No one seems to want to discuss the idea that Yahoo! and Facebook were simply adhering to their illegal agreement to not poach talent from each other. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/15/silicon_valle...
Yup.
STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp
81–90 of 245 posts
Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
A master's degree, assuming no experience, is more like a warning signal for someone who's stayed in academics too long and has no practical skill. It's like you're hiring a really expensive junior developer if they've never built real world software under business constraints that needed to like be bug free, and scalable. It's like the code written in graduate college gave a shit about memory use, file or network i/…
> The thing is, more education will enable a good developer to be even better. It's doesn't seem to help a struggling developer in any shape or form. In my (limited) experience, the people who struggled in undergrad run screaming away from any possibility of doing grad school (my experience here is consistent across econ and CS). The people who were good at the field consider grad school because the psychic costs of…
Replying to leobelle here since the thread got too deep.
I agree that learning to program is individual, but you don't learn to program in grad school. If a school gave you an MS and you can't do Fizzbuzz, that school isn't serving its signalling purpose (that I mentioned in my first comment). So while that school may be fine, if lax, if the employer is using education as a signal, a school that doesn't fail students doesn't provide a strong signal.
Relating to your comment about needing to see more code, education is actually perfect for that. Most companies don't let you take your source code with you, schools do. So provided you took some courses that required significant engineering projects, a student has a big pile of (hopefully) reasonably-designed code to show off to an interviewer. A person who worked for a less-than-progressive company (since some maintain open source libraries and such) does not. They both have their open source contributions.
Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp
#83I think that there is great opportunity for some company to do "Moneyballs". There are great A-players that are completely ignored by traditional hiring processes. The company that will tap into that source will probably become the next Google.
Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Employees are now commodities. Other industries have realized this and now the tech sector is realizing it as well. Especially now that people are more computer literate than they were 20 years ago combined with globalization plus the internet. The pool is much bigger than yesterday.
Employees are ALWAYS commodities. These issues are not new. This is exactly the same labor vs. capital struggle that has happened, well, forever. Companies exist to run business processes that create money. Employees are an input to that process. Employers only care about employees to the extent that the employees help that process run efficiently. Expect these things to become ever more apparent as more and more com…
"Employees are ALWAYS commodities.".
Yes, this is the MBA training, that engineers are labor, to be reduced in cost. This leads to shortage, confusion by MBA. Until they solve what you just said, treating engineers as commodities.
Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp
#85This post is largely about discrimination and uses Brian Acton as a timely centerpiece. The truth is however more complex (IMHO): - Culture matters a lot in hiring. By this I mean a Stanford grad is much more likely to hire another Stanford grad in a field of qualified candidates. This isn't simply a form of nepotism as such. Two grads from the same college will share a larger common cultural base; - The culture the…
"Cultural fit" is just another name for racism, sexism, and ageism. Yeah, all of those things can be culture. Why should it be any less wrong to discriminate based on college attendance than on race? What else is cultural fit? "Sorry, you don't fit our culture of being heterosexual here." We're supposed to be adults. We're supposed to know how to get along and play nicely with others, regardless of how different we a…
|We're supposed to be adults. We're supposed to know how to get along and play nicely with others, regardless of how different we are from each other.
We're also human, and I work better with some humans than others.
Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp
#86I wonder if we as an industry will continue to practice almost blatant age discrimination as the current generation of engineers grows older. If we continue to obsess over youth, the job market will be remarkably unpleasant 15 years from now.
My guess is that as "our" generation ages, age discrimination will subside greatly. There are a few factors I think currently contributing to the the current age discrimination practices that are unique. First is that the consumer web is relatively young and that our generation was the first to adopt it on a mass scale. And second, the most prominent and visible tech success stories of the past decade have revolved around social media, in which the most innovative products were heavily driven by younger demographics. This is still true; the more "innovative" social media products, or most widely adopted (ie Instagram, Snapchat, etc) are still heavily driven by younger demographic users. In these cases, it was important to have employees get the product, which seemed to be most adopted early by "our" young generation. I think as we move past the social media dominant consumer web, we'll see less of this age discrimination.
Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp
#87>> $19 billion in cash and stock (slightly less than the inflation adjusted cost of the Manhattan Project)
Holy Crap !!! That cannot be right - surely not....
Edit: According to Wikipedia : "The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (about $26 billion in 2014 dollars)."
So, if you allow 7bn to be slightly less, then yes. It is right.
And there is worse to come - also according to wikipedia and the BBC, the US spends around 50bn pa, (the UK an embarrassing 4.6bn a year) on science funding - but really, half of US science spending on a mobile IM app.
How utterly depressing.
Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp
#88Acq-hires are proof of dysfunction. Companies like Yahoo have talent, but can't recognize it at the bottom because the middle-management filter is so defective. So they buy market-verified talent at a panic price. That's shitty for the individual (well, great for 0.05% of them and shitty for 99.95%) because there's so much noise.
The problem is that the VC-funded world is full of soft-skulls who never grew up (some are old, but not mature; those tend to be investors). They make workplaces that are culturally defective and mean-spirited but have the superficial trappings of college because they're halfway houses for frat boys. "Culture fit" is about wanting to work with the same people you'd go drinking with or (for most non-tech roles) have sex with. I ask: Why? You should hire the people who'll do awesome work and lead, and some of those are 65-year-old women. If you don't, your halfway-house/I-could-live-here "utopia" will underperform and forever be beholden to the VCs.
Reality: if you make one real friend per job, call yourself lucky. My experience is that it's Poisson(0.75). That "culture fit" camaraderie is bullshit. Don't take seriously or trust anyone who wouldn't have your back (and give you a reference, even if you needed him to lie) if you got fired on bad terms.
Another lesson from the old (30): your life should be diversified outside of your job, because you can lose the latter at any time for any reason. Losing a job is bad enough as it is, but if you have nothing outside of it, it's catastrophic. The "culture fit" workplace is bullshit. Just build something awesome worth giving a shit about.
Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp
#89Very well written article and I can add some context being in the unhired category of engineers. I graduated from Georgia Tech sometime in the last couple of years with a 3.64 GPA. I know that GPA doesn't mean much but really at Georgia Tech they make you work for it like a dog. I have some projects on GitHub and well I thought companies would come knocking at my door. Boy was I mistaken. So I started applying late i…
Are you a citizen? As I've very rarely heard of a fortune 500 company sponsoring a new grad's visa. I will mention that I've interviewed for Facebook in the past, and have found them to be very pretentious. The interview really made me not want to work for them. Also as a Gatech student as well, did you primarily do on-campus interviews E.g: Career Buzz. As I've found Career Buzz to really suck at getting students jo…
Not a citizen.
Haha to be perfectly honest the only reason I wanted to work at Facebook was because of the perks. They pay well plus you aren't spending much at all on food / gym / laundry / etc. so you can save quite a bit if you live frugally. Plus the network in the event I wanted to venture out on my own.
Anyways yes most of my non-citizen friends applied to 20-50 jobs using spreadsheets and all that. I was a little late to get my act on like I mentioned in my initial post, and as a result I clicked on all the apply buttons for CS or related jobs on Career Buzz. For startups I emailed co-founders / applied to their open positions.
Anyway one of my friends was a Korean and is now serving in the army, so is the Israeli kid that lived down the hall, so atleast I'm a little better off?
Re: STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp
#90Interesting article. Whenever an article like this pops up the usual chorus is, there is no skill shortage, just a shortage at the price the employer is willing to pay. Sadly I've seen myself as someone on the hiring side of the table fall into a few of these traps listed in the article. A newly minted Phd, is one type of person that I've found myself having trouble hiring. Same with an newly minted Masters. The reas…
" just a shortage at the price the employer is willing to pay." - preach it. In a fair market, price goes up to increase the supply. For example lawyers. I'm paying $600 /hr. Plenty of them around, no shortage.
I'm not sure if this is sarcastic