What percentage of engineers in your experience are bad?
Posted by fuckoholic@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 345 comments
Most people I've worked with have been decent, or average, meaning they get the job done, sometimes poorly, but more often than not okayish, some things need to be corrected, but overall it's something one can work with. They usually improve with time, albeit slowly.
But there’s also a small group of people I genuinely can’t understand how they ever got the job. Very slow, produce only low quality. The personalities vary too, there are those who are trying, but are clearly not cut out for this and just never improve, even after years; then there are those who are just not interested and are basically coasting from day 1. No amount of handholding, pair programming and explanations will help here.
Have you met many of those? I'd say it's a good 15% of all devs I've worked with.
The thing is, of those I know nearly all of them have been let go in the last 2 years and now that I think about it, only one remains! Maybe there's good things about bad market, it filters out those who should not have been in this profession in the first place.
ikeif@reddit
I have worked with exactly one developer I thought was god awful, and one who couldn’t think out of what he knew.
One guy couldn’t figure out basic JavaScript (like a one line update - it took me longer to write him the ticket than it would’ve been for me to do the work - it took him, a senior developer, over a week, and refused help). Their refusal to end his contract was part of why I left - they put him on my team because a guy left, and he slowed us way the fuck down.
Another guy never understood semantic HTML, SEO, or progressive enhancement - his background was “enterprise apps” so he made everything a div - ignoring the long planning discussion that we had templates to follow.
I think he’s a VP at Chase now.
fuckoholic@reddit (OP)
I have been asked what a semantic HTML was in an interview once and I had no idea that it was called that. Since then I know what it's called.
Low_Promotion_6648@reddit
I’ve seen both ends of this, and honestly it changed how I look at “good” vs “bad” engineers.
So I don’t think it’s about “percentage of bad engineers.”
It’s more like: how long can someone sustain without real substance?
Short term → optics can win.
Long term → fundamentals always show up.
Just takes time.
igharios@reddit
Too many, and it made question why we call it software ENGINEERING, or even development. You won't cross a bridge designed or built by that 15%
Shogobg@reddit
What I learned working in enterprise is your technical skills are not important - your bullshitting skills are. You may be the worst developer, architect or whatever title is assigned to you, but if you can deceive enough high-standing people, you’re up for promotion.
Tiny_Ad_7720@reddit
We had a guy who apparently programmed in Python who didn’t understand how to use square brackets for indexing or list comprehension.
Spent most of his day just ringing up different people for help. Covid with WFH he basically disappeared. I bet he is loving the new AI meta.
fuckoholic@reddit (OP)
We had one exactly like that too who couldn't figure out function parameters. Not sure why he was hired, it was peak covid. He was let go instantly.
ImmediateFocus0@reddit
We hired a guy that didnt know what hashmaps were
Sensitive-Ear-3896@reddit
Lol, that was my first question at one company, whats the difference between a map and a list (job was Java), surprisingly a 50% pass rate
euph-_-oric@reddit
Seriously?
ImmediateFocus0@reddit
😬
The guys excuse was hes never used anything other than C
Sensitive-Ear-3896@reddit
I was a c student my whole life! So I can sympathize
iceburg47@reddit
Well to be fair, I don't know the specifics of how python places parameters when allocating new stack frames. I just kind of assumed it was reverse order before the start of the frame like most other... Oh. I see. That is a problem.
cleodog44@reddit
This seems like a Python internals joke I'd love to understand, but don't. What's up with how Python handles parameters?
NeitherEchidna3491@reddit
Its framed as a Python joke but it's not really, any language using a stack based abstract machine model probably does something similar (I don't know if Python actually works this way but I'm just going to roll with it for the sake of the explanation - the actual joke is simply that they were massively over-estimating the complexity of what the other person was stuck on heh).
When you start peeling the onion about how functions calls actually work it will typically look something like below (+/- the specific ABI implementation detail): - Some arguments and return address get pushed on to the stack - Jump to the function address - Space for some other things like local variables get pushed on to the stack - Function logic executes - Stack frame gets cleaned up on return leaving the return value(s) for the caller to retrieve from the top of the stack
iceburg47@reddit
This is correct. Thanks for explaining it so well.
NeitherEchidna3491@reddit
<3
UntestedMethod@reddit
How do these people get hired?
Tiny_Ad_7720@reddit
At my old work (big government research org) a bit of it was nepotism or knowing someone.
I did a codality(?) test when I joined though.
im-a-guy-like-me@reddit
FINISH HIM!
CODALITY
marcodave@reddit
During COVID there was a surge of hirings , and being all of them remote to remote, it probably meant that many people cheated during interviews, before the industry caught on the new normal.
Sensitive-Ear-3896@reddit
He had a cousin at horse guards.
ericmutta@reddit
So he was a good "researcher" then :)
randbytes@reddit
once worked with a TL who had a master's degree in sw engg but didn't knew what tilde symbol was and its use in command line. the product was used by big financial institutions and has even survived layoffs.
OkExpert3078@reddit
To put that into perspective - I'm a Windows developer with 30 years behind me and I just looked up what the tilde means in response to your post. In Linux I'm a tourist, not a native, and he could have been as well.
RandomPantsAppear@reddit
I think it feels weirder on the Linux side because you can’t help but absorb a significant amount of windows stuff. So almost everyone who uses Linux knows at least a certain amount of windows.
The same is not true inverted.
randbytes@reddit
yeah understandable if it was a knowledge gap and that's what i used to assume initially but that whole product dev env was java-linux lol. there were other examples where that person didn't know what they didn't know and yet made decisions involving the team.
UUS3RRNA4ME3@reddit
A lot of engineers go their whole careers without even seeing Linux, so this is actually quite believable.
Thay knowledge may not be as widespread as you may think, a lot of people work in disciplines where that would never be something you'd know.
randbytes@reddit
yeah understandable if it was a knowledge gap and that's what i used to assume initially but that whole product dev env was java-linux. there were other examples where that person didn't know what they didn't know and yet made decisions involving the team.
swoleherb@reddit
Just wait untill you work in windows shop, those devs don't even use a command line. its all click click
Icy-Squirrel@reddit
This sounds like someone I interviewed. With the utmost confidence he stared straight through Zoom and told me and my shadow that "he's never had a use for lists". It was the first code pair I stopped short.
hooahest@reddit
...never? did he at least explain what he used instead?
Icy-Squirrel@reddit
For context, the Codepair problem had a couple compile time errors, one of which was to instantiate a list. His problem with a list was because he kept hitting run and not reading the errors, not actually using a list on their own. Okay, I chalked it up to interview nerves, so I give a little hint. That's when the train derailed and started flying off a cliff.
"Ahhh yeah that makes sense, I'm not used to using lists. I never really had a use for them".
I tried, he deflected when I asked him to explain any or even identify one trade off.
"Well... I mean dictionaries are faster" was the most meaningful technical response I could get.
It was the last red flag that broke the interview. If you're going to be that arrogant at least produce code that actually works and only you can maintain. I'm all for giving someone space and exploring their unique approach, but no one was enjoying themselves on that call.
I later found out he wasn't very nice during his initial phone screen and all in all it led to some quality improvements on both the recruiter and on the technical interviewer side.
hooahest@reddit
okay, that makes more sense. Just bullshitted his way through the interview and that was one of the things he said.
Western_Objective209@reddit
well, at least it raised the floor significantly. new devs will never know the level of incompetence that existed BeforeChatgpt
PlasticExtreme4469@reddit
We can bond over experiencing the new level of laziness.
JaySocials671@reddit
This New AI level is not lazy. It is SO easy to get rid of ppl underperforming.
Western_Objective209@reddit
well, people who don't know how to do anything can still learn to use AI, so like I said it's a floor. someone who is completely incompetent today will be able to get some work done for the cost AI token usage and some guidance on what to look for, what kind of context the model needs to be given. It's a different skill and a lot easier to learn
lemgandi@reddit
I worked with a guy like this once. Brilliant salesman, disaster as a coder. I took over a program from him. By the time I finished rewriting and refactoring his code, there was exacctly one line of the original left. And it ran faster, failed more gracefully, and allowed more used customization. Fun Times.
hobbycollector@reddit
All, including me.
allenrfe@reddit
We had a ee grad student work with us over the summer, and he was assigned to my group. At the time I was testing suppliers batteries. At some point I asked him how much voltage was left in a cell. After a week he brought me over to the oscilloscope to show me it had 2.3 volts. I asked him what happen he said after reading the manual he had to call the manufacturer to ask how to measure DC. I asked why didnt you use the fluke, he picked it up and asked me how to turn it on. We didnt hire him.
AfroJimbo@reddit
For technical skills, very very few I would consider "bad". It's common for people to have a ceiling but maybe I've been fortunate that I haven't worked with anyone I'd considered bad at coding. (26+ YOE)
Personality skills, however: too many.
kosmos1209@reddit
This has also been my experience with 24 yoe. It’s never the actual tech skills, it’s the personalities. Some are egotistical, selfish, unhelpful, mean, a sociopath, prideful, dogmatic to their own beliefs, on and on. Some of the most amazing programmers and engineers were the hardest to work with
sippin-jesus-juice@reddit
Personality issues amplify in FAANG. Most of my jobs were with friendly, easy going people who helped move the needle.
FAANG was full of greedy sycophants who would steal your work, openly lie and throw their peers under the bus.
I much prefer startup life or boring Fortune 500s as opposed to anything FAANG. Apple SPG once, never again
juusorneim@reddit
Could you please describe an example? Is this obvious or insidious?
I want to learn to identify understand exactly what it looks / feels like.
vasaris@reddit
This skit drives quite near to what it actually feels like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mokllJ_Sz_g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8Kt7fRa2Wc
kosmos1209@reddit
It's also been my experience that larger the org, more sociopaths there are. Sociopaths are great a navigating corporate culture.
max123246@reddit
Because it's so large that you can show different views of reality to different people
Don't ask about my dad please
TehTriangle@reddit
Gotta play the game.
max123246@reddit
I'll pass
juusorneim@reddit
Could you please describe an example of what such sociopaths do or how they act?
I want to learn to identify and understand exactly what it looks / feels like.
Steinrikur@reddit
I've had some really bad ones.
You point out the input that crashes the app, and the reply is "don't use that input". Admittedly a fresh graduate.
5-10 ways a new feature will crash in a PR, and I have to rewrite the whole thing in the PR, and then the guy does it differently, adding a bug. Happened repeatedly. This was a guy with years of experience.
Bricktop72@reddit
You've been lucky.
Karl-Levin@reddit
In my whole career I have had maybe three coworkers that actually knew how to program.
Most can cobble together stuff using libraries and fix basic bugs but they would be completely lost if tasked anything other than a basic CRUD app from scratch.
And then there is always a few people that can't program at all but will bullshit their way through the day until they are found out and move to another company.
crap-with-feet@reddit
Agreed. I have similar yoe but I’d say a solid 20% simply don’t belong in software, at least not in writing it. At the other end of the spectrum, maybe 10% are doing all the heavy lifting and the other 70% are just there to do a job.
Scottz0rz@reddit
Don't worry, with AI, we now have product managers and designers coding with Claude, so we're pumping those numbers up actively.
mudskips@reddit
This is the case for me too as someone who works at one of the highest market cap tech companies. Over the past 6 years of working there, there are very few people that I met who I would consider incompetent (maybe like 3-5% of the people I met). However, a majority of the people I met have some kind of personality deficit that makes them hard to work with
TheRealStepBot@reddit
Selection bias
shawntco@reddit
I'm fortunate. I've only worked with 1, maybe 2, developers who I thought were genuinely bad. So very small percentage.
peepeepoopooballs420@reddit
So many engineers are absolutely insufferable. I often feel like bro, you’re moving some data around. Relax. Nobody is saving lives, and the profession has changed a lot. Not everyone can be tom Brady and that’s okay. Big execs make all the pay anyway. The culture of being better than and snooty about skills exists only in engineers I swear.
fojam@reddit
why is so much of this sub just shittalking co-workers now
spvky_io@reddit
Sadly most, but I've only had jobs in web
No_Bowl_6218@reddit
Honestly, I don't think there are good or bad engineers. there are good or bad teams and organizations.
Sure, some people know more than others. But software development is already drowning in oversized egos. The real problem isn't the engineer who doesn't know something, it's the environment that judges instead of mentors, that fosters competition instead of collective progress toward a shared goal.
We've all been the "worst engineer in the room" at some point. And frankly, more of us could use that experience. being humbled by someone better is one of the fastest ways to grow.
So instead of counting how many bad engineers I've met, I'd rather ask: how many times have I actually helped someone level up?
cakecoke@reddit
the task is to build a tiny app, really nothing fancy, not at all like fang interviews
out of 100 devs who pass initial screening,
< 80 can code at all
< 50 can finish the task but take more time,
< 10 can finish the task in required timeframe
< 5 finish with great time and the quality is great
Exirel@reddit
Your definition of "bad" is biased. If I measure by your definition, maybe 5% of dev I've met fit that definition.
However if you raise your expectations of what an average dev is capable of (adjusted for the seniority level of each dev), I'd argue that the vast majority of Devs are below average at best, but mostly mediocre.
Cute_Activity7527@reddit
At least half. We are way way oversaturated with ppl who think IT was good money but lack both comprehension skills and social skills.
HoratioWobble@reddit
As a contractor, and before that a freelancer, I've been brought in to a lot of businesses and projects to fix shit.
Either things have gone wrong, their developers are incompetent or things have over run significantly.
Perhaps this is confirmation bias, but I've worked with far more incompetent developers than not.
But it's also mostly title inflation and complacency.
Developers who are relatively new, with senior and lead titles or developers that haven't moved companies in the last 10 years and so they don't get much variety in their capabilities.
I also see a lot of bad management wearing down developers, they start off with big dreams and ambition and over time management layers erode their ability to give a fuck. So they just deliver what they're asked to and don't strive to produce anything of any quality at any speed.
I think these situations are exasperated by bringing in contractors as well because usually we're not bound by the same rules as the normal teams, companies give us mandate to do what we need to do, whilst severely restricting their developers general mobility.
So to answer your question, in my experience a lot - but I also don't think it's entirely their fault.
fuckoholic@reddit (OP)
had to quote that
Healthy-Dress-7492@reddit
> I also see a lot of bad management wearing down developers, they start off with big dreams and ambition and over time management layers erode their ability to give a fuck. So they just deliver what they're asked to and don't strive to produce anything of any quality at any speed.
Honestly this is like 2/3 of all devs, beaten to within an inch of their lives, then management wonders why theres a performance/productivity issue.
luisluix@reddit
Once managements makes it clear deadlines are deadlines, quality gets thrown out of the window.
1_4_1_5_9_2_6_5@reddit
In that situation now, except management set up lofty plans to fix things, put a lot of responsibility on the contractor and middle managers to get things in place, and here we are months later, the ONLY parts of the plan that have been done are the ones devs had responsibility for. Our output remains bad, because management doesn't want to do their own damn jobs
eliquy@reddit
At least 50% of contractors are also crap. I have worked with one (singular) contractor that I would recommend bringing into any project any time, and many that were just dead weight even when given very clear direction and freedom in completing the work.
TrickProgress4094@reddit
Yeah I do some side work as a contractor, I don’t really prioritize them that much relative to my day job but I’m still the highest paid contractor they have and consistently get work because everyone else is abnormally bad at that particular company. It’s really bizarre
HoratioWobble@reddit
Fair, in my experience the shit ones usually get fired pretty quickly. Atleast here in the UK
XxasimxX@reddit
In my org i feel like Im one of the few (if not the only) bad one :/
fuckoholic@reddit (OP)
If I join a more serious game dev company, I'll be the worst dev for sure. Or an even more extreme example is me vs HFT guys. I will eventually pick it up, but I'll be dead weight for quite some time.
Healthy-Dress-7492@reddit
You’re probably right but it does depend on the project if it’s a decent sized game dev company. Usually thé best people are grouped together on the important stuff and the okay people are on the projects that dont really matter. If it’s a AAA title then yeah I’m definitely the worst person in the room; a mobile title, probably the best.
Dreadmaker@reddit
The good part about being the worst in the room is that you have an incredible group of people to learn from. That applies to any skill, but it definitely, definitely applies to software engineering.
Absorb, and you’re not gonna be the worst for long.
juusorneim@reddit
Could you please describe what healthy learning looks like in this case?
Dreadmaker@reddit
Learning in this case looks a lot like listening and asking questions.
When there’s a meeting happening and you don’t understand what’s going on, don’t just tune out. Actually ask the proper questions to get yourself back into the game. Don’t be embarrassed about asking those questions - you’ll look a lot dumber if you were there and said nothing and clearly didn’t absorb it than if you ask a question, get an answer, and learn right then and there.
This is the same thing that carries over to when you get back a code review. If people give you feedback you don’t understand, don’t just accept it - ask them to explain. Not even just in GitHub, right - ask them on slack, hop on a call, try to understand where they’re coming from and what they’re suggesting. Hell, maybe it’s them who didn’t understand what you were trying to do, or maybe you just didn’t get their suggestion. But the key is to not let that ambiguity hang. Figure it out together.
The best developers I’ve ever known are the ones who, despite knowing seemingly everything, are still not afraid to ask ‘stupid’ questions. These are how you learn.
Then there’s another set of things. If you’re in a team and you feel everyone else is better than you: observe and try to follow. How do those people work? How is it different to how you work? Ask them to do some pair programming, maybe - and if that works, ask questions about their workflow and if they do some crazy terminal bullshit you don’t understand, ask them what that was and why they did it.
Don’t be shy. Being shy or feeling like ‘you’re being annoying’ is precisely how you fall behind. Ask questions relentlessly. actually listen to the answers to those questions and really truly consider them, even if at first they sound wrong to you.
TLDR: if you have resources around you, use them. Treat it as the last time you’re going to be on a team of this quality, and milk it for all it’s worth. They’re not going to fire you for being annoying. And if they are, they would almost certainly also fire you for stagnating and not getting clarity about anything - but faster.
Hopefully that helps.
juusorneim@reddit
Thank you!
XxasimxX@reddit
The problem is i feel like when i adopt to their standards, by that time the standards have changed (in a better way) and im just chasing to get to their level again lol
ThatShitAintPat@reddit
I’m always right because when I’m wrong I absorb that and I’m right the next time
strongly-typed@reddit
Wait till you're this person and you're cursed with a boss who doesn't want you to succeed.
The_Right_Trousers@reddit
They're incredible often because they took that very advice.
When I started my current job, a big-name researcher who worked down the hall scheduled a weekly visit with me just to gab about what we were each working on. He didn't do it to bestow his wisdom on me, but because he was convinced that I - a lowly senior research engineer working in a somewhat adjacent specialty - had things to teach him.
I've realized that the amazing people I work with are amazing partly because they absorb ideas and skills from literally everyone.
Solid-Conclusion0@reddit
The bad ones are the ones who feel they have no reason to improve or change.
The fact that you're expressing this means you are not one of the bad ones. You have impostor syndrome. Most of us do. Sometimes that feeling is right and that's not a bad thing. It's good to be aware of your shortcomings.
Rely on your colleagues. I've never worked at a dev org where a person was shunned for asking for help improving. If anything it'll likely improve opinions of you.
You're doing fine.
I'm a dev with 12 years of experience. I feel the same way you do some days. It never goes away, not really. You just extend the interval between your high days and your low ones.
BackgroundLow3793@reddit
Aww 🥺🥺
_bobby_salsa_@reddit
The actual bad ones don't realize they're bad. If you're questioning it, you aren't a bad one.
Iampoorghini@reddit
I’m the only non senior dev in my team and I feel the same
vocal-avocado@reddit
I feel I am one of the bad ones - but some colleagues of mine are even worse, so I am not sure.
northrupthebandgeek@reddit
As long as you're the second-worst or better, you're fine. It's like how outrunning a bear is impossible, so you should prioritize outrunning at least one other person instead.
natty-papi@reddit
Hey if that's worth anything, that probably means you aren't too bad.
My worst colleagues are the mediocre ones who think they're good. At least the mediocre ones that are aware you can work with.
Antique_Mechanic133@reddit
Technical skills are often just the 'entry fee' for a job. In reality, loyalty and soft skills are what actually get you promoted or keep you safe during layoffs. Being low-maintenance and easy to work with usually trumps technical brilliance. Competence is a dime a dozen, but someone who follows the vision without creating friction is invaluable to a manager.
There’s no shortage of people with the baseline skills to do a task; there’s a massive shortage of people who are actually pleasant to work with.
gtd_rad@reddit
It's both really. I've worked with brilliant people but have zero clue wtf they were taking about half the time. Then there's nice people, but useless and borderline incompetent. But to your point, yes it's better if you had a good technically competent team lead to help guide people with less competence but easier to work with.
1_4_1_5_9_2_6_5@reddit
I'm slowly realizing I'm the guy people don't understand a lot of the time. I try to use the right terms for things, so in my current job (where technical ability is lower across the board), I have been saying a lot of things that everyone else in the room doesn't get. Doesn't help much that they don't ask though...
gtd_rad@reddit
Yes this is actually a very common business / organizational problem. Learn to communicate in a context with common language and terminologies next time. Reason people don't ask because they don't want to sound stupid in a room full of people.
Cens0redBlackSheep26@reddit
No.
Absolutely NOT.
We are nearly (or perhaps in excess of, at this point) $39 trillion dollars in debt.
There is literally NO MONEY for vanity projects…especially not for a TRAITOROUS LIAR who has added yet more trillions to our debt by starting a war (on behalf of a FOREIGN NATION, no less) he promised NEVER TO WAGE AGAIN‼️😡🤬
Contact your representatives and make sure that that DUPLICITIOUS, MENDACIOUS, TREACHEROUS son-of-a-bitch gets ZERO funding for his latest Narcissist’s Folly‼️🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
Murky_Citron_1799@reddit
Id say the 80/20 rule applies here. 20% of the devs do 80% of the work
FlipperBumperKickout@reddit
I've known one who did most of the work, but the reason was he destroyed the codebase to such a degree it was hard for anyone else to get anything done in it 😅
New_Screen@reddit
Lol what type of company was this? And he was a senior+ I’m assuming?
FlipperBumperKickout@reddit
Senior indeed. One of the other devs called him a "tactical tornado" because it was a description he had found in a book somewhere 😂
JaySocials671@reddit
You worked at indeed?
loosedolphin@reddit
A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout, for anyone curious.
MasterOfTriviality@reddit
Love that book!
northrupthebandgeek@reddit
Brilliant job security measure, at least until the system collapses under the weight of his sins.
Which-Way-212@reddit
Only because a dev codes a lot or ships features fastly doesn't mean he is a good dev
todo_code@reddit
I worldview say 80% suck though
PineappleLemur@reddit
Not suck, but lazy/unmotivated/doing bare minimum and in general not putting much thought into things.
That's in any field/role/job.
Sea_Structure577@reddit
The lazy/unmotivated crowd is most people - likely higher than even 80%. And those people eventually suck if they do not suck from the beginning.
As they only ever put in the bare minimum effort to complete (with meh quality) the immediate task, they never learn more or reflect on decisions they have made, never take on larger scopes, and then stagnate and whatever they might have known originally falls off into a black hole. After years of that, people revert to being about as useful as an intern, minus the motivation of an intern.
bluetista1988@reddit
It's less about skill and a lot more about timing/opportunity IMO.
On a large codebase you end up with certain teams that own some cross-cutting/high-impact functionality or certain developers who were around working on the code for a long time. Those people are the ones who tend to have the biggest impact.
I was one of those 20% guys at a company where I basically defined and implemented our API strategy, and created the model that every other team followed. I later got to be part of the cloud transformation initiatives because I was the guy who understood the API design the best and could help with breaking things up into smaller services. My boss was one of the first 100 hires and was one of maybe 5 people left at the company who understood the deep cross-cutting interactions between certain modules and where niche failure states might exist.
Now I am quite squarely in the 80% group at a different company after ~1 year. I have my little domain and I know how that works in detail but beyond reading a few docs and maybe seeing some pieces of code I have little understanding of the larger ecosystem.
Big_Bed_7240@reddit
10-20% suck. The remaining 60% does the 20%.
Pyorrhea@reddit
That 20% do -20%. So the remaining 60% do 40%.
northrupthebandgeek@reddit
Ah yes, the legendary -10× programmer.
Big_Bed_7240@reddit
Lol yeah
New_Screen@reddit
That’s more accurate.
HaMMeReD@reddit
Lol, have you been to this sub?
New_Screen@reddit
Yeah there’s a big difference between being actually bad and not doing as much work as the other devs.
keto_brain@reddit
100%
zeus-rs@reddit
life and 80:20 rules, everywhere
Odd-Investigator-870@reddit
80/20 rule: Square root of the population accounts for more than 50% of the results.
newEnglander17@reddit
Those 20% are either pushovers or tryhards. It’ll always be that way as long as they make themselves so easy to offload too much work into.
Murky_Citron_1799@reddit
Not really, I said they get the work done, not that they have a lot of work piled up. The best engineers get the most done and work the least from what I've seen
kbn_@reddit
This but it’s recursive, with 20% of the 20% doing 80% of the 80%. Also I think it’s probably more like 90/10.
spreadred@reddit
Agreed.
JaySocials671@reddit
60-70% includes bad/don’t care.
10%cared too much. 20% grew into the role v well
metaphorm@reddit
you're making a fundamental attribution error. "bad developer" is not an invariant of a human. it might be a valid temporary assessment of a person's impact in one specific context (the project they're assigned to).
the reasons why people struggle are varied and complex. your judgment of them as "bad" is a tunnel-visioned view. you're only really seeing "in the context I worked with them, they weren't effective". you don't know the contributing factors. don't judge the whole person based on a narrow and short-term experience of them.
ForeignOrder6257@reddit
That’s fair
hibikir_40k@reddit
Depends on where I've worked: Quality isn't a straight line. I worked in places where the top 5% of devs would be seen as under average devs in the next tier of companies. The best of those probably couldn't pass a big tech internview.
There are differences of just pure smarts, dedication, personality.... it's a huge divide. Someone's best ever dev is just no good elsewhere, and vice versa.
ingobingo84@reddit
This is so true. I have worked at a lot of companies (20yoe) and always felt so good like a rockstar developer only cause i read books (!) and then ended up in a company where I first felt like a total impostor and now I feel average.
killz111@reddit
That's why the term unicorn exist.
fuckoholic@reddit (OP)
agree, if one were to put me into HFT, they will laugh at me. Apart from simple concepts like cache lines and unrolling loops, I am basically not on that level as them.
Ok-Structure-6911@reddit
In this sub? Everyone is great
imagebiot@reddit
Like 50%
Dyledion@reddit
Still incredibly generous.
imagebiot@reddit
Yeah haha maybe, but I didn’t say the other 50% are good 😅
FalseRegister@reddit
I fear with the grow of AI, the excess of CS graduates and the shrink of the economy (making companies hire less)... that number will increase a lot in a few years
Junior devs simply cannot get enough experience.
HowTheStoryEnds@reddit
I don't know if it's just that: I've been interviewing a lot of juniors(straight out of school - 3 years) lately and an alarming number of them claim they don't read books when I ask them.
Like how do you improve if you don't read and apply?
A recurring tend in the answers and the questions also seemed to be an expectation of the employer teaching them everything they need to know, which is wildly naive and lacking of drive, even for a very young person.
I think our schools are failing them as well though, many couldn't recognize a recursive function nor explain the danger of one.
All in all I get the impression that the bar at the educational level has been set too low and that they're not enough prepared for the knowledge-side of the profession.
FalseRegister@reddit
Man, I'm also not-US (nor in my studies, nor now, but have lived and worked in 3 different countries). I also never once picked up a book, as most are outdated the moment they are published, and everything they publish is on documentation already.
I did read a few during uni, or rather read a few chapters, on software architecture patterns and testing, which I was not taught in depth.
So, idk, I wouldn't judge on the picking up books or not.
As for the rest, yes, agreed. I've had juniors who couldn't code a simple fibonacci function.
HowTheStoryEnds@reddit
That attitude is quite foreign to me.
All fundamentals by definition will look outdated but you still need to know them to assess the new stuff.
How do you get into new terrain without reading?
FalseRegister@reddit
I got solid foundations during studies. Most other things I learnt on the field or reading documentation. I almost never had to pick up a book.
Why would I do it, the information is free out on the internet. Books are not a primary source for these things nowadays and I wouldn't judge people for not reading them.
How to get into new terrain? Reading documentation, watching videos, even asking AI nowadays is valid way to learn or find entry points. Books are good but not a requirement.
HowTheStoryEnds@reddit
So your mindset is one of using, not creating.
gtd_rad@reddit
AI basically replaced juniors entirely. So they don't even get an opportunity to enter the industry to begin with.
I think there would just be a natural economic transition into trades and hopefully it will fix housing issues in the bright side.
kosmos1209@reddit
If you think nearly half of engineers are bad, you’re either in a bad organization, or you’re overestimating your own self if you think you’re in the good half.
gjionergqwebrlkbjg@reddit
Try interviewing people and you'll change your mind.
gbear605@reddit
A problem with interviewing is that you're definitionally sampling people who want a job, and those are going to be disproportionately bad engineers.
kosmos1209@reddit
Interviewees are not your coworkers. Do you approve ones you think are bad or something?
gjionergqwebrlkbjg@reddit
The vast majority of candidates likely worked somewhere before they applied.
kosmos1209@reddit
So 50% of all engineers are bad, but not 50% of engineers in your org?
ConspicuousPineapple@reddit
Or you're doing the opposite of that yourself.
thatdudelarry@reddit
All of us suck.
imagebiot@reddit
Underrated comment
Sensitive-Ear-3896@reddit
Except Claud, all hail Claud!
susmines@reddit
*and all code is shit
friendlytotbot@reddit
I don’t think most ppl are truly bad, like they could do the work if the applied themselves, but they don’t. Sometimes I think it’s because they have other stuff going on in their life like dealing with kids, so they’re just coasting. Some ppl are just lazy though. The only person I can think of who was truly horrendous, was just lazy and didn’t try.
SnooStories251@reddit
I guess it is normal distributed, so its a definition what bad is? Lets say the average engineer is 100, then you can calculate the answer yourself
grilledcheex@reddit
I had a colleague who was hired without any technical screen in the interview process, only vibe check basically. Yes this was during Covid. He couldn’t even write a for loop. I mentored the heck out of him and he managed to make himself useful. A company with proper standards would have let him go. He stayed for 3 years until he got an offer as senior somewhere else.
They are rarely this bad but yeah, at least 15% of devs I’ve met I would pay to NOT have them on my team if it came to that.
itix@reddit
In our team of five, I say 20%. He will retire in 1-3 years. Sooner the better.
He used to be an embedded developer using C. He was not a great coder, but it worked. The HW was renewed every 5 years, so it didnt have to be great. New HW, new code.
But over the last 15 years, he has been working only on the desktop code. He struggles to install the latest .NET 10, he has no debugging skills, he writes ugly code with 20000 loc classes with huge 2000 loc methods. Every new feature he builds is behind a flag because he cant develop code that is backwards compatible.
He ~~wrote~~ vibe-coded a new tool using Claude Code and it is actually good. But then he tried to use CC to debug a network code with insufficient information and was completely derailed. It got me angry even though I am using AI, too.
But he is also trying very hard. During his embedded development years, he worked at the office for a long time, sometimes sleeping on the sofa, trying to get the code running. He didnt want to give up. Idk, he just got a wrong career.
thodgson@reddit
At my current job, there are very few because they simply don't last. We weed them out quickly because no one wants to pick up the slack.
At my last employer, we had several "coasters" who would produce little to nothing every single day. The company was a typical "lifestyle company".
It was a small company, privately funded that was barely profitable some years and on the years when it was not, there were layoffs. There were friends of the owners who were "developers" who had some knowledge, but basically only knew fundamentals from 20 years ago and were never never under consideration for layoffs. They sucked.
I was brought on as an expert in .NET and web to help create a web application that paralleled their desktop application.
A couple of us dragged the rest of the development team into modernity back in the 2010s: first with convincing them that they had to create a viable backend with a full fledged API. Next was using a modern web UI. First with AngularJS, and then with Angular 2, 3, 4, and so on. Along the way, we did everything we could to teach the do-nothing crowd how to do things the new way. They resisted and ended up doing little to no work.
Fast forward to Covid in 2020. We had our worst revenue projections ever and 50% of the staff were laid off, myself included. No idea why they chose me, but it was a blessing. One of the other developers who was useless also left and eventually found a job at a local University. Later found out that he was fired for underperformance (not a shock). Many others let go also followed the same fate.
I've since moved on and done far better. Glad to be rid of that black hole.
defnotashton@reddit
firm believer in the pareto principal here being that 20% of the engineers do about 80% of the work indicating the other 80% are 'bad' to some degree.
Northbank75@reddit
A solid 20% …. For all the bleating about AI driven layoffs, I’m kinda looking forward to them being gone.
purpuric@reddit
70% and this is me being nice. Of the 70%, 20% are tolerable because they try and learn and eventually get better because they want to. Of the remaining 30%, 80% are average and get the job done. The rest are good engineers.
CaptainBlase@reddit
27 YOE. I would say that your percentages match my own in terms of technical ability. .
There's other dimensions beyond technical ability. Someone that's driven but mediocre is high-value, IMO. Also, low-maintenance mediocre talent beats high maintenance high talent. By low maintenance, I mean that you don't have to get on them to stay on task, field complaints from their coworkers, constantly coach them to be professional, or more valleys than hills on productivity.
I can get a lot more done with a team of four low-maintenance mediocre talent than I can with a team of low-maintenance/med-talent and one high-maintenance high-talent.
Fabulous-Meaning-966@reddit
Depends on what you're doing. Good luck building say a new industrial-strength database with a team of mediocre programmers.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-notes/
BrilliantNet5920@reddit
75% at least are bad.
bobsbitchtitz@reddit
I'll say it scales with the pay. In big tech I've met 95% great eng and the 5% that were bad eng weren't bad because they're too dumb to to do the job, most of the time they were burnt out or had too much work on their plate or just not incentivized to care.
When I was at a shitty company I was the smartest and best eng in my whole org at 1 year out. The second I stepped into the big leagues I was below average until I worked my way up.
randomInterest92@reddit
About 80%. How do I get to this number?
Generally speaking 80% of people are basically contributing at a neutral rate or worse. The last 20% are the ones who carry everybody else. You see this pareto principle EVERYWHERE in business.. across all kinds of industries.
Herr some real life examples in my company:
We offer 5 products. 1 of the products makes up about 78% of all profits.
I have a team of 7 devs. 2 are actually useful and consistently improving, having real impact. The rest is "just existing".
Llebac@reddit
Id say anywhere from 60 to 80% of professional devs I've met in my career have been bad engineers. No passion, shortcuts, slow work, bugs upon bugs, doesn't ask questions etc. I'm very fortunate to have a near 100% number of good devs in my current organization. Once you've been around long enough it becomes apparent how valuable and rare a good dev really is
Frolo_NA@reddit
i don't see many/any folks i would call bad devs. i do see ingrained bad habits sometimes.
eeltonc@reddit
Do you think that 15% is magnified with AI tools?
UpsetCryptographer49@reddit
I had an engineer that was word blind, lovely guy. But he would sometimes spend a lot of time to find an issue. And when I then look into the settings I will notice ‘heart_rate’ spelled as ‘haert_rate’.
programming_bassist@reddit
Half of all developers are below average.
And I think the answer depends on what you’re looking for. Need a code monkey to type out your architectural ideas? 25% are bad. Need someone to design your company’s entire system? 90% of them are bad.
funbike@reddit
There's this dev on our team, let's call him Claude. He's really smart and super fast, but often doesn't follow instructions and does way more code changes than what was asked. He lies too, making up facts and figures. He can't debug and will spent massive amount of effort on easy bugs, until someone helps him. It's rumored that he plagiarizes code.
Immediate_Spirit_384@reddit
"plagiarizes code"
lol
Prostion@reddit
His salary is incredibly low and on balance is probably a net positive, so let's not PIP him just yet.
TheTacoInquisition@reddit
The worst are the ones who are mediocre devs, but have huge egos, think they're awesome, aggressively push bad ideas and use politics to constantly ram through bad code. They create unsafe, toxic working environments and are a constant problem in the codebase.
Quite often they deliver lots of lines of code, but cause both standards issues and architectural problems. They obviously don't understand the foundational basics of software development, but will argue with and shout down anyone who points out problems. They use terms like "performance" and "best practices" to rail road others into doing what they want. Non-technical people think they're super smart because they overuse jargon and make everything sound like it was really difficult, when all they really had to do was update some copy, or they fixed one of their own bugs like some kind of hero. They throw other people under the bus when they cause these issues and make promises to senior leadership to try harder to better "train" their colleagues. They take credit for others work at any opportunity, even if they had little or nothing to do with it.
I will take a hundred slow devs who need extra handholding, or coasters who don't care, over one of the "rock star in their own mind" devs.
indigo945@reddit
100%.
grgext@reddit
I just think about the people I have worked with, and if I would hire them to work in my new company. There's not many I can recommend.
tutami@reddit
Half of the developers I've worked with should not be developers. 90% of the other half has the potential but they don't give fuck about doing quality work. So I've only met 4 or 5 people who has the brain and drive to be good.
PressureHumble3604@reddit
50% because everyone went into programming in the last decade.
The thing is that as you mature in your career and get to more prestigious companies, real bad engineers disappears. I haven’t had a bad engineer in my team in years and that was a previous company. You can have engineers that are not so good at some task but overall they are still capable.
The only bad engineers I am still seeing are the one outsourced from places where the cost of labour is very low. When a company wants to save money they don’t hire top talent because top talent will require competitive salaries, somehow they think that doing this abroad will lead to a better outcome.
AlmiranteCrujido@reddit
I've not worked anywhere near that many of the course of my career, but having done a LOT of interviewing, if you're doing top of funnel screeners, the percent of "totally dreaming" is way higher than 15%.
As an EM/Senior EM, I hit exactly one of those: a Staff Engineer who came from a "non-coding Architect" background and who wanted to transfer to my team to stay ahead of a PIP. I gave him a few weeks informally, and then gave him back to the other team because he was useless.
Lot of talk; maybe he'd been able to code a decade prior, but literally took two weeks to do a basic onboarding task that charitably should have taken someone rusty 2-3 days and someone who wasn't rust half a day. Out of about 40 people who reported to me (including dotted-lines like him) directly or indirectly over 4 years, that makes I guess about 2.5%
I've hit a handful of others across a 25 year career, out of hundreds. If you work for places with a decent hiring bar, it should be at most a couple percent.
but_why_n0t@reddit
Thankfully pretty low. 5% that I genuinely felt weren't cut out to be SWE. Everybody else I've worked with can atleast follow instructions, even if they're slower than avg.
Rincho@reddit
Wow seems like majority of people commenting here are completely insufferable. I'm grateful for my team
youChipS@reddit
Just reading through and biting my tongue. I’ve worked with some truly unadaptable, low social skill and empathy engineers but very rarely any real „bad“ ones. This thread is a good example of what I dislike most about the field.
sebkek@reddit
50% are worse than average 😛
paperlantern-ai@reddit
Funniest thing is when you see someone who was "the bad dev" at one company absolutely crush it somewhere else. Had a coworker everyone wrote off, moved to a smaller company where he owned the full stack instead of writing JIRA tickets about microservices all day, and suddenly he was their best engineer. Sometimes the environment just sucks the life out of people.
zezer94118@reddit
It used to be about 75%, but with ai it has dropped to like 10%
Ninja-Sneaky@reddit
I don't know I may have been paired with one in my last project, I'm collecting a list and it's growing:
- Is a tryhard to be a contributor, would happily waste everyone's time to point out useless shit like: this markdown should be ```console and not ```bash. Yea... literally unreadable
- Not a problem solver, actually more like a problem creator. Would happily add a page of complexity for non-existant gains. Has no concept of complexity vs usability, abstraction/solid vs locality of behaviour
- A hardline clean-code/solid/dry right in the moment and place where you wouldn't apply it.
- Insisted to make a whole config file into a secret... because he didn't want to implement actual secret injection & management in the program.
- Wanted to remove lines from the configuration file because the code has hardcoded values, so the client should be using these. So rather than self-documenting config the users need to find somewhere in the readme (and someone has to reference and mantain it) if some settings (that were there but now are removed) can be added in config.
- Had issues tracking the duplication of a grand total of not 5 not 10 but: two config files, one for linux one for windows. So the day he forgot to align 3 lines of shared config and insisted that someone wasted their time creating a fully-coupled single template config with macro/conditionals to distinguish what went into linux & windows.
fuckoholic@reddit (OP)
I am against book burning, but if we ever do that again, clean code would be the perfect candidate for that. And dry should be avoided where the abstraction becomes a monster.
Ninja-Sneaky@reddit
He's done it again! A couple ansible tasks tested and working, requested to add convoluted facts with facts check spaghetti so that it is using facts!
symbiatch@reddit
Most I’ve worked with are decent or good. Some are above that and some also understand the work isn’t just writing code and can actually go beyond and care about result, processes, users etc.
And then there’s the ones that are also in the “how on Earth did you get here?” type. I’m currently involved in one situation where a person with supposedly 20 years of experience is completely not being able to produce stuff, went full AI (on the level of just copypasting whatever it says to others as ‘reviews’ and also “I think this, person C thinks that, who is correct” stuff pasted to others.
And apparently they’ve been a good worker in the company for a while and people relied on them. I have no idea how.
But not the place to rant about that. These have been the minority where I’ve been, fortunately. Only a handful. The lack of knowledge and skills has usually been above in the managerial side. Not knowing how to do specs, how to handle tickets, and so on. In my eyes managers shouldn’t even create tickets usually but often they do and they have no idea how to split work.
And basically none of them have realized they’re bad - managers or devs. They really thought they were good. All the ones who realized they’re not up to the task actually worked on it and clearly indicated their problems and asked for help. And got it and became better. So it’s clearly a mindset issue also and if they can get a job while not knowing what to do they’ll never have to become proficient.
03263@reddit
I have not met many truly bad in all ways
Some worse with code but good at organization, meetings, soft skill stuff which is a big part of the job
Some with good tech skills but rude or abrasive personality or other soft skill issues
kasakka1@reddit
Same.
I have met some people that are just unfit for the project, like an offshore dev team working on a multi-million project. These were nice people but had barely junior grade skills.
They were in charge of a search feature and after several months the end result in theory ticked all the requirements, but in practice was unusable. Me and another senior dev rewrote it from scratch in a week.
They would've been fine working on something much simpler, so that was also a management failure.
CodelinesNL@reddit
It really differs from company to company. Large slow enterprise companies are incredibly easy to 'hide' in. Ive seen teams where only a handful people were doing meaningful work, and 90% barely did anything. On the other hand small/startup companies often have a much higher level of quality of people. I currently work for a small fintech, we have 11 engineers, I would not want to miss any of them.
puremourning@reddit
About 80%. Usually because they have bad habits or culture or were taught objectively bad things, by other people loudly and confidently incorrectly preaching their dogma, rather than lack of ability.
Willing_Parsley_2182@reddit
Depends on what bar you’re talking about.
Devs who actually understand maintaining the ecosystem, building architecture for the future, and writing higher quality code / abstractions… you’d be lucky to get 10-20% in a company.
Okay devs who have 1-2 of these attributes, probably another 20-30%.
That leaves 50-70% who are just bums in seats. The bottom 30% are genuinely not useful in my opinion, and the 20-40% in the middle are those who put in hours and it’s more about freeing up load for the people above them to actively work.
I don’t think it’s much different from most professions though to be honest.
m1nkeh@reddit
Well it depends which company and what the hiring bar is but across a general population easy 70% plus
I talk with a lot of different companies and customers in my job and Lord alive the quality bar is low
SnugglyCoderGuy@reddit
70-90%
unfiltered_avi@reddit
Honestly the "bad" engineers are usually just people stuck in the wrong role. Seen plenty of mediocre ICs turn into solid PMs or solutions architects once they stopped pretending to love coding
CelebrationWitty3035@reddit
Bad dev + good interpersonal skills = Scrum Master 😂
WrongSample2139@reddit
Everyone except me is bad, handled their project wrong and would require a complete rewrite for it to be viable
AurumDaemonHD@reddit
This is the cooks vs chef article. Its abiut mindset. Curious devs will be godlike. Others feature devs will be small next to them.
throwaway_0x90@reddit
Well "bad" is very subjective and contextual.
There are definitely devs that I personally do not like working with. I don't that it makes them a bad SWE, but in my book they're difficult people to deal with in general.
I'm too busy with my own work to be judging others. It's not like I can sit down and give them a thorough interview.
Electronic_Anxiety91@reddit
I think bad engineers are very rare.
In my experience poor performance from engineers is usually due to a combination of subpar training and management not understanding how to work with employees.
Sensitive-Ear-3896@reddit
The industry is crawling with nepotism sorry to say
Linaran@reddit
What is a low bozo factor and can you name a few industries?
Sensitive-Ear-3896@reddit
Low bozo: not many no ops, name a few industries, sure defense, entertainment, automotive, freight, aerospace.
Excellent_League8475@reddit
Im assuming they're talking about the bozo explosion [1]. Once you hire a "B" player, they start to hire "C" players. Low bozo factor is nearly all "A" players. It's less about industries and more about individual companies.
[1] https://www.kevinpaulscott.com/blog/the-bozo-explosion
Linaran@reddit
Well now I got a sudden boost of confidence as I was hired without a recommendation 😂
vocal-avocado@reddit
Surprisingly, also good looking people tend to achieve more success even in technical careers. I’ve never met a very handsome colleague who didn’t quickly move up the ladder. There are very few good looking people in my company (lol), but all of them that I know who are over 30 are way more successful than the others who joined the company at the same time. Maybe looks bring confidence and that makes them better workers - or they are just easy on the eyes and management ends up benefiting them without even noticing. I can’t tell.
Sensitive-Ear-3896@reddit
I know at least two that were promoted for their horizontal skills
cmpthepirate@reddit
nepotism?
sdn@reddit
Yeah your drinking buddy from college or… at large tech companies, people from your specific caste - https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/googles-caste-bias-problem
cmpthepirate@reddit
Thats not nepotism
waffleseggs@reddit
nepo took on a new meaning recently. stop gatekeeping something we need a single word for. nobody wants to say "cronyism and nepotism technically".
sdn@reddit
You should google “define:nepotism”
cmpthepirate@reddit
Yeah apologies I was wrong and updated my comment
PaulPhxAz@reddit
By the other side -- have you tried hiring from advertisements? What a pain in the a**.
I hired people I knew in college that I thought were smart. I hired the guy who taught me Selection Sort in datastructures I.
zarlo5899@reddit
i would say 80+ are bad but i hope that is just people not liking their jobs
feeling_luckier@reddit
Surely this is a distribution question and a Pareto's law question.
Regardless of the shop, 20% of devs/dev time does 80% of the work.
And, depending on where you sit on the local and global skill curve will determine your answer here.
I mean, 50% are below average by definition. For some that might also mean bad.
randbytes@reddit
getting the job, surviving in the job doesn't require you to have great engineering skills.
mrfoozywooj@reddit
outright bad ? maybe 30%.
Unemployable/ not capable ? a further 50%.
In reality ive seen that the top 20% of engineers in a company seem to do 80% or of the actual work.
Its part of the reason we never get any good hires when megacorps do mass layoffs and people say "tech is hard" yet most of my peers are all fighting off headhunters still like precovid.
as to how we get here, corps like to overhire, the last decade has seen a lot of quota based hiring and the upper tier of management is usually not close enough to teams to see the bloat until a major event happens.
Dramatic_Seesaw3226@reddit
how do you think this percentage varies by industry?
TheGRS@reddit
There have been a few folks I've worked with who turned out to not be able to do pretty simple stuff and figured out how to game the system of shared responsibility. As in, they pick up a ticket, flail a bit, and get others to help them code through the problems via pairing or mobbing. Unable to explain their code very well.
They also didn't get much in the way of technical interviews, which solidified my opinion that while tech interviews suck, they are absolutely necessary.
AnAcceptableUserName@reddit
Like a quarter
IME maybe 25% are good or trying hard to get there. Self-directed, self-motivated to learn and make themselves and the things around them better
50% are fine. They pull weight and are more help than hindrance.
The remaining 25% are those seat warmers. Warm bodies in a chair who go to the meetings and may be capable of opening a PR without adult supervision. Somebody else is doing the rest of the job for them, one way or another. Probably their whole team is.
swiftmerchant@reddit
It varies.
There are some devs who are very smart technology-wise, but act like assholes. Oftentimes these are the same folks who tend to over-complicate things while forgetting to address the basics.
Then there are those who are very good and act like assholes some of the time but not always. They are the tricky ones because they are actually very strong when you need them.
Then there are those who just suck and pretend like they are good.
Then there are those who are decent but lazy and you have to stick their nose in the crap they built or didn’t build and show them the issues.
Then there are those that sometimes suck and sometimes are very good.
Then there are those who are very good and are actually always helpful.
travelinzac@reddit
Most
nasanu@reddit
Depends on what you mean by bad. Where I currently work the rest of the department can do good work, they know how, they just refuse to. You can look at my post history for the truly mind blowing crap they do and even yesterday there was something new. I quit my old project because it was just too stupid. New project (a mini app inside a super app) and the API seems storage, I have had a hunch about it so I setup a meeting with ios/android devs and the API devs. Find out (among many bad things) that the client app displays a list of chats, which themselves have messages if you click on them. Normal. But on load they not only get the list of chats, but they also request ALL messages for ALL chats on screen. This can be 20 or so API calls at once.
I asked them about it, they know how wrong that is. I propose a tiny change that would massively reduce strain on the API, but no, they cannot do it as its work, they already have work. But then it gets worse as I find out the method to pass data to my part they said existed doesn't exist. So now not only are they still going to request all data all the time, but they wont pass it to me so I need to request at least some of that data again. This is the plan as only I need to work and they dont need to do anything. All the "best approach" as confirmed by management.
They all know full well how to do better. Getting them to do it though, near impossible.
mpanase@reddit
In companies where they actually evaluated who they were firing... it's funny to see how productivity has not really gone down anywhere near the rate of devs they let go. In some, productivity has not suffered at all.
Morale, though, has gone down in all of them.
Mor eto your point, I've been a contractor for a long time; one who's not a great salesman but you can tell will get you out of the hole, and therefore my experience is a self-selected sample.
I'd adventure to say that around 30% of devs I've found were just bad. If I evaluate them as engineers, 40-45% was bad.
In bigger companies I have also found many proper good engineers who were motivated to do as little as possible. If you fix the issue... you might get blamed for not fixing it earlier, you might become responsible for it without any compensation increase, ... If you work hard, it will annoy you to no end because the other 3 guys in the team are appallingly lazy and will get paid the same as you anyway...
I just watched a couple videos from a FAANG head of recruitment, a FAANG distinguished engineer, ... technical competence mattered very little, it was all about salesmanship.
vocal-avocado@reddit
Sorry I find your comment contradictory. You say morale went down on the companies where the bad employees were fired - but also say that when good engineers work with incompetent colleagues they are not motivated because they are all earning the same money anyway…
So, is it better to fire the bad people or not?
mpanase@reddit
If you fire them early, it's good. The harm hasn't happened.
If you slowly replace them with better ones, it's still quite good. The message is clear.
If you slowly fire them, it's not great. you should try to communicate that the good ones are safe, but there will always be doubt.
If you fire a bunch of engineer at the same time, it's bad. Even if you managed to only fire bad engineers, whoever is left is scared for their job (aside from workload considerations).
NickW1343@reddit
I agree with this. If I saw a co-worker get axed or laid off, even if they weren't that great, I'd be alarmed if I were taken aside by my manager and told I was safe from that.
Firing early or firing people who are clearly so burnt out they're beyond redemption don't feel as bad to see happen. Sucks for them, but way too many burned out people don't realize they're burnt out and a drag on the team. Getting fired early must suck, but it's always hard to empathize with the new guy, so it's no big deal.
wKdPsylent@reddit
Not within my team, but a lot of the other teams we interact with are atrocious. They release updates that simply don't work, they give us documentation (for integrations) that is completely wrong.
I honestly don't know how they are in the positions they're in. These are 20+ year developers with major products on the market. It's crazy how incompetent many of them really are.
RecentSubject3918@reddit
At my previous no-name company we hired almost exclusively new grads. Very few external intermediate and senior hires. We took the shotgun approach that some of these people would be amazing and it offsets the crappy ones.
I’d say 30% of them were absolutely terrible, 30% you could tolerate, 30% were good and 10% were amazing.
At my current “prestigious” big tech company interns and new grads are almost exclusively sourced from top 10-20 schools with precious FAANG or equivalent internships.
10% are “meh”, 50% are great, 35% are phenomenal and 5% are literally the smartest people I’ve ever met.
Primary-Walrus-5623@reddit
At my place (S&P500 fairly large) maybe 5% in the States and they usually get culled pretty quickly. Everyone else more or less knows what they're doing
vocal-avocado@reddit
Yeah in my big company it’s about the same, maybe a bit worse because in Europe it’s hard to fire people. I’d say about 10% of people are bad.
Primary-Walrus-5623@reddit
I purposely left out some other countries
EliSka93@reddit
I know I'm great at coding, I seriously suck at organisation and self management though. Because of that I'm not a very efficient worker, and could be considered "bad" depending on your metric. I'm sure some former co-workers have perceived me as such.
Fluid-Hovercraft6059@reddit
15% seems a bit harsh maybe
s0ulbrother@reddit
80
ListenLady58@reddit
I bet you’re a blast to work with
frugal-grrl@reddit
The type I’ve worked with the most is not what you’re describing. They are in the middle. They write ok code but never seem to feel any ownership or have any ideas. They think their job is to “do tickets.”
I feel stressed keeping track of lots of things because so many team members don’t want to do anything except “do tickets.”
frugal-grrl@reddit
I’ve worked with a couple of these in 10 years. Most people want to get better and do, but not all.
One in particular would just paste spaghetti code from stack overflow into pull requests. Like lines and lines of unreadable code with no line breaks.
I was like “Well yea it works, but what about in 2 weeks when we need to go change something?”
In her case, she was from a wealthy family and sort of seemed like working was beneath her or something. I never figured out what her deal was.
CreepyNewspaper8103@reddit
Like 90% of devs are bad. Including most of you who think you're in the 10%
Unlucky_Data4569@reddit
100%
buddroyce@reddit
I think it depends on the definition of “bad”.
Vasilev88@reddit
Every system of production in nature is following a Pareto distribution, in regards to its producers and its outputs.
SQRT(ENGINEERINGS) = 50% of production.
In a company of 100 engineering, 10 of them do 50% of the total output
3.(3) of them do 25% of the total output
1.824 of them do 12.5% of the total output
Depends on your definition of "bad". I'm a relatively cynical person and I would say that the vast majority of people on earth have absolutely no idea what they are doing in their respective professions.
Groove-Theory@reddit
I've seen a lot of "bad" engineers look good in another company and vice versa. I think we downplay how much environment can really help or hinder an engineer's brilliance.
hippydipster@reddit
25-50% are basically zero value.
Most of the rest are playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, but ate managing to create value slowly while doing so.
And a precious few are designing systems that really function pretty well.
Odd-Investigator-870@reddit
20% continuously learn enough to warrant engineer as a title. 10% become engineers but have a passion for empowering their teams and delivering outcomes despite project manager efforts to the contrary => staff+ or founder.
20% are so bad they wish to become untrained project managers to feel important while removing psychological safety from every workplace.
50% are low quality developers aka code monkeys for said project managers who never see a codebase order than 24 month, and promote based on doing the same greenfield junior codebase build out 4 times.
supercoach@reddit
Sounds about right. I care about my results and those of my team so I end up carrying others. They must know that there are talks of removing them, but they just don't seem to care. Snail's pace seems to be the only speed they'll ever work at.
Personally, I hate the thought of not providing value to my employer. Conversely, I also expect to be paid well for what I do. I wouldn't like a role where I was coasting. I guess there are some who don't mind being a burden.
TrickProgress4094@reddit
Honestly, probably somewhere around 50% are pretty mediocre in my opinion. An astonishing number of people lack basic problem solving skills.
I’d say about 20% truly suck though.
SingleAttitude8@reddit
As Warren Buffet used to say:
"It's only when the tide goes out that you see who's been swimming naked."
mwax321@reddit
I admittedly was coasting a bit when I was laid off. I was still hosting talks about how to best leverage AI, both for dev and new features.
I could sit here and write how I was disgruntled with the direction, the people in charge rewriting features instead of pushing new features in an extremely competitive space.
But reality is: I was burned out. I could have fought harder and been a leader. I said "fine, if you don't want to use me for what you hired me to do, then I'll just hit some metrics and be passive."
Well after a bad review from my manager, I lasted a few months and then that was it. Funny part was: our review process took 6 months. I actually realized I was being an ass and corrected my behavior. Manager admitted I had fixed the problem, but the review was already in.
I don't even think it was this job's fault. I was burned out from a terrible previous job. I just didn't realize how fucked up I was.
Fortunately, I've saved my entire career and don't need steady income anymore. So now I'm back to writing apps and doing some light contract work. Much happier.
Maybe one day I'll try again at a big company. But probably not. I just don't enjoy it. It's become just a paycheck.
Cal_3@reddit
AI sloppage
mwax321@reddit
Lol you think I write like ai?
kruvii@reddit
The bell curve applies to everything, including us.
MasterLJ@reddit
Half of all "programmers" could be sent home, with pay, never to touch a keyboard for your company again, and you'd be in a better spot.
It does depend though. The more prestigious the company the higher the percentage. Most of the really bad programmers inhabit mid-tier Fortune 500s. There are still some bad programmers at the best companies, but they are actively hiding.
StephTheBot@reddit
My imposter syndrome is telling me I’m one of those engineers.
ppepperrpott@reddit
In my experience so far, 1 in 5 is a superstar, 1 in 5 is a disaster, the other 3 are ok
speby@reddit
It’s like most any profession. There’s a standard bell curve. So realistically about 20% are in what I would consider pretty poor or low performing, and in general, not very good or productive. Then there’s kind of the middle 50-60% that are “ok” and good enough, leaving the top 10-20% that are outstanding and the ones that every company says they try to hire. It’s this same top 10-20% that tend to be the most competitive and sought after, and usually paid the most, too.
yessssssdude@reddit
It's impossible to put a number on it. I'd say in 13 YOE, I've worked with <10 truly incredible engineers, and <10 truly terrible engineers. Most people are perfectly fine and pleasant to work with, not any deeper than that imo
Logical-Idea-1708@reddit
People that you work with probably skew higher because they all passed the same bar that got you hired.
Interviewing candidates exposes a lot more of the bad ones and these are the ones that passed the resume screening too.
Based on that, I say 95% are bad.
Noobsauce9001@reddit
My temptation was to say no- it really. Everyone I’ve worked with gets the job done and no one has been careless.
That being said, I was laid off and have been for 15 months. Maybe that means I’m in your 15% 😅
SoulTrack@reddit
Most engineers I've worked with are fairly average.
talldean@reddit
Depends where I'm working. For Google and Meta, pretty darn close to zero. For a dozen jobs before that, 5-25%, depending on how the company did it's interviews. If engineers either ran interviews or were fully equal in the decision process, closer to 5%, if engineers were second-class votes in the process, closer to 25%.
Sad_Bookkeeper_8228@reddit
Meta? Seriously? To me they mostly buy companies and produce functional garbage. Have you seen Meta ad Manager?
talldean@reddit
I've written part of it, or *rewritten* to get more than a 2x performance gain about seven years ago, because it was slow as dogshit.
I know the engineers who were there before me, and don't blame any of them for performance issues, or the UI.
Highest level, I think the organizational rewards were perhaps misaligned compared to user needs, but I'm an IC, and not an ads lead. I couldda got more than 2x but chose to go code golf elsewhere internally.
chikamakaleyley@reddit
i was prob that 15% for a large chunk in the middle of my career. 18YOE
self taught, wasn't really career focused, and really just enjoying life in SF.
Thought very highly of myself in the first few yrs, but I think that was accruate
Thought the same in the middle chunk, that was mostly lazy, but also comfort, also not realizing how important it was to pay attention to the rest of tech outside of the office
Now, i'd like to think that I'm above avg, I don't know if that's modest but... I know what i'm capable of, I know what value and exp i bring, yet i'm always fully aware that I'm surrounded by a lot of talented devs. That's a great thing. My career is my own and I don't really compare where i'm at to where i prob should be at.
PracticallyPerfcet@reddit
About 50% are chucklefucks
Familiar_Branch_3349@reddit
i'd say around 20% in my experience
CakeBrilliant7037@reddit
chucklefucks" is a term i haven't heard in a while
lIllIlIIIlIIIIlIlIll@reddit
I'd say there's 4 developers I've worked with who I genuinely believe were bad developers. I could tell they were trying but they're just weren't any good.
Now, to be fair, my experience with them is a snapshot of their career, a brief window on a specific project over a series of tasks. Is this reflective of their overall ability? I don't think so. I think project fit definitely matters a lot and in another project/team they might be perfectly fine developers. That being said, a good developer can be a good developer on any project. So I think I can confidently say they weren't good developers.
But even for that statement, they weren't good developers at that point in time. They could develop their abilities and mindset into becoming good developers. Nobody's static.
So, I think a better way to frame the question is, what percentage of my coworkers are bad at this point in time? I'd say 15% is a good estimate.
CrouchingJaguar@reddit
You sound like a very level-headed person, I imagine you are a great person to work with.
kbn_@reddit
I’ve done this type of analysis at various companies. With the extreme caveat that measuring engineer quality by objective means is functionally impossible, and so all we have are terrible proxy metrics like lines of code and tickets closed… the results tend to be very consistent in magnitude and direction.
Best illustrated with an example. At one company, across an org of about 1000, one very specific team of just under 10 engineers was producing more code than the rest of the org combined. It was better quality too (fewer bugs, fewer incidents, reliable feature delivery, etc). But think about that: 10 engineers produced more than 990. And this ratio has been consistent throughout my career across companies.
So yeah, most engineers are sadly not very good. Even of those that are good, they lag significantly behind the top tier. The distribution is absolutely not Normal.
GongtingLover@reddit
Sometimes it's easy to judge. I know devs who were good in some situations but not the best in others.
Onedome@reddit
It’s about 95% that are dead weights. Permanently stuck at the copy and paste level, asking the good engineers for help and getting promoted for nonsense reasons. Titles mean very little in the SWE world now.
DoctorSchwifty@reddit
How do we know you aren't a shitty dev who isn't aware he's shitty?
Individual-Praline20@reddit
It greatly depends, from workplace to workplace… My last two ones were having like 85% very competent people, now in the current one, it’s more like 20%. 🤷
08148694@reddit
I don’t like to call people “bad”
There’s plenty of people earlier on in the running Kruger curve than they think they are though
RandomLettersJDIKVE@reddit
Agreed. I'm deeply suspicious of the quality of those who think they're better than 70% of engineers. That's pretty classic Dunning-Kruger.
VolkRiot@reddit
Im in SV where the salaries are top of the batch. I would say maybe about 20% are just weaker or have no initiative to do anything not explicitly assigned, but generally most are capable of writing code and reasoning about it so they will eventually end up senior ICs, but few will move any higher than that.
kaizenkaos@reddit
I'm the last surviving developer on my team. I think I'm an average engineer.
fuckoholic@reddit (OP)
Hire a new born or an old lady and you're a rockstar developer. Put that on your resume! Did 100% of the work etc etc
arstarsta@reddit
It's very company dependent. Have seen 0/10 on one company to 4/8 in another.
I have worked in a bank and there most seems hard working but not the brightest engineers.
Bricktop72@reddit
What do you think the responsibility of an engineer is?
Hog_enthusiast@reddit
15-20% are good or amazing. 15% are awful (which is mostly laziness, not a lack of skill or intelligence). The rest are good enough.
Pale_Height_1251@reddit
Probably over half are straight up bad.
Logical_Newspaper_52@reddit
it’s always 15%
VictoryMotel@reddit
I saw someone here with a heavily upvoted post who talked about the custom stuff they did. It turned out they had 30 years of experience and didn't know that there was more than a bubble sort and had implemented their own tree sort thinking they invented something new and it was linear time. They didn't know C had a sort function and they didn't know what log algorithm time was.
drahgon@reddit
Over 80%
SellGameRent@reddit
I think good managers will intentionally keep them around so they can avoid being forced to layoff high performers
vocal-avocado@reddit
That definitely plays a role. Losing headcount is “forever”, so managers will only do it when they have absolutely no other choice - and then it’s good for them to have some cannon fodder.
tmclaugh@reddit
I’ve found it depends on a few factors but tech company versus non-tech company has been a major factor. Non-tech companies seem to have a higher percentage of bad.
One difference between the two is at a tech company Engineering is a profit center while at non-tech companies they’re often regarded as a cost center. And as a cost center the pay is not as good. Due to pay issues I’ve seen engineers who have been promoted beyond their actual skill set in order to bump their pay ceiling. If that becomes common it starts a death spiral in employee talent because the new bar for a role becomes lower which in turn affects the expectations of the roles above and below it.
I once joined a team that I would thought would be incredibly strong because have the team was half post-senior. I was very wrong. And worse, I was expected to operate at a lower level.
thro_redd@reddit
Out of the 37 people I’ve worked with on my teams throughout my career directly, only one of them I have legitimately questioned how they got hired (they are on pip now so not surprised).
But yea I have lucked out and worked with some great engineers!
Southern-Reveal5111@reddit
Out of 20 people in my team, only 2 are really bad. Others are mediocre engineers. Around 3 are considered as top by management. I am not sure about their engineering skills, but they have excellent political skills.
createthiscom@reddit
Depends on how hard you spank them.
vocal-avocado@reddit
Oh yes
FutureGrassToucher@reddit
Somewhat of a side discussion, but im a software engineer doing a masters program in data science/ML and i HEAVILY limit the amount of AI I allow myself to use for assignments and projects.
My classmates baffle me how little they care. One does all the hw the first night its assigned by copy pasting the hw document into claude and repeating until it gets an A or a B. If this is who im competing against for work I feel less stressed.
arekxv@reddit
I met A LOT of those. Story always ends the same way, they don't deliver or constantly say something else is a problem, and they leave or get fired.
Once you see them best course of action is to stay clear and not pick up their mistakes.
SomeoneInQld@reddit
Or promoted to management;)
anglophile20@reddit
I’ve always been a weaker engineer. I’m a slow processor so it can be hard to get up to speed as fast as others can, or to figure out how to implement something. In reviews I usually get praise for good communication, team morale building, keeping people engaged and on topic, etc. I am sure that there are plenty of people who have worked with me who would call me a bad engineer. I’ve had to level up to meet increasing expectations….. it’s going better as I’ve had more time to be in our space and learn the patterns, and with Claude I can ask those things im #afraidtoask which is helpful
Maturion@reddit
From my own experience, I'd say 5-10% are really bad, and another 10-20% are moderately bad. I've seen relatively few devs that are really bad. But of those, most were really hopeless cases where I saw absolutely zero improvement (or even any potential for improvement) over time. These people usually stay only because there is somebody on a higher level protecting them.
Of the moderately bad ones I've worked with, at least half of them are bad not because they can't do any better, but because they've seen they can get away with low effort. Often that is due to management either not caring or management wearing down devs who simply resign without quitting.
jasfour04@reddit
Like 80%
DeterminedQuokka@reddit
I think a very small percentage are actually bad maybe like 2%.
I think a much larger percentage are bad at their jobs like probably 30%.
Usually for lots of reasons
And other stuff.
Esseratecades@reddit
Like 60%.
Bootcamps, the wave of self-taught engineers, upper-management's inability to conceive of quality control, and the never ending attempts to unemploy our entire industry has flooded the industry with new engineers who suck, and old engineers who've lost motivation. Both of which are then used to justify lowering the quality bar, because "nobody can be that good anyway", which only makes the problem worse.
diablo1128@reddit
This has been my experience as well. In my 15 YOE I don't think I've ever met somebody that was actually bad to the point they couldn't do the job. Granted I don't work at some tech company. I worked on safety critical medical devices, think dialysis machines, so were not getting the top end candidates applying to open roles.
I would also add the idea of "bad" is probably subjective at some level. I'm sure most SWEs working at actual tech companies would call 99% of the SWEs, including myself, bad SWEs. The truth is standards are just higher at places like Google then it is at companies making safety critical medical devices.
pirateofitaly@reddit
At my last job it was 99.99% (huge fortune 50). Now it’s like <1% (and it’s probably me) at a much smaller place
no-sleep-only-code@reddit
Probably 60-70% if I’m being totally honest. It’s rough out there.
Shinobi_WayOfTomoe@reddit
I think this depends on what company you’re at. I’m at one of the big giants and the vast majority of the people I’ve worked with are pretty decent at their job.
Hziak@reddit
It’s all relative. Where I work now, I’d say by their metric, it’s about 40/60 good to bad. Those same devs where I worked just before this? 0/100… and if we took those devs and made them contribute to the Linux kernel project, we’d all look like children mashing keys…
I’d say most of the industry is steaming hot garbage objectively, but it really depends. most of us are steaming hot garbage to someone…
Agent7619@reddit
100% on any given day. (Including myself.) Some just have more days.
AllHailTheCATS@reddit
Post covid a huge number of people on the payroll are basically useless
Antique-Wrap-75@reddit
What does Covid has to do with it?
gtd_rad@reddit
Mass hiring due to huge stimulation across all fronts.
Antique-Wrap-75@reddit
Oh. Quality of a hire boils down to the screening process
Standard_Future_5055@reddit
Surge of employment?
throwaway0134hdj@reddit
Probably 80% are OKAY 10%-15% very bad and 10%-15% very good, and probably like 1% extremely bad and 1% extremely good.
Best engineers I’ve ever met with like the friendliest person you’ve ever met, willing to help you and explain steps, while also being incredibly smart. Those ppl are like 1% of devs. The worst ones of the polar opposite of that. Most just seems like the like solving problems, need a paycheck, and so-so social skills z
LoveSpiritual@reddit
At big companies, well over 50%. Startups is a different story, just not a lot of places to hide. More like 10-20%
Basic-Kale3169@reddit
50% could we let go and you wouldn’t feel anything 30% are good solid workers. 20% are top tier
gtd_rad@reddit
Our company was like 100 people and canned 50%. A lot of the useless people were project managers / paper pushers. Unfortunately they got rid of some of the useful engineers I wish we had kept but overall, were only slightly less productive in consideration to the ratio of number of people gone. If anything, it makes things more efficient.
Singularity-42@reddit
Most were kind of bad...
TeslaSubmarine@reddit
50/50 but we too fired them asap. Have only backfilled through offshore and 90% of our offshore are just glorified prompt engineers which will get replaced by business side vibe coders while actual engineers review
thinkingtitan@reddit
As one of the bad engineers I am struggling
BaconSpinachPancakes@reddit
Im more generous since i understand most ppl treat it as a job and not their life. I’d say <10% I’ve worked with seemed completely clueless at any given time.
Foreign_Addition2844@reddit
Think about how dumb the average person is. Its the same for engineers.
OblongAndKneeless@reddit
Sometimes it depends on the code base. Old shitty code is difficult to grok and maintain. If you are not familiar with it, a good engineer can be swallowed into the tar pit. This is one place where AI is helpful in following work flows and showing the conditions necessary to get to places that would otherwise be daunting.
Altruistic_Pear747@reddit
Depends on the company. In most smaller companies you probably have a low 10% or 20% of dead weight you are able to carry around, in big companies you go up to 50% hiding in plain sight. Government or close to it....jesus if I say we have ONLY 80% that would be generous. Of almost 50 ppl in IT of under 300 total I think we have around 5 or 6 that get the job done, 8 or 9 if I count the young ones that I still have hope for and would love them to leave to get a better experience elsewhere.
Personally I made the mistake to switch after doing contract work for them for almost 2 decades. I knew it was bad. I didn't imagine it was THAT bad
Wide_Obligation4055@reddit
10 % maybe. Those that just can't really code or grasp tech and systems and those that are incapable of working with others or communicating, ie they hoard knowledge and create unmaintainable code.
utihnuli_jaganjac@reddit
80-85
zero1045@reddit
I think alot of it has to do with willingness to exert effort. I've met a few people now who do terrible things in the office but have the sleekest home lab you've ever seen.
That mixed with Devs who knowingly lied on their resume and are googling half the questions means I'm pitting it at about 1/4 competent and choose to show it. The fourth group is management, because I've seen good engineers become bad managers and good engineers be good managers who have to sacrifice the work to be good managers.
... I'm rambling it's end of day
Heavy-Commercial-323@reddit
When I was young I did a lot, then I got that it means jacks shit and now I do what is needed
Antique-Wrap-75@reddit
I’m an Engineering lead, still an avid programmer. Last week a 55 yo senior developer was BS’ing me, so I dove into his pull requests only to find, no tests and fuckwit functional programming with zero error handling. It defies logic. Bounced his changes, gave him a warning for this repeated behaviour. Next time they do it, I’m sure a 20 yo will be taking their place in the team or co pilot.
Entuaka@reddit
100%
MrMichaelJames@reddit
I don’t hire crap so none of my hires were bad. Others? Mostly horrible personalities that shouldn’t have been hired because they were weird.
Alternative-Wafer123@reddit
70% are basically useless, they can be get rid off without any impacts.
notAGreatIdeaForName@reddit
70%
TenchiSaWaDa@reddit
Early on. In junior roles maybe 50. Most moved to sales or less technical. As I got higher still a percentage of them but fir different factors beyond technical
Affectionate_Link175@reddit
80%
gokkai@reddit
Changes from company to company immensely, but there is usually a common ground in companies.
engineered_academic@reddit
How long have you been employed OP?
I would say the number drastically increased since software salaries went gangbusters, but in my experience bad is a spectrum from incompetent to malicious.
PentakilI@reddit
95% of people (including engineers) are useless in every org i’ve worked in
sleepyguy007@reddit
i've worked at 10-12 firms. 5 were startups, some pretty well known. i worked at non tech companies, mostly in the media industry as well in the tech part (streaming apps).
I want to say it was much worse in the non tech companies, probably could have been 30% were either less than a 1x engineer to some degree. so like maybe they were slow but contributed down to... they were actually making us slower.
at the actual tech companies quite a lot better standards wise, yeah some people were a bit slow but no one who was basically actively retarded
Routine_Internal_771@reddit
Thinking about this answer makes me sad.
Significantly more than 15%. An interview process is doing a TON of pre-filtering for you.
onFilm@reddit
Yes
phillythompson@reddit
This is a sub about how AI is bad , cmon now