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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

#101

Post by moron4hire »

matwood wrote: post #79
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…

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.

Care coming up with a few examples? On the east coast? I've unfortunately never been graced to encounter them.

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

#102

Post by btilly »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #80
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…

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…

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.

This point is key given that industry turnover is such that the first company to hire you has to expect that they are simply training you for the next.

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

#103

Post by not_paul_graham »

rayiner wrote: post #27
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…

Considering that 3.55 is the cut-off for highest graduation honors at GT, you have nothing to be ashamed of there! If you decide to take another stab at things, there is no reason to limit yourself to Amazon/Google/etc. The southern east coast has a perfectly healthy tech ecosystem, from Atlanta up to D.C., and the GT brand carries well there.

Yes man the irony. Georgia Tech tells you that you've graduated in the top 10% of your class, institutional highest honors and all that.

And then your parents call you and tell you that they spent six figures on your education and you are essentially worth nothing. Here are some quotes from my parents:

"If you really wanted to work as a shitty programmer for a small pay we could have saved all that money instead of sending you to this school."

[My dad to relatives in front of me] "Sending not_pg to Georgia Tech was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. It was just a drain of my hard earned money."

The reason for shame was my culture and I'm still grappling with it a bit because it is so ingrained in my psyche from all the years of growing up with it. It seems like everyone in my family is constantly judging me for being such a failure. In the grand scheme of things I've stopped caring lest I let this get to my head. But I do realize that I essentially screwed up my time by not being more diligent, not managing it better.

Anyway I'm out of the US so Atlanta to DC isn't in the picture atleast in the short term. The only good thing to come out of this is that if I do apply for a PhD in the coming few years I'll have some professors that'll write some good recommendations for me and a decent GPA.

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

#104

Post by viscanti »

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.

Do we know what role Acton applied for? I saw the twitter posts about the rejection but never saw what job he was applying for. It's hard for me to generalize about the industry from this one specific case, without even knowing what job he was allegedly rejected from (his experience may have been undesirable for an entry level position where the hiring manager felt he was overqualified, or conversely he probably lacked the experience at the time to get the role of CTO).

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

#105

Post by waterlesscloud »

groby_b wrote: post #62
raverbashing wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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?

An important thing to realize is that no matter how much they try, a company the size and profile of Google has at best only a loose control over their hiring process.

There are too many internal recruiters of varying ability and agendas, and too many interviewers of varying ability and agendas.

A company like Google can have stated hiring principles and techniques, but in practice it's going to be nearly random.

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

#106

Post by ForHackernews »

moron4hire wrote: post #50
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.

That might hold water if every company I've ever worked for hired much more than just self-diagnosed-with-Aspergers', white-guy assholes. I've never seen a group of programmers get along. "So-and-so should be fired/shouldn't be hired because we just don't get along" is not an acceptable excuse. Any other industry and your boss will tell you that you better learn to get along. This is Kindergarten level issues here. Y…

> Why do we continue to let the tech industry endorse childish behavior in the work environment?

Sometimes assholes are super-productive geniuses (note that there are more assholes who think they're a genius) so even if they don't get along with the rest of your team (or any humans, really) it's a tough tradeoff whether it's worth having them around.

You have to balance whether they're doing more harm than good to the overall endeavor. In our case, we have one very senior guy who's highly antisocial but absolutely a crack dev. We've given him an extremely flexible work-from-home arrangement. It works out well because we hardly see him, and he's happy communicating over email and just churning out code in his batcave or whatever.

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

#107

Post by jnbiche »

rooted wrote: post #90
puppetmaster3 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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.

I'm not sure if this is sarcastic

Of course it's not. Why is it reasonable to pay lawyers $600/hr but to pay a skilled computer engineer the same is interpreted as a joke? That's not a rhetorical question -- I'd really like to know the answer.

Actually, I suspect I know the answer in many cases, but I'm curious what other people think.

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

#108

Post by yardie »

matwood wrote: post #79
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…

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.

> salary, responsibility and respect

Well 2 out of 3. I know plenty of small companies that respect you for your responsibility but are deathly afraid you'll leave because of salary. My company loses good people to our, much larger, clients who can pay top dollar. We've, humorously, set up a job board on our website to cut out the middle man, us.

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

#109

Post by yesiamyourdad »

iamsalman wrote: post #94
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.

As others have noted, having an advanced degree should be a signal that the candidate is capable of deeply investing themselves into a subject area. The typecasting is ridiculous: just because you have no graduate degree but spent the first 3 years of your career working on, say, an online store, does that disqualify you from working in any other area of software engineering?

Github as CV has been debated already. Your employer may place restrictions on your ability to contribute to or publish open source. You may already be working 40+ hours a week and have other interests besides writing more code. If I'm not especially familiar with a project, I have no way to evaluate whether your contributions are valuable; I'm using the project owner's judgement as a proxy for my own. Maybe the project manager is a chump and the project is a mess, so does someone contributing 100 commits to that project count as a positive or a negative?

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

#110

Post by porker »

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 do you tell if you're (hiring) one of these?

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