Tuesday, May 18, 2021

I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

Problem no. 2

The credentialism barrier

I’ve been programming for years. I’ve made interesting projects with a variety of tools, including Rust, Typescript, Ruby, Haskell, Assembly, C#, and more.

Am I an expert with all of those tools? Of course not. Can I be valuable with any of those technologies? Obviously yes.

The stuff I’ve touched over the years includes many subjects like game development, web development, sat solvers, compression algorithms, cloud architecture, hashing algorithms, machine learning, and more. The list is longer than I care to explain.

I can get cooking with a programming language I’ve never seen in my life in a matter of days because most programming languages are either very similar to each other or they’re similar to some paradigm most of us already know like functional programming.

And yet, I still get turned down for jobs I would excel at because priorities in hiring are so far away from being meaningful that I could be turned down for anything.

Expecting to find a developer who has 10 years of experience in a specific tool is insane. If you’re trying to find a rust developer and you will only accept them if they have been exclusively coding in rust since its conception you won’t find it. What you’ll get is a receding, inbred hiring pool.

Developers are creative. They try new things. They’re not going to be droning in one language forever. Most developers I know will comfortably do coding challenges in a variety of languages. They do actual work in a variety of languages too.

You’re obviously not going to find a lot of developers if this is how you’re hiring. So I don’t want to hear you crying on NPR about failing to find “skilled labor” when it’s a problem causally related to your own hiring practices.

Furthermore, if you really want a C++ developer you can just expect a developer to learn C++ on the job if they have any adjacent experience with any other language.



from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3bC1hJm

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