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Darpa: US Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

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Re: Darpa: US Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

#11

Post by mattdeboard »

econo_girl wrote: post #4

I think this really comes down to basic economics. Talking about a "shortage" of something is equivalent to saying the market isn't clearing: that there's more demand than supply. And having more demand than supply is equivalent to the price being too low. Salaries for developers, inflation-adjusted, have remained essentially the same since the dot-com boom. Meanwhile, salaries for bankers and consultants and lawyers…

There's an implicit "smart & passionate" qualifier on the title of the article. There's a shortage of smart and passionate geeks. It's not about cramming more people into the Computer Science pipeline. That will make absolutely no impact on the actual problem.

Re: Darpa: US Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

#12

Post by barista »

catch23 wrote: post #10
sp_ wrote: post #6

German, Romanian, Vietnamese-American (1st generation immigrant), Chinese-American (1st generation immigrant), Spanish, Iranian, French, Australian, South African, Indian, British, Russian. What's that? The nationalities of the people who sit in my hallway in the computer security department of one of the biggest software companies in the United States. OK, admittedly there also four or five true red-blooded American…

What's wrong with being international? My parents were once international geeks -- their company sponsored their green card and they've been living in the States for over 50 years. They both received their PhD's from US universities and work in research firms. They consider themselves more American than any other "true" red blooded American even though they weren't born here. I think the real problem is our immigrati…

Unfortunately reforming immigration policy is not a very popular issue and neither party has any intent to solve it. It's a much easier to get votes by saying we want to protect US jobs than to say we are protecting US interestes by making it a more attractive destination for international talent.

Re: Darpa: US Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

#13

Post by econo_girl »

mattdeboard wrote: post #11
econo_girl wrote: post #4

I think this really comes down to basic economics. Talking about a "shortage" of something is equivalent to saying the market isn't clearing: that there's more demand than supply. And having more demand than supply is equivalent to the price being too low. Salaries for developers, inflation-adjusted, have remained essentially the same since the dot-com boom. Meanwhile, salaries for bankers and consultants and lawyers…

There's an implicit "smart & passionate" qualifier on the title of the article. There's a shortage of smart and passionate geeks. It's not about cramming more people into the Computer Science pipeline. That will make absolutely no impact on the actual problem.

The principles of supply and demand apply just as much to the market for "smart and passionate labor" as "all labor". If demand exceeds supply, the price is too low.

Even if you assumed that the ability to program was purely the result of some genetic mutation, so that there were X programmers in the world and there could never ever be any more, there still wouldn't be a shortage if prices rose enough - because there would be less demand. If each programmer had to be paid twice as much, companies would hire fewer programmers, and there wouldn't be a shortage.

Re: Darpa: US Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

#14

Post by demian »

mattdeboard wrote: post #11
econo_girl wrote: post #4

I think this really comes down to basic economics. Talking about a "shortage" of something is equivalent to saying the market isn't clearing: that there's more demand than supply. And having more demand than supply is equivalent to the price being too low. Salaries for developers, inflation-adjusted, have remained essentially the same since the dot-com boom. Meanwhile, salaries for bankers and consultants and lawyers…

There's an implicit "smart & passionate" qualifier on the title of the article. There's a shortage of smart and passionate geeks. It's not about cramming more people into the Computer Science pipeline. That will make absolutely no impact on the actual problem.

You are assuming that most people follow their passion, disregarding the economic aspect.

PS: what about the smart and passionate people interested in cs that choose another career because of the perceived social and economic status?

Re: Darpa: US Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

#15

Post by [deleted] »

sp_ wrote: post #6

German, Romanian, Vietnamese-American (1st generation immigrant), Chinese-American (1st generation immigrant), Spanish, Iranian, French, Australian, South African, Indian, British, Russian. What's that? The nationalities of the people who sit in my hallway in the computer security department of one of the biggest software companies in the United States. OK, admittedly there also four or five true red-blooded American…

[deleted]

Re: Darpa: US Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

#16

Post by foob »

One of the things that made the US so strong in the last century was the influx of great scientists from Europe during the world wars. I know many brilliant people from other countries today who would love to become US citizens but in some cases it is difficult for them to even secure visas. Our academic culture might still be preferable to that in many other countries but if we continue to let it decay this won't be the case for long. I think that it would help solve the problem the article addresses and carry countless other benefits if we made citizenship very easy to obtain for people with intelligence that is far above average. Even some rule like any foreign national who graduated from college in the US in the top 5% of their class automatic gets the option of US citizenship would have a profoundly positive impact. It's just baffling to me that we close our borders to people who would clearly improve our country.

Re: Darpa: US Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

#17

Post by programminggeek »

I think that part of the problem is in how geeks are trained and what they work on. For example, think of all the software people go go to school, learn java, and then build big ugly enterprise bank, insurance, whatever software inside some megacorp that nobody cares about. Most end users of said software don't like it and have zero appreciation for the people who made it.

Outside of Silicon Valley being a geek isn't cool, being a geek just means that you're seen as tech support to friends and family. They appreciate it, but it's not like you're a doctor or a lawyer or pro athlete or something.

Also, not only do a lot of the jobs for developers kind of suck, the things we expect from geeks is horribly standardized. For example, outside of the startup community you have 3 primary camps - PHP, Java, and .NET. I think most jobs I've seen want developers who are stuck in one of those three camps and have lots of experience there so that they build more standard software on standard platforms.

Even PG wrote about that very phenomenon when he talked about how you didn't have to worry about a competitor whose job listings wanted Oracle. I see more job listings for PHP/JavaEE/.NET coders in a week than I've seen for Rails/Python/Lisp/Scala/Clojure in a year.

If we are turning developers into PHP/.NET/JavaEE glue coders I kind of doubt that young geeks would look up to us either. It's hard to be a uber geek when all you know is Java from college CS course and Java EE in your full time job. It's hard to make other people want to turn into uber geeks when they see their parents or friends' parents having boring corporate tech jobs they don't enjoy any more than the accountants or secretaries or managers do.

If as geeks we want more geeks, we have to do more super cool geeky stuff instead of being so dreadfully boring.

We need to do more things that are "magic" like iPhone, Facebook, Kinect, and StumbleUpon(which has become bizarrely popular on college campuses I've noticed) and less things that are super lame like building horrid software that people loathe using - Lotus Notes, SAP, etc...

Since when does programming have to feel like double entry accounting? Since when should the hiring process and the training process feel much the same as accounting or banking?

Geeks have gone from being seen as wizards to being seen as technical bean counters and paper pushers.

Re: Darpa: US Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

#18

Post by ww520 »

It really is simple economic at work here. When lawyers, doctors, investment bankers, or managers got paid much higher than engineers, why would smart native born Americans want to be engineers? Engineers are populated with smart people who don't have verbal fluency in English, i.e. smart first generation immigrants or smart foreigners.

Re: Darpa: US Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

#19

Post by ww520 »

mattdeboard wrote: post #11
econo_girl wrote: post #4

I think this really comes down to basic economics. Talking about a "shortage" of something is equivalent to saying the market isn't clearing: that there's more demand than supply. And having more demand than supply is equivalent to the price being too low. Salaries for developers, inflation-adjusted, have remained essentially the same since the dot-com boom. Meanwhile, salaries for bankers and consultants and lawyers…

There's an implicit "smart & passionate" qualifier on the title of the article. There's a shortage of smart and passionate geeks. It's not about cramming more people into the Computer Science pipeline. That will make absolutely no impact on the actual problem.

Whenever I read "smart & passionate," I see "smart & willing to work for less."

Re: Darpa: US Geek Shortage Is National Security Risk

#20

Post by lawtguy »

I think there's three reasons that there's a shortage of U.S. CS graduates:

1) Dot-com bust: Lots of people jumped into CS when it looked like being a programmer was a easy way to become a millionaire. When it became obvious that wasn't going to happen for most CS graduates and there was a glut of talent in the market, people switched to something else.

2) Outsourcing: Right on top of the dot-com bust was the trend towards outsourcing. There was lots of scary noise about how programmers were the next factory workers: gone overseas and never coming back.

3) H1-Bs: They hurt the supply of U.S. CS students by making wages lower which makes CS a less attractive major. (For the record, I'm pro immigration, but anti-H1-B. H1-B workers have very little ability to negotiate salary and companies like Tata abuse the H1-B system).

Issues #1 and #2 have more or less worked themselves out, so you'd expect that the current shortage will end as people start seeing CS as a good option again.

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