Comment by 0xbadcafebee

Comment by 0xbadcafebee 11 hours ago

The problem is "Seniors" started becoming worse a decade ago. Not only wouldn't they mentor, but they wouldn't lead by example. Problem-solving on their own, collaborating with peers, sharing information/communication, doing proper due diligence, organizing and improving themselves and their team/product/business. This was around the same time bootcamps started flooding the industry with amateurs with no experience. These neophytes were then competing with more experienced people for the same jobs, because hiring in tech is more Ouija board than accurate assessment of professional engineering.

Amidst this influx of applicants, junior and intermediate staff began getting Senior titles to justify pay raises. Soon those exact same people were moving from job to job as a "Senior", but without the relevant criteria that would've qualified for that title a decade before. You can still see people get promotions without having accomplished anything, much less learned anything, but they did keep the lights on. Today there's a sea of "Senior" engineers that can basically write code (and not especially well), but lack all the other "non-coding" skills that Seniors should have.

Even if you hired 100K new Juniors tomorrow, there's nobody to train them, because most of the people working today are practically Juniors themselves. Each "generation" is getting worse than the one before, because they're learning less from the generation before, and not being required to improve. There's still good engineers around, but finding them is like playing Where's Waldo? - and you have to know what Waldo looks like, which you won't if you're not experienced!

The fix isn't going to be learning to network ("relational intelligence") and mentoring more. The fix is for us to stop letting the industry devolve. Treat it like the real engineering professions, with real school requirements, real qualifications, real apprenticeships, real achievements (and titles that aren't meaningless). Otherwise it'll continue to get worse.

johnnyanmac 4 hours ago

>The fix is for us to stop letting the industry devolve.

Sadly not in "our" hands. At best, some director/product owner brings it up. Executives have a nice chuckle, and they continue to outsource to anywhere else. This US industry barely wants to hire Americans to begin with at this point.

We're gonna have to divorce from big tech and push more businesses that reflect our desires if we want true change. Or collectively bargain while we have the chance. I don't know what is more likely in this community.

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venturecruelty 6 hours ago

God, thank you for writing this. I agree 100%. We are rapidly losing all of our "low-background" programmers in this industry. Even ten years ago, I encountered developers who could not debug a stack trace, of the application they were hired to develop. People would send me screenshots of Python errors and ask me how to fix them. I was shocked. I was a junior myself, but surely a programmer would know how to read a compiler error. I mean, that's the entire point of the computer telling you what went wrong...

I saw the title inflation happen in real time. When the boot camp floodgates opened, that was the beginning of the end of my faith in this field. I saw people with three months of create-react-app tutorials churning out garbage, while I was called upon to put out fires and fix things when they broke. I "did devops", and rapidly became shadow developer IT, helping incapable programmers fix bugs in codebases I wasn't even familiar with, better than they could. And I am truly not that great of a programmer! I just know how to read, reason, and use grep a lot. These aren't superpowers, but finding someone who can even reason through how to debug something is impossible these days.

I would love some sort of licensure or guild or standards, but I have no idea how we even begin to change that. Part of the problem is that companies don't want to change. It's cheaper to pay a few people nothing than it is to pay a lot of people a lot, and that shows no sign of changing. Maybe more planes have to fall out of the sky, I don't know. Maybe Windows has to become so buggy and unusable that multiple hospitals shut down for months on end. We don't just need a reckoning, we need a reckoning where we all wind up better on the other side.

I am squinting at the horizon, but still, all I see is darkness.

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sumedh 2 hours ago

> Not only wouldn't they mentor, but they wouldn't lead by example.

Because their jobs were being outsourced.

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