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Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

nytimes.com

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Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#121

Post by jimbokun »

kabdib wrote: post #109
enko wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a core problem is "HR" departments with absolutely no understanding of the positions they are supposed to be hiring for, even for technology companies where technology is supposed to be a core competency. The only thing stopping me from calling out HR departments in general as a sign of organisational cancer, since I am yet to encounter one that pulls even a tenth of its weight, is that they tend to be compri…

++ on "HR doesn't understand the tech" I had a phone interview once where the person on the other side was (the hiring side) was trying to suss out my skills. "Do you know real-time object-oriented programming?" they asked. "Well, I know object-oriented programming, and I've done a lot of real time stuff, so: Sure." "No, I think you're trying to fool me. Please answer truthfully, do you know _real-time object-oriente…

I had a phone interview once where the person on the other side was (the hiring side) was trying to suss out my skills. "Do you know real-time object-oriented programming?" they asked.

I would be so tempted to reply "Do you?"

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#122

Post by codewright »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #81
moultano wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine that for a company with a runway measured in months, immediate skills might be more important than for a well established company.

I'm not sure about this. When I was at my startup, I hired a guy with no Django experience and minimal python. He made his first bug fix within 24 hours of showing up and was productive within a week. Maybe RoR has a much steeper learning curve, or maybe the people doing the hiring just don't get it.

>When I was at my startup, I hired a guy with no Django experience and minimal python. He made his first bug fix within 24 hours of showing up and was productive within a week.

I had the same experience with Django walking in with the same repertoire (minimal Python, no Django) back when I lived in NYC.

I don't do Django anymore, but it taught me a lot about trusting people to pick things up on the fly. Especially with the right person and environment.

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#123

Post by ucee054 »

cousin_it wrote: post #67
ucee054 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they tend to be comprised of the only cute girls in the whole company Why's that a reason not to fire the lot of them? You have a harridan making your life miserable with stupid policies but she looks cute ? You call that a good trade? You know companies could employ competent ladies in place of those cute ladies. Like a lady I knew who could write a whole network stack in assembler.

Would a good programmer (female or otherwise) want to work in HR instead of programming?

I was implying hiring them as programmers and shrinking the HR dept.

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#124

Post by rsheridan6 »

tokenadult wrote: post #62

From the article: "The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. 'It’s hard not to break out laughing,' says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. 'If th…

>If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.

Why would you use a mental ability test outside of the US, but not in the US? Is it illegal in the US or something?

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#125

Post by losvedir »

mseebach wrote: post #22
zmmmmm wrote: post #3

I see a similar problem even in software jobs. Employers frequently advertise for highly specific skill sets that almost nobody has. Then when nobody or only fraudulent people apply, they reject them all and claim a skills shortage. The problem seems to be a basic misconception about how transferable software skills are. An excellent programmer with no experience in Python will be out performing a poor Python program…

It's not just HR. I did an interview with a YC startup that obsessed over my lack of Rails experience. I have several years of industry relevant professional experience in Java, Python and PHP, but only ever dabbled in Ruby and Rails. Their offer (which did come through, grudgingly, through many repetitions of "so will you commit to teaching yourself rails before starting?" (No, I won't.) was quite a bit on the low e…

You're deluding yourself if you think you'd be as valuable to an early RoR-based company as a good dev with a year of Rails experience. I used RoR for my start-up because I was sick of PHP and wanted to learn Rails, and I feel immensely more productive now than I did when I began. And I'm a "quick learner", too.

Familiarity with Active Record, and making it reasonably performant, handling rails security issues, experience with the gem ecosystem, understanding the intricacies of the routing DSL, getting a handle on reasonable rspec/capybara or cucumber practices, ruby metaprogramming, knowing the Rails conventions and what it looks for automatically in controllers, views, and partials, and which methods are available where, knowing all the various helper methods rails provides for text processing, working with dates, and html tags, best practices integrating with AJAX, migrations, rack middleware, the asset pipeline, etc, etc. I've been working on our Rails app non-stop for 9 months now and every day I learn new stuff.

Long story short, for a start up which needs to iterate fast before it dies, acclimating a competent programmer to the "Rails Way of Life" just might not be worth it. Now, it's a completely different story if you have important domain specific knowledge, and the company is working on something especially innovative, but it seems like a lot of start-ups are scrambling for a pretty low-tech piece of the pie where "execution wins". My point is, Rails is surprisingly big, and while you can become useful in a matter of weeks, you can't become extremely productive with it for awhile longer.

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#126

Post by WildUtah »

rsheridan6 wrote: post #124
tokenadult wrote: post #62

From the article: "The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. 'It’s hard not to break out laughing,' says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. 'If th…

>If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test. Why would you use a mental ability test outside of the US, but not in the US? Is it illegal in the US or something?

Yes, using a general mental ability test (IQ type test) in hiring is illegal in the USA. Some protected groups do worse on average on such tests.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.#

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1991

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#127

Post by [deleted] »

rsheridan6 wrote: post #124
tokenadult wrote: post #62

From the article: "The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. 'It’s hard not to break out laughing,' says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. 'If th…

>If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test. Why would you use a mental ability test outside of the US, but not in the US? Is it illegal in the US or something?

[deleted]

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#128

Post by marknutter »

goostavos wrote: post #95
Soarez wrote: post #53

If an Entrepreneur can't pay for the resources needed to build/ensure a product/service at their market prices, he should and eventually will, close business. There is nothing wrong with that. That is the economical system in the works. If no one is willing to pay for his product/service at the price he needs to charge, it is because either people do not need it, or they can get it cheaper somewhere else. In business…

What does that mean for us though, the "skilled workers" when everything is being shipped overseas? A friend of mine who works as a systems engineer for Verizon said their dumping 30% of their US staff and shipping it to overseas. This seems to be the pattern (anecdotally) as of late for a lot of large companies. When there's someone with comparable skills on the other side of the world who will do your job for a fra…

It means the rest of the world will start to enjoy some of the success and luxuries we've had for the last 50 years while our standard of living will decline slightly. Doesn't seem like such a bad outcome to me.

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#129

Post by marknutter »

indiecore wrote: post #107
goostavos wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does that mean for us though, the "skilled workers" when everything is being shipped overseas? A friend of mine who works as a systems engineer for Verizon said their dumping 30% of their US staff and shipping it to overseas. This seems to be the pattern (anecdotally) as of late for a lot of large companies. When there's someone with comparable skills on the other side of the world who will do your job for a fra…

>what's to stop a race to the bottom? Absolutely nothing, welcome to one of the big problems of capitalism.

The "race to the bottom" benefits the consumer, don't forget. We will make less money in wages, but we will also have access to far cheaper goods and services because of increased productivity globally. It's not a big problem of capitalism that people in third world countries can pull themselves out of poverty, it's one of its great triumphs.

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#130

Post by stonemetal »

anigbrowl wrote: post #34

Part of Isbister’s pickiness, he says, comes from an avoidance of workers with experience in a “union-type job.” Isbister, after all, doesn’t abide by strict work rules and $30-an-hour salaries. At GenMet, the starting pay is $10 an hour. Those with an associate degree can make $15, which can rise to $18 an hour after several years of good performance. I'm not a fan of unions or work rules, but those are terrible wag…

Hire 5 guys in China? He literally can't pay more or the cost of doing business overseas wins. The golden arches has to pay more because the night manager can't live on a different continent.
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