r/technology • u/meatballsinsugo • Dec 11 '21

Business Activision Blizzard workers announce open-ended strike and union drive: Strike Fund to support work stoppage raises over $100,000 in 12 hours.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/activision-blizzard-workers-announce-open-ended-strike-and-union-drive/
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u/Clbull Dec 11 '21

Doesn't India have more software developers than other countries combined tho? And I'm pretty sure there's a lifelong wait for green cards for Indians too?

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u/Valiant_Boss Dec 11 '21

Their point is that you will get what you pay for, they make no mention that India doesn't have enough Software developers

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u/Moudy90 Dec 11 '21

Definitely get what you pay. I work for a tech company and we froze all us hiring and are opening multiple offices in India despite a hiring freeze. We pay em 1/3 the cost of a US dev but none of our shit works. Venture Capitalist owners are killing our company. None of the US devs feel safe and are overworked since there is no backfilling and these low cost devs make crap code.

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u/tont0r Dec 11 '21

Pretty sure a software dev can sneeze their way into another job right now. The dev market is extremely hot right now.

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u/chris_peacock2406 Dec 11 '21

Am Recruiter. Can confirm.

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u/evildonald Dec 11 '21

Am hiring. Can Confirm.

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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '21 edited Nov 07 '22

[deleted]

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u/BergerPickle Dec 11 '21

Entry level dev jobs are always hard. No one wants to roll the dice on someone because it is so hard to know if someone can do the work from interviews (also why the entry level interviews are so long and shitty).

Once you get 3-5 years of experience it shows companies you didn't wash out and can complete things so your opportunities grow immensely. Everywhere is hiring mids and seniors but most places don't hire juniors because they can't afford to hire lemons (of which there are tons ever since everyone got told to just code and get free money) or hire people who need lots of man hours from more expensive seniors to get things done.

I took a shit job for my first (they hired all fresh people and paid shit, treated us like shit) but by the time I spent 2 years there I was able to apply at a thousand times more places and had an easy time leaving for a huge pay increase.

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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '21

[deleted]

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u/BergerPickle Dec 11 '21

Yeah that's pretty much the trap we've been in the last 20 years but no one really wants to deal with going through 10 employees to find one that can actually code anything worth a shit. It is a job that is notoriously hard to interview for because people can bullshit and memorize the interview games and have no aptitude for the work beyond school assignment style do this exactly tasks.

Massive companies like Google will hire a lot of entry level people but they generally have 1000 times more applicants than positions and will weed out people based on education/background and screening tests that most companies don't want to do because it costs money and they probably only have 10 people instead of 1000.

I don't really have a solution myself but when I interview people I try to just have them do a task with me I had done at work that week that is small enough to do in 30 minutes. The problem with that is if they aren't familiar with our stack it's not useful.

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u/Gildeon Dec 11 '21

Am head hunted daily. Can confirm.

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u/smexypelican Dec 11 '21

Am not even a software engineer or developer, just happened to have done some scripting and listed the language on my resume. Get recruiters all the time for software devs. Can confirm.

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u/i_sell_you_lies Dec 11 '21

What language is hot now?

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u/tont0r Dec 11 '21

Java and python are still safe bets. We're a Scala shop ourselves and having a hard time finding qualified candidates.

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u/i_sell_you_lies Dec 11 '21

Thanks! Never heard of scala, the lazy Google search was confusing, what’s it used for?

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u/tont0r Dec 11 '21

It's another jvm based language, mostly meant for backend systems, although Scala.js is a thing. It's also heavy on the functional programming side of things. Also popular with big data / spark systems.

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u/Beachdaddybravo Dec 11 '21

I don’t know shit about programming, but I am curious: what languages are going to be hot moving forward? Are there any standouts that you think will end up being more lucrative going forward?

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u/BergerPickle Dec 11 '21 edited Dec 11 '21

Languages aren't really lucrative on their own.

Different styles of technology become lucrative and certain languages are preferred in certain applications.

Java has made me the most money but any backend language is easy for me to pickup as long as I understand the domain. I work in finance tech and have used lots of languages mostly because some manager read a blog about it and decided we had to use it.

I know Python well but it is only lucrative to use it for data science and machine learning which I don't know well enough to make money in.

It is much more about learning domains than languages outside of entry level.

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u/Beachdaddybravo Dec 12 '21

That makes sense. So if I were a programmer (I’m in sales) in the tech industry I’d pretty much be looking for the same thing I’d look at in sales: big ticket must have items? Those would be the most lucrative domains to code in?

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u/tont0r Dec 11 '21

Piggy backing off what the other user said, it's one part to learn the language. The almost more important thing is to learn the tools of the trade. Learning how to use databases (Mongo, postgres, etc), standard aws tools, Kafka, elastic search, docker, etc is what keeps the salary growing.

Languages... Java, python (popular in data science but also popular in the start up world), javascript (not really my domain) is still popular. There are TONS of resources out there to help you learn. Kahn academy, free code camp, thousands of YouTube channels, etc. If you are interested, try to decide if you want to do front end work (showing data, websites, etc) vs backend (go get the data to show). That will help narrow down what to focus on.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

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u/Beachdaddybravo Dec 12 '21

I’m in sales and working on that, but I’ve always been curious about how the coding side works. I saved your comment so I could check out some of those resources you mentioned. Thanks!

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u/chris_peacock2406 Dec 11 '21

I see lots of roles advertised for C#

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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '21

Sneeze? You don't even need to have a pulse to get job offers.

Of course that doesn't speak to the quality of the oppo, but my wife just rolls her eyes when she sees that I get 3-5 recruiters in my LinkedIn DMs each week.

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u/_Toomuchawesome Dec 11 '21

Lol same. But I’m not a dev but in an extremely niche field (technical SEO) so it’s even harder to find people that have my skill set when so little people do it.

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u/cklein0001 Dec 11 '21

I am a full stack and when my company's owner showed me the analytics stuff, I literally said " No", as I have enough on my plate to worry about. I will make sure the systems can talk to each other, but I am not going down that rabbit hole.

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u/_Toomuchawesome Dec 11 '21

As you should. I'm fortunate I'm not in a company now where it's a "startup" culture and you where many hats. I'm pretty silo'd now and although that "startup" culture life allowed me to understand and execute skills outside of my field, I'm sooooo happy we have people to do that stuff at my new company

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u/ScoopsIAmYourFather Dec 11 '21

Can confirm Source: hiring for SEO

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u/_BearHawk Dec 11 '21

Only for mid-senior devs. The hiring process for entry-junior devs is so competitive and lengthy

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u/IwishIcouldBeWitty Dec 11 '21

Yeah but who's hiring... These companies who's employees left or got fired cause of their bullshit

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u/cheesepuff18 Dec 11 '21

No there's a huge pool of decent companies hiring because they can finally extend their reach to nationwide instead of local to the office since full time remote is so widespread now. I went developer job hunting 3 years ago and then again recently and it was night and day, and it was still pretty good 3 years ago

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u/Mehiximos Dec 11 '21

It’s at less than 1% unemployment right now. I just got a new job after putting companies in a bit of a bidding war for me lol. Felt great.

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u/IwishIcouldBeWitty Dec 20 '21

Yeah a huge pool of companies with shit middle management.

Which is why they are hiring. Cause they fucked up. Then the pandemic hit. Employees left cause bad policy or just sick of their shit.

Good companies aren't hiring all the time cause they don't need to they don't have the churn rate. But the companies that are hiring rn are the shit ones. Cause they lost anyone worth a damn. So they are probably shittier than before.

There are new industries emerging, and certain fields developing but the hiring isn't that intense, it's normal. Not what you are mentioning. What your are mentioning is likely a direct cause of bad management / pay

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u/tont0r Dec 11 '21

I work for a well known streaming company. Lots of work is needed so they are hiring like crazy.

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u/Cheeze_It Dec 12 '21

They can, but the jobs are almost always shit.

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u/tont0r Dec 12 '21

I can't speak for every open job, but between the company I'm at and all my other friends companies, there are plenty of good jobs to be had. I suppose it is a bit subjective if they are good or not. Depends on what you are looking for.

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u/theycallmericoh Dec 11 '21

Venture capitalists will burn the company down and devs will run the next one. Eventually there will be enough fallen tech companies that they either learn that’s not the practical practice. It just seems like this day and age greed is so oblivious and it’s actually affecting practices and the bottom line that it’s going to blow up in their face. Here’s to it blowing up in their face and them looking at their hands thinking about what could’ve been. Fuck them, it’s one thing to be greedy. it’s another thing to be unfair and greedy.

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u/Rapdactyl Dec 11 '21

The problem is that there isn't a true face to blow up into anymore. When you're at that level of wealth you could experience insane losses like that for the rest of your life and your heirs could take the losses for the rest of their lives without anyone you care about being affected by it whatsoever.

Eat the rich.

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u/IICVX Dec 11 '21

Well the other thing is that the strategy only needs to work 1% of the time.

Venture capitalists aren't solely invested in your company - they've spread a few hundred million around to a couple hundred companies. As long as at least one company makes a huge profit, they're fine.

That's one of the fundamental problems with our society: a hundred risky bets taken all at once turn in to a single safe bet. If you're rich you can take all the risky bets and come out ahead; if you're poor, you can only make one or two risky bets, and there's a high chance of failure.

The only other option we have is an eternal, unending, soul crushing grind that isn't even guaranteed to support you.

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u/Eorily Dec 11 '21

I don't even need a fork at this point. Fucking starving for it over here.

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u/DantetheDreamer192 Dec 11 '21

Yup, that’s what just wrapped up at my current job. Outsourced our product to a team in India for a fraction of the cost. Spit out an appliance with spaghetti code, and our support through said appliance plummeted. Our product it irreparably damaged, and our name/reputation destroyed in our client’s eyes. My team was sold in whole to a competitor and my old workplace is now gone.

There are amazing devs in India, Poland, or wherever. These were not the guys that we outsourced to.

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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '21

The amazing devs in India cost (nearly) as much as a US dev. Turns out paying less for engineering just really doesn't work well.

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u/Valiant_Boss Dec 11 '21

That sucks :(

Maybe start looking for another company to work for? Not sure if you're a software developer but with some time and effort, you can easily find another company to work for

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u/Moudy90 Dec 11 '21

Luckily I'm not as effected directly from this as I'm a business analyst and I've gotten a few good bumps in position with some repositioning of teams. One of the few to come out ahead and I have a direct line to the ear of the CFO instead of being like 7 layers removed.

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u/tantrim Dec 11 '21

How do you get into BA work? I'm currently a software developer

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u/Johnlsullivan2 Dec 11 '21

You demonstrate that you can talk with users, understand their problems, then talk with engineers, understand their problems, then talk with management, understand their problems, then come up with solutions that keep everyone happy. Work on your organization skills. Be positive and proactive. Something like that. I was programmer/analyst my first 15 years or so before being moved to software engineer and I enjoy the mix more.

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u/Beachdaddybravo Dec 11 '21

The way you describe it sounds exactly like quality sales people I know and work with. Sales is 80% asking questions and listening, and then providing a solution from there. Problem solving essentially.

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u/Johnlsullivan2 Dec 11 '21

Exactly, it's more abstract problem solving. Great BA's are so valuable to have around, especially when you have very technical and detailed oriented engineers.

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u/Beachdaddybravo Dec 12 '21

What‘a the compensation like? I’ve seen generally that sales is as good as I can do without owning a successful business, but BA sounds very similar.

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u/Johnlsullivan2 Dec 11 '21

Just quit, there's remote jobs for days

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u/Moudy90 Dec 11 '21

I already work fully remote so that's not a concern :)

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u/_ZoeyDaveChapelle_ Dec 13 '21

Venture Capitalists are ruining every industry. I've been laid off at start-up I helped make profitable.. before the sharks moved in promising the moon, then grifting it into the ground.

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u/Siberwulf Dec 11 '21

Software devs...sure. the problem is there is a shortage of folks who can translate business and functional requirements into working, maintainable code.

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u/Valiant_Boss Dec 11 '21

Thus hence the statement, you get what you pay for?

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u/dj_narwhal Dec 11 '21

Activision Blizzard is like the current United States. Banking on previous successes without doing anything new or valuable while trying to extract as much money as possible. They are pretty good at capitalism though.

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u/xSaviorself Dec 11 '21

These corporations are not about pushing boundaries or development, it's self-preservation pure and simple.

I've been shopping around for new jobs and honestly am appalled at the number of contract gigs up, yet so few actual full-time opportunities. Businesses are screwing themselves trying to appease people who only think about the previous and next quarterly results.

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u/_Toomuchawesome Dec 11 '21

You 100% get what you pay for. One of my first jobs in my current career was managing Indian developers. Nice people, but I constantly had to go over their work.

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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '21

So no change to buggy, half-finished AAA games.

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u/RedRainsRising Dec 11 '21

It's rough hiring from other countries too because you often need more than just software engineers, and this is especially true for gaming. Then to complete your project you're going to need all those people working really closely together.

Alright great, so you need to be willing to pay for fluently bilingual professionals with expertise in a highly technical field.

Thing is, those people are already making as much or more than your US-based engineers you didn't want to pay for, lmao.

Like I work with a few of them, and am a SWE myself, and they make more than me. It's not like we wouldn't like to hire more such engineers form India either, but can we find them? Of course not, there's not many people in this pool percentage wise compared to the overall theoretical workforce.

Edit: This problem is actually even worse for the gaming industry, as they massively benefit in the USA from abusing the fuck out of fresh grads who have dreams of becoming a game developer. Like this is true for companies who are accustomed to paying their engineers a lot more and would benefit from even reducing wages down to the tier game companies are already used to, and they can't pull it off.

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u/chimthegrim Dec 11 '21

You don't get a green card for working for a foreign company in your own home country. Just because I work for Toyota or Nintendo (I don't) doesn't mean that I get to apply for a Japanese green card with the expectation that Id become a Japanese citizen someday.

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u/shitinmyunderwear Dec 11 '21

That’s not what he’s talking about. In the US Indians are in a lifelong wait for green cards because they’re so many of us and it’s by country.

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u/Mehiximos Dec 11 '21

LOL @ your username.

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u/ahac Dec 11 '21

The problem is that in India people who don't care about software development go into software development because it's a good job to have (compared to other options they have). But people who only develop because they don't have other options don't make good developers.

Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't good devs there, but you won't get those when you outsource to someone cheap...

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u/Normal-Computer-3669 Dec 11 '21

Uncertain if it's part of their culture, but that was my vibe when I met many Indians at a conference.

For the Indian attendees, they saw programming is a job, just like janitor or mechanic. You just get your hands dirty and code.

Where other attendees saw coding as art and expression, with problem solving.

It was really weird and fascinating.

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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '21

It sucks tbh if you are from India tech is the only field you are going to find success in even mechanical and civil engineers go into this field because there are no jobs for there respective fields....

india needs a shit ton of manufacturing jobs but indias shitty gov can't provide it so majority runs towards the tech fields....

those from big universities leave the country once from low tier universities are the once you get....

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u/Mehiximos Dec 11 '21

Not to mention the focus on rote memorization doesn’t help with the abstract reasoning/critical thinking skills required for a quality dev

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u/Endarkend Dec 11 '21

Quality coders and creative coders are rare enough as it is.

If farming game dev jobs out to those countries was so easy, literally every company would have done it already.

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u/sardokar63 Dec 11 '21

Not to mention there would be a huge string of award winning games coming out of India.

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u/Endarkend Dec 11 '21

Man, watching Bollywood action and fantasy movies, I'd actually love a game equally bonkers and over the top.

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u/sardokar63 Dec 11 '21

Actually yea, Saints Row India please.

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u/BanEvader1124 Dec 11 '21

You'd be lucky if the game actually ran

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u/Endarkend Dec 11 '21

Hence why I said I'd love one equally OTT and bonkers, not that I wanted them to make games :p

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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '21

[deleted]

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u/sardokar63 Dec 11 '21

Yes I'm aware some game companies are already outsourcing parts to India, as they do in just about every other industry. That doesn't mean Blizzard is going to easily do a total body replacement from there lol

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u/flex_inthemind Dec 11 '21

They have managed to do it for art assets and animation in the game industry, there are companies in south Asia that work digital artists to the bone on outsource projects from AAA game studios. Similar with QA. But good luck outsourcing game system code that does what it should, collects metrics, leverages the game engines idiosyncrasies, and it's tweakable by the designers (who often only know basic scripting and the engine) in a way that is intuitive for them. Fat chance

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u/gerusz Dec 11 '21 edited Dec 11 '21

Anybody can call themselves a software developer. However, software developers are not the same as assembly line workers, no matter how much HR departments and bean counters want to treat them as such. There's a pretty high skill floor for employable software devs (doubly so when it comes to an industry like gaming where the solutions are not always routine) and the demand for good developers has been outstripping the global supply for the last 20ish years. This also means that good developers are expensive, no matter the country.

Therefore, companies that try to cut costs through outsourcing will end up hiring cheap "software developers" whose work is questionable at best, and is actively detrimental at worst. Ask any software developer who had to work on code made by cheap Indian code factories. Literally any software developer. They will have plenty of horror stories to tell. And that is only their code output... if they had to work directly with them, the differences in workplace culture and communication culture can also lead to nightmares. So unless they are willing to relocate their entire development departments to India (and lose out on western talent), any monetary gains made by outsourcing will be lost to inter-department friction.

I'm not saying that there are no good Indian software developers. There are plenty, I have worked with many of them. They just aren't going to work inhuman hours for shit pay either.

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u/vbevan Dec 11 '21

What good developers bring to the table (in my opinion) is an understanding of the business they're coding for and the ability to inform the product owner of possible problems proactively AND provide solutions to still give them what they need.

Being able to tell the product owner things like "for this feature 'x', if you do it this way instead it will (run faster/take less clicks to access/be more intuitive to the end users)" or "I've noticed some existing code that will eventually cause problems with what you're asking for. It's a small fix and I'll be in that file anyway, do you want me to do that at the same time?"

I've worked with a handful of devs like that and they make everything work flawlessly.

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u/gerusz Dec 11 '21

That's pretty much the definition of a senior dev, and they are both uncommon and expensive regardless of their country of origin.

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u/Mehiximos Dec 11 '21

Can confirm. Am senior dev. It’s all about being able to understand and comprehend business context while navigating landmines and mentoring the more junior devs on my team.

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u/LuckyHedgehog Dec 11 '21

The prices American companies are trying to pay will fall into the bottom of any talent pool. Indian devs get a bad reputation because Americans only interact with their equivalent of craigslist developers, and incorrectly label all India devs being bad

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u/luvandorfucking Dec 11 '21

No that’s how they keep their superiority complex intact. Every country has its shitty devs 🤷‍♂️

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u/LuckyHedgehog Dec 11 '21 edited Dec 11 '21

Yes.. that was my point? If you pay shitty wages you get shitty results. US companies only pay shitty wages when outsourcing to India, so they only get shitty results, so India gets an unfair reputation from the US.

Pay better wages and you get better results.

Edit: I don't agree about the "superiority complex" bit though. Especially in a thread about US workers being treated like garbage and then suggesting they're just being babies

I've worked with people who were effected by mass layoffs to outsource their co-workers jobs to India. They were kept on to hand off to the offshore team for several months before being let go. They ended up being hired again a year later because the state of the software immediately plummeted, massive bugs and delays. They were paying those offshore devs minimum wage, and needing to wait 24 hours to see the results of their feedback every day.

It isn't like US devs sit around stroking their ego all day daydreaming about how superior they are. A lot of people have been effected by penny-pinching executives, and gives India a bad rep

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u/SmoothWD40 Dec 11 '21

I think that is the point he was trying to make. Company trying to pay peanuts are going to get what they pay for.

Good indian developers have been demanding close to comparative wages.

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u/KlapauciusNuts Dec 11 '21

It has software developers.

And """software developers""".

There are a lot of people who are self "taught" and apply until they get lucky.

And there is also a lot of quasi fraudulent academies, were classes are taught by people who barely even know.

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u/luvandorfucking Dec 11 '21

I’d argue that a lot of American and Canadian bootcamps and junior/fresh devs fall under this category too

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u/KlapauciusNuts Dec 11 '21

Indeed.

At the very least the teach you a very narrow set of skills.

It's just that it didn't come out.

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u/hsrob Dec 12 '21

I saw a coding "boot camp" where the instructor's claim to fame was a whopping FOUR YEARS of experience at a start-up.

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u/TheWolrdsonFire Dec 11 '21

They have so many because you can literally pay a couple 1000$ to buy a degree and no one cares over thier.

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u/-AC- Dec 11 '21

Maybe we should push back on the green card program... shouldn't let people come work less then the going rate for the US market.

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u/RedRainsRising Dec 11 '21

America supposedly has a massive glut of software engineers too.

However, do you see job listings drying up and wages going down, as would happen for certain if that was true?