The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10557990

I have said it a million times before and I will say it as long as necessary to fix our employment-education conundrum: you do not learn how to work by sitting in class, you learn to work by going to work. We need publicly subsidized apprenticeships to replace the assumed role of the outrageously expensive 4 year college degree as the primary means of acquiring skills for the modern labor force.

There is a place for higher education - I must say so, for it is my employer - but it cannot be expected to be the sole gateway to the middle class. My grandfather was a combat engineer in WWII and quit his unenthusiastic GI Bill college career to start a successful restaurant instead. College doesn't work for everybody - working does.

I think the major disconnect here is in the industry's general inability to recognize ability through the standard interview processes.

On one hand you have the common whiteboard coding interviews popular among the big tech players (and much of the rest of the industry). I'm definitely biased here, as someone who is average/below average at these types of interviews but an above average (I hope) developer, but I don't think these interviews are very good indicators of on-the-job performance.

On the other hand you have many startups who won't even interview you if you don't have side projects or open source contributions to show. As someone who has side projects to show, I understand that most people do not, and it's unrealistic to expect everyone to.

The best way I can think of to predict how someone will perform is to have them do something relatively close to what they'd actually be doing, like going over some of your actual code with them and asking them to talk about what it's doing, and doing some pair programming with them on an actual computer.

Has anyone had success with something like that?

No, they keep leaving little crumbs of this here and there. I usually see it on Kotaku and Polygon but once in a while on Verge and Guardian.

It's propaganda by a thousand cuts. Eventually you'll just slowly buy into it. Or your dumb kids will.

There are strong economic disincentives to training employees in transferable skills: the second you do, their market value increases, which means that if you don't pay them more, they will be recruited by other companies willing to do so. So you wind up paying for both their education and an increased salary because you educated them. It's cheaper to just hire someone who's already educated.

For example, consider the employer who decides to pay 10,000 to train their employees when doing so will cause their employees' market salary to increase by 5000/year. Assuming the employee will stay with him for 2 years if he does the salary bump, he's effectively paying the employee $5000 (salary bump) + 10,000/2 (training) = $10,000/year extra, when he could just go to the market and hire someone who already has the skill for $5,000/year extra.

Going to the market may also be faster if the skill is both complex & modularized (so it doesn't require deep insight into the current code base). You'll also benefit from the experience of the person who's done it before and gained battle scars.

So instead of promoting a jr engineer and training them, it's often just cheaper and more efficient to hire a senior guy who's done it before.