.....Your A Software Developer Eh?
Id like to talk about something thats hurting the software development industry and we have all seen managers hire these folks with the strong intention they knew what they were doing, only to find out they didn't have any experience. Im talking about the folks that take the online courses and then market themselves as a software developer. I don't believe that anyone taking a 3 to 6 month course has enough qualifications to take on a project without direct supervision from a senior developer. I don't consider you a developer of any kind and you shouldn't either. You only hurt the people hiring you. I know its not a popular subject guys but its an issue.
They come in and convince the hiring manager they have worked on x projects, school projects that is. The one sure thing is that real world experience trumps any and all school or educational program. You see you have to know why and how to do something in order to make things work properly. I do believe that if you are starting out by all means take your courses but please don't lie to the hiring managers and call yourself a developer. If that hurts your ego then thats lesson one, your ego doesn't matter and what you learned in class doesn't matter. I assure at some point developers call everything by a different names in different environments. Its your job to learn the lingo. :)
Here is how you come to call yourself a real developer.
- JR DEVELOPER - 6 months of education at a tech college or with a senior developer. You should be able to do basic html,css,js, and database lookups. You tell the hiring manager you have basic skills in programming that you obtained through school education.
- MID LEVEL DEVELOPER - 1 to 6 years of developing your applications and others with several platforms and tools like .Net, SQL, Oracle, DB, XML,C#, VB, Java, HTML5, and many others that would take time to list here . You may even have a second programing language you picked up. You should be introduced to server management during this period as well. You cant fix it if you dont know about it. :)
- SENIOR DEVELOPER - You are a leader! If you are not genuine, honest, fair, tough, and skilled you will get fired and blamed for all the issues the company may have caused themselves but since your in charge its on you. I realize some might say that doesn't happen but the people above you will and always cover their ass before you. Its the nature of being a leader, cover your own ass. :) Now at this stage you should be able to take a project form concept to completion managing all workloads of your developers. I don't mean brow beating them everyday because that kills productivity. I also don't mean asking when they will be done with something because ill let you in on a secret ..... we don't know either. Please don't set your guys up to fail. In this role its a worle wind in the first few months because you have to know your guys and gals. I know some think its counter productive but please care about your people. Listen to the older developers and learn from them. I suspect that this stage should take you between 8 and 10 years.
Just my thoughts... take them with a grain of salt.
Thank you for reading and drop a comment,
Billy Wagner
Here's is another fun read
11-things-developers-love-hearing-from-non-developer-co-workers-ea94805cf05d
So how is this not the hiring managers fault for not vetting them properly? Another thing that is hurting the software industry are egos that ruin company cultures. If you want to be a leader then take those with 6 months of experience and help shape them into better engineers rather than insulting them because they only have 6 months of experience and they aspire to have the title of Software Engineer. If someone has the ambition to spend the time and money to learn software engineering then leaders should not belittle them but rather mentor them. I'm not a fan of one mis representing themselves to get a job but I can understand why they would do it. You should try getting a dev job in this day and age with only 6 months experience, I bet you would become desperate too and inflate yourself a bit to help you get in the door. So maybe you are mad because someone with little experience messed up a code base? I know guys with 10 years experience that would do the same, but you cannot teach the 10 year vet a better way. The newbie would be much more open minded and willing to take your direction than the guy thats been doing it for a decade. Don't criticize someone for trying to make a living, your manager is not doing his job.