It's the core problem facing the hiring practices in this field. Any truly competent developer is a generalist at heart. There is value to be had in expertise, but unless you're dealing with a decade(s) old hellscape of legacy code or are pushing the very limits of what is possible, you don't need experts. You'd almost certainly be better off with someone who has experience with the tools you don't use, providing a fresh look and cover for weaknesses your current staff has.

A regular old competent developer can quickly pick up whatever stack is used. After all, they have to; Every company is their own bespoke mess of technologies. The idea that you can just slap "15 years of React experience" on a job ad and that the unicorn you get will be day-1 maximally productive is ludicrous. There is always an onboarding time.

But employers in this field don't "get" that. For regular companies they're infested by managers imported from non-engineering fields, who treat software like it's the assembly line for baking tins or toilet paper. Startups, who already have fewer resources to train people with, are obsessed with velocity and shitting out an MVP ASAP so they can go collect the next funding round. Big Tech is better about this, but has it's own problems going on and it seems that the days of Big Tech being the big training houses is also over.

It's not even a purely collective problem. Recruitment is so expensive, but all the money spent chasing unicorns & the opportunity costs of being understaffed just get handwaved. Rather spend $500,000 on the hunt than $50,000 on training someone into the role.

And speaking of collective problems. This is a good example of how this field suffers from having no professional associations that can stop employers from sinking the field with their tragedies of the commons. (Who knows, maybe unions will get more traction now that people are being laid off & replaced with outsourced workers for no legitimate business reason.)

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mschuster91 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Rather spend $500,000 on the hunt than $50,000 on training someone into the role.

Capex vs opex, that's the fundamental problem at heart. It "looks better on the numbers" to have recruiting costs than to have to set aside a senior developer plus paying the junior for a few months. That is why everyone and their dog only wants to hire seniors, because they have the skillset and experience that you can sit their ass in front of any random semi fossil project and they'll figure it out on their own.

If the stonk analysts would go and actually dive deep into the numbers to look at hiring side costs (like headhunter expenses, employee retention and the likes), you'd see a course change pretty fast... but this kind of in-depth analysis, that's only being done by a fair few short-sellers who focus on struggling companies and not big tech.

In the end, it's a "tragedy of the commons" scenario. It's fine if a few companies do that, it's fine if a lot of companies do that... but when no one wants to train juniors any more (because they immediately get poached by the big ones), suddenly society as a whole has a real and massive problem.

Our societies are driven into a concrete wall at full speed by the financialization of every tiny aspect of our lives. All that matters these days are the gods of the stonk market - screw the economy, screw the environment, screw labor laws, all that matters is appearing "numbers go up" on the next quarterly.

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Sohcahtoa82 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> but when no one wants to train juniors any more (because they immediately get poached by the big ones)

Can we stop pretending that we don't know how to solve this problem? If you hire juniors at $X/year, but they keep getting poached after 2-3 years because now they can get $X*1.5/year (or more!), then maybe you should start promoting and giving raises to them after they've gotten a couple years experience.

Seriously, this is not a hard problem to solve. If the junior has proven themselves, give them the raise they deserve instead of being all Surprised Pikachu when another company is willing to pay them what they've proven themselves worthy of.

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mschuster91 4 days ago | parent [-]

The problem is, no small company can reasonably compete with the big guns.

We're seeing this here in Munich. BMW and other local industry used to lure over loooots of people by virtue of paying much more than smaller shops - and now, Apple, Google, Microsoft and a few other big-techs our "beloved" prime minister Söder do the same thing to them... and as a side effect, fuck up the housing market even more than it already is.

	▲	Sohcahtoa82 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's a good point. I don't really have an answer for it.

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chasd00 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Our societies are driven into a concrete wall at full speed by the financialization of every tiny aspect of our lives. All that matters these days are the gods of the stonk market - screw the economy, screw the environment, screw labor laws, all that matters is appearing "numbers go up" on the next quarterly.

I have been in the various nooks and crannies of the Internet/Software dev industry my whole career (i'm 49). I can't think of any time when the stock market didn't drive software innovation. It's always been either invent something -> go public -> exit or invent something -> increase stock price of existing public corp

	▲	mschuster91 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It's always been either invent something -> go public -> exit or invent something -> increase stock price of existing public corp Yes, but today more and more is invent something -> achieve dominance -> get bought up by an even larger megacorp. That drives the enshittification circle.

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johntarter 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Capex vs opex

That's part of the problem, but I also notice the new hiring managers are incentivized to hire (or replace) employees to make their mark on the company. They then advocate for "their guys" the ones they recruited over the incumbents that are the unwilling dinosaurs in their eyes.

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no_wizard 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I can’t think of another career where management continuously does not understand the realities of how something gets built. Software best practices are on their face orthogonal to how all other parts of a business operate.

How does marketing operate? In a waterfall like model. How does finance operate? In a waterfall like model. How does product operate? Well you can see how this is going.

Then you get to software and it’s 2 week sprints, test driven development etc. and it decidedly works best not on a waterfall model, but shipping in increments.

Yet the rest of the business does not work this way, it’s the same old top down model as the rest.

This I think is why so few companies or even managers / executives “get it”

	▲	JumpCrisscross 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> can’t think of another career where management continuously does not understand the realities of how something gets built All engineering. Also all government and a striking amount of finance. Actually, this might be a hallmark of any specialist field. Specialists interface with outsiders through a management layer necessarily less competent at the specialty than they are. (Since they’re devoting time and energy to non-specialty tasks.)
	▲	cobar 4 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		While product often does operate in a waterfall model, I think this is the wrong mindset. Good product management should adopt a lot of the same principles as software development. Form a testable hypothesis, work to get it into production and begin gathering data, then based on your findings determine what the next steps are and whether to adjust the implementation, consider the problem solved or try a different approach.
	▲	PhantomHour 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I can’t think of another career where management continuously does not understand the realities of how something gets built. This is in part a consequence of how young our field is. The other comment pointing out other engineering is right here. The difference is that fields like Civil Engineering are millenia old. We know that Egyptian civil engineering was advanced and shockingly modern even 4.5 millenia ago. We've basically never stopped having qualified civil engineers around who could manage large civil engineering projects & companies. Software Development in it's modern forms has it's start still in living memory. There simply weren't people to manage the young early software development firms as they grew, so management got imported from other industries. And to say something controversial: Other engineering has another major reason why it's usually better understood. They're held to account when they kill people. If you're engineering a building or most other things, you must meet safety standards. Where possible you are forced to prove you meet them. E.g. Cars. You don't get to go "Well cars don't kill people, people kill people. If someone in our cars die when they're hit by a drunk driver, that's not our problem that's the drunkard's fault." No. Your car has to hold up to a certain level of crash safety, even if it's someone else who causes the accent, your engineering work damn better hold up. In software, we just do not do this. The very notion of "Software kills people" is controversial. Treated as a joke, "of course it can't kill people, what are you on about?". Say, you neglect on your application's security. There's an exploit, a data breach, you leak your users' GPS location. A stalker uses the data to find and kill their victim. In our field, the popular response is to go "Well we didn't kill the victim, the stalker did. It's not our problem.". This is on some level true; 'Twas the drunk driver who caused the car crash, not the car company. But that doesn't justify the car company selling unsafe cars, why should it justify us selling unsafe software? It may be but a single drop of blood, but it's still blood on our hands as well. As it stands, we are fortunate enough that there haven't been incidents big enough to kill so many people that governments take action to forcibly change this mindset. It would be wise that Software Development takes up this accountability on it's own accord to prevent such a disaster.

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absurdistan 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That we talk about "building" software doesn't help.

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jofla_net 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>For regular companies they're infested by managers imported from non-engineering fields

Someone's cousin, lets leave it at that, someones damn cousin or close friend, or anyone else with merely a pulse. I've had interviews where the company had just been turned over from people that mattered, and you. could. tell.

One couldn't even tell me why the project I needed to do for them ::rolleyes::, their own code boilerplate(which they said would run), would have runtime issues and I needed to self debug it to even get it to a starting point.

Its like, Manager: Oh heres this non-tangential thing that they tell me you need to complete before I can consider you for the positon.... Me: Oh can I ask you anything about it?.... Manager: No

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Aperocky 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Could not agree more. Whenever I hear monikers like "Java developer" or "python developer" as a job description I roll my eyes slightly.