to an experienced professional, rather than to a student. When I left, they gave me a shabby certificate of employment which even contained spelling errors. And I think that sums up the relationship they had with their developers.

Another thing that I have learned over the years is that while there are of course good and competent developers, and less competent ones, what more often than not makes a huge difference is how work is organized. It can easily increase or decrease the productivity of work by a factor of ten. And this can very much determine how much value good developers can create with their work. That means that if a company cannot pay that much, it might also be because its processes simply cannot generate good value.

So, in short, part of the mismatch which seems to crop up here could be that companies sometimes do not know what they really need, and also do not appreciate what they have in terms of people.

> Companies rely too heavily on automated filtering

We use minimal to no "automated filtering"--certainly no AI that I'm aware of. Instead, we just focus on pipelines that we perceive as having generally higher quality candidates (e.g. angel.co, Hired.com) and review them all by hand.

As a result, we move more slowly and have a smaller pool. Sadly, this hasn't been working because apparently the candidates are only of marginally higher quality or there's not enough in particular roles. Probably the only way we could ever hope to expand to broader talent pools is by using AI, because we simply do not have the manpower to keep up with the _mountains_ of application.

> The credentialism barrier > Expecting to find a developer who has 10 years of experience in a specific tool is insane. If you’re trying to find a rust developer and you will only accept them if they have been exclusively coding in rust since its conception you won’t find it. What you’ll get is a receding, inbred hiring pool.

I agree with this (frankly, only big old businesses with McKinsey managers still do this BS). In most scenarios ~2+ yrs is plenty. Sadly, even with this flexibility on my end, we're still in a huge shortage.

> I can get cooking with a programming language I’ve never seen in my life in a matter of days because most programming languages are either very similar to each other or they’re similar to some paradigm most of us already know like functional programming. > Developers are creative. They try new things. They’re not going to be droning in one language forever. If you think these are normal, average traits, you have a misunderstanding of the value of your talents. _Most_ developer applicants I see cannot do these things.

> Most developers I know will comfortably do coding challenges in a variety of languages. They do actual work in a variety of languages too.

"Most developers you know" are very far removed from "most developers in general". The developers you know were already hired through a grueling hellfire walk of filtering _countless crowds of candidates_ who struggle to spit out a basic print statement in Python while someone yells from the other room asking if they need help with the interview.

> The credentialism barrier pt. 2/3/4

You won't hear me argue with any of this. Any company that practices this has flawed leadership and hiring practices. Again, we are actually very proactive in avoiding these toxic practices, but sadly still have a shortage problem.

> Education is inaccessible

I can't really speak to this problem. Am I understanding this correctly? If you're turning down jobs because there is no education stipend, that just sounds like a personal decision I've never even heard of before. My engineering career has steadily advanced from junior to upper management, and this thought never once crossed my mind.

> Low Pay and Bad benefits

We offer normal market rates and solid benefits. Do we compete with Google or Facebook? No, but who can? At least we're fully remote, so the compensation is going to be insanely higher than average for some people, and perhaps average-ish for people living in, say, Manhattan.

Anyhow, all this is to say that I hear your frustrations; they strike very close to home for me. I work tirelessly to uphold high standards in my hiring and interviewing practices. But the reality still stands that _there is a shortage_. Next time you find encounter a company with hiring practices you hate, pause for a moment and consider that maybe they're just completely burned out from an endlessly fruitless search just like you are.

(I wrote all this with "anti-procrastination mode" enabled so won't be able to edit it to correct any potential mistakes for a couple hours.)

We all benefit from an educated society and higher education should be funded by the state.

>You try to lowball your employees then you act surprised when you’re struggling to find good labor.

This applies to service industry jobs as well.

Is this style of discourse really what Hacker News is about? I come here specifically because it is one of the few places where vague sentimental ranting is discouraged over directness and constructing thought out arguments for points. It's disappointing to see something make it to the top just for having an aggressive "hot take" and not because the content is well presented.