
Simultaneous Shortage and Oversupply (2019) - luu
https://www.jefftk.com/p/simultaneous-shortage-and-oversupply
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throwaway98az8
Having had applied to and even interviewed at some of the companies/jobs
listed in the blog post, I will provide an alternative explanation:

These roles are just like many others in the field, companies are supposedly
desperate to fill them, but set unrealistically high expectations for the
hiring bar so the role is never filled.

Context: 6 years professional experience, open to moving anywhere in US,
experience at two SV unicorns, fine taking a reasonable pay cut to work on
these things, still rejected or never heard back from every job of this type
I've applied to/interviewed for.

~~~
centimeter
As a similar but "dual" experience: I am a very desirable candidate in my
specialty. My resume is really really good looking, to the point where jobs
have commented that they were worried I was fake. I've never been turned down
for an interview, and only turned down for a job or internship once.

Having been offered positions at a number of companies who "really need"
someone with my skillset, a lot of these places are shockingly inflexible on
pay. I make 3-4x what (I infer) they normally pay people in nominally similar
positions, and they seem absolutely unable to match that for procedural
reasons, even though based on their description that seems like a reasonable
investment for a specialist they really really need. The companies I end up
working for are typically outsize successful, and I attribute a lot of that to
their willingness to fork over some extra cash when it makes rational sense,
and shockingly few companies in SV fit this description.

~~~
xvedejas
There are reasons to be inflexible on pay. I imagine it works enough of the
time, and a candidate will accept the lower pay. I hypothesize also that
inflexible pay policies make it more difficult to be accused of discriminatory
pay practices.

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csharptwdec19
The problem is that expectations and accepted norms in software engineering
are out of reality.

A few factors involved here:

1- The 'Full Stack' Developer

You'll often see companies looking for 'full stack' developers, and in their
mind they are expecting someone who is a master of both the backend and
frontend.

But, that is, in fact, exceedingly rare. Most people will gravitate towards a
part of development that they are most comfortable in. That's not to say that
a developer _can 't_ be good at both, but the number of people who are _great_
at both is a small group indeed.

Node.js is a symptom of this problem IMO: Whatever you say about JS as a
backend language, the drive to have web developers to not have to 'learn
another language' to do backend work is fairly obvious.

So, rather than looking for a mix of team members that are good at either
backend or frontend, they look for this godlike 'full stack' developer. What
they often get instead is whomever is best at convincing them they can handle
it all.

2 - RDD Driven development

Oftentimes, rather than picking the existing tools/paradigms that are right
for the job, the tools _marketed_ as the solution to the problem are instead
chosen. And of course, the expectations for those marketed tools wind up being
out of whack (i.e. the recent job posting looking for 12 years of Kubernetes
experience.)

3 - It's easier/better to get a better job somewhere else than an internal
promotion

Many orgs make it difficult to advance, or advancement doesn't have the same
gains as taking a similar role elsewhere. As a result, people often leave, and
because of corporate/cultural norms (screw offboarding, we need to finish the
sprint commitments!) knowledge loss is a result.

4 - The Second order effects of the above

Basically, the points above feed into a vicious cycle: The developers better
at bullshitting (that also realize the above) will produce RDD driven projects
and hop to the next space. But because they have spent most of their time
studying 'persuasion' rather than good development practices, they leave a
huge mess, which only makes the hiring manager's expectations that much more
unreasonable.

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matthewaveryusa
What is EA??? The answer is really simple: oversupply of mediocre talent, and
shortage of top talent.

~~~
zomglings
Agreed - this article would have been a lot better if the author defined what
they meant by "EA movement".

It broke my reading flow to have to go and look the term up.

Effective altruism. I had no idea that was a thing.

Also, I don't see what's particularly altruistic about working at Deep Mind or
OpenAI - they pay pretty well from what I know.

There probably _is_ a genuine shortage of programmers willing to work full
time at a socially or environmentally oriented non-profit in the Bay Area.

~~~
neilparikh
> they pay pretty well from what I know

The core point of effective altruism is to maximize the positive impact you
have on the world. That doesn't really have any correlation how much you're
getting paid.

> There probably is a genuine shortage of programmers willing to work full
> time at a socially or environmentally oriented non-profit in the Bay Area.

Would that be more impactful than working at high paying job and then donation
that money somewhere? I doubt these non-profits are constrained by their lack
of programmers.

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angarg12
Leaving everything else aside, the author seems to ignore a glaring point that
in part solves this apparent paradox: everything is a huge game of musical
chairs.

Imagine that everyone he knows who want to change jobs go and filling those
openings. Brilliant, now the other companies new to open new positions to fill
those who left. In big companies, particularly in places like SV, the
attrition rate is so high that they need to constantly hire just to keep their
numbers even over time.

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cxr
People are less interested in doing the thing they said they're going to do
than they are in saying they're going to do it. Examples:

\- "I'm going to start working out"

\- "I'm going to 'learn to code'"

\- "I'm going to follow through on that thing from Craigslist"

\- "I'm going to meet up for coffee"

\- "I'm going to change jobs"

\- "I'm going to find somebody to fill this job"

Aziz on flakes:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RbMv7HUiO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RbMv7HUiO4)

~~~
TeMPOraL
A lot of the time, life intervenes. And a lot of the time, they say that just
to shut their friends/family up about an issue.

Aziz talks about commitment-phobia, but on the other hand, one of the most
frequently given personal growth advice I've seen in the last 20 years was:
learn to say no. Stop trying to agree to every single thing someone proposes
to you. I suppose they're flip sides of the same coin - say "yes" only when
you mean it, and say "no" otherwise.

~~~
cxr
Not exactly relevant to this context, where the question is "[Why is there]
simultaneous shortage and oversupply [of programmers for the EA movement?]".

People don't post job ads or tweet about wanting to work in EA because their
friends and family are nagging them about it.

My answer to the question is that people have an idealized version of the
person they'd like to be, and this differs from how much work they're actually
willing to put in to follow through. This goes for both the people claiming to
want to find work and the company (i.e. people) claiming that they're looking
for someone to hire. In other words, there is a simultaneous shortage and
oversupply because people are flakes.

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pyb
"So, why don't these openings get filled quickly? " What made him think that ?
Not sure I agree with this premise. OpenAI, Deepmind, etc have no difficulty
hiring.

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TeMPOraL
Isn't the standard answer that most programmers on the job market are bad, and
those who are good are already employed and thus rarely on the job market?

~~~
perl4ever
The complementary scenario is also plausible - the employers that are decent
have low attrition, write reasonable job ads, and fill positions quickly, so
most of the ads (on a number x unit time basis) are from clueless employers
with self-defeating criteria.

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KSS42
What is EA?

"The EA movement has a ton of programmers ..."

~~~
awinter-py
effective altruism

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mrcartmenez
What the hell is an EA?

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michaelt
_> the good jobs are all in AI safety,_

Today's problems - like "AI" systems that replicate existing biases; decisions
too opaque to check whether they're based on protected characteristics; and
systems with higher error rates for some minority group - are about 75%
politics/advocacy.

After all, no matter how good your solutions to those problems, you've got to
persuade companies to adopt them voluntarily - or legislators to force them
to.

Tough to find _that_ skill set.

