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Where are all the skilled developers?
- Thread starter roguemat
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FarligOpptreden
Executive Member
Nerd Dinner?
Best advice right there, we are in a slightly different part of the industry but we apply this model on junior techies to see who will get far in the company. Generally there are 2 types of people:
1) those who burst into tears constantly about how unfair life is and how badly they are treated and KPI'ed for sulking at their jobs.
2) those who will hang around the office until the early hours of the morning or straight through the weekend just watching seniors work and doing whatever they can do to learn.
The opportunities are there for everyone, some people just choose to feel sorry for themselves while other will use unhappiness as motivation to work hard and solve their own problems. Our MD always says, don't bother going to him with a problem, come with a solution.
Maybe they hired you to do exactly what you are doing and they don't need someone with more/less skill than you have.
If they train you up and give you more responsibility then you fall outside the job role they designated for you which means they need to pay you more/give promotion/whatever. This could be problematic for them as they don't have budget for it or the structure to accomidate a new mid level dev.
As others have said, go look for a new job, you've hit some sort of ceiling (or it's been there all the time) and it's time to move on.
You filter out the "noise".
Also, be a master of one (or 3) or a jack of all.
Get to know what each new technology is about - jQuery is DOM manipulation, Angularjs is a frontend development framework, LESS and SASS are css precompilers .. etc (I do frontend and php dev). Read a couple of articles and see which ones other people prefer and then possible read a little more about the most popular one. If you have time, play with them a little, see which one you prefer.
There are MANY new frameworks, build utils, preprocessors, etc popping up all the time in what I do. I don't know all of them but I am aware of what they do. If I get asked in an interview how good my LESS skills are, I can say that I know what LESS is, I've touched it before but I use SASS a lot more and that changing from one to the other isn't too hard and would not be a problem.
Ask me about the stuff that cguy (was it him - the high performance distributed stuff) is doing and I don't have a clue, it's not my field (back to master of 1, jack of many) so I wouldn't be applying for the job.
If you were going from embedded c dev to a frontend position, then yes, it would be expected that you know jQuery (or something similar) and I doubt I'd hire someone that didn't.
DominionZA
Executive Member
What I did.
My first coding job eventually hit a glass ceiling. When I requested training, increase, etc... my IT manager was cool enough to be straight with me and explained what you said above. I moved on and they employed another junior in my position. I did get tired of job hopping to keep advancing skill though. None of the companies I worked for offered any form of training so I had to train myself (which I did in the evenings).
Been a contractor for 9 years now and never looked back.
A developer has a core skill.
You don't have to know EVERYTHING in detail. You have to prove that you are competent and that you can pick the subsidiary technologies. You prove that by your experience. A junior developer has to build up that experience. This is one the main reasons employers look for experience.
Don't think of experience as a list of technologies that you have had exposure to. Yes, having the right list helps, but it's not the main point. Rather think of experience as proof of your ability to pick up a technology that you need in order to solve a problem.
Some of those technologies will never be your core skill and you will never be expert in them, but you know enough in order to write an interface for your core skill to that technology and you can have a productive conversation with the developer whose core skill is that technology.
You don't have to know EVERYTHING in detail. You have to prove that you are competent and that you can pick the subsidiary technologies. You prove that by your experience. A junior developer has to build up that experience. This is one the main reasons employers look for experience.
Don't think of experience as a list of technologies that you have had exposure to. Yes, having the right list helps, but it's not the main point. Rather think of experience as proof of your ability to pick up a technology that you need in order to solve a problem.
Some of those technologies will never be your core skill and you will never be expert in them, but you know enough in order to write an interface for your core skill to that technology and you can have a productive conversation with the developer whose core skill is that technology.
Hamster
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Same. My first job headed into a dead end after 2 years. As big a dick as my first boss was he told me (after I asked) that they cannot afford a salary increase for me. He did me a favour else I would've missed out on a big project when I moved to JHB two months later.
As stated before, not easy to learn the Enterprise Java at home. Experience cannot be built without exposure as it is the actual proof. All I want is just an opportunity to learn, nothing else. Even if I get a small dev task that I can work on from start to finish using the available resources I would take the chance. But to ask me to just research something and handover the information so someone else can do it does me no good. Practical experience counts and being a research assistant does not.
Hamster
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And if your boss is a douche then ask the Senior Dev to look at some of the legacy code. You don't need to code but what I've learned is that if you can create a document, a checklist and maybe a spec sheet from just reading through the code...you will learn how the system is put together and gain a better understanding of why things are the way they are in the code...It will speed you up. It's on you to skill up before you make a jump to another company...else you will have the same problem wherever you go.
semaphore
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This is so wrong its not even funny. AngularJS is more than just a "frontend" development framework. Unless you've only just used its two way binding then you have not even scratched the service of how powerful it is.
Your post is incorrect.
You've been pretty hostile in a couple of the threads that you have responded to tonight and I was about to reply in kind but possibly it's late, you're tired and have had a hard day, I hope tomorrow is better.
Angular IS a frontend development framework.
You don't use it on the server side. It has different methods to access server side interfaces but you're not going to be writing any device drives with it anytime soon.
Here's the quote from wikipedia to save you the hassle:
And just to be sure, here's the official word from their site (it's the top line in case you miss it)
You can nitpick about me saying "frontend" development framework and not "application"development framework but its still BROWSER BASED and last I checked they don't run on the backend. Go on, point out something like lynx or phantonjs if you feel like it.
Now, did you bother reading the thread?
If you did and if you had comprehensive reading ability you would have noticed:
Now replying to him and saying that he needs to study exactly what each new technology does and exactly how it does it is counter productive as that is what he is complaining about. So, going on this, I recommended that he "get to know what each new technology is about" and I should have probably added "In as brief a way as possible". You don't have to know the ins and outs of Yi to know it's a PHP framework or the entire command set of vagrant to know that it's used for ease of virtual machine deployment. What is important is that you are aware the there is something out there that can assist you in deploying virtual machines easily and it's called vagrant.
If you want to post "This is so wrong its not even funny. " then please have something to back up your claim with. kthxbai.
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one thing is for sure, angular is disgusting 
give me Ember's templates over Angular's ng-* scattered all over the place anyday.
I am still not sure how someone goes about evaluating javascript frameworks and ends up thinking, "wow, angular's polluting of html, and $scope is awesome!!!"
give me Ember's templates over Angular's ng-* scattered all over the place anyday.
I am still not sure how someone goes about evaluating javascript frameworks and ends up thinking, "wow, angular's polluting of html, and $scope is awesome!!!"
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kripstoe
Expert Member
Thread. Derailed.