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

#181

Post by LoSboccacc » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 10:30 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…

> 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.

nope. you are mistaken, nothing keeps companies in any specific place except opportunities. With labor prices so cheap in Asia, what would stop company to just move all production off shore like they did for electronics?

they are trying, have tried and will try again countless time to outsource tech jobs, but it will take more years for them to figure out the quality issues they're having in doing so.

anyway it's not like oversea there are millions of great coders and engineers just waiting to code for food. STEMSs tend to be of higher education overall, which makes exploiting them harder.

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

#182

Post by collyw » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 12:11 PM UTC

tmuir wrote: post #137

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 per…

Are their solutions more maintainable, robust and long lasting perhaps?

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

#183

Post by jazzyk » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 1:05 PM UTC

orthoganol wrote: post #145

j_baker wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is that it's "crappy programmer entitlement" to: * Expect to earn the median income * Expect to have a decent lifestyle. * Expect to be able to have a family Sounds like crappy employer entitlement to me.

Well yeah... it's completely delusional to think a 3 month developer should earn the median income for programmers. It's also unfair to your family to decide to support them as a completely inexperienced developer. Have some savings for a couple years until you can add value. I don't know what Ivy League school you went to, but for relatively normal people an excellent lifestyle can be had on $75/k in SF. An upper mi…

An upper middle class lifestyle is not going to happen on $180K in SF either - if you are senior level, but have a family and want to have an adequate place to live.

Median home price just hit $1M. We are talking _median_, not a mansion.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/1-million-ci...

Wake me up when senior people in software can reach compensation levels of doctors and other professionals ($300-400K).

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

#184

Post by cafard » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 1:11 PM UTC

roymurdock wrote: post #65

npalli wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the insightful comment. I avoided singling out the larger corporations at the end of my comment (Starbucks, McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts) as I don't have any friends who will be working service jobs for these chains. I graduated undergrad a couple of months ago, and I do have a fair amount of friends who gave up looking for work in the finance/startup field full time and are now working at trendy restaurants/b…

The bar and restaurant business has always attracted college graduates who found that they could make decent money (and, I suppose, continue the nocturnal hours they were used to). I remember a guy who had passed the New York bar exam, which gave him the right to practice quite a few places, and kept right on tending bar, despite frequent phone calls from his mother. But he was certainly making better than Starbucks money.

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

#185

Post by jazzyk » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 1:50 PM UTC

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…

"There also is a shortage of high-skill developers. Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming standard"

I don't see it at all. At least in Boston, salaries seem to top out at $170K, perhaps a bit more if you have a _really_ rare skillset. But in a stagnant economy getting $180K is not easy. Usually a lot of hand-wringing about the cost, etc.

The just-released Employment Cost Index (ECI) rose a record-low 0.2% last quarter. This is hard data, not anecdotes.

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

#186

Post by j_baker » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 2:55 PM UTC

orthoganol wrote: post #145

j_baker wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you're saying is that it's "crappy programmer entitlement" to: * Expect to earn the median income * Expect to have a decent lifestyle. * Expect to be able to have a family Sounds like crappy employer entitlement to me.

Well yeah... it's completely delusional to think a 3 month developer should earn the median income for programmers. It's also unfair to your family to decide to support them as a completely inexperienced developer. Have some savings for a couple years until you can add value. I don't know what Ivy League school you went to, but for relatively normal people an excellent lifestyle can be had on $75/k in SF. An upper mi…

> Well yeah... it's completely delusional to think a 3 month developer should earn the median income for programmers.

$75k is not the median income for programmers. $75k is the median income for anyone in SF. Which is exactly my point. To expect engineers to live in SF, you have to be willing to pay exorbitant salaries just to break even. If you want to pay a good salary, you pretty much have to pay 6 figures. Don't like it? Move to Cleveland or Detroit. I'm pretty sure $75k would be considered a great salary there. Just don't complain that developers cost too much and then require them to live somewhere with such a high cost of living.

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

#187

Post by 1971genocide » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 3:33 PM UTC

Asbostos wrote: post #119

1971genocide wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Can you explain more how the free market stops existing if you commodify labour? I don't understand that.

Sure !

Karl Marx originally explained the idea quite well.

Wages in a real economy is the real driver for demand. The capitalist yearning to drive down wages and cost as much as they can. That is how the system was designed !

The end result of thus maximum capital accumulation is a Commodification of labour. What does that mean ? It means that once wages are pushed down enough - there is no room for labour to increase demand and thus generate growth ( the thing that drives capitalism ).

Once you commodity labour then the demand side of your market collapses.

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This was what essentially what happened prior to the great depression and what happened ever since 2008.

I know people in silicon valley live in a bubble, but if you go outside you will see that the world is burning.

The reason why tech engineers are being paid 500K is not because of some inherit huge contribution to society but because huge accumulated capital is looking for yield.

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The way historically this inherient end state of capitalism was solved was through war ( it doesn't have to be )

War de-commodifcation labour by massively increasing its demand. It happened during WW-2, vietnam war, iraq war ( after the tech bubble burst )

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One way to solve the european debt crisis for example would be massively start spending. Imagine a massive investment to completely reform europe into green energy. There is however no political will to pursue this.

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The Chinese however understand this very well, their leaders are well versed with karl marx's study on capitalism - unlike in the west where neo-classic liberalism has corrupted the field of economics to such a degree that we cannot even openly talk about marx's analysis.

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For example the Chinese had 0 miles of high speed trains in 2009. Now they have 6000 miles worth of it !

They spend more cement in a year then america did in 100 !

They have more green energy then then both US and europe combined - even though they had no technological expertise until recently.

The Chinese also are spending a lot on their military but its a small part. They know that it can bankrupt a society.

Their most astounding new initiative is to provide free universal healthcare to 1.4 billion people !

While we in the west cannot even get out act together to solve the greece's debt problem. We are driving up growth by inflating huge tech and asset bubble in hope of driving up demand since the government is completely paralysed to act in a decisive way.

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

#188

Post by nickpsecurity » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:10 PM UTC

ScottBurson wrote: post #156

nickpsecurity wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.?…

As glad as I am to see someone mention all this great old technology, I feel compelled to point out that the GC on the MIT Scheme chip was not pauseless. It was a fairly simple mark-sweep collector.

I'm talking about this one (see Storage Management on p17):

http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-...

They had to leave it out of the first prototype due to space constraints but describe the approach. They build a second, state machine into storage interface that continuously looks for stuff it can reclaim. The idea was clearly to make it concurrent and use dedicated circuits. An enterprising reader of old wisdom would combine this with any number of parallel/concurrent algorithms in literature to achieve GC w/ predictable, performance impact.

That work was later referenced in a 1976 treatment of the subject that worked out foundational issues for concurrent collection:

http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:8b7d64a2-e9a7-4b04-...

Most work in GC from them on focused on software implementations. Did find a hardware implementation in embedded space with some interesting choices:

http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~morris/papers/IEEE_TMC_03.pdf

So, the original LISP machines and many later used mark-and-sweep often around or during a heap exhaustion. There were concurrent ones, with most using software. The Steele chip describes a concurrent design w/ straightforward implementation in hardware. That combined with literature gave people more than enough to acceptably solve this problem.

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

#189

Post by paulhauggis » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

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?

Then it's a moot point. Software developers are some of the highest paid professionals. This pays for the cost of any education already (college, etc).

The OP is implying that an employer should not only pay a salary, but pay for an employee to get trained.

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

#190

Post by angersock » Mon, Aug 03, 2015, 5:46 PM UTC

bbcbasic wrote: post #165

DGAP wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> I'm already working as one for a company. :) Wow THAT is a touche!

Depends on the company. :)

Either way, the desire to hone the technical skills is in the right place.