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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

#61

Post by thelastpizza »

matwood wrote: post #22
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…

Speaking as someone who has interviewed in the field of programming there are many frauds. I don't even necessarily mean deliberate frauds but there are clearly people who are employed as programmers/engineers who have no business being such. I agree mostly, but for a different reason. I see a lot of people who have experience in years, but not in work. They were basically hired out of school, learned their job in 6…

It's very frustrating to be in this position when you don't want to be. It's like 'My pay is good, but my long-term prospects are falling apart.'

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

#62

Post by groby_b »

raverbashing wrote: post #60
groby_b wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have to ask - is that your personal experience, or what you read about the interviews?

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

#63

Post by Dewie »

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…

> 1) The 10 year developer who has 1 year of experience 10 times over. This is just a junior developer who wants the salary of a senior developer.

How simple is it to gain 10 years of real experience in the industry? Are there enough jobs and opportunities for the ambitious developer to keep improving and gaining novel insights and experiences in that person's jobs? Or does she, after a point, have to relegate most the learning to free time projects because the work doesn't take her out of her comfort zone any more?

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

#64

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

doktrin wrote: post #15
jhoechtl wrote: post #7

Where is the problem? The risk was outsourced, so were the investments. When it looks like a worthwhile project, the knowledge get's in-sourced. Don't see the recruitment fail in this particular happening of things.

Is this satire? We're talking about $19 billion here. In either case, your statement is almost completely incorrect. The WhatsApp founders were turned down before WhatsApp even existed. Therefore, it was not some bold tactical decision on the part of FB. Their technical acumen was up to snuff, so they were rejected based on some other criteria (not necessarily age).

The funny part is that if Facebook had hired them when they had the chance, they probably wouldn't have built anything resembling WhatsApp or whatever Facebook was trying to achieve by acquiring WhatsApp.

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

#65

Post by tomp »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #43
tomp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

This is horrible. Maybe I should suck it up, but it's not my fault industry has zero imagination. What are alternatives? I want to be in R&D, something that America doesn't seem to believe much in.

I have no idea. Google X, Facebook AI Lab? I'm struggling with this myself, the solutions (for me) now seem to be: learn something new every year at work (by changing the technologies your employer uses or changing employers), and research in the afternoon.

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

#66

Post by wyclif »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #43
tomp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

This is horrible. Maybe I should suck it up, but it's not my fault industry has zero imagination. What are alternatives? I want to be in R&D, something that America doesn't seem to believe much in.

What? America doesn't believe in R&D much?

I'd push back rather hard on that statement. US companies invest loads of cash in R&D, more than any other country. The problem is that if you expect to be doing R&D for a YC startup (or even a typical SV consumer web or B2B startup), you're really barking up the wrong tree—those sorts of companies don't do a lot of R&D. If you're really interested in that kind of work, you'd be far better off in bioscience or hardware. Or at least larger, established software companies.

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

#67

Post by wil421 »

coldcode wrote: post #40
wil421 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, but if more people were playing basketball in schools today than were 20-30 years ago then the talent pool would be much larger today. If you look at people born in the 50s and 60s most of them didnt have a computer to tinker around when they were in their teens or even 20s. But my generation saw the dawn of the Internet. When I was young everyone had a desktop in their house the family shared, now families each have their own computers like laptops and smaller computers like tablets and even smaller devices like phones. 12 year olds are building iphone apps and elementary schools are having programming days. Being a beginner is easier today when you have an internet community and the device of your choice to play with. More people enjoy building websites using blogger or wordpress or what have you and some of them dont even write a single line of html much less CSS.

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

#68

Post by glesica »

leobelle wrote: post #51
glesica wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/…

  > 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.
In my (limited) experience, the people who struggled in undergrad run screaming away from any possibility of doing grad school (my experience here is consistent across econ and CS). The people who were good at the field consider grad school because the psychic costs of learning more are low.

If you find a person with an MS who can't pass a simple programming test, then (and this is very general, I'm sure there are exceptions) take a look at the school her or she attended and stop interviewing people from that school, problem solved.

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

#69

Post by wes-exp »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #6
doktrin wrote: post #2

I wonder if we as an industry will continue to practice almost blatant age discrimination as the current generation of engineers grows older. If we continue to obsess over youth, the job market will be remarkably unpleasant 15 years from now.

Perhaps this is why tech companies have so little ambition: a constant stream of new blood ensures some things change (yak shaving), but never anything substantial that requires extensive experience. Instead, everyone just props up the technological status quo for their CRUD website.

Some of the most fascinating and, frankly, lucid technology discussions I have had were with highly experienced (dare I say, older) engineers who actually know a thing or two. I find it completely scandalous that, in addition to these guys getting punished in the hiring process, the industry does not really seem to learn from them. Software engineering seems like a field that does not tend to advance in any real sense, except at a snail's pace. Most of the programmers I know (who are mostly young) are merely trying to reach a level of understanding that allows them to participate in the status quo, let alone challenge it. By the time they have sufficient experience to drive meaningful change, I suppose they will be old by industry standards, pushed out, and the cycle repeats.

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

#70

Post by Tohhou »

doktrin wrote: post #2

I wonder if we as an industry will continue to practice almost blatant age discrimination as the current generation of engineers grows older. If we continue to obsess over youth, the job market will be remarkably unpleasant 15 years from now.

Claims of age discrimination is like claims that there is untapped cheap labor in hiring women in first world countries. If the claims were true anyone could hire up all of the cheap labor and stomp their discriminating competitors. That doesn't happen. Either it's really a grand conspiracy like some claim or the situation is not so simple. I think it's more likely older people expect to get paid more for their experience, are less likely to learn new things on their own like younger people are, are less likely to start up their own companies like younger people are because doing so is risky.

You see people obsessing over youth. They are not. They are valuing risk takers, people who know modern tech, people who don't expect to be paid so much just because they know more less useful to the current situation skills and knowledge. The quality of a low age itself is irrelevant. It will be the same 15 years from now. Current younger people will feel more entitled to higher pay, will feel less willing to compromise or settle for jobs which their younger peers would be happy to get. Ultimately if someone brings value to a job it's the stupidity of the employer to not understand their value. If a company can make 10x more from hiring someone why wouldn't they? Companies which don't hire the best value makers don't do as well, which allows those companies which do hire those people to float to the top. It is the same thing with women. Any sane businessperson would hire people no matter their gender if those people can make them more money, and anyone who is leaving value on the table by being discriminatory despite the lost potential leaves room for their competitors to destroy them. If you think older people can make you more money ultimately then you hire them and rule the tech world.

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