
Report Shows Just How Wrong Silicon Valley Is About A Tech Worker Shortage - HarryHirsch
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-brand-new-report-shows-just-how-wrong-silicon-valleys-claim-of-a-stem-shortage-is-2013-5
======
pg
No one is claiming there is a shortage of programmers. The shortage is of
really good programmers. These tend to be people who have an innate love of
and aptitude for programming. It's orthogonal whether they happen to major in
CS in college. (I didn't.)

If the people with the greatest innate love of and aptitude for programming
are evenly distributed among the world's population, 95% of them are born
outside the US.

~~~
nhebb
> No one is claiming there is a shortage of programmers.

Since no one else is challenging you on that assertion, look at the graph on
page 3 in the paper published by Microsoft:

[http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/news/download/presskits/citiz...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/news/download/presskits/citizenship/MSNTS.pdf)

The lead sentence is:

"The United States faces a growing economic challenge — a substantial and
increasing shortage of individuals with the skills needed to fill the jobs the
private sector is creating."

~~~
lepht
The second sentence of pg's post is:

> The shortage is of really good programmers.

From your quote:

"... __individuals with the skills needed __"

Compatible statements, no?

~~~
nhebb
Given the graph on that page, I wouldn't interpret it way way. At best, it's
highly misleading.

I support immigration reform for top talent. I just have a low tolerance for
BS.

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btilly
My impression of "Information Science" based on a few bad interactions with
people who boasted of having the degree was fairly negative, so I went to
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_science> to update it.

My impression just got even more negative. In general the more meta you make
your description of yourself, the less likely you are to be doing anything
obviously useful.

My view on this particular subject goes farther. If you aren't competent to
express your ideas with a database schema, then I don't want you to try to
tell me how I should be manipulating the information stored in a database.
Because you don't understand what is or is not doable. And if you are
competent to write that schema, then you are likely to make yourself useful
writing code using it. This goes in reverse as well. Until you've got
experience actually using databases as a tool, you're unlikely to design good
schemas.

------
mindcrime
Part of the problem is that there's a mismatch between the education being
provided and what employers need and want. A brand new Computer Science
graduate isn't usually terribly qualified to do what most employers, who hire
CS graduates, want them to do, which is to write code and build programs /
systems.

Why is this? Well, part of it is because, as always, a liberal arts degree
isn't meant to be job training in the first place. This gap is especially
pronounced with software people though, since a CS degree can be very
theoretical and: A. might teach a lot of "stuff" that most programmer's don't
use (or don't use very often), B. doesn't always include enough of the "stuff"
that programmer's _do_ need, and C. can be overly general, when "practice" in
this field is highly specialized and includes lots of niches.

Another part is because employers don't do enough to fill in the gaps and help
train younger employees. Ideally, employers would hire new CS graduates and
spend a year or more grooming them, teaching then the specialized skills they
need in that specific domain, and helping them ramp up. But American employers
are so averse to providing training, taking a long-term view, and "playing the
long game" that it's ridiculous.

One thing that might help, would be if more schools started offering a
_Software Engineering_ degree in addition to _Computer Science_ degrees, and
if more students started choosing the SE degree. But even then, again, a
liberal arts degree isn't supposed to be "job training" and the SE degree
would still probably turn into more theory and not enough "how to actually
build something" than what employers would want.

Net-net, I think employers are going to have to bite the bullet at some point,
and accept that you have to hire and groom "green" people if you want to
compete. And maybe universities should start offering a few more classes on
the "nuts and bolts" aspects of building systems. Perhaps some partnerships
between universities and local community colleges could be involved.

No matter what, though, I don't think you're going to be able to look for
fresh graduates who, for example, walk in the door knowing Hibernate, Spring,
PostgreSQL, Camel, JMS, Lucene, Maven, Ant, JUnit, SAX, JDOM, STaX, JSON,
Hadoop, etc. But, unfortunately, employers are largely looking for folks to
walk in the door ready to contribute with highly specialized skills from day
one.

~~~
greggman
> Ideally, employers would hire new CS graduates and spend a year or more
> grooming them, teaching then the specialized skills they need in that
> specific domain, and helping them ramp up

Please No. That is what they do in Japan and I'd feel that's the number one
reason programmers get paid shit in Japan. They hire straight out of school
with no experience with salaries starting at around $30k. At 15 years
experience you'll make somewhere between $45k and $60k.

Programmers in Japan make less than flight attendants

<http://www.worldsalaries.org/japan.shtml>

Some people would say that's a reason they're in trouble. As the world
switched to software being more important then hardware they didn't switch to
valuing those that make software.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Programmers get paid poorly in Japan because Japanese culture doesn't respect
software. It has nothing to do with the way they are trained.

~~~
greggman
It does have to do with they way they are trained. If you have a culture that
highers starting at $30k with no experience that has to affect overall
salaries. Why pay for experience when you can just take next years cheap
graduates? In fact Japan even goes so far as to not hire programmers over 35.
Programmers are considered jobs for people 21 to 35. Just go read some jobs
ads in Japanese.

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fossuser
I think it's fairly obvious that there isn't a shortage of _applicants_ , but
of highly skilled applicants as determined by a somewhat arbitrary and flawed
interview process with a strong preference for false negatives over false
positives.

~~~
lobotryas
Sure. Consider incentives though. A false negative is cheap (at most you spent
the time interviewing the person), while a false positive is expensive (good
luck firing the person in our litigious environment).

~~~
michael_miller
A false positive is expensive for more than just litigious reasons. Hiring a
bad apple can destroy the culture of a small company. As Steve Jobs said,
"It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then
attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players."

~~~
wavefunction
Steve Jobs, that noted "good apple" who took advantage of the Woz...

Our Jobs who art in Heaven hallowed be thy name

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting, the numbers are high enough that it suggests that it would be
useful to look into making the market identification of talented engineers
more efficient and that building some systems of getting these folks engaged
would also improve productivity.

Both of those suggest an organization which hosts contests and events for
training would be programmers. An example of a group that does this for
business types is DECA [1] which my kids participated in at high school and
learned a lot of quite practical business experience. If we could create an
organization that had similar sorts of events (DECA does role plays for
dealing with work situations and tests to demonstrate general knowledge) We
could achieve two things, one we could create visibility for these people to
industry who is looking for them, and we could give them confidence and skills
they would use in their future employment.

[1] <http://www.deca.org/>

------
yekko
There is a real shortage of people willing to work for peanuts.

~~~
wavefunction
Or remain in their third world country and its attendant corruption and
infrastructure.

------
auctiontheory
I wasn't sure what "Information Science" was, so I used Google. Cornell,
probably an above average department, was the first hit.

As far as I can tell from the course descriptions, graduates of this program
are not preparing to invent the next generation of technology breakthroughs:
[http://www.infosci.cornell.edu/academics/degrees/ba-
college-...](http://www.infosci.cornell.edu/academics/degrees/ba-college-arts-
sciences/degree-requirements/tracks-required-courses)

A Cornell undergrad wanting to be a hardcore technologist, would major in
"Computer Science" in the College of Engineering. But that would be more
effort.

------
Throwadev
Stupid article. The author thinks "Information Science" qualifies as a STEM
subject.

~~~
prayag
It does. <http://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/stem-list.pdf> 11.0401

~~~
Throwadev
While it is categorized there, most IS grads aren't qualified to work in
Silicon Valley company engineering departments, or even in most
engineering/software dev. departments of non-SV companies. To use IS grad
unemployment rates in this argument is arguing semantics.

------
muglug
This article is fairly sloppy journalism. It equates what Silicon Valley wants
(programmers with strong math/CS backgrounds) with Information Scientists
(whose degrees prepared them for academic/archival roles).

From the actual report: "People who make technology are still better off than
people who use technology. Unemployment rates for recent graduates in
information systems, concentrated in clerical functions, is high (14.7%)
compared with mathematics (5.9%) and computer science (8.7%)."

~~~
TheCoelacanth
8.7% for computer science is still rather high.

~~~
muglug
Bear in mind these figures are for 2010-2011, when overall figures for college
graduates were not great, and a fear of a double-dip recession loomed large.

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zekenie
CS grads are educated but not _trained._ The reason their unemployment rate
isn't lower is because they haven't demonstrated their ability to build--to
translate theory into practice. The ones that get hired are those who can hit
the ground running.

~~~
jmcdonald-ut
This is why things like internships or personal projects are so important for
those pursuing a CS degree. Companies actively recruit from my campus, but
lose interest quickly if the only thing you can talk to is your class or
homework experience. What I find interesting is that, at least in my area
(Utah), internships are readily available.

