101–110 of 153 posts
Fully agree. Recently discussing this issue among friends, not one of them could get hired for specific positions, even though they knew the required technologies. All got the same excuse, the said technologies were being used in side projects, not on their main job.
I took it anyway because I wanted to work with the tech I used in my spare time.
There is only a shortage of cheap / entry level tech workers. There are plenty of experienced and over-qualified tech workers, but most short-sighted employers don't value older employees.
Correct. I'll steal someone else's comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761424 ) that illustrates this and corresponds to the OP's experience: Junior programmer (22): makes $80-100k, 120k in the Bay Area. Easily gets jobs. Senior programmer (28): 5-10 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $120-140k, possibly 150k. Serious stock options possible with the right company. Three- month job searches. Expert pro…
I myself have 27 years experience working full-time, several full-time summer jobs, and part-time jobs while I was in school before that. I wrote my first program in 1976.
Only once in my entire life have I seen a post that asked for coders with 15 years experience.
I find it odd that this only happens, to the best of my knowledge, in the software and entertainment industries. I don't think it's the case for electrical engineers, for example.
Would you want to hire a 22 year old surgeon? If you were falsely accused of murder, would you trust a 22 year old attorney to clear your good name?
Help Me Out Here, I'm Begging You.
That is a self-contradictory proposition if ever there is one. What is that this supposed talented programmer wannabes do, if they are in a position not to take a 100K+ salary?
More importantly, if indeed there is such talent and you know how to run a company profitably paying this supposed talent the salary you assume...then why aren't you doing it?
You have a perfect arbitrage opportunity, and by your own admission - FB, Google, MS etc. are all "greedy" and only care about their bottom-line. So if you can demonstrate that hiring "American" programmers at 200K+ salaries and deliver high-quality code (better than those crappy Indian outfits), all the luck to you!
Why aren't you all doing it? Be the change you want.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correct. I'll steal someone else's comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761424 ) that illustrates this and corresponds to the OP's experience: Junior programmer (22): makes $80-100k, 120k in the Bay Area. Easily gets jobs. Senior programmer (28): 5-10 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $120-140k, possibly 150k. Serious stock options possible with the right company. Three- month job searches. Expert pro…
(47 year old technical founder here; about to plug my startup so feel free to skip) Maybe this is true in general but it's not true everywhere. We're looking for a few great engineers, are happy to pay what they're worth, and understand the value of experience -- where experience means "every year I get better at writing code", not "now I'm an architect and don't have to write code". If you or anyone you know is inte…
However, if you're willing to tell me where you're located, I'd be happy to link your site from here:
http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/united-states/californ...
The "San Francisco Peninsula" could be San Mateo county, or the northern part of Santa Clara county. When I possibly can, I link each employer from a specific city's page.
The above link goes to an Apache index page, as I have not yet provided an index.html for it. Here's my page for Seattle:
http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/united-states/washingt...
If you know anyone that has the same outlook on life as you do, that is in our near Portland, Oregon or Vancouver, Washington, I'd really like to hear about it.
There is no shortage of work. There is a drought of talented engineers though. Most of them are terrible.
You are just repeating this. How do you know there is actually a shortage, rather than a lack of a process for finding them? Or a lack of ways for them to find the good employers? A non functioning market is rather hard to distinguish from inability to find what you want.
We are looking for machine-vision programmers and the ones who have experience in thsi space are all either snapped up by amazon, fb and google or doing their own startup.
Our choices were to either hire a freshly minted PhD in AI from MIT (H1b) or from the legion of the resume-padded "locals" with made up skill-sets, who expect a job, just because their highness graced our interview and deigned to come to our office. Not to mention that they wouldn't pass a basic programming test.
Believe me, I would MUCH rather hire an American than jump through the visa hoops, it costs thousands of dollars upfront, with no certainty of outcome, plus the hire is only with us for 3 years! After 3 years, we lose a trained person
"I know lots of engineers who are unable to find work." I don't. Probably your definition of "engineer" is different from mine. "Another problem is that us engineers are expected to have real-world, paid experience in whatever technology the hiring company uses" Generalization and obviously not true. I have a company, I don't care about paid experience, in fact we hired lots of people from open source projects, or di…
Boy, I really wouldn't want to work for your company
However, my thesis in this particular topic is not that I myself am unable to find work, but that a great many of my colleagues cannot, despite being highly qualified.
I do believe that those who employ coders, cannot find enough qualified staff. I've been hearing that very same complaint from so many people for so many years that I really don't buy the argument that they're just trying to drive our pay scales downwards.
I feel that there is a deeper underlying cause.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 apparentl…
You're using anecdotal evidence to argue against the general case. Consider the book "Laughter is the Best Medicine". Some guy's cancer went into remission when he watched a whole bunch of really funny movies. Given that, would you suggest that we should do away with chemotherapy, radiation and oncology surgeons?
Given the existence of Craigslist, Monster, Stack Overflow Careers, etc. over and beyond what was available 30 years ago, it should be easier now to find employees rather than harder. You need to demonstrate that it's actually harder.
Under your analogy, you haven't shown that the people actually have cancer in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many interviews have you conducted? If the answer is more than 0, I feel you have gotten lucky in the candidates you interview or are far more selective on who you actually interview. If the answer is 0, then you would be incredibly surprised. It isn't quite as simple as this dialog is making it sound, but essentially, yes, a not-insignificant number of candidates cannot solve problems with a fizzbuzz level of di…
I have done about a dozen or so interviews. I can totally imagine some people not being able to do a simple fizz buzz from scratch. But when they have full internet access and no one is watching them. "Solving" fizz buzz is then as simple as performing a search and copying the results. I'll probably get down voted because it seems people on HN are incredibly attached to the FizzBuzz story. Possibly I am totally wrong…
Truth is, I think a lot of people in this field are not "bad" or "stupid", they simply don't care. That's what struck me the first couple of times, not that they failed fizzbuzz or to understand how simple of a problem it's supposed to be, but that they don't even copy it.
At first you think it's a couple of bad apples, then you think you're really bad at choosing interviewee, then you get that no matter what, almost half of the people you see shouldn't even be working in that field.
Frankly, it might not be politically correct to say that but running interviews had to be one of the best thing of my career for my self esteem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many interviews have you conducted? If the answer is more than 0, I feel you have gotten lucky in the candidates you interview or are far more selective on who you actually interview. If the answer is 0, then you would be incredibly surprised. It isn't quite as simple as this dialog is making it sound, but essentially, yes, a not-insignificant number of candidates cannot solve problems with a fizzbuzz level of di…
I have done about a dozen or so interviews. I can totally imagine some people not being able to do a simple fizz buzz from scratch. But when they have full internet access and no one is watching them. "Solving" fizz buzz is then as simple as performing a search and copying the results. I'll probably get down voted because it seems people on HN are incredibly attached to the FizzBuzz story. Possibly I am totally wrong…
Truth is, I think a lot of people in this field are not "bad" or "stupid", they simply don't care. That's what struck me the first couple of times, not that they failed fizzbuzz or to understand how simple of a problem it's supposed to be, but that they don't even copy it.
At first you think it's a couple of bad apples, then you think you're really bad at choosing interviewee, then you get that no matter what, almost half of the people you see shouldn't even be working in that field.
Frankly, it might not be politically correct to say that but running interviews had to be one of the best thing of my career for my self esteem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you are worth a bajillion dollars you tend to think your opinions are right. You would have to show that your rejection from Facebook was due to age bias. Just because the head of a company makes a statement like that doesn't mean that the company carries out those actions. So no, you would not have a good case. Did you even read the first link I gave? It explains the situation; absurd requirements are used to r…
That's what "Discovery" and "Deposition" are for. In the United States - specifically the US, I don't know about other countries - the Constitutional right to not incriminate oneself only applies to criminal procedures, not to civil ones. So all I would have to do is put Zuckerberg - or whoever I think may have made the decision not to hire me - under oath in a deposition, then ask them directly whether the didn't hi…
The immediate response from Facebook will be that you have no grounds for your lawsuit: you have no evidence of age or disability discrimination, only conjecture, they decline to hire many applicants, and there are legitimate reasons for not going forward with hiring you. Such as they found a better candidate.
Even under Reid v. Google, a stray remark like this only helps if it's part of a larger picture. It cannot be used on its own, because Zuckerberg wasn't part of your hiring process. The comment was made years ago, and under EEOC you have less than a year before you can file for discrimination. (The Supreme Court of California decision in Reid points out that Brewer v. Quaker State Oil Refining Corp used statements that were two years old, but that's the most extreme example. Six years is unreasonable.)
And in a deposition you cannot ask for "all of your email". Otherwise people would abuse the system and sue a company under any pretext in order to get all email, to spy on the internal operations of the company.