Where the hell are great senior developers and hands-on engineering directors?

Your problem is:

1. Great senior devs are actually rare, so yeah, you won't just have them flowing into your applicant queue no matter who you are.

2. You're not just looking for great senior devs, you're looking for great senior devs who hold certain ideological positions, which is going to narrow your pool much further.

Lots and lots of senior devs have been through the OO design stuff and come out the other side. Like a lot of people, I read and used a ton of design patterns stuff back when I was working in Java around the turn of the century, and nowadays think of OO design as an antipattern to be avoided, with a strong preference toward functionally-oriented code.

Same thing with the XP/agile stuff. Been there, done that, kept what worked and abandoned what didn't. I wouldn't want to apply for a place that had an ideological commitment to strong XP principles and thought of people with other opinions as being in need of "training up."

And maybe you don't want people like me working for you; that's fine, you've got your vision of your OO/XP workplace and you don't want people who don't buy in fully. But don't be surprised when you can't find people who combine strong ability, a lot of experience, and a particular type of tech ideology.

Looking at the company's careers page, I get the impression of old school enterprise meets academia. Entry level administrative positions [clerks] require a bachelor's degree. Senior administrative positions want a CPA or a JD. An employment office position prefers a Master Degree.

What about software engineers you might ask? Software engineer positions include "Senior", "IV" "III" "II" etc. I'd say this is poor signaling. If Roman numerals ever suggested an engineering culture, it's one that was well over by 476 CE [when Odacer became King of Italy rather than Emperor of Rome and an important milestone for Gibbon].

What does that structure optimize for? The Techonolgist II at some college or government who wants to be a III and the IV who wants to become a Senior. These are people who are fine as part of formalized bureaucracies. Who else? People taking a shot bullshitting through an interview structured around categorizing a software engineer as a II or III or IV or a Senior.

My intuition is that the problem of attracting the right sort of engineering talent is cultural fit. As Salvor Hardin quipped "an atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways."

Good luck.

"Competitive pay" is not a number. Most companies just don't want to pay for the talent they claim to want so bad.

Also, a lot of people are tired of the Agile stuff. Senior people in the range this person is looking for are likely to be among those who saw Agile come around and slowly turn into the weird joke that it is today. Places that are so dogmatic about it that they require TDD and pair programming experience are a red flag imo. Just some thoughts from a dev with 12 years experience.

Read as "where are all the senior developers that think exactly like me. I have some limited exposure doing xyz at my last job and I think it's the only way to do things. Come work for me were you can be my minion and if you exercise an ounce of your own thinking I'll "can" your ass faster than you can say "but your way could work too""

Obie. Great to read you. As you know we have a nearshore company specialized in ecommerce and fintech. We have found the importance of intrinsic motivation with balance of extrinsic motivation. What you have setup, if I reading right, it's more appealing for extrinsic motivation, the only point that you cover for intrinsic motivation is the need for growing our mastery. Your extrinsic motivation drivers are very conventional and no very good for attract good talent, as a good friend once told, joking about why she still single: "husbands are like parking spaces, the good ones are already in use". Usually talent developers have a lot of working options, usually the work that is more aligned with your view and believes is more likely and option. My recommendation work more in intrinsic motivation factors: autonomy, propose, meaning, mastery, etc. Maybe you should also see the international talent, here in Mexico there are lot of talent, there the challenge is cultural fit and remote working. I wish the best for you, if I can help you in any way please let me know. All the best --- Manuel

Maybe because Agile is not what it should be. Managers love it Devs hate it. And every place I worked in, no one could do it right. It's not helping at all. It helps the manager to have more tools at his disposal to annoy the team, but it doesn't help the common folk. Also I'm tired to see people referring to seniors as old guys who worked as Devs for XX amount of years. Most of these people are stuck in a loop and know nothing about the new technologies and the younger generation has to teach them in the end. Also most of the senior Devs will move up in to manager positions and won't look back. None of my workplaces knew anything about SOLID principles, Design Patterns and all that fancy unicorn stuff because it looks lovely on paper but in the end it slows development down, so people avoid it. Most of the development work is done like we were monkeys with typewriters. But this is only my opinion. Take it with a pinch of salt.

As silly as it sounds, if you are a senior developer/eng director that is in high demand these days, the product that you'd be working on matters tremendously. Having people motivated by the whole of the product they are working on is huge, while individual complex problems are also fun, staying power lasts in people who want to use what they are building every day.

I think the sentiment of this article is more around finding senior developers who are also interested in the product you are building. Which is a huge problem because the intersection there is even more sparse than finding a senior developer that just wants to solve generic, complex problems.

Obie! I'm dealing with it too. I think many of us who are hiring are. I've got a good team, but besides myself and one other, none are senior. Despite having open positions at a thriving company with great pay and benefits, I have zero senior folks in my pipeline of candidates. We've attracted great talent in every other area of the business from marketing to finance, but development is left with a pool of junior applicants. I know for myself, I don't look for a new opportunity outside of my existing network of friends and colleagues. I am where I am now because I have history with two other people at the company and I want to work with them. Pay and benefits at a cool startup aren't enough because there are lots of those opportunities. As much as I like mentoring, I want to work with other talented developers. There is the catch I suppose. Senior developers want to work with other senior developers so that they can keep upping their own game, and if you don't have any, it's hard to attract others.

I've written a response to this article. It echoes much of what's been said, but also adds some new things. Enjoy!

In response to Obie's where the hell are all the good senior software engineers and hands-on engineering directors

https://medium.com/@bradurani/in-response-to-obie-s-where-th...

There are very few companies that do pair programming. It will really close down your funnel if you make pair programming experience a requirement. I would wager less than 1% of programming jobs do any significant amount of pairing

Without your medium post I would have dismissed your job adverts completely. They're awfully 'grey' and samey.

On one hand medium uses the positive accomplishments eg "...Empowered cross-functional teams doing disciplined TDD ... pair programming, and continuous integration/deployment ..."

On the job advert reads like you want someone to come and get the team to do those things.

If anything I'd sum up the medium post as "We do good things, come join us" and your jobs adverts "We're slightly above average, can someone please make us better"

Good article. I think there's a shortage, and I also think technology overload and the ever-increasing rate of innovation and change prevents many junior programmers from really learning agile fundamentals well. There's just too much other stuff to learn that changes too fast, as well as general societal information overload, to get into the deep philosophical fundamentals of agile and OO. I spent hours reading the TDD Usenet list when I started. Who has time to do that now?

I had not previously heard of "2U", and I may be atypical in this, but working for a for-profit education outfit is not in line with my personal ethics.

"Tons of interesting and potentially great people that have never paired or don’t know really know how to TDD".

I am slightly surprised at this because these are not new things.

Great read! Thank you!