5 ms·

Why Can't Good Engineers Get Hired?

14 points by davidotter 7y ago

PaulHoule 7y ago
More spam financed by triplebyte. Friends don't let friends vote this up.
- mberning 7y ago
  The amount of ads I see for triplebyte and their copy cats is ridiculous. There must be huge money in it right now. Kind of reminds me of the code school fad a few years ago. I think they figured out actually educating people is hard/impossible. It’s a lot easier if they can get you to pass some basic coding test and quickly place you with one of their clients for big $$$.
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    For the last few years there have been a vast number of articles on Tedium with the title "Hiring is broken" where you always find a few mentions of Triplebyte. It's an open secret that they've spent a lot of money on paying bloggers to not just get their message out, but to make sure you are surrounded by mentions of Triplebyte so you think it is a thing. It seems that they've realized that using the same tired headline over and over on the same tired Tedium site is damaging their credibility so now they are spreading the cash around to other blogs, new headlines, etc.
- mtmail 7y ago
  How is this financed? The company is mentioned once, not linked, not even spelled correctly.
- davidotter 7y ago
  I have nothing to do with triplebyte. I watched one video of them talking about noise in the hiring process. Wasn't aware they were so disliked!
richardwhiuk 7y ago
Meta: Contrast ratio on the site is pretty poor.
jfkienennd 7y ago
Please increase the contrast ratio.
codeduck 7y ago
for Cthulhu's sake, put an opaque background behind the menu so that the article text doesn't scroll through it.
- davidotter 7y ago
  this is fair. thanks for the feedback, will try and figure it out
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jrockway 7y ago
I think at the smallest companies, they do need engineers that can do everything. There isn't enough income to pay teams of people to do specific things, so you are going to have to be comfortable writing code, screwing around with CSS, pushing stuff to production, worrying about security, and laying the framework for hiring the next n engineers. There just isn't anyone else that is going to do it. At bigger companies, it really varies. There is a lot of specialization, so you can definitely get away with only programming (or only doing SRE, or only developing build/testing tools, or only maintaining production machines, or only developing Linux on embedded devices, etc.) I think that is where you want to aim if you don't care about the details of the "full stack". And, I think it's perfectly fine to specialize; you can probably be more productive when you're focusing on only one thing. I am 50% looking for a job, 50% doing my own thing right now. The biggest problem I have is that when companies need the skills I have, they have too many employees and I know everything is going to be "meetings to review the employee handbook" instead of engineering. If I were going to write a complaint about the state of the industry, it would be that. Do more with less people!

14 points by davidotter 7y ago

PaulHoule 7y ago

More spam financed by triplebyte. Friends don't let friends vote this up.

mberning 7y ago
The amount of ads I see for triplebyte and their copy cats is ridiculous. There must be huge money in it right now. Kind of reminds me of the code school fad a few years ago. I think they figured out actually educating people is hard/impossible. It’s a lot easier if they can get you to pass some basic coding test and quickly place you with one of their clients for big $$$.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  For the last few years there have been a vast number of articles on Tedium with the title "Hiring is broken" where you always find a few mentions of Triplebyte. It's an open secret that they've spent a lot of money on paying bloggers to not just get their message out, but to make sure you are surrounded by mentions of Triplebyte so you think it is a thing. It seems that they've realized that using the same tired headline over and over on the same tired Tedium site is damaging their credibility so now they are spreading the cash around to other blogs, new headlines, etc.
mtmail 7y ago
How is this financed? The company is mentioned once, not linked, not even spelled correctly.
davidotter 7y ago
I have nothing to do with triplebyte. I watched one video of them talking about noise in the hiring process. Wasn't aware they were so disliked!

richardwhiuk 7y ago

Meta: Contrast ratio on the site is pretty poor.

jfkienennd 7y ago

Please increase the contrast ratio.

codeduck 7y ago

for Cthulhu's sake, put an opaque background behind the menu so that the article text doesn't scroll through it.

davidotter 7y ago
this is fair. thanks for the feedback, will try and figure it out

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jrockway 7y ago

I think at the smallest companies, they do need engineers that can do everything. There isn't enough income to pay teams of people to do specific things, so you are going to have to be comfortable writing code, screwing around with CSS, pushing stuff to production, worrying about security, and laying the framework for hiring the next n engineers. There just isn't anyone else that is going to do it. At bigger companies, it really varies. There is a lot of specialization, so you can definitely get away with only programming (or only doing SRE, or only developing build/testing tools, or only maintaining production machines, or only developing Linux on embedded devices, etc.) I think that is where you want to aim if you don't care about the details of the "full stack". And, I think it's perfectly fine to specialize; you can probably be more productive when you're focusing on only one thing. I am 50% looking for a job, 50% doing my own thing right now. The biggest problem I have is that when companies need the skills I have, they have too many employees and I know everything is going to be "meetings to review the employee handbook" instead of engineering. If I were going to write a complaint about the state of the industry, it would be that. Do more with less people!