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

It's not quite that - it's that the organizational structure prevents middle-managers from acting on their knowledge even if they do recognize talent.

Imagine that you are responsible for a department of people, all of whom need to work together to accomplish a big job. Assume that talent is normally distributed - maybe you have 1 superstar and 1 idiot, 10 high performers and 10 laggards, and 100 average developers. Also assume that the boundaries between categories are fuzzy - it's not that there's 1 superstar who absolutely stands out, it's that there are 2-3 people who are really good, and one is obviously better to you but that isn't apparent to everyone else, and another 20 or so people are just a bit behind them.

What do you do?

If you preference your best programmer, give him the pick of assignments and a lot of latitude to choose projects, you will demotivate all the people who are just below him. Ironically, a lot of michaelochurch's past comments are examples of this - his perspective on the "Real Googler line", and even the grandparent comment, is what things look like for someone who is talented and high-performing and yet right below the line. These folks become bitter, demotivated, subversive, and ultimately toxic to the organization.

Moreover, you destroy the effectiveness of your superstars as well. To accomplish anything in a large organization, you need cooperation from your peers. When your peers resent your special treatment or want to sabotage your rise, you won't get this. So the only way to succeed as a superstar in a large organization is to act very subtly and bring a lot of people with you, which usually means keeping your more radical ideas to yourself and only saying things that can be heard. (Which, really, is how it should be - think of how unpleasant it is to work in an environment with a "golden kid" who's always running around with the latest technologies, not answerable to anyone else, and yet has management's favor.)

This is also why getting rid of laggards is far more important for organizational health than hiring superstars. If you populate an organization full of folks who understand compilers, or understand immutability, or can work with multiple languages, or who understand design patterns, then those techniques become part of the general culture that the whole eng organization can use. If you lack that critical mass, any superstars that understand why those concepts are important will not have the freedom to use those techniques because of the political issues above.

There's very good evidence that the middle-managers know exactly who their star performers are. When they quit to found their own company, who do they call? You often have groups of programmers that have worked together through multiple companies, and as soon as you hire one the whole group comes on board within a year. But within a company, the constraints of organizational politics prevent them from favoritism, which is probably how it should be.

On the other hand, a for such a specialized area a relevant PhD seems almost a necessity. Either that, or an equivalently long time in industry specializing in that area.

I doubt that this is the norm though. I get the impression that most of these hiring managers who don't value experience are hiring for pretty uninteresting work and simply want inexpensive labour. The op didn't state what area of work he's in, but if a junior is the ideal candidate, it's very likely not very interesting or difficult work.

edit: after a bit of digging, it turns out that the OP works on trading systems in Canada. The ironic thing is that 125k is quite a bit above a junior position in most of Canada. So it's not clear what is going on here. When hiring PhDs, he's competing with the US companies and might be a bit shy of what they pay. On the other hand, if he's paying a junior 125k, he's paying well above the local average.

> - Another item I have noticed was that an applicant's PhD thesis was very well written yet when I read the Masters thesis and any other written documentation produced, the grammar is less than average, even poor! Which makes me think of potential 'help' involved that polished their PhD. So look for inconsistencies.

Generally there are 3+ years between writing your Master's Thesis and your PhD, during which you spend a lot of time writing and editing and would hopefully get significantly better at doing so. I don't think there is any inconsistency in seeing an improvement in ability over that long span. It would be like looking at someone's code from the beginning of their career, comparing it to something they just wrote, and citing the inferior quality of their earlier work as a clear sign that someone else helped them with their most recent stuff.

> - I found out that they registered a domain name Dr back even before they started. Who the heck does that?

Why is this weird? Presumably if you're entering a doctoral program, you plan on finishing it (whether or not that happens). Whats wrong with getting a domain if you think you'll need it in the future?

When they say they can't find the right person, they mean that Frank's cell phone ran out of juice.

So, my brother used to work in a small clock shop. These were really precise clocks (nanosecond) and they did distributed timing. You have an oil field, maybe, and want to know the size of it? Send out a blast pulse and record the echos. But the recorders need to really know where and when they hear the echo over a few hundred square miles. Its not easy stuff to deal with.

But the company had Frank. Frank had been there since the beginning. He had written all the code for the clocks, he built and wired the entire place, he knew the whims of the servers and the phone system, the slight burning smells that meant an imminent failure. Frank was the company, and the rest of them where there to make sure Frank was working and happy. Yeah, he owned a bit of the equity, not a major share, but a bit. No-one else knew all the passwords or the files like Frank. Frank barely had time for his kids, let alone to train anyone else. To keep things going, Frank was the ONLY person.

So, this worried the owners a lot. If Frank got cancer or in an accident, they were screwed. Hell, everyone was screwed. But to train anyone up was near impossible. Because Frank didn't have the time between putting out the little fires in the code and sleeping and making money for the owners. Frank didn't have them in a bind as much as Frank himself was in a bind. He wanted time to see soccer games, but he wanted his kids to go to college more, and that meant the money came first.

So, what was everyone supposed to do? They needed a new Frank. But anyone they brought on was just confused by the spaghetti of wires and the nonsense code that Frank had made 20 years ago to solve some problem half drunk at 2am on a Saturday. There was no record because there was no time to make one. You had to just clone Frank's brain, because nothing else would do in time.

My brother left that company because trying to untangle the Gordian Knot that Frank and the comapny were committed to was a noose.

But there are a few thousand Franks out there. There are a ton of companies that are in this bind. They have 2 or 3 guys that can actually do the job. And trying to replace that team is impossible. When the Zuck merps out that they can't find anyone, he is not lying, but mis-speaking. He means that Frank's phone is out of juice.

I would argue that the number of people needed for older technology is finitely limited not that they are no longer needed. There may be demand for older technology, but the majority of new jobs won't be for older technology.

>is comparatively timeless

Why are companies apparently hiring younger people over older people who are vastly more experienced and given that timeless knowledge would give so much more value to their companies? Are they just plain stupid?