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The Programming Talent Myth (2015)

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Re: The Programming Talent Myth (2015)

#111

Post by humanrebar »

vinceguidry wrote: post #75
Kluny wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apprenticeship has been a thing as long as professions have existed. A common way to justify training an apprentice is to indenture them - they agree to work for you for a set number of years at a given wage, in exchange for training. Then you get professional organizations who negotiate on behalf of trainees/apprentices to make sure that the training wages are fair and the conditions aren't too onerous. Membership i…

Nobody's going to accept indentures in this day and age.

Pro athletes, medical residents, and certain teachers seem OK with it. College professors can't exactly take their tenure with them.

Re: The Programming Talent Myth (2015)

#112

Post by humanrebar »

Kluny wrote: post #101
vinceguidry wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's going to accept indentures in this day and age.

I would, for a chance to be trained in a technology that I don't know and have a steady job for 5 years or so.

I'm surprised that no employers even offer this as an option when hiring.

There might be some legal barriers to this problem like recovering the investments when the employee breaks the contract? Seems like some kind of insurance would help there, though.

Re: The Programming Talent Myth (2015)

#113

Post by chiefalchemist »

mkirklions wrote: post #57
chiefalchemist wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 Code is simply a tool. And dev tools are even further removed. Git is not problem solving. I'm certainly not going to belittle that skill. I have Git expert envy. However, hiring a problem solver for their experience with nearly irrelevant tools is comical. A red flag, but still comical.

> However, hiring a problem solver for their experience with nearly irrelevant tools is comical How far down the rabbithole does this go? I have never programmed iOS, but I'm completely positive I could program for iOS. 10 years of occasional programming, from python, to school projects, to database development, to android apps, to full stack react-native development. I'm confident that I can build an iOS app. Progra…

Oops. Sorry. I was speaking about something like Git, not a particular language tool.

Re: The Programming Talent Myth (2015)

#114

Post by humanrebar »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #97

> The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by 2020 there will be a 1.5 million programming job gap This makes me wonder 2 things 1) Why are we debating if we should keep the ~500k H1B visa holders around (of course we should) and 2) Why don't we just train the top 10% (in ability + willingness) of the ~13M unemployed people in this country?

a. There isn't really a gap. Employers are just slow to adjust to market rates for quality engineers.

b. If engineer salaries went up to the market clearing rate, certain business models that assume certain labor costs will become flawed

c. Who is going to pay for the training, especially in the case that all the training doesn't actually end up making the candidate any good at the job?

Re: The Programming Talent Myth (2015)

#115

Post by chiefalchemist »

Avshalom wrote: post #20
chiefalchemist wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Learnable. But problem solving doesn't come easy. Critical thinking is another tough nut to crack.

Is there any particular evidence that working programmers actually have either of those? Or are they just fuzzy-ass words we've made up to convince ourselves there's some hard barrier to the eventual reclassification of programming as "un-skilled labor"?

I can only speak anecdotally. I've seen someone look at a problem and break it down effortlessly, while the rest of the room plays catch up.

Re: The Programming Talent Myth (2015)

#116

Post by vinceguidry »

noonespecial wrote: post #82
vinceguidry wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yeah, that's what it means, right? If you pay me $50k per year and invest $20k of company resources to train me, and the second my training's up, I jump ship to a company promising to pay me $60k, wouldn't you feel ripped off? Nobody these days would turn down a $10k raise out of company loyalty. They might for other reasons, but loyalty is absolutely not one of them anymore.

The right thing to do is to start transitioning the $20k you were spending training the new guy into salary as he acquires the skills. Its stupid to spend the $20k, figure its "done" and then think you can just go on paying the $50k after the fact even though the employee is clearly now worth $70k. You want a $70k talent, you can either find one straight up or make one with some mix of lower salary + training until y…

You don't see what's wrong with this? Unreal.

If you hire someone for $50k, then train them with $20k, then give them a raise after the training is over for the $20k it takes to bring their comp up to market, you're out $90k. Accounting-wise, you just gifted the employee $20k on top of his comp.

Or you can just go out and hire for $70k and just be out $70k. This is what's already being done, shifting the cost of training and education onto the ones receiving the benefits of that training.

I'm trying hard to not post a diatribe about what's wrong with this kind of thinking and just point out the errors in reasoning that come from it, but this game of whack-a-mole is frustrating. You can't demand your employer to shoulder all the risks and grant unto you all the rewards. It's unethical and leads to underhanded dealing. We want a more professional labor marketplace, not one governed by promises and half-truths.

Re: The Programming Talent Myth (2015)

#117

Post by vinceguidry »

humanrebar wrote: post #112
Kluny wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would, for a chance to be trained in a technology that I don't know and have a steady job for 5 years or so.

I'm surprised that no employers even offer this as an option when hiring. There might be some legal barriers to this problem like recovering the investments when the employee breaks the contract? Seems like some kind of insurance would help there, though.

I asked my last employer about this and they said that no contract can bind an employee to a company. Any contract would be one-sided in favor of the employee. Seems obvious when you think about it. Indentured servitude is wrong.

Re: The Programming Talent Myth (2015)

#118

Post by humanrebar »

pixelperfect wrote: post #69

Does anyone else disagree with this article? There is talent for programming, and that talent is correlated with IQ. A person with average or below average IQ is very unlikely to excel as a programmer. There is a lot of academic literature to back this up.

I think innate intelligence (whether measured by IQ or more qualitatively) is a real thing. I think people implicitly live that way and organize society that way.

I also think it's also considered a faux pas to actually say as much. People tie respect, identity, and self worth into intelligence a lot. It's hard to say Kimberly is smarter than David without offending people. Let alone to say engineers are generally smarter than elevator operators (to pick a mostly extinct job).

To some degree, all the interview hazing and discussion about "programming talent" is all dancing around the West's inability to discuss intelligence quantitatively and dispassionately.

To be fair, historically there has been a lot of sexism, racism, bigotry, and pseudoscience tied up in the science of intelligence. I'm not sure how to get society to re-approach the subject in a scientific, productive, and beneficial way.

Re: The Programming Talent Myth (2015)

#119

Post by humanrebar »

d0lph wrote: post #49

I don't want to be mean but it looks like programming is both: Talent: 1. natural aptitude or skill. Passion: 2. strong and barely controllable emotion. ... * an intense desire or enthusiasm for something. ...

Couldn't passion be innate as well? If you hate cilantro, you certainly won't have a talent for eating cilantro.

(Also, passion in this context doesn't imply any sort of lack of control. You don't program in the "throes of passion".)

Re: The Programming Talent Myth (2015)

#120

Post by vinceguidry »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #94
vinceguidry wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-insurance against the risk of employee defections costing them time and money is exactly what employers are already doing, by not taking on the risk of educating and training employees .

You can hedge your bets in many different ways with different assumptions for likely outcomes. For example, if you think it likely that your employee won’t hang around for very long, then you can act by treating them as disposable. You could also choose to mitigate the risk of them leaving if you thought you could be successful at it. Both approaches are forms of self insurance, none of them are full proof, and they…

> You could also choose to mitigate the risk of them leaving if you thought you could be successful at it.

Yeah good luck with that.

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