41–50 of 152 posts
That's not the case so I don't think there's a real shortage.
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…
Tech can afford to train their workers, regardless.
Of course it's a lie. Like with many industries, worker 'shortages' only exist at the price level the corporations want to pay. So they artificially inflate supply to lower wages. Nothing new here.
I am not sure what you mean by 'want to pay'. It isn't like the companies that can't pay higher prices are rolling in profit. The companies that DO make a lot of money DO pay their engineers good wages. It is just that most companies tech workers don't add enough profit to afford their work. If a company will make $100k extra in profit a year from the work a developer does, but the worker capable of doing that costs…
But that doesn't mean that there's a shortage of workers. It means that that company isn't paying the market rate and thus will pull the good old H1B trick.
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…
The whole idea of you need to be well-rounded and take those $$ general ed courses is such a money grab. You want people to be able to speak, so let them take speech courses. I'm all for apprenticeships - you learn by doing - but will there be enough companies willing to participate?
The problem is that a bad hire is too expensive. What we need is a way to make it less expensive so hiring managers can take more risks.
I get a hundred emails a week from tech companies and head hunters who found some of my skills in a query in some database. I've sent resumes, had phone interviews, and taken technical tests.
But maybe 1 in 10,000 recruiter emails leads to a situation in which I feel a potential employer understands how "talented" I am.
Everything from skillset databases to bad recruiters, to arcane, useless technical interview questions makes me think we're doing this all wrong.
How many good jobs have good workers missed out on because everyone is so afraid of hiring the wrong person?
There's another group facing barriers to entry in the tech world: those without CS degrees. There are plenty of people without a CS degree who are talented, have natural aptitude, work hard, and can certainly program who get blasted during technical interviews trying to do the "CS fundamentals" dance. I have a ECE degree (with a focus in software), and while I looked for jobs it was and still is tough. And I don't mean OOP concepts or datastrucures. I mean trivia - whiteboard questions where the "correct" answer is Monte Carlo, or how to manipulate the call stack in C. 99% of entry-level jobs don't even get close to the depth of these concepts. I never learned them in school. I learned them on my own time, but only after flopping hard.
I know that knowledge of deeper concepts are important to becoming a well-rounded developer, but they're far from the skills needed to succeed in day-to-day development work. You can be an excellent developer and not know what P=NP even means. It's irrelevant.
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'…
Here's the thing about the whiteboard coding interviews:
A) There's a huge false negative rate. I.E. a lot of good engineers get turned down because of a bad whiteboard exercise.
B) The "big tech" companies know this and do not care. They have people who want to work there lined up out the door. The whiteboard interview is setup to minimize false positives.
C) The above argument can possibly be made in favor of the pair programming/"do what you'll actually be doing" type of interview and with even less false negatives, but frankly those interviews are harder and more time consuming on the interviewer(s). Additionally, the whiteboard panel gives 5-6 people time to meet and speak with the candidate instead of 1-2 which helps to mitigate the effects of any personal biases that might be present.
Tl;Dr - the whiteboard interviews actually work well when you have a giant pool of potentials and only optimize for minimizing false positives.
They are using PR to communicate to the public that there is a shortage, but in reality there is only a shortage of labor in the sense that employers are not offering enough for skilled labor to attract the unicorns they want. The only "shortage" that appears in a highly competitive market with rich labor supply is due to picky employers unwilling to be aggressive with talent acquisition. Try offering a million bucks a year for any given dev job, I guarantee people will be quitting their day jobs to fill your "shortage". The point is that companies aren't willing to give to employees. The selfishness which embodies corporations chasing profit is the root problem here. The lack of training and mediocre wages that companies offer is a symptom of that same issue. Cue people bitching about how "hiring is so hard" when really they should be complaining about "training people is so hard"-- yeah, hiring the perfect unicorn for your machine is harder than investing in someone to make them what you want.
"In fact, I’ve come to believe the so-called “talent shortage” is a lie — the real shortage is of companies that are willing to invest in talented people."
I have been saying this for quite some time. Nobody is willing to accept that employees are capital purchases which require an up-front investment of capital in the form of training time and training infrastructure in order to make having them mutually profitable. Instead, they expect to unbox "interchangeable" employee labor for free, then provide a (calibrated to be a low-ball) salary once they have the labor they want in hand.
There's more than enough talent, it's just waiting outside the gates of the coliseum.......
1. Mid-level engineers (I consider 2-5 years of experience) are very hard to find. 2. Entry/Junior engineers are much easier to find, but finding good ones[1] is still difficult. 3. I suspect it is the shortage that has caused the following discrepancy in applications: 100% of Program Manager respondents include a well-thought out cover letter, less than half of our software developer candidates do the same. With a frantic hiring of software developers (i.e. shortage), you don't need to put in so much effort and still find something.
[1] We consider good software developer candidates someone in the area or willing to relocate, who is sharp at coding and who has done some independent work.
Someone else commented about not having time to do independent work. In life, you have time or money. Is there someone out there like the protagonist in "The Pursuit of Happyness"? Yeah, probably. But you can't tell me that's the case for 90% of engineering candidates. If you love what you do, you find a way -- in fact, wild horses couldn't keep you away from building something.
It's not that there isn't a deep talent pool, it's just that the demand is deeper than the supply.