Yup, and that’s why I’ll discourage people from entering my career, not because it’s a bad gig and it’s going away, but because the bar for competency is about to go up. Do it if you’re passionate and you’ll probably do well for yourself, but don’t do it if you’re just looking for a good job. If you just want a good job, go into nursing, accounting, or the trades.
I think it’s even worse than just the bar for competency going up: even for a coding wizard going into the career, it’s a lot harder to squeeze through the bottleneck which is getting an entry level position nowadays unless they have some public proof out on the Net of how good they’re at coding (say, commits in open source projects, your own public projects, or even Youtube videos about it).
This is something that will negativelly impact perfectly capable young developers who have an introvert personality type (which are most of them in my experience, even in domains such as Hacking) since some of the upsides of Introversion are a greater capacity for really focusing on on things and for detailed analysis - both things that make for the best programmers - and self publicising isn’t a part of the required skillset for good developers (though sooner or later the best ones will have to learn some “image management” if they end up in the Corporate world)
I’m a bit torn on this since on one side salesmanship being more of a criteria determining one’s chances of getting a break at the start of one’s career as a developer is bad news (good coding and good salesmanship tend to be inverselly correlated) but on the other side a junior developer with some experience actually working with other people on real projects with real users (because they contributed to existing open source projects) has already started learning what we have to teach fresh-out-of-Uni developers to make them professionals.
it’s a lot harder to squeeze through the bottleneck
Eh, I think that’s overblown. As someone involved in hiring, we go through a ton of crappy candidates before finding someone half-decent, and when we see someone who actually knows what they’re doing, we rush them through the process. The problem is that we’re not a big tech company, we’re in manufacturing, but we do interesting things w/ software. So getting on at one of the big tech companies may be challenging, but if you broaden the scope a little, there are tons of jobs waiting. We’ve had junior positions open for months because the hiring pool is so trash, but when we see a good candidate, we can get an offer to them by the end of the week.
We don’t care too much about broader visibility (though I will look at your code if you provide a link), we expect competency on our relatively simple coding challenges, as well as a host of technical questions. We also don’t mind hiring immigrants, we’ve sponsored a number of immigrants on our team.
introversion
As an introvert myself, I totally get it. I got my job because a recruiter reached out to me, not because I was particularly good at following up with applications. And that’s why I tend to tell people to not get into CS. I encourage them to take CS classes if they’re offered, but not to make it a career choice, and this is for two reasons:
- manage expectations of the future of CS - junior jobs are likely to contract a bit w/ AI
- thin the field so it’s easier to find the good candidates - we have to go through 5-10 candidates before we find someone we like
I see. That does change the idea I had about things a bit.
It’s been a while since I was last hiring.
I wasn’t aware that the problem nowadays in the West (or at least the US) was an excess of people who don’t really have a natural skill for it choosing software development as a career.
That kind of thing was one of the main problems with outsourcing to India maybe a decade ago: the profession was comparatively very well paid for the country so it attracted far too many people without the right skills resulting in a really low average quality of the programmers there - India had really good programmers just like everywhere else but then had a ton of people also working as programmers who should never had gone into it, so the experience of those having to deal with outsourced programming in India usually was pretty bad (I remotelly was a technical lead for a small outsourced team in India from London, and they were really bad whilst, curiously, the good programmers from the Indian Subcontinent I worked with had emigrated from there and were working in London and New York).
