You might think, as our profession expands exponentially, that the highest priority would be to keep the most experienced devs at the code face to mentor the ever-growing numbers of people entering the industry...
But, as a trainer, I've seen just how few companies invest in their younger devs skills, and as a job seeker just how keen the industry is to move me out of code-facing roles into mgmt (because of my age, basically)
I started Codemanship to try and sidestep that pressue ten years. Feeling it far stronger in my late 40s now. And, over that decade, the problem has grown worse. Ratio of experienced devs to starters worse than ever...
And constant complaining from employers that new devs (grads etc) "don't have the technical skills" they want (unit testing, VCS, CI/CD, TDD/BDD, refactoring, design etc), but I know from experience that < 10% of orgs doing *anything* to address it...
Little or no training, no internal (or external) mentoring or coaching, no regular time to learn and explore and improve...
The solutions are staring us in the face, but still we refuse to go that way. Devs still move further away from code as they get older. Training/mentoring still pitifully rare. 10%-20% time still rare...
The end result is an industry of perpetual beginners - through no fault of their own - making all the same costly (sometimes disastrous) avoidable mistakes and reinventing the wheel over and over...
And all that time and effort wasted is time and effort taken away from making real progress
The only thing holding it together is a small % of devs who sacrifice a lot of their free time to seek out knowledge and teach themselves. Learning in our industry is heavily subsidised in this way. Employers want ALL THE SKILLZ, but not willing to invest in developing them
And the time that has to be invested excludes a lot of people from development careers - single parents, carers, volunteers etc. I've probably invested ~1 day a week to learning over a 25-year career. Because I could.
The solutions are right there. We know what they are:
1. Create a parallel career track for experienced devs to stay devs (e.g., "Chief Software Developer")
2. 10-20% should be the norm
3. Dev orgs should have proper long-term internal mentoring programmes
4. Training, goddamit!
1. Create a parallel career track for experienced devs to stay devs (e.g., "Chief Software Developer")
2. 10-20% should be the norm
3. Dev orgs should have proper long-term internal mentoring programmes
4. Training, goddamit!
But I don't think these ivestments will be freely given. Things will only change if we, as a profession, take them.
