Ah, the old "shortage" "issue". More likely, there is no shortage - just a shortage of engineers willing to be paid the low wages most likely on offer at these companies
Low wages? Silicon valley engineers tend to be fairly highly paid...
If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?
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Re: If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?
#12Ah, the old "shortage" "issue". More likely, there is no shortage - just a shortage of engineers willing to be paid the low wages most likely on offer at these companies
In my experience it's not so much a shortage of people willing to work for peanuts but rather a shortage of "experts" whom the company doesn't have to train at all and will magically sit down in their desk and print money.
Every industry has their own version of the perfect employee but in tech, companies actually expect to get them.
Re: If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?
#13The article seems to be mostly about the UK, but from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree). There's also a lot of people who aren't that interested in it or bad at it but still manage to not get weeded out. Add that to the decades-old "CS != progra…
> from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree)
This sounds a lot like "sorry, we won't take you until you've been trained, but we're not willing to train you."
Re: If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?
#14It's interesting that this is an article about the UK rather than the US. I really enjoyed a recent Econtalk episode on "Learning by doing" that talked about labor markets:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm...
The example in the episode is about textile mills. For about 50 years after mills were mechanized, productivity in mills had gone up by a lot but employee wages didn't increase even though it was "skilled" labor. The reason (explained in the episode) is that because of a lack of standardization, employees couldn't transfer skills between firms, so they were unable to demand more for their skills on the labor market by shopping for a new employer.
There's no immediate connection to the article but I've been thinking about employees' ability to "shop" and I wonder if maybe these CS graduates would be employed if they had access to the US labor market.
Re: If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?
#15The article seems to be mostly about the UK, but from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree). There's also a lot of people who aren't that interested in it or bad at it but still manage to not get weeded out. Add that to the decades-old "CS != progra…
Umm... Of course they're graduating with no professional coding experience. The entire point is they don't have professional experience yet.
What the hell do you expect them to do? They have to start somewhere.
Do chemical companies refuse to hire newly graduated chemical engineers who don't have professional chemical engineering experience?
That doesn't even make sense.
Re: If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?
#16Well my education is in economics and, in general, the way to solve a 'shortage' in labour is to raise wages.
Of course, what they're really talking about is a shortage in engineers willing to do the job at the price they've specified, so they lobby the government to open up immigration to workers from abroad willing to work for less, while at the same time trying to push more and more kids into CS, so that the market will be over-saturated with workers and they'll be able to drive wages down to blue-collar levels...
Edit - guess I should answer the article more directly. There isn't a tech skills shortage. There's lots of tech workers. I personally know a bunch who are unemployed or in other fields. This article has yet more data on it. But the shortage is a useful scapegoat for the practices I described above.
Re: If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?
#171. Standards to pass university classes are lower than the standards to be worth a salary. 2. Accidentally hiring someone who can't produce is more expensive than passing on a good hire.
I don't think the standards are lower (certainly they weren't at Princeton) -- University standards may not perfectly align with the job market, perhaps?
Re: If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?
#18Re: If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?
#19Ah, the old "shortage" "issue". More likely, there is no shortage - just a shortage of engineers willing to be paid the low wages most likely on offer at these companies
Low wages? Silicon valley engineers tend to be fairly highly paid...
Silicon Valley is in the US. This article is about the UK.
Re: If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?
#20Ah, the old "shortage" "issue". More likely, there is no shortage - just a shortage of engineers willing to be paid the low wages most likely on offer at these companies
In my experience it's not so much a shortage of people willing to work for peanuts but rather a shortage of "experts" whom the company doesn't have to train at all and will magically sit down in their desk and print money. Every industry has their own version of the perfect employee but in tech, companies actually expect to get them.
The internet has made that a pernicious aspect of our culture that seems impossible to shake.
"Whatever you need, whatever you want, the perfect answer is out there, somewhere, and you can communicate instantly. You just need to know where to look. All the mountains are flat."