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

You wrote: "I speculate that the reasons for the perceived - and ONLY perceived - shortage is that it's far more difficult for employers and potential employees to find each other.", and follow it up with an example of how most of Dalhousie's CS grads are able to find work in another country?

How is it meaningful to say that it's hard for the students and their potential US employers to find each other when apparently it's quite easy?

Quite a serious problem I myself have - at least I'm willing to admit to it - is that when presented with any coding task at all, I start looking for ways to optimize it. That's lost me more than a few jobs.

It's not that I can't write fizzbuzz. It's that I won't write anything at all because I'm trying to figure out a faster way to implement it than the obvious way.

Here's a little exercise for you: give your candidates what you call the "fizzbuzz test", but instead of 2 and 3, use, say, 4 and 7.

I bet quite a few candidates will write out the code for 2 and 3, because that's what they memorized before the interview, without understanding what the code actually does. Source code for fizzbuzz is all over the series of tubes these days, you see.

Caltech didn't offer any programming language courses at all when I majored in Physics there in the early eighties. One was expected to learn any required languages completely on one's own.

I have only taken one CS class in my entire life, Caltech's CS 10, which is commonly taken by first year CS majors; I took it my second year.

I found it quite puzzling that the CS majors were often stymied by the final project, which required us to write a full-featured GUI vector graphic editor. That was a tough project but I aced it. Many of the CS majors would go totally out of their minds trying to get their editors to work, but were unable to.

When I entered the workforce after dropping out of school, I was quite concerned that the folks with CS degrees would eat my lunch, so I worked very, very hard to perfect my craft. However it was not long at all that I found that recent CS grads often knew very little about writing the kind of code that was required of coders in private industry.

Consider that an algorithms class would teach all the common ways of sorting - quicksort, mergesort and so on. One is then expected to write a program that sorts an array of integers using quicksort, a second program that sorts the same array using mergesort, a third that uses insertion sort.

None of these programs are very large. They're easy to debug. You're not expected to handle edge cases, like what would happen if someone unplugged the network cable while your program was running.

In the kind of code that's sold for retail sale, or for eCommerce websites or what have you, you wouldn't be expected to implement quicksort, someone else would already have done that so you'd call a library function like the standard C library's qsort(). However what your code WOULD have to do, is handle all that nastiness like unplugged network cables.

It's not that Computer Science schools could not teach that stuff. It's that they don't.

Also, it's quite uncommon for CS students to collaborate on large projects. While I do know of it being done, it's uncommon. It would be very helpful, were CS students - at least occasionally - required to collaborate.

Finally, many of the technologies which are of crucial importance to private industry, are of very, very little interest to CS professors. I learned all about what most refer to as "Game Physics" in my upper-division physics studies, but I can't imagine a CS instructor wanting to teach her class about how to do, say, ad syndication.

Some people don't even know how to do Google searches.

This suggests a productive interview question: ask your candidate a question that they could not possibly answer on their own, then provide them with an internet-connected box, and see whether it even occurs to them to use web search.

It's not just programmers; I devoted twenty years to asking medical professionals why I have a constant, raging, unquenchable thirst. That's a symptom of the very worst kind of diabetes, so of course they'd order a fasting blood sugar test. "No doctor, it could not possibly be diabetes. If I had diabetes, I would have been dead twenty years ago." When the tests came back normal, the doctor would lose all interest in talking to me, then refuse to investigate further.

Just a few years ago an emergency room resident who I never personally met, but was a member of one of the other websites I frequent, diagnosed it as Psychogenic Polydipsia - "Thirst of the Mind" - which is an uncommon side effect of the medicine I take for my schizoaffective disorder.

>There are no 'algorithms in the wild' - they always solve some problem..

Interestingly, this isn't true. I have done worse than I can in interview cycles because I tend to go into them without having studied "Cracking the Coding Interview" or my old algorithms textbook, and thus do strictly worse at the algorithms-and-data-structures hey-let's-talk-about-asymptotic-performance-bounds quiz questions given in interviews.