I Don't Agree That There Really Is a Tech Worker Shortage

http://math-blog.com/2014/03/10/stem-shortage-claims-and-fac... - which points out that it's not "difficult for employers and potential employees", giving an example of how Facebook decided to not employ the people who became the founders of WhatsApp, then paid $19 billion for their company a few years later.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth... - titled "The Myth of America's Tech-Talent Shortage: And what it should mean for immigration reform."

If you want the economic details, you might look at at http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-... , which (among many things) points out that two people get a STEM degree for each STEM job available.

The general conclusion is that there is no shortage, and that complaints by various large businesses about a lack of trained people is a strategy to pay lower wages and spend less on training. This has been known for over a decade. Eg, http://www.cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2005/back130... concludes """Overwhelmingly, the H-1B program is used to import workers at the very bottom of the wage scale. The wide gap between wages for U.S. workers and H-1B workers helps explain why industry demand for H-1B workers is so high and why the annual visa quotas are being exhausted.

Many in industry have called for an increase in the number of H-1B visas, citing the early exhaustion of the cap as reflective of widespread need for skilled workers. However, the fact that very few H-1B workers are earning salaries as high as U.S. workers in the same profession would seem to refute that claim, and should make lawmakers wary of increasing the H-1B quota. The exhaustion of the H-1B quota may reflect employers' interest in lowering labor costs or widespread fraud rather than an insufficient number of visas."""

HN comments include those of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8656028 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372574 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689383 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804016 and more .. again, search HN for "shortage".

Lots of companies have "Careers" or "Jobs" links, typically in the footers of their pages but often at the top. They're real easy to find.

But some companies have no such links.

I speculate that this is because the HR department is granted access to a specific directory on the corporate webserver, but somehow it never occurs to them to ask the webmaster for a link from the homepage.

Another problem is that the URLs are sometimes hard to figure out. If I speculate there might be a Jobs page, I can often guess at the URL:

   http://www.example.com/jobs
   http://www.example.com/careers
   http://www.example.com/careers.aspx

   http://www.example.com/corporate/join-our-team.html

It's not like employers are keen on training anywhere else in the US either.

American business executives have become culturally short-sighted and the unwillingness to train is part of that.

However I have also lived in Vancouver BC, Truro, Nova Scotia, St. John's, Newfoundland, Santa Cruz, California and Silicon Valley.

The claim that there was a tech worker shortage started to appear during the dot-com boom, but never really went away, even when the economy contracted during the dot-com crash and later, the subprime meltdown.

I have worked for a few companies that were happy to train. That typically happened when engineers who were experienced with the technology were not to be found at all. For example I was taught Python by a shop that was all-Python, quite a long time before it became popular. I was also taught Smalltalk at another shop, but that came after Smalltalk had declined in popularity.

In both cases the expense of the training was really quite minimal: I was given my regular pay to read a book, then write some practice code, for about a week, after which I was able to code productively, then was as productive as the rest of the staff after a month or so.

Yes, there are many people with the right credentials. In my own personal experience, many of these people can't do the work. They either don't really enjoy what they do or they simply aren't smart enough. They got into this field because of the money.