The Tech Industry is broken

Monday, 25 Mar 2024
techthe-tech-industy-is-broken

The new dotcom bust?

The mass layoffs from big tech has had a noticeable impact on the software market, the only way to describe it would be "rocky". It's now an employers "market" because for every role there is a rush of devs looking to apply.

This is now the inverted situation from only a few years ago when it was the other way around, developers were spammed with job offers all the time.

But the change in “roles to devs” ratio aside, I believe the tech industry was already broken even before this latest drama.

The big tech giants had clearly gone on a recruitment frenzy and artificially inflated the market, so this “course correction” was sadly all too predictable.

The tech industry has this weird relationship with the developer, in that it’s one of the few industries where the goal seems to be to actively reduce or remove the developer altogether.

It’s understandable, techs are near impossible to manage, projects are open ended and nothing seems to get delivered, from a non-tech perspective they see devs are a necessary evil that they can’t fully understand or control.

All these development methodologies are simply ways for management to gain some semblance of control over the development process. However software development is closer to the arts than something mechanic like building cars in a factory.

Also non techs can’t tell the difference between good devs and bad ones, so they just lump them altogether, in the hope things get evened out. Of course that doesn’t always happen and you just get a team of really bad developers.

In order to try and “filter” for a good dev, the industry has fallen into a “Cargo Cult”.

And so we have these utterly useless “technical tests” that are just broken! The base rationale is that “coding” is solving puzzles right? So if we filter for candidates that are great at solving puzzles surely they’ll be a great developer right?

Well turns out no, if you filter and test for solving puzzles, you get someone good at solving puzzles (never mind that this area is now gamed via “LEET GRIND CODERS”) We don’t seem to have any kind of consistency nor formalised approach to actually understanding that software engineering isn’t just “solving puzzles”, it’s much more than that. So the interview process needs to be completely overhauled.

I’m not saying there is no place for technical tests, what I’m saying is that tests should be taken with a massive bag of salt, tests should be used as an indicator and NOT as a filter.

To compound this further, all of the failed attempts at reducing/removing the dev from the industry has failed (we had offshore, bootcamps, everyone should learn to code, Full Stack, No Code/Low Code), the latest hype attempt seems to be “AI” with companies salivating at the prospect that they can “do away” with developers (seems they never learn).

I predict, once this AI hype train inevitably crashes and burns we will be back to square one, this time we will have a mountain of AI spam generated codebases in desperate need of fixing and a shortage of actual competent developers to fix and maintain them (Déjà vu of offshoring). But because of the broken interview process companies will not once again know the difference between a competent dev and one that's just good at puzzles, even worse now with AI, the ease of cheating would be very difficult to stop!

What’s the solution? Well I don’t have one really, lets just hope the industry slowly matures. I for one immediately turn down any interviews once they mention “technical interviews” because to me that means that company interview process is broken.