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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?"
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.
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.
Ah, you work in government contracting too?
Enterprise, government contracting. It's all the same (I know, I've seen it, it's ugly.)
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.
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)
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