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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

#51

Post by leobelle »

glesica wrote: post #31
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"). Howe…

A master's degree, assuming no experience, is more like a warning signal for someone who's stayed in academics too long and has no practical skill. It's like you're hiring a really expensive junior developer if they've never built real world software under business constraints that needed to like be bug free, and scalable. It's like the code written in graduate college gave a shit about memory use, file or network i/o performance, a good ui design, or like actually doing the thing it's supposed to. Sorry, ranting due to bad experience in the past.

The thing is, more education will enable a good developer to be even better. It's doesn't seem to help a struggling developer in any shape or form. Unfortunately sometimes I get the impression that people stay in school to address a problem that can't be addressed with more classroom time and end up doubling down on a field that maybe isn't right for them.

At the very least try to intern early on and or successfully help a popular open source project before graduate school.

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

#52

Post by MAGZine »

digita88 wrote: post #45
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…

In regards to a newly minted PhD, it invokes training someone who has spent 10+ years (or even their whole lives) in academia. Other items to look out for: - If the only projects they produced have been for academia or they have had a history of starting AND not finishing multiple side/non-academia projects - Little to no involvement in group work or publications (which makes me think - what have you been doing durin…

Their MSc thesis was probably the first that they wrote. After a while of paper writing, thesis writing, and even more paper/thesis reading and the like, I'd imagine that they got better.

What I'd worry about is if I saw NO improvement after 4-5 years. ;-)

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

#53

Post by rayiner »

CognitiveLens wrote: post #41
gallamine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their area of specialization doesn't really help in the role I'm hiring Perhaps you should instead consider that their specialization is a specific example of them applying themselves to a difficult new problem and solving it. It seems unlikely to be able to constantly hire people already experienced with what you're doing. Wouldn't you rather hire someone who's demonstrated an ability to learn something new and su…

Agreed. It's disappointing that there is a general skepticism of newly minted PhD's, since the degree generally involves extensive problem solving, independent thinking, self-organizing, commitment to a specified goal, receptiveness to feedback, critical eye of both one's own work and that of others, and the ability to communicate those ideas effectively. Those are powerful tools. If the candidate wants a job that ex…

Newly-minted PhD's should consider casting a wider net. At the company where I used to work in D.C., probably 1 in 5 of the staff was PhDs. Areas where the tech industry is more "meat space" than "net space" seem to have more PhDs per capita among the engineers.

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

#54

Post by digita88 »

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…

About the 3rd point, was there a common factor with those programmers/engineers in their CVs that prompted them a coding interview (which obviously they failed)?

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

#55

Post by edraferi »

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.

Employees are ALWAYS commodities. These issues are not new. This is exactly the same labor vs. capital struggle that has happened, well, forever.

Companies exist to run business processes that create money. Employees are an input to that process. Employers only care about employees to the extent that the employees help that process run efficiently.

Expect these things to become ever more apparent as more and more complex work becomes commoditized. Remember when you could make real money as a Wordpress developer? Now a person who wants a website (if they still want a website and not an Etsy / Amazon / Facebook / whatever presence) should really just sign up with Square Space. The market needs products & services... employees are a by product.

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

#56

Post by thelastpizza »

glesica wrote: post #31
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"). Howe…

This isn't always the case in CS. It is often more advantageous to your career to not take time off. Granted, someone can get a masters while working, but it's often for the purpose of a career change or promotion into a specific category of position.

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

#58

Post by groby_b »

raverbashing wrote: post #12

Well, it's really simple FB's (and Google's and Yahoo's) definition of talent is whoever passes their "quiz show" interview However, yes, you don't need to know the worse case complexity of shell sort for most tasks, especially at the beginning of a project where load demands are smaller.

Here's the odd thing - if I meet a candidate who knows about shellsort, I'd already be impressed. Many people I interview have trouble with much more basic concepts than that.

And of course, it is worth keeping in mind that when you hire an employee that hopefully at some point, the load demands are higher. And it's kind of awkward if your product hits rapid growth, but your engineers are currently busy learning about algorithmic efficiency.

Nobody sane asks about "worst-case efficiency of shell sort" unless you yourself suggest shell sort as an algorithm. But it is expected that you get the general idea of O notation, because it actually does matter for day-to-day work.

And, as a practical interview tip: It's perfectly OK to say "I don't know about this specific case" - just follow it up with "for most sorts, O(n^2) is an upper bound, so if I'd guess, I'd go with O(n^2).", or something like that. It tells the interviewer that you know general principles.

That's the big problem in most interviews - candidates treat it like a test, where there's just the right answer, and nothing else. It's not a test. It's an attempt to somehow, within an hour usually, find out what you know and how you think. Throw the interviewer a bone or two, and help them do that. Silence and short "I don't know" answers really just waste time for everybody.

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

#59

Post by tim333 »

digita88 wrote: post #45
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…

In regards to a newly minted PhD, it invokes training someone who has spent 10+ years (or even their whole lives) in academia. Other items to look out for: - If the only projects they produced have been for academia or they have had a history of starting AND not finishing multiple side/non-academia projects - Little to no involvement in group work or publications (which makes me think - what have you been doing durin…

> registered a domain name Dr back even before they started. Who the heck does that?

It's probably either do that or wait and find someone else has registered it

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

#60

Post by raverbashing »

groby_b wrote: post #58
raverbashing wrote: post #12

Well, it's really simple FB's (and Google's and Yahoo's) definition of talent is whoever passes their "quiz show" interview However, yes, you don't need to know the worse case complexity of shell sort for most tasks, especially at the beginning of a project where load demands are smaller.

Here's the odd thing - if I meet a candidate who knows about shellsort, I'd already be impressed. Many people I interview have trouble with much more basic concepts than that. And of course, it is worth keeping in mind that when you hire an employee that hopefully at some point, the load demands are higher. And it's kind of awkward if your product hits rapid growth, but your engineers are currently busy learning abou…

" That's the big problem in most interviews - candidates treat it like a test, where there's just the right answer, and nothing else. "

Humm no. Google interviews are (or at least were) pretty much right or wrong answers mostly.

The best interviewers could do what you say, but for the most part, no.

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