
An explanation to the global talent shortage - CalderWhite
https://medium.com/@calderwhite/education-in-tech-ea22d896e6fc
======
schalab
Maybe its not an education problem. Maybe the idea that everyone can be an
engineer/coder is just as ridiculous as everyone can be a musician.

~~~
elindbe2
And not everyone is _interested_ in becoming a programmer. Not everyone wants
to sit at a desk staring at a computer screen all day at their job.

~~~
TuringNYC
And many of the ones that _do_ want to sit around and code (older workers)
find it impossible to finds job — throwing a monkey wrench into the narrative
of some massive shortage.

------
MarcScott
I don't think that tech is any more complicated than other fields/subjects.
Every subject has levels of abstraction, and as you advance the layers are
gently stripped away.

When I started in this field, I began by learning to use some apps, then
progressed to learning a single programming language, then another, then about
assembly and binary, then about logic gates and then about transistors.

The reason for a talent shortage in tech has more to do with children's
education than anything else. I remember giving a talk in front of about 600
developers and asking them, "How many of you chose this field because you were
inspired by a teacher at your school?". I'd say about three hands went up. I
think if I had been talking at a literature conference, a medical conference
or an archaeological conference, there would have been far more hands raised
in the air.

The majority of successful developers that I know are self-taught. Even those
with CS or SE degrees acknowledge that the skills that got them hired were
self-taught. There could be thousands of potentially amazing developers out
there that will never know their potential because they either never
experienced being taught CS at school, or it was taught badly.

Early years education is important. We should be introducing the subject as
early as we introduce English, Math, Science, History, etc. We've all done
history projects on the Romans, or Geography projects on volcanoes, when we
were six or seven, why not do projects on Turing machines at the same age?
Kids should be programming (Scratch) as soon as they can use a mouse and a
keyboard.

Unfortunately we have a vicious circle. While there is a tech shortage, we'll
have a shortage of tech competent teachers. You're simply not going to get the
best of the best, entering the world of education, when there are more
lucrative jobs in industry. If we really want to solve the shortage of talent,
CS teachers need to be paid an industry competitive salary, and then we need
to wait twenty years for the products of their teaching to enter the market
place

~~~
MuffinFlavored
> There could be thousands of potentially amazing developers out there that
> will never know their potential because they either never experienced being
> taught CS at school, or it was taught badly.

In my eyes, the same way it found all of the self-taught developers is the
same way it "could have found" the group of potentially unbeknownst developers
you are talking about.

I'd guess the natural desire to understand how things work (taking apart
electronic toys as a child) lead a lot of developers to developing. I find it
hard to believe deep down there are generally curious tinkerers who haven't
found their way to a programming language of some sort?

~~~
bklaasen
> I find it hard to believe deep down there are generally curious tinkerers
> who haven't found their way to a programming language of some sort?

I know one. He's rigourously logical. As a hobbyist, he's worked with
electronics and complex mechanical systems: analogue cameras and vintage hifi
were two of his passions. He's used computers for decades, but for some
reason, they never clicked with him in any deep way. I've explained Turing
machines to him, and he understands the concept, but it didn't trigger an
interest in going deeper. Fundamentally it's about fear, I think. Fear of
facing one's own intellectual shortcomings. Computers expose that in a more
raw way than tinkering with physical objects, I think.

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tw1010
Or, you know, there's no shortage and it's just a narrative ploy from
corporations in order to decrease wages.

~~~
boldslogan
A shortage of something increases the price... a corporation ploy to create a
fake shortage to increase price, decreases price?

~~~
deogeo
The fake shortage is an illusion, but it results in a real increase in supply,
which decreases price.

~~~
cunac
and how that did work so far? All I can see wages are going upward for a years

~~~
Retric
_Research into real wages in Silicon Valley has found that 90 percent of jobs
in the region are paying less than 20 years ago._

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-companies-blamed-
for-20-y...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-companies-blamed-for-20-years-
of-falling-wages-in-silicon-valley/)

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Your own article says " _The one group of employees whose wages rose across
the board are those working in the high-tech sector in Silicon Valley, with
median pay up 32 percent compared with 1997._ " and tech sector employees are
who we are talking about.

~~~
TuringNYC
Meanwhile housing prices and rents in the same region went up 300%. Seems like
a major net decrease in income.

------
ordu
I cannot agree, that the troubles with a talent caused by some inherent
complexity of tech. I got a bachelor degree in psychology, and generally I
think that psychology is a much more complex topic than tech. In tech if you
do not understand something, you could read a book explaining things. In a
psychology mostly you even do not know what you are not understand, because
there is a layman's understanding of human mind that you have been learning
for decades, and it needs a lot of effort to separate scientific knowledge
from intiutive.

The most problem with tech is fast change rate. It leads to a troubles with
devising good ways to teach. You know, if we look at any teaching process,
we'll see that people teach other people by the way they'd learnt themselves.
It comes naturally to any people, and therefore we could read that BASIC is
the best language for novices: because those who recommend BASIC learn how to
code with BASIC.

Normally this process of creating curriculum works, generation of professors
after generation distill teaching methods. But it does not works with modern
tech. If we tried to keep in the curriculum all the stuff we learnt in a
college and than add some more, than in a mere 20 years we might come to a
situation when students needs 10 more years to get a degree. So we need to
throw things out, and no one really know how important rejected bits of
knowledge. Because knowledge is not a state of mind, it is not a bunch of
bits, it is a process evolving through education and experience. So to
replicate knowledge of a person we need to replicate process from the birth.

First years of human life backed up by thousands years of parental experience,
and they generally work. But the book about Rust was written a several years
ago. Than it was rewritten. Maybe a decade more and it come to a state when
ownership and borrowing is not difficult at all. There is nothing inherently
complex in ownership and borrowing, it just our past experience gets in a way
of understanding them. All we need is to create RASIC -- a rust version of
BASIC, -- and teach kids to program in RASIC with an intent to introduce them
Rust later. Then the next generation would be unable to understand our
troubles with ownership and borrowing, they would think that C rules are dumb
and they need a specially wicked creative mind to invent them. They would see
C rules as we see Brainfuck: someone did his best to invent a language to make
things difficult.

~~~
CalderWhite
I agree with you in that the challenge is partially caused by the rapidly
changing environment. However, I also believe the combination of the changing
environment and the style which technology is taught creates the problem. It
is taught in a more specific manner that promotes getting things to "just
work". Or at least, that is what a young student might strive for. I am also
not trying to compare the "complexity" of the subject to others. I am simply
saying that technology is extremely interconnected. All the topics relate to
one another. So, when getting something to "just work" without understanding
multiple times, this compounds on itself to create a real challenge in the
long run.

~~~
ordu
I agree, that there is a feedback loop between education and practice. But I
meant that any attempt to change something needs to start from the root cause:
the rapid pace of tech progress. This pace is a good thing, but it comes with
a cost.

 _> I am simply saying that technology is extremely interconnected. All the
topics relate to one another._

I believe that it is an artifact of our cognition: our understanding of tech
is not crystallized enough. To draw borders between topics one needs a lot of
time to think and to experiment. It is like developing software by splitting
it into separate libraries: you need a lot of time to think to do it
perfectly. But in a 10-20 years your separation of a problem domain will stop
being perfect because the problem changed.

------
sleepysysadmin
I have interviewed many people just out of school. They never gained anything
from school. They aren't any better equipped for the job than anyone else.

Frankly, I know what the textbooks have in them; it's not like the content was
missing. Do we blame the teachers or do we blame the students? It really
doesn't matter.

How about another reason why people quit IT?

[https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-
exemptio...](https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptions-
or-special-rules/government-employees-and-professionals#section-3)

In Ontario, Canada if you work in IT, you dont get breaks, lunches, overtime,
weekends, you can work until 2am in the morning and then be expected to be at
work at 7am.

The MSPs in Ontario pretty much all do this. Don't like it? Quit or be fired.

------
dcre
To the extent what you describe about depth and breadth is true, it’s true of
all knowledge and all subjects.

I highly recommend Nathan Ensmenger’s The Computer Boys Take Over for a look
at the history of the so-called “skill gap” (which is mostly bullshit) since
the 1960s. It has a little to do with the nature of the subject matter, but it
has a lot more to do with historical contingencies and internal dynamics at
schools and companies.

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262517965/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262517965/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_u1YmDbZVX26FD)

