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Once CS became the hot thing to get a degree in, the impact was almost immediate. And based on my experience, it happened a decade earlier than you think. In the early 90s, universities threw students straight into data structures and algorithms in LISP and expected fully half of them to drop out first year. By the early 2000s, the market was already full of useless grads. I was always on the east coast, but near as I could tell from the refugees I interviewed after the dot bomb, SV had been hiring anyone who could type as a senior developer, and the market just kept going downhill from then on. The schools must already have been complicit in it, because I had employees with degrees who didn’t even recognize the names of basic algorithms and data structures when the need for them arose. Now I see intro curriculum from serious schools that’s just a few loops in python or even visual programming in a browser. Less serious CS schools seem to be little more than job training programs. And of course, like this post shows, tens of thousands of coders who really have just completed a job training program are flooding the market. When I started working, every programmer I worked with was at least competent. If they weren’t, they just didn’t have a job. There wasn’t such a desperate need for people and it wasn’t hard to find someone competent. Now I assume that someone’s code can’t be trusted until I see evidence to the contrary. I used to bring people straight in for in-person interviews or do a really quick phone screen. Then I started doing much deeper questions on phone screens. Now I have to start with a coding test, because 95+% of candidates cannot write simple programs in their language of choice, even though they’ve got a fancy degree and they sound like an expert on the phone, because they’ve been trained for that... but apparently they have not been trained to actually create software from scratch. One company I worked for had a well researched candidate screening program and was talking about spinning it off as a service by the mid-2000s. Now extensive screening is universal and there are multiple companies that you can outsource it to. There’s no shortage of developers on the market, but there’s a real shortage of good ones. If you’re right and that shortage ends at some point, there’s going to be a sea of unemployed, unqualified coders who need job retraining or something. But I don’t see the shortage ending unless the pipeline starts spitting out more well qualified people. |