The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie • Hacker News Board

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#81

Post by stcredzero » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 7:02 PM UTC

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…

There's probably enough hysteresis and softness in the market, such that job markets that are pricing the wages too high will retain their error long enough to drive a lot of companies out of business that wouldn't have failed if wage levels were set perfectly.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#82

Post by freshhawk » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

trishume wrote: post #8

> 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…

That's definitely true, in the bubble you are currently in. This is an exceptional situation, not the norm. I do think it's a very successful model though, and it should be copied.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#83

Post by mpweiher » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

cynicalkane wrote: post #6

"The tech talent shortage is a lie... you just have to train people so there'll be no shortage several years from now." So there is a shortage. But clickbait gets clicks.

> "so there'll be no shortage several years from now"

is - present tense

will be - future tense

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#84

Post by qntty » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

NoCulturalFit wrote: post #17

eertami wrote: post #7

>part of the institution of privilege and power that has driven diversity from our ranks Satirical piece right? For my own well-being I'm gonna assume this is satire.

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.

can you explain what you mean by this?

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#85

Post by vonmoltke » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

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 whiteboard interview is setup to minimize false positives.

I have yet to see evidence that it actually does this. Everything I have seen so far is of the form, "$BIG_COMPANY does whiteboard interviews, $BIG_COMPANY hires few bad people, therefore whiteboard interviews minimize false positives". The problem is, that says nothing about the effect the whiteboard interview has on doing this. Would the rate change if it were removed? Would the change make the rate worse or better?

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#86

Post by jellicle » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 7:04 PM UTC

Median real wages for IT workers (and any subcategory you want to pick) in the USA are on a decline over the last fifteen years or so. This suggests that the field has a substantial surplus of workers.

Wages are decreasing. There's no shortage. Hasn't been one since the dot-com boom.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#87

Post by cortesoft » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 7:06 PM UTC

sbov wrote: post #73

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…

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.

Whether it is a problem or not can be debated, but it IS a shortage. If we don't say this is a shortage, then nothing ever would be, unless there is literally 0 supply of something. As long as there is at least 1 of something, there will always be at least SOME price you could pay to get it. In economics, a shortage means the price of something fails to rise to reach an equilibrium, which is EXACTLY this situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortage

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#88

Post by taurath » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 7:07 PM UTC

wellpast wrote: post #20

I disagree with this article's thesis, that the industry is incorrectly framing the talent problem. Whether people are talent or have talent is philosophical; the truth of the matter is that it is really hard to find software practitioners that can come in and do the job and do it well. The problem, IMO, is that we don't have a good and clear understanding of what is the professional skill set. Even companies like Go…

It could also be that there are many paths to and definitions for the skillsets that make good professional workers. Even if you create a list of the most desirable features of a software developer there are infinite ways of actually getting those features and they will not even look the same for 2 people.

One person who could be driven to learn and improve themselves by sheer ego, and another by absolute anxiety from bad things happening in their lives and a need for security and understanding. Those people look quite different when they work, and respond very differently to the high pressure situations of an interview. In the end you'll end up trending towards the same people that are in charge of interviews, because you'll tend to want to work with people that match your expectations of what a productive professional looks like (which can sometimes be "diversity" itself, though usually with a lot of degrees).

The other problem is that people tend to stick with what they know through their careers, and be around similar people. Its a fact of life of any interviewing programmer that with the exact same job requirements you can completely bomb one interview and look like a saint in the next. This is something that isn't easily quantified, which pretty much goes against the whole point of software to begin with, creating quite an interesting problem.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#89

Post by trishume » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 7:07 PM UTC

_lex wrote: post #19

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 th…

This. The economics and incentives make more sense for individuals to train themselves. Whether that be through university or through side projects.

In fact I'm going to university and was taught this in "Comparative political economy of advanced industrial nations". Germany and Japan counter this effect through a culture of non-poaching whereas Anglo-saxon nations deal with it through lots of university education.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#90

Post by Silfen » Fri, Nov 13, 2015, 7:08 PM UTC

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…

I agree with the thrust of your argument. Pretty much no one gets job training from university, they get it when they start actually working.

There is a big problem, however, and it's only going to get worse. If all your training is in a specific industry, what happens when that job gets outsourced or automated away? I'm not sure I completely buy it, but there is a case to be made for generalist education as preparation for a changing world.