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STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

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Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

#31

Post by glesica »

chollida1 wrote: post #8

Interesting article. Whenever an article like this pops up the usual chorus is, there is no skill shortage, just a shortage at the price the employer is willing to pay. Sadly I've seen myself as someone on the hiring side of the table fall into a few of these traps listed in the article. A newly minted Phd, is one type of person that I've found myself having trouble hiring. Same with an newly minted Masters. The reas…

  > A newly minted Phd, is one type of person that I've found myself having trouble hiring. Same with an newly minted Masters.
The PhD issue makes some sense, a person who just spent two to four years becoming an expert in a narrow area of specialization may want to use that knowledge, and may not be all that much more valuable if you don't need it (especially since his or her other skills may not have "kept up").

However, for masters degrees I wonder if you're considering the fact that the degree (in many fields) can be seen as a "signal" [1]. Many masters programs are highly applied and, assuming a reasonable degree of rigor, more challenging than undergraduate programs. So, looked at in this way, wouldn't it make sense to use a masters degree to help narrow your pool down to people who can handle challenging work? In this case, you would pay more not for the additional knowledge, but for the free screening the degree provided.

Disclaimer: I'm getting a masters degree in CS (and already have one in econ, hehe), although from what I've seen, people don't have much trouble finding jobs, so...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

#32

Post by wil421 »

moron4hire wrote: post #13
wil421 wrote: post #4

I really dont see the STEM shortage that people are talking about. Last year I graduated from a local college and we had no shortage of STEM from Biology to Comp Science to Information Systems. We recently bought an engineering school full of students so next year our STEM foot print will be even larger. Lets be honest here sometimes its cheaper to use foreign labor and that is why these companies are doing it. I don…

"Lets be honest..." Yes, let's. I want Mark Zuckerburg to admit out loud that the reason he can't find qualified engineers is because he's not willing to pay. No more of this "they don't exist" lie. This, coupled with the Google/Apple/Intel/Adobe/etc. collusion to prevent salary negotiation wars, it's very clear: Silicon Valley companies aren't special anymore. They are now just like every other corporation in Americ…

Employees are now commodities. Other industries have realized this and now the tech sector is realizing it as well. Especially now that people are more computer literate than they were 20 years ago combined with globalization plus the internet. The pool is much bigger than yesterday.

Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

#33

Post by tomp »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #23
chollida1 wrote: post #8

Interesting article. Whenever an article like this pops up the usual chorus is, there is no skill shortage, just a shortage at the price the employer is willing to pay. Sadly I've seen myself as someone on the hiring side of the table fall into a few of these traps listed in the article. A newly minted Phd, is one type of person that I've found myself having trouble hiring. Same with an newly minted Masters. The reas…

> Too far along in their career can also be tough. Often this is due just to salary demands not fitting a junior role. Why are there not enough roles for senior devs? It's not like someone with ten years of experience wants to do the same thing over and over. It's like experience is undesirable in the tech industry.

No, the thing is that there are not enough "interesting" and "complex" things to do - industry doesn't usually need to scale an app to the size of WhatsApp or Twitter, and even when it does, a handful of senior people managing a team of junior devs usually suffice. So, experience usually isn't really a benefit (after 3-5 years of experience), and can be a detriment for the reason you mention (boredom with doing the same CRUD app over and over again).

Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

#34

Post by CognitiveLens »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #23
chollida1 wrote: post #8

Interesting article. Whenever an article like this pops up the usual chorus is, there is no skill shortage, just a shortage at the price the employer is willing to pay. Sadly I've seen myself as someone on the hiring side of the table fall into a few of these traps listed in the article. A newly minted Phd, is one type of person that I've found myself having trouble hiring. Same with an newly minted Masters. The reas…

> Too far along in their career can also be tough. Often this is due just to salary demands not fitting a junior role. Why are there not enough roles for senior devs? It's not like someone with ten years of experience wants to do the same thing over and over. It's like experience is undesirable in the tech industry.

In my somewhat limited experience, companies often treat 'senior devs' as team leads, building mentoring responsibilities into the role rather than treating them as 'highly skilled devs who work efficiently and do not require much oversight'.

For a mentoring structure, it is always more efficient to have more mentees than mentors, hence more junior roles than senior roles.

The 'senior' = 'superproductive' structure requires fewer employees overall, but also brings an element of risk since the work is more concentrated.

The net effect is fewer senior roles.

Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

#35

Post by jerf »

roberjo wrote: post #5

No one seems to want to discuss the idea that Yahoo! and Facebook were simply adhering to their illegal agreement to not poach talent from each other. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/15/silicon_valle...

That agreement doesn't seem to cover new talent. If the companies are screaming about lacking talent, that they could only acquire more engineers by hiring from each other would be positive evidence for that claim.

Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

#36

Post by tomp »

roberjo wrote: post #5

No one seems to want to discuss the idea that Yahoo! and Facebook were simply adhering to their illegal agreement to not poach talent from each other. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/15/silicon_valle...

> According to news reports, both Acton and Koum “took a year off to tour South America” not long before applying to work at Facebook, giving both a recent period of prolonged unemployment.

Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

#37

Post by cobookman »

not_paul_graham wrote: post #14

Very well written article and I can add some context being in the unhired category of engineers. I graduated from Georgia Tech sometime in the last couple of years with a 3.64 GPA. I know that GPA doesn't mean much but really at Georgia Tech they make you work for it like a dog. I have some projects on GitHub and well I thought companies would come knocking at my door. Boy was I mistaken. So I started applying late i…

Are you a citizen? As I've very rarely heard of a fortune 500 company sponsoring a new grad's visa.

I will mention that I've interviewed for Facebook in the past, and have found them to be very pretentious. The interview really made me not want to work for them.

Also as a Gatech student as well, did you primarily do on-campus interviews E.g: Career Buzz. As I've found Career Buzz to really suck at getting students jobs. You're talking like 50+ students interviewing for 1 job. And the interviewers are looking for that closet nerd most of the time.

I kind of have a philosophy that if its a good job, the company doesn't need to approach students. The students will approach them.

Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

#38

Post by flurie »

> However, in this era of e-mail, Skype, and many people working successfully in the technology business from a large distance (e.g. India or China), why exactly couldn’t the desperate “starving” technology companies offer him a job he could do from Texas?

I feel like there's a blindness by some STEM professionals to the fact that not all jobs can be done nearly anywhere, least of all those available to semiconductor engineers. I blame the acronym for bundling us all together unnecessarily.

Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

#39

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

moron4hire wrote: post #18
cletus wrote: post #11

This post is largely about discrimination and uses Brian Acton as a timely centerpiece. The truth is however more complex (IMHO): - Culture matters a lot in hiring. By this I mean a Stanford grad is much more likely to hire another Stanford grad in a field of qualified candidates. This isn't simply a form of nepotism as such. Two grads from the same college will share a larger common cultural base; - The culture the…

"Cultural fit" is just another name for racism, sexism, and ageism. Yeah, all of those things can be culture. Why should it be any less wrong to discriminate based on college attendance than on race? What else is cultural fit? "Sorry, you don't fit our culture of being heterosexual here." We're supposed to be adults. We're supposed to know how to get along and play nicely with others, regardless of how different we a…

And "cultural fit" can also be code for classism. Too bad for you that you didn't go to Stanford, Harvard, etc.

Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

#40

Post by coldcode »

wil421 wrote: post #32
moron4hire wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Lets be honest..." Yes, let's. I want Mark Zuckerburg to admit out loud that the reason he can't find qualified engineers is because he's not willing to pay. No more of this "they don't exist" lie. This, coupled with the Google/Apple/Intel/Adobe/etc. collusion to prevent salary negotiation wars, it's very clear: Silicon Valley companies aren't special anymore. They are now just like every other corporation in Americ…

Employees are now commodities. Other industries have realized this and now the tech sector is realizing it as well. Especially now that people are more computer literate than they were 20 years ago combined with globalization plus the internet. The pool is much bigger than yesterday.

Ah, no. Being computer literate is not the same as having skill in programming, QA, DB, UX or whatever you need. Being tall does not mean you can dominate in the NBA. I was the same size and weight as Michael Jordan but that doesn't translate into 6 NBA championships. If you need skill you have to pay for it, not just fill in the blanks with random people who work cheaper.
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