We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage • Hacker News Board

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#721

Post by retiredcoder » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 1:26 PM UTC

b212 wrote: post #164

revvx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same thing happen to me a couple times. Long and tiring process. Blackboard, make a project, lots of dirty laundry about "long gone incompetent developers" that made the current system a giant mess. Lots of red flags but lots of promises including a large maximum salary, including bonuses and stock options. The final offer, however, was 60% of my current pay. Lower than the average for someone with my exper…

Is this an American thing? I live in Eastern Europe and make decent buck here (close to 5000 EUR/mo after taxes in a country where you can cover all expenses under 1000 EUR/mo). I never had any trouble getting quality work in my country but a few times I got approached by companies from the US and oh boy, weeks of tiring recrutation process and the pay was ALWAYS worse than local. I feel like they do it on purpose ma…

It is not just American companies but big companies treat different labor markets differently.

For example, I used to work for a big company in Denmark that has a sattelite office in Bucharest.

It is questionable to see that even the equipment the developers get there was subpar. The fulltimers there were treated as contractors (e.g.: no career incentives), expendable (high turnover).

The office just existed because when the company was smaller and needed more than now cheaper labor, they made it so that remote managers could be there as a proxy.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#722

Post by bayesian_horse » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 1:32 PM UTC

TuringNYC wrote: post #681

bayesian_horse wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may honestly not have the money/resources to afford you. Most startups and new businesses fail. Part of that is a lack of funding and a lack of information/knowledge about the specifics of the markets they are working in. They may not know that they are looking for a Ferrari or what the market for Ferraris looks like.

This is totally fine, but it isn't a "shortage". It is poor product market fit, poor pricing, or just a bad business. If a business cannot support input costs, the business is just a bad business. If I start a business that sells Ferraris for 20k, then complain how I cant buy them cheap enough wholesale, there isn't a shortage.

This example certainly constitutes a "shortage", especially from the point of the employer. He has a demand which he can't fulfill. Due to not fulfilling it, he has problems investing his capital as productively as possible.

The idea that job applicants get offered wages which they perceive as too low does not mean that there is not a shortage of similar talent on the market, even at reasonable wages, if there even is such a thing.

The analogy with the Ferraris breaks down for developers and engineers because their qualifications are hard to quantify and their added value is hard to predict.

Employers will especially talk about talent shortages when they can't hire additional talent at the wages of their existing workforce. That may be because they got lucky and found very cheap engineers ("suckers"), but it also may be that they are running against the wall of the talent shortage, meaning they can only hire new people if they embark on a potentially ruinous wage competition with other employers...

If wages are perceived to low compared to profits, than I'd rather question the potential collusion among employers. There have been dramatic cases of such sollusion in silicon valley, as I recall. Less drastically labor market regulations and workforce protections will also play a role.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#723

Post by retiredcoder » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 1:42 PM UTC

meddlepal wrote: post #188

b212 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an American thing? I live in Eastern Europe and make decent buck here (close to 5000 EUR/mo after taxes in a country where you can cover all expenses under 1000 EUR/mo). I never had any trouble getting quality work in my country but a few times I got approached by companies from the US and oh boy, weeks of tiring recrutation process and the pay was ALWAYS worse than local. I feel like they do it on purpose ma…

I don't know about the EU business culture, but in the US you are expected to negotiate. You really have to fight for every penny you want...

My anedata for EU is that varies a lot between States.

In Germany, I had salary negotiation closer to what I was used to in the US (e.g.: two competing offers, etc).

In Denmark, very little room to maneuver. I had no luck negotiating salaries in big corps here (Final comp in DK mostly from salary). Every attempt I made to initiate a salary discussion/negotiation seemed to make the hiring managers uncomfortable as in “we don’t do this here”..

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#724

Post by toomuchtodo » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #606

toomuchtodo wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you increase supply, wages decrease. Wages will decline if you open the field up to everyone. Understandably, not everyone in tech wants wages to decline. If you want your wage to decline in the name of opportunity, that is your choice to make, but it is not your choice to have someone else's wages decline. What you're saying is, "God forbid you care about your quality of life so much you're not willing to keep…

> it is not your choice to have someone else's wages decline By your own logic, every time I help someone learn something to do with coding - for free - I undermine the wages of everybody else in the market whose job that person is going to be able to "steal" now. And yet it is my choice to do so.

It is your choice, and I fully support you having that choice. I speak of doing so at scale. You alone aren’t going to cause industry wide wage depression.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#725

Post by maxxxxx » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:17 PM UTC

sjy wrote: post #668

maxxxxx wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8*600 is $4800 per day. What kind of expert in what specialized field do you have to be to make that much? Can you give a specific example?

Seems below average for law firm partners [1], and there's a lot of them out there, so it doesn't surprise me at all that technical consultants with genuinely rare skills could command hourly rates like that. [1] https://www.mlaglobal.com/en/knowledge-library/research/2018...

Has anybody ever seen such a thing in reality? I have seen quite a few consultants and nobody ever got even close.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#726

Post by throwaway25475 » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:21 PM UTC

ianai wrote: post #388

throwaway25475 wrote: post #123

Making a throwaway to share my anecdote. What I find interesting is that if you point all of this out to HR/management, sometimes they don't believe you! I just left a company for which I was the random unicorn (perfect intersection of 3 different skillsets and relevant past experience) after one year. I was referred because someone at the company knew I had the exact skillset they needed, and ended up joining right…

Can you expand on how cognitive dissonance would play a role here?

The role it plays is in how people may respond to evidence that runs counter to their perception of reality. The blinding happens when HR/management decides that rejecting feedback and evidence is the best route to resolving the contradiction of reality vs belief. If they ignore it, then no such conflict exists.

Obviously this isn't the ideal way to handle cognitive dissonance. However, it is a way of handling and one that you often see. Another bad way of handling it is when you see people "explaining things away" without ever really addressing anything of substance.

In my case, I saw it manifest in the sheer confidence they displayed all year despite our rollout plans failing. It did not matter how many market signals they received either. There was always another excuse as to why things will eventually go smoothly.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#727

Post by ChuckNorris89 » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

retiredcoder wrote: post #721

b212 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an American thing? I live in Eastern Europe and make decent buck here (close to 5000 EUR/mo after taxes in a country where you can cover all expenses under 1000 EUR/mo). I never had any trouble getting quality work in my country but a few times I got approached by companies from the US and oh boy, weeks of tiring recrutation process and the pay was ALWAYS worse than local. I feel like they do it on purpose ma…

It is not just American companies but big companies treat different labor markets differently. For example, I used to work for a big company in Denmark that has a sattelite office in Bucharest. It is questionable to see that even the equipment the developers get there was subpar. The fulltimers there were treated as contractors (e.g.: no career incentives), expendable (high turnover). The office just existed because…

Are you from my former employer? :)

Joke aside, what you said above also applied in my case to my ex German employer in Eastern Europe. We got cheap machines with half the specs of the German counterparts but the management in The Mother Land expected the same productivity as the German colleagues.

Now, having migrated West to Austria(similar culture to Germany) tings don't get better an all accounts, even if you speak German. Sure, now you get nicer machines, and even if you manage to negotiate a salary close to local levels, your career development opportunities are close to zero as management will only propose the locals for promotions and trainings as those are the guys managers spend their lunches and cigarette breaks with, even if they're mildly incompetent. You'll be left as that guy who just needs to sit as his desk, do what he's told and be grateful to his masters he's been given a job as if you're coming form a country of goat hearders.

This horrible discriminatory culture in EU countries is not something the EU can't fix unfortunately and it's one of the reasons countries like Germany or the EU as a whole will never catch up to the US on innovation or salaries in tech.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#728

Post by exelius » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:39 PM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #698

exelius wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of brain drain going on at consulting companies as everyone flees a dying industry for 30% raises at FAAMG companies as they start to tackle vertical industry offerings. They’re all aggressively attacking the enterprise space. These companies just have profit margins high enough to afford to blow everyone out of the water with their offers. They’re competing with each other for the top talent, and it ma…

I like FAAMG but it's not pronounceble. I always though Netflix was a odd company next to the giants. MS is a better one. Maybe IBM should be included as well. "FAGAMI" ... maybe "FAMAGI" to be less profound.

IBM doesn’t belong; their revenue has been flat for 20 years and they have almost no influence in the tech world anymore. My clients view IBM as a consulting company with a market position somewhere between Infosys and Accenture.

On the other hand, Microsoft is still quite relevant to the future; Azure is getting a lot of traction in the enterprise world as an alternative tech stack to AWS. VSTS is rapidly displacing the whole Jira ecosystem and VS Code needed 6 months to become one of the most popular development tools.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#729

Post by seattle_spring » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

seattle_spring wrote: post #600

rubicon33 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. And they're missing the point that this isn't 1985 anymore. A high school student with a week of JavaScript and HTML could write AirBnB. Or at least, JavaScript and similar languages make programming much, much easier (and hence the barrier to entry much easier). As coding difficulty drops, and supply increases, the net effect will be a much higher demand for jobs than supply. And that's exactly where big tech w…

> A high school student with a week of JavaScript and HTML could write AirBnB I actually love it when a developer says something like this, because it tells me way more than even 2 full days of pairing or interviewing could: They know absolutely nothing about software at scale, and are probably extremely arrogant to boot.

Wow, looks like "here cometh the downvotes" homeboy couldn't take the criticism and flagged every comment he disagreed with.

Re: We Don't Have a Talent Shortage. We Have a Sucker Shortage

#730

Post by scotty79 » Sun, Apr 21, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

revvx wrote: post #301

pm90 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the OP mentioned that the recruiter thought the candidate was lying which is why they low-balled. So that explains the logic at least. They're not stupid, but they don't trust candidates I guess. Which is a whole different thing.

Yeah, the recruiter told me the whole hiring team thought I was bullshitting about my salary. It was a problematic company from the get go. I was cold called and the recruiter was very insistent. Their engineers were very unprofessional during the technical interview and complained A LOT about technical debt left by past co-workers during the interview. Now, when I tell recruiters my minimum salary I refer recruiters…

> Their engineers were very unprofessional during the technical interview and complained A LOT about technical debt left by past co-workers during the interview.

That was them just warning you: "Dude you won't hear it fom HR and I am not allowed to tell you directly but you most likely don't want this job."