> The amount of people who don't know what they're doing. So many people seem to have 1-year * x experience. They reach a certain level and they just stop.
Part of the problem is because people only look at years of experience at all, and recruitment often inflates the requirements. I don't need 5 years of work experience in .NET to modify an existing application with very defined and clear boundaries: within a few months, I can easily read what is happening already and mutate the application within the set boundaries. 5 years of work experience is what I'd need to set up an application the size of Stack Overflow from scratch in an acceptable timeframe.
What we have now is a recruitment procedure within the industry which overemphasizes ticking boxes without looking whether they can actually deliver. We have so many quality online sources available, any half-competent person can read, copy what is happening, use it as a foundation and then change it to their specific needs, producing actual applications. You might not cover the edge cases (a specific cryptographic problem here, an suboptimal solution there, etc.), but that really isn't that different from most of the crap software that's getting shoveled out into the open today.
The biggest problem is that there is no baseline of competency. Seriously, when somebody asks for minimally passable competency for employment as a software developer what do you point to in 5 words of less? Software doesn't have that so instead you get a bunch of posturing and smoke signals. Seriously think about how you would explain this to your non-developer uncle who is an educated professional of any other industry.
Think about it like this:
What is the minimal passable qualifier to be a lawyer: a law license. What is the minimal passable qualifier to be a truck driver: a CDL. It is illegal to do those, and many other, jobs without the minimum qualifier.
Worse is this tooling bullshit. No carpenter or mechanic creates a resume detailing their job experience using a screw driver or a hammer. Those are just assumed. If a candidate felt the need to mention stupidity like that you don't hire them. For some reason software has that backwards which invites and encourages incompetent people to apply and degrades competent people to compete with unnecessary stupidity.
I can expect this experience in tooling if the tools were remotely difficult. They aren't. What's more, teams are documenting their tools much better than before, and many are putting strong emphasis on being able to search the right terms and implementing it before the end of the week. Whatever topic or problem I had on ASP.NET Core, the problem was usually solved and documented by Microsoft. At that point, expecting this much experience over such trivial matters, is just being disrespectful to the teams investing all that time documenting and polishing their tools.
Maybe that's the part which annoys me the most. The entire practice devalues everything, no matter who, what or how old you are.
Part of the problem is because people only look at years of experience at all, and recruitment often inflates the requirements. I don't need 5 years of work experience in .NET to modify an existing application with very defined and clear boundaries: within a few months, I can easily read what is happening already and mutate the application within the set boundaries. 5 years of work experience is what I'd need to set up an application the size of Stack Overflow from scratch in an acceptable timeframe.
What we have now is a recruitment procedure within the industry which overemphasizes ticking boxes without looking whether they can actually deliver. We have so many quality online sources available, any half-competent person can read, copy what is happening, use it as a foundation and then change it to their specific needs, producing actual applications. You might not cover the edge cases (a specific cryptographic problem here, an suboptimal solution there, etc.), but that really isn't that different from most of the crap software that's getting shoveled out into the open today.