
What does “there's a shortage of talent” mean? - adamzerner
I&#x27;ve heard from various reliable sources that there&#x27;s &quot;a shortage of talent&quot; in the tech industry.<p>On the other hand, I read things like http:&#x2F;&#x2F;unemployable.pen.io&#x2F; about people struggling to find jobs. Additionally, I recently graduated from one of the top coding bootcamps, and while I did find a job, I got non-responses or rejections from pretty much everywhere I applied. And this is the story I hear from everyone I talk to at the bootcamp. We&#x27;re told that it&#x27;s a &quot;numbers game&quot;.<p>So what is meant by &quot;there&#x27;s a shortage of talent&quot;? In the context of that claim, what is threshold you have to surpass to be considered &quot;talent&quot;?
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davismwfl
It can mean a number of things.

1\. Truly there are not enough trained people for the jobs available, but I
don't necessarily think that is our core problem in the US based market right
now.

2\. There is a shortage of new graduates to fill the entry level jobs
available to do the grunt work on projects, and paying a senior engineer 6
figures to write programs or utilities slightly harder than Hello World is a
bad investment (obviously a bit of an exaggeration but you get the idea).

3\. Employers are not willing to pay the wage necessary to hire the people
that are available in the market with the capability to do what the employer
needs. e.g. they want to pay 70k/year for a 10 year senior engineer instead of
a 6 figure salary. Supply and demand issue basically.

4\. Employers are not willing to invest in an employee with 75-80% of the
skill set to get them to the 100% they need. This can be because companies are
so focused on quarterly numbers that they don't want a carrying and training
cost or that they are fearful the employee will just leave once they are
trained. I have heard both fairly recently.

Personally, I think all of these are true at different times and in different
places, and I think there is some type of "shortage" now depending on the
market you are in.

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flurben
I would not call an employer's unwillingness to pay market rates a "Supply and
Demand issue."

~~~
davismwfl
When supply of talent availability outweighs demand for the talent, wages go
down or remain flat. McDonalds, Dairy Queen etc all have an abundance of high
school aged kids to work the counter every year as an example of ample supply
and relatively flat wages.

When demand for talent out paces the supply then wages should generally
continue to rise until some equilibrium is established. Tech is on the rise
side of this. A side affect is it has made it harder for small businesses to
afford senior engineers. Many companies are also playing games primarily using
foreign workers that essentially is manipulating supply which allows them to
control wages.

There are of course other reasons an employer could be priced out of the
market or unwilling to pay market wages of course. Maybe they just can't
afford a senior engineer because their business isn't mature enough, it
happens so they need to get creative. e.g. Use an outside firm or hire an
individual who has less experience and hence has a lower cost.

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CrankyFool
Speaking as a hiring manager in a tech company here for a moment, I do find
there's a shortage of reasonable people to consider. I found this thread
because someone had pointed me at unemployable.pen.io and wanted to comment on
it specifically, because having read that particular blog post, I started off
thinking "man, that's someone I'd like to talk to," and then realized a few
things:

If you're trying to get hired, then maybe when you write a blog post on the
fact, you also include a link to your resume. Or at least your name. Because
otherwise, I'm sitting here thinking to myself "welp, no idea who this person
is"

This person acknowledges that for more than a decade, she/he coasted in an
office job. I tend to hire for strong initiative and drive, and I'd worry
about this person. And that still wouldn't stop me from talking to them IF
THEY MADE IT EASY FOR ME TO FIND THEM.

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taprun
A "shortage of talent" is actually economic shorthand. The full phrase is
"shortage of talent at the rate I'm willing to pay." You can _always_ find a
fantastic developer, if you're willing to pay more than the other guys.

That said, the hiring process is completely broken. I know barely literate
programmers making bank, while exceptional programmers are just scraping by.

~~~
autotune
The problem is the hiring process tests for your ability to make it through
the hiring process, not for your ability to actually do the job.

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paulrpotts
You might take a look at this article from the New York Review of Books on
"STEM" jobs and all the noise about the talent shortage.

[http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jul/09/frenzy-...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jul/09/frenzy-
about-high-tech-talent/)

My take, as an older, very experienced software engineer (with 25+ years of
professional experience): it's basically bullshit. Big employers just don't
want to pay for American citizens, especially ones who want to be compensated
appropriately for their degree of skill and experience, because they have a
track record of getting stuff done. These employers want H1-B warm bodies to
fill seats at half my salary. These employers can go !@#$% themselves.

~~~
partisan
Part of the problem, too, is that there are too many people making outrageous
salaries.

I am currently hiring and as part of the interview process, I ask a very
straightforward question. I expect it to take on the order of 5 minutes and 7
lines of code. It is programming 101. Out of the 10 or so people I've
interviewed, exactly none of them has gotten past this question. Most of them
take 45 minutes to work on it and few of them get it to work even then. These
are people who have contracted at big name places, with 10+ years of
experience, with CS degrees, H1-B and non-H1-B.

So if I am going to hire someone who is unable to write a simple algorithm, I
would rather do it at offshore prices. And sadly, that is something I am
seriously considering doing.

~~~
paulrpotts
You might consider whether this is really a valid test, or just something that
you _think_ truly evaluates whether a candidate can do the job. In my
experience hiring, it's not that valuable. I do think some kind of screening
for basic skills is valuable at the low/inexperienced end, but writing code in
front of an expectant audience may not be it.

I have written hundreds of thousands of lines of shipping code, and I've faced
this kind of code-for-an-interview process repeatedly. The last time I had to
do it, I found that I actually choked on a simple string reverse problem.

It was a really basic algorithm; there was absolutely no difficulty with my
understanding of how the algorithm worked, or how to code it. I just choked. I
was talking to three people on Skype with a shared whiteboard, and I had to
give up. It was very frustrating. This had more to do with the fact that I had
been out of work for several months and was facing a huge amount of stress
about things like paying the mortgage than it did with my actual abilities on
the job.

~~~
partisan
What should I be doing to find a candidate who can code and understands basic
concepts without asking them to demonstrate that ability to me? I've been
burned by people who talk a good game.

~~~
paulrpotts
I don't have a great simple answer for this. I think it some combination of
maybe looking at code samples, talking to previous employers, maybe doing some
code in a timed exercise, either on or off-site, or maybe even contracting
with a prospective employee to pay them to work on some small trial piece of
code. I agree with you that there are definitely candidates out there who are
all talk. I'm just not sure demanding code on a whiteboard during the
interview itself is really a foolproof proxy for "smart and gets things done."
I think it might weed out obvious duds but it might also weed out some people
who might be having a bad day. It also is, I think, quite possible to game
this kind of interview question, by studying some of the many books of coding
interview questions coming out and just memorizing some of them.

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chrisbennet
If they _could_ hire someone if they paid 1 million dollars, it means that the
market rate is somewhere between what they are offering and 1 million dollars.
Remember "market rate" means what you could actually purchase something in the
market for.

If we set aside the possibility of greed on the part of employers, it may mean
that they cannot afford to pay market rates i.e. _their business model isn 't
compatible with paying the market rate for the labor they need_.

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cypher_glyph
"Shortage of talent" is code for "we abandoned our in-house training program
and want other companies to foot the bill"

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kasey_junk
The software industry has a fundamental problem in that we don't have a broad
objective measure for what is "good" software. It is also a very young
industry that is still in the crazy iteration/development phase. This leads to
changing "best practices" and wheel reinvention to the extreme.

This causes software projects to be both extremely expensive, hard to estimate
and with terrible success rates.

Because all of that, finding software developers that can regularly deliver
business value is extremely difficult and it is usually priced too high for
most businesses.

Personally, I don't view this as a hiring problem, I view this as an oddity of
the times we live in. Give it another 25 or 30 years and maybe we will
actually know something about how software projects should work.

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JSeymourATL
> I got non-responses or rejections from pretty much everywhere I applied.

Turns out that Corporate America is really bad at recruiting, thanks to poor
technology investment decisions.

Here's an excellent assessment on the hiring situation by headhunter Nick
Corcodilos > [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/ask-headhunter-
recr...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/ask-headhunter-recruiting-
technology-costs-job/)

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J_Darnley
What does it mean? There is no Linus-level genius willing to work for $10 an
hour.

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sheepmullet
It means companies refuse to:

1) train people, and 2) pay for talent

Businesses have pretty much tapped out the supply of devs who will spend
thousands of hours of their own time on l&d for the love of the craft. So now
if they want the expertise they have to pay.

If I am learning on my own time in order to increase my income I expect to get
returns of at least 1cent/hour (and that's the extreme low end). So if I
invest 10,000 hours I expect at least a $100/hr return.

How many companies complaining about a dev shortage are offering salaries of
$300k+/year (intermediate dev salary + $100/hr compensation for all the l&d)?

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phlyingpenguin
What is a top coding bootcamp? Is that a degree? If not, then I don't find it
surprising that it was difficult. Just as that article implies, many employers
have minimum requirements that you may not meet, and they aren't necessarily
crazy requirements.

But a bigger question than that is what market are you talking about? Are you
talking about the valley? Boston? Have you considered that IT shortage is not
a local problem, and a broader search could turn up unexpected opportunity?

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mcnamaratw
As far as I can tell, 'shortage of talent in tech' just means companies are
hiring.

