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The stock response such arguments is: "there is no shortage of programmers, just a shortage of programmers at a given salary". Yeah right! "There is no poverty. just shortage of people with money" :
What you call a "stock response" is also known as the role of price in equating supply and demand in free markets
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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.
Those people exist. If you pay enough for them, you can hire them.
p.s. I am an entrepreneur and have had significant hiring challenges for my company. So not spewing out stock lines from Lou Dobbs and his ilk.
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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.
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.
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…
-On the claim of unfillable positions, "It's not bogus."
-"companies ... can't find people"
-"the mistake ... in article's reasoning is ... "
-"the reason there are open positions ... is ..."
-the writer's "put effort into saying something false" because ...
Can these statements be backed up? Is there is a metric for star programmers that companies can measure? If there is an obviously star programmer, but in some obscure language, do they get job offers? Perhaps in your capacity as startup advisor, you have inside knowledge?
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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.
I don't have data. It is anecdotal, based on the complaints of friends trying to hire people. A huge proportion of applicants, with CS degrees, fail basic litmus tests (including fizzbuzz) in interview.
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I think he's implicitly they are in positions that are paying them more.
Implicit in that statement is a shortage. If programmers have choices, by definition implies more demand, less supply. You contradict yourself!
When demand exceeds supply, prices should go up until both reach equilibrium; conversely, when supply exceeds demand prices should fall until both reach equilibrium. In a real market, there will always be buyers who are overpaying or trying to underpay. You cannot cherry pick these instances and make any sort of valid assessment of the market.
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Academia has an awful lot to do with real-life software engineering. It might not be as good of a preparation as spending those four years in internships or as a junior developer, but saying that there's (literally) no difference between the software engineering capabilities of a CS grad and an English grad is hyperbole.
Meta: One funny thing about online discussions is that the activation energy required to make a post means they tend to be by people with extreme positions. The same phenomenon that leads to bimodal amazon review distributions of 1 star / 4.5 stars, or blog posts about how golang sucks/rules, means that an open-minded reader needs to continuously apply this huge smoothing windowed filter over the point-sampled views…
Speaking of context, in many discussions on this and related topics here I see many contrasts like this raised. There is a vast gulf between startups that (truly) need rock stars and corporations that need IDE monkeys. There is a vast gulf between top programmers who read CS papers for fun and implement problems in 8 different languages out of curiosity, and "programmers" who can't even write FizzBuzz in pseudocode. In these discussions, I get the impression that this segment is either nonexistent or is so small it doesn't matter. As someone in that segment, it make me question if I should be in this industry. If the industry truly has a programmer shortage, I would think that is a poor impression to give.
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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?
The truth, of course, is that those rockstars account for a very, very small portion of the sought after visas. The vast majority of the allocations are for average professionals at companies far from the bleeding edge.
It seems odd to me that we would put in such an effort to import average workers when there is both not an insignificant number of unemployed American tech workers, and a large number of tech-educated American workers pursuing other vocations. This smells more like a failure of employers to lure the workers they need than of a true shortage.
I do think top companies should be able to scout internationally for top talent and bring them back to live and work in the country. But top talent demands top dollar, so there needs to be a bar. A company must be willing to pay them significantly more than their position's average salary. If they're the best of the best, they're worth it.
To stick with the soccer analogy, how much more do you think someone like Lionel Messi gets paid than a junior league player, or even an average pro player? It's understood in sports that you must pay top dollar to get top talent. I don't think it's too much to expect industry to do the same.
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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…