Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

math-blog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 245 posts

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

#91

Post by doktrin »

glesica wrote: post #82
glesica wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Replying to leobelle here since the thread got too deep. I agree that learning to program is individual, but you don't learn to program in grad school. If a school gave you an MS and you can't do Fizzbuzz, that school isn't serving its signalling purpose (that I mentioned in my first comment). So while that school may be fine, if lax, if the employer is using education as a signal, a school that doesn't fail students…

> Replying to leobelle here since the thread got too deep.

FYI the thread isn't too deep. HN disallows rapid-fire back-and-forth exchanges within a certain timeframe.

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

#92

Post by seivan »

michaelochurch wrote: post #88

Acq-hires are proof of dysfunction. Companies like Yahoo have talent, but can't recognize it at the bottom because the middle-management filter is so defective. So they buy market-verified talent at a panic price. That's shitty for the individual (well, great for 0.05% of them and shitty for 99.95%) because there's so much noise. The problem is that the VC-funded world is full of soft-skulls who never grew up (some a…

'Companies like Yahoo have talent, but can't recognize it at the bottom because the middle-management filter is so defective.'

This.

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

#93

Post by aganders3 »

rayiner wrote: post #53
CognitiveLens wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Areas where the tech industry is more "meat space" than "net space" seem to have more PhDs per capita among the engineers.

Can you explain this a little more? I'm genuinely interested.

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

#94

Post by iamsalman »

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…

After the rise of "social" coding ala Github, it's now a lot easier to vet a candidate for a development job. PhD is only useful if the core product has a considerable overlap with your PhD thesis. A graduate degree doesn't help, in fact, if the time is invested in "specializing", one may lose out on gaining 2 years worth of core dev experience but I think it really depend on the type of job.

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

#95

Post by lmm »

danielweber wrote: post #48
mkaziz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's invalid. If you find someone who's a great programmer, but obviously won't get alone with your teammates, then you definitely should not hire him. Team dynamics are as important than individual skill levels.

People of vastly different cultures can easily work together, as long as they aren't assholes.

I don't think it's that simple. At the trivial and obvious level, you need to speak a common language. But even if you're both speaking English, you can communicate much more effectively if you have a shared cultural background that you can both refer to.

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

#96

Post by techmatters »

Tohhou wrote: post #70
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 exper…

> I think it's more likely older people expect to get paid more for their experience,

Myth : The highest paid are in the 30-40 age bracket. See http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_241497.pdf (UK-focussed, but the US is probably similar)

> are less likely to learn new things on their own like younger people are,

...but they already know so much more that learning is less important. They know it already!

> are less likely to start up their own companies like younger people are because doing so is risky.

Myth : http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educatio...

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

#97

Post by moron4hire »

billmalarky wrote: post #85
moron4hire wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

|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 are from each other. We're also human, and I work better with some humans than others.

You're not going to know that until you've been working with the person for a while. You cannot possibly tell that from "culture". If you think you can, it means you're being prejudiced in some way.

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

#98

Post by yardie »

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.

> people are more computer literate than they were 20 years ago

Less afraid of the keyboard, almost certainly. More computer literate, I'm not as convinced. I know plenty of people that can tell me about their Android smartphone yet not anything about the underlying OS.

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

#99

Post by argumentum »

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…

> Why should it be any less wrong to discriminate based on college attendance than on race

This question can be asked of anything. Why should it be any less wrong to discriminate based on intelligence? Why should it be any less wrong to discriminate on skill set?

It isn't so much "wrong" to discriminate on race as it is stupid, because race has nothing to do with most jobs (unless you're interviewing to be the grand knight of the klu klux klan or something).

The same cannot be said of which college you attended. Going to Stanford or MIT may not be the best indicator of your potential, it may not even be particularly good, but it requires a certain amount of hard work, determination and intelligence to get into and graduate from good schools like these.

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

#100

Post by waterlesscloud »

imjk wrote: post #86
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.

My guess is that as "our" generation ages, age discrimination will subside greatly. There are a few factors I think currently contributing to the the current age discrimination practices that are unique. First is that the consumer web is relatively young and that our generation was the first to adopt it on a mass scale. And second, the most prominent and visible tech success stories of the past decade have revolved a…

Consumer web is 20 years old. Those engineers in their late 40s / early 50s invented the thing.
Post reply on HN