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Ask Slashdot: Minimum Programming Competence In Order To Get a Job?
First time accepted submitter Wisecat (3651085) writes "So we all know that computer programming jobs are hot right now. Heck, even President Obama has been urging Americans to learn the skill. But all of us in tech know that not everyone can hack it, and what's more it takes a while to learn anything, and keep up your skills as technology changes. Add to that the fact that companies (and their hiring managers) are always looking for 'the best of the best of the best' talent, and one starts to wonder: just how good does one actually have to BE to get hired? Certainly, there must be plenty of jobs where a level 7/10 programmer would be plenty good enough, and even some that a level 5/10 would be enough. And perhaps we can agree that a level 2/10 would not likely get hired anywhere. So the question is: given that we have such huge demand for programmers, can a level 5, 6, or 7 ever get past the hiring manager? Or is he doomed to sit on the sidelines while the position goes unfilled, or goes to someone willing to lie about their skill level, or perhaps to an H1-B who will work cheaper (but not necessarily better)? I'm a hardware engineer with embedded software experience, and have considered jumping over to pure software (since there are so many jobs, so much demand) but at age 40, and needing to pick a language and get good at it, I wonder whether it would even be possible to get a job (with my previous work experience not being directly related). Thoughts?"
Given how many 2/10 I see in my everyday job life, it can't be that hard.
40? Whatever. Lots of people in their 40s and 50s and 60s have mediocre jobs writing 200 lines of code per quarter in some large corporation. My team of ten has only two programmers under 40, and just barely (38 and 39).
Just dig in and apply for jobs until you get one. Work as hard as you can at being good at your job.
So we all know that computer programming jobs are hot right now.
Only if you have an H1-B visa.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Sysadmin scripting? Build tools control? Data modeling? UI development? Maintenance and enhancement on a ERP or SCM system? So it depends on what you are targeting and the demand. No one wants to support COBOL. Everyone wants to do mobile apps. So how do you differentiate in each of those areas? A 2/10 in one area may be considered a 7/10 in another area. That would be the better question. Please resubmit your question with a better statement of goals. Then we may be able to help you.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
a 10% skilled programmer can be identified with simple interview questions. A 20% programmer can be identified with a little more effort. Beyond that? Really hard to differentiate in an interview. You can measure how good they are at language trivia. You can measure there ability to solve easy problems quickly. You can identify basic levels of sanity and social competence. But programming ability? You'll figure it out after they've been working for you over 6 months. So no, you don't have to worry about being a master programmer to get a job, you just need to be a 40% programmer and know how to interview.
setTimeout(function(){ document.write("I make $150K a year!"); }, 3000);
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
People often ignore their non-programming skills. Get fired from a manufacturing job? Learn to code and try to get a job coding the software that runs the machines that took your job. Your industry xp will be a plus. Work as an orderly in a hospital? Code for medical machines.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I fancy myself a "knows a LOT of languages and knows how to adapt". So I can sit down in front of a machine running a completely in-house language, and be proficient in it in less than a day, very skilled in under a week. I think this is more important than already being proficient with any given language. Having a very broad background of languages is very useful, because there comes a point where a new language won't really have any surprises you're not used to managing.
Things change so fast with computers, how fast you can adapt is usually more useful than how much you already know. Experience goes stale so quickly, only adaptation remains valuable any distance out into the future.
So this makes it a little tricky to judge "programming competence". If you simply sit them down and see how well they can code in what you use right now, you're not necessarily getting a good measurement on how "competent" they'll be at it in a week. I'd say "throw something at them you know they have ZERO experience with, and see how they react". A competent programmer should be able to have 80%+ comprehension on any code you set in front of them. They should also be capable of very simple edits, and maybe even a little debugging. Have an experienced dev sit down beside them and then give them a simple challenge, with the dev as their assistant. The questions they ask the dev will tell you a lot about their level of competence. Get the dev's input on this later too.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
What I like to see are the following:
1. Statistics knowledge
2. Excel (pivots, charting, VBA, etc.)
3. SAS/R/SPSS (in order).
4. Unix shell scripting.
5. Some sort of data visualization tool usage (e.g. Tableu)
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We are currently looking for analysts and the market is tough. We take people from all walks: CS, social sciences, Stats/Math/Econ/Finance, etc. The Analytics market is continually growing and in desperate need of people who are competent until higher education catches up and starts putting people out with a good mix of CS, Stats, and Business knowledge.
Get into Analytics IMO, the pay is great and the work is pretty fun.
...who only knows HTML, CSS, and JavaScript will be posting in 3....2....1.... .
Those are hottest paying jobs right now. HR wants people with 5 years experience developing IOS, HTML 5, CSS 3, jquery, and nosql. You can pull in six figures easily if you can do this.
For Cobol and java EE jobs? Uh no as applicants are flooded with many many decades of experience which is something HR weenies love and will devalue you as every applicant has +10 experience? Why don't you etc?
Comes to show you need to stay current in tech if you want the big bugs. Stay behind and your money and worth stay behind with it.
http://saveie6.com/
First of all, let me be the one to say that getting past the HR department is independent of skill. Simply because they usually know LESS about programming than you. I don't know how much you know, but I can say with some credibility that if you ever had to do anything with computers other than turning it on, your chances are high that you're a computer wizard compared to anything that could sit in HR.
That aside, you do have some valuable experience and I'd build on that: You worked on embedded hardware. Yes, I'm dead serious, build on THAT. We're getting more and more "smart appliances", the next big thing in IT will probably be how to manipulate all the appliances in your home with your smartphone or your tablet. Let's face it, we've pimped TVs and got people to buy a new one every other year, at least. But their fridges, microwaves, washers and dryers sit there for years and years without being replaced. A marketing nightmare. The next big thing must logically be to get people to throw those out every other year to buy something better, and "better" in this case can only mean that you can somehow network them. My suggestion would be to get on that train.
If you don't want to be the guy designing and developing the hardware/firmware for the appliances, there will most certainly be a spot for a software developer for mobile devices who knows the "other side", read, the hardware in the appliance, and how to string them together sensibly. If you have any kind of experience with WPAN in any of its forms, I'd say you're going to be very popular.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your actual competence and achieved competence may vary.
You may be a good 9/10 however you may achieve 2/10 in your job because you are not given the time/resources to do any better.
Shit is complex.
+----------------- | What is the question!
Warning: lots of terms in quotation marks here because there are no agreed-on definitions for those terms.
In we and mobile development, there is a lot of demand for developers and there are not enough "senior" developers to go around. That means there are opportunities for "junior" and "intermediate" developers to work on teams where they can gain experience and work their way up. It also explains why so many intensive developer training courses have popped up everywhere.
And why shoot for 7/10? That might be a place you live for a while, but with a little discipline and lots of practice, I feel many people have the ability to be great programmers. For most web development, having a great CS background isn't really all that useful.
Having other experience is often (almost always) useful, especially if you have knowledge of the domain you're working in.
It's never too late to start. I've had people well into their 50's come to the Rails Girls workshops I have organized.
Your age does not play as large a role as you may think. In 2004, I had 13+ years of experience in pure software on the odometer, but - due to mental illness - first lost my job, then became homeless. I did the only thing I was still able to do: I walked. All over Europe. Homeless, but not giving in. Once back in my home country, in 2006, I managed to settle down again: the clouds in my head had cleared, and a large aerospace constructor gave me chance. I was 39 years old, and it started a great ride in my career, one that I am still on.
What I did, you can do. As to the language: there is not really a problem discernible to me. You probably already master C, or a C-like language. The jump to C++ is not that hard, in that case. Otherwise, you might want to consider ADA, a stunningly elegant language that could very well land you jobs with e.g. Rockwell, Boeing etc. etc. ( assuming you are in the USA ). Good luck, and do not forget: it is not your success that counts - it is the fact that you keep trying.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I lived in California after the dot-com crash, and the field was tough-going for a few years. I had to take some out-of-state contracts with sleazy agencies to pay the bills. Fortunately I had some "legacy" knowledge to fall back on compared to the web-only developers, who had to compete directly with other webbies recently dumped from the failed dot-coms.
Remember, ups-and-downs are likely and the field changes fast. Being good enough to work in the field during the boom years may not be good enough for the bust years, and you could wind up with the wrong skills at the wrong time.
In my opinion, for a longer view, pick a field you are good at rather than one that appears strong now.
And people skills are always good to have and/or hone because that reduces the chance you'll be off-shored or automated out of the job.
Table-ized A.I.
"you need to stay current in tech if you want the big bugs"
truer words have never been spoken. Although probably not what you intended.
Stop listing iOS as a computer language, moron.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The more complicated part is all of the system libraries, the third-party libraries, the "right way" to do things in that language, etc.
...the bar is pretty fucking low. Incompetence rules the industry; everyone is selling snake oil.
It is not a language. I put IOS as what employers list as requirements.
Most of iOS development is just some HTML 5 with objective-C logic thrown in for integration sake. I just spoke to someone whose son is making $100,000 a year and he is a 24 year old highschool drop out. He works for Coca Cola, Home Depot, and other companies consulting and he has only 2 years exprience.
He learned HTML 5 and that is how he got in. These companies needed someone to write mobile apps and they couldn't find anyone qualified. Tablet websites, mobile apps all require iOS, Android, mobile app, objective-c, and jquery +html 5.
In the tech field your value can fluctuate widely based on demand. While C++ coders laugh and look down at HTML 5 development the mobile/web coders are the ones getting the last laugh. You can not pull in 6 figures within 3 years or get people to even talk to you at that level of experience with C++. Doesn't matter if it is harder. It matters is the market demand. There was a time when Java programmers 12 years ago were recession proof and could pull in insane amounts of money for kids with HS diplomas too. Not anymore. Yes you can still pull in cash if you have 10 years experience now but it is not like it was in the old days of new.
http://saveie6.com/
I have fielded this question a number of times.
Right now, the job market for developers is not very discriminatory. They'll take anyone they can. That means your barrier for entry is low. That being said, I've done a bit more research, and I can say that the most lucrative and mobile entry level development job you can land is probably web application developer. Not designer, but rather, someone who makes a web-based application 'go'.
With that in mind, you'll need the following skills: SQL, HTML, CSS, Javascript (jQuery specifically, but other libraries are good), and a backing language - probably Java or C#/ASP.NET. You'll also need to become familiar with your web execution framework - Tomcat is big in the Java world, and naturally IIS is used in the .NET world. Luckily for you, there are many resources to learn all these things absolutely free of charge, with huge communities of volunteers helping each other out. So, what level do you need these skills at?
Well, as a new hire - regardless of your skill level - you're unlikely to be given a new project to start on. Likely, your first few months are going to be a combination of learning your company's domain knowledge (like finances or autos, or whatever), and tackling bug fixes and/or feature enhancements. For that you'll need to understand how the programs work so that you can source problems. You'll have to be familiar with IDE's and the debugging capabilities - especially learning how to setup and debug web based programs on your local system, as well as remote debugging. You're going to have to be able to read code well enough that you can translate most of it into english in your head - without having to go line by line until you have to dig down that deep. That means recognizing structures and flow easily (which is why I also recommend you avoid ruby on rails and spring - and maybe even hibernate/nhibernate until you've learned more).
You're also going to need to know enough about a development environment to know how to ask an intelligent question about it. There's a world of difference between "I can't get it to work," and something like "I tried increasing the max heap size, but I'm still getting an out of memory error each time I execute a prepared statement after the first call." See here: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/s... . One important quote to take away from this: "What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions." That faq will help you get past the newbie phase without giving up.
So, an unasked followup question, how long will it take to get there? Well, hour-by-hour, you can compress the entirety of a CS degree program into 4 months of 8 hours, 5 days a week, but you won't need all that. I'm going to say that to get there, to really be employable, worst case it'll take about 250 hours of study total. If you take it at a light pace, about 10 hours a week, you should be ready in 6 months.
With today's environment, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you halved that and still got a job, but I would feel bad for suggesting that was an adequate amount of study and practice.
One last important thing that I've only touched on indirectly; you absolutely must learn how to teach yourself. New libraries and frameworks come out every day, and the flavor of the month changes at a rapid pace. At some point, you'll realize that all languages do more or less the same thing, they just have different syntactical sugar, or internal constructs that make a given task easier or harder, sometimes even between versions of the same language. You need to be able to stay on top of those changes, while googling or asking for solutions to odd problems or configuration errors.
Its probably some simple equation that could be written in 3 lines of code but unless someone knows how to do it I doubt they could figure it out, at least not in the few minutes required in an interview.
I live in the home Amazon and Microsoft. The region is starving for more developers, but it's very hard to land a job. I'm not a prodigy; just a solid programmer, with a Masters. It took it a couple of dozen interviews and a year to get a job. It is going great. Companies here compete to see who can be the pickiest. I heard some one brag once that they flew in half a dozen candidates from Sweden and that only one Swede made the cut.
So where are you looking for work? Every region has its own peculiarities.
The relationship between programming talent and programming productivity, at least in complex real-world systems, isn't linear. The very best (top 10%) of programmers can get things done dozens of times faster than average programmers. And it's not just about speed. The very best programmers produce code with fewer defects. They are less prone to making unfortunate architectural decisions that cause problems later. They can find difficult bugs and solve difficult problems that average programmers simply cannot, regardless of time spent.
Sure, there are jobs out there for people with limited talent, mainly involving software that solves simple problems. There are reports to be generated that are too complex for someone without a certain amount of database and software experience. There are relatively isolated scripts that connect stuff together that wasn't originally designed for that. There are the sort of third-tier corporations that need some IT but can't attract top-flight talent. All kinds of stuff that's more complicated than an Excel macro but simpler than a web browser.
i am paranoid about that as i'm 43, but honestly i haven't seen it play out. I've consistently been able to find work. I have recruiters banging on my door day and night. i've turned down offers from those big imposing software giants. maybe i'm just lucky because my core competencies are in use all over the place. maybe i'm lucky because i'm a young and hip 43 riding around on my skateboard with my full head of hair and getting mistaken for a 20 something. However, i strongly suspect that i just happen to be able to pass a technical interview and that's really all that most places care about.
Oh, also, i'm not really interviewing at those startups run by actual 20 somethings.(If i really needed that job, you can bet i'd ride my skateboard to the interview)
The field is too broad, and everyone is dropped in the same bucket.
Designing a fully functional shopping cart (that handles everything from complex discount and coupon rules to credit card) from scratch is -hard-. Writing a proper video card driver from scratch that handles everything a game needs is also hard.
The two, however, requires such different skill set, they should not have the same title. Yet they do. They require the same degree from the same schools. Its a problem.
You see it at companies like Google or Amazon, where "one size fit all" interviews are the norm. They filter out people who didn't go to MIT or CMU, but their questions are so far off from anything you'd actually do day to day (even if you work there!), that they're really just gambling on the loose correlation between someone who can write a hash algorithm for a tree and the ability to develop software in the real world.
And that's why some of their stuff is amazing (ie: the search engine) and some is buggy piece of crap (ie: any desktop app they ever made)
My favourite take on lines of code as a metric is from the early days of the Macintosh:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryV...
In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.
Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.
He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.
He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.
I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The secret for me was hair dye. Suddenly I started getting offers. It doesn't seem like it should make that much difference, but it did.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The Plague, is that you? I haven't seen you around since '95. How's da Vinci treating you?