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I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

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Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#541

Post by imtringued »

ivalm wrote: post #311
nradov wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's still not a shortage. The government hasn't imposed a wage cap. Employers can just increase wages to the market rate.

No, sometimes there is no zone of possible agreement (value produced is below market rate). In this case you can both have shortage and unemployment at the same time. Example, you have labor force of 10 people. All jobs have mandatory stay of 2 years. 6 companies have an opening each that pays 1 mil/year. The openings are staggered so 3 jobs are available on odd and 3 on even years (and last 2 years). 50 jobs are pos…

>The minmax solution is to not take a 100k job because of opportunity cost (you won’t get a chance at the 1 mil job next year). So you have both 40% unemployment and massive labor shortage (56 openings but only 10 viable candidates).

>These salaries represent value produced to company and cannot be raised.

This means the company needs one employee at minimum. If it loses that employee it will not produce value. Therefore it is in the best interest of the company to hire two people, the first position is compensated as much as possible, the second is compensated one dollar more than the lowest competing position that got filled.

Thus, the top offer becomes $899999 and the lowest offer becomes $100001. However, there is a problem. We have 12 positions but only 10 people. The companies will have to outbid each other on the lowest position until all salaries hit market rate, which is the average of the top ten original positions (6 times 1 mill 4 times 100k) that market rate is $640k for everyone.

The 100k jobs never get filled and they shouldn't get filled ever, because a lack of customer demand will never be a shortage. (the assumption in your scenario is that training costs exceed $1000k and therefore it never makes sense to increase the labor pool)

The mistake you made in your scenario is that you did not mention price controls enforced by the government. In a free market companies will negotiate and adjust their salary. The lack of training is acceptable for a thought experiment though.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#542

Post by imtringued »

shagie wrote: post #297
nradov wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's still not a shortage. The government hasn't imposed a wage cap. Employers can just increase wages to the market rate.

But what is "market rate"? Likewise, if "market rate" is above "value produced by the employee" it doesn't make any sense to pay that much. There are lots of companies out there that need some tech and some programming, but when the company revenue is only a few million that has to span a few score employees, and costs... its not possible to pay the small handful of devs six figures and keep everything in the black.…

>Likewise, if "market rate" is above "value produced by the employee" it doesn't make any sense to pay that much.

It also means that somewhere out there is a business that can actually produce enough value to pay market rate and you should work for that company instead.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#543

Post by jokethrowaway »

This is conflating so many different problems.

The work you do at a FAANG is generally much simpler than what you prepare for the interview. If I were them I would just split the streams: hard interviews and high pay for incredible talent and just pair programming / entry level pay for entry level developers.

I have senior engineer friends who got hired at Google for basically doing overpaid crud API all day. You could have that for a fraction of the price and without wasting a senior's time on that crap.

FAANGs complaining about lack of developers have only themselves to blame. I rarely heard it's a problem for them, though: the high salaries attract a never ending stream of talent willing to prepare for whatever interview they can think of.

Smaller companies with lower compensations and less valuable stock have much bigger problems. Finding people who are able to code is not trivial if you don't have FAANG's money.

You have no idea how many people I've seen coming to mid / senior interview (no algorithms, just pair programming) lacking basic programming skills.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#544

Post by imtringued »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #272
nradov wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's still not a shortage. The government hasn't imposed a wage cap. Employers can just increase wages to the market rate.

If 1000 companies want to hire top tier experienced engineers and there are only 100 on the market, that is the definition of a shortage.

No it isn't because you can train 900 more engineers. If companies aren't willing to train 900 more engineers then demand is only 100. Willingness is expressed by the price. If the price is high enough people will train themselves even if the companies themselves aren't providing training.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#545

Post by jl2718 »

ditonal wrote: post #149
_2d30 wrote: post #14

I literally can’t relate to this on any level. I’m an HM at a company that pays on the order of a FANG and at best matches one of these credentialist barriers and yet we can’t come close to hiring targets on devs. I don’t get how people can see the plethora of individuals under 10yrs experience in SWE and other tech roles in SV/NYC/SEA with incomes of $250-600k/yr and think this happens without a “shortage” of talent…

I've mentioned this on HN before, but I have 10+ years experience, a BS in CS from a top 10 school, worked as SWE at Google for over 3 years, I've done 100+ leetcode questions, studied grokking the systems interview/designing data intensive applications, I live in the Bay Area, and I've _still_ failed 90% of my onsites last few years at the top tech companies (Stripe, Lyft, AirBnB, Square, Dropbox, etc). Reasons for…

This seems like the most relevant anecdote in this thread. When I talk to friends about how they interview, it’s never about skills. Some say they’re not actually hiring, but they interview experts for free advice. If they are desperate, they hire for exact experience. I don’t know who out there is hiring new grads at giant salaries for Leetcode skills, but I think they’re mostly looking for impressionable followers.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#546

Post by imtringued »

username90 wrote: post #432
mannerheim wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In economic terms, there is no shortage. There's a shortage in common parlance terms, sure. There is an easy solution - pay market rates. When people say there's a shortage of engineers, they mean there's a shortage of engineers at the price they're willing to pay.

No, they mean there is a greater lack of engineers compared to other occupations requiring similar levels of education and therefore we should put more effort into educating and importing engineers. Saying we shouldn't focus on getting more engineers in those cases is just dumb, the economy would greatly benefit, you just want to protect your currently privileged position at the cost of society as a whole.

>No, they mean there is a greater lack of engineers compared to other occupations requiring similar levels of education and therefore we should put more effort into educating and importing engineers.

Importing engineers is just poaching engineers from other countries. It's the same thing.

Educating engineers is a matter of compensation. Given a high enough salary people will get the necessary degree. The only other thing you can do is cut education quality and just let more people pass.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#547

Post by imtringued »

namdnay wrote: post #415
nxpnsv wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I not understanding what "market rate" means. I bought my care at market rate, it costed less than a lambo. But it also didn't cost $10.

"market rate" usually applies to a single good (or goods that are fungible between themselves). i think for your car or engineers we would say there are many different markets depending on skill level, location, nationality etc

The mistake is that companies want a certain quality standard for as low a price as possible, which means their salary expectations don't match their quality standards but they put out press releases telling everyone that it's not the case.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#548

Post by imtringued »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #538
Leherenn wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably won't need merge sort in your day to day programming, but closures (sometimes called lambdas), definitely. Every time you create a function that captures some variables outside its scope, congratulations, you've just used a closure.

The point being here is that you can use them, but you don't have to necessarily know the term for them. The only reason I know what a closure is in JavaScript is because I have heavily practiced for Frontend interviews. I've been otherwise using them productively forever now.

That's true. The problem in this case is that they are weeding out applicants based on their knowledge of terminology. Talking about a concrete code sample may not fall into that trap.

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#549

Post by geoduck14 »

uyt wrote: post #395
anchpop wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now new grads feel lowballed at 200k TC As a new grad, was I supposed to feel lowballed at getting an offer quite a bit less than that? I know senior devs who make less than that. Is this just for stanford/mit grads?

Most schools have post-graduation survey. Quick google shows mit's 2020 class had 70 bachelor students responding to the survey for jobs in the tech industry, with base salary of: $97,750, $118,000 $129,000 for 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile respectively IIRC this number is typically just the base salary so you can roughly double it to include bonus and stock. Click Employment tab then Page 9 in https://capd.mit.edu…

FWIW, my bonus is definitely NOT half of my compensation

Re: I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

#550

Post by majani »

sizzle wrote: post #524
Loranubi wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senior devs in my country make around 35k in international companies. Even FAANG is maybe 50k.

What country?! You should demand more?

Probably any country that's not the US. Very few companies in the world have FAANG-level cashflows or Silicon Valley-level funding to be able to pay developers high salaries.
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