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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

#71

Post by sanxiyn »

wyclif wrote: post #66
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

In software, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Intel OTC, Qualcomm QuIC, etc. come to mind.

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

#72

Post by puppetmaster3 »

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…

" just a shortage at the price the employer is willing to pay." - preach it.

In a fair market, price goes up to increase the supply.

For example lawyers. I'm paying $600 /hr. Plenty of them around, no shortage.

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

#73

Post by leobelle »

glesica wrote: post #68
leobelle wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> take a look at the school her or she attended and stop interviewing people from that school, problem solved.

This is really bad advice, because much about learning programming is about an individual effort. It has little if anything to do with the school.

> If you find a person with an MS who can't pass a simple programming test

You actually need more than a simple programming test that solves a single problem. You need to see enough code to have some architecture, designed by the candidate. Interviews are too short for this so experience whether at some other company or open source, or just if skilled people can vouch for you goes a long way.

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

#74

Post by xyzzyz »

While there certainly are companies whose business model is to get cheap workforce from India or China on H1B (just take a look at H1B stats), there is something I don't get. Where and how this pay inequality for local vs. imported workforce manifests for more desirable companies like Google or Facebook?

As a student outside United States I had a chance to do internships in the US several times (on J1 visa), and as I am finishing my degree soon, it was natural for me to try and get a job there. My observation is that the salary and benefits I was offered at Google, Microsoft and Facebook wasn't much different than if I was American - if any, it was even slightly higher than what they pay American new grads (data based on talking with American peers and reading Quora posts). My non-American friends who also got a job in the US also didn't complain about getting lower than their American peers. Thus, should I expect fewer bonuses/pay raises? Smaller chance to get promotion? Less desirable project?

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

#76

Post by glesica »

thelastpizza wrote: post #56
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…

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.

Who said anything about taking time off? If the goal is to become a talented software developer, what does a hiring manager care if that was done for-pay or in school, provided the candidate got the experience and did something challenging?

I understand that there are "business" concerns (deadlines, tools, testing, and other things that aren't always taught in school) but a candidate could just as easily be deficient in those areas having worked for an employer with crap practices.

At some point companies need to stop whining and solve their own problems.

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

#77

Post by digita88 »

tomp wrote: post #65
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did exactly this - did my research after work, when my employer didn't budge in terms of putting on new technologies, or even improving it, I changed.

The other move is to do a start-up and work on one's own R&D (how you do it is your call)

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

#78

Post by puppetmaster3 »

xyzzyz wrote: post #74

While there certainly are companies whose business model is to get cheap workforce from India or China on H1B (just take a look at H1B stats), there is something I don't get. Where and how this pay inequality for local vs. imported workforce manifests for more desirable companies like Google or Facebook? As a student outside United States I had a chance to do internships in the US several times (on J1 visa), and as I…

H1s get to work with worse bosses on worse projects and less chance of promotion/raises. Or you get shipped back.

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

#79

Post by matwood »

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…

What you are seeing is typical of all big companies. At that size 99% of employees are fungible. If you want to be valuable and have an impact you need to move out of the big SV companies and into the smaller shops. This may mean leaving SV, but there are lots of companies out there the truly do value their employees and show it with salary, responsibility and respect.

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

#80

Post by jandrewrogers »

gallamine wrote: post #30
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…

> 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…

The problem is that for many areas of software it is not possible to be effective without at least a couple years of fairly deep experience. That is the learning curve regardless of how smart someone is and it is difficult to justify hiring someone that will not be qualified to fill the job they were nominally hired for for two years. It is not a matter of training per se, it is the amount of time required to develop competency.

For many areas of software development, such as database engine internals, the pool of people that are qualified or trainable within some reasonable number of months is quite small. Therefore, for those areas of software development the shortage is real for all practical purposes. A PhD in computer science does not automagically confer the ability to become a software subject matter expert within a few months.

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