This quote from the article really stands out and may become my 'go-to' analogy for explaining being a software engineer:
If you know a programming language, then
are you an engineer? No. Knowing a language
does not make you an engineer. The same as
knowing how to speak elementary Spanish
does not automatically make you a good
Spanish teacher.
I like how all the problems with getting engineers are listed and then they include "salary demands are too high". There's a higher demand for software developers at a certain skill level than there is supply.
Either bid more than your competition, or invest in bringing people to that skill level.
Whining about how you have to pay money to people so that you can make even more money off of them is just childish
The shortage of software engineerng talent exists only in media articles. When I try to help these poor companies, shortly after declaring salary expectations miraculously they discover abundance of talented candidates in their recruitment pipeline. The location is central EU and the salary I’m talking about is not even six digits in USD, in fact well below.
I haven't been at this that long, and already the bar of entry is so much higher than it used to be. If you could sling some HTML and rudimentary JavaScript, slap together some PHP or ASP backend, and knew what a database was, that was enough to get in and hit the ground running, once upon a time.
I haven't seen that people coming out of college know anything more now than I did then, which even then was based on best-practices and experience from the mainframe and dawn-of-the-PC eras, and so was at least a decade out of date.
The complexity seems to be growing on a trajectory akin to Moore's Law, with layers and layers of abstractions papering over the cracks and making this labyrinthian mess barely manageable.
>Forcing every prospective engineer to attend 4 years of formal computer science education isn’t a realistic answer — and ultimately it doesn’t even solve the problem. Formal comp sci education is a foundation, but the application of comp sci to problem solving is a skill that is learned by experience and mentorship.
This is the thing that has been killing me and incredibly demoralizing as I've been trying to find a position at a company, along with not having production experience in the specific frameworks that they're looking for. I've started a project from the ground-up with my bare hands that managed to make over $500,000 in crowdfunding, but because I didn't do it in a framework that modern companies want, and because my degrees are in Biology and Psychology rather than Computer Science, even when I've trained myself in the frameworks in question I'm a pariah to hiring managers.
I'm seriously beside myself now. I have no idea what avenues I even have left open to me if I want to have a career at this point. The only way I see myself getting a job is going further into debt by going through a bootcamp.
Maybe reevaluate your resume and interview skills also. There nothing scientific abnout hiring decisions. so much is subconcious.. I like this person. My experience, most hiring managers are not as smart as the programmers that work for them are are not super analytical, they make decisions on instinct.
I started on the IT support desk cause I had zero experience with nothing on my resume except an Economics BA and pizza delivery job. Within a year I transitioned into a programming job. My experience is in IT depts of large companies, many have a good attitude with letting you change positions once youve been an employee for a while.
Sorry about the experience, feel free to email me at either of my emails in my profile if you'd like to bounce some ideas off someone or get some feedback. I think I can empathize with your situation - I've been part of the hiring decision for a number of developers without CS degrees or even college degrees.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 37.1 ms ] threadEither bid more than your competition, or invest in bringing people to that skill level.
Whining about how you have to pay money to people so that you can make even more money off of them is just childish
I haven't seen that people coming out of college know anything more now than I did then, which even then was based on best-practices and experience from the mainframe and dawn-of-the-PC eras, and so was at least a decade out of date.
The complexity seems to be growing on a trajectory akin to Moore's Law, with layers and layers of abstractions papering over the cracks and making this labyrinthian mess barely manageable.
This is the thing that has been killing me and incredibly demoralizing as I've been trying to find a position at a company, along with not having production experience in the specific frameworks that they're looking for. I've started a project from the ground-up with my bare hands that managed to make over $500,000 in crowdfunding, but because I didn't do it in a framework that modern companies want, and because my degrees are in Biology and Psychology rather than Computer Science, even when I've trained myself in the frameworks in question I'm a pariah to hiring managers.
I'm seriously beside myself now. I have no idea what avenues I even have left open to me if I want to have a career at this point. The only way I see myself getting a job is going further into debt by going through a bootcamp.
I started on the IT support desk cause I had zero experience with nothing on my resume except an Economics BA and pizza delivery job. Within a year I transitioned into a programming job. My experience is in IT depts of large companies, many have a good attitude with letting you change positions once youve been an employee for a while.
Sorry about the experience, feel free to email me at either of my emails in my profile if you'd like to bounce some ideas off someone or get some feedback. I think I can empathize with your situation - I've been part of the hiring decision for a number of developers without CS degrees or even college degrees.
Best,
-Mason