Re:Study: There may not be a shortage of American STEM gradu...
by jlgreco on Thursday April 25, 2013 @01:59AM
(#5605908)
There are absolutely roles where the developer with more industry experience is unambiguously the correct choice.
But if this is widely the case, then is there a labour problem at all? If we are all trying to hire the guys with lots of industry experience and are all willing to let them ramp up on new tech while earning their industry experience salaries, then what is the problem? Everything is great if that is what is going on.
However the horror story that I seem to be hearing from other people is that the big names in tech right now are only interested in hiring people straight out of college, hence the "college style" non-monetary perks and whatnot.
I tend to prefer the guy with 15 years of experience with "C/C++/Perl" on his resume.
Our software is a mix of Python, Scala, Java, CoffeeScript and Obj-C (different components). Scala is the driving force right now for the backend and the code that we've built in it is heavy on concurrency and functional programming. We've also standardized our workstations on Ubuntu (not Windows, not OS X).
From my experience, the language or the technologies themselves are NOT THE PROBLEM. The problem is finding people that are able to build software, people that when faced with a problem, they solve it, even if the problem is new to them.
Our backends also need to handle massive traffic and we don't have the resources to throw hundreds of servers in the mix for scale. To build efficient backends you need an incredibly difficult to achieve mix of knowledge that I won't even bother to enumerate.
We also have to analyse terabytes of logs daily. So besides setting up clusters for map/reduce, those scripts have to infer knowledge from those logs, going into the territory of statistics / machine learning and natural language processing.
So you're a hipster that knows Go/Node/Ruby/Whatever. Great, but what can I use you for?