I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages • Hacker News Board

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

#581

Post by cutemonster » Tue, May 25, 2021, 12:26 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #541

ivalm wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. There…

> This means the company needs one employee at minimum

Maybe not -- for example, we don't know if there are other permanent employees already, and then, not hiring more people can be acceptable

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

#582

Post by rmk » Tue, May 25, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

rhacker wrote: post #559

rmk wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bootcamp grads haven't been in the workforce long enough, so whether they can weather the fickle winds of the technology landscape is an open question. That's where the CS degree shows its worth: technologies change but fundamentals change less. Comparison-based sorting is still O(nlogn). You still have to partition and break down large data sets in order to work on them. Time and space tradeoffs will always exist an…

meh - I had basically 2 data structure courses, which is not a "year of classes" since the class met for 1 hour, twice a week for about 20 weeks, and times 2 for that second semester. So I have 20 * 2 * 2 or 80 hours of O notation and heap sorting. The rest of my CS degree consisted of a lot of stuff I used in class (assembly programming) and maybe I got something out of that. I also took a functional languages cours…

No. Look around you in any tech organisation and see how much value is generated by the people who code vs. data scientists, and how many software people there are vs data scientists. ML is very popular and the startup ecosystem has latched on to it for funding but the fundamentals of CS have not changed. Sure, there's real money in ML but there's plenty of lucrative opportunities in software development.

Your post somewhat proves my point: you are here (and presumably thriving) in software dev despite taking many courses that you deem only tangentially related, years ago. Whether the same can be said of bootcampers remains an open question, because they haven't been in the industry long enough. Anecdotal evidence from software dev managers I know who have tried hiring bootcampers has been overwhelmingly negative (but they are often comparing BS/MS/PhDs who have spent 4-10 years immersed in various aspects of CS to bootcampers, which isn't fair).

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

#583

Post by Hnrobert42 » Thu, May 27, 2021, 4:36 AM UTC

namdnay wrote: post #374

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Off-topic) I was surprised to learn that in Northern Ireland, you are legally required to ask candidates whether they are Catholic or Protestant. If they decline answering, you must make an educated guess and document that. The goal is to ensure you are not hiring all Catholics or all Protestants. Northern Ireland is in a unique situation. The Troubles were horrible. I can’t imagine having to write regulations to pu…

What’s interesting is that of the other developed countries, the US actually sounds the closest to this. No other country that I know of (maybe Canada?) will ask you to describe your “race” when applying to university for example

Heh. That’s true. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if we had to ask about race. I guess each country/culture has to address its particular fault lines. Like I said, I don’t envy folks drafting laws to try to rebuild civil society.