Software Engineer

[Anonymous]

So-called "Agile" is a mess in our experience. It was clever marketing and an attempt to claim that process is more important than hiring people with strong design & coding skills.

Our experience is that lightweight good processes (i.e., not the mess called Agile) can help great programmers perform more effectively, but there are no magic processes which will enable marginal programmers to perform visibly better.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Be aware that we have over a million foreign workers temporarily in the US doing IT work.

Any it keeps growing. Anyone waiting for a green card can stay forever so the
Numbers grow and grow.

They are all desperate for a green card and with this huge supply they suppress wages and allow ageism to be rampant in IT field

It is not a career anymore but a 5 to 15
Year job path before you will be fired and replaced with an HXXXb

This person has no idea what they are talking about.

I’m a 56 year old US born development manager and was just hired for a new role. Also, I’m actively hiring developers and happy to talk with people of any age. The reality is that 95% of the applicants we get are not US born, and those that do apply are often wildly unqualified (e.g. can’t answer the question “what’s a relational database”).

Culture has changed though. Work has devolved into an "assembly line" type of situation where you are timed and constantly pressured to develop things as fast as possible at the expense of creativity and quality. This has even penetrated consulting which used to be expertise driven field. Agile and "sprinting" took all the joy out of being able to engineer interesting solutions and have time to solve problems instead of patching things up. And this has become tough for older people to keep up too. Many younger developers are on a fast moving treadmill and take ADHD drugs and anxiety meds.

This notion of Agile “taking the joy” out of software development is entirely a reflection of people who know nothing about Agile claiming to apply it.

Robert Martin is great on this —- Agile is a tool for teams of 8-10 software developers to write software. Non technical people don’t and can’t meaningfully understand it and shouldn’t be allowed working 50 miles of a software development project as so called “scrum masters.”

Agile is a way for self-organizing teams of software developers to manage their work. Automated testing, pair programming, and protection from clueless non-technical middle managers tearing for control are essential components. For example, story points are not a metric to be used by manager la to try to squeeze more productivity out of developers. They are a tool for ongoing learning by the team, period. Managers’ job is to manage scope. Period.

When practiced this way, Agile leads to craftsmanship, quality, clean code, clean architecture, and always deployable code. Unfortunately, all of the non-technical IT bureaucrats with PMPs who feel threatened by tech people make it’s their life’s work to coop Agile into a tool for managers, and thus guarantee awful code and continual failure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Be aware that we have over a million foreign workers temporarily in the US doing IT work.

Any it keeps growing. Anyone waiting for a green card can stay forever so the
Numbers grow and grow.

They are all desperate for a green card and with this huge supply they suppress wages and allow ageism to be rampant in IT field

It is not a career anymore but a 5 to 15
Year job path before you will be fired and replaced with an HXXXb

This person has no idea what they are talking about.

I’m a 56 year old US born development manager and was just hired for a new role. Also, I’m actively hiring developers and happy to talk with people of any age. The reality is that 95% of the applicants we get are not US born, and those that do apply are often wildly unqualified (e.g. can’t answer the question “what’s a relational database”).

Culture has changed though. Work has devolved into an "assembly line" type of situation where you are timed and constantly pressured to develop things as fast as possible at the expense of creativity and quality. This has even penetrated consulting which used to be expertise driven field. Agile and "sprinting" took all the joy out of being able to engineer interesting solutions and have time to solve problems instead of patching things up. And this has become tough for older people to keep up too. Many younger developers are on a fast moving treadmill and take ADHD drugs and anxiety meds.

Agile has its place, but for large systems, it doesn't scale, and it actually makes the application harder to support long term. Too piecemeal.

Yes, but it is still the "golden standard" and vastly used and pushed by various consultancies and management of the companies themselves. It's miserable when it comes to complex development projects and large volume data related work.

I know. It's unfortunate. I'm working on an application right now that was developed using agile method, and five years out, it's a mess. But it looked good on the slick presentations to the PMO.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So-called "Agile" is a mess in our experience. It was clever marketing and an attempt to claim that process is more important than hiring people with strong design & coding skills.

Our experience is that lightweight good processes (i.e., not the mess called Agile) can help great programmers perform more effectively, but there are no magic processes which will enable marginal programmers to perform visibly better.

It’s kind of shocking to me that someone who works in software can be this ignorant of major trends on software development since the 1990s. Have you heard of the Agile manifesto? Extreme programming? The whole clean code/software craftsmanship movement? Uncle Bob?

I hate to tell you this, but there’s a whole world of highly skilled, highly compensated experts writing the best applications in the world who live and die by (real) agile.

Do you have a CS degree? Did they not cover all this?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Be aware that we have over a million foreign workers temporarily in the US doing IT work.

Any it keeps growing. Anyone waiting for a green card can stay forever so the
Numbers grow and grow.

They are all desperate for a green card and with this huge supply they suppress wages and allow ageism to be rampant in IT field

It is not a career anymore but a 5 to 15
Year job path before you will be fired and replaced with an HXXXb

+1 I tried transitioning into software engineer and the market is over saturated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Be aware that we have over a million foreign workers temporarily in the US doing IT work.

Any it keeps growing. Anyone waiting for a green card can stay forever so the
Numbers grow and grow.

They are all desperate for a green card and with this huge supply they suppress wages and allow ageism to be rampant in IT field

It is not a career anymore but a 5 to 15
Year job path before you will be fired and replaced with an HXXXb

+1 I tried transitioning into software engineer and the market is over saturated.

I though engineers were pulling in $400k at FAANG and resting and vesting? What is this dissonance??

[Anonymous]

SS is graduating with a comp sci degree in May. She knows the job market. She just loves to code. Fingers crossed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:SS is graduating with a comp sci degree in May. She knows the job market. She just loves to code. Fingers crossed.

SS=DD

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Be aware that we have over a million foreign workers temporarily in the US doing IT work.

Any it keeps growing. Anyone waiting for a green card can stay forever so the
Numbers grow and grow.

They are all desperate for a green card and with this huge supply they suppress wages and allow ageism to be rampant in IT field

It is not a career anymore but a 5 to 15
Year job path before you will be fired and replaced with an HXXXb

This person has no idea what they are talking about.

I’m a 56 year old US born development manager and was just hired for a new role. Also, I’m actively hiring developers and happy to talk with people of any age. The reality is that 95% of the applicants we get are not US born, and those that do apply are often wildly unqualified (e.g. can’t answer the question “what’s a relational database”).

Culture has changed though. Work has devolved into an "assembly line" type of situation where you are timed and constantly pressured to develop things as fast as possible at the expense of creativity and quality. This has even penetrated consulting which used to be expertise driven field. Agile and "sprinting" took all the joy out of being able to engineer interesting solutions and have time to solve problems instead of patching things up. And this has become tough for older people to keep up too. Many younger developers are on a fast moving treadmill and take ADHD drugs and anxiety meds.

This notion of Agile “taking the joy” out of software development is entirely a reflection of people who know nothing about Agile claiming to apply it.

Robert Martin is great on this —- Agile is a tool for teams of 8-10 software developers to write software. Non technical people don’t and can’t meaningfully understand it and shouldn’t be allowed working 50 miles of a software development project as so called “scrum masters.”

Agile is a way for self-organizing teams of software developers to manage their work. Automated testing, pair programming, and protection from clueless non-technical middle managers tearing for control are essential components. For example, story points are not a metric to be used by manager la to try to squeeze more productivity out of developers. They are a tool for ongoing learning by the team, period. Managers’ job is to manage scope. Period.

When practiced this way, Agile leads to craftsmanship, quality, clean code, clean architecture, and always deployable code. Unfortunately, all of the non-technical IT bureaucrats with PMPs who feel threatened by tech people make it’s their life’s work to coop Agile into a tool for managers, and thus guarantee awful code and continual failure.

This is why the foreign workers are better, never had one argue with me about methodology.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Be aware that we have over a million foreign workers temporarily in the US doing IT work.

Any it keeps growing. Anyone waiting for a green card can stay forever so the
Numbers grow and grow.

They are all desperate for a green card and with this huge supply they suppress wages and allow ageism to be rampant in IT field

It is not a career anymore but a 5 to 15
Year job path before you will be fired and replaced with an HXXXb

This person has no idea what they are talking about.

I’m a 56 year old US born development manager and was just hired for a new role. Also, I’m actively hiring developers and happy to talk with people of any age. The reality is that 95% of the applicants we get are not US born, and those that do apply are often wildly unqualified (e.g. can’t answer the question “what’s a relational database”).

Culture has changed though. Work has devolved into an "assembly line" type of situation where you are timed and constantly pressured to develop things as fast as possible at the expense of creativity and quality. This has even penetrated consulting which used to be expertise driven field. Agile and "sprinting" took all the joy out of being able to engineer interesting solutions and have time to solve problems instead of patching things up. And this has become tough for older people to keep up too. Many younger developers are on a fast moving treadmill and take ADHD drugs and anxiety meds.

This notion of Agile “taking the joy” out of software development is entirely a reflection of people who know nothing about Agile claiming to apply it.

Robert Martin is great on this —- Agile is a tool for teams of 8-10 software developers to write software. Non technical people don’t and can’t meaningfully understand it and shouldn’t be allowed working 50 miles of a software development project as so called “scrum masters.”

Agile is a way for self-organizing teams of software developers to manage their work. Automated testing, pair programming, and protection from clueless non-technical middle managers tearing for control are essential components. For example, story points are not a metric to be used by manager la to try to squeeze more productivity out of developers. They are a tool for ongoing learning by the team, period. Managers’ job is to manage scope. Period.

When practiced this way, Agile leads to craftsmanship, quality, clean code, clean architecture, and always deployable code. Unfortunately, all of the non-technical IT bureaucrats with PMPs who feel threatened by tech people make it’s their life’s work to coop Agile into a tool for managers, and thus guarantee awful code and continual failure.

This is why the foreign workers are better, never had one argue with me about methodology.

PP you’re responding to. Not sure what this means. On the teams I lead, we have a mix of US and foreign born developers, and we talk methodology all the time. Then again, we all have CS degrees, aren’t as wildly ignorant as most of the posters on this thread, and don’t hire non-technical people to manage software.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:some folks using chatgpt today.

+1

LOL. So obvious.

OP, look up your response on chatgpt and let us know the requirements.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So-called "Agile" is a mess in our experience. It was clever marketing and an attempt to claim that process is more important than hiring people with strong design & coding skills.

Our experience is that lightweight good processes (i.e., not the mess called Agile) can help great programmers perform more effectively, but there are no magic processes which will enable marginal programmers to perform visibly better.

It’s kind of shocking to me that someone who works in software can be this ignorant of major trends on software development since the 1990s. Have you heard of the Agile manifesto? Extreme programming? The whole clean code/software craftsmanship movement? Uncle Bob?

I hate to tell you this, but there’s a whole world of highly skilled, highly compensated experts writing the best applications in the world who live and die by (real) agile.

Do you have a CS degree? Did they not cover all this?

I am at aloss for words. Not just the bolded part, but the whole thing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Be aware that we have over a million foreign workers temporarily in the US doing IT work.

Any it keeps growing. Anyone waiting for a green card can stay forever so the
Numbers grow and grow.

They are all desperate for a green card and with this huge supply they suppress wages and allow ageism to be rampant in IT field

It is not a career anymore but a 5 to 15
Year job path before you will be fired and replaced with an HXXXb

This person has no idea what they are talking about.

I’m a 56 year old US born development manager and was just hired for a new role. Also, I’m actively hiring developers and happy to talk with people of any age. The reality is that 95% of the applicants we get are not US born, and those that do apply are often wildly unqualified (e.g. can’t answer the question “what’s a relational database”).

PP is not entirely wrong. Wages in this industry had been suppressed due to outsourcing and insourcing. Even if good English communication skills and long term experience and high skills are still valued it's true that these jobs used to pay better in the 90s and early 2000s before massive outsourcing/insourcing. You can still get get paid well, but higher comp jobs are harder to get and they have poor life/work balance and more pressure and there is more competition. It's still a decent way to make a living and comparatively better compensated than let's say having a social sciences or humanities degree, I mean that you have a much higher chance getting a living wage with Comp Sci degree.

OK. It's not a great career, it's just the best option for anyone who can do it, except for a tiny fraction of people who can claw their way into BigLaw partnerships or get elected to Congress. Beware!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Be aware that we have over a million foreign workers temporarily in the US doing IT work.

Any it keeps growing. Anyone waiting for a green card can stay forever so the
Numbers grow and grow.

They are all desperate for a green card and with this huge supply they suppress wages and allow ageism to be rampant in IT field

It is not a career anymore but a 5 to 15
Year job path before you will be fired and replaced with an HXXXb

This person has no idea what they are talking about.

I’m a 56 year old US born development manager and was just hired for a new role. Also, I’m actively hiring developers and happy to talk with people of any age. The reality is that 95% of the applicants we get are not US born, and those that do apply are often wildly unqualified (e.g. can’t answer the question “what’s a relational database”).

Culture has changed though. Work has devolved into an "assembly line" type of situation where you are timed and constantly pressured to develop things as fast as possible at the expense of creativity and quality. This has even penetrated consulting which used to be expertise driven field. Agile and "sprinting" took all the joy out of being able to engineer interesting solutions and have time to solve problems instead of patching things up. And this has become tough for older people to keep up too. Many younger developers are on a fast moving treadmill and take ADHD drugs and anxiety meds.

This notion of Agile “taking the joy” out of software development is entirely a reflection of people who know nothing about Agile claiming to apply it.

Robert Martin is great on this —- Agile is a tool for teams of 8-10 software developers to write software. Non technical people don’t and can’t meaningfully understand it and shouldn’t be allowed working 50 miles of a software development project as so called “scrum masters.”

Agile is a way for self-organizing teams of software developers to manage their work. Automated testing, pair programming, and protection from clueless non-technical middle managers tearing for control are essential components. For example, story points are not a metric to be used by manager la to try to squeeze more productivity out of developers. They are a tool for ongoing learning by the team, period. Managers’ job is to manage scope. Period.

When practiced this way, Agile leads to craftsmanship, quality, clean code, clean architecture, and always deployable code. Unfortunately, all of the non-technical IT bureaucrats with PMPs who feel threatened by tech people make it’s their life’s work to coop Agile into a tool for managers, and thus guarantee awful code and continual failure.

This is why the foreign workers are better, never had one argue with me about methodology.

PP you’re responding to. Not sure what this means. On the teams I lead, we have a mix of US and foreign born developers, and we talk methodology all the time. Then again, we all have CS degrees, aren’t as wildly ignorant as most of the posters on this thread, and don’t hire non-technical people to manage software.

Yeah, we're pretty much the exact opposite, just getting things done instead of worrying about roles and ceremonies and burning through budgets while under producing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Be aware that we have over a million foreign workers temporarily in the US doing IT work.

Any it keeps growing. Anyone waiting for a green card can stay forever so the
Numbers grow and grow.

They are all desperate for a green card and with this huge supply they suppress wages and allow ageism to be rampant in IT field

It is not a career anymore but a 5 to 15
Year job path before you will be fired and replaced with an HXXXb

This person has no idea what they are talking about.

I’m a 56 year old US born development manager and was just hired for a new role. Also, I’m actively hiring developers and happy to talk with people of any age. The reality is that 95% of the applicants we get are not US born, and those that do apply are often wildly unqualified (e.g. can’t answer the question “what’s a relational database”).

Do you pay more than 100k for a senior developer (>5yrs exp)?