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The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

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Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#111

Post by krisdol »

aianus wrote: post #14
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…

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.

I don't understand how, as a student in a (miraculously) high paying internship for (miraculously) 4+ years straight, you could save up the $30k-$100k needed in the US to pay off a degree after dealing with rent, food, insurance, and other bills for those years. Our dorms at UT Austin were nearly as much as rent nearby, and while rent was barely cheaper if you commute, there's the added cost of having to use a car. Regardless of commuter status, you'll need a car to get to work in most cities in this country, and if you stay on campus, the parking passes make up for the savings you had living in a dorm. Luckily our yearly tuition was "only" 7-8.5k per year throughout my education -- yes, it increased by 15% through my stay, which nothing compared to the rent increases caused by West Coast migrants driving up prices. Now that I'm in a "real city", the cost of tuition every is at least five times the amount I used to pay, and don't get me started on the other costs.

I was very fortunate in how quickly I was able to pay off my debt, but anyone who graduates without debt in the US today is either getting a lot of outside help or outright lying about how much help they're getting.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#112

Post by xlm1717 »

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.

Agreed. If apprenticeships were that good of an idea, tech companies wouldn't need a government subsidy to implement them.

What we are seeing is the rise of more coding "bootcamps", roughly semester-long courses to get someone started with coding. Maybe federal loans/grants can be allowed for these, but definitely not giving companies subsidies to train their workers.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#113

Post by cholantesh »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #95
Jormundir wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ask Tobias Lütke, founder of Shopify, if apprenticeship restricted him.

Presumably, he's not the only person to ever undertake an apprenticeship...

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#114

Post by jasode »

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…

>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 higher education - [...] - but it cannot be expected to be the sole gateway to the middle class.

Unfortunately, your apprenticeship idea does not address a key driver of why college institutions act as gatekeepers of desirable employers. It's not so much the "training" but more of the "signaling".[1]

As a thought experiment, let's pretend that the USA de-emphasizes college and promotes apprenticeships. The USA has roughly 3 million high school graduates every year. It's safe to say that most of them are not really interested in college purely for the "skills", or "well-rounded education" including Shakespeare and Calculus III. They'd rather just earn a middle-income salary right away and college is just that "hoop to jump through" to make it happen.

Well, businesses like Google, Ford Motor, Goldman Sachs, etc are not going to be interested in dealing directly with a vast sea of undifferentiated high school graduates to offer internships. They need a pre-selection process. Therefore, a new "clearinghouse" institution would naturally emerge in the marketplace to "evaluate" (test) and "filter" (rank) these hopeful apprentices. (Perhaps Donald Trump could create a spinoff business to do just that.)

Once the clearinghouse is in place, the hopeful candidates will want to demonstrate "talent/smarts/whatever" so they get the best internship offers. That will then lead to tutoring, coaching, preparation, etc and all those services cost money.

Because of how humans work, we'd just be replacing variable $FILTER="college" with $FILTER="clearinghouse+coaching". That new model may cost less overall to society because C+C doesn't spend 4 months dissecting Shakespeare but let's not kid ourselves that this new model is "more fair". A future complaint would be, "I took out a $20k to pay for clearinghouse coaching but instead of landing a coveted apprenticeship slot at Google Inc, I'm a barista at Starbucks. It sucks because The Whole Point of the apprenticeship system is to TRAIN me!"

You see, the core problem remains because companies don't want to "waste internship training" on poor candidates. Everybody wants the best of the best and apprenticeships don't fundamentally change that human desire.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#115

Post by wINfo »

> And between them, we have colleges that offer students educational groundwork in computer science but don’t want to transform into coding trade schools.

> Budding engineers are talented and eager to learn. And schools are right — their job is to educate, not to train. The duty of cultivating talent lies with employers.

The "tech talent shortage" is a result of the failure of colleges to actually deliver the vocational training services they advertise. Students invest huge sums of money and take on unsustainable student loan debt to pay colleges to "educate" them and adequately train them in a profession. Why is it unreasonable for employers to expect that colleges take on the burden of "making engineers"?

In a labor market you need to have a properly functioning supply and demand side to ensure that market is efficient. In our economy the demand side (students, employers) is highly functional, innovative and more creative than ever. Yet the supply side (colleges) is both backward and highly dysfunctional.

The college's reckless freewheeling management of the supply side of the market is leading to dangerous levels of student loan debt which is a huge risk to our entire financial system.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#116

Post by bryanlarsen »

burkaman wrote: post #101
bryanlarsen wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask Tobias Lütke, founder of Shopify, if apprenticeship restricted him.

It probably did restrict him, he still works in the industry of his apprenticeship. The point is, what if he realized two years in, or five years in, that he didn't want to be a programmer?

He finished his apprenticeship at a younger age than most people finish college. Switching fields would have been easy.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#117

Post by Alyoshi »

thedufer wrote: post #100
vonmoltke wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

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.

How long did you keep the new practices before reverting? Any company making this change could run into the issue of interviewers being well practiced at getting meaningful information out of whiteboard interviews and inexperienced at getting meaningful information out of real-work style interviews. Additionally, hiring successful whiteboard interviewees may actually select for people who are better at getting meaningful information out of whiteboard interviews and in turn perpetuate the relative effectiveness of solutions that are less effective in absolute. Which would bring us back to the problem being one of company culture. And this is a case where it is particularly expensive to fix it.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#118

Post by sokoloff »

vdnkh wrote: post #46

>Barriers To Entry 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 to…

At the same time, I've seen an awful lot of coders set out on a course of action that is easy, provided they first solve the generalized Halting Problem.

When I observe that the first thing they need to is solve the Halting Problem, they've never heard of it, but they're going to get cracking straight away on it...

I don't have a CS degree, technically. I have a Mech E degree with an awful lot of EE/CS coursework and work experience along the way. IME, companies aren't focused on the degree per-se, but on knowing that you have basic competence. My non-CS degree has never (knowingly) been an issue for me.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#119

Post by sokoloff »

jellicle wrote: post #86

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.

This has not been my personal experience as an employee nor as a hiring manager.

Re: The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

#120

Post by neogodless »

_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…

So on the one hand we have this general sense that "there aren't enough talented people to hire" but on the other hand we have this idea that "it's easier to hire someone talented than to train them ourselves." Can it be both?

Any time a business is saying they are having trouble hiring someone talented... maybe they just have to look inward and improve their own training processes.

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