Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 152 posts

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#71

Post by newjersey »

tosseraccount wrote: post #42
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #13

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…

Public subsidized? Government spending on schools is enough; maybe too much. Tech can afford to train their workers, regardless.

According to http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa...

Utah spent $6,555 per student per year in 2013. This isn't a lot. New York spends $19,818 per student per year. This is a lot and I'd say a lot of this money is misspent. A former teacher told me that because he raised his hand on a misbehaving student, he was assigned desk job of some kind where he'd just sign in and stay cooped up in a room all day. I don't think there is too much money in education as much as there is too much bureaucracy in education. The "support structure" is too damn big. We don't need so much administrative overhead. We do not need to spend millions on a sports stadium. We went too far on trying to get schools to create well-rounded individuals.

Now comes the unpopular bit: We need to scale back on "no child left behind" as well. No, not in the sense that George W Bush bill, in the sense that public school system does not have to educate every single child. No, not every school needs therapists and counselors and what not. We need smaller class sizes so teachers know the names of their students.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#72

Post by nfriedly »

rco8786 wrote: post #22
aianus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm, I don't know a single person who studied CS at Waterloo and graduated with $1 of debt. Most had cars and hefty savings accounts along with job offers by senior year.

My company aggressively hires interns and new grads out of Waterloo. I wish more CS programs would follow their model. For those that don't know, the CS program at Waterloo is 5 years long. 4 years for the traditional education but there's also a requirement that the student complete FIVE internships at different companies(thus the extra year). It's a great combination of learning and on the job training, and they ge…

University of Cincinnati has a very similar program (or, at least did ~5 years ago.)

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#73

Post by sbov »

cortesoft wrote: post #26
Mikeb85 wrote: post #16

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…

How is this a problem? It's like saying that there's a shortage of X because I have a business idea that won't work unless I can pay all my workers minimum wage.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#74

Post by arbitrage314 »

At my small, startup-ish company, we see great talent come through all the time. These are people who can write good code reasonably fast, and they are also people who simply love coding.

There seems to be no shortage of these people.

There does, however, seem to be a shortage of people like these who are willing to work for $100k and a small bit of equity, though, unless they make the mistake of valuing their stock options for way more than they're worth. In that case, we sometimes get them :).

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#75

Post by jellicle »

refurb wrote: post #57
Mikeb85 wrote: post #16

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 don't think that's true in the short run. If there are 4 people in the US who have the skills to do a job, but you need 8, you have a shortage. It doesn't matter how much you offer for the role, you only have 4 skilled workers. Of course in the long run, that doesn't hold true.

Is there any company in the U.S. that needs more tech workers than exist in the United States or can come to the United States to work? If not, your example is silly.

No company needs more than a tiny fraction of all the workers. Any company can fill its tiny fraction, if it wanted to, by simply increasing wages.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#76

Post by tosseraccount »

cesarbs wrote: post #67
tosseraccount wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cut down on administration costs.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#77

Post by jdmichal »

rco8786 wrote: post #47
jwoah12 wrote: post #15

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'…

Lots of companies do that, fwiw...though I agree that many companies may benefit from doing it more instead of blindly following the "big tech" whiteboard style. 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 wa…

> The "big tech" companies know this and do not care. They have people who want to work there lined up out the door.

Also importantly, the big companies seem to purposefully have a short memory to help counteract this. The chances you even interview in the same division are relatively low, much less with the same team. So why not let people try again and again and again? If they really are good, they'll eventually find a fit and get in.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#78

Post by jwoah12 »

rco8786 wrote: post #47
jwoah12 wrote: post #15

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'…

Lots of companies do that, fwiw...though I agree that many companies may benefit from doing it more instead of blindly following the "big tech" whiteboard style. 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 wa…

Totally agree that the aim is to minimize false positives. although I think you could devise the pair programming type interview to still allow for 1 hour chunks with many different people doing the sessions. A good phone screen should be able to filter out candidates who obviously don't have the foundation, and watching them code in a (semi)realistic environment can tease out things like resourcefulness, search IQ, etc. I find those things to be better indicators than the ability to find the distance between two nodes in a binary tree.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#79

Post by cortesoft »

tankerdude wrote: post #43
cortesoft wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So that specific company either doesn't hire, or hires for less compensation, if they can find it. 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.

If lots of companies that have a need can't fill that need at a price they can afford, that is by definition a shortage. Of course a company could hire a worker if they spent enough money; even in the middle of a famine, you can find food if you have enough money.

Are there a lot of engineers sitting around unemployed, not taking these jobs that are offered because they aren't paying enough? I don't think that is the case - if there were, those people would start taking those jobs at the lower pay.

Since this isn't the case, imagine what you say starts happening - those companies with openings raise the pay enough to find a candidate. Where do you think that person is coming from? Not a pool of unemployed engineers, but from a pool of engineers working at other companies. So now, that other company has an open position. You have not changed anything, just shifted the problem to another company.

Sure, an individual company can deal with a shortage by just paying more, but that doesn't fix the industry wide issue.

I know as engineers, the shortage is great for us. It drives up our wages, and it benefits me greatly. I make a lot more than most other industries. But that doesn't mean there isn't a shortage.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#80

Post by lowpro »

I'm not sure why exactly the author related the issue to racial and gender inequality, which is an issue, although I think it doesn't properly address the real price ledge issue. The real problem is you have to know someone to get in early, and not everyone has an in. Because there are less women and minorities, they have less people to help them get in, although being a white male, you still have to know someone to get in, there's just a higher likelihood you'll know someone.

When the industry looks at actual skills instead of who you know, the issue will correct itself.

Post reply on HN