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

#121

Post by orthoganol » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:11 AM UTC

j_baker wrote: post #105

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 p…

Certainly one of the more absurd comment I've read on HN.

3 month bootcamp attendees shouldn't make more than $75k. They are junior as hell, and add little if not negative value for a long stretch of time. Even $75k is a reflection of the crazy job market, not their actual value.

Your COL & salary analysis for SF is incredibly off. Yeah you'll probably have to sacrifice the excesses of your upper middle class SF lifestyle (boo hoo...). You can easily live on $75/k year in a $1600/mo studio in the Tenderloin, or on the flip side you can have a $1600/mo shared apartment in the Marina. You can't do that if you have a family, (but if you do, that's on you for switching to programming while needing to support a family).

Crappy programmer entitlement is just so off the charts (and disjointed from reality) it's a little frustrating.

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

#122

Post by crdoconnor » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:11 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #87

crdoconnor wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 la…

>No sane employer turns to an internship program for cheap labor.

You're kidding, right?

>For one thing, intern salaries are not exactly "cheap" ($10k+ at SV companies).

Relative to tech salaries after graduation that's cheap. In industries without such high salaries interns often don't get paid at all. That's super cheap.

>For another, nearly every intern is a net drain on the company in the immediate term.

So are many dirt cheap outsourced developers. That doesn't change the why they are hired.

>So why should they invest in training? In the immediate term,

For a long term investment pay off.

>Note that that's what actually broke the wage-fixing cartel: Facebook.

A class action lawsuit by tech employees broke the cartel.

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

#123

Post by DGAP » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:13 AM UTC

angersock wrote: post #106

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.

>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.

I get that, the only reason I have my sights set on it is that I'm already working as one for a company. :) I think that I'll best be able to leverage my experience and skills in some sort of technical product or program manager role, but I wanted to be sure I can pass a big 4 technical interview ect in addition to my pm/ business skills.

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

#124

Post by gkoberger » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:13 AM UTC

j_baker wrote: post #105

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 p…

Rent is so high because salaries are so high.

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

#125

Post by mahyarm » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:15 AM UTC

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #60

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?

The people I know in that range tend to work at: * Google * Facebook * Amazon * Microsoft * Apple They work on security, mobile, back-end, and "I can't tell you what I'm working on," the last being the most common answer, unfortunately. The common thread is that they're all good developers. I got my offer in large part because of Android development skills on top of low level skills, which on Android means I'm comfor…

I want to second that the salary tends to top out, and the rest of compensation is very heavily stock based. Also that stock compensation might of not been as worth as much when it was defined, but because the company stock has performed well, it's value has increased significantly.

For example if your 4 year stock grant was rated on the early 2012 price of apple, and now it's about double, then your making a lot more money!

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

#126

Post by deciplex » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:18 AM UTC

pbiggar wrote: post #93

bradleyjg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

> now the manufacturing industry in the US is so bad

Isn't this pretty soundly debunked at this point? Honest question because I hear alternately "US manufacturing is dead" and "US manufactures more crap than anyone else except China, barely". I get the sense that saying the US manufacturing industry is dead because it doesn't employ many people, is the same as saying the US agriculture industry is dead for the same reason, and also wrong for the same reason (i.e. number of people employed is a weak metric for the strength of an industry).

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

#127

Post by mahyarm » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:19 AM UTC

Bahamut wrote: post #118

mahyarm wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet a lot of Bay Area startups (some even YC companies that popup here) think they can get away with offering top notch developers in their field $130k & poor equity. The outrageousness cuts both ways.

Usually they are young and don't know how startups work that well. They don't know how the full financial simulation works out.

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

#128

Post by rmason » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:19 AM UTC

Shortage may be phony?

Ask all the unemployed engineers over fifty if it's phony.

Ask all the women leaving the field after less than five years if it's phony.

Ask developers who want to work remotely if it's phony.

If you don't see companies making simple, easy changes then you can be pretty assure the shortage is phony.

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

#129

Post by morgante » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:21 AM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #122

morgante wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 la…

>No sane employer turns to an internship program for cheap labor. You're kidding, right? >For one thing, intern salaries are not exactly "cheap" ($10k+ at SV companies). Relative to tech salaries after graduation that's cheap. In industries without such high salaries interns often don't get paid at all. That's super cheap. >For another, nearly every intern is a net drain on the company in the immediate term. So are m…

Have you ever actually hired an intern?

I've literally never seen a company make a net profit on interns. Talk to people running intern programs: it's explicitly seen as a hiring funnel for full-time, not as an end of itself.

> A class action lawsuit by tech employees broke the cartel.

The lawsuit came after the cartel had already stopped functioning. Facebook refused to play ball and started recruiting aggressively from the other companies (particularly Google), directly undermining the wage-fixing.

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

#130

Post by keerthiko » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:21 AM UTC

NhanH wrote: post #109

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…

Was pretty much in your exact same boat 2 years ago. Had to leave. Spent 2 years outside as a digital nomad, working remotely from Asia. Got my O1 approved last month, and am moving back. On the one hand the last 2 years bouncing about in Asia have been a unique experience that has made me a grow a lot. I would never have done it without being forced into it. On the other hand, I missed SV so much and can't wait to be back.

Find my contact info in my profile, feel free to get in touch.