Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by crdoconnor » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:26 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #55

crdoconnor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> The problem is that there's a shortage of companies willing to invest in training. How so? Nearly every tech company has extensive internship programs, which are undoubtably an investment in their future workforce. Moreover, high tech salaries are compensation for learning this stuff. If you were to spend years learning on the company's dime, I'd expect salaries to be much much lower.

>How so? Nearly every tech company has extensive internship programs, which are undoubtably an investment in their future workforce.

Or just cheap labor.

>Moreover, high tech salaries are compensation for learning this stuff. If you were to spend years learning on the company's dime, I'd expect salaries to be much much lower.

I'm not complaining about the tech salaries. They are. That's why several of them engaged in a wage fixing cartel.

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

#72

Post by School-Cotton » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:26 AM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #53

asuffield wrote: post #26

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" r…

[deleted]

Downvoted this for being snotty and egotistical. Regardless of whether it's true, it's annoying.

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

#73

Post by physguy1123 » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:26 AM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #41

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #27

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…

> Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming standard in some areas for such developers. Do you have any more data on this? What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k?

HFT firms pay very well for systems and HPC developers, especially when you count the bonuses. I'm not sure when/if the total salary reaches 500k, but I've heard that total salaries from 200-300k are fairly common.

A recent graduate friend of mine just started in the field and he has a base salary of 160k (don't know what the bonus is), so 250k for a senior developer doesn't seem out of the question.

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

#74

Post by mfisher87 » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:27 AM UTC

nichochar wrote: post #7

Wow... as a VISA immigrant, who had a VERY hard time getting through the visa process, this kind of silly american opinion is quite irritating. When a company lays off 20,000 people, those are _not_ the same people as the ones coming in on visas. They are probably very low skill engineers. The people coming in on visa's (have you met any?) are usually way more skilled than their american counterparts. America is _win…

>The people coming in on visa's (have you met any?) are usually way more skilled than their american counterparts.

I have worked with a lot of visa workers. It's as mixed as local workers. Some are way more skilled than average, others below average.

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

#75

Post by thaumasiotes » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:27 AM UTC

paulhauggis wrote: post #33

crdoconnor wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

"The problem is that there's a shortage of companies willing to invest in training." This is a sad excuse. Companies should be paying for training of specific skill sets to the company, but not for knowledge and skills you should already have to get the job. This would be like asking a hospital to pay for medical school to get a qualified doctor. It's absurd.

The hospitals do have to pay for medical school. If they didn't, nobody would go through it.

Here's a cleaner example: suppose getting an M.D. required a filing fee of $800,000. You don't think that would show up in what hospitals paid doctors?

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

#76

Post by supercanuck » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:27 AM UTC

This H1-B problem is not a "silicon valley" problem. Those companies are unfortunately the companies that are probably doing H1-B the way it was designed.

The real issue is the tech industry outside of Silicon Valley providing services to everyday companies. That is truly where the injustice is and where the meat of this article is pointing at.

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

#77

Post by wting » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:27 AM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #41

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #27

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…

> Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming standard in some areas for such developers. Do you have any more data on this? What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k?

Here's a listing of Google H1B's base salary: http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=GOOGLE&job=SOFTWARE+ENGINEE...

Keep in mind that equity makes up a relatively high percentage of a Googlers' compensation. Salary is usually only 40-60% of total comp.

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

#78

Post by rewqfdsa » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:27 AM UTC

Eridrus wrote: post #61

asuffield wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there's few companies who can afford to invest in training. Only big established companies can do it (and they do, extensively). Small companies and startups don't have the time or funding to do it. Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in pay…

> Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training. Yes, once you train a person you need to pay them more. You might feel like they owe you, but unless there is a real understanding between the two of you that you are…

> lots of the work developers are tasked with doing is really quite repetitive, intellectually unchallenging and uninspired.

Then why the fuck isn't work automated away? We're developers, for God's sake! We develop things!

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

#79

Post by learc83 » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:28 AM UTC

sbuttgereit wrote: post #20

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…

Exactly this. Just because you call yourself a programmer/engineer/etc or have held jobs as such doesn't mean that you're competitively skilled or able to perform well in all jobs with the same title. I go into many shops where the people they call 'programmer', for example, really and simply are not. And some of these people have been in these roles for years (many years in some cases). The truth is the mid and lowe…

>often times talent that you need you have a hard time finding... anywhere. This is why high tech companies are complaining about shortage; sometimes you just need better staff than what's generally on the market to maintain standards.

That's when you pay more. A highly skilled programmer can easily make a million dollars a year for a company, so if demand is really that high and supply that low, there would be far more companies willing to pay $500k salaries.

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

#80

Post by Eridrus » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 4:28 AM UTC

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #27

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…

The problem with "prevailing wage" is that if you classify someone as the lowest tier programmer (not developer or software engineer), the prevailing wage is like 65k. So it's really quite easy to meet that, even for Infosys.

As someone working in the states on a visa, I feel like the prevailing wage should be set at least at some high percentile of salary, the same way O-1 visas require* pay in the 95th percentile, though I don't think you want to get rid of the grades of developers so that companies can still hire excellent junior developers.