Skip to main content

Sorry, Conceptual Fluency Won't Land You a Job

I saw a recent post where a software engineer/programming influencer was encouraging:

If you know how to work with C#, you can learn Java.
If you know how to work with JavaScript, you can learn TypeScript.
If you know how to work with GitHub Actions, you can learn Jenkins.
If you know how to work with SQL, you can learn SparkSQL.
If you know how to work with Angular, you can learn React.
If you know how to work with Databricks, you can learn Snowflake.
If you know how to work with Event Hubs, you can learn Kafka.
If you know how to work with Bicep, you can learn Terraform.
It's not the tools that are important, it's the concepts.

Kudos for speaking the truth. With 20 years of experience in software engineering myself, I whole heartedly agree with her post. But sadly, the market doesn’t value conceptual fluency.

From a job search perspective, conceptual fluency presumes you're networking and already in contact with the hiring manager, they like you, and they are willing to give some "wiggle room" on requirements. There are many candidates who don’t have that luxury. They're stuck looking for work on slop job boards, and when applying in this manner, the ATS that helps the overworked recruiter is configured to match Java, not C#*. Applicants applying cold through job boards or recruiters aren’t evaluated as thinkers, they’re filtered as product.

As the market continues implodes, we're also left with many unemployed, extremely qualified engineers. Employers seem more inclined nowadays to wade through the hundreds of applicants to find the unicorn that matches their reqs than to the dedicate time and resources to train. They also don't intend to keep the engineer around for very long, for example using unregretted attrition to save on benefits and lower salaries. There's no loyalty and thus no incentive for training.

Fun fact: I once had a hiring manager explicitly say candidates should "learn on their own time" (I withdrew my application).

What's also interesting to think about is the impact that AI coding assistants are having. Most tech stacks are common enough where engineers can use these on a daily basis for their professional work. They don't have to be proficient in React because an LLM will spit out code for them. Critical thinking is still required to solve bugs, but the day to day proficiency is less important now. At least thats what the marketing hype is leading us to believe. I don't see many jobs listings that show the employers have adjusted their mindset to reflect the new reality they're trying to bring about. There should be no distinction between a C# or Java or PHP programmer... it should be just "experienced programmer".

I guess that makes me feel a little better about the decline of Stack Overflow and what it means for the language rankings that reference the site.

Oh, and what does it mean for things like coding interviews? :-D

* Except when it doesn't... but even then it does... because it doesn't.... but sometimes.... depends on who you ask

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Composing Music with PHP

I’m not an expert on probability theory, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. And even my Music 201 class from years ago has been long forgotten. But if you’ll indulge me for the next 10 minutes, I think you’ll find that even just a little knowledge can yield impressive results if creatively woven together. I’d like to share with you how to teach PHP to compose music. Here’s an example: You’re looking at a melody generated by PHP. It’s not the most memorable, but it’s not unpleasant either. And surprisingly, the code to generate such sequences is rather brief. So what’s going on? The script calculates a probability map of melodic intervals and applies a Markov process to generate a new sequence. In friendlier terms, musical data is analyzed by a script to learn which intervals make up pleasing melodies. It then creates a new composition by selecting pitches based on the possibilities it’s observed. . Standing on Shoulders Composition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Bach wa...
9 comments
Read more

Learning Prolog

I'm not quite sure exactly I was searching for, but somehow I serendipitously stumbled upon the site learnprolognow.org a few months ago. It's the home for an introductory Prolog programming course. Logic programming offers an interesting way to think about your problems; I've been doing so much procedural and object-oriented programming in the past decade that it really took effort to think at a higher level! I found the most interesting features to be definite clause grammars (DCG), and unification. Difference lists are very powerful and Prolog's DCG syntax makes it easy to work with them. Specifying a grammar such as: s(s(NP,VP)) --> np(NP,X,Y,subject), vp(VP,X,Y). np(np(DET,NBAR,PP),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y), pp(PP). np(np(DET,NBAR),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y). np(np(PRO),X,Y,Z) --> pro(PRO,X,Y,Z). vp(vp(V),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y). vp(vp(V,NP),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y), np(NP,_,_,object). nbar(nbar(JP),X,3) --> jp(JP,X). pp(pp(PREP,N...
22 comments
Read more

What's Wrong with OOP

Proponents of Object Oriented Programming feel the paradigm yields code that is better organized, easier to understand and maintain, and reusable. They view procedural programming code as unwieldy spaghetti and embrace OO-centric design patterns as the "right way" to do things. They argue objects are easier to grasp because they model how we view the world. If the popularity of languages like Java and C# is any indication, they may be right. But after almost 20 years of OOP in the mainstream, there's still a large portion of programmers who resist it. If objects truly model the way people think of things in the real world, then why do people have a hard time understanding and working in OOP? I suspect the problem might be the focus on objects instead of actions. If I may quote from Steve Yegge's Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns : Verbs in Javaland are responsible for all the work, but as they are held in contempt by all, no Verb is ever permitted to wander about ...
9 comments
Read more