The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

This is an interesting topic to brew on. There would certainly be a lot of problems that would be tough to address using apprenticeship, but it's not like our current education system is lacking in problems.

I wonder, though, how apprentices would fair in competition with people having general education and degree focus. Fields require skills to change over time, and quite quickly now. I wonder if an apprentice would be stronger in the short-term and outpaced in the long-term.

Also, where does the wage subsidy you talk about come from? Would people be paying for their own apprenticeships? The government paying for some like public institutions?

Sorry if this is just oversight, but I haven't seen much discussion on HN of liability arising from termination of an employee. I'd guess (admittedly, no data here) that this is one of the major factors driving disemployment for marginal tech candidates (read: those whose qualifications are in doubt). Hiring someone you may soon need to fire is difficult enough, but probably not a dealbreaker. However, pair that with legal risk, especially arising from discrimination suits, and the expected value of your candidate turns deeply negative.

The discussion is muddied by treating "tech talent" as a meaningful grouping of people. It is a similar type of error as "STEM jobs", which includes both marine biologists and computer scientists even though they have wildly different experiences in the job market.

Some software jobs can be quickly learned by anyone with good programming experience. These are the kinds of "shortages" that can be reasonably solved by training existing software talent. There is a baseline amount of skill required but that level is low enough that it is at least plausible that you can expand the supply on a reasonable time horizon.

However, some high-demand software jobs require multiple years of experience and a high talent baseline to be an effective practitioner. The time required to develop these skills can exceed the life cycle of companies and products. These shortages are very real because there is no easy way to manufacture more of this talent on a time horizon that matters to anyone. Consequently, they tend to be self-trained in operational environments over several years. People with these skills tend to be paid atypically well, but you are really just shifting the shortage around between different companies. High wages per se does not manufacture a talent pool.

In software, we have talent shortages that could be addressed by training and we have talent shortages where the amount of time required to produce new talent is so high that it is almost never worth it for a company to make that investment. In practice, the latter case has been solved by people investing in themselves over several years (usually because they have a keen interest) to develop the skill but in many areas this is definitely not producing enough talent to meet demand.

These are problems that must be solved differently. Lumping them together muddies the conversation as people talk past each other.

I always focus on hiring for Attitude and Aptitude.

If you have a bad attitude I can't help you with that.

If you have aptitude and a good attitude we can teach you whatever you need to learn to be successful on our team.

What I know about every person ever is they came into this world with little to no knowledge, they had to learn to eat, walk, talk, run, etc. If we focus too much on a candidate's experience and background we miss out on their potential future value.

One of the greatest employees I ever hired was a pool man, literally cleaning pools for a living when I met him. He was a hobbyist computer hacker and I asked him how he'd like to do that full time. He learned and turned out to be an amazing asset to my team. I have many stories like this over my long career. It's not about the school you went to, or what social circles you hang out in, in the end it's about your passion and ability to learn and get shit done.

All this said I do worry that our systems are not creating the space for people to find their passion while they hone their skills and find a career path.

Anecdotally, we switched up our process some in an attempt to be able to hire faster (mostly by avoiding false negatives). It used to be standard whiteboard style; we switched to a mix of that and more real-work style interviews. False positives went up pretty significantly, and even after shedding those the general quality was of hires was a bit lower.