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

latimes.com

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

#81

Post by Gibbon1 »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #40

First, I don't know how this even started. Why did tech companies all of a sudden decide there was a shortage of knowledgeable and competent workers? I'm asking because throughout my career as a programmer I've worked with people from all sorts of backgrounds that have not had a traditional CS degree. They have come from fields like math, IT, physics, mechanical engineering, etc. Engineering disciplines but not reall…

The tech industry's managers have been whining about this at least since I entered the workforce in the early 80's. I tend to think it's because the rise of the MBA and the consequent unwillingness to invest in people. MBA's want to hire engineers like they buy office furniture. And then manage them like a group of accounts payable clerks. Doesn't work.

Then add in the managements favorite predilection 'downsizing for success' In order to boost profits over the next couple of quarters, can a a few well oiled engineering teams. Then wonder why you don't good house engineering resources for the next big thing.

Frankly what they want, it's not possible.

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

#82

Post by 1971genocide »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #42

I've always viewed these persistent and ridiculous claims of a tech-industry worker shortage through a lens of class. To a Harvard MBA, that we programmers earn six figures is prima facie evidence of a worker shortage, since there's no way that ugly nerds should be earning that kind of money for typing into a computer. Programmers are workers, so investors and management should be able to siphon off their productive…

When I was in college, I was doing engineering. Many of my friends got bored and wanted to go MBAs. I almost went that path until I started programming.

Ever since then I went from a commodified drone to feeling like a kid.

It felt like escaping the capitalist matrix. I almost was seen upon as a hippie. I told my dad that "I have no interest in pursing an MBA, I just want to spend me time in a cave with a terminal and a few books"

He was almost shocked by it.

I notice it all over in society these days.

If you read about how tuition fees are rising and students are in debt, people make insane arguments like "well on average a person earns X more over their lifetime by having a degree"

I never noticed how ridiculous these arguments were.

I have been reading a lot on economics lately and karl marx predicted this outcome.

We have in many ways reached the end of capitalism, before capitalism as a system breaks apart. We are trying hard to commodify labour - but the great paradox is if you commodify labour then the free market stops existing !

I can go on and on, but yes - we need to get rid of capitalism and this free market darwinist bullshit and return to a more social and morally right form to organize society.

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

#84

Post by morgante »

This article makes the perennial mistake of assuming all "STEM graduates" are equal. This is flawed in three main ways:

1. STEM graduates includes many fields where there genuinely is a huge surplus of labor (we don't really need more physicists).

2. Talent is critical and sadly a large number of CS graduates do not have the talent to be good developers. Many fresh graduates just don't have the skills to cut it as a high-quality professional developer, yet the best ones have six-way auctions going. Companies are absolutely desperate for good developers, with the operative word being good. (Don't even get me started on bootcamp graduates.)

3. The shortage of developers is most acute for senior developers. It takes about 10 years to become a truly senior developer and 10-15 years ago not many people were interested in starting a career in CS (the dot-com bust was still raw). This shortage can only be solved with time or immigration and until then senior developers can command considerable salaries ($250k+ all in).

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

#86

Post by wpietri »

asuffield wrote: post #31
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 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…

> Small companies and startups don't have the time or funding to do it.

I think this depends a lot on how you do the training. Sure, if you think of training as something very separate from the work, then doing lots of it could be expensive. But the last team I put together was very collaborative, with pair programming being the norm. In that environment, a lot of training comes essentially for free.

In a rapidly growing startup, I think building your processes with a strong bias toward staff development is the best way to scale. No matter how much experience a new person has, they still have very low knowledge of the product, the audience, local process choices, and the local code base. So startups always need to be educating their staff. Adding some technical education on top of that doesn't seem hard.

Personally, I've never quit a place where I'm still learning a lot. But I've hired plenty of people because they felt like they were stagnating in their current jobs.

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

#87

Post by morgante »

crdoconnor wrote: post #71
morgante wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Or just cheap labor.

No sane employer turns to an internship program for cheap labor. For one thing, intern salaries are not exactly "cheap" ($10k+ at SV companies).

For another, nearly every intern is a net drain on the company in the immediate term. They take more time for supervision than it would have taken for a senior developer to just accomplish their project.

If you assume that interns are actually cheap labor, I have to assume you've never run an internship program.

> I'm not complaining about the tech salaries. They are.

So why should they invest in training? In the immediate term, training actually makes the shortage more acute (as you have to move senior engineers into training programs).

The far more sensible solution is to just bid higher until you can get the senior developers which are actually out there. Note that that's what actually broke the wage-fixing cartel: Facebook.

Of course, they would always like to pay less for developers (just like I'd like to be paid more and would like to pay lower taxes). Fortunately, unless you have a magic training program which compresses 10 years of experience into 4 weeks, salaries are likely to stay high for quite some time.

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

#88

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

_delirium wrote: post #44
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…

This definitely gets at the problem, imo. There would be much less opposition to the H1B program if it were bringing in exclusively employees with, say, $150k+ compensation. It would be hard to argue those employees are undercutting salaries, except perhaps a few of the higher salaries. But there are a lot of $60k salaries on H1Bs, which seems a lot more suspicious. How scarce can a skill be if you're only paying $60…

>My pet solution to the problem is to prioritize quota slots by pay tiers, as a rough proxy for how rare the skills being sought really are.

That is absolutely brilliant.

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

#89

Post by cellis »

bradleyjg wrote: post #69
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. ... I've been trying to hire, and my inbox is full of people who know half a language and want a starting salary of $130k. The money isn't the issue; I'd pay way more than that for someone good. But six figures is crazy high for the average developer in SF. >> How much more? $250,000? $500,000? $1,000,000? $3,000,000? Sure, it is plausible that if all the…

Exactly. You want to know of a true shortage of workers? 7 ft centers who are aggressive, not injury prone, and can hit a free throw. They're so rare that 17% of all 7footers in the US play in the NBA. It's why Deandre Jordan is making 100 million over the next 5? years. A shortage of programmers, ha!

There is one kind of shortage though, and one that is adequately compensated; programmers willing to work at below average wages for lottery tickets (read: technical cofounder equity) that happen to hit, and therefore end up making millions -- they don't even need to be exceptionally skilled, just right be in the place and right time (I've known several of these). But show me an Anthony Davis of coding who is paid as such, and I'll show you someone who is a skilled manager/entreprenuer.

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