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The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

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Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#71

Post by don_draper »

pg wrote: post #18
achompas wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. What about the assertion that companies are struggling to fill these roles because (a) they demand more from potential candidates while (b) offering no more in wages than what we saw 10…

The finance companies competing for programmers are also American. So even assuming that SV companies could draw star programmers away from Goldman Sachs by paying them more, there would still be exactly the same net shortage of them in the US.

The finance companies pay considerably more than Silicon Valley companies thus don't have the same problem with filling positions as SV does. Do you disagree with that?

Search 'finance companies lobby h1b visa'. Nothing Then search 'bay area companies lobby h1b visa'. Tons of results.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#72

Post by gohrt »

jcnnghm wrote: post #66
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…

Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech companies is that these companies want star programmers Maybe they should try paying like stars. What percentage of engineers that aren't founders or within the first five employees make over $300,000 a year? The money is in Silicon Valley, Google's 2011 net income was $299,874/employee [1], but the vast majority of engineers aren't going to be…

You seem to be ignoring tha tech companies give employees equity (RSUs) as well as salary.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#73

Post by YuriNiyazov »

pg wrote: post #8
jaggederest wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://hackerschool.com

I understand that the comment you are replying to here says "nobody in the US is even attempting to train effective programmers, let alone 'star' ones." However, a few comments up, you say "The fundamental issue you mentioned above is that companies want stars, and you can't train stars."

Can you elaborate on how you envision things like hacker school to solve the problem of stars, if those can't be trained? I am not trying to be semantically nit-picky - I don't think I understand how star programmers come about, and maybe you have better insight.

The only thing I can think of is that you might imply that being a star programmer is an innate talent that needs to be developed, and things like hacker school would allow for this talent to be discovered. Is that about right?

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#74

Post by muzz »

stdgy wrote: post #60
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…

The issue with this analogy is that the vast majority of the imported foreign workers aren't rock star programmers. They're not Real Madrid starters. They're second string junior league players. They're consultants. Facebook/Google/Twitter/Microsoft/Amazon aren't the major users of H-1B Visas. Consulting firms are. http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134...

Isn't that because of the nature of the beast, since the consulting firms serve many other companies? Wipro, Infosys, etc. each have how many clients? Hundreds? Thousands?

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#75

Post by tosseraccount »

rogerchucker wrote: post #54
achompas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This paper http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill... seems to say yes: "Analyzing new data, drawing on a number of our prior analyses, and reviewing other studies of wages and employment in the STEM and IT industries, we find that industry trends are strikingly consistent: ... Wages have remained flat, with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels." EDIT: if you're skeptical of EPI, Br…

Table 2 in the Brookings paper says the opposite . " In recent years, from 2009 to 2011, nominal wage growth for U.S.-born workers with at least a bachelor’s degree has been high for the most prominent H-1B occupations. The average native-born worker experienced flat annual growth in wages over that period (0.0 percent), but wage growth for those in computer occupations—the largest H-1B category—grew by 1.3 percent e…

what about real wages?

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#76

Post by CleanedStar »

During the twentieth century, US economists promoting the values of those controlling production talked about how production was fundamentally controlled by laws of supply and demand, and economic theories thinking otherwise were silly.

Yet flying in the face of that is this idea of a "high tech worker shortage". If there really could be a shortage of high tech workers for longer than a short period, than the bedrock idea of supply and demand are bogus. Even miniscule hurdles like visas would mean nothing - if there is a mass of talent in India and a worldwide demand for that talent, then if visas were a problem, multinationals and trans-continental consulting firms would just set up there.

There is no high-tech worker shortage. There's a bunch of "idea guys" sitting around who think how much money they could make if they could hire a bunch of rock-star programmers on the cheap.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#77

Post by blhack »

aidenn0 wrote: post #37
blhack wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a perfect analogy. Lots of people also want to play pro ball. They can't, and no matter how much they train, they never will be able to. Their body just isn't built for it. Similarly, there are people who can study their ass off. They'll probably become pretty good, not great, but pretty good. Then there are a tiny, razor-thin minority of people who were born as some sort of intellectual freak, who will also s…

Except the league minimum for an MLB player is quite high, and has been going up. Why is the starting salary for highly recruited devs relatively flat?

I'm pretty sure the starting salary for the types of people PG is describing here is "whatever I want".

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#78

Post by gkuan »

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.

I have heard about declining educational standards at the primary and secondary level in the US. There are also studies on the impact of grade inflation at the college level. However, this is the first time I've heard about declining quality of Computer Science education at the college level. Are there any references about this? I am sincerely curious.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#79

Post by muzz »

wunna wrote: post #62
RyJones wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can't find people for the wage they're offering. The people they want are doing other things.

what is that these people do, that they turn down even 125K,150K,200K - according to you - "low salaries"? McD? or Welfare paying higher?

I think he's implicitly they are in positions that are paying them more.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#80

Post by blhack »

achompas wrote: post #36
blhack wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a perfect analogy. Lots of people also want to play pro ball. They can't, and no matter how much they train, they never will be able to. Their body just isn't built for it. Similarly, there are people who can study their ass off. They'll probably become pretty good, not great, but pretty good. Then there are a tiny, razor-thin minority of people who were born as some sort of intellectual freak, who will also s…

I'm not a fan of this analogy, as it perpetuates the idea that SV companies need a humongous collection rockstar ninja h4x0rs. I suspect that's not the case for the majority of positions--there's probably a shortage at the tail of the job distribution, but not at the mode.

Sure. I don't think anybody is arguing that every single programmer needs to be a pirate rockstar ninja-hacker, but there is a need, in some places, for those people.
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