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The Web Development Skills Crisis
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister raises questions regarding Web development skills in an era of constant innovation. Sure, low barriers to entry give underdog technologies ample opportunity to thrive without the backing of name-brand vendors. But doesn't this fragmentation of the Web development market put undue pressure on developers to specialize? Choosing one tool to be your bread and butter from a field this broad is one thing, McAllister writes. Recruiting talent for a Web project when your technology requirements eliminate most of the applicants is another. The result is a crisis, McAllister concludes, one in which maintaining a marketable skill set gets more and more difficult as the so-called state of the art changes on an almost daily basis."
I think the emphasis needs to be less on specific and proprietary technologies and more on how a candidate thinks. While the task and platform/architecture at hand is important, picking someone because they know flash, and you're "doing" flash may be the wrong reasoning. Instead, focus on picking someone who has some proven background, strong in at least a couple of areas. Verify they really are strong, but then ask them questions that make them think. Give them problems to solve. Give them something unsolvable to solve. See how the react.
Getting a sense of how they maneuver in problem-solving situations is going to be a much better indicator of their eventual worth than some credential (certificate, etc.) in the chosen technology du jour. A good tech can always and easily adapt to new and different ways to do things.
Is the state of the art really changing that fast or is it all a problem of "buzzword turbulence", if you will?
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
It's not a shortage of web developers, it's a shortage of web developers with skills.
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because you are a moron.
if someone was building a house, they would hire carpenters.
if someone was building a gigantic stadium, they would hire welders.
they wouldnt hire somebody 'who has experience with ryobi chop saws and drills' or 'must have 10 years experience with fiberglass hammers'. you would assume the person could figure out that a fiber glass hammer is not a big deal compared to a wooden hammer or a plastic hammer, and a ryobi chop saw works pretty much like every other damn chop saw.
then again, if you were in the building trades, you wouldnt call yourself an 'engineer' just because you can do amazing things with a crane or a nail gun.
I think it's a shortage of companies willing to take the effort and risk to train. I had this conversation with my father, who was bemoaning the lack of skilled mechanical engineers. If your requirements are specific, don't expect a huge pile of people (without jobs, mind you!) to be waiting in the wings for your spot to open up. You need someone who might take a year or two to get up to speed, but once there will be good.
THEN - and this is important - you have to be a good place to work and... raise compensation when the person is now the highly trained mythical creature that you would have given your right arm for the year before. Your goal should be to keep his resume un-updated and off monster.
So yeah, there is a definite shortage of people pre-trained for your job opening. There's also a shortage of gold at the end of rainbows and fountains of youth. I think this is a matter of unreasonable expectations.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Web development is such a dead-end job. Most web sites are by kids, imbeciles and graphic designers who fancy themselves as coders. Trying to maintain or develop their code is soul-destroying.
The next time you try to use a small business web site to buy something, do yourself a favour and look at the page source.
If your details aren't being sent out over the intartubes unecrypted, and if you still want to make the "purchase" you might see a way to pay nothing, or bare minimum with a discount.
Scotland is a good place to start looking.
Stick Men
I've run into this very thing before in trying to decide what to study. There are so many different web languages, each of which come with their own toolsets and frameworks. How are we expected to keep up with it all? I don't want to commit to a language or technology that might easily be eclipsed within 2-3 years.
My biggest concern is the amount of time required just to keep up with the Jonses. How much time can I siphon away from paying work on php to learn about rails or django? What about the X number of new Ajax toolkits that have recently emerged, or some supposedly fantastic deployment set? I think of how fast javascript has accelerated since 2005 from digraceful reject to shining star, and it truly terrifies me how little I know of it. I'm used to mastering a language, understanding its uses and differences from others, then applying it towards the future. Do I have time to do that any more?
In the end, I came to the conclusion that I would just study Java and its ilk, because it seems to have made major inroads in enterprise applications and it's free-ish. That's good enough for me, and it bodes well for long term stability.
checking for libvirus... no
ERROR, libvirus.so not found, terminating
That's the entire problem. Companies love to whine about shortages of employees, while it's their own fault. It was always easier when companies treated skilled employees like assets, now they treat them like disposable labor and are paying dearly for it.
The list:
pensions
training
raises
bonuses
perks
All gone except a 3% cost of living raise that is just compensating for inflation. They complain and bitch and moan about turnover and no "loyalty" when they're the ones at fault. They took away all of the reasons to be loyal to cut costs, so employees jump for a new job with higher salary because salary is the only benefit left.
Always kinda blew my mind when people get anal about specific technologies.
Do I know JavaEE? PHP? Ajax?
Doesn't matter.
Why?
Because I know programming. WTF does that mean? It means that language/technology is irrelevant because it takes me a matter of days to pick up on new languages/technologies.
Anyone who touts a single language as some kind of achievement is fucking pathetic.
FLAME ON!
At will employment works both ways.
Companies can, and will, drop you at any moment without a reason given if it serves their needs.
Loyalty is earned. If a company doesn't value me and pay me/train me accordingly of course I will jump ship if I find what looks to be a better opportunity.
That's what java developers said about PHP guys 5 years ago.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Long working hours, no compensation
6-day work weeks
I am in the Casino/Sports Betting industry and good enough to tell them 7-15 5days a week or bye-bye .. but most of my colleagues are working for shit, 6 days a week 2 shifts ... That is in Costa Rica....
Moral of the story : learn stuff, do not count on training, have an attitude, and be good. ...
We just lost a support guy who was answering phones (software developer engineer), and a designer, because he was sick of answering the phone on sunday afternoons - yes, designers make nice pix 9-5, then they wanna go home and be with their family or smoke pot .... they are artists, just like programmers ....
BOSSES DO NOT UNDERSTAND THAT. Period. But they will learn, as all you IT people stop being pussies and tell that what you want, then do not make exclusions.
I can do it, you can do it ...
OK, terrible week, 8+ 4-5 hours a week of coding at work + coding at home (for other clients).... so I had my Friday night drinks before shooting some people on PS3 ...
Anyways, everyone stop whining, start downloading ebooks from pirate bay, learn how to use prototpype, PHP and get a job and have an attitude.
Problem is: people (especially in the US) want free (mostly useless) training. Elsewhere (esp, Europe and Asia) people download/buy a book on whatever, and then write a program just to learn it. They end up in a good job where they perfect.... Problem solved.
Ok that is the drunk version, but I went to all kinds of trainings, and 99% was useless. Just write an app that does .SOMETHING. in language @#$%, then you learn something. Then read a book about it, and you will be better than any certified monkey.
For the record: I am a software engineer with many years in unix/net administration, and I coded PHP/MYSQL before landing in a full time coding MSSQL ASP (!!!JSCRIPT!!), and JS.
I am working on a sportsbook software, and have 3x the assignments I can do. I am a healty nerd who rides bikes, exercises and scuba dives I do not live in my grandma's basement. In other words; I am a normal person and can learn enough technologies and sustain+save well enough, because I care and want to train.
Can you do it? Yes. Just want it?
No I am not the writer of "Oprah you can do it" or "Chicken soup for the soul" ... I am jsut a slightly drunk (now) programmer/IT admin/tech geek who thinks that instead of all the wining, all these people can make a very nice living without ripping people off, and without learning things day by day.
ahmm.... I go and watch some chick-flick my wife wants to watch .... life is not perfect
Just my 2c ..
True story: I just interviewed at a very small company. I already had another job offer on the table, mind you, and just went for the interview because a friend/former coworker had just gotten hired there. So it wasn't a big deal to me if I got the job or not. But I really did want to work with my friend again.
The job was a LAMP dev position. I have been a web developer for 8 years and have loads of experience with some very hot skill sets, lots of successes under my belt, plus the all important aptitude and desire to learn new things all the time. Don't have a lot of PHP experience, though the consulting firm made me take an online test and I scored 80% on it. Why? Because I know how to program, and PHP is just another language that lets you write web pages. So I used my existing programming knowledge to do well on a PHP test. I scored perfectly on another test given me by the firm.
I disclosed all of this to the interviewer because I don't want to get a job on false pretenses. The tool proceeded to ask me reference manual questions like "What does function x do?"
This isn't sour grapes about not getting the job; I had another one waiting (ironically using another technology I don't have much experience with, got it on the strength of other skills) and I don't know if I would have taken it anyhow after seeing the place. I laughed afterwards that this guy's idea of an interview was to ask me ref manual questions as a way of determining my programming aptitude. I hope he gets someone who knows every PHP function and still doesn't know how to write decent code. That'd serve him right. You get what you ask for.
blah blah blah
The bitch, in my opinion, is that the guy who knows Perl::CGI and Perl::Mason can probably learn Ruby on Rails and have a better understanding of the underlying concepts (having been doing this sort of thing for years), but most companies would rather higher the guy who read the Ruby on Rails book. He has the "right skill set" (meaning he has a vague understanding of the language we're working with right now). The other guy has a conceptual grasp of the whole pie, and could easily learn the specific skill, but his lack of experience with "whatever we happen to be using at the moment" makes him somehow unsuitable.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
It's the curse of HR. Human resource people have no idea what we do or how to hire us so they go by the buzz word of the week (usually spelled wrong - looking for Pearl programmers?). Companies that let engineers hire engineers get a much better quality of employee I think. If they then offer a good work environment then they'll probably have an awesome crew that can kick serious ass.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.