
The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie - doppp
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/the-tech-talent-shortage-is-a-lie/
======
MrTonyD
I teach several technical courses every year - usually to Fortune 50's but
occasionally a public class too. And I routinely have people who have been
laid-off - often people over 45. They may have skills (java/web/database), but
they find that they can't get interviews or a job. At the same time, I talk to
hiring managers who say that they can't find people with the skills they need.

My impression is that the expectations put on the hiring managers is to hire
someone who already knows everything and is willing to work any number of
hours. So people who would be great employees in a sane job market are seen as
"too old" (or the usual euphemism of "not high energy".) I think we need to
find some way to force companies to hire our citizens.

~~~
pastProlog
I've seen this as well. We interviewed a guy, for a crummy position in our
division of a Fortune 1000 company. This guy was friendly, personable, had
worked at Bell Labs and elsewhere, and knew the technical details back and
forth. The management didn't want to hire him though - and this was after we
had looked at hundreds of resumes and had interviewed well over a dozen
people. The only answer I got was "I don't think he'd like it if we called him
at 3 AM to do something".

Then these people go out and cry about how they can't find talented
developers.

~~~
ap3
Haha who would 'like' that?

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wyclif
I know a number of smart, hardworking engineers who cannot find jobs now, even
when they are doing everything they can to make sure their skill sets are up
to date. The unifying factor among them is that they are not kids anymore, and
have wives and families. Yet I still keep hearing about the supposed "talent
shortage."

One guy is in his mid-40s, and was a UNIX sysadmin whose company went bankrupt
in the dotcom bomb. He's survived several recessions. He's quite proficient at
Python scripting, and he's learning JS and Ruby. But companies won't hire him,
I guess because of "culture fit" which seems to be a code phrase for "we want
our team to gel around interests and work styles common among single
millennials." The worst-case scenario is when a company thinks "culture fit"
means "we only hire hipsters proficient in Amazeballs framework and
BeardyScript."

Some other problems I've observed: finding mentorship is tough, particularly
for women and minorities, because the very people in a position to be great
mentors are the same people running startups, and don't have time to mentor.
It's a Catch-22.

If there really were a tech shortage, you'd see salaries rising and more
training and mentorship instead of the collusion among major companies
regarding salary caps and non-poaching agreements. A lot of US-based companies
are afraid to train qualified people, like some firms do successfully in the
UK (training humanities students from Oxford or Cambridge in software
engineering), because they think other companies will poach their talent and
therefore their training budget will be spent on their competitors. I think
that's a short-sighted view, but that's what I see now.

~~~
ctlby
> you'd see salaries rising

Residents of the Bay Area looking for housing would beg to differ.

~~~
wyclif
Not all Bay area residents are software engineers.

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morgante
The article's content does not support the headline.

Yes, we could absolutely do more to develop tech talent. But that doesn't
change the fact that there is currently a shortage of talented developers.

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Futurebot
Sometimes it seems like two different things get discussed when this topic
comes up. On the one hand, we might have shortages of people with very
specific skills in certain industries (maybe Fortran / mainframe programmers
are hard to find, for example.)

On the other hand, the BLS data, various studies, and other sources like CEPR
agree with him in the more general case:

[http://www.cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/is-there-a-shortage-
of-w...](http://www.cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/is-there-a-shortage-of-workers-
in-stem-fields)

[http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-
hiltzik-201508...](http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-
hiltzik-20150802-column.html#page=1)

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asadlionpk
I think "sowing the seeds" is something that should be developed early on into
the company culture even at a smaller scale. Otherwise, it won't magically
implement itself when you get busier (at later stage of the company).

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circlecrimson
I suspect this is a concern rage clickbait piece from techcrunch. Just because
one CEO with a limited view of the entire industry says something doesn't make
it true. I work in a tech field at an advanced level and there are so many
other vast and varying fields that I simply don't stand a chance of getting a
job in another. It simply couldnt be the case that the US has an abundance of
experts in all these fields.

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bruu_
Just another Marxist failing to explain shit about the problem. Look away,
people

~~~
dang
Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

