If I want a prime ribeye steak; but only want to pay $3 for it, is there a "cow shortage" ?
The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie
61–70 of 152 posts
Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie
#62I 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…
Apprenticeships aren't a good answer either, though. They create too much of a caste system, and are very restricting. What if at 18 I don't actually know what I want to do? If I join an apprenticeship I'm learning one thing. What if I don't like that one thing? What if I get 5 years into an apprenticeship and realize I can't get to the level I want to be at? I have to start over from zero in another field? I don't l…
Many of the reasons you point to are the result of guilds, which were very territorial about their workers and markets. What I am proposing is for apprenticeships to be democratized by being made available for any employer willing to accept the wage subsidy. So if you decide after 5 years that engineering sucks, you can always find an apprenticeship elsewhere (assuming your former employer doesn't give you a dreadful reference)
Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie
#63I am a self-taught developer.
I think part of the reason is that "software development" job requirements have vastly expanded from 10-15 years ago. Speaking generally, a decent hirable engineer is now expected to not only be able to contribute full-stack (front and backend) but also do an amount of devops as well. The tools have become more specialized requiring greater experience to wield them. Nobody with less than 5 years exp is going to be at all productive and worth hiring IMO (note: that could include 4 years of freelancing while in college) Granted this is allowing very small teams to be highly productive. But you can't hire B-level or Jr. people at all.
So the experience level bar has been raised for the same position 10 years later.
Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie
#64Anyone want to move to Boise, ID for firmware positions? We're looking.
(I do not officially speak for my employer.)
Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie
#65The tech talent shortage is a lie when you don't know what tech talent actually looks like. It also doesn't exist nearly as strong as it does in SV. Remote is a solution, but not everyone knows how to run a company with remote employees. > And therein lies the problem: The real shortage isn’t of talented people; it’s of employers (and, by implication, society) who are willing or able to nurture talented people. When…
> When everyone has a runway of 18 months, spending the time and money to nurture talented people isn't feasible whatsoever. You need productive people on day 1.
Day productivity is a mirage. Nobody is productive on day 1 unless they were already somehow working with your organization and understand your processes[1], team dynamics, and whatnot.
> Yet, the author's company is full of white males in their 20's and 30's...
You must be seeing something on that page I am not. In fact, it looks more diverse to me than the typical Valley start-up.
> It sounds like the author wants other people, with other capital to invest in the hard part of what he's suggesting to be solved.
That is a huge leap to make from a few pictures on an about page.
> For the record, Google brings in 1,500 interns per year. That's a pretty significant investment in talented people who many not necessarily be productive...(hint: they take a lot of Stanford CS undergrads) of which many will eventually take full time jobs there when they graduate. I've tried to hire these people and they are extremely difficult to attract when the alternative is a cushy job at Google.
So, there's a shortage of Stanford CS grads who interned at Google. What about the hundreds of thousands of grads who didn't go to Stanford or intern at Google? How many of them have you interviewed?
[1] Of course, it is my firm belief that much of the angst in Valley hiring is that companies don't want to actually pay attention to things like process and organization and so try to hire a bunch of self-organizing rockstars to compensate.
Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie
#66The INS moat protects the high salaries of US based developers. There's more than enough talent, it's just waiting outside the gates of the coliseum.......
> The INS moat protects the high salaries of US based developers.
The INS ceased to exist in 2003.
If you want to say "US Immigration law" in general, just say that; if you want to blame the particular agency responsible for enforcing that law, you want to point to USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services).
Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie
#67I 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…
Public subsidized? Government spending on schools is enough; maybe too much. Tech can afford to train their workers, regardless.
> Government spending on schools is enough; maybe too much.
Are you kidding? Almost every public school I know of has to run fundraisers because government funding is not enough to last through the school year.
Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie
#68There 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 th…
I don't contest your math, but I think this suggests the experienced employee is under-priced.
It only seems that way because as a company you're amortizing the investment in education over 2 years, when as an individual the employee can amortize that investment over the effective life of the technology or how long he thinks the knowledge will benefit him, which should be way, way longer (since he can switch companies and sell himself as a battle-tested expert). So the $5000 premium does include a payoff for investing in education, but the payoff is spread out among many more years.
This is a fundamental economic problem in training employees in transferrable skills. It's the reason why companies rarely pay for employees' graduate degrees (even though it can be extremely tax efficient for them to do so), and in the case that they do, they include term requirements (e.g. you have to work for us for 4 years afterwards, otherwise repay a prorated portion).
Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie
#69> Few businesses give interns real coding assignments or support them adequately. Many can’t or won’t pay interns, which erects a privilege barrier by excluding anyone who doesn’t have savings to weather working for nothing for a few months. I'm a university student in a co-op CS program and most of my classmates, many with no previous programming experience, found good jobs that pay well where they get real experien…
(I'm assuming you are a Canadian student due to referring to the work as "Co-op")
In general, Canadian labour laws prohibit what are typically considered unpaid internships, although it varies slightly by province.[1][2] My understanding is that this is not the case across most of the United States.
[1]: http://www.labour.gov.on.ca/english/es/pubs/internships.php [2]: https://www.labour.gov.bc.ca/esb/igm/esa-part-1/igm-esa-s1-w...
Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie
#70I 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'…
> "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" In my experience having too many side projects can be perceived as a negative for some employers.
I hear you however that's shortsighted on part of the employer. As an employer, you have a projects/tasks which needs to be done, you set up estimates on how long it should take. If the employee does it within those estimates, what he/she does in their spare time should not matter at all.
Personally, I would love to hire a person who is doing side projects to keep learning. I feel very confident that they will be able to take care of the regular tasks assigned as part of the job.