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Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
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Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#2In tech most managers and recruiters think there is a skills shortage. This is untrue. The truth is that companies do not want to pay market rates for people with the right skills
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#3In tech most managers and recruiters think there is a skills shortage. This is untrue. The truth is that companies do not want to pay market rates for people with the right skills
What are those people (with the right skills) currently doing instead of working in tech?
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#4The majority of commercial software writers are banging out poorly designed, fragile, inadequately tested and often borderline-unmaintainable code.
I feel that people have a kind of double-think about this; they suspect this is the case, but they still expect software to work properly.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#5Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#6Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems.
These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spreadsheet works.
Changes to the spreadsheets are not controlled in any manner, are not tracked in source control, but are often (thankfully) backed up by virtue of being saved on a network drive.
The business prefers spreadsheets over "real software" because they have complete control of it whereas their internal IT department are slow and expensive, and the resulting custom-coded products are often substandard (see zubairq's comment about paying market rate).
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#7In tech most managers and recruiters think there is a skills shortage. This is untrue. The truth is that companies do not want to pay market rates for people with the right skills
What are those people (with the right skills) currently doing instead of working in tech?
I assume he thinks the prices should rise until demand drops off, and at that equilibrium price we shouldn't say there's a shortage. Lots of people would like a rolex and don't have one, but nobody would say there's a rolex shortage.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#8Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems. These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spre…
A spreadsheet can mostly be maintained by the next person to come along. More complex systems often die when the person who knew them leaves. Plus all that stuff about crappy IT departments who don't act as if they exist to serve the actual purpose of the business.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#9In tech most managers and recruiters think there is a skills shortage. This is untrue. The truth is that companies do not want to pay market rates for people with the right skills
What are those people (with the right skills) currently doing instead of working in tech?
They are working in tech.
For someone else.
Re: Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?
#10That we are actually quite close to the development of a panoply of working rejuvenation therapies capable of significantly extending human life spans, were the right lines of research and development just more aggressively funded than is the case at present.