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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • My experience as a senior dev who is often involved in the recruitment process (admittedly in Sweden and not Silicon Valley) is that there are hundreds of people applying but they all lack sufficient skill. We still have a severe shortage of people who can actually do the job without requiring so much hand holding that they have a negative impact on productivity. There seems to have been a surge in “quick-fix” educations that are a couple of months long, and the new iPad kids are already behind when they start the education because they don’t understand how a computer works. They have no interest in the craft and don’t enjoy it, they just want to check off a detailed todo list and get a fat pay check. We need people who can think, extrapolate from unclear requirements, and ask smart follow-up questions.

    The demand is still there, the supply isn’t. Half of these applicants couldn’t even implement FizzBuzz.


  • Why does everyone assume that programmers can just go and fix stuff they don’t like without getting shot down in performance reviews for lack of focus or for overstepping their authority.

    We have a prioritized list of work items coming in from the PO and that’s what we work on. There’s generally no room for creativity. Supporting larger files in Notepad in particular would increase maintenance costs due to requiring much more complex memory management, and it would label you as not being a team player for increasing complexity for everyone. It wouldn’t pass code review.