[FilterSweep]

Well here's why......

The benefits you listed, "flexible hours, work remotely, etc"

Are, indeed, nice, but they are actually far more rare than you'd expect. Many places still require 100% "facetime" despite being able to commit & deploy code and take calls remotely, and some that don't require "100%" still will hem and haw over days that you are not in the office.

Not everyone is sitting in an (over)funded startup with foosball tables, a fridge full of beers, young & eclectic coworkers, and happy hours with the coworkers every other day - where as long as you complete your projects by/around deadline, you're happily well-employed.

And most are not in an area that complains over a "dearth of tech talent" and have the liberty to hop from job to job without actively searching, taking the time to interview several rounds, and locking in the second job before leaving the first.

Labor Supply and Labor Demand have upmost influence on these factors, and with thousands of intelligent people finishing coding bootcamps every day, Supply is far outpacing Demand.

The other key (and probably the biggest) benefit you're missing is legitimately coding for yourself with your own. You want to develop a "Slither.IO" type game by yourself with PhoenixOnElixir as an un(der)employed coder? Go for it. Because most of us aren't getting jobs at Blizzard or Riot. You want to build a fitness app in a city with only financial/legal/logistic coding jobs? Go for it! It's an unparalleled learning experience.

[hnjm0101]

Thanks for your response. I guess I've been coding long enough now that I just view it as work and not fun (although I do enjoy other aspects of my job). I do remember when I enjoyed coding just for fun so I can see the appeal of your argument there.

I'm surprised to hear that supply is outpacing demand where you are. Where I am (in Toronto), we always have a hard time hiring good people and it seems to be getting more difficult.

[FilterSweep]

Thank you too. I agree that as I get more jaded, I consider it more "work" than fun in C#, but at home when I get my webscraping/scripting jobs in Python or even my front end styling working, I still get the thrill of achieving. From what I've heard, even more jaded devs than myself enjoy it when the work they produce is going to their own/their future employee's own benefit than when they are working for someone else, underpaid.

Question for you: Is hiring good people refer to hiring good people, or hiring people who pass your exams and interviews?

I'm still recently out of college, but when I first joined a company, our interview questions were more along the lines of Palindrome/FizzBuzz and being able to write good, simple SQL queries. We found out relatively quickly if you were competent for the job, and if not, you were gone.

Now, even MVC/CRUD Apps are asking interviewees to complete Google coding interview questions such as "Implement a Binary Search Tree" - which most of us even just a few years out, have not done for quite a while.

[hnjm0101]

Yeah I would never ask anything crazy like "implement a binary search tree" in an interview. Our hiring is more like, look at someones resume, and if their skills generally fit what we're hiring for and they actually know the things on their resume and they don't seem extremely lazy/arrogant/(whatever personality flaw that is hard to work with), then hire. A lot of the time we bring them in to the interview and they don't actually know the things they say they did on their resume. For example, if you claim to be experienced in object oriented programming but have no clue what i'm talking about when I say words like inheritance or polymorphism, you do not actually know object oriented programming. You should also know how to do it in one of the languages you say you know on your resume (I don't care if it is the language we're hiring for, syntax can be learned quickly enough).

[Bakary]

I am not familiar with the industry at all, but my understanding was that there weren't enough programmers to fill the demand. So it turns out to be the exact opposite?