171–180 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Yo…
Two huge unanswered questions. What do you mean by "trained and have these skills?" And at what price?
At $50,000 a year, I would also like to hire as all the engineers. I will place them into jobs that pay 100K a year, and I will keep 50k. How many times would I like to do this? Answer: all of the times.
Now, suppose I have to pay them 125K a year, and I can hire them out at 100k a year. How many times would I like to do this? Answer: none of the times.
So there's a massive shortage of 50k/yr engineers, but a huge glut of $125k a year engineers. It sounds like there's a severe shortage of programmers willing to work for far less than they're worth. How is this different from any other field?
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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)
The problem is that I'm interested in robotics/AI, which (right now) seems to be a high-investment/low-probability-of-success endeavor.
The hard part is the "proving competency" part. I consider myself a somewhat competent programmer, but trying to catch myself up on the state of the art in my focus; N body simulation; is a hard enough problem, and even when you feel like you understand it, how do you let other people know? (little bit of chicken in egg here, since normally the PHD is this sort of signalling.)
The answer I chose is "build fun projects in my free time." and with the advent of more accessible programmable robotics, you can certainly explore both of your interests. (I should take my own advice here too...)
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>Who is claiming that first world women are an untapped source of cheap labor? In what field? The people who claim that women are discriminated against purely based on gender. If women really are being discriminated based on gender, and companies are hiring less qualified men in favor of more qualified women, then someone should be able to hire up all of the women who are being snubbed by all of the sexist companies…
> Unless of course if this isn't about age or sex. I'm female and not getting any younger by the way. But I still don't buy the bull others try to sell. You're rebutting a straw man. > No startup is a sure thing. Younger people are less risk averse. Again, a moot point. If an employee is applying to work for a startup, they're acknowledging the risk. The risk, by the way, is negligible for employees. > It's not that…
>Ageism: people are not being hired because of their age only and not for any other reason.
>The risk, by the way, is negligible for employees.
What. Employees don't care that they might not have a job? Employees don't care that they might not be able to be paid?
>This doesn't make sense.
Companies don't want to pay for what they don't need. People feel entitled to what they feel they are worth and not necessarily what value they give to a company based on what the company needs. When they have a lot of experience but nothing useful to contribute they blame things which do not factor in at all in hiring.
>What are you basing this on? This reads like a caricature.
I think you are mistaking my snark for me actually asserting things.
>I already addressed this. If you're intent on repeating your original claim, we'll just have to agree to disagree.
Whose responsibility is it to fix the apparent ageism if the people complaining about it don't want to do anything to solve their own problems?
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.
However the fault probably lies within the wider academia culture and the lack of expertise that academics/institutions provide to those wishing to leave and go to industry. Some PhDs genuinely do enter for the purpose of having a research career only to realise that academia is not for them and vice versa..
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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…
Wow. You can't judge your success by what your parents think, especially not Asian parents who, though they often have the best of intentions, frankly have no idea how things work in the U.S. Anecdote: my parents, who are from Bangladesh but have lived here since about 1989, called me one day (five years ago now), deeply concerned that my brother wanted to turn down his acceptance to Cal Tech to go to this place call…
My brother used to work at that Newtown facility. He left before this crash happened, but LM firing all those people has killed the town. We hear about the Rust belt and the factories closing, this is the high tech example. My brother saw it coming and left. Everyone there said he was crazy at the time. Now he has income and skills, they do not.
Life changes. You have to raise your kids with enough sense to be able to recognize when it does and then act accordingly. Even if it seems crazy to you, you gotta trust that you raised them right and then trust them.
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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.
I would certainly pay an amazing engineer $600/hr if I could call on them at any time and get billed at increments of 6 minutes, but that would be an insane way to build software (I know lawyers who think its an insane way to do law, but it is the system).
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> 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 lik…
>Myth : The highest paid are in the 30-40 age bracket. I'm not saying people are not paid money I'm saying older people will expect higher salaries based on their experience compared to younger people despite the direct value they can contribute to a company. Value = money. >...but they already know so much more that learning is less important. They know it already! Yes, they know so much... of things no one uses any…
This claim is bandied about way too carelessly. Application level tools do change quite fast. The fundamentals of technology do not.
Knowledge of networking, TCP/IP, x86 assembly, stack discipline, cache implementations, etc. is comparatively timeless. For instance, one of CMU's core CS/ECE classes (213) has been taught in roughly the same manner for the last 15 years. The same I believe holds true for 6.001 at MIT.
You can argue that COBOL is no longer relevant. What you can't claim is that only the framework-du-jour is important to modern business. It's simply not the case.
I don't know that rockstar companies really say that much about the industry as a whole. I also don't put much stock in that Zuckerberg quote about "hiring as many talented engineers as we can find", unless they define talented as a very high bar, in which case the statement is meaningless. Who wouldn't want to hire as many crazy good programmers as they can?