I used to work as a software engineer. As the company I work for has grown a lot, I now no longer write code, but do software design, and hire new team members in different positions, inluding PMs, visual design, usability design, backend programming, and frontend programming.
It is extremely difficult to find good programmers, especially frontend programmers.
I’m pretty sure that the reason here is not that it is difficult to become a good programmer, but that a lot of people choose not do, for a number of reasons.
Two reasons that I have personally encountered:
I studied comp sci between 2000 and 2005. During my first year, we had about 20% women. At graduation, we had about 5% women. Reasons are probably varied, but a major reason, at least back then, was that professors were hostile towards women studying comp sci (one of them explicitly told a friend of mine who was studying with me that he thought women were not suited for comp sci). In effect, we’re basically excluding half of the population from this job option.
A lot of people just don’t consider programming as a job option at all. Trying to encourage people to enter the field, people typically push back because they have been told that it is difficult, and/or that it is similar to maths, which many people don’t enjoy.
For visual design positions, we get a large number of applications from many qualified people. Applicants are highly diverse in age, gender, interests, and so on. But hiring for software engineering positions, we get few qualified applications, and they’re almost exclusively men below 35 years with often a very similar profile. If we search for people who have less common abilities (e.g. for full-stack developers), we basically don’t get qualified applications.
This is in a city that has one of Europe’s highest-rated technical university that produces a lot of comp sci graduates.
One intersting data point here is that game studios tend to pay developers much worse than other companies, and offer much worse benefits. The reason for this is likely that developers want to work at game studios, and that many more apply there.
Also, one other thing to consider is that software is eating the world. There are very few products that are not in some way dependent on software, directly or indirectly. Even things that ostensibly don’t depend on software were probably created using specialized software, and were produced by companies that run on specialized software (e.g. process management software).
Consequently, when we find qualified applicants, they basically dicatete salaries. We are dependent on them, we can’t grow without more people who write software. They are not dependent on us, and there’s nothing we can offer that other software companies can’t also offer.
I don’t think the growth of our dependence on software will stop any time soon. Even if a lot more people started studying comp sci right now, that would only only lead to more growth, and thus increase demand further, at least for the foreseeable future.
I used to work as a software engineer. As the company I work for has grown a lot, I now no longer write code, but do software design, and hire new team members in different positions, inluding PMs, visual design, usability design, backend programming, and frontend programming.
It is extremely difficult to find good programmers, especially frontend programmers.
I’m pretty sure that the reason here is not that it is difficult to become a good programmer, but that a lot of people choose not do, for a number of reasons.
Two reasons that I have personally encountered:
I studied comp sci between 2000 and 2005. During my first year, we had about 20% women. At graduation, we had about 5% women. Reasons are probably varied, but a major reason, at least back then, was that professors were hostile towards women studying comp sci (one of them explicitly told a friend of mine who was studying with me that he thought women were not suited for comp sci). In effect, we’re basically excluding half of the population from this job option.
A lot of people just don’t consider programming as a job option at all. Trying to encourage people to enter the field, people typically push back because they have been told that it is difficult, and/or that it is similar to maths, which many people don’t enjoy.
For visual design positions, we get a large number of applications from many qualified people. Applicants are highly diverse in age, gender, interests, and so on. But hiring for software engineering positions, we get few qualified applications, and they’re almost exclusively men below 35 years with often a very similar profile. If we search for people who have less common abilities (e.g. for full-stack developers), we basically don’t get qualified applications.
This is in a city that has one of Europe’s highest-rated technical university that produces a lot of comp sci graduates.
One intersting data point here is that game studios tend to pay developers much worse than other companies, and offer much worse benefits. The reason for this is likely that developers want to work at game studios, and that many more apply there.
Also, one other thing to consider is that software is eating the world. There are very few products that are not in some way dependent on software, directly or indirectly. Even things that ostensibly don’t depend on software were probably created using specialized software, and were produced by companies that run on specialized software (e.g. process management software).
Consequently, when we find qualified applicants, they basically dicatete salaries. We are dependent on them, we can’t grow without more people who write software. They are not dependent on us, and there’s nothing we can offer that other software companies can’t also offer.
I don’t think the growth of our dependence on software will stop any time soon. Even if a lot more people started studying comp sci right now, that would only only lead to more growth, and thus increase demand further, at least for the foreseeable future.