| Have you ever thought that some software engineers enroll not by their natural calling but for pure economic factors? For a lot of people in Europe, the paycheck immediately turns you into a middle class person with stable income, benefits and you get to work with kind of smart people around more or less. Plus, it’s all over the media, how the hi-tech sector always lacks talents and that there’s no formal admission process to these kind of jobs except for FAANG. Where I’m going with this, is that you’re actually right. I’ve worked with people who are born into this job without a degree but also, I’ve worked with those who enrolled into this career for purely economical reasons. The economical no degree guys, especially in their late 20s, early 30s may have a tendency of producing a result, but it would be of lower quality than that of a CS grad. With a CS grad, we can speak the same language about data structures, patterns and we do generally get each other. But with the off-the street guys — you never know if they get you. And this is a big problem once you build software at scale. Adding to that, I’ve encountered situations, where the SSEs just discovered design patterns and for no good reason decided to practice what they learned right in the production codebase. This practice later came down to code rot, decreased portability and generally waste of engineering time (which is money too). When you at the company at a later stage, you can see that a self-trained SSE was just juggling with new shiny things (that could’ve been learned at school as when to apply them etc) and it’s a train wreck to work with such people. Also, once you question what was the engineering justification for it, they may immediately take offense and become hostile rather than engage in what is expected to be a basic engineering discussion. So I would say, that the overall quality of working software engineers is decreasing across the board, yes. My own experience proves this. |