

A Hacker School That Helps Solve Silicon Valley's Hiring Problem - Hackruiter - pitdesi
http://www.fastcompany.com/1815287/a-hacker-school-that-helps-solve-silicon-valleys-hiring-problem

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tosseraccount
There is no shortage of workers. This is a myth. Always has been.

In economics, supply = demand. There's never a surplus. there's never a
shortage. If you want more engineers, raise wages. They will come. If you
don't want to raise wages, then you really didn't want them. Saying there's an
engineering shortage is like saying there's a hamburger shortage because I
don't want to pay more than 25 cents for a hamburger. If I pay $5, I could get
a nice hamburger .and ... ta da ... end of "the great hamburger shortage" in
this case.

Silicon Valley has the wealthiest people in the world and is a very expensive
place to live. Engineering careers are quite short and living in an efficiency
and washed up at 38 is not as inviting as our "we need more workers" mantra
repeaters would have us beleive.

If they raise wages, they'll get what they want. Another alternative of those
giant visionary West Coast capventure brains is use the principle of "capital
mobility": just move the capital to where the labor is cheap. Not very hard,
folks.

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eli_gottlieb
I was going to say, myself: if they want more workers, they could try moving
out of the San Francisco-Seattle bubble. Portland, Boston-Cambridge, Texas,
Raleigh and New York _all_ have good supplies of tech workers who would _love_
to work on Silicon Valley-grade projects earning Silicon Valley-grade salaries
_but who won't abandon our entire lives to move to Silicon Valley_.

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untog
I'm in New York and I'd say that it also has the same problems that Silicon
Valley does, these days. Places like Austin and Raleigh seem like very viable
destinations, though.

~~~
shareme
Lets deal with reality folks..99% of start-ups are not at stages were they pay
the going salary rates..

Has nothing to do with supply and demand or anything else.

Or famous Jason Calacanis blow hard likes to claim they do not want to
work..that does not work either..

what works is transparency about at what funding stage you are at to the
potential employee..

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tosseraccount
It's not about supply and demand? It's about transparency? It's about "funding
stage" ?

I don't get it.

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TheCapn
To me it sounds like he's trying to say that the vast majority of startups
aren't in a position to offer lavish wages to obtain talent; they're still
trying to receive funding to get off the ground. He suggests that the
companies should be transparent with the state that "they don't have money
yet, but we're hoping to soon" as a pitch that'll draw workers?

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retroafroman
Is a couple week "school" really going to produce the kind of potential hires
that SV is looking for? From what I've heard, the interviews at the companies
there allow only recent CS grads from top tiered universities who have been
programming for fun since 12 to succeed, let alone excel. After casually
programming for the past few years, I'm pretty sure I could probably figure
out Ruby basics and bang out some half decent web app/data analysis tools
(which I'm planning to do if I switch careers in the near future). From the
sounds of it, that's about what they're doing in this program. Does that make
me hire worthy to any companies in the Bay Area? (Honest question)

~~~
nicholasjbs
A few clarifications, since I don't think it comes through clearly in the
press we've gotten so far:

1\. Our goal is to help people who love programming become even better
programmers. We don't aim directly for employability or hiring.

2\. We explicitly _don't_ focus on web apps, prototypes, or products. Instead,
most of the code people write at Hacker School is code for other programmers,
e.g., frameworks, libraries, command-line utilities, etc. People at Hacker
School work on projects that are technically interesting and one step beyond
their current skill level.

3\. Hacker School is three months, not a couple weeks. And we don't think
people can become great hackers in three months. We do, however, think people
can improve dramatically in that time if that's their primary focus and
they're surrounded by smart, motivated and intellectually curious people who
also love coding and want to grow.

~~~
retroafroman
Thank you for the detailed response. Your words do a much better (and less
sensational) job of explaining what it is you do than the article. It sounds
like a cool opportunity and I may apply in the future.

~~~
nicholasjbs
You're welcome -- I'm glad to hear my comment was helpful.

I hope to see you apply to a future batch!

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TheCapn
So please bare with me as these are the questions of an outsider looking in.

For background: I'm a Canadian software engineering graduate, I'm working
towards my P.Eng. and have a IEEE Computer Society certification.

What sort of "shortage" does Silicon Valley have? tosseraccount's post leans
more towards the idea that there is this huge disconnect between available
worker's expectations and potential employer's expectations. Am I lead to
believe there is this gap with two groups of people staring at each other?

When I graduated one of my profs dropped an offer for me to apply to somewhere
in California. I had already accepted a position with a place that I wanted to
work at locally because I was not really willing to move out of my country for
something that was very sudden and - seemingly - insecure as far as job
security goes. With posts like these it makes me believe that his offer was
more legitamate than I had given it at the time.

Is the Silicon Valley hub really desperate for engineers? This peaks my
interest in the sense of possibly regaining contact with him to see what he
has to pitch.

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GuiA
To put it in a concise (and possibly politically incorrect) way:

Yes, Silicon Valley is desperate for engineers. However, Silicon Valley is
desperate for engineers who are in the 0.1% of the engineer population in
terms of intellect, motivation, adaptability, etc.

These are hard to find, first of all because it's 0.1% of the population (so
it just boils down to a numbers game), and second of all because often these
individuals will rather work on their own thing rather then work under someone
else's orders.

If you have the potential of a John Resig, Ben Kamens, or Craig Silverstein,
you won't have any trouble finding a job, and you'll have every startup at
your feet. If you're "just" an OK engineer, then SV is not going to move
mountains for you, unlike what some have said.

~~~
TheCapn
Well, I don't blame them. If you're walking a thin line between
success/failure you want "the best" with you and often "the best" want to do
it on their own (like you said). Makes perfect sense; thanks for the reply.

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Toddward
I applied, interviewed for, and then (stupidly) realized that I couldn't
attend the coming batch. But I did get a chance to chat with Nick for 45
minutes or so - these guys seem very with it and I really admire how the
primary focus of the school is to help people become better hackers. The press
they've received in the past couple of weeks has focused more on the
business/recruitment aspect of the operation - the feeling I got was that
that's more of a peripheral advantage of the program.

I hope I have the opportunity to attend in a coming batch - if nothing more
than to become a better hacker.

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mtr
On a related note does anyone know of any Python/Django crash courses?

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meric
Go through the Django tutorials.

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Toddward
Seconded - the Django tutorial is very well written and extremely informative.
Django's documentation in general is a valuable resource.

