[LRUG] Code quality 2.5-question survey: the results

[Louis Goff-Beardsley]

> it's clear that job title inflation has run amok. Faced with a severe shortage of Ruby developers, employers will add pretty much any adjective to a prospective candidate's offer title to get them to come on board. Anecdotal evidence supports this: I can barely find the # key on my laptop, and yet my email signature still gets to have "Senior" in it. When all those graduates of General Assembly and Makers Academy start flooding the market, a bunch of us are going to have to up our game, because the word "Senior" will no longer be handed out like candy to anyone with over a year's experience.
A few thoughts on this:

I’m seeing 30-60 Makers Academy/General Assembly/Code clan graduates enter the market every 90 days (there are also many similar programs throughout Europe generating similar numbers of new developers). I’ve been wondering what affect long term this is going to have on the market. I’ve not observed any Makers Academy/General Assembly graduates get fast tracked into senior roles like their Computer Science degree counterparts. I’ve worked with many of the developers from the first courses that these camps held and I’ve not seen anyone reach to upper-Mid level yet. I get the impression that the career path that they are on is more natural as if there equity in supply and demand. I imagine that it may take the Majority of these people 6+ years to hit senior. Unless demonstrably talented, they generally aren’t on the crazy +£10k /year salary trajectory that most developers are on currently.

Short term, these people are struggling to find work as the supply of juniors into the market is far outstripping the demand. Long term as these developers gain in experience I agree that it is going to increase the threshold to qualify as a senior developer. If you compare Ruby to Java, Java developers typically need 7-8+ years’ experience to get senior Roles and I think this is what it probably should be for Ruby if supply/demand of developers reaches an equilibrium.

Web development salaries were not amazing until relatively recently. People who are truly senior now would have to have weathered the storm post dotcom bubble when the industry wasn’t as lucrative. This limited the number of people who are currently senior to those who likely stuck on their career path through passion and enthusiasm. When I was doing a Computer Science degree in 2004 I heard people saying “The industry has gone to crap, there’s no jobs”. Its only now that salaries are so high due to the limited number of such developers who stuck around that people who would have not otherwise considered programming are jumping on the bandwagon. Now that people are more motivated to join the industry for financial reasons, it is likely going to lead to a reduction in salaries in the long term. Hopefully the current seniors of now, are still probably always going to be a few steps ahead of the people coming up in the future, but the aspiring developers who are entering, attracted by the £70-80k senior packages, may never reach that amount, or they will, but it will take significantly longer than it used to.

Best, Louis

From: Chat [mailto:chat-bounces at lists.lrug.org] On Behalf Of Patrick Gleeson
Sent: 13 September 2016 16:10
To: chat at lists.lrug.org
Subject: [LRUG] Code quality 2.5-question survey: the results

Thanks to everyone who participated! There were 66 responses, of whom 52 self-identified as senior, 13 as middleweight and one as junior.
6% of respondents said the last codebase they inherited was good, 55% said ok, and 39% inherited something bad. Looking at just senior developers, only 4% said good, 52% said ok, and 44% said bad.
Brief bit of trollnalysis:
First of all, assuming (unfairly), that LRUG respondents are representative of the industry as a whole, it's clear that job title inflation has run amok. Faced with a severe shortage of Ruby developers, employers will add pretty much any adjective to a prospective candidate's offer title to get them to come on board. Anecdotal evidence supports this: I can barely find the # key on my laptop, and yet my email signature still gets to have "Senior" in it. When all those graduates of General Assembly and Makers Academy start flooding the market, a bunch of us are going to have to up our game, because the word "Senior" will no longer be handed out like candy to anyone with over a year's experience.
Continuing to assume (still unfairly) that the results are representative of the industry, we Ruby developers are clearly both grumpy and hypocritical. If most codebases are at best ok, then that applies to our own code as well as the code we judge. The fact that the more senior you get the more you dislike other people's code suggests that in fact code "quality" is merely a measure of how well other people's code conforms to your own personal preferences, which get more idiosyncratic over time. It's telling that complaints about code were broadly split between the "too complicated for what it needed to achieve" camp and the "too simplistic for what it needed to achieve" camp - are those really objective judgements about the code itself, or just subjective expressions of preferred style?
Depressing conclusion: the more experienced you get, the more likely you are to hate the codebase you have to work on. No matter who you are, you probably won't think the next codebase you inherit is good. And the next person will probably think the same about the code they inherit from you. In short: coding sucks. Let's all set up artisanal coffee shops.

--

Patrick Gleeson

Senior Ruby Developer

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