Ben Mellows’ Post

Software Engineering. Berlin. Good news: 1) Lots of software development jobs compared to 2023 2) Some excellent developers on the market :) Software Engineering. Berlin. Bad news: 1) Lots of developers now on the market making it super competitive 2) Companies being pickier than ever 3) All the software development jobs not being filled due to point 2 4) Lots of excellent developers still on the market struggling It's a weird time right now, things are picking up for everyone which is great, but i've never seen so many excellent developers struggling to find a position, not getting feedback from interviews, not even getting interviews, and being rejected over the smallest of things - resulting in positions not being filled when they should/need to be.

***** Frontend roles are not on raise ***** Backend roles are not on raise ***** QE roles are not on raise ***** Dev-ops roles are not on raise In short, the number of openings are not increasing in high numbers since the beginning of 2024, I don't see them getting increased in any near future. Does that mean you should worry ? "No, try becoming a Software Engineer from developer. Quality Engineers will continue to have demand and mediocres will be wiped away" Don't end up spending money on anything/anyone who says openings will increase and pay me and I will assist you. Vasanth Bhat

If I was a frontend engineer right now, I’d also shift to backend engineering after a while. See the major business impact(in the way it’s measured currently) comes from scaling up to millions of users, reducing latency, error rates, boot up time, increasing system stability etc. All of this is backend. So if you’re a backend engineer you’ll have more chances to get promoted quickly cause you will have more chances to create business impacts. Supply demand dynamics have less role to play here. Engineer’s value and their salary is measured in terms of impact.

📣 Trends in Software Engineer Specializations: 2024! ⚡Interested what roles employers want to fill and software engineering specializations most likely to secure an interview? ✅ 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬: - The most dominant specializations have remained steady over the past three years. Backend Engineer, Full Stack Engineer, and Frontend Engineer consistently topped the list of most-posted and most-interviewed roles. - However, among the smaller specialties, interesting new trends are emerging, like a rising demand for Data Engineers and DevOps Engineers and a declining number of active open roles for Mobile Engineers. 👉 Please follow the link in the comments to read more. #techtrends

The best flaw to have as a software engineer: being "dumb" 🐤 Personally, I feel stupid when I work. For example: - It often takes me a while to understand code written by others that I'm not familiar with. - When I have some changes to do on a Pull Request I made the week before, I've forgotten what I did. - I forget the edge cases of my features: why is there this 'if' statement again? But in the end, I consider this flaw to be one of my greatest strengths. 🏋️ Because of this, - I write code that is simple to understand. - I name my variables and functions well. - I write tests that document the use cases: just by reading the tests, you can understand the code, and it prevents me from missing a case I no longer think about. - I write detailed descriptions in my PRs to remember what I've done. - I take notes and am better organized. On the contrary, there are super smart devs who write all sorts of code really fast and do amazing things. But they are the only ones who understand what they're doing. Pro tip: Hire devs who aren't too smart to have clean code 😄 What is your view on this ?

Wanna grow faster in your career as a software engineer? 🌱 My #1 piece of advice to junior or mid-level devs working under a senior engineer is you should do everything you can to save your senior’s time. Senior devs are typically extremely busy, often needing to provide support for many other devs. Your job while working under them is to enable them to be a “force multiplier” across the team by having them unblock you and your teammates only when necessary. You should be spending 3-4x more of your own time to save the senior one unit of their time. You will learn so much more by doing this and increase your velocity towards becoming a senior yourself. For example, during code reviews, take extra time to carefully go over your PRs line-by-line 1 final time before asking for a review from your senior. This has many benefits: 1. Increased code quality: You will often spot many improvements to code quality & readability, or discover edge cases you did not previously consider. 2. Faster development cycle: The fewer comments your senior needs to leave per review will decrease the number of total iterations. Counterintuitively, if you spend twice as much time carefully reviewing your PRs, you may find it actually significantly increases the amount of features you are able to ship. 3. Get your PRs prioritized for review more quickly: Writing comments about basic mistakes & improvements is extremely tedious for seniors, but if your PRs consistently have very few of these mistakes, the senior will notice and will be more likely to review your code instead of pushing it to the back of their todo list. If you consistently find ways to save your senior’s time, you can quickly become their “right hand person” they turn to for future high-impact tasks; and if you are consistently demonstrating impact within your organization, a promotion is likely soon to follow. If you found this helpful, repost, comment & send me a connection request! 🤝

Agreed. There are hidden miles between interview skills and job execution: I know I could get it done in just about any skillset within a reasonable time in top quality and performance but not so well in interviews😂. Bootcamps prepare you for such intricate questions that you still might not be able to answer, even after years of solving these questions in practice, I guess. To avoid the whirlpool of endless skills acquisition, I’d say: man know thyself. Sometimes, perhaps most, the basics are the bedrock of great success.

The biggest mistake I made as a new Software Engineer. I asked too many "stupid" questions. People often say "There's no such thing as a stupid question". But that's not true in Software Engineering. In my early days, I would go to senior engineers the moment I could not solve something. And I would ask "How do I do X?". In hindsight, that was a "stupid" question. The question should have been more like this: "I'm working on X. This is how I think it can be done. I've tried Y and Z but I'm facing this problem." This has 3 advantages: 1. Trying to solve problems yourself will help you grow as an engineer. 2. You'll learn more from the discussion because you've given some thought to the problem. 3. Seniors will help you more when they see that you respect their time. Of course, you need to keep deadlines in mind. But whenever possible, give your best shot before asking someone else. You can timebox it if needed. Like they say, give someone a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach them how to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.