Who's Solving The DEVELOPER SHORTAGE Crisis?
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- čas přidán 12. 12. 2023
- There has been a reported software developer shortage for the past 50 years, despite occasional ups and downs, like the current layoffs at some of the big web companies, despite this though, the data says that vacancies are at an all-time high and demand for people with software development skills is predicted to continue to rise, in fact to double by the end of this decade. Software developer jobs are hard to fill. So despite the doom and gloom, and questions like “Will AI take all out Jobs”, so far the future of software development as a career looks pretty secure. But if this has really been a problem for at least the last 50 years, who has been doing anything about it and what have they done?
In this episode, Dave Farley, author of “Continuous Delivery”,’ Modern Software Engineering” and other books, addresses the current software shortage and discusses the steps that are being taken to address it, and some of the responses that are less common, but may really help.
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#softwareengineer #software #developer - Věda a technologie
Companies not wanting to hire Juniors because they leave once they are trained has an easy solution. Pay them!
Companies not wanting to hire Seniors (i mean +50 years old) because they don't leave and are harder to fire in most countries.
yup, just left my first dev job even though I performed well and they didn't want to pay a fair salary and left. I hope they aren't surprised. Would have stayed tbh. If wasn't getting paid 50% of market rate.
@mr.random8447 if you are a junior then chances are you are not even doing 50% of the job even though you think you are doing 150%.
Not true. If you are trained and get paid well but don't like the type of projects the company is doing then you would leave anyway.
We just hoping AI advances enough to replace the juniors. Then to become a senior you would have to work for free until you are really competent. And yes there will be less seniors then, great higher demand for seniors and more money.
They don't want to hire Seniors, because they believe they cost too much (myth) or they aren't with the latest dev stuff (myth). You hit 50 and, suddenly, you're not wanted in software (even with evidence of bleeding edge skills). Let's face it: it can take more than a decade to become expert level w/multiple languages, platforms and development paradigms. Why do companies throw this experience in the garbage for faster coders with little experience (fast often equals reckless, and we wonder why the same mistakes are made all over again in so many areas). Another is barriers to entry unrelated to technical savvy. I was rejected for a few jobs due to a bankruptcy and the bad credit as a result (it didn't affect my coding ability, but this stuff is why HR can't find coders. A nephew of mine was rejected due to an opinion piece discovered questioning veganism and a YT channel indicting corporatism (political). It's stupid shit like this that an HR twit will reject valid candidates for all the time (HR uses software I wrote a decade ago to "parse" candidates and follow rejection rules no human will ever see). Plenty of good devs out there (but way too many "chefs" in the corporate kitchen).
There is no "Shortage of Developers" - it's a shortage of "Cheap Developers with years of experience"!
I have unfortunately seen this way too many times, where whole teams are fired just to hire new Developers in a country with a lower salary expectation.
I am also long enough in the market to experience how the same companies lost a lot of money following this strategy or even went completely out of business, because the "new" teams didn't perform, sold the source code to competition and instead being proactive waited for their Management to decide EVERYTHING, leading to bugs and vulnerabilities everywhere - having technical debt even before release.
I am from an Asian country with cheap labor due to currency exchange, and would like to say that things are not any better here. I have always wondered who are actually filling in these low cost, high expectations jobs. And this phenomenon is not exclusive to local or expats companies.
Conflict of interest in newly hired CTOs. They all are getting paid on the side by the offshoring companies they provide as a solution. They come in for a few years on a high salary, outsource and destroy companies who were “promised it would solve the technical debt”
Nope. There is a massive shortage of the experienced developers. And it is only aggravated by the abundance of crap developers who generate tons of needless complexity and tons of technical debt, which can only be mitigated by the experienced developers.
Lack of Competence, the two are not exactly the same even though one would hope so.
@@CW91 I have worked with agencies in the Philippines, India, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, Peru ... and can promise they exist.
I'm a retired lecturer in computing who worked at a large university somewhere in the UK - and I got sick of hearing companies complain that universities don't turn out the graduates they want. Especially since what a company _really_ wants is for universities to churn out hundreds of grads who can use _exactly_ the tools, languages and stack they use, thus providing a ready pool of job candidates that they can treat like pond scum and reward with peanuts. And if you happen to ask whether the same company could possibly provision a lab of (say) 20 seats with exactly the tools they want us to teach, including the licences for the software, and the computers to run everything? Well, they look at you as if you've grown an extra head all of a sudden.
The dilemma that every computing department faces isn't deciding what to teach. It's deciding what _NOT_ to teach, because there is simply more material than can possibly be fitted into a three year full-time course, and each year there are new developments and it gets harder and harder to decide what to throw out.
It's easy for an outsider to make suggestions about some new thing(s) to teach, but the question they also have to be ready to answer is "what do we discard from our syllabus to make space for what you want us to teach?"
And if you *do* teach industry-specific skills, it will be the wrong industry. "Hey, all your graduates have been trained in remote retail trading, where are the people trained in medical instrument control?"
@@jgharston Damn right!
I've been a software development lecturer for 23+ years and couldn't agree more with you. I could read out your comment at a staff meeting and have 100% of the people in agreement.
No truer words than these. Most of these advertised job positions are fake job posting
Personally, I think that software development should be viewed as a trade, and it would be good for it to unionize similar to construction workers.
Because then the companies would use internships/externships more, and workers will have a union to negotiate for them (as long as they pay their fee)
Imo...
Labour Shortage is one of the strangest phenomena. Real wages barely budge, hiring processes are long and do not improve despite much criticism and yet somehow there isn’t enough devs?
Paying someone more doesn't make them the correct person for the job, it just makes all the people you don't want to hire anyway more expensive.
@@surangapanagamuwagamage5029 Paying people more means they are less likely to seek another job. And if hiring there will be more candidates to choose from...
Today IT labour shortage is just a myth. In reality there is a large surplus and this is why there is a long hiring process. There was a shortage more than a year ago.
Companies are using the same approach night clubs do: even empty, they let the line grow to show everyone how cool they are, and how expensive they can charge you (translated to lesser payment)
@@tongobong1
Meanwhile I know many people (including myself) who are experienced developers who've failed hundreds of job applications over the course of the year. The skill floor for entry level jobs is being raised rapidly while pay isn't moving to follow suit. It's odd hearing companies complaining about lack of supply, while there's employees begging for work on the other side.
Same. Blame the Indians
Companies could be "hiring", but they are actually just gathering a portfolio of people who could be hired in the future if there would be demand (more money from the investors, more clients or a job opening).
I.e. HR still need to work, even if for the person who applies it is a total waste of time. Just keep applying even if it feels like companies do not know what they want.
Oh, there is still a possibility to catch an amazing dev for cheap, so why not to try?
(besides, the channel which is about learning IT would be saying that IT skills are in high demand, just because it is how it works)
Simple: There is no shortage of tech workers. There is shortage of tech workers who the companies can pay as little as possible without training them.
Exactly! What companies expect if they hire for a principal engineer position and ask candidates to do automated, timed mumbo jumbo algorithmic tricks? Seriously?
Poor management, client's giving up or dont wish to pay as much as dealt or maybe project is even more expensive for company its self i dunno. Its time of recession and crisis.
In the US, there is no labor shortage or shortage of skills. We have corporations laying people off, doing stock buybacks, and posting jobs with unrealistic terms so they can complain about not having enough skilled labor.
Most our devs are from India, Pakistan, or China. US company.
exactly the same in Germany (and EU in general)
I got about 4 interviews with my ~90 applications and 2 offers!
so I can tell u this software dev dream is a dead one. phuck it
They've been running this scam on and off for decades now in various fields.
Same in the UK.
@@SuperDudu72 I applied applied for a position about a year ago that was essentially made for me. They wanted someone with indepth knowledge on a service that I developed.
They sent a rejection email that said I didn't have the required years of experience working with it. They wanted 10 years of experience but the service went live a year prior. I sent the hiring manager an email stating exactly that and she told me they would not make exceptions to the requirement.
If you, as a company, are concerned that training your juniors may lead to them leaving, you should be even more concerned about not training them and having them stay.
If you're concerned that training juniors may lead to leave them, maybe don't treat them like shit.
Well, that's why those companies don't hire them in the first place.
@ then they complain when they need to hire seniors and no one is qualified
This is illogical. You hire a junior only if they are capable of fulfilling the responsibilities for which they were hired; otherwise, they would still be unemployed. One ceases to be a junior with experience, solving real-life problems. Experience is something you can only teach yourself; nobody else can impart it to you.
Juniors should be training themselves. Are you a university graduate or something?
I’m not sure how there can be a dev shortage after over 200,000 tech employees have been laid off in 2023 alone.
These companies are just liars and fraudsters. And they get away with it too, and at the same time blame the victim.
I just got paid and yet i'm already broke. See?
Not to mention the hordes of early twenties devs trying to break into the industry...
It seems contradictory that 200,000 tech employees were laid off, considering big companies typically maintain reserves, especially during times like the COVID-19 pandemic when people stayed indoors, and tech firms experienced substantial profits. The tech market is normalized right now.
Us good developers left, created businesses, and tripled our income.
A stat I will never forget from ethics in my CS program: there are about 2.5x as many IT grads in a given year as there are job openings in IT for them to fill. There isn't a shortage and there never will be. Every complaint you hear from managers about struggling to hire is the venting of their own incompetence.
Getting a degree doesn't guarantee a job, more so for CS because skills > education. Just because you can show up to a classroom and regurgitate the 15 year old outdated information the professor teaches doesn't qualify you for an entry job.
@@Peglegkickboxerit's true, and it's also true that those students worked hard for their degrees and no one has 3 years of experience for an entry level or even an internship.
@@Peglegkickboxeryep I've sat in on software developer interviews where people had a masters degree but couldn't do the most basic simple coding. I'd rather have the guy with no degree if he knows what he is doing.
@@PeglegkickboxerYet, most interviews conducted by these "managers" are literal whiteboarding interviews, with nothing to do with actual skills. Most themselves are at best good at just making presentations or excel sheets, and talking a lot. And once you get hired, these managers are more interested in getting their egos flattered rather than any meaningful projects.
Managers are creme de la creme of the corporate world 😂
Well, if they want to go into IT, that's their problem. This discussion is about software development, not IT.
I love how most of "tech" companies put the damn bar so high with ridiculous requests like 'Must know Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, CouchDB .etc .etc', and when someone eventually made it, they just used them as a frontend webpage decorator with barely above junior pay.
This industry deserves a good slap in the face and a stomp to its balls.
Ooh boy do I love seeing the most basic requirements like
- Must know Spirngboot
- Must know Java core
- Must know MySQL, PosgreSQL or some other database
-Must have 10 years of experience
The years of experience part with the most basic requirements is a joke tbh 😂😂😂
@@angelg3642 They have to pretend ready-made, low paid people exist or they might have to treat their employees better than dirt.
I once applied for a role that listed about 10 skills. I could match 9 of them but not the 10th. I thought 9 of the 10 was good enough, but it wasn’t. 😳
Must know HTML CSS Javascript (React) SCSS, photoshop and illustrator. Wage, less than LIDL
It’s not unique to software. I think what we really have is a management class issue. They blame all the problems on everything else than them being in that position which is probably the real source of most of the problems.
Former software architect and project manager here. Left the industry in 2015. Had a team of 19 underpaid and overworked folks, myself included. Fortune 500 with a bunch of the “free perks”. It’s not worth the extra hours, extra stress and subsequent tap on the back when it went well. Becoming an illustrator and animator was the best decision i’ve ever made. Never going back 😅
I bailed in 2015 too after nearly 20 years as a dev. The long hours, constant stress and endless BS simply aren't worth it, when you can get comparable money in other roles that are much less stressful.
Have you had success with it?
Women generally cap out, they cant handle. not all of them, but a notable figure@MisterRaiGuy
So you are willing to work for lower salaries now? Software Architects usually make way more than illustrators. Of course mental health and well-being is more important than a big paycheck though - so if a job drags you down and you can move then move.
Also what are your thoughts about generative AI eating into your industry? What can illustrators do to win this battle with AI?
@@captnoplan3926 That’s a great question and it involves an existential debate. The short answer is absolutely, yes. And the long one boils down to dreams. When I entered University, IT was the closest thing available to 3D animation and digital illustration in my country, but then one climbs the ladder rather quickly, becomes enamored with earnings and a sense of power, forgetting the initial dream all along.
As you progress in life, the dream comes
back to bite you in the ass, and at that point, very few have the courage to jump off the wagon. I’m very grateful for the time I spent in IT, as it allowed me to put my logical brain to use, making it a powerful asset to create a practical plan for my dreams.
Now concerning AI, I don’t see it as an enemy by any means. What we artists fight against is theft. AI is not learning how to draw or paint, it’s simply mimicking portions of countless artworks to create something new.
In my opinion, that’s exactly why it lacks the basic pillars of drawing. Eventually a big name will be impacted by it, fight the legal battles, and something like Spotify for illustrations will emerge: artists publish work, AI uses this database, user generates inside the platform, artists get ridiculous small royalties (hello musicians!)
But I don’t see authors, filmmakers, animators or illustrators disappearing any time soon.
The "shortage" is entirely self inflicted by companies. There are plenty of recent computer science undergraduates who can't find positions because the company's filter them out using crappy tools, and human resources scum are making selections by looking for keyword matching instead of actual skill proficiency.
You want to fix it, start putting computer science degree graduates in recruiting positions and start interviewing candidates more, instead of using ATS to delegate work to a computer that should be handled by a human.
Also, there are so many unrealistic requirements or expectations in job posting for intern/entry-level and there is shortage of opportunities to gain solid skill.
I put my CV through one of those automatic CV screening tool things. My CV starts with "I offer 40 years' experience of...." The report came back saying "...has 13 months experience..."
@@jgharston that's pretty funny. Someone made a good buck for software that doesn't work
Exactly. You can’t expect to reap if you don’t sow.
@@jgharston I put mine in one of those web sites. It came back saying I didn’t have c# on my resume, which, of course, I did.
On another occasion, I pasted the job ad itself where the resume goes. It came back with a poor match.
I think some of the problem is the lack of willingness to let Juniors exist and let people learn in an environment where failure doesn't result in an instant verbal assault or risk of losing employment. People aren't given space to make errors or be human anymore. Maybe the employers needing talent should start there first. It's a systemic culture issue.
Scrum being the predominant culture doesn't help either. With dailys and retros they feel they are being put on trail on a daily basis, being sit in court sucks not only kills inclusion but also burns out even the more experienced employees.
Ever heard of open source?
Over the years we've added a lot of new laws on the books making it hard to give people large raises for fear of lawsuits over X getting more than Y because supposedly Z unfair reason. If you want a large raise you have to get it through moving to a new position / job.
Shortage? I am an architect level senior dev willing to accept a midlevel dev salary, and I can't get a single interview. This is either age discrimination, or the hiring managers are too intimidated to hire someone who have more experience than they have. Maybe I should dumb down my resume and pretend that I am desperate junior developer. But I have heard junior developers are having a hard time too. So who tha hell are they hiring?
at the end of the day it's the network that get you hired
This.
The market is screwed. I used to work on contracting only and now I can't get a software engineering job because all the jobs are suddenly permanent now and the employers don't want to take on someone who has been contracting their whole life because they see it as a flight risk.
They look at a limited set of trendy technology buzzwords in your CV. If you have them, you go ahead to an interview, otherwise you don't. It's that simple. Skill? Math? Architecture? There are very limited areas where these are still required. Most of today's software developer positions are intended for monkeys developing CRUD "microservices" using primarily copy-paste method... until their job is fully automated.
The grass isn't any greener for Junior positions. I've been applying for over a year with no luck. I'm not even being picky either... at this point I'd take like $40k and be on-call all the time lol. It'd be a lot better than $0. About to go back to delivering pizza with a CS degree...
As a developer in Silicon Valley, it sure doesn't feel like we're in demand. Every job I apply for, where they're asking for skills and languages I have professional experience in, I'll see hundreds of other people applied for.
Tbh I think being in SV already tells employers you’re going to be very expensive, they could hire 2 devs for the same price as you.
Crap jobs, with crap bosses, just looking to get into a better position is my bet. Plus the best way to get a nice big jump in salary is to get a new job at a different company.
No shortage, companies just expect you to know a specific skill set that includes EVERYTHING. I equate finding a job like winning the lotto. Each number is a different skill and you have to line up all those numbers to win, plus the bonus ball, which can be anything really, not even related to coding, they just want you to have it. So either you learn EVERY framework, language, style of coding, etc. out there, or you know someone at the company to get you in, else you don't get the job and join the many many developers (I think it's 80% these days) that get ghosted by the recruiting agency or company directly. Oh but don't forget, if you are a full stack developer, with ALL the skills they want, they'll be happy to pay you an entry level salary and to work 80 hours a week because you have to make up for all the other developers they are ghosting. Maybe they'd have better luck if they didn't go after full stack developers and just focused their teams so that backend developers work on backend, frontend work on frontend, server admins work on servers, etc. Least then it might make sense for the salaries they are asking for and they'll actually get developers since the chances of finding say a .NET or PHP developer is higher if that developer also doesn't have to know how to setup servers, work with one of the many frontend UI frameworks, etc.
Dev industry is flawed. So many frameworks vying for customers. These frameworks add NOTHING to the outcome of a project, they exist to earn themselves money and offset bad developers / habits.
So any given job will have any combination of languages and frameworks and there are literally tens of thousands of possible combinations. No dev can learn/experience all this nor should we
I limited myself to core languages, telling the likes of typescript to go learn what the entire design vision of js is (go take a walk off of a short ramp) , the likes of symfony to get flushed. And well, its worked for me.
We must all do our part imho
@@TheBelrick Exactly. Project funders don't care, but we've created this situation and the madness doesn't seem to have an end ... 8000+ languages
The "training on the job" problem is not restricted to juniors. In some sense it's even worse for senior developers who are expected to know dozens of frameworks and libraries and start hacking with 100% productivity on the first day of new job.
How long does it take to learn a new NoSQL database if I already worked with two or three different ones. How difficult is it to tell the new guy your "very special" way of deploying code to the cloud?
They keep posting the same job for months, spend many hours interviewing candidates and rejecting them because they are looking for mr perfect.
The worse part about being a senior is being asked to clean up a junior's mess that lied just to get the job.
I've recently seen a funny example of this. In mid-2022 the managers had hired a senior guy to run a small project to build an ML module into their platform. He had collected loads of information, written a detailed project document, but they hadn't got on with him for him not being perfect, so he had left and they had frozen the project. A year (!) later (Q4 2023) they have hired another guy to pick the project up and continue it and fired him just a month later for not being blazing fast from day 1 (they have ambitious goals and KPIs, and blah blah blah). They are literally posting this vacation for months. Perhaps they are going to hire someone else in Q4 2024 to continue this thing, and these 1-year freeze periods are somehow an efficient way to achieve the project's goals quickly, may be that has something to do with Lorentz transformation of space-time, who knows...
The software industry is in the worst recession in over a decade. It's very hard for even senior devs to find a position. And forget finding an entry level position.
Why is Dave Farley regurgitating this myth? I'd guess he's telling mangers what they want to hear. Management always wants the labor market skewed in their favor.
What we have right now is a shortage of opportunity.
He’s pedaling products.
Exactly right. This skills shortages myth has grown very tiresome. Have 20 years xp and it's tough right now.
@@jaymason7097 - Yes. He's sucking up to the managers who are his potential customers.
I'm guessing the product being sold is coding boot camps, CS degrees, and certs.
Thats because it takes 3 people to do that same things it took 50 to do 15 years ago.
IT has among the most self important employers out there. That's part of the problem since it cause the hiring requirements to become a wishlist rather than real requirements and instead of asking for specialist, they ask for the guy who knows everything; an impossible request.
But software engineering is NOT IT. That's a big part of the problem, software development gets lumped into the catch-all of "IT".
One reason there's a skill shortage is because software managers keep chasing after new siren-song technologies that promise quick and easy creation and deployment of software. It seems like every time you turn around there is another front-end development framework, back-end scripting language, or general-purpose development language. I'm a full-stack developer with a decade of experience in software, and I can only fill about ten percent of full-stack job openings because the tech stack varies so much.
The real insanity is the fact that they put these frameworks as the primary requirements for eligibility to get offered the job.
It's like looking for delivery drivers, requiring them to know how to get around city X really well, but not demanding that they know how to drive in the first place.
@@MrAntice Need experience driving Toyota.
So glad we finally settled on Angular 2 and don't have to change frameworks again.
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@@MightyDrunken 4 years experience with driving the brand new toyota hilux 2024 model to be exact.
This is so true! Then there are those jobs with descriptions that require 10+ years experience with software that is 4 years old.
I read an article several years ago about Michael Crichton, the author of Jurassic Park and other novels. He said that his mother asked him why he didn't choose English as his major if he wanted to write novels. His reply was that the English department at Harvard University would only teach him how to be an English professor. He didn't want to be an English professor. So, he chose Biology as his major because he wanted to write novels about biology and science. Likewise, the computer science faculty in Western universities teach students how to be computer scientists like Alan Turing. However, my experience was that the professors had never written commercial software. So, I learned what I could from them and used my work experience to learn more about software development.
Computer science and software engineering should be different degrees. With software engineering you should learn about dependency injection, client specifications and continuous deployment all in the first week. In computer science you can learn about ENIAC, Scratch and calculus all day long, if that is what you want.
Yes but the few professors that managed to sneak in is often years behind because they're not building software while they're teaching
@@michaelnurse9089 and they are different degrees indeed. Yet dummies go to CS and then complain that they're forced to study a science.
@luke5100 technically the professors can do. They just do something different. Software development is different than computer science.
This is cynical, but it's my experience: With CS in especially, academia is so far behind industry practice that they've resigned to serving as a tool for class division. CS grads aren't much more useful than self-taught devs, but many carry a sense of entitlement knowing they can easily land high-paid jobs with lots of vacation time and little responsibility or consequence for poor decisions.
I see it with other grads in other disciplines too, but I'm much closer to this happening with CompSci.
keyword here is REPORTED shortage. experienced developer here, can tell you they're currently hunting for unicorns with wish lists at 30-50k a year. it's NOT happening! it's always been this way. when PHP came out, I saw job postings asking for 6 years of experience in it. it had been out for about 4 years. so they wanted people who invented it basically or worked in the betas? same applies to this day.
Yeah I see job postings where they want someone with 15 years specialized experience but they don't want to hire anyone over the age of 40.
Schizophrenics write job requirements to get liars hired. They get on well.
@ad6417
Looking for an 18 year old with 30 years of experience
I was paid 120k 25 years ago. Today, that same level of experience pays 140k max, most places.
Non technical people just despise paying us weird developers what we cost.
I agree. As an outsider I felt the salary was crazy. Once you actually start developing you realize why the salary is so high. Not a cake walk
In my country Juniors negotiate their salaries... The issue is that everyone in their mother tells the Juniors to agree with the slightly above minimal wage salaries. Like those salaries that a single person can barely sustain himself. That obviously hurts every single other dev who knows his worth. I got rejected from few job offers because of my salary expectations which were twice the minimal wage. Not because of my experience or skills... A friend of mine got into a job with 300$ more than me which is great but even though he had talent, competence and professionalism he had to negotiate a lot... .
Tldr everything is messed up
Are you aware that the world has changed in 25 years? ,🤦🏿♀️🤦🏿♀️🤦🏿♀️
There is no shortage of developers. There is only a shortage of realistic expectations.
Is it unrealistic to expect that programmers can program? Because the vast majority of candidates cannot. Is it too much to ask?
@@vitalyl1327 Well I don't know about that, but I've seen plenty of reasonably qualified candidates get turned down either because the recruiter didn't think they had enough years of Java experience, or the company didn't think they were a cultural fit (subjective), or they didn't get come up with an optimal perfect algorithm in a coding question, or the candidate didn't have enough experience in the dozens upon dozens of technologies the company wants. Companies are extremely picky and rigid is what I'm saying. And they can afford to be ... because there are plenty of qualified developers in the world. You can't be expected to learn, apriori, every single one of the hundreds of services that AWS offers, on the off chance that it might turn out to be useful in some job some day. No reasonable person can do that. But it seems like that's what companies expect. You have to be flexible and you have to be willing to invest in people after you've hired them. If you can't do that, then yeah, it's gonna seem like there aren't enough developers.
@@vitalyl1327 What do you mean by programmers ? people can do python, it doesn't seem hard,
the industry want people to have experience and they want they pretrained with industry experience, but where do you get industry experience from ? by getting hired
@@vitalyl1327What are some of the examples of candidates that can't program which you have first hand experience with? Can you go into more detail and quantify this as much as possible.
I'm genuinely curious.
@@jamesgood7894 a lot of cases when people were unable to express a simple idea even in a pseudocode (anyway, no reason to ask about any specific languages, this is not an important knowledge). Is it that much to ask?
And I'm not talking about dumb and pointless intevriew questions like the infamous FizzBuzz or asking to implement a double-linked list, no. Just any kind of a problem with more than two steps in its solution.
The increasing complexity of software development is DEFINITELY one of the factors. While the tools are indeed getting better, the scope by which employers are expecting talent to learn new tools, be proficient at them and the shear breadth of the tech out there is putting devs into a tough spot. When I started you would hear one or two languages in a job post. Now you see stacks of tech plus they often mix in devops and even skills related to customer support. Know LAMP? Tough luck, they want MERN. Know both? Sorry, they want GHER (of course it is made up but more stacks are always popping up). Then on top of this, businesses are beginning to ask for skills in tech that you only can access through enterprise. Not everyone at home can work on complex data models on clustered machines... especially if they can't even afford a cloud platform solution. The developer shortage is also a shortage of skilled devs who don't have the RIGHT skills.
100% agree on this one. Software industry is the least standardized industry I have ever seen. And employers are not backing down from their specific demands. They want candidates who meet their EXACT requirements. Yeah, good luck with that.
100%. I'm currently looking for a route out of software development because the pace of (usually unnecessary) change is just becoming overwhelming; I'm spending a much higher percentage of my day now just fighting the technology.
Nah. A generalist can fit anywhere, there is absolutely no need to specialise in any particular stack. I don't know where do you people get these weird ideas.
@@vitalyl1327 So far we have had three people AND the poster of this video saying the same thing. Generalists are not discouraged but you are easily going to be out competed by those specializing in a company's tech stack. Why hire you, the generalist, when they can get someone who generally knows programming AND has industry tech experience in the exact stacks they are asking for?
@@MartyrCry this may only apply to the very junior roles. I rarely see stack even being mentioned in the role descriptions (and I certainly never mention it myself when I write such descriptions), for it's an irrelevant tiny detail.
@4:41 the systems are horrifically more complex, but not because the TASKS are more difficult. I wrote a POC shell script to integrate with an API. It was 30 lines of code. They were mad it was a command line tool, but I was only tasks with showing you could connect to said API.
Draft 1 was given to another developer. It took him about a week to do the same POC before he could progress to round 1, because he decided he was going to do it in Java with some frameworks, and his frameworks were colliding and his build kept failing. I looked into what he was doing, and his build was pulling in literal thousands of libraries before he could just do a simple curl.
Guess what- his was praised and became the backbone for the new system, because management liked the words "Java" and "Frameworks"
It has plagued them ever since as the build breaks all the time and debugging is obfuscated by the sheer quantity of libraries.
From my perspective as someone who struggled to find my first internship for years and now unemployed as a graduate for over a year now, this supposed developer shortage is a total lie. So many fellow graduates and students are literally unemployed after years of job hunting. If companies *really* wanted people, the entry level wouldn't be this insanely difficult to navigate.
Shortage is real. There is a shortage of *experienced* and *competent* developers. True, companies are not willing to train the juniors, and having juniors in a team is always a massive liability, not many can afford doing it.
And, what is even worse, the vast majority of those juniors will be a waste of time anyway, no matter how much effort you'll put in training them. There is an abundance of very low quality very inexperienced developers, and a huge shortage of competent developers.
@@vitalyl1327 You just used circular logic. Shortage of experience -> juniors are a liability... Shortage of competence -> companies not willing to train. Mexican standoff.
Oh here's how to solve that. First, you have to go and make a wildly popular app, on your own, that makes $millions/year. Stay doing that for 5 years until you're a senior level dev. Next, get hired at a company making $50k/yr doing the same thing. See how that works?
@@WhyteHorse2023 this is why this situation is so absurd - overproduction of juniors led to an unsustainable drop in average quality, made it nearly impossible to find those who are worth even trying to train, all the while experienced people retiring with nobody to replace them.
If the junior pool was not so diluted with the wrong people it would have been much easier to train them into experienced engineers.
There isn’t a shortage of software developers. There’s a shortage of software developers willing to work for less than $30k per year.
Some companies have offshored software and firmware jobs to save money. That offshoring causes a lot of problems since the senior developers with the technical know how usually lose their jobs and leave the company and the new offshore teams struggle to meet schedules for new features and bug fixes due to lack of knowledge and technical debt.
“Have we got the programming models wrong for the cloud?” Yes -would love to see a video on this. I think we absolutely have.
Yes, we have got cloud programming wrong. Languages like Elixir provide immutable data and actor-based programming, and HTMX gets rid of the fat client written in a large JS framework and all the complexity of two types of developers in a team.
@@finnwillows6031Not sure what HTMX has to do with the cloud; you can just as easily use it with on-prem servers. Also, someone writing HTMX still needs to understand how HTML and CSS work, both of which are very different from backend technologies.
@@finnwillows6031 cloud is a massive scam!
but also a new opportunity to earn easy money. bc honestly everybody hates it and if u do it well, you'd have less competitors
but seriously, cloud is a scam!
As a senior programmer I think that clueless HR is to blame for this.
Often the job requirements make no sense.
They'd call it a "Javascript position " but then ou'll have to be an expert in ReactJS, Angular, or even Ruby on rails.
When you ask what they actually need to do with those skills, most often than not they simply don't know, they're just using buzzwords they heard elsewhere.
And once you reach the kata test, you then notice that it's a PHP test with a such a vague description that you don't even really what they expect from you to do...
Programming is supposed to be a passionating job requiring passionated people, working on interesting and challenging projects.
I feel that those HR and projects managers are sucking all the fun out of the profession, with confusing requirements and excessively controlled environments.
Even with a 20+ years of experience all this is annoying, so I can't even imagine how young programmers feel.
I remain highly skeptical that this industry isn't oversaturated. The semantic argument of "well, software developers ARE in demand, they're just only at the demand at the senior level" has never satisfied me. I've always wondered; isn't the degree to which a field will accept fresh people at least somewhat indicative of how in-demand it is? Why would this metric be less valid than the metrics that industry proponents use to say it is in demand?
...we live in such a tricky, confusing world.
They can't fill the "senior role" because the "senior role" involves doing what was previously the combined work of 1 product manager, 2 senior devs and 3 junior devs.
A lot of devs are chased into a burn out and the industry is wondering why there's a shortage? And the big tech companies are laying off staff by the hundreds too, so there should be a labor surplus if anything else. So things just don't add up, whatever the 'data' says. Lies, damned lies and data.
Exactly. Currently there is a huge surplus of developers looking for a job. In good times there usually is a shortage. Good times ended a year ago.
@luke5100 developer shortage is just a myth from the past.
Because they layoff the juniors who don't do anything anyway
In my experience, most devs burn themselves out. In my 15 years in software, I have never been denied time off, nor have I known anyone to be denied time off.
Learn to say no.
@@blackjackjesteris there a tactful way of stating this?
My gut reaction would be something like "F no I'm taking the break like I had stated 4 months ago" but on the other hand I don't know what kind of leverage I would have. I've read that the clever employees ask for requests to be made written so there's a record of it ( so it can be held to unbiased scrutiny ) but not much more than that.
Also, have you found that greater pay = less work life balance? Obviously if someone were to work in the gaming industry or be a staff engineer there's gonna be perpetual crunch time but I wonder if there's a sweet spot? If you work for a shitty company they're gonna use you up; and if you work in a fang company does that mean you automatically get burnt out? ( aside from Amazon which seems to have a horrible work culture)
I've been a software engineer all my career. It's been a good ride but I can't say I'd recommend it for young people looking for a career. The fact that there is a shortage and therefore upward wage pressure is good so far as that goes. But once hired companies want to wring every last bit of work out of you they can, and that's not so good. There are still companies out there to whom work life balance isn't just a buzzword. But they're getting scarcer. And to make that worse companies tend not to give that much in the way of raises, but they will hire experienced developers at a higher salary than a typical developer that's been with the company a few years makes. So the best way to increase your income is to job hop. I hate job hopping. I've done it a few times because of layoffs, companies going broke, etc., and I've been well rewarded every time I have. Though that's an inefficient way to go about increasing your income you do sort of have a responsibility to yourself and your family to do the best you can in providing. I don't see too many companies giving away product, why should employees give away the most valuable thing they have - time.
Hey I am a computer science student.
I am looking for a dev job I am actually genuinely passionate about software. Can I connect with you on linked in or discord ask ask you about breaking into the industry? It is very hard I have some internships/contract work I have been putting in effort to learn everything but I fear it won't be enough
@@fromnothingtoeverything1419 I'm afraid I wouldn't be any help to you. It's such a changed world from when I got started you could tell me way more about breaking into the industry than I could ever tell you. A couple things worth mentioning though. Pay more attention to the people than the technologies or the product. You want to work with good people, success follows them around. And don't limit yourself to looking at big corps. There's plenty of midsized companies that are stable and that offer the same opportunities and are more likely to treat you as an asset that generates income and is to be supported than as an expense to be minimized. That's been my experience anyway. I do wish you the best.
Yup, in dev, you should like any artist expect to get hired on return percentage basis if the salary isn't very huge, at very least by getting shares along side of regular money, because truth is what they do with code wouldn't fly with any other copyrighted material.
A guy I worked with does exactly the same, I'll be trying to in the new year as I don't see a good future with my current employer - only been doing this for 3 years though.
Because they can get away with it.
If companies were more willing to pay current employees on par with what they're willing to pay to attract new hires, keeping good people wouldn't be a problem. Strange how there is always "no budget" to give a current employee a raise up to something close to market rates, yet there's that much budget to offer new hires. Companies create the situation where the only way for an good employee to get a reasonable raise is by leaving. Can't blame an employee for doing the rational thing.
Think from the company perspective. It would cost a company a lot of money to keep everyone's salary at the market level. Its much more efficient for them to lose and rehire a couple people at market price who are fed up with this then to raise salary to everyone.
There is no labor shortage. There is a shortage of companies willing to pay what is will take to hire the available engineers. Unlike most professions which have a high barrier to entry for starting a business, every software developer has all the tools, equipment and knowledge to do independent development. Making mobile applications independently can earn most developers enough to live reasonably well. So why would any experienced developer work for a low ball company when they can make the same amount of money or more on their own? If you are finding it hard to find developers try raising the wage you are offering until you exceed what they can make independently. Oh and stop using AI to filter resumes. The AI is tossing good people because it doesn't know that there are different ways to abbreviate the same skills. Stop asking for mutually exclusive skill sets and being surprised that nobody has them all. Stop asking for more years of experience in a framework than that framework has existed.
If companies aren't willing to pay your ask, but still find _someone_ to hire and still continue to operate as a business, then that's actually evidence of a labor glut and resulting wage correction -- not a labor shortage. And to be fair, the basis of this video might be wrong: there may not even be a labor shortage in sw engineering. The bigger issue might be as you say - that frankly many SW engineers can make more money doing things for themselves than by taking a job with some tech company. Ah but the other way to look at it: if there were ever more sw engineers flooding the market then they'd all be doing the same "work for myself" strategy and then that market would get a lot cheaper and now the company trying to hire engineers for cheap can probably do it easier thanks to increased.
@@JakeStine Wages tell the entire story. If there is a true labor shortage for a certain role, then wages for that role will rise. There's no way around it, it's simply supply and demand. If wages are stagnant, or falling, then there is no labor shortage.
Companies love to lie about supposed "labor shortages" to try and manipulate the labor market.
If that's so, then why is it in every call I've had they don't say "would you accept X thousand a year?" as in a lowball number. I've never seen any HR try to negotiate down. What I have seen is the recruiter push me away from applying to lower paying jobs than I would have accepted. I want to work 4 or 5 years and then retire and going a bit lower would be fine.
The shortage is caused by the industry not wanting to keep up with the wage standard that software development has introduced. I follow the market closely and in the last year, the entry wage of a software developer has gone down by roughly 5%, A similar trend has been seen in mid positions with 3%. For seniors and true seniors, wages remained relatively the same for now but the salary negations have been more intense than before.
There has also been a big disconnect between entry & true junior positions. Companies unwilling to invest in training entries are becoming a big problem and are pushing them out of the job market till they reach that level on their own.
The shortage of jobs and higher supply of developers looking for a job is caused by many factors. #1 higher interest rates, #2 lower growth of economy, #3 energy crisis because of war between Russia and Ukraine, #4 many developers from Russia and Ukraine are looking for a job in USA and EU
I’m seeing the opposite problem. A significant lack of jobs at reputable companies. There are still plenty of layoffs happening and it’s really a seller’s market for jobs at this point in time.
As one of those old-school self-taught developers, I can't recommend often enough to get involved in open source projects to rapidly increase your experience. Not only will you acquire new coding skills, you'll also gain experience working in a distributed team, dealing with code reviews, following coding standards and guidelines, and if you're the lead on a new feature or even start your own open source project, you'll learn how to lead remotely - even without having a lot more authority than just being perceived as (hopefully) competent and saying "please". All of these are high-demand skills - and since all your work is public, you can easily prove your worth. It's almost cheating :-D
Yeah write more open-source code for AI to learn. Great idea
We need to work full time just to afford half of the rent man, there is no time for that, which is part if tge tragedy
There is no shortage of software developers at the moment, but there is a shortage of programming jobs. There are a MASSIVE amount of youtube videos and stories out there RIGHT NOW with tons of software developers that can't get a job after applying to a 100+ because there are so many people applying to the positions. Don't you remember all the tech layoffs that JUST HAPPENED? There are a record number of software developers that don't have a job at the moment.
In the UK, the current software dev positions for a Senior developer with 10+ years of domain specific knowledge are being offered at 40k... THAT is the problem.. turn that number into 200k and your shortage will vanish over night. And stop doing any Agile and Scrum crap that is an existential dread for any engineer that has ever had the misfortune of being dragged into. The is not a human alive that for 40K will wake up in the morning and deal with the dread of attempting to justify their existence in front of a group of do nothing wastes of space in the guise of "managers". The crisis is self induced, Agile has failed as a system and the low wages make a perfect storm that is killing the industry, add to that AI systems that take a lot of learning to use and you have an industry that is no longer fit for purpose.
Agile/Scrum almost forced me to leave the industry 10 years ago. If ever did have to go back to that environment, as you say grovelling every morning to justify my job against recurring 2 week tight deadlines in the form of 'sprints', for a wage that doesn't even buy a decent house most of the UK....well I'd just quit.
I suspect when a new methodology comes to replace Agile, it would be even worse. Scrum virtualizes the job, prevents people from seeing the bigger picture by focusing on some secondary unimportant matters. Next they are going to put a VR helmet onto everyone's head and stimulate them with an electric discharge.
There is no shortage of software developers. I see people being laid off in tech right and left and spend months looking for work. I see same position posted online from the same companies for months remaining unfilled.
companies create shortage for cheap senior developers by asking them to work for junior salaries
There isn't a skill shortage, there is a shortage of companies who are actually interested in hiring developers. All of these "technical coding challenges" and "take home tests" are a put off to people and weed out good candidates that can definitely do the job.
What do you think makes a good candidate? Good candidates are willing to jump through all the hoops and do all the unreasonable requests from the company. If the candidate is not willing to go above and beyond, then objectively for a company he is not a good candidate. So companies are doing the right thing (for themselves, obviously).
@@Astral100 In the end though, even you acknowledge that these practices are unreasonable. I suppose that a company may feel like they’re getting the best candidate but that’s objectively hard to measure. I think they’re actually just getting people who say yes to every request, no matter how unreasonable. I would argue that a company full of people who just say yes, is not a thoughtful or diverse company.
@@th3oth3rjak3_ Going above and beyond and saying yes is very different. Smart companies filter not just for yes people, but for people who say yes and then go above and beyond. Companies full of proactive people that go above and beyond will be a lot more successful. So maybe its unreasonable to you, but its very good for companies.
@@Astral100 I think what I’m suggesting is not that going above and beyond is unreasonable. I’m totally with you on that one. Hard workers are a valued commodity in any industry. I recently took one of these technical assessments as a current software engineer. It was a timed assessment with 3 complex algorithms from various problem domains. Though I felt my test went fairly well, I didn’t find out how I did, only that it wasn’t good enough for an interview. These assessments are great at analyzing a candidates aptitude for leetcode problem solving in a constrained environment but they miss a lot of values which companies can measure through the interview process. For example, the ability to communicate, work as a team member, and other related skills which also benefit the company. Many candidates who “fail” these assessments without an explanation feel alienated by companies trying to recruit them. Every company can hire how they wish, but small companies offering a modest salary aren’t helping themselves by imposing these hiring practices. Especially given that most software developers won’t be solving some of the businesses most complex domain logic on their first day. I can certainly see why high caliber companies like FAANG would do this because the candidate pool is wide and they offer significant compensation. Overall, I just find it weird that this industry has this practice but I don’t see this in other industries, acknowledging that I haven’t looked very hard.
Yet here I am, with 14 years experience, applying to roles that I wouldn't even have to learn anything to perform; yet not getting any calls. Well, one. One call. But the recruiter thought I lacked experience in HTTP because I hadn't used firefox very much, despite my having 7 years developing chrome. (Not really. It's just an analogy. But change the protocol and apps and it's the exact same...)
Lol, HTTP is browser agnostic.
@@WhyteHorse2023 He was using that as an anology, not an exact example. See my example of "your experience writing stock market trading systems has no relevance to our medical instrument control software".
“developer shoratage” ?
I’m a recent CS grad from a renowned university and don’t get a call or email after submitting CVs. Over 100 resumes submitted and nothing back
I wish I felt the shortage 😅. I got laid off at the end of October and getting interviews is taking forever!
Me too, in August. Still nothing.
Wishing you best of luck!
@@johnsartain4160 Wishing you the best of luck!
@@kompila thanks! I actually got a job at the end of January 😁. Got 2 offers too!
@@AddisonRennick Aweeeeeeeesome!
And here I am with a CS degree unable to get an entry level job for a year.
Same, it's incredibly awkward explaining why I am going for call center and other menial temp jobs despite being qualified to do much more. I try to keep my skills sharp but there's only so much grinding leetcode and building yet another portfolio project can do when the jobs aren't there.
yep, youre not the only one, youre in good company :(
I decided it would be much easier creating my own company and moving into something like Blender. At least I would be able to take commissions
The reason people leave after training is because you can get a 30% raise by leaving or have a 3% one by staying. Of course leaving is the preferd choice.
There's honestly no survey or study that shows that there's any shortage of SW devs.
Rather, more and more fools in HR departments are behaving like they come to office just for having fun by breaking monotony of their otherwise dull lives, and are actually not interested in hiring anyone.
After Uni I worked for HP; working on disk drives. Some of the best troubleshooting skills I learned was also from my coworkers; other young guys who'd been tearing systems apart since they could walk; cars, electronics, farm equipment and even "non-existent" logic systems implemented in software. That knowledge is priceless.
Some of the best problem solvers I've ever seen have been farm kids that were used to figuring things out and making things work, and with very limited resources. I'll take all the people like that I can get.
"non-existent" software implemented in hardware. ;) Who needs logic, a small PROM will do!
Good catch @@jgharston ! :) I was referring to non-physical things; some of them came to software dev way before the rest of us.
I live in Switzerland, and some companies are after unicorns.
They pretend that there is a shortage, but the reality is that, when I started to work in the 90’s, technical people where at the beginning of the hiring process. Now, it’s the HR and they have no clue. So they create a list full of buzz words and nobody fits the bill.
The elephant in the room not covered is burn out. I started programming when I was a kid. It's something I've always been passionate about. I've been a professional software developer for the past 25 years, and have worked on some of the largest scale problems you'd be familiar with. But even as someone who has been successful and has always loved what I do, I'm feeling burn out. I am getting close to early retiring. Probably something I will do this year. I will not stop programming though, I just won't be getting a pay check for it anymore. No more middle managers selling me and my colleagues down the river as they set insane deadlines.
Imagine if you spent 5 years learning something just for some self taught person to tell you that you dont have experience. What a hello world are we living in.
As a software developer currently looking for a job for a few months now, I’ve never seen the job market this bad. I’m at risk of homelessness because so few places are interested in me, and most companies that offer an explanation with their rejection say that there were a lot of candidates. So where on earth is this shortage?
Hang in there. It IS bad.
These CZcams channels are all selling shovels. Although this one is directed at folks who are already a few years into this mess of a career.
I personally saw this coming nearly 10 years ago. Everyone in my school from math, CS, Engineering, and even Science/Arts were targeting developer jobs because they were so abundant and relatively easy to snatch. That was just at a University coop program. There were also high school graduates, dropouts, and college students building the same skills to target the same sort of jobs. By late 2018, there was a crypto crash and the jobs dried up.
Things shot up again during the pandemic.
These are all economic booms and busts that are part of our economy. Hang on for the rough ride, it WILL recover.
There is a shortage of experienced developers, and overproduction of very low quality juniors, so even for the good ones it's hard to prove their worth while competing with hordes of the worthless and incompetent. It's an awful situation indeed, and I do not have an easy solution. There's simultaneously a huge shortage and it's hard to get in for the newcomers.
In 2023 there's more developer excess than shortage. Many projects get cancelled, many devs agree to work below their qualifications and past salary levels.
In the long term there'll be developer shortage again, but in the short term it's an enormous excess.
"Software is easy, as long as is local, single threaded and doesn't share data"
- Dave
Truer words haven't spoken in a while
I'd definitely be interested in hearing more on the topic of how programming models cover the various cases of (non-local, multithreaded, data-sharing, all permutations) and whether these are suitable for the cloud or other niche cases like, say, game development
I disagree. I had been on software which was "local, single threaded and doesn't share data" and not an easy code base.
Difficulty is subjective. For me, given that constraint, that's more than enough to be hard.
@@Sergio_Loureirobare-metal Embedded with minimal interrupts meets that definition and yup…nastiest codebase I’ve ever seen. I guess the data sharing part was still there tho. I don’t see how you can slash that from any software project.
@@h4ck3rd4wg two words: message passing.
But is there really a shortage? I know we are repeating it all the time, but we seen massive layoffs through 2023 and the economy is slowing down.
My experience is there is a shortage of senior developers, or companies don't want to hire developers with 1-2 years of experience, which seems strange too me, because how are we getting more seniors developers then?
The US economy is growing
@@StarsMannythe economy is growing, but all of that earned value is going into profits of mega corporations and the pockets of the 1%. It’s not going into developer’s salaries or to hire more developers.
@@Arbiteroflife true, but in the first comment you said it's slowing and in the second one you said it's growing.
@@StarsManny There’s no contradiction in my statement. The economy is growing on paper, that growth is going directly into the pockets of the CEOs as huge “bonuses” and corporate profits. Regular developers are not seeing that growth, most salary increases are going to be sub 4% this year which is below inflation and those corporations aren’t hiring more devs so they’re putting more responsibility on the devs they have.
I'm not from the field, exactly, but I tried getting into it after getting my PhD in physics. I worked for 2 years in a company, then I spent a whole year trying to find another remote job and couldn't land anything. Honestly, I am surprised there is a shortage!
I don’t *see* a labor shortage, I see a job shortage - in the US at least. People on the market staying on the market for months, lots of sorrow on linked in.
If you define developer shortage as "Companies not filling *entry level* positions with 10+ years of experience for $12/hr"... then yes, there is a developer shortage.
I think that companies are over reporting "vacancies" to inflate their numbers. It lets them say that they're hiring, and thus growing. If anything, the market is saturated with devs. I know guys with 20 years of experience unable to even land an interview.
I started in IT and went to engineering... eventually ended up in DevSecOps and cyber... there wasn't a single job I worked that didn't need a sw dev... most the time they didn't even know it.
This labor shortage problem is a bit more complicated than stated here. Part of it is due to companies posting jobs that they have no intention of filling. It's a bit of hand-waving with the numbers.
Part of the reason is companies like collecting data on people too. Information is easily monetized.
Where is the demand for people who are passionate and into the craft of software development? I mean, people who go beyond just code and start learning about architecture, design, and the cloud? People who are driven to learn through their own projects? All that companies seem to care about is that you are a "team player" in a group of people who don't collaborate. And that you are driven by Jira.
👏🏻
i dont see any developer shortage crisis, on the contrary. i see few jobs with lots of applicants all around the world
Which is indeed a sign of shortage - with an overabundance of candidates of an inadequate quality. There is a shortage of *competent* developers.
@@vitalyl1327do you just expect juniors to be well rounded devs out of college? Especially with how basic the education is and these entry level jobs requiring a mountain of different tech?
What is the excuse when all the experienced devs retire and all thats left is juniors who never got a chance to get experience working in a professional environment and recieve mentoring or even company training?
@@DyingKlokateer by competent I mean capable of learning and solving problems. Knowledge is cheap, ability to gain it and use it is rare. And, sadly graduating from a university does not guarantee such an ability, especially these days, when it is very hard for a student to get kicked out.
@@vitalyl1327 ah I see. You've got a more than fair point there
Either hire and train juniors or pay current devs more. Companies refuse to do either. They rather hire cheap programmers overseas and complain about quality and 'skill shortage'.
I'm a junior dev, got my first job in the industry 18 months ago, and the company i work for have no plan in place of how to develop juniors. I work on a service desk. Kept thinking this is going to change at some point, but that hope faded a while ago. It's difficult to build knowledge/skills as I'm busy with the service desk work, but looking to keep up with it as best i can and start applying elsewhere in 2024.
I am thankful for having a job, and realise it could be worse.
i'm sitting here reading about "a developer shortage", having not worked as a developer since 2008. My first programming gig was 1990.
I went back to school to get an Associates degree in 2021 and 3/4 of a Bachelor's degree, and STILL NOTHING.
Now I am still $40k in debt for student loans, unable to find any work to pay them off.
I think you must be talking about a local phenomenon, cuz I am still just sitting here.
Obviously you are doing something wrong. Market is not great right now, but your situation must be something different. To be honest, it's getting more difficult as you are getting older. If you've just graduated and don't know shit about programming - it's ok, you have your entire life in front of you, if you are smart fella, you can get internship and work your way up from there.
But if you are 35+ and have years of experience but don't have impressive achievements - you are in trouble. I've got told that "you have decent experience, but you have knowledge gap (in fields i don't give a shit about), that means you are not progressing and wasting your time, so we can't hire you". I don't care about that company as it was a "training" interview and even if i got an offer i wouldn't take it. But still, that's a troubling sign.
Obviously very sorry to hear that, but it is not being reported as a local phenomenon.
@@ContinuousDelivery I am a senior developer and after applying for more than 100 contracting jobs in Germany and Austria I got ZERO interviews mostly because my German is basic. I usually work as a contractor in those countries and language wasn't an issue until the bad times came for IT industry. Today it is very hard to get a job even for experienced developers.
@@GdeVseSvobodnyeNiki it depends on where you are looking for a job and also when. Today it is hard everywhere but in Germany and Austria they prefer experienced developers over inexperienced. In the eastern Europe they prefer inexperienced students over experienced because they don't care much about the quality and they just want to earn more by paying inexperienced less. It is a dirty market in eastern Europe so you should go to west or to USA where they care and pay for quality.
Honestly, part of the issue is your age. Being in the late 30s is very old for starting developers.
Opening up entry-level remote positions (in similar time zones) in my firmware team has made hiring pretty easy, and the overhead on senior engineers in terms of mentoring and extra code review has been quite small. We had a smaller, fully senior-level team before that and expanding to a heterogenous team has actually been great.
Waiting years to hire exactly the right expert is nearly always foolish, and just means you burn out your current team before reinforcements arrive.
"Yes, but as soon as we train them they leave for better jobs" Well since [you] seem to have a good grasp on what exactly is wrong here. I feel like this is something that can be fixed quite easily
Thanks Dave. You just made me feel that I might not be an impostor after all.
I'm mostly self taught. Got my first job as a developer after taking a boot camp due to lack of opportunities.
My skills as a problem solver actually comes from another non university trade entirely. electronics and house appliance repairs.
I check of all the boxes you mention for becoming a good developer. despite my complete lack of formal education outside a web boot camp class.
It is very hard for Western software engineering graduates to find their first job because corporations have sent all the entry-level jobs offshore to cut costs. When corporations report that there is a shortage of developers, what they really mean is that there is a shortage of low-cost, experienced developers who don't need training. Hence, they should be allowed to replace all their high-cost staff developers with low-cost, low-skill developers in India and Vietnam. Corporations are causing a local shortage by refusing to pay local market rates or invest in graduate recruitment programs.
They also abuse the h1b system. I've personally seen a lot of the junior teams of these companies considering entirely of h1b teams. The companies are training up foreign juniors so they can completely offshore operations in the future
overseas devs are terrible. always. doesn't matter their qualifications, the cultural differences will result in a shoddy product. the amount of times i have witnessed this first hand. Its right up there with when they shipped overseas customer service
@@TheBelrick generalization fallacy
@@deadlydiminuendo2161 all concepts are generalizations and it is a fallacy to dismiss observations.
Why not instead tell us your real motivations for such an emotional post? Are you such a dev or worse, did you go to a usa school?
There is no shortage until 5 round interviews and ghosting exists. And until these companies are looking for sw devs for the wage of a fast food worker.
From my experience demand seems to be down. I'm getting far less contact from recruiters now than before and during the pandemic. Is there really a skills shortage or just a shortage of people that exactly meet the skills of the person whose job you need to backfill?
The demand is way down and the supply of developers looking for a job is way up.
Demand for senior developer is extremely high though.
There are a LOT of programmers who don't know how to program. But TBH I think what you're seeing is just fewer recruiters (overhead), not fewer job openings.
Senior Developer here…it’s very hard to get hired and I tick all the tech boxes and have high scope product accomplishments coding features for millions of consumer electronic devices. I’m building my portfolio website and featuring an ai project to improve my chances of getting a new job
@@jonintc Being over qualified is a thing. You are considered too expensive, because you (rightfully so) want to get paid more than someone who qualify, but have less experience overall, and far less outside their required needed knowledge base.
Employees are expensive, and unless they can find someone willing to work cheaply enough, the project won't ever get done.
I've advised companies to not pursue their own custom applications for just such reasons. They simply can't pay what it costs to get it done properly. bargain bin developers might deliver something, but that something is going to be a buggy mess because these developers who might be passionate diamonds in the rough needs more than just practice. they need guidance.
I had terrible experience on my computer science bachelor degree. Once I started my career it struck me how much time we wasted there ... Too much calculus, outdated problems&solutions, no cohesion - many courses were "1-off" - instead of focusing on high level programming, we got a bit of assembler, a bit of network/routing, some PHP, some C++, some embedded systems, some administration courses, some telecommunication/electronics, some phisics labs with tools no one will ever see again... oh, did I mention calculus? Each one of these just scratched the surface, so we still had no real skills. Other thing is that the entry level of these topics are the easiest to learn - the hard part is going deeper.
So after my bachelor I had no idea about Spring framework (despite the studies had Java as their main language), no idea how to write effective tests. You could send a 300-line, 1 class and 1 method abomination and nobody cares (you obviously send it via email, no one is going to waste time on such nonsense as VCS). It was 12 years ago, but my god I'm so butthurt about it.
Sorry for this rant, I really wanted to vent it out.
Yes they sadly skip the most important lectures for future developers.
Calculus will come in handy if you want to go into ML or AI in depth. Just read some papers on the theory behind key ML technologies like Transformers.
@@JBoy340a youre not getting into ai without a masters degree thats for sure .
you want computer engineering not computer science .
Is your complaint that the curriculum didn't train you for the specific job you happened to land?
The hiring process. The hiring process. The hiring process. The hiring process.
Keeping good juniors is an important and hard problem.
From my experience, the best way to keep a promising developer is to have a great mentor to educate him/her.
The best (juniors) devs see the value for them to stay at the company to learn as much as they can so it will benefit them in the future.
A bigger salary at X tech giant won't be so appealing anymore as you (the junior) invest in your skills
Problem is most juniors think they are senior and they want more money but can't even center a div
@@jonathandavis8599 Most juniors do not think they are a senior. Honestly, from your other posts, feels like you just have a large hate boner for junior developers.
@@jonathandavis8599 I'm as senior as it gets, greybeard-senior, but I also cannot "center a div", I don't even know what it means. Probably it's a wrong metric after all.
Now imagine, how as a senior mentoring juniors I can feel when my senior colleagues, one by one are being replaced by folks in India... how motivated can I feel?
@@Meritumas you must feel like you're in the wrong sector of this industry if it can even be outsourced. And if something can, in fact, be outsourced without severe quality and communication implications, it is criminal not to outsource.
The "shortage" could be stopped overnight if companies stopped discriminating against older developers. ("older" >= 30)
They have enough wisdom to not be treated like cogs though.
Companies pretend that there is shortage because the want the government to give them money to train young devs in order to pay less.
If the shortage was real then someone like me with 25+ years full stack experience would not wait even for a phone call from an agent and never getting one.
It is virtually impossible to get a developer job in the US right now. There is NO shortage of developers! It is possible there is demand for cheap offshore labor but clearly not at western prevailing rates.
I was a freelance software engineer. I got to 40 and bang, no more work offered except low paid testing. There's your problem - assuming older folks brains turn to jelly overnight while the youngsters all too often bash away re-inventing the wheel. I, like many of my peers, was forced to go freelance as employers assumed I, and everyone else, would want to go into management, which we didn't.
I gave up looking for SW dev jobs. Even with a degree, its incredibly hard to get an interview, and very few companies want to hire a junior unless they are still in college or fresh out. I've even had a few phone screenings where they told me I'm perfect for a junior position for new grads, but because i had already been out of school for 1 year I couldn't get hired at that position and the next level up the program manager wanted someone with atleast 4 years experience...
Bad culture is large factor that is keeping a lot of companies from evolving. Focusing on culture around software development and being open to ideas is one of the most difficult things I have tried to achieve. I see lots of software developers stick with dogma over trying to advocate for change. I don’t think everyone loves software development as much as others, or they don’t feel comfortable to speak out against dogma. Some folks are just there to get a pay check and scoot by. 😔
“It’s the problem solving that is the bottleneck, not the typing” then why every single job interviews involve writing code where most of the time the solution was never discussed in follow up interviews. Again I think we need to take a serious look at hiring processes if we want to solve this problem.
Where i live companies want mid and senior level software engineers. Even juniors are required to have 2+ years of experiance. While the only way to get start in IT industry is either having conections or going through internship (and it doesn't even guarantee that you will get junior position).
You can't ignore a software complexity point. I started with development 3 years ago and I can tell you that it is pretty though to get into industry now days as a newbie. I was looking for my first job for more then a year and just got lucky that I got recommended by friend of mine. Also, expectations are ridiculous for junior positions and seniority levels are interpreted how company wants. It is also a tool for getting more work for less money. When I look at my friends who started with development 10+ years ago, it was a completely different story back then. You could get a job with some html and css knowledge and a will to learn. Now days juniors are expected to know frameworks, server-less stuff, git, design patterns, clean code practices, and so on. This sounds easy for you right now but for a beginner is a lot. Second point is scrum and scrum like processes that drive people away from software development into other fields in IT.
I agree.
*tough
With vacancies so high I'm beginning to wonder if ageism is also a factor.
As a contractor, I finished a contract in late 2019, with a view of returning in March/April 2020.
Because of lockdown in March 2020, all of the emails from recruiters basically stopped.
Once jobs started to appear again I began to apply for contracts.
Since 2021 I've had a total of 3 interviews and no job offers; I've never had this problem before now. Although my CV doesn't include my age (63), it's not hard to guess that I must be 60 or over from the employment history.
My wife (61) is finding the same issue. She applies for contracts that she is *very* well qualified for, but, no response, not even an interview offer.
Drop anything more than 5-10 years in the past off your resume.
I haven't noticed a developer shortage.
Executives are forgetting outsourcing failed due to the language barrier. They seem to be staying at companies long enough to cut costs, but get out before all the old problems come back again.
I´m a junior with 2 years of experience, nobody wants to hire me, the shortage is because companies don't hire, that's it, they only want seniors... it´s like if all football teams want Mbappé and no other and saying later that there is a shortage of football players
Mbappé’s the greatest!
I have always been surprised by how the job market works. Some are hired straight away, others cannot find work for years. My college classmates, who I know for sure didn't know programming better than I did, got job offers easily and quickly.
Has anyone told hiring managers there is a shortage? After getting my associates in CIS software development focus i spent 3 years applying to hundreds of jobs a week while doing projects on my own WHILE working a 9-5 to pay my bills. With 0 call backs i pivoted into sys admin and now pivoting into cybersecurity where i can use my programming to abuse api's and software ❤ best choice i ever made
Eternal "shortage" of highly profitable deals? As long as there's even one item left in the world, it's not a shortage-it's just something someone can't afford.
Employers don't want to hire anyone over 50 years old, thus the shortage.
I never understood this. If you are 50 you have exxperience like no other. I mean it is not like you are going to run a marathon. I always felt like people who were 50 uyears old had a lot of opportunity since many CEOS gladly hire "friends" from their generation and talk old military service memories etc.
I've been out of work for 6 months. Can't wait for this shortage to come my way
see ? There's no shortage actually.
Not in Canada, easily 600-700 applicants per job, even for non-remote positions
"Nobody wants to work anymore"
"2,000 developers laid off because of market downturn"
"Developer shortage"
It is just a matter of what they want to spin today.
"Nobody wants to work, we posted job openings, even though we just laid off 2,000 people we can't find anyone to hire".
As a person learning software development and the tools without having a job, it was hard knowing what to use and how they were used. It was only by chance I finally came across the right books. The ones that assumed I knew absolutely NOTHING and had NO JOB in the field and fed it to me like a baby. All the other books had missing information and assumed that I already worked in the field or would use the internet.
It was so annoying reading a book, realizing it was lacking then moving to the next one. It was until this year I was able to get all the books in order that I needed to actually do and learn something. These books were "closed". A term I use to describe books where the code examples work with minimal look up online because of some update or change to it. I like these types of books because if a problem occurs with the code when I am initially trying it out, I know it is instantly an error on my part. Then when I play around with it and add some extra stuff here and there using the concept and going through what ifs that will break it, I know the foundation that allows it to work.
Why do I read books instead of watching a video? I like being in my head and moving at my own pace. I can stop and play around with the information and when I mess up I can go back and evaluate what I did wrong. I do still watch videos when all else has failed. Videos usually show how to do something, but don't have a "try it out". The books I tend to like reading have that test it out portion. It's not just a "here's how to do this" like a reference. Although, I know time is important. So when I can't ever find what's wrong with it and have exhausted all possibilities in an allotted time, I go to the internet.
Honestly, when I was in college, I would simply open up a math book, find some complex math concepts then shoehorn it in the code problem our teachers gave us. Sometimes it was just a small line of code of equations with few statements. I used numbers and letters and I knew it would work because math. I also though testing was dumb because math existed. Then I realized that was NOT software engineering.
I opened up that code some years later and was like "wtf did I write?" It was an unreadable mess and since I've been away from that type of math it didn't pop out at me what the code did. It took me a week to pull out the math books and decipher what the hell I wrote lol. That's when I realized testing wasn't about me using math to know my code would work. It's to protect me and everyone around me of some human error that might occur. Whether it's from a beginner programmer or a seasoned one. Humans are error prone.
That's when it hit me that all engineering isn't just about building things. That's the secondary thing. It's about human interactions and how we pass on the information of building and working together to build those things THAT WORK. This is why adhering to certain standards, tools and code is important. It must be reproducible, and this is where the science part comes into play.
That's why I like software engineering, I see it as an art and a science. Well at least in between the two. Some people see art as fluid, some people see science as rigid. Then one has to ask, "how does one make an art style?" They have to make something that is reproducible. This means there's a logical method. "We've created a laser. It will probably have no use outside of this specialized experiment." Yet people use it in nightclubs and in the science lab. (Although people of the past used radioactive materials in beauty products before they knew what it did...some things...need to stay in labs lol)
Well, now you do need to share the books that worked for you. 😁
> that's when I realized testing wasn't about me using math to know my code would work. It's to protect me and everyone around me of some human error that might occur. Whether it's from a beginner programmer or a seasoned one. Humans are error prone. That's when it hit me that all engineering isn't just about building things. That's the secondary thing. It's about human interactions and how we pass on the information of building and working together to build those things THAT WORK. This is why adhering to certain standards, tools and code is important. It must be reproducible, and this is where the science part comes into play.
Thanks for sharing your wisdom. That's a really valuable insight for me as a non-SWE.
This is exactly why getting a STEM degree (any STEM discipline, really) is so important: nobody can lean the fundamentals by chance and without a strict guidance. But once you have a sufficient mathematical foundation, you can build up on top of it and get a systematic understanding of any practical engineering domain, programming included. Without such a foundation you're doomed to get stuck in a mythical thinking, in a pile of unconnected factoids with tons of gaps in between.
@chukukaogude5894 Excellent post! Please share your best findings when it comes down to books that are worth something for software devs.
Mine are:
- A Philosophy Of Software Design; Ousterhout.
- Unit Testing; Khorikov.
- Code Complete; McConnel.
- Computer Organization and Design; Patterson, Hennessy.
- The Phoenix Project; Kim, Behr, Spafford.
- Modern Software Engineering; Farley.
- Hackers & Painters; Graham.
~ Also, something on design patterns would be good.
These books give you a complete and very valuable point of view on software engineering and the industry. There's more, but the above ones I'd recommend to every aspiring software professional to gain new, more complete and coherent perspective. There's a word for the kind of books that are transformative - quake books ;) Having a help like that is invaluable. Have a nice reading!
@@vitalyl1327 Well, a STEM degree is indeed a science degree, and if you were to take courses on just the scientific method (without the hard science behind science) then you'd probably do better than almost any self-taught programmer. I feel there's a huge gap between people who have had fundamental knowledge in science versus those who don't; it's very difficult to talk, convince, or even communicate with people who are faith-based.
@@langhamp8912 yep, that's my point exactly. Though I doubt you can teach the scientific method properly without using any of the hard sciences as a guiding example.
Im a 42 year old chemical engineer who decided two years ago i wanted to code. So far i've been learning many things JS, React, Nextjs, CSS tailwind, AWS and others yet i dont even get an interview. I understand my salary i used to earn is more than what a junior will get but im happy with the compromise. So, how is it possible not to get noticed at all, i doubt im stupid 😂😂😂😂 and cannot learn quickly. This industry is hard to understand sometimes. Maybe it is just a luck game, send your CV to 100 companies to get 3 interviews 😅
Seems to me there must be opportunity for new software in the chemical engineering field? Can't you just write some of that as a hobby (unless you already quit!), then sell it!
@@secretchefcollective444 yes, im doing a project related to the work i did previously, trying to solve a problem contractors had.
One last thing I will say about growing the industry, mentoring juniors and growing them. I’ve seen a lot of problems in this area from the older senior devs gate keeping. They hesitate to spend time helping juniors within a company as that junior, let’s be honest, is a potential threat to them. I know it’s not logical but I’ve seen this.
this! along with resume driven developement makes everything so much harder.
Well honestly I don't blame them much, I worked at a company where seniors were god sent and juniors left after 2 or 3 years. And there most touted senior dev can't send me data type for http end point because he doesn't have it. How do you not know what type I need to send to you, how hard can that be? So then what happens is you do guess work trying to figure out what seniors are doing.
Nobody taught me nothing on the job whole my career. But still after endlessly teaching them the same things over and over again I can only see most of them very rarely stepping up just a tiny little bit, if any at all.
Don't know why. It's been complex ever since. Today not more than in the past.
I'm not surprised developers are leaving because the workplaces are full of people who just like to talk about how to work rather than actually do any work.
aka "too many chiefs not enough indians"
@@CW91 I've seen a lot of super talented developers stuck in a box gradually losing their will to live.
As a developer that tried to get a job as developer , I gave up the search and now I am working on a no code low code platform to partly solve the developer shortage (and make millions on the side obviously).