121–130 of 245 posts
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…
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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 th…
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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 s…
There is more to the world than that. Take time off, explore and learn about the world. Start a company. Start ten companies.
Believe me, "jobs" are overrated. Between me and my friends, we've worked at every top tech firm in the world (Apple, Tesla, Google etc). They're all the same. They want all of your waking hours in exchange for a subsistence wage (Bay area is expensive).
Go and live your life. Build your own skills so you can consult and control your hours. Travel and have fun. YOLO.
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.
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." Like everything else, that depends on the candidate. A person who has had 10 1-year jobs may have tons of applicable experience and be a better developer than the Loyal Schlub who spent two or three 3-4 year stints doing CRUD (or even proprietary trader front-end) app X. G…
For example, if your job is cranking out CRUD apps or "online brochure" websites for various clients and you do it for 5 years, there's a good chance that while you're very good at those things now, it hasn't really gained you the same experience as if you'd been doing something a bit more demanding.
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> 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 lack…
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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.
When I'm having trouble with something, the last person I want to help me figure out my problem is an exact clone of myself. I want people used to different tools and different ways of thinking.
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…
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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.
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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.
Certainly, Silicon Valley has tons of these sorts of jobs too. Google is full of PhDs. But the ratio of specialized domain products to consumer products seems to be higher in the southeast. And as a result, my perception is that the market's valuation of PhDs is higher. It's quite common to see companies in that market where not having a PhD is considered a severe liability.