
Tech companies should create ‘farm teams’ to close the talent deficit - jchin
https://www.recode.net/2017/4/19/15331366/tech-companies-recruitment-hiring-mlb-playbook-farm-teams-talent-deficit
======
20years
"what is a company to do today if it finds itself part of the 71 percent of
employers that claim they can't find suitable technology candidates?"

Increase the salary of what you are paying in order to attract more qualified
devs.

"they're reinvesting the money saved from hiring less-expensive engineers to
create "farm teams" within their organizations"

Aha! It is not about being able to "find suitable technology candidates" it is
about being able to acquire "less-expensive engineers"

Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of companies investing in apprenticeship
programs but let's call it what it is. Not a talent shortage but a willing to
pay top dollar shortage.

~~~
pinaceae
We can't even get enough qualified resumes. Pay doesn't even come into play.
And my associate engineers make more dough than my parents ever did.

You should try hiring once, before dropping such simplistic statements.

The upcoming H1B squeeze won't help. White CS grads do. not. want. to work in
boring tech such as QA, etc. Remove Eastern Europeans and Asians and we're
back to outsourcing whole departments to their home countries.

That's reality.

The US is utterly failing in creating enough homegrown talent, university
education is far too expensive, everything below is useless as there is no
good education available below.

Just a little bit more and some other country/region will take that whole
business, that's how the economy works. Unlimited salaries never happens.

~~~
uiri
QA is a function that is distinct from development and both are distinct from
operations. SRE and DevOps are merging development and operations. QA is
disappearing because of automated testing. It is a separate career track
altogether and is usually significantly less lucrative than development.

People have weird feelings about certain markets. Examples include housing,
labour, health care, and education. These weird feelings result in irrational
behaviour and irrational claims like "there is a tech shortage" when prices
aren't rising to compensate.

Comparison to your parents salary or the salary of any other industry is a red
herring. The market always clears if participants are willing to pay market
price. Your refusal to pay market price might be why you have trouble filling
your resume funnel.

~~~
dasmoth
_QA is disappearing because of automated testing._

They are, and frankly it shows. Someday we're going to realise that
(especially for tools that the developers can't or won't dogfood extensively)
it's a terrible loss.

~~~
pinaceae
It is.

Functional QA is the very first user of a new feature.

Automation handles the rest of the work.

But not having a human go through the software as it is intended is a mistake.

------
wai1234
Hmmm. So, they're saying they should hire people with basic training in the
necessary skills but who did not hatch out of the egg already knowing
everything they will ever need to know. They then imagine they might need to
invest time and energy into something I will refer to as 'training' that will
help those people reach full productivity over time. And, they will risk that
some of them might not work out perfectly.

This is truly shocking and innovative. Maybe they could come up with something
so we can move heavy loads without using rollers and a way to prepare food so
we don't have to eat it raw. /snark

If you needed evidence that SV occupies a hermetically sealed mental bubble,
there's your sign.

~~~
EnFinlay
I don't think this is restricted to SV, anecdotally from various stories I've
heard this extends to most STEM disciplines.

------
MS_Buys_Upvotes
I love tech: Take something old (apprenticeships), re-package it as something
new (a farm team) and bam: Instant, free, PR for zero innovation.

~~~
DamnYuppie
And they get to keep the wages low!

------
dasmoth
I kind-of wonder if a key point here is:

 _Grooming newly trained engineers to be comfortable with a proprietary tech
stack, a particular delivery cadence and a company’s cultural values results
in a shorter and more seamless onboarding process and quicker contributions to
the team._

I.e. "We want interchangeable developers to slot into our process, rather than
people who arrive with established ideas and -- probably -- a desire for some
degree of autonomy.

~~~
mindcrime
_rather than people who arrive with established ideas_

If those established ideas conflict with the prevailing mindset at $COMPANY
and - more importantly - aren't objectively better by a sufficient margin,
then it might make sense to not want that person around. Especially if they're
going to spend a lot of energy and time creating conflict, arguing with other
people, creating controversy, etc.

 _and -- probably -- a desire for some degree of autonomy._

I've been there, and in hindsight, I was an asshole about it. I've come to
realize that if you're part of a team (and a company is a team of sorts) there
are limits on how much autonomy you can really have. On the flipside, I
believe the core responsibility of higher leadership is to create a vision and
direction, and get people to buy into moving towards that vision, as opposed
to simply leading by fiat. But if a given player is constantly rowing in the
opposite direction, or even perpendicular, to the direction of everybody else,
they're causing problems and you might actually be better off without them.

------
pleasecalllater
That just made me a day. My searching for a job is generally like this: I send
a CV, then there is a short call (or email) with this one question at the end:
"How much do you want?". Then I usually don't want to reply, but I got
convinced with "I cannot go with you further without this information".

So I give them some number, usually something like I'm getting at that moment.

Then I get no reply or "we cannot pay you that much".

The last time I got that from a huge international company, where I really
wanted to work. That company has been publishing the same job offers for the
last year. I wrote something that I expected maybe some proposal from there
side, etc. The answer was really funny "we are not negotiating salaries at
this moment of the process".

And all that was even before any technical interview.

And that company is still publishing the same job offers :)

So I'm really confused. I have over 15 years of experience in many different
areas, and still the recruitment process is so broken that only sometimes I
can get to the technical interview.

~~~
objclxt
> The answer was really funny "we are not negotiating salaries at this moment
> of the process" [...] And all that was even before any technical interview.

I wouldn't expect any company to start a salary negotiation prior to
interviews - because how you perform in the interviews is going to drastically
impact how willing they are to negotiate with you.

~~~
randomdata
A company that is struggling to fill all the jobs they need filled doesn't
have much of a bargaining position to begin with. May as well get it out of
the way and save everyone some time if it is found to not agreeable. Imagine
going through several interviews and then still told "we can't afford you".

In fact, companies that are struggling to find people should be advertising
how much they can pay right from the job ad. If it is sufficient, it will help
attract the talent they seek. Plenty of developers don't bother looking for
new work because they believe, rightly or wrongly, it means taking a pay cut.
If not sufficient, at least everyone can be saved the effort of trying.

You're not McDonalds who has a new applicant to hire every five minutes. You
can't play by their rules.

------
Ductapemaster
While this article is mostly fluff, I question the comparison to a "farm
team". Few players from farm teams ever make it to the big leagues. Assuming
the comparison is similar in this case, what happens to the tech workers who
have just invested a year of their lives learning some proprietary stack and
incorporating themselves into a company's culture and get let go because they
didn't make the cut? That won't look great on a resume. Also, what metrics
will they use? Will people move into permanent positions based on performance
reviews? Hopefully they don't apply the same old-hat ideas to these groups and
try to rethink how they grow their teams from the ground up.

Also, I'm not really sure how this differs from hiring interns to test them
out before going full time? It just feels like the same thing with a snazzy
name.

~~~
TP4Cornholio
It sounds like an internship, (low paid trial worker), except for a longer
term.

------
startupdiscuss
Or maybe set up an office with a fat pipe in Detroit where you can buy a house
for $5k, rather than forcing them in to San Fran. Every large city could have
a small office.

~~~
GordonS
Or even embrace remote working. I know it's not for everyone, but it does work
for many.

~~~
socialist_coder
My startup is 100% remote and we've been doing it for the past 4 years. We are
very collaborative, and for that to work remotely, you need good & reliable
internet. And that is turning out to be a problem sometimes. You can't just
work from any random beach or forest.

Right now I live in a big city but I want to move out to the country. Well,
lots of places in the country don't even have cable or dsl. You can only get
"wireless" internet which is shit.

So yeah, until it's easy to get broadband even out in the country, I don't
think remote work is going to catch on. Because if you live in a city, you're
probably just going to get a non-remote job. Half the advantages for working
remotely is that it allows you to live out in the country, but without good
internet, a big chunk of remote work is just not doable.

~~~
lj3
Damn, how remote are we talking here? I live in the middle of nowhere in New
York State (1 hour drive to the nearest town, 2 to the nearest C-list city, 4
to Toronto, 10 to NYC). We've had high speed cable internet since 1999.

> You can only get "wireless" internet which is shit.

Depends on where you are. WISPs with a microwave connection are usually faster
than cable, if run properly. More and more of them are popping up in rural
areas because you don't have the high cost of running cable or fiber.

~~~
socialist_coder
I've been looking at 20+ acre land parcels in Oregon/Washington. The only
internet service is wireless stuff like this:
[http://www.peakinternet.com/internet/fixed-
wireless/](http://www.peakinternet.com/internet/fixed-wireless/)

------
4258HzG
How is this different from having 'entry level positions' (ones that don't
require 5 yrs of experience)?

~~~
dalfonso
I briefly glanced at LinkedIn's apprenticeship program (linked in the
article). It's 6 months. There's probably some sort of legal/HR benefit where
if the apprentice doesn't work out, LinkedIn can cut ties.

~~~
jchin
Is that a negative? Seems like if you're the candidate and you don't work out
after 6 months, you wouldn't have to claim you were fired. You can just say
you completed the apprenticeship and decided to move on.

------
bjornlouser
Every person in that photo is frowning. It looks as if they just found out the
micromanagement doesn't end after bootcamp.

------
geebee
"There are more than half a million open computing jobs in America today"

What does this even mean? Doesn't basic economics tell us about supply and
demand. At a low salary, demand for developers will be high, and supply will
be low. At a high salary, demand will be lower, and supply will be higher.

What does this "half a million openings" say other than that the supply and
demand curves are out of whack because employers aren't paying enough?

There's another little problem here - being a software developer, even one of
those "CRUD" developers, is actually very difficult. Just try getting a basic
web app with a database back end and a new fangled javascript framework
running. Now get specs from a client. Host it on a server. Keep the server up
and running. Fix bugs. Make estimates. Deal with business requirements that
don't fit easily into the technical framework. Negotiate, explain, do demos.
Upgrade as your javascript framework goes out of date every 6 months. Realize
that the upgrade requires massive refactoring. Add developers and bring them
up to speed, use git properly. Do code reviews, explain difficult sections to
a group at the whiteboard. Articulate complex logic and how it relates to
business requirements. Track down and fix obscure server log errors. Migrate
data. Migrate it back when the new data structure doesn't work...

This takes substantial reading comprehension, presentation skills, business
acumen, writing, negotiating. People who can do this well and are free to
choose their procession without fear of deportation really do have a lot of
options. They don't have to be software developers.

Now, ask them to work in a big open office with limited autonomy and middling
salaries (really - out here in SF, the median salary for an application
developer is a little more than for a dental hygienist, and less than a
registered nurse[1]). Don't be surprised if people with choice choose other
fields. It really isn't a head scratcher.

All in all? Being a dev is an OK job, it can be a rational choice to become a
developer, but I don't see anything close to the kind of gap that would have
me scratching my head about a "shortage" of developers or worrying about "a
half a million unfilled jobs." Honestly, every observation I have suggests
that people with the ability to become devs may be rationally choosing to do
other things, as you'd expect in a free labor market (note - many of the
people who work as devs in the bay area are not free members of the labor
market, they are required to work as devs as a condition of living in the US -
this may be partly why the market hasn't adjusted).

[1] I've learned that I should always add this bit - I have no objection to
nurses being paid well, more than devs. And I'm aware the salaries are higher
for nurses in the Bay Area, devs often earn more in other regions - however,
the Bay Area is ground zero for this supposed "shortage", so I think it's
reasonable to consider regional salaries here.

~~~
xaa
> What does this even mean? Doesn't basic economics tell us about supply and
> demand. At a low salary, demand for developers will be high, and supply will
> be low. At a high salary, demand will be lower, and supply will be higher.

It means, "we're trying to convince people to get into this field because then
supply will increase and we will have to pay less". Obviously, any individual
company could fill as many positions as it wanted if the price were right.

You are quite right that "half a million open jobs" is a meaningless statement
missing a variable, like quantifying speed by saying my sailboat moved 500
meters.

------
socialist_coder
Calling this is a "farm team" is completely bullshit. It's an apprenticeship
on an existing team.

If it was truly a "farm team", it would be a completely separate group working
on a different product. Now, _that_ would actually be something interesting to
try. Throw together 2 senior level developers as "coaches" and 20 new grads
all on a team working on stuff that the other dev teams don't have time for.
They could be fixing bugs in products owned by another team, or working on
their own completely separate projects.

I'd love to see a big company try something like that!

------
hinkley
Do we really have a skill gap, or a skill glut?

What I see is a lot of companies building essentially the same systems. I
suspect this is because they can almost find enough people willing to work on
it. Or maybe they feel like they can't find tools that do what they need.

About half of my jobs have had huge chunks of the work that felt like the same
problem space.

~~~
TP4Cornholio
Having multiple companies work on similar things is true of every industry.
There isn't a soda glut because both pepsi, coke, and many others make soda
which is very similar.

------
DTrejo
I can imagine they're also investigating this because they're bad at hiring
hidden/under-valued people for normal positions.

Maybe they're also discovering they get the best signal from actually working
together on real projects.

------
wheelerwj
lol. They do, "college league" and "acquisitions league."

------
spcelzrd
Or... recruit and hire minorities. Measure the the results.

~~~
ohstopitu
I don't get this train of thought...Why minorities? should it not be - hire
the best for the job? (and if you don't get the best, then you are not paying
well enough?)

Not trying to be sarcastic, just wanted to know a more in-depth view point.

~~~
spcelzrd
If that's the case, then say it. We don't believe in diverse work
environments. We don't care if every employee is a white male. They asked for
diversity, this is how you get it.

Not trying to be sarcastic, but your argument assumes a meritocracy.

Companies hire the best college graduates. Colleges take the best high
schoolers. The best high schools are in rich, mostly white areas. Who's to
blame?

Most CEO's, founders, and senators are white men. Either it's not a
meritocracy or white supremacy is real.

I believe it's not a meritocracy. More opportunity for minorities is one step
in fixing this.

~~~
TP4Cornholio
It sounds like you're saying meritocracies won't hire minority candidates
because they won't measure up. This is blatantly false. A few of the brightest
guys I know are minorities and they were hired because they were smart as
hell.

