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There is no talent shortage

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Re: There is no talent shortage

#31

Post by tikhonj »

zanny wrote: post #26
tikhonj wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The "talent shortage" is a lack of employable programmers period , not just a lack of exceptional programmers. And this is easy to see: everybody I know in my class (also Berkeley, coincidentally) has managed to get an internship or full time job without much effort. This includes both people with and without experience before college. I managed to get a couple of interesting offers despite never sending my…

You went to Berkeley. You get a somewhat different response from PR than someone like myself, who went to a crappy liberal arts school with no name in PA. They recognize the school, and expect that to be a substitute for skill - "oh he went to Ivy League / big state school, he must be a genius". Versus "I have never heard of that place, must be dumb not to go to an Ivy League". Anecdote: I like to think I can write f…

I'm actually still going to Berkeley :). The only reason I brought it up was because the allegorical students in the blog post also go there.

I have actually avoided HR. I've been too lazy to send out resumes, and I only really want to work at small startups (at least for now). All of the interesting offers I got had some concrete spark independent of my education: for example, I got one after doing well at a hackathon and another from an HN post (but largely thanks to my knowing Haskell and having some interesting projects on GitHub).

I think that if you don't mind not working for an established company, you will have to worry much less about your education (but, probably, more about your actual skills). Of course there are good startups and bad startups, but I've found the good ones to be very good not just from a technical standpoint but also from an employment standpoint.

Re: There is no talent shortage

#32

Post by k_kelly »

Then what does a talent shortage look like?

This article is arguing that the current situation is because companies wont employ below a minimal technical competence.

New, brand new, out of college only done programming in college programmers can expect massive starting salaries, the best equipment, and probably lunch and accommodation with a strong chance that they'll get a higher salary the year after.

Few companies require you to actually have used their technology or their architecture, if you have you might have already priced your way in to a job above the one been offered.

If the industry contracts as it surely will programmers are going to be scratching their heads at articles like this.

Re: There is no talent shortage

#34

Post by joeycfan »

Two things -

Donald Knuth said only one person in 50 has the brain wiring to do computer science. He didn't say programming, but it has been my experience that it applies there, too.

Did you notice that, programmer wise, the industry has not progressed to agriculture but is still practising hunting/gathering?

Re: There is no talent shortage

#35

Post by michaelt »

coryl wrote: post #16
dspeyer wrote: post #10

This article is playing word-games. When employers and economists talk about talent, they mean capability, regardless of whether it's natural or comes from hard work. Your dictionary may say "natural aptitude or skill", but that's irrelevant to the job market.

I hope most people know by now that "natural talent" isn't real. See books: Outliers, The Talent Code

Gladwell's theory, as I've heard it, is that mastery demands 10,000 hours of good quality practice.

When your developers cost $75 an hour including overheads, paying people for those 10,000 hours is an extremely costly proposition.

Re: There is no talent shortage

#36

Post by ericd »

apaitch wrote: post #22
viscanti wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly helps to already have X skill. There may be some positions where that's a non-negotiable requirement. For most, you only need to show some experience with something related to X skill, and a willingness to learn quickly. The barrier to entry for programming is very low. Anyone can get started and build things. They can put their code up on github and start displaying what they've learned. They need to ke…

It's totally understandable for a 10-man startup to not want to take in a relative newbie and have him/her drag down the team's productivity when they've got to ship in a month. However, for bigger companies (not necessarily giants like Google either) it may well be worth it to invest in a number of somewhat less experienced employees and grow them internally. The only problem, I suppose, would be selecting the right…

A large percentage of "the right people" will have already invested in learning programming and the innumerable related skills, because that's what they're interested in and have been interested in for a long time. Thus, being a bit older without much experience is a bad signal from a company's perspective. But if you learn aggressively on your own, it can be overcome. Don't expect to learn all the random skills on a company's dime, though - the salaries are too high to justify that.

Re: There is no talent shortage

#37

Post by rdl »

xiaoma wrote: post #13

It is a weird market. I've been job searching pretty hard for the past month in SF and the response has been a bit frustrating. I get tons of people reaching out to me after meeting me at tech meetups, etc, but I'd say over half of those leads end up cutting me at an HR filter before I can even get an interview! From what I understand it's due to two things-- at 34, I'm older than others going for junior positions. I…

If you're looking for a job, it would be worth putting your email address and a website or linkedin profile or something in your hn profile.

Re: There is no talent shortage

#38

Post by flywheel »

xiaoma wrote: post #13

It is a weird market. I've been job searching pretty hard for the past month in SF and the response has been a bit frustrating. I get tons of people reaching out to me after meeting me at tech meetups, etc, but I'd say over half of those leads end up cutting me at an HR filter before I can even get an interview! From what I understand it's due to two things-- at 34, I'm older than others going for junior positions. I…

I wouldn't hire you either. At 34 with a year's experience at a tech start-up, you are not going to get hired when there are people at 34 with 14 years experience at tech start-ups. It's not just a job for some people, it's an obsession, and that is why they get hired. If you want to work in tech, you have to focus on it, stick with it. The people with little experience show it in their sub-standard work. I don't care how good you think you are, you are still going to make the same mistakes everyone else made at your experience level. Companies who want to succeed want experience. Stick with it, freelance and intern if you have to, but you need to start building a portfolio, a track record. If you can stick it out for a few more years getting whatever experience you can get, you'll start to see your luck changing. 5+ years experience is typically where it starts to get easier.

Re: There is no talent shortage

#39

Post by rdl »

juiceandjuice wrote: post #20
xiaoma wrote: post #13

It is a weird market. I've been job searching pretty hard for the past month in SF and the response has been a bit frustrating. I get tons of people reaching out to me after meeting me at tech meetups, etc, but I'd say over half of those leads end up cutting me at an HR filter before I can even get an interview! From what I understand it's due to two things-- at 34, I'm older than others going for junior positions. I…

You've been searching for a month, you've been getting interviews, even repeat interviews, and you are complaining? Not to make little of your situation, but I don't think you really have a whole lot to complain about, especially because any place with a real HR department is going to take at least a month to get you into a job. Also, SF is expensive, and if you are staying somewhere expensive in the city while tryin…

Any employer who can't hire you in a week start to finish either doesn't actually want you or is too defective to be worthwhile. Maybe two weeks if it's out of the area and you need to fly to visit them for the final round of interviews.

(the exception being for VP/COO at larger companies where a board would need to sign off)

Re: There is no talent shortage

#40

Post by xiaoma »

juiceandjuice wrote: post #20
xiaoma wrote: post #13

It is a weird market. I've been job searching pretty hard for the past month in SF and the response has been a bit frustrating. I get tons of people reaching out to me after meeting me at tech meetups, etc, but I'd say over half of those leads end up cutting me at an HR filter before I can even get an interview! From what I understand it's due to two things-- at 34, I'm older than others going for junior positions. I…

You've been searching for a month, you've been getting interviews, even repeat interviews, and you are complaining? Not to make little of your situation, but I don't think you really have a whole lot to complain about, especially because any place with a real HR department is going to take at least a month to get you into a job. Also, SF is expensive, and if you are staying somewhere expensive in the city while tryin…

I didn't mean to be complaining. It's just an unexpected outcome for me. I can't remember ever having to look for this long before. About half the work I've done has been under my own employ and 80% it has been in Taiwan or China. Truth be told, I've never dealt with a "real HR" department before!

I've got a $500/month place in Chinatown, and really haven't found anything near that price with English speaking landlords. It's not to the point of missing rent or anything that dramatic yet, but I have taken on some $11/hr writing and translation work via various freelancing sites as well as some similarly priced work on a rails project. It's the surest way I see of surviving long enough to beat the chicken and egg problem of getting relevant experience.

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