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

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

#91

Post by jschwartzi »

npalli wrote: post #52
roymurdock wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would posit that Starbucks example is the exact reverse of what you're seeing in the tech industry. Starbucks is hiring, but a lot of the workforce that is unemployed is overqualified with bachelor degrees that they thought would guarantee them a safe job on a nice career track. Upon graduation, they are finding that there is a shrinking pool of jobs for them, and that they'll either have to retrain (do a masters o…

This is an interesting viewpoint about Starbucks that I have heard many times. So here is an article [1] talking about how 75% of Starbucks employees don't have a college degree. If you go up the Starbucks hierarchy 50% employees are baristas. 35% are shift supervisors 15% assistant store manager or higher in the hierarchy Which means the odds are overwhelming that every employee you interact with in a normal Starbuc…

It's my opinion that the whole "People with BAs in liberal arts work at Starbucks" thing is a joke that someone took seriously.

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

#92

Post by morgante »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #75
paulhauggis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

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

What? As far as I know, hospitals don't directly pay for medical school.

Rather, the cost of medical school is reflected in doctor salaries.

(Just as the cost of training is reflected in developer salaries.)

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

#93

Post by pbiggar »

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…

The issue for the US is that they want to keep those good jobs here, and so they need to keep the good companies here. If the price is driven up -- and it is being driven up -- but you can get good devs in Estonia, India, the Philippines, Uzbekistan, etc, at a far more affordable price then:

a) US companies will hire those remote workers, causing cash to flow out of the US

b) companies will set up in those countries to compete with the US companies, but without the burden of the US' skyrocketing salaries.

This happened in manufacturing: the US had high salaries, so costs of manufacturing were too high, so the US started outsourcing to Asian, and now the manufacturing industry in the US is so bad that companies can actually afford to hire US manufacturing workers again.

The solution: when wages skyrocket, bring in foreign engineers. When wages are depressed, don't.

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

#94

Post by mtviewdave »

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…

>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.

"Training" is far too broad a term for this to be accurate. Training can mean anything from training someone how to use git to training a non-programmer to be a data scientist. We can't expect a company to spend multiple years on the latter, but even the smallest, leanest startup can afford the former.

Where do we draw the line?

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

#95

Post by 1971genocide »

The more I read articles like this the more I hate america.

america wants to be global hegemonic power without paying the price for it.

america only has 5% of the world's population and deserves only 5% of the world's GDP, and should limit itself to absorbing only 5% of world's resource.

American multinationals who also control america's govt want to absorb the best of the world's labour and force wage suppression on its own people.

Guess what - its working so well that they can even ignore to invest in their OWN infrastructure, education and people.

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

#96

Post by SilasX »

crdoconnor wrote: post #32
droopyEyelids wrote: post #8

Until the law is passed that releases all restrictions on visa-workers and simply grants them citizenship or an extremely permissive stay-while-looking-for-a-job situation, increasing the h1-b quota is simply a means to create a reduced-rights cheaper workforce. It really fills me with disgust to see influential people present this issue as a skills shortage, while hiring workers at reduced wages and burdening them w…

That's the reason behind this too: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2013/02/26/bill-gates... Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Drew Houston, Tony Hsieh and Gabe Newell and Mark Zuckerberg aren't throwing their name and money at learn to code charities out of the goodness of their heart. They're very directly trying to lower the primary cost that their investments face - wages.

The economics of that theory don't (seem to) make sense. If you expand the supply of a factor of production, you expand the supply of the output. The employer pays less, but has to sell for less too.

If widget specialists flood the market, their wages go down [1], but so do widget prices. The factory owner doesn't necessarily benefit, just like grocery stores don't benefit from higher tomato prices. (In fact, they may lose in greater shoplifting costs that can't be passed on to customers.)

On top of that, there's the public goods problem, of how other employers, who aren't expanding the supply of programmers, can hire them just the same.

So I don't see the monetary incentive to fund these things like you claim.

[1] Of course, just like your claim about programmers, this ignores systemic/ecosystem effects: maybe the lower price of widget labor will lead to investment in capital that depends on widget labor, which leads more investors to look for better uses of widget labor, which bids it back up. This isn't an unreasonable dynamic to expect in software, as more app ideas might get pursued than otherwise as more programmers come on the market.

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

#97

Post by angersock »

School-Cotton wrote: post #72
[deleted] wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

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

It's the truth, and it didn't strike me as particularly egotistical.

If you're having trouble hiring, maybe you need to wise up to the idea that some of these "snotty and egotistical" developers are worth every penny.

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

#98

Post by nickpsecurity »

rewqfdsa wrote: post #51
ForHackernews wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k? Anecdotally, it's not a specific skill, but a talent for solving problems using any tools and skills necessary. The 10x developer is real, and he's not afraid to read a damn textbook or go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job.

"go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job"

EXACTLY! I've been knocking them off for years. Most modern problems are variations on older ones. First step is to see if someone solved it already, how, and if I can use it. So, stopping code injection for example, I find that all kinds of hardware from 1960-1980 tagged memory & used CPU in ways that prevented it. Stack overflowing S.P.? Use a reverse stack like MULTICS. Pauseless GC? Put one in memory controller on your FPGA/ASIC like a Scheme machine did. I could go on all day on this stuff.

So much wisdom in relatively, few books and a bunch of papers. I wish someone would figure out a way to collect, organize, and spread them. That way people might stop asking me things like whether OS's can be written in "managed code." Stock reply: "type Niklaus Wirth or Oberon System into Google."

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

#99

Post by mahyarm »

ams6110 wrote: post #19
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…

They need to consider moving outside the valley, if a developer with 3 months experience can get 130K. They can come to the midwest USA and get devs with 10 years experience for well under six figures.

They cannot get 130k, they just think they can get 130k. They won't pass the interviews, or even the recruiters most of the time.

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

#100

Post by nevdka »

Not all tech companies are the same. Google needs engineers with skills that most tech workers don't have. You might have a CS degree from a great school and 15 years experience with J2EE, but you're not experienced with say... reactJS. If Google (or Facebook, or startup that just raised $25M) is looking to hire a team of reactJS devs, then they can very quickly exhaust the supply of locals who have used it. From Google's perspective, there is a shortage.

But some other companies, usually 'IT' more than 'Tech' from my experience... yeah... they can get a bit squirrely. When a company gets newly 'redundant' workers to train the new migrants, they can't really claim that there are no suitable qualified locals.

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