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by kadabra9
4590 days ago
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> Is our industry doing the equivalent of offering free rides to hopeful software developers, calling them pilots, and throwing them by the thousands into airplanes just to watch them crash and burn? The evidence is pretty compelling. There's a lot of crashing and burning out there. Is that because nobody is signing the log? No, it's because some companies do a really bad job of interviewing and hiring developers. This could be for a few reasons: 1. Companies are so hungry to attract developers they make an offer to the first candidate that seems remotely competent, only to see him/her struggle when they get out of the bootcamp and into the trenches of day to day work. 2. Companies have clueless people interviewing candidates for technical positions, and just do a bad job evaluating them. For all of those "novices" that these bootcamps and such produce, some will go on to fizzle out, but my guess is some of them are actually talented/hard working enough to stick with it and evolve into competent developers. At the end of the day, it's still the responsibility of the company doing the hiring to determine which is which. The need for developers is only going to increase... so yes, we do need those hordes of novices, but with that need comes an increased responsibility to focus your hiring/recruiting efforts. |
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The issue is that we don't have any objective measures as to what makes good software. This means that everything we do in the hiring space is subjective, which makes it really difficult to do rigorous study/improvement on.
That said, novice programmers even excellent ones are exponentially less valuable than experienced ones. But, the ratio of good developer to bad seems constant across experience levels.
In my mind the 2 biggest issues in finding good developers are: 1) the cost of novice developers. The market has driven demand so high that it is too costly to experiment/mentor young developers knowing that they will (and probably should) only provide 2 years of valuable work (1 year of uselessness and 2 of value in a 3 year hire). 2) the senseless ageism in our industry. The idea that older developers are somehow inflexible or out of touch just doesn't gel with my personal experience. The older developers who are still out developing are doing it because they enjoy it and keep up with new technology. If they didn't they would have left the profession a long time ago.
Unfortunately, this has led me to a policy of hiring a few more experienced developers instead of a more healthy mix of novice/experience. I know that makes me part of the problem but I can't afford to be otherwise.