How does anyone ever get their first programming job?

The question is personal. My daughter Kimberly recently graduated from a software boot camp, having acquired coding proficiency in several useful languages, along with practice in a number of popular development techniques. Now she’s doing what she’s supposed to be doing to make the proper connections and all.

But she’s caught in a well-known Catch 22: HR and hiring managers want applicants to have at least two years of experience under their belts, but to get two years of experience, someone first has to hire you.

I have to admit, the problem is personal for another reason: I’ve been part of the problem.

Every new hire is a risk. Unlike promotions or transfers, with new hires all you have to go on are interviews, which are highly unreliable (thanks to long-time correspondent Leo Heska for bringing the linked article to my attention), and test scores if you use them, only many of the tests used to screen job applicants are junk science at its worst.

Even the best programming schools have limits as to how close they can make classrooms and assignments to what their graduates will have to handle once hired. You know experienced applicants have been through this transition. Were they successful? You at least have a basis for having the conversation.

And if you insist on a few years of experience, you know even the worst of the bunch have had to cope with juggling responsibilities and dealing with personalities, along with the technical assignments themselves.

Did they cope well? You at least have a basis for this conversation, too.

But when you accept new graduates as applicants, all you know for sure is that the individual on the other side of your desk knows how to turn specifications into working code. Even the most promising will have to learn what are politely called “soft skills” after you hire them.

And “soft” is a poor description of these skills, because …

In addition to being an organization that delivers business results, every department in every business is also a society. New employees are immigrants who have to figure out how to live in it. Experienced applicants have been through this before. Trainees have not.

No question: Applicants looking for their first position are riskier hires than those who have a few years under their belts. When I was a hiring manager, I usually insisted on a few years of experience, too. I wasn’t willing to take the risk.

But … CIOs are complaining bitterly about a talent shortage. Whether it’s real is debatable — every time a company needs an Oracle DBA and refuses to consider otherwise excellent applicants whose experience is limited to MySQL, SQL Server, and DB2, the talent-shortage meter clicks up another notch, even though the talent shortage comes from a self-imposed refusal to consider highly qualified applicants.

But forget all that and accept the IT talent shortage at face value. Further, accept that entry-level applicants shouldn’t be considered part of the solution.

What we as an industry have just done is to make the talent shortage permanent. The experienced men and women who are worth hiring are all now employed. We won’t take a chance on new entrants to turn them into IT workforce members.

It isn’t quite fair to say nobody is hiring entry-level programmers. As an experiment I searched for developer positions on LinkedIn. In round numbers, perhaps one out of every hundred position descriptions indicated a willingness to hire newly graduated talent.

If only one percent of hires are inexperienced applicants, the IT workforce just isn’t going to grow very quickly.

In a completely different context, Elon Musk looked at the state of the electric car industry. He sees Tesla as being part of a larger ecosystem. To improve the health of that ecosystem he open-sourced a bunch of Tesla intellectual property. It wasn’t an act of altruism so much as it was enlightened self-interest.

Once upon a time, employers considered IT talent so valuable they were willing to train their own, and to accept a cadre of new graduates every year. Doing so helped build the industry while gaining highly loyal employees.

Those were kinder, gentler times for our industry. But I wonder: Maybe being kinder and gentler might also, in the long run, turn out to be more profitable as well.