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

#131

Post by joe_the_user » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:22 AM UTC

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…

I don't understand how your claim about Starbucks employees not having college degrees contradicts the assertion that people with college degrees apply there but don't get hired because they're overqualified. The employees actually hired would be those without degrees, which is what the OP says.

I would also add that despite quoting juicy statistic from your article, you don't seem to have read it accurately - there's no about how many baristas have degrees. The only comment is that 25% of all employees have degrees. I don't have the data tell what the chance is that the average Starbucks barista has a college degree but I'd claim neither do you if you're just going by that article.

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

#132

Post by digisign » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:23 AM UTC

gkoberger wrote: post #124

j_baker wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rent is high because there is not enough housing.

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

#133

Post by deciplex » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:26 AM UTC

gkoberger wrote: post #113

MortenK wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess I meant that no good developer is out looking for a job on something like Angellist or Hired.com. And plus, it never hurts to be a bit optimistic, I suppose.

Then are you just round-filing CVs that you get via that path? Because if you really think that you'll get no good candidates that way, all you're doing is introducing needless noise into your search process by cluttering it up with unwanted candidates.

Either you're not being honest about your opinion of those sites and others like them, or you are behaving irrationally.

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

#134

Post by 1971genocide » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:30 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #112

1971genocide wrote: post #95

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…

I'm not clear how a country can deserve a fixed portion of global GDP, no more, no less. It's not a zero-sum game, and how exactly do you apportion productivity? And FWIW, in GDP per capita, the US is only #10.

5% +- 1%

I am a strong believer that all people have equal ability, and if all countries were on a equal footing then their GDP size would be more of less reflective of their labour force.

Ofcourse it gets complicated if countries have resources only to their geography.

GDP per capita is a weak measure since america has high inequality, some people in america are as poor and hungry as the worst conditions in africa.

America was built mostly out stealing labour from the rest of the world in a selective way, without taking full advantage of your own labour force.

The unfairness comes when we talk about investment. A lot of counties like India invested heavily on education. What happened to the talent produced by that investment ? They all ran away to US.

Its okay if a small number of people do it, but when a huge portion of the population does it then its not fair to the country involved.

It also allows america to get away with it by not investing in their own education or labour force.

Some countries figured out this game - south korea, china. who force their labour to pay back the investment - is it wrong ? yes.

But given america's hypocrisy they had no other option.

Right now america is loosing its ability to attract talent, since the global financial meltdown in 2008. It used to be a blackhole to world labour and investment (using wallstreet).

But as countries develop american multinationals and the american govt will need to downsize and they are not happy to do it, since it means downsizing its global bullying power.

-----------------------------------

If you want to learn more about how america has screwed over humanity.

1) http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Global-Minotaur-Economic-Controv...

2) http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Oil-Kings-Changed-Balance/dp/143...

3)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...

------------------------------------

I have been reading about it and making sure things are historically accurate, not only am I becoming more economically literal - I am also enraged about how horrible america has being, I used to celebrate american culture and now really feel bitter. I have been reading them only for the past 20 days or so, so my initial phase of angry is still not complete.

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

#135

Post by maerF0x0 » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:33 AM UTC

digisign wrote: post #132

gkoberger wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent is so high because salaries are so high.

Rent is high because there is not enough housing.

Not enough housing because high salaries draw more workers.

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

#136

Post by deciplex » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:36 AM UTC

learc83 wrote: post #79

sbuttgereit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> 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.

A programmer can easily make a million per year for a company and still find himself with almost no leverage within the firm, compared to someone on the business side of things doing the same. I'm in that situation myself, having made the company my salary for the next decade or so within my first year there, and yet you would not know that from looking at the work I'm doing here now or my career prospects here going forward.

The fact is it is difficult for non-programmers to properly assess the skill of other programmers, and at the same time existing programmers within just about any company you can name, are low-status enough that their recommendations for salary will go ignored. And so it is easy to see how most of the players on the supply side of the job market for software development, will behave very irrationally.

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

#137

Post by tmuir » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:36 AM UTC

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…

Something I've thought a lot about at my current job is the relative nature of the 10x engineer. Half of the developers on my team consistently require over a week to accomplish tasks that would take me half of a day. That's a 10x difference. Some of these people have several more years of experience than I do. Everyone has over five years of experience.

The very fact that the disparity is accepted and allowed to persist is pretty demotivating. When deadlines slip, its not the stragglers who are asked what happened, its the high performers. It's not the stragglers who are asked to work more hours, because management knows that those hours would be ineffective. What that really translates to is "Gee, being 10x more productive is great, but we're behind, and you're the developer most prepared to fix this problem we have, so we're gonna need 15x."

Are there actually 10x developers who don't resent their 10% counterparts?

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

#138

Post by cybojanek » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:38 AM UTC

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…

Agree - we've been interviewing loads of candidates, and most don't know the difference between a process and a thread.

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

#139

Post by enraged_camel » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:43 AM UTC

gkoberger wrote: post #124

j_baker wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Um, no. It's very well-documented that the reason rent is high is because the locals are strongly resisting the development of new properties. The resulting supply shortage, combined with overwhelming demand, makes property prices skyrocket. Therefore, companies end up having to offer high salaries to compensate.

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

#140

Post by enraged_camel » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:46 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #129

crdoconnor wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

You should work at a law firm sometime. Interns are very, very profitable for them, because they work insane hours and do everything they are told without question.