Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 200 posts

Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

#21

Post by gkoberger »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #14
gkoberger wrote: post #5

So, I can't speak specifically to Qualcomm's case, however there's a weird paradox in Silicon Valley. There's both an excess of jobs and excess of employees. This is probably true in every industry (every Starbucks is hiring, yet everyone complains how hard it is to find a job), but it's especially true in tech. The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. Salaries have gotten so high that even the most…

In trying to hire, where are you posting job ads? Or are you using recruiters? Both?

My comment was more glib than a real complaint about how hiring is going for us. No good developer spends time on Angellist; it has to be proactive. That being said, we do get dozens of inbound applications every week from dev bootcampers who find us through Hacker News job postings/Angellist/etc.

(For any developers looking to work at a cool startup, shameless plug: http://readme.io/careers/)

Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

#22

Post by _delirium »

pbh101 wrote: post #10
fivedogit wrote: post #6

All arguments aside, there's one fundamental way to answer whether companies' talent shortage complaints are "phony" or not: pay. If there really were a shortage, pay would be rising dramatically. Average engineers would make 200k, 300k... Just like doctors do. But it isn't happening. These BigCos just want more supply so they can pay even less than they do now. Plain and simple. Edit: Doctors and lawyers make so muc…

Pay in the field has indeed risen dramatically in the last decade. Maybe not uniformly or to the level we would like (or in a way we think will last, such as being accompanied by increases in status in contrast to doctors, to expand on your example), but it has notably risen.

A pay-trend graph for some of these "established" companies, like Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Seagate, IBM, Dell, HP, etc. would be interesting. My guess is pay has indeed been rising, but not as rapidly as the Silicon Valley boom would suggest. Unfortunately I don't think there is a good public data set.

Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

#23

Post by crdoconnor »

gkoberger wrote: post #5

So, I can't speak specifically to Qualcomm's case, however there's a weird paradox in Silicon Valley. There's both an excess of jobs and excess of employees. This is probably true in every industry (every Starbucks is hiring, yet everyone complains how hard it is to find a job), but it's especially true in tech. The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. Salaries have gotten so high that even the most…

>The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates.

The problem is that there's a shortage of companies willing to invest in training.

Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

#24

Post by tdicola »

fivedogit wrote: post #6

All arguments aside, there's one fundamental way to answer whether companies' talent shortage complaints are "phony" or not: pay. If there really were a shortage, pay would be rising dramatically. Average engineers would make 200k, 300k... Just like doctors do. But it isn't happening. These BigCos just want more supply so they can pay even less than they do now. Plain and simple. Edit: Doctors and lawyers make so muc…

Companies have been looking for other ways to keep wages from growing, see for example the poaching lawsuit Apple, Google, etc. lost: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/apple-google-i...

Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

#25

Post by allworknoplay »

ZoeZoeBee wrote: post #4

The very real issue is the use of H1-B visas to drive down the cost of labor across the board. Its not a coincidence that real wages in the US have declined since 1970 while the percentage of population immigrants represent have tripled from 4.7 to over 14%

You're using a real wages figure for the entire workforce, not engineers. Engineering salaries are extremely healthy, while the real minimum wage has also fallen. Unless you have data on inflation adjusted engineering wages, this is a totally misleading/inaccurate argument.

Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

#26

Post by asuffield »

This article makes the persistent assumption that any graduate is the same as any other engineer.

Having worked for a whole bunch of companies over the past few years, one thing is a constant in the tech industry: there is a limitless supply of candidates for any given job, all of which are bad. It is a huge, challenging problem to find the small number of people you want to hire. I'm not sold that "10x developers" really exist, but I know that "0x developers" are plentiful: these candidates aren't just a "poor fit", they are entirely unable to do the job they're applying for. I've seen far too many graduates who are entirely unable to solve the most basic screening questions, and just don't seem able to write code.

In a similar vein, it is entirely reasonable for a company to be simultaneously cutting jobs and hiring, if they are cutting persistent underperformers and trying to hire more promising replacements. (Some legal fiction is necessary to do this in the current regulatory environment)

Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

#27

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

This is a difficult problem to discuss, in large part because not all developers are created equal.

There is a reasonable supply of entry-level and low-skill developers. I refer to them as commodity developers: Developers who have a very basic skill set, who can do only a few specific things, none of them with extreme skill, but some of them reasonably competently. They typically do web front-end work, but sometimes work in Java on server back-ends. Typical pay ranges from $80-$120k, the same as it has been for 10 years or more.

There also is a shortage of high-skill developers. Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming standard in some areas for such developers. [1] That pretty much could only happen if there were a shortage, since real wages have remained flat in general since the mid 1970's. [2]

The problem is when companies ask for more H-1B employees, citing the fact that they can't hire developers for their highest skill positions (or claiming that they can't hire mid-skill developers at "market rates", because even the mid-skill tier is asking for more money now), but then import commodity developers.

By importing such workers, it unfairly keeps those developers' wages down by creating an artificial surplus of employees at that level. The idea of an H-1B worker is that they are not supposed to be paid less than the "prevailing standard" for a worker of equivalent skill in the local market [3]. But if by hiring H-1B workers you're holding down the "prevailing standard" in pay, that hardly seems like companies are following the spirit, or even the letter, of the law.

[1] My own compensation was in that range when I took a job working from remote full time, and I know several other developers at top companies whose compensation is well within that range.

[2] http://www.thestreet.com/story/11480568/1/us-standard-of-liv... and many other such charts and reports.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Employer_attestation...

Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

#28

Post by Apreche »

Another factor is that even though there may be plenty of graduates with STEM degrees, they may not have the exact skills a company wants.

Just about every job posting is looking for someone with very specific knowledge of languages, frameworks, tools, platforms. etc. How many people with a CS degree already know the technologies that your company is using?

By expanding the employee search to the entire world, companies are more able to find someone who has the specific skills they need.

Yes, they are very likely trying to hire H1-B to pay less salary. But they are also hiring H1-B to save money by not having to pay for training. Even companies that work with very obscure proprietary technologies that almost nobody knows seem to insist on hiring people who have experience with that technology rather than hiring an otherwise skilled candidate and letting them learn on the job.

Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

#29

Post by techscruggs »

crdoconnor wrote: post #23
gkoberger wrote: post #5

So, I can't speak specifically to Qualcomm's case, however there's a weird paradox in Silicon Valley. There's both an excess of jobs and excess of employees. This is probably true in every industry (every Starbucks is hiring, yet everyone complains how hard it is to find a job), but it's especially true in tech. The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. Salaries have gotten so high that even the most…

>The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. The problem is that there's a shortage of companies willing to invest in training.

That's a rather entitled viewpoint.

Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

#30

Post by ForHackernews »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #17
[deleted] wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Not exactly. The complaint was people who want big money and don't create a lot of value. The ones who want $130K and you ask them why page loading is so slow and they tell you its because the bubble sort they run on every update takes forever. They create negative value.

Then companies better start paying more. This is how supply and demand works. If $130k only gets you incompetents, then it's time to start offering $200k, or whatever the magic number is.

Remember: Any time you hear an employer whining about "lack of qualified candidates" be sure to mentally append "...at the rate we want to pay."

Post reply on HN