Confession Of An IT Developer - Why It Is So Hard to Find a Developer Job.
Liene Karaca
?? Digital IT Recruiter sharing job search tips no Hiring Manager tells you about.
Hearing that companies cannot find IT specialists is nothing new. It was crazy to see the amount of messages I received from IT specialists after posting one of my recents posts:
Here is an open confession from Software Developer on why it is so hard to find a job in this industry.
?I will try to share my opinion based on my personal experience.
In my mid 30's I finally decided to jump into software development to make my dream true. I had a few PM/PO roles in small companies before and had no clear idea of what software development really is. Looking back, I see that there is a difference between a "programmer" and a "software developer".
I had a project in mind. To achieve the target I researched tech stack which would suit the best. It was Golang, gRPC, Kafka, SQL, vanilla Web Components, TypeScript, Redux, Redux-Sagas, Web Sockets, OpenShift. I know, the list is bit long, but I believe these are the core things. Microservices (even "nanoservices" in some cases), Event Sourcing, latest web standards, real-time collaboration. I have this internal belief that this stack has huge power long term and I have noticed a growing adoption across the pond that serves as a proof to me. And I really love this true real-time data intensive web application trend/development. And this is what I have decided to focus on long term.
I am not interested to become a WordPress monkey or SAP coder nor Dynamics.. you name it. At the same time, learning a new, complicated stack by yourself is not an easy thing to do. That is why I sometimes check local job positions in hope to see someone looking for junior (I hope I am a junior) for a project that uses at least pure Golang and Kafka.
And... there are no companies who work with that scale.
At least, by scanning job titles I do not seem to find any. Yes... there are companies in gaming industry that use Kafka, but that is Java/Scala shop which is not something I would like to spend my life mastering. Sure there are some Golang positions that want somebody with 5 year experience so they could train the whole team. That is not who I am YET.
Most of the developer job postings can be split in several categories:
- PHP (probably to deal with legacy and WordPress)
- WordPress next-next-done clickers
- Java for SAP and kind
- DevOps
In my case, I am pretty stuck. Things I am really interested in are not used in small companies and are too new for large companies. This is, in my opinion, the reason, why it is hard to get a job as a software developer. Probably, if you are fine with learning whatever companies ask then it could be easier.
Just learn Java, React or WordPress and you can find a job in seconds.
But if you clearly know the things you want to truly master then it is much harder to get an offer that suits you.
Last thing, probably misconception, is that large software houses are actually looking for, as I call them "code monkeys" - people who do one thing and do it well & fast. They are not interested in developer shifts from Java to Golang or from React to Angular. They really need Java or React ninja. And so... developers constantly are looking for new positions that suit their current interests (developers by their nature mostly are curious). And this mentality of these software houses is totally understandable, however, I do not want to be a part of it.
This is why I truly believe in microsevice oriented culture where you have one or few products and every team of that project can use the tools that suit them the best. That way developers can shift internally according to their current interests (I am not talking about short term interests here). SAP and other similar products are not allowing this kind of team management and DX.“
How do you see it from a perspective of a hiring company or an IT specialist yourself? Why are we in such situation where demand is there, but supply is quite short? Curious to hear your opinion. ??
Not a talent. Developer at heart. Engineering, IT architectures, Integrations, Bug fixing, Problemsolving. My learning curve is Your success!
4 年Companies are done by people.If people's expectations are too high or too low companies fail to meet their ideal candidates.I've been interviewed even for big companies in the past. Some interviewers very arrogant other pleasant people but uncertain whether to hire You or not,other very pedant, other interviewers made riddles instead of questions (once I had a question that even my friend which has a Master Degree in Engineering+years of experience wasn't able to answer).I've been also interviewed by developers with 2 years of experience in IT while my experience was about 20+.Very unfair but this is how the world is going.It is sad to say but some companies look like to live a middle age where the engineers like the popes put down the roots.the most professional interviews I think are those where You are requested to make an homework before and only after the homework,a couple of questions about general programming.I can know by hearth what are the OPEN principles but if i cannot put together 2 lines of javascript in 5minutes even though 1of them is copy-pasted from stackoverflow I'm not a developer.Also a big lack i think is that frontend is considered mostly a B Series profession by backend developers in most of the companies
Consultant
4 年Effectively IT companies offload the burden of learning and keeping up to date with constantly evolving technologies on the employees themselves. This is mostly not the case with other industries where an employer trains his employees with the skills that his/her company needs. The result is the mismatch with what a company needs and what an employee finds interesting to learn and evolve. This creates a push for companies themselves to upgrade their projects to technologies popular with the employee candidate pool. If the owner of a company is not willing to do it, he/she should be ready for not finding employees of desired quality and the company going south. Unfortunately, hiring more and better recruiters to get the employees out of nowhere will not help the company in this situation. The solution is obvious: Not only the employees need to adapt to evolving technologies, but also the business owners themselves.
Co-Founder of smartist.one & IT-Recruiter - Delivering Happiness at Work ??
4 年Interesting point of view