Agreed, sometimes people aren't aware that HN is its own little echo chamber.
I was talking to a recruiter recently for a managerial job and somehow got onto the topic of hiring. I asked him what's the hardest jobs for him to fill right now. He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers. Corporations have built their castles on these technologies, not FOSS/Mobile and need staff. Degrees were an issue but he said he could place people with two year degrees.
We talked about pay, and it wasn't terrible impressive, but for someone straight out of community college it sounded pretty good to me and he also revealed that if the person wasn't a complete nightmare socially, he could expect to be promoted quick.
> He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers
Why does he need so many entry level programmers?
> We talked about pay, and it wasn't terrible impressive
Is the recruiter trying to staff a company with mostly entry-level programmers, paying low wages? I've seen plenty of companies like that, including those who used mostly trainees. Usually, the work environment was the crappiest possible, and word gets around.
In the interest of building an experience-diverse workforce employers need entry level, mid level, and experienced developers with skills in their core stack, which in many cases is Java or .NET.
My theory is that technology trends are leading the entry level developers to learn Python, Ruby, and JavaScript rather than .NET or Java, thereby reducing the supply and putting these candidates in high demand.
So, they could hire another senior person at 2.5x the pay instead of 3-4 junior devs. The problem is a lot of younger managers don't understand the different in ouput can vary a lot from developer to developer. And on top of that quality output can be far more maintainable.
All they care about is # of jira/tfs tickets that are open, and the number of features, and how many warm bodies based on their averages they need. The smoothest project I ever worked on was staffed by all senior people, with relatively diverse and overlapping skills. That wouldn't be possible with 3x the developers if 2/3 of them were junior to mid level.
HN may be an echo chamber, but look what you're saying: Employers are desperate for developers, including entry level ones, mostly using older tech stacks, and they'll pay solid money for them.
It doesn't sound like you're describing a world in which someone with 10+ years of solid experience with techs is going to be struggling to find a job, right?
> It doesn't sound like you're describing a world in which someone with 10+ years of solid experience with techs is going to be struggling to find a job, right?
Overqualification (or the perception thereof) happens. The development world, like most others, is a bit of a pyramid. More experience doesn't necessarily translate to more positions being available. Some (many, even) are specifically targeted at young, entry level devs.
After I had landed my first job out of college (10 years ago), I got an offer from a company like that in the midwest.
It took them 9 months from the interview to get back to me with an offer (which is why I was already working somewhere else) and the offer was $30k for a one year contract.
If that's still typical of their hiring process, I'm not surprised they're having trouble hiring people.
Companies like that would benefit from being more flexible on the degree issue; there are a huge number of programmers out there who are self-taught. It makes things seemingly more difficult in judging qualifications, but if you aren't filling the positions to begin with, that would seem like a good problem to have in the first place.
Oh my. I know somebody who needs that job. Probably the "Georgetown, KY" on his resume is the difficulty, but he's willing to move. He can do C#, Java, and C++. He even has a traditional 4-year computer science degree.
Pass along his email if you can: markcahalan@yahoo.com
Well, my own quirk is I'm a later day starter... it's almost impossible for me to start consistently at or before 9am... outside of that, I tend to take more time to understand the problem and the desired solution than hacking away. Both of these have cause me a lot of issues in positions for companies that are more rigid in their desire for a homogenized work environment.
On the flip side, I share knowledge and work to leave code better when I'm done than when I start. Others will show up/leave on time, but won't share anything and will leave very obfuscated code in place.
Lets face it though... the personality traits that make one adept at somewhat technical and often mundane tasks have a pretty high correlation to some generally less than desirable personality traits. Programming is much more of a craft (or even art) than it is an engineering discipline in most places, but we have to interact with business roles where expectations and mindsets are vastly different.
I was talking to a recruiter recently for a managerial job and somehow got onto the topic of hiring. I asked him what's the hardest jobs for him to fill right now. He told me he's dying for entry level .NET/ASP and Java developers. Corporations have built their castles on these technologies, not FOSS/Mobile and need staff. Degrees were an issue but he said he could place people with two year degrees.
We talked about pay, and it wasn't terrible impressive, but for someone straight out of community college it sounded pretty good to me and he also revealed that if the person wasn't a complete nightmare socially, he could expect to be promoted quick.