My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU’s digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
I have the opposite experience, when I was doing interviews I just skipped the very obviously underskilled people (which, IIRC were in the single digits) and interviewed pretty much everyone.
For context, I’m the main architect and dev of the company I was hiring for. Most of the candidates were horrible.
In 2006 I had a hard time finding C++ programmers in a university town. 9/10 who responded to the ads were just clueless. Of the remainder, we had a simple test - here’s sample code in an IDE that draws a straight line on the screen (you’ll be doing graphics programming in the role) - take that code and turn it into a program that draws a sine-wave in the same space… Everyone put computer graphic on their resume’s, expressed confidence in their ability to perform in the role, deep former experience, but 5/6 who passed the clueless test couldn’t manage that, given unlimited time and resources - the computer has internet access and a browser window open right there beside the IDE- USE IT!!!
Sadly, today we’d probably have to shut off the internet access aspect, or make the test much more difficult. Even AI can draw a sine wave.
A lot of this has to do with recruiters. I’ve been interviewing for a few years at my company such with as many different sets of recruiters, from recruiting firms to our corporate recruiters, to ones we hired ourselves. Our corporate recruiters handed over garbage candidates who we could often tell wouldn’t work out after the first 10 min of the interview, whereas the other two groups of recruiters would do a good job filtering so we’d get than a 50% hit rate on our first round. Unfortunately, we promoted our recruiters once the need for talent dropped (or they moved on to a recruiter firm), and now they’re unwilling to go back to recruiting.
The quality of your recruiter matters quite a bit, so you’ll want to find someone who is experienced hiring a certain type of person so they know what to look for.
Absolutely, but in a big company you don’t get to choose which recruiters you use - corporate just sends you candidates.