The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage • Hacker News Board

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#21

Post by bennyg » Wed, Jul 24, 2013, 10:43 PM UTC

harryh wrote: post #15

larsberg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting to see if there is still a shortage of "valley-quality graduates" in 3-ish years. The reports I'm hearing from most of the top-15 departments are of record CS enrollments starting from last year, far over even the boom in the dotcom era. Of course, the growth in graduates may not keep pace with the growth in companies!

enrollments != graduates != star programmers

Sure, but statistics is on your side too. More enrollments has a higher shot at increasing the number of star programmers than not (all education and teaching ability staying the same).

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#22

Post by dillonforrest » Wed, Jul 24, 2013, 10:44 PM UTC

LOL, as if academics are more qualified to comment on the tech job market than hirers.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#23

Post by magicarp » Wed, Jul 24, 2013, 10:44 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #11

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #4

What if employers aren't being "picky". What if deterioration in academic standards means most graduates are not competent? A CS graduate being unable to do fizzbuzz is a travesty, and should be grounds for a school losing their accreditation if widely seen.

Academia has (literally) nothing to do with real-life software engineering. I hope I'm not bursting your bubble, but if you think otherwise you're severely mistaken.

FizzBuzz isn't software engineering, it's CS101.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#24

Post by epicureanideal » Wed, Jul 24, 2013, 10:45 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #2

It's not bogus. Many if not most of the big high tech companies have open positions they can't find people for. If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable, and that all you have to do is train them to be Xes, and you can have as many Xes as you want. Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech…

Having seen hiring practices in a large corporation first hand very recently, I can tell you that most of our positions were filled by very very unskilled people from overseas that could easily have been filled with average graduates from US computer science programs. It would have taken serious work to hire worse engineers, but hey, they're cheap!

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#25

Post by jmduke » Wed, Jul 24, 2013, 10:45 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #11

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #4

What if employers aren't being "picky". What if deterioration in academic standards means most graduates are not competent? A CS graduate being unable to do fizzbuzz is a travesty, and should be grounds for a school losing their accreditation if widely seen.

Academia has (literally) nothing to do with real-life software engineering. I hope I'm not bursting your bubble, but if you think otherwise you're severely mistaken.

Academia has an awful lot to do with real-life software engineering. It might not be as good of a preparation as spending those four years in internships or as a junior developer, but saying that there's (literally) no difference between the software engineering capabilities of a CS grad and an English grad is hyperbole.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#26

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 24, 2013, 10:46 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #2

It's not bogus. Many if not most of the big high tech companies have open positions they can't find people for. If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable, and that all you have to do is train them to be Xes, and you can have as many Xes as you want. Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech…

[deleted]

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#27

Post by shawndrost » Wed, Jul 24, 2013, 10:47 PM UTC

jaggederest wrote: post #6

pg wrote: post #2

It's not bogus. Many if not most of the big high tech companies have open positions they can't find people for. If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable, and that all you have to do is train them to be Xes, and you can have as many Xes as you want. Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech…

On the other hand, nobody in the US is even attempting to train effective programmers, let alone 'star' ones. There's a lot of room on all sides to improve the quality and availability of good technical workers. And, in the US at least, the financial industry siphons off a lot of otherwise excellent talent that could be going towards more productive ends than shaving milliseconds off automated trading.

http://hackreactor.com

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#28

Post by forgotAgain » Wed, Jul 24, 2013, 10:47 PM UTC

pg wrote: post #2

It's not bogus. Many if not most of the big high tech companies have open positions they can't find people for. If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable, and that all you have to do is train them to be Xes, and you can have as many Xes as you want. Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech…

If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable.

The basis of outsourcing at most large corporations is that people are more or less interchangeable.

Someone asking why we need to hire programmers from other countries might just as well ask why Real Madrid has to hire so many non-Spanish players. Can't they just train more Spanish players to play at the level they need?

Sorry but that is a ridiculous analogy. Most programmers here on H1B's are boiler room grunts. They work for large consulting companies where their key talent is looking like they know what they are doing. There are very few remarkable Cobol programmers working for InfoSys at Fortune 500 companies.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#29

Post by asr2bd » Wed, Jul 24, 2013, 10:48 PM UTC

Sure we may be graduating more STEM students, but I really hate when studies like this assume all students of a given field are equally talented. I'd say my university had a good CS program, but maybe 1/3 of our CS majors would get hired at top tech companies (Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft, etc) and get those really high salaries.

At the end of the day it's much easier to import top talent to fill the gap than to cultivate more of it in the U.S. Some companies like HackerSchool are popping up to address this need, but there's a long way to go.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#30

Post by badman_ting » Wed, Jul 24, 2013, 10:48 PM UTC

Good points here, but anyone trying to hire good tech talent knows how hard it can be. "Has a degree" and "qualified" aren't even in the same ballpark, but they seem to be conflated here.

I am interested in the salary thing, though. I think there is at least a little bit of companies bemoaning the fact that they can't find a person to fulfill rock-star expectations on a junior salary. It's macro 101, if there isn't enough supply then increase the price.