That 4/5 statistic is purely imaginary, I think. There might be a way to massage the numbers to get it, but I think you'd have to pretend that every job posting in existence represents an actual need. Every place I've worked has has standing open recs for 10+ jobs even though they didn't technically "need" or "were looking" for someone. They basically just were interested in hiring anyone who was super exceptional who might come by. To say that those jobs are "unfilled" is something of a stretch.

I worked in tech during a period of real shortage* and it was very different than today. We'd hire any warm body - no degree, no experience, no problem.

* the industry didn't really "need" these developers, but money was flowing so freely that if you started some dumb company and hired 20 devs maybe you could get bought for 100 million for some dumb reason. It happened a lot. (It happened to the first startup I worked for, for example, for no good reason. Getting 100 million nearly ruined that company)

Sure beats a career in sales though, amirite guys?!

Sure, but I would argue in almost every case I have seen, being willing to be flexible on the business side would result in significantly less need for things to be "perfect".

IME larger companies fail pretty hard at being even a tiny bit flexible on the business side.

But no one is forcing anyone to underpay in this industry so I don't understand the mechanism by which quantity demanded can persistently lag quantity supplied at market prices. One could also say that there's a shortage of quality jobs since Google and Facebook receive 500 resumes for each offer they make or something like that. From the perspective of the guy who thinks he's good enough to get a high-paying job at Facebook but can't pass the interviews, there's a job shortage because whatever he has to offer isn't good enough to get that job. From the perspective of the company who thinks their job offer is good enough to get someone with XYZ skills, there's a skills shortage because whatever they have to offer (and it's not just the money) isn't good enough to get the person they want. It's fairly easy to create an appearance of shortage by creating a position that pays X and set the hiring bar such that you only make offers to those whose skills add up to X + 50K in market value.

It sounds quite a bit like the dating market. Lots of single men/women complain about how there's a shortage of good women/men because everyone wants above-average mates when what they have to offer is, on average, average. Likewise, on average, an average job with an average salary cannot be filled with an above-average talent. The tech industry has a fetish for "above-average" and "extraordinary" and "10X" and whatever without being able to separate those in an objective way that allows clear market segmentation. The result seems to be a dating market like situation with inflated entitlements on both sides.

How do you like it btw? It seems to be one of those things that present way better than it's useful in practice. It seems like an overkill for simple projects and doesn't seem match the natural workflow for large projects with lots of people.

I don't have enough knowledge to judge those yet. Working on it.

Just dropping in to say:

Full Stack Web Developer
Required: 8 years experience
Pay: $10.15 / hour

LOL

Shortage: A temporay situation arrising when the demand for a product suddenely increases or the supply of the product increases.

PenguinPoker's unabridged dictionary.


Those guys trying to hire a developer with 8 years of experience for $11 an hour will be facing a skills shortage from here until eternity.

Google onsite was rough. Had 4 interviews. This is how I felt ratings out of 5.
5-0-4-2. Don't think I made the cut. Had some interesting discussion with the last one. We shall see. Hopefully my intuition on how I did is wrong again.

I was surprised I didn't get asked any DP problems.

Double Penetration? Dr. Pepper? Double Play?

I don't think you should quit your day job to sell your dictionary...

DP = dynamic programming

i wonder if other professions bitch as much as software engineers.

i mean lawyers, doctors, finance ppl work just as much if not more, and their jobs seem to SUCK, but the complaining seems to be kept to a minimal

I have an upcoming interview with another company that is notorious for asking specific C++ questions. Stuff like how memory is laid out for class inheritance, vtables and all that jazz. I have a C++ primer book, but I'm not sure what else I should be studying besides that and googling.

Don't be afraid to say "I have no idea" if you have no idea. We get people who try to muddle their way through stuff when you can tell they have knowledge of the subject. It's much worse than just admitting you have no clue.

C++ 11 or an earlier version? That would matter, STL, containers, RAII, RTTI, everything about specifying a class, using namespaces, template basics too.

lawyers, doctors, finances ppl have more power and get more respect.

secretaries, CS people, and office assistants bitch plenty. i'd argue that in many ways the day to day of programmers is closer to the day to day of these people....

to go a little deeper, i think we could make the general statement that bitching (mostly) is what people do who are affected by decisions that they aren't making. this may be the result of fact (you really are in a situation where you're not making the decisions but have to live with them) or a result of attitude (you see the world as a place where you have no agency, even in situations where you actually do, because this allows you to avoid responsibility for your own life).

everyone is familiar with the latter phenomenon as people who are simply "complainers." while it's always possible to frame things from a complainer perspective, i think it's probably a lot tougher if you're a lawyer or doctor running your own practice, or even within a larger practice where you have autonomy. your own authorship of your life circumstances will just be clearer to you.

programmers, on the other hand, even senior ones, typically answer to someone else, or at the very least have high-level priorities and expectations set by someone else. this makes it a lot easier to blame other people and circumstances for your problems, if you're so inclined.

Yeah, I'd say as soon as developers don't control the shipment dates you have a bitch rich environment.

GM, I generally agree with what you wrote except for the premise. I suspect programmers aren't particularly more complain-y then other industries. We're just more exposed to the complaints of our own industry.

Everybody complains. And almost everybody answers to somebody - even if you run your own business and its your customers/clients.

I don't know the exact details of how vtables are laid out in memory and I've been doing this **** professionally for almost 10 years now, lol interviews

I worked in financial services for many years with lawyers and accountants as colleagues as well as software engineers. The level of bitching was pretty consistent across all professions.

They all thrive on pedantry; just different aspects of it.

This.

I write embedded firmware, where theoretically this stuff could be important. I know that vtables are there, but I have no idea EXACTLY how it is laid out. Seems like a silly question to me, and probably a place I wouldn't want to work.

Since interview questions asking if you know random factoid X (that will in practice never be important until you need to google it and click the first stackoverflow link that tells you everything you need to know) are so endemic to the industry, I hesitate to say I wouldn't work anywhere that asked a question like that.

But if you said "I don't know" and they actually held it against you, yeah, **** them.

Yeah I thought the question is kind of dumb about vtables. I could be wrong but where they actually reside in memory is function of the compiler in what sections they're allocated to and where the linker actually allocates addresses for the sections. Pretty much dependent on the build parameters. I think what they wanted to know is how do virtual methods work at a closer to the machine level. Discussing how they work in the abstract is way good enough FWIW.

I just bought my first mechanical keyboard and I am surprised by how much I'm enjoying it. clickity clackity clack clack clack.