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

101–110 of 200 posts

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

#101

Post by Animats »

The IEEE points out regularly that there's no shortage of engineers. Otherwise, salaries would be going up across the board. Whenever some employer complains they can't find engineers, ask how many people they have in off-site training right now.

Companies need to be paying for training that's just conversion from one skill set to whatever skill set the company needs right now. Most programmers who are competent in at least two languages can easily learn a third. A combination of explicit training and someone to answer hard questions is usually sufficient. (There's startup potential there - offer conversion training courses, where people who already know A are taught B. A "hard question" answering service, sort of like StackOverflow but paid, with a service level agreement, and without the clueless closing of questions, could work as a business.)

This industry has forgotten what management is for. Part of the job of management is to organize the division of labor. Not everyone can do everything. It's the job of management to divide up the job so that no one part is too hard. Instead, we see a demand for "full stack developers". That's a confession of incompetent management.

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

#102

Post by [deleted] »

gkoberger wrote: post #38
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.

Salaries are, in part, a way of reimbursing people for their educations. Sure, large companies can (or, more accurately, need to) train people. But, look at, say, my startup. I'm the only engineer. How am I supposed to find the time to train someone who can barely program? Things would get done significantly quicker if I just did everything myself.

[deleted]

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

#103

Post by crdoconnor »

SilasX wrote: post #96
crdoconnor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

>If widget specialists flood the market, their wages go down [1], but so do widget prices.

Only if we make the patently unrealistic assumption that the widget manufacturers have negligible market power (a perfectly competitive market). That assumption would also lead us to believe that they have negligible profits. They don't.

Those billionaires have a lot of market power between them and make a lot of profits.

If we used your assumptions, the tech wage fixing cartel of 2013 would also have been impossible. It happened.

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

#104

Post by sliverstorm »

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…

> Wow... as a VISA immigrant,

> The people coming in on visa's are usually way more skilled than their american counterparts.

I see...

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

#105

Post by j_baker »

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…

Yeah, but you know what? The cost of living has also skyrocketed dramatically in Silicon Valley. I mean, you make it sound like engineers here are on a gravy train where we spend 3 months learning a language and can suddenly move to San Francisco where we just let the money roll in. The truth is it costs a lot to live in the Bay Area these days, and that means that if companies want people to move here they need to pony up and pay a good salary.

That $130k starting salary you mention is enough for a person to afford a studio in the Tenderloin these days?

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

#106

Post by angersock »

DGAP wrote: post #83

In this thread there's a lot of complaining about mediocre developers. I'm still finishing my undergrad, and looking to go the PM route, but how do I avoid being the type of developer complained about here?

You shouldn't go trying to be a PM, because you've got neither the experience nor the respect to get there. Sorry to be blunt, but this'll save some time.

Instead, focus on being the best engineer you can be, on building and crafting software as well as you can. That will earn you the respect of the people whose respect is worth something, and will give you the insights needed for leading a team properly.

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

#107

Post by MortenK »

gkoberger wrote: post #21
andrewljohnson wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ )

Why would you even post job listings and ask people to apply, if you think no good developers apply for jobs?

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

#108

Post by sliverstorm »

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…

Do we really have to hit 8-figure salaries for college grads before we can say with any confidence that we have hit a supply-limited market? We are supposedly a group of smart people; I hope we can notice the smoke before the house is burning down around our ears.

I'm not saying we have one. But I'm also suspicious of the self-serving opinions that rank-and-file developer salaries ought to be 10x higher.

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

#109

Post by NhanH »

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…

Rant time:

I'm #1 engineering hire in the current startup I'm at for the past 2 years. I know more than half a dozen programming languages (ie I can read them, and reasonably tell if you're doing something horrific to the code) and I can competently/ confidently work in at least a few. Yes I have one language I'm deep in. I can do reasonable sys admin works, setup aws shit, knowing most of the basic work you need to know to set up Yet, I have failed to get the damning H1B in the last 2 years and have to leave next year. My company do plan to set me up with the green card EB process, but that takes a few years. And startup being startup, sudden death isn't particularly rare, you know the drill. I've been asking people every time I heard their them complaining about h1b and low skill ... and I have never gotten an answer.

Also, I'm trying to find a new job in SV for the past few months (thinking that I should live there for a bit before leaving the States), and the job finding process has changed me from self-doubt to angry to disappointed to wtf-is-going-on-up-there.

So, unicorn-without-a-horn developer looking for remote job! Will anyone hire me, wink wink ;)?

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

#110

Post by abritinthebay »

My company has been trying to hire good Ruby and Frontend developers for... well.. a while.

There's no shortage of applicants but the quality...? Eh.

Finding even a Junior level engineer that knows more than "I can use these libraries" rather than "I know the language" is hard in both (but especially in JS).

There's a big pool... but sadly most of it is shallow.

Post reply on HN