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Comment by 20years | Hacker News Reader

The problem that I have seen is most companies don't want to pay a skilled full-stack developer what they are worth. They think $100k is the going rate and unfortunately a lot of junior developers are calling themselves full-stack and jumping at that salary. Then the lines get blurred and the true value of a full-stack developer gets diminished.

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I recently was looking for new work. When trying to apply to Developer opportunities, I realized that recruiters largely didn't know what they were talking about.

Many times I was told that my Computer Science degree, large school projects, personal projects such as random apps and maintaining an Arch Linux setup, awards such as winning 1st place in a Google Hackathon, several years of student work including iOS development work, and my 3 years industry experience as a Technical Lead somehow was less valuable than people graduating from coding bootcamps.

I was told by many people that I was not qualified for a Junior Developer position, but people coming out of these bootcamps were considered "Seniors". I was told by one recruiter that my "degree is almost useless".

Unbelievable. Three years of industry experience alone would qualify you beyond a junior position. https://www.altexsoft.com/media/2018/09/unnamed-14.png

These are basically code for "reject them for silly reasons to get back to screening cheap candidates"

dgzl probably dodged so many bullets that they should be in the Matrix by now

I recently had a recruiter questioning my application for a "senior developer" role as "You seem to have no background in software".

I told her I have "a background" of well over 10 years as a developer, and consider it my profession.

"So why did you study Biology"? she replied.

“Does your history degree help you during recruitment?”

I suspect in the UK it would have been an "ology" from a former polytechnic.

Though having said that I have only had two bad experiences with recruiters in the UK.

HR drones focus on qualifications because it frees them from the responsibility of actually having to evaluate and corroborate that a candidate is competent in a field.

Well, for a company that wants someone to hit the ground running in their chosen stack, your degree is useless as well as your ability to do well in hackathons, and unless they are looking for an iOS developer, so are your iOS skills.

Most jobs don’t need or care that someone can do leetCode or invert a binary tree.

yup :/

i mean, i never did well at hackathons, never got first prize at anything and i'm not graduated.

but, i do have real-world-experience with early/mid/late stage startups as well as corp jobs (i did a project for a local bank working with mainframes). due to that, most companies don't even care about my lack of graduation -- but they do care that i know when to cut corners, when to do crunch-time/overtime, how to take care of customers (including answering support emails!).

real world experience is always much more important.

A lot of recruitment processes do unfortunately

That’s why I avoid those companies and I’m both in an area of the country where it’s not part of the recruitment process and have nurtured a network over a couple of decades that allows me to jump through fewer hoops.

Holy, what region are you in? That definitely wouldn't happen over here in the Seattle area, not at top tier companies or even startups that know what they are doing.

This happened in the PDX area, so... Yeah.

Eh, Portland has always been a weird place, maybe coding bootcamps are taken more seriously down there than they are up here?

When you graduated how familiar were you with Twitter Bootstrap, X popular framework (Rails / Laravel / Django), any experience using Vue or React?

My brother graduated 4 years ago (he's a stock boy now) with a degree in Digital Design and Development (Flash, PHP, JS, CSS, Adobe CS), he leans more frontend/graphics but never once was taught anything about CSS frameworks or bootstrap. I'm self-taught laravel dev since 2013, I've used vue, jquery, bootstrap, vuetify, bulma, tailwinds, on frontend even though backend is my strong suit.

I think the point I'm getting at is bootcamps teach exactly what companies need in terms of frameworks and 'hot ticket' skills. You could be a kick ass java developer after you graduate college but if you've never used Spring or Clojure or some other Java framework you're just useless to most companies.

Bootcamps also do quite a bit of bridge building with companies/recruiters to keep their job placements high, where most colleges wipe their hands after you get your diploma and it's on your own good graces that you find your first gig... 2-3 years in it gets way easier though.

A senior full-stack developer has so many opportunities that they have the privilege of only considering positions with a compensation level acceptable to them.

> They think $100k is the going rate

Okay. So get a different job.

But it is the going rate for senior developers in fly over states.

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