
The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie - bpolania
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/the-tech-talent-shortage-is-a-lie/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook#.avliqr:5ahD
======
rm_-rf_slash
I have said it a million times before and I will say it as long as necessary
to fix our employment-education conundrum: you do not learn how to work by
sitting in class, you learn to work by going to work. We need publicly
subsidized apprenticeships to replace the assumed role of the outrageously
expensive 4 year college degree as the primary means of acquiring skills for
the modern labor force.

There is a place for higher education - I must say so, for it is my employer -
but it cannot be expected to be the sole gateway to the middle class. My
grandfather was a combat engineer in WWII and quit his unenthusiastic GI Bill
college career to start a successful restaurant instead. College doesn't work
for everybody - working does.

~~~
Jormundir
Apprenticeships aren't a good answer either, though. They create too much of a
caste system, and are very restricting. What if at 18 I don't actually know
what I want to do? If I join an apprenticeship I'm learning one thing. What if
I don't like that one thing? What if I get 5 years into an apprenticeship and
realize I can't get to the level I want to be at? I have to start over from
zero in another field?

I don't like the college system we have now, but switching to the extreme of
apprenticeship is definitely not a good answer. Right now I'm an engineer, but
with my rounded education, if I don't like it, I can go and switch to a myriad
of other fields that I'm educated enough for.

The world already had apprenticeship systems, and it's not some magical system
we forgot about. Apprenticeships lead to weird power dynamics that aren't very
good for the individual, such as being indentured to your employer for
providing the training.

The main problem I see with our education system is that it's inefficient, and
growing too large and slow to keep up with modern needs. This doesn't mean a
well-rounded education is a problem though.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Ask Tobias Lütke, founder of Shopify, if apprenticeship restricted him.

~~~
burkaman
It probably did restrict him, he still works in the industry of his
apprenticeship. The point is, what if he realized two years in, or five years
in, that he didn't want to be a programmer?

~~~
bryanlarsen
He finished his apprenticeship at a younger age than most people finish
college. Switching fields would have been easy.

------
jwoah12
I think the major disconnect here is in the industry's general inability to
recognize ability through the standard interview processes.

On one hand you have the common whiteboard coding interviews popular among the
big tech players (and much of the rest of the industry). I'm definitely biased
here, as someone who is average/below average at these types of interviews but
an above average (I hope) developer, but I don't think these interviews are
very good indicators of on-the-job performance.

On the other hand you have many startups who won't even interview you if you
don't have side projects or open source contributions to show. As someone who
has side projects to show, I understand that most people do not, and it's
unrealistic to expect everyone to.

The best way I can think of to predict how someone will perform is to have
them do something relatively close to what they'd actually be doing, like
going over some of your actual code with them and asking them to talk about
what it's doing, and doing some pair programming with them on an actual
computer.

Has anyone had success with something like that?

~~~
rco8786
Lots of companies do that, fwiw...though I agree that many companies may
benefit from doing it more instead of blindly following the "big tech"
whiteboard style.

Here's the thing about the whiteboard coding interviews:

A) There's a huge false negative rate. I.E. a lot of good engineers get turned
down because of a bad whiteboard exercise.

B) The "big tech" companies know this and _do not care_. They have people who
want to work there lined up out the door. The whiteboard interview is setup to
_minimize false positives_.

C) The above argument can possibly be made in favor of the pair
programming/"do what you'll actually be doing" type of interview and with even
less false negatives, but frankly those interviews are harder and more time
consuming on the interviewer(s). Additionally, the whiteboard panel gives 5-6
people time to meet and speak with the candidate instead of 1-2 which helps to
mitigate the effects of any personal biases that might be present.

Tl;Dr - the whiteboard interviews actually work well when you have a giant
pool of potentials and only optimize for minimizing false positives.

~~~
nulltype
Part B there is why I suspect this tech talent shortage is not as real as it's
made out to be. If there was a shortage, they would totally care.

~~~
rco8786
I don't know if it's necessarily mutually exclusive. It's only a handful of
company's that can afford to do this sort of interviewing.

Judging by the amount of recruiter activity in my email/LinkedIn I'd say
there's plenty of non "big tech" companies out there that are really
struggling to find people.

------
_lex
There are strong economic disincentives to training employees in transferable
skills: the second you do, their market value increases, which means that if
you don't pay them more, they will be recruited by other companies willing to
do so. So you wind up paying for both their education and an increased salary
because you educated them. It's cheaper to just hire someone who's already
educated.

For example, consider the employer who decides to pay 10,000 to train their
employees when doing so will cause their employees' market salary to increase
by 5000/year. Assuming the employee will stay with him for 2 years if he does
the salary bump, he's effectively paying the employee $5000 (salary bump) +
10,000/2 (training) = $10,000/year extra, when he could just go to the market
and hire someone who already has the skill for $5,000/year extra.

Going to the market may also be faster if the skill is both complex &
modularized (so it doesn't require deep insight into the current code base).
You'll also benefit from the experience of the person who's done it before and
gained battle scars.

So instead of promoting a jr engineer and training them, it's often just
cheaper and more efficient to hire a senior guy who's done it before.

~~~
cortesoft
This seems so obvious, I can't believe others aren't seeing this. It is a
clear collective action problem - the free loader (the company who doesn't
train and just hires the trained worker away from the other company) will
always have the advantage.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Except when you can't hire, because all those experienced folks are taken.
Then the work doesn't get done and the company falls behind in inaction.

------
wellpast
I disagree with this article's thesis, that the industry is incorrectly
framing the talent problem. Whether people _are_ talent or _have_ talent is
philosophical; the truth of the matter is that it is really hard to find
software practitioners that can come in and do the job and do it well.

The problem, IMO, is that we don't have a good and clear understanding of what
is the professional skill set. Even companies like Google, etc have lamented
the very difficult problem of interviewing and identifying talent that
correlates to on-the-job success.

I know (believe) that there is an acquirable skill set of a professional
software practitioner that maps to real value. It's just that we as an
industry haven't successfully codified it yet, we haven't yet shown which of
the practitioner's skills are the most valuable, and we haven't shown how to
measure and evaluate those skills in a candidate.

Only when we can be specific about what is the talent, the skill set will we
be in a better position to consider the shortage (or not) of that talent; and
only then will we also be able to be specific with individuals on how to
acquire that skill set.

~~~
taurath
It could also be that there are many paths to and definitions for the
skillsets that make good professional workers. Even if you create a list of
the most desirable features of a software developer there are infinite ways of
actually getting those features and they will not even look the same for 2
people.

One person who could be driven to learn and improve themselves by sheer ego,
and another by absolute anxiety from bad things happening in their lives and a
need for security and understanding. Those people look quite different when
they work, and respond very differently to the high pressure situations of an
interview. In the end you'll end up trending towards the same people that are
in charge of interviews, because you'll tend to want to work with people that
match your expectations of what a productive professional looks like (which
can sometimes be "diversity" itself, though usually with a lot of degrees).

The other problem is that people tend to stick with what they know through
their careers, and be around similar people. Its a fact of life of any
interviewing programmer that with the exact same job requirements you can
completely bomb one interview and look like a saint in the next. This is
something that isn't easily quantified, which pretty much goes against the
whole point of software to begin with, creating quite an interesting problem.

------
trishume
> Few businesses give interns real coding assignments or support them
> adequately. Many can’t or won’t pay interns, which erects a privilege
> barrier by excluding anyone who doesn’t have savings to weather working for
> nothing for a few months.

I'm a university student in a co-op CS program and most of my classmates, many
with no previous programming experience, found good jobs that pay well where
they get real experience after 1 year of school. This paragraph doesn't seem
true to me at all. Demand is extremely high for CS interns, many even make it
to earning $100k+ before graduating. These internships can also easily pay
your entire tuition, you can even end up with tens of thousands of _savings_
after you finish your degree.

~~~
aianus
Can confirm, I don't know a single person who studied CS at Waterloo and
graduated with $1 of debt. Most had cars and hefty savings accounts along with
job offers by senior year.

~~~
rco8786
My company aggressively hires interns and new grads out of Waterloo.

I wish more CS programs would follow their model.

For those that don't know, the CS program at Waterloo is 5 years long. 4 years
for the traditional education but there's also a requirement that the student
complete FIVE internships at different companies(thus the extra year).

It's a great combination of learning and on the job training, and they get
paid for their work.

~~~
aianus
The requirement says 5 internships to graduate, but that's just in case you
can't find one your first work term. There are 6 work terms in the schedule
and almost everyone does all 6 internships.

------
cryoshon
This article is decent, but it's missing the main component of the problem,
which is that companies aren't willing to pay for the level of talent they are
demanding, and instead will smile and offer "entry level" pay for a job that
is not entry level. This problem occurs in broader audiences than the tech
industry, of course.

They are using PR to communicate to the public that there is a shortage, but
in reality there is only a shortage of labor in the sense that employers are
not offering enough for skilled labor to attract the unicorns they want. The
only "shortage" that appears in a highly competitive market with rich labor
supply is due to picky employers unwilling to be aggressive with talent
acquisition. Try offering a million bucks a year for any given dev job, I
guarantee people will be quitting their day jobs to fill your "shortage". The
point is that companies aren't willing to give to employees. The selfishness
which embodies corporations chasing profit is the root problem here. The lack
of training and mediocre wages that companies offer is a symptom of that same
issue. Cue people bitching about how "hiring is so hard" when really they
should be complaining about "training people is so hard"\-- yeah, hiring the
perfect unicorn for your machine is harder than investing in someone to make
them what you want.

"In fact, I’ve come to believe the so-called “talent shortage” is a lie — the
real shortage is of companies that are willing to invest in talented people."

I have been saying this for quite some time. Nobody is willing to accept that
employees are capital purchases which require an up-front investment of
capital in the form of training time and training infrastructure in order to
make having them mutually profitable. Instead, they expect to unbox
"interchangeable" employee labor for free, then provide a (calibrated to be a
low-ball) salary once they have the labor they want in hand.

~~~
x0x0
The reality here is VCs, billionaires, and CEOs are busy talking their book
(what is their largest expense? Often, salaries. What does skilled immigration
serve to reduce? Salaries. Say it isn't so!) But they're in danger of losing
control of the narrative.

Secondly, they want to claim, particularly to government, that the tech
industry as a whole needs more immigration and more government funded
education. ie they speak for us, rather than for themselves, and a small group
of owners and the rich.

They certainly well understand if they pay more they'll be able to hire nearly
anyone they choose or want. They just don't wish to do so. By their fruit you
will recognize them. I suggest that, as a working engineer, we refrain from
taking advice on what's best for us from many of same people (or their paid
advocates) who were recently involved in a conspiracy to reduce our wages.

Where's the massive runup in engineering salaries that would accompany an
actually tight labor market? Have you, or any of your peers, recently gotten,
say, a $10k or greater per annum raise? Without switching employers? Have your
wages kept pace with the runup in housing costs in the bay area? It's finally
percolating through the collective consciousness that working at startups as
an employee often isn't a particularly good deal. See eg Tikhon [1].

But, you know, employees advocating for themselves instead of their bosses;
that's class consciousness and socialism and all sorts of evil. To the
fainting couch!

[1] [https://medium.com/@tikhon/founders-it-s-not-1990-stop-
treat...](https://medium.com/@tikhon/founders-it-s-not-1990-stop-treating-
your-employees-like-it-is-523f48fe90cb)

------
jandrewrogers
The discussion is muddied by treating "tech talent" as a meaningful grouping
of people. It is a similar type of error as "STEM jobs", which includes both
marine biologists and computer scientists even though they have wildly
different experiences in the job market.

Some software jobs can be quickly learned by anyone with good programming
experience. These are the kinds of "shortages" that can be reasonably solved
by training existing software talent. There is a baseline amount of skill
required but that level is low enough that it is at least plausible that you
can expand the supply on a reasonable time horizon.

However, some high-demand software jobs require multiple years of experience
and a high talent baseline to be an effective practitioner. The time required
to develop these skills can exceed the life cycle of companies and products.
These shortages are very real because there is no easy way to manufacture more
of this talent on a time horizon that matters to anyone. Consequently, they
tend to be self-trained in operational environments over several years. People
with these skills tend to be paid atypically well, but you are really just
shifting the shortage around between different companies. High wages per se
does not manufacture a talent pool.

In software, we have talent shortages that could be addressed by training
_and_ we have talent shortages where the amount of time required to produce
new talent is so high that it is almost never worth it for a company to make
that investment. In practice, the latter case has been solved by people
investing in themselves over several years (usually because they have a keen
interest) to develop the skill but in many areas this is definitely not
producing enough talent to meet demand.

These are problems that must be solved differently. Lumping them together
muddies the conversation as people talk past each other.

------
brianlweiner
Definitely tech companies don't do enough to recruit and train novice
programmers. Cue the "Junior level" position with a 3 year experience
requirement.

That said, certainly the group that face the most racial inequalities and lack
of institutional privilege in the American job market are humans who had the
unfortunate luck of being born outside her borders.

~~~
kenko
The phasing out of on-the-job training is an atrocity, IMO, especially since
what tends to replace it is training at a university, which ought (imo) be a
place where people can get some education that isn't oriented primarily toward
making them better workers.

It's especially ironic since often the university is a public institution, and
the tech world (and the business world generally) tends to be so down on the
public sphere and are big boosters of private enterprise. But they're not
above taking a giant, giant handout in the form of _worker training_ and then
pissing and moaning when they think it isn't coming fast enough.

~~~
kenko
Ha and I see that pinboard just tweeted sth relevant:
[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/665235613373718528](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/665235613373718528)
"Recurring theme this morning is Minimum Viable Education, how to train future
tech professionals without the baggage of reading English lit"

------
makesnosense
I cringe every time I hear someone say it's hard to find talent. I've been a
software engineer for over 12 years now and I know I'm good at it. My problem
is that I truly suck at interviewing. I have no social issues whatsoever, I'm
just a normal guy outside the interview room, but when I do get in there - I'm
at my absolute worse. I've been out of work for going on 8 months now and I
just don't get it.

I've tried many things to overcome my severe interview anxiety and I've tried
creative ways of getting employers to give a second chance or even a better
first chance :) But it fails me each and every time.

~~~
jcadam
I feel your pain. I've managed to do enough interviews that I no longer
_appear_ to be nervous, but my brain still just does not work correctly when
in an interview situation. Hell, I once used a _goto_ during an interview for
a C++ job because I was so stressed out I could not recall the concept of
loops.

I have literally hung up the phone after a live(remote) coding interview and
had the answer to the problem that had stumped me pop into my head _seconds_
later. Similar things have happened with driving/flying home from an on-site
whiteboard interview.

My best-ever interview performance came after a year of looking for a new job.
I was so beaten down and emotionally exhausted I showed up for a coding
interview knowing I would fail, and I just did not care. No stress. Got the
job.

So I guess that would be the secret for me, I have to not care if I get the
job or not. Easier said than done.

------
mbesto
The tech talent shortage is a lie when you don't know what tech talent
actually looks like. It also doesn't exist nearly as strong as it does in SV.
Remote is a solution, but not everyone knows how to run a company with remote
employees.

> _And therein lies the problem: The real shortage isn’t of talented people;
> it’s of employers (and, by implication, society) who are willing or able to
> nurture talented people._

When everyone has a runway of 18 months, spending the time and money to
nurture talented people isn't feasible whatsoever. You need productive people
on day 1.

> _Despite the tech industry’s propensity to hire people of privilege,
> research shows that people with different backgrounds are no less capable or
> successful as software engineers than those from privileged circles. And
> there are strong bottom-line arguments for a more diverse workplace._

Yet, the author's company is full of white males in their 20's and 30's...[0]
It sounds like the author wants other people, with other capital to invest in
the hard part of what he's suggesting to be solved.

For the record, Google brings in 1,500 interns per year. That's a pretty
significant investment in talented people who many not necessarily be
productive...(hint: they take a lot of Stanford CS undergrads) of which many
will eventually take full time jobs there when they graduate. I've tried to
hire these people and they are extremely difficult to attract when the
alternative is a cushy job at Google.

[0] - [https://www.vividcortex.com/about-
us/#leadership](https://www.vividcortex.com/about-us/#leadership)

~~~
vonmoltke
> When everyone has a runway of 18 months, spending the time and money to
> nurture talented people isn't feasible whatsoever. You need productive
> people on day 1.

Day productivity is a mirage. _Nobody_ is productive on day 1 unless they were
already somehow working with your organization and understand your
processes[1], team dynamics, and whatnot.

> Yet, the author's company is full of white males in their 20's and 30's...

You must be seeing something on that page I am not. In fact, it looks more
diverse to me than the typical Valley start-up.

> It sounds like the author wants other people, with other capital to invest
> in the hard part of what he's suggesting to be solved.

That is a huge leap to make from a few pictures on an about page.

> For the record, Google brings in 1,500 interns per year. That's a pretty
> significant investment in talented people who many not necessarily be
> productive...(hint: they take a lot of Stanford CS undergrads) of which many
> will eventually take full time jobs there when they graduate. I've tried to
> hire these people and they are extremely difficult to attract when the
> alternative is a cushy job at Google.

So, there's a shortage of Stanford CS grads who interned at Google. What about
the hundreds of thousands of grads who didn't go to Stanford or intern at
Google? How many of them have you interviewed?

[1] Of course, it is my firm belief that much of the angst in Valley hiring is
that companies don't want to actually pay attention to things like process and
organization and so try to hire a bunch of self-organizing rockstars to
compensate.

~~~
mbesto
> Nobody is productive on day 1

"Day 1" doesn't literally mean the first hour of employment. I guess you
didn't pick up the subtle exaggeration.

> You must be seeing something on that page I am not.

There are exactly 11 images of people on that page. 9 of which are light
skinned, male, and dressed almost identical to what you would see in a typical
SV tech startup. There is exactly 1, yes 1, woman.

> How many of them have you interviewed?

Lots, in fact, most of them are not Stanford grads. Care to elaborate why
that's relevant?

------
cynicalkane
"The tech talent shortage is a lie... you just have to train people so
there'll be no shortage several years from now."

So there is a shortage. But clickbait gets clicks.

~~~
kenko
You can hire and start training people now. They can start being useful
_fast_. The whole bootcamp model proves this. If there's such a shortage
businesses could just subsidize the bootcamps.

------
vdnkh
>Barriers To Entry

There's another group facing barriers to entry in the tech world: those
without CS degrees. There are plenty of people without a CS degree who are
talented, have natural aptitude, work hard, and can certainly program who get
blasted during technical interviews trying to do the "CS fundamentals" dance.
I have a ECE degree (with a focus in software), and while I looked for jobs it
was and still is tough. And I don't mean OOP concepts or datastrucures. I mean
trivia - whiteboard questions where the "correct" answer is Monte Carlo, or
how to manipulate the call stack in C. 99% of entry-level jobs don't even get
close to the depth of these concepts. I never learned them in school. I
learned them on my own time, but only after flopping hard.

I know that knowledge of deeper concepts are important to becoming a well-
rounded developer, but they're far from the skills needed to succeed in day-
to-day development work. You can be an excellent developer and not know what
P=NP even means. It's irrelevant.

~~~
sokoloff
At the same time, I've seen an awful lot of coders set out on a course of
action that is easy, provided they first solve the generalized Halting
Problem.

When I observe that the first thing they need to is solve the Halting Problem,
they've never heard of it, but they're going to get cracking straight away on
it... <facepalm />

I don't have a CS degree, technically. I have a Mech E degree with an awful
lot of EE/CS coursework and work experience along the way. IME, companies
aren't focused on the degree per-se, but on knowing that you have basic
competence. My non-CS degree has never (knowingly) been an issue for me.

~~~
vdnkh
>Halting Problem

What an easy way to confuse someone whose never heard of the term for "does
the program stop". It's pedantic.

------
tosseraccount
There is no tech labor shortage.

No study, other than those sponsored by the industry, has ever shown a
shortage.

Wages, both for new graduates and established professionals, have been stable
in the engineering and programming fields. Starting salaries for new computer
science graduates were up about 3% in Spring 2011, according to NACE; a 2011
DICE report, in spite of claiming a shortage, concedes that overall tech
salaries are up 1%; a San Jose Mercury News article in July 2011 reports a
strong job market in Silicon Valley, but also states that wages are up only 3%
since 2009. None of these figures indicates a labor shortage.

A 2007 Urban Institute study found that the universities are producing more
than enough graduates at the bachelor's level in STEM.

Figures for students graduating with computer science degrees cannot be used
to determine whether we have a shortage of people qualified for computer
science jobs. Most people in the computer field, including those in software
development, have their degrees in fields other than computer science.

In 2012 congressional testimony, Texas Instruments admitted that they have
plenty of American engineering job applicants at the bachelor's level.

[
[http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b10min.html](http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b10min.html)
]

------
Mikeb85
Of course it's a lie. Like with many industries, worker 'shortages' only exist
at the price level the corporations want to pay. So they artificially inflate
supply to lower wages. Nothing new here.

~~~
cortesoft
I am not sure what you mean by 'want to pay'. It isn't like the companies that
can't pay higher prices are rolling in profit. The companies that DO make a
lot of money DO pay their engineers good wages. It is just that most companies
tech workers don't add enough profit to afford their work.

If a company will make $100k extra in profit a year from the work a developer
does, but the worker capable of doing that costs $150k a year, that company
isn't going to be able to hire the worker. It isn't about 'wanting to pay them
less' it is about the fact that every worker needs to produce more value than
they cost, or the company will go out of business .

~~~
tankerdude
So that specific company either doesn't hire, or hires for less compensation,
if they can find it.

But that doesn't mean that there's a shortage of workers. It means that that
company isn't paying the market rate and thus will pull the good old H1B
trick.

~~~
cortesoft
If lots of companies that have a need can't fill that need at a price they can
afford, that is by definition a shortage. Of course a company could hire a
worker if they spent enough money; even in the middle of a famine, you can
find food if you have enough money.

Are there a lot of engineers sitting around unemployed, not taking these jobs
that are offered because they aren't paying enough? I don't think that is the
case - if there were, those people would start taking those jobs at the lower
pay.

Since this isn't the case, imagine what you say starts happening - those
companies with openings raise the pay enough to find a candidate. Where do you
think that person is coming from? Not a pool of unemployed engineers, but from
a pool of engineers working at other companies. So now, that other company has
an open position. You have not changed anything, just shifted the problem to
another company.

Sure, an individual company can deal with a shortage by just paying more, but
that doesn't fix the industry wide issue.

I know as engineers, the shortage is great for us. It drives up our wages, and
it benefits me greatly. I make a lot more than most other industries. But that
doesn't mean there isn't a shortage.

~~~
tankerdude
The pool of unemployed engineers is of decent size, especially people who are
over 40. We know that ageism exists in tech, and many are deemed not even
worthy of an interview.

I will also disagree that these companies "cannot afford it". Who are the ones
complaining? They are mainly very large corporations, or at least the ones
that are being heard. Do you really think that hiring of an engineer here will
make it so that they will become unprofitable?

It's the old saying of, "if you've been unemployed for X number of months, you
will get shunned".

So again, it's supply/demand. If you want to pay less, why not just hire give
the unemployed guys a shot at that lower pay? It's part of doing business. So
pay less for less quality, but that's not what companies want. They want to
pay less but for a higher quality. Like all things economics, we can have a
substitute. It might be an inferior one, but you're not sure.

As far as wages, meh. I dunno. Once you hit a certain level these days, you
kind of top out in engineering, or what people _want_ to pay. And the top of
the graph gets dragged down by the sheer number of H1Bs.

------
birken
The author is making a lot of statements without any evidence. For example:

> Unsurprisingly, this has spawned an arms race where companies like Facebook
> and Google keep swapping engineers like they’re pawns in chess. It’s also
> closed the doors for talented people who need an opportunity to develop and
> demonstrate their skills.

The "closed the doors" point links to the anti-poaching agreement that stopped
5 years ago and Facebook wasn't even involved in.

My experience at Google was also exactly the opposite of what he is saying. I
was hired as a new-grad who knew very little and was extensively trained via
my more experienced coworkers and a bunch of classes that Google has
explicitly set up to train new engineers.

Not to say that Google doesn't have its faults, but to argue that "even the
large prestigious tech companies don't train their employees" is just not
correct.

------
vukmir
Of course it is a lie.

There's a shortage of talent willing to work 80 hours a week and get paid for
20. There's a shortage of talent with 5 years of experience in technology that
is 3 years old. There's a shortage of talent willing to jump through an absurd
number of hoops in order to work for you.

------
geis
As the CEO of a company that focuses on developing our developers, I find this
article very click-baity. We're currently trying to hire engineers in house
and we have found a few interesting things:

1\. Mid-level engineers (I consider 2-5 years of experience) are very hard to
find. 2\. Entry/Junior engineers are much easier to find, but finding good
ones[1] is still difficult. 3\. I suspect it is the shortage that has caused
the following discrepancy in applications: 100% of Program Manager respondents
include a well-thought out cover letter, less than half of our software
developer candidates do the same. With a frantic hiring of software developers
(i.e. shortage), you don't need to put in so much effort and still find
something.

[1] We consider good software developer candidates someone in the area or
willing to relocate, who is sharp at coding and who has done some independent
work.

Someone else commented about not having time to do independent work. In life,
you have time or money. Is there someone out there like the protagonist in
"The Pursuit of Happyness"? Yeah, probably. But you can't tell me that's the
case for 90% of engineering candidates. If you love what you do, you find a
way -- in fact, wild horses couldn't keep you away from building _something_.
</finding-a-job-in-software-advice>

It's not that there isn't a deep talent pool, it's just that the demand is
deeper than the supply.

------
sz4kerto
In the country I actually live in reports say that there is a huge shortage of
waiters and chefs at the moment. And there is -- most of them are leaving for
richer countries. What this means is that there are a lot of businesses who
don't want or cannot afford paying more for chefs and waiters, and not that
there are simply not enough people who could serve pizzas in a countryside
restaurant.

Same goes for tech talent. I was testing the tech market in my home country a
couple of years ago, and a multinational company who is (also) complaining
about extreme lack of tech talent said that no engineer is allowed to be paid
more than ~ $40k/year (in that particular office). They pay three times as
much in the UK. Well, tough luck then. :)

~~~
cortesoft
Well the issue, in both the waiter and chef situation and the tech one, is
that the company who employees them has to make enough from the labor that it
is worth paying the higher price. There might just not be enough opportunities
that will generate the level of income to support paying the higher wages.

In other words, there are a lot of companies that have tasks for tech workers;
the problem is that a lot of those companies don't make enough profit to
afford to pay those tech workers.

------
kator
I always focus on hiring for Attitude and Aptitude.

If you have a bad attitude I can't help you with that.

If you have aptitude and a good attitude we can teach you whatever you need to
learn to be successful on our team.

What I know about every person ever is they came into this world with little
to no knowledge, they had to learn to eat, walk, talk, run, etc. If we focus
too much on a candidate's experience and background we miss out on their
potential future value.

One of the greatest employees I ever hired was a pool man, literally cleaning
pools for a living when I met him. He was a hobbyist computer hacker and I
asked him how he'd like to do that full time. He learned and turned out to be
an amazing asset to my team. I have many stories like this over my long
career. It's not about the school you went to, or what social circles you hang
out in, in the end it's about your passion and ability to learn and get shit
done.

All this said I do worry that our systems are not creating the space for
people to find their passion while they hone their skills and find a career
path.

------
arbitrage314
At my small, startup-ish company, we see great talent come through all the
time. These are people who can write good code reasonably fast, and they are
also people who simply love coding.

There seems to be no shortage of these people.

There does, however, seem to be a shortage of people like these who are
willing to work for $100k and a small bit of equity, though, unless they make
the mistake of valuing their stock options for way more than they're worth. In
that case, we sometimes get them :).

------
eertami
>part of the institution of privilege and power that has driven diversity from
our ranks

Satirical piece right?

For my own well-being I'm gonna assume this is satire.

------
up_and_up
I am a self-taught developer.

I think part of the reason is that "software development" job requirements
have vastly expanded from 10-15 years ago. Speaking generally, a decent
hirable engineer is now expected to not only be able to contribute full-stack
(front and backend) but also do an amount of devops as well. The tools have
become more specialized requiring greater experience to wield them. Nobody
with less than 5 years exp is going to be at all productive and worth hiring
IMO (note: that could include 4 years of freelancing while in college) Granted
this is allowing very small teams to be highly productive. But you can't hire
B-level or Jr. people at all.

So the experience level bar has been raised for the same position 10 years
later.

~~~
taurath
I'm also a self-taught developer and contributing full-stack and with devops,
and I've got a year to go to that 5 years XP mark. I'd say I'm pretty
productive on a day to day basis, but I do lack certain skillsets that are
"required" in some interviews but don't effect my day-to-day (I learn things
as a need arises):

Low level considerations: Its extremely rare with todays tools and libraries
especially to have to dive super deep into compilers or engines. I have to do
it once or twice a year to fix some terrible bug, so spending years learning
about the intricacies of building my own compiler isn't that useful for me to
actually get work done. Granted I"m not doing groundbreaking computer science
work but I AM getting a full stack of performant secure and load-balanced
services and servers up and running to perform core business work.

You can hire Jr. people absolutely - just make sure that whatever they have
grown in first is something that you use a lot, while they grow into other
areas. If you don't have the budget for super senior do it all people, or if
you are on a large team or company where a super senior do it all person would
be slowed down there's no issue with hiring B-level or Jr. people - in fact,
you'll probably get a lot of good work done out of them. If nobody took a
chance on me then I'd be nowhere now.

------
xiaoma
If there were a talent shortage, the surest sign would be an increase in
average wages after adjusting for inflation over the past 10 or 20 years. That
would mean salaries would be significantly _more_ than 23% higher than 2005 or
57% higher than in 1995 for approximately the same skill level.

That's not the case so I don't think there's a real shortage.

------
BrainInAJar
This article is wrong for the wrong reason. There's no talent shortage,
companies just aren't willing to pay for talent.

------
samfisher83
There is something like a million unemployed engineers in India.

[http://www.thenewsminute.com/lives/609](http://www.thenewsminute.com/lives/609)

Just basic statistics tell you some percentage of these people are quite
talented. The thing with software is you don't really need that many people.

------
padobson
I completely agree with the title of this post, and agree with most of the
points, but this problem is a lot bigger than breaking down cliques and social
barriers, and developing mechanisms to get people experience.

The problem is that a bad hire is too expensive. What we need is a way to make
it less expensive so hiring managers can take more risks.

I get a hundred emails a week from tech companies and head hunters who found
some of my skills in a query in some database. I've sent resumes, had phone
interviews, and taken technical tests.

But maybe 1 in 10,000 recruiter emails leads to a situation in which I feel a
potential employer understands how "talented" I am.

Everything from skillset databases to bad recruiters, to arcane, useless
technical interview questions makes me think we're doing this all wrong.

How many good jobs have good workers missed out on because everyone is so
afraid of hiring the wrong person?

------
anowell
It's a few years old at this point, but the 2013 Velocity talk "there is no
talent shortage" is still one of my favorite resources on the topic:
[https://youtu.be/P_sWGl7MzhU](https://youtu.be/P_sWGl7MzhU)

------
tosseraccount
If I want a prime ribeye steak; but only want to pay $3 for it, is there a
"cow shortage" ?

------
20years
"Who should be responsible for developing talent? On one side, we have
enthusiastic, curious people without much experience. On another, we have
employers who want experienced people but don’t want to invest in the training
themselves. And between them, we have colleges that offer students educational
groundwork in computer science but don't want to transform into coding trade
schools."

I would also like to add: We have employers who want highly skilled full-stack
developers with 5 to 10 yrs experience but don't want to pay top dollar for
them. Instead they scream about a tech talent shortage in order to push the
expansion of H1-B to get cheaper labor.

------
mixmastamyk
This rings true, regarding training... lost an opportunity this year because I
hadn't used Django REST framework yet, even though I have years of Django and
REST experience separately. Probably would have taken the better part of an
hour to fill that deficiency.

Part of the problem are the blog posts that became fashionable a few years
ago. The ones that talk about accepting only 10x developers, and the
"horrible" outcomes of hiring the wrong person. While they have truth to them,
what a disservice they have done to the industry. Hiring managers are now
frozen in fear and inaction. Not everyone can be a "unicorn" but certainly
even average developers can crank out good web apps with occasional guidance
and high standards around them.

Since most places are looking for multiple devs, why not hire an extra and cut
under-performers when that becomes clear in a couple of months? Start them
with low-context tasks.

Besides the race/gender problem, another issue is the age thing, which the
article didn't mention. Imagine an other industry where people with experience
are excluded! "Only 28-year old white guys with beards need apply". No, your
new event-driven web framework is nothing special that hasn't been done a
hundred times. But those in charge now unfortunately don't have the experience
to know that.

Oh, and the pay problem, despite tech companies sitting collectively on
trillions of dollars.

So there we go, this "tech shortage" seems to be mostly self-inflicted IMHO.

------
wINfo
> And between them, we have colleges that offer students educational
> groundwork in computer science but don’t want to transform into coding trade
> schools.

> Budding engineers are talented and eager to learn. And schools are right —
> their job is to educate, not to train. The duty of cultivating talent lies
> with employers.

The "tech talent shortage" is a result of the failure of colleges to actually
deliver the vocational training services they advertise. Students invest huge
sums of money and take on unsustainable student loan debt to pay colleges to
"educate" them and adequately train them in a profession. Why is it
unreasonable for employers to expect that colleges take on the burden of
"making engineers"?

In a labor market you need to have a properly functioning supply and demand
side to ensure that market is efficient. In our economy the demand side
(students, employers) is highly functional, innovative and more creative than
ever. Yet the supply side (colleges) is both backward and highly
dysfunctional.

The college's reckless freewheeling management of the supply side of the
market is leading to dangerous levels of student loan debt which is a huge
risk to our entire financial system.

------
mariopt
"Talent" is one of those words that we should erase from you dictionary.
Personally, I don't believe in "talent".

The industry thinks you're "talented", usually, if you're a jack of all trades
and managed to get things done without having in consideration if understand
what you're doing or if you're just a tutorial driven guy ( aka the design who
uses a js hype framework and become an engineer in 4 weeks). For me this heart
breaking because I actually enjoy my work despite the bad days everybody faces
at it.

Every 3 years or so you need to reinvent yourself and learn new stuff and
still be productive! People think that getting you of college means that
you're production ready and that you don't need time to learn or even 1 week
off to be updated.

The "talent" shortage is just another way of saying:"We don't find enough
cheap jacks of all trades out there that can handle everything. It's quite bad
because we need to hire expensive managers that won't train then and make
(force) them solve to tickets no matter what."

------
molecule
previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10557990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10557990)

------
jellicle
Median real wages for IT workers (and any subcategory you want to pick) in the
USA are on a decline over the last fifteen years or so. This suggests that the
field has a substantial surplus of workers.

Wages are decreasing. There's no shortage. Hasn't been one since the dot-com
boom.

~~~
sokoloff
This has not been my personal experience as an employee nor as a hiring
manager.

------
thadd
There's not enough tech workers, everyone learn tech!!

There's too many tech workers, we're all screwed!!

Yawn.

------
lowpro
I'm not sure why exactly the author related the issue to racial and gender
inequality, which is an issue, although I think it doesn't properly address
the real price ledge issue. The real problem is you have to know someone to
get in early, and not everyone has an in. Because there are less women and
minorities, they have less people to help them get in, although being a white
male, you still have to know someone to get in, there's just a higher
likelihood you'll know someone.

When the industry looks at actual skills instead of who you know, the issue
will correct itself.

------
ctlby
Sorry if this is just oversight, but I haven't seen much discussion on HN of
liability arising from termination of an employee. I'd guess (admittedly, no
data here) that this is one of the major factors driving disemployment for
marginal tech candidates (read: those whose qualifications are in doubt).
Hiring someone you may soon need to fire is difficult enough, but probably not
a dealbreaker. However, pair that with legal risk, especially arising from
discrimination suits, and the expected value of your candidate turns deeply
negative.

------
kelukelugames
I'm really tired of people saying there is evidence that diversity is good for
the bottom line. The numbers in the study only proves correlation, not
causation.

------
kumarski
The INS moat protects the high salaries of US based developers.

There's more than enough talent, it's just waiting outside the gates of the
coliseum.......

~~~
dragonwriter
> The INS moat protects the high salaries of US based developers.

The INS ceased to exist in 2003.

If you want to say "US Immigration law" in general, just say that; if you want
to blame the particular agency responsible for enforcing that law, you want to
point to USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services).

------
linuxlizard
Anyone want to move to Boise, ID for firmware positions? We're looking.

(I do not officially speak for my employer.)

------
NoCulturalFit
You can't call it a shortage when you expect developers to work 80 hour work
weeks so you can squeeze $$ out of all your clients who decided not to hire in
house for their main product on Android.

I thought it was pretty much known that the concept of SW-shortage was a big
lie?

