There are tons of socioeconomic factors to consider, but I know a lot more fairly average IQ couples with 4 kids instead of two, and I know a lot more smart people who are either childfree or single than parents.
The ability to use birth control properly requires some intelligence.
The needs/career ambitions of a knowledge work career sometimes push aside the desire for a family.
Not trying to be down on people who have lots of kids! There's just tons of factors, some less obvious.
> To be fair aren't most dog walkers paid extremely little? (Below minimum wage even)
IDK what your source is on this one but the last time I got one it cost like $40 for a person to walk my dog and leave a little paper note that they pooped.
Our Android dev task: write a login/signup dialog. Shows that you have layout skills, networking skills, general Java skills, etc. Candidates either bomb it or nail it, no mis-hires yet after about two years. You get a real good sense of experience level, confidence, and "I like clean code" attitude.
I'm a fairly senior mobile/web dev (12 years full time, part time and hobbyist before) and the best part of my job is mentoring the juniors! I push hard for hiring people who are hungry and fun to work with, and it's paid my company dividends. You can spend a few months training a junior or a twice the time hiring a senior, and the juniors always bring good energy and open minds. It's not for every company but I have enjoyed it immensely.
Humanity needs to get radically better at funding startups without all the salesmanship
I swear to god, there needs to be a much, much better system to just incentivize people building useful-to-humanity inventions. So far we've tried: survival (got us fire and farming), traditional societies (got us guns and religion), and capitalism (ouch)
I used to write the best code :). Now it's meetings, checkin, answer questions, talk to QA and directors, maybe a PR if someone else didn't get it.
It sucks but I guess my job is to do all that dumb stuff so that my team can be 100% productive. They're awesome and don't deserve to have to go to meetings.
It seems to be working though, the team fucking cranks like never before. I do wish I could grab more than like one bug a week.
What location are you in? In my experience, Seattle and Boulder have open slots for junior devs that pay pretty okay, just show up and be ready to sling some code. Agree banking is the pits.
That said, it sounds like you have a pretty good gig. Might want to start shopping around.
Presume that the next dev to be hired will be the founder's slow nephew. Make sure none of the conditionals are too hard to read. No nested ternary operators, no bullshit variable names, no magic numbers. That's like rule 0 stuff. Past that I think it depends more on language and conventions and stuff.