That was developer recruiting then.
Developer recruiting now: “$14/hr 3 month contract at Megacorp Inc., pErMaNeNt EmPlOyMeNt PoSsIBle (butwillneverhappen)! You must be willing to uproot your family and move to Bemidji, Minnesota before you will be considered. Candidates must have PhD or equivalent in computer science, Bachelors or greater in applied mathematics, and at least 10 years senior development experience in [buzzwordy web framework that has only existed for 16 months]. Apply with full résumé which we will not read, and as part of your standard interview screening process we’ll try to trick you into writing functional code for the project we have in mind. Don’t bother calling us, we’ll call you.”
You’ll find our CEO bitching on Linkedin or Twitter that “no one wants to work anymore.”
Is this just an American thing? I got a master’s in CSE and got a job months before graduation. They’re desperate for developers here.
I’m an American and I haven’t really had this problem. My career trajectory is weird in that I did systems and networks (with lots of automation because I’m lazy), then SRE, and now development.
I get headhunters calling me weekly. I was able to take a low stress medium pay job for a few years to recharge and moved right back into a faster paced good paying job within weeks of deciding I was ready for it. I don’t know what jobs these folks are applying for but I very rarely see those “10 years experience in 2 year old language” jobs these days. A few years back they were all over the place, though.
Can’t say for the US but the situation got erratic nowadays, sensible people and outrageous assholes may sit in offices next floor to eachother.
Also the “pay for our course and get 3k/hr job in three months” courses make it harder for an employer to distinguish who’s who, which makes getting the job harder for honest novices.
It looks like percentage of requests for experienced developers in the last three years had grown a lot, so I’d say it gets worse for newcomers :( which is bad because how are we going to get new experienced people if we refuse to give them experience
It exists but it’s an exaggeration. Most companies are not like that. I also had a job lined up before graduating with my bachelor’s. I live in California.
There’s a shortage of programmers — of all IT professions — in Australia, so wages here are pretty high
I went back to college to get a 2 year degree in networking. Part of the degree program required landing a paid internship. I interned at a bank at which they frequently hire their interns (and even the director first started there as an intern) but right when they had to decide whether or not to hire me Silicon Valley Bank went under and it became a very bad time to be a regional bank, so i was infotmed 1 month before graduation that they would not be hiring me on. So 2-3 weeks of intense job hunting and interviewing later I landed my current job for about twice what we were told we should make immediately after graduation with much better benefits than the bank could have ever offered me.
So to answer your question: maybe? The jobs are out there but you do have to be ready to put in some work to interview well to land a good one
I have a dozen colleagues without formal CS education. Many without a degree at all. And as a hiring manager myself for software engineers, I don’t look much at education at all
A lot of places around here do a bootcamp thing and hire students out of high-school that do well since they say a lot of what they need isn’t taught in college or university exactly they teach on the job
I have a CS/Engineering masters and while I really enjoyed learning everything, most of it is academical. I also don’t think university needs to be geared purely towards the job market, that’s a really sad perspective. But I think we need to be more transparent about it, specially to 18 year old going to college, that the degree isn’t preparing them for the job market.
Less true of pure programming, but operations isn’t taught in any colleges. It’s a different mindset and finding those people is tricky
While there are surely companies trying to do this, it’s not even close to the majority of the industry.
Well, it fits the majority of recruiters we hear from.
That sucks. Are you a recruiter? What area?
No, I’m an engineer, which is why I hear from recruiters constantly.
Oh, you’re getting the spam calls. Those people are looking for cheap labor and get it by reaching out to thousands of people, looking for someone desperate to rip off.
To be fair, there are also plenty of lowballs from more legitimate enterprises.
I visited Bemidji once on my way to Voyager national park and thought it was really nice. Do americans consider it not a great place to live?
It’s just got a ridiculous sounding name that’s become a shorthand for a remote location out in the geometric center of nowhere. Sort of like Timbuktu.
I’ll bet anyone who didn’t listen to Prarie Home Companion on a regular basis couldn’t point to Bemidji on a map without looking it up. And someplace like, say, Dubois Wyoming doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. (Although maybe Ten Sleep, Wyoming and its population of 250 might work.)
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I was for sure that a giant living there would put the town on the map. i guess not!
I remember talking to an older fella about his experience becoming a programmer back in the 60s (I think). He told me that he decided it was time to start a career so he went to a nearby IBM office and asked for a job. They gave him an aptitude test and then hired him the same day. He wrote code for their mainframes until he retired.
“Boy, when I was your age I just walked into the nearest IBM office and asked for a job, and that’s how I’m a billionaire today. Don’t know why kids nowadays are so lazy & complaining about how hard life is.”
Lol he was nothing more than middle class. He also was telling the story from the perspective of “I understand how easy it was for me”. He was a really cool guy.
Sounds pretty good if you ask me.
Indeed. Like many career stories from back then it sounds kinda lovely.
What made that possible was the training program they had. They definitely didn’t require experience with punch card machines. How would anyone get that?
Companies now expect you to have experience with their exact tech stack and wonder why it’s hard to hire senior developers / engineers. They’ll just leave positions open instead of paying to train people.
I’magine trying to light your cigarette, and you get a popup ad
Believe it or not, that’s actually what the complimentary branded matchbooks that smoke shops and strip clubs used to give away were meant to be!
They weren’t an ad directed at you, though - they were an ad directed at your friends. You’d go hang out somewhere, set your cigarettes and matches down, and people would see the logo.
My grandpa actually had an interesting collection of those old matchbooks.
Imagine trying to light a cigarette
Imagine trying
This was a plot device in Superman 2
I thought it was 4 with Richard Pryor?
Was actually Superman 3, as referenced in Office Space.
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Assuming this came out in 1970 (because it says by 1975), the top end would be about $97,000 in todays dollars.
I can’t even pay rent with that.
