Relatively young industry, the population pyramid of workers would have more people at the bottom. So gaining only 700 jobs isn’t that fun. That being said, I feel bad for newgrads, since it feels like nobody wants to train them anymore. Any job posting I’ve seen is mostly 2-3 year minimum experience at a professional level.

I have genuinely never seen an in-house training program in the software industry. Maybe some bullshit industry certs that amount to a single exam. But nothing like an apprenticeship style program where over a year you are taught and mentored.

Even university doesn't teach you how to work in the industry. It's a very DIY career, we should probably change that.

Training in CS is giving some new-grad a job, instead of not. Plenty of companies hire senior-only.

I agree we should be doing at least that. But we could do better too. Apprenticeships are a much better transfer of practical knowledge than university, and has been a concept in use for centuries.

There was a tech company in the UK who was doing it (irritatingly, I can't remember their name atm) with Oxford and Cambridge humanities grads. Just googled it and couldn't find it. If anybody remembers what I'm talking about, please reply below because now it's bugging me.

Lots of UK companies do it - google Software Engineer Apprenticeships. Vodafone, BAE, Softwire, BT, Rolls-Royce, the BBC, HMRC, tonnes do.

At my previous company there was an in-house training, where the first three months were dedicated to the training of a new employee. The training consisted of both the tech stack and the development and business processes used by the company.

As a result everyone knew how things worked and everyone by far exceeded the minimum level of knowledge needed to meaningfully contribute. It was a great department to work in and I miss it still.

Sadly, the company had that insane policy of only 3-4% annual raise irregardless of performance, so most people, including me, would leave after a few years.

Think of internship programs, streamlined hiring of new grads and etc. My previous companies had both, now I don’t see that on their website. Obviously not a real statistic, but a bit disheartening.

No one wanted to hire new grads when I first started working in 2000... Except startups. And it was very slim pickings until you had 3 years under your belt. This isn't a new phenomenon.

Well, that would mean we’re just rolling back to 2000s era? I did finish a pretty decent university to be fair, but had options right after grad even in mid-sized companies. So did my peers.

I’m not sure that’s changed at all. I graduated in 93 and I remember having conversations with friends where we complained that all the jobs seemed to expect 2-3 years experience.

Or become unhireable because of age discrimination

Not enough, obviously

not enough for what? you'd have to show numbers of either unemployed new grads or retiring tech folks over the last few years to be able to say anything at all.

Probably more relevant is how many over 40 give up coding because they're bored and/or employers dont want them any more. (I'm over 50 and finding it much harder to get piad compared to when I was younger despite kids moved out and I have lots of time to dedicate to working)

Ageism is one of the bad things about our industry. It's the last accepted form of discrimination. The irony is that when you're young and starting a family, you feel guilty about working crazy hours because you're not spending time with your wife and kids. Then when the nest is empty you've got plenty of free time to work hard and even learn some new things, languages, frameworks, &c. but at that point a lot of closed-minded companies think you're too old for software development.

not to nit pick but there are still many accepted forms of discrimination after ageism.

My sample set is definitely biased. I see plenty of very conservative (doesn't want to learn, will only work in one technology) junior engineers, folks who are going to stall out. For senior folks I don't see many. This could be because older folks have jobs or are self filtering to the tech they like or maybe their resumes don't make it to my desktop. Of the folks I can recall that were going for a jr position with many years of experience had some pretty obvious personality issues. Everyone else I interview that's been in industry over 12 years is trying for Lead/Staff/PE. I'd definitely want to know why someone with 20+ years of experience in development is applying for a SDE2 job.

"Just needs a job" and "moved into software" are good reasons. But I'd be really worried about "just needs a job" person getting mad/frustrated if they were that experienced and banging heads with manages that didn't know how to leverage their skills.

When I was younger (~2005) I worked as a peer with one of the dads of a kid who was one year older than me in highschool. He actually became a good friend and mentor. I also worked with a guy who had been a CTO of a 500 person dev shop for years and went back to being a dev. He relished not making decisions or dealing with politics. They were both great mentors. It was a 2 way mentorship as I had a bit more core CS than they did and was more willing to experiment on new tech. They were great with doing whatever they needed to to get the job done. And they'd been in many techs stacks, that helped me break my single language bias and my "not my job" quickly.

I think these days my bias would come from everyone I work with that's older is also quite senior, level wise. On the engineering side they're people who are also constantly trying new things and really leveraging their experience. They're all very introspective. You can call into question pretty much anything with them and you'll get a good discussion.

Companies I've worked with definitely expect engineers to at least reach the lead position for the most part. Up or out in some ways. But the megaco I worked at definitely has really solid non-lead, non-entry-level engineers who have been there forever, esp in critical systems, ignoring their up-or-out guidelines. The main risk there was a new manager being biased and just assuming a 15 year tenure L5 engineer should be managed out. As a contradicting factor there was general consensus anyone over 10 years "really knows some shit" as the default assumption.

Thanks, this is a really valuable answer and makes sense to me. The only follow-up I would have would be if that dev with 10-20 years of experience applying for SDE2 did tell you in an interview that they didn't want to move "up or out" and their goal was to be a productive dev for as long as possible instead of applying internally for management roles, would you accept that answer?

So lead (3) isn't manager...

I'm in one of those systems where after lead you have staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished/fellow/God tier. You never have to be a manager in those. In that style system you can stop at lead (L1/L2/L3 lead/PE/sr PE/de). At those you can stop at L3. It would be very hard to explicitly stop at L2 there. You would have to opt out of hiring, peer reviews, and doing architecture and just do assigned tasks on jira.

We had one engineer who wanted this, they had a ton of stock and we're kinda set, had been there forever. Their super power was ops. You just let em go at a system and it just becomes more and more stable and better documented quietly over time. They had a manager explicitly protecting them that they didn't really grok was happening. They actually left after moving to a new product team and the new manager kept trying to uplevel them. But again they basically just retired at that point.

For me I always worry about people who just do what others tell them. I need feedback and have had projects go sideways when I didn't get it. "Wait you realized 3 months ago this wasn't going to work and you didn't mention it?" "Your the boss/lead I do what you say".

Another way to say it is I think small team lead is the minimum viable dev in places I've worked. That doesn't mean you cant step into a support role and rotate who's lead or work as a team but you need to be capable of doing it.

"staff, principal, senior principal, distinguished/fellow/God tier"

wow people do love their titles )))

There are definitely many more forms of discrimination. Think about neurodiverse people, e.g. with autism. Reardless of skill, knowledge, degree, age etc. it may be much harder to acquire a job for social reasons.