6 ms·

The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

141 points by bpolania 11y ago

kelukelugames 11y ago
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.
samfisher83 11y ago
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.
brianlweiner 11y ago
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.
- sotojuan 11y ago
  > Definitely tech companies ... don't ... train novice programmers. This is the worst part IMO. As we all know a Computer Science degree isn't a 1:1 match for what people will be doing in the industry. Assuming every candidate had the chance to do side projects or internships[1] instead of spending a couple of weeks training smart grads is an easy way to have a "shortage". [1] Not everyone has time for side projects (work + school), not all internships are the same either
- kenko 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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"
anowell 11y ago
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
cynicalkane 11y ago
"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 11y ago
  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.
- mpweiher 11y ago
  > "so there'll be no shortage several years from now" is - present tense will be - future tense
eertami 11y ago
>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.
- NoCulturalFit 11y ago
  No, they keep leaving little crumbs of this here and there. I usually see it on Kotaku and Polygon but once in a while on Verge and Guardian. It's propaganda by a thousand cuts. Eventually you'll just slowly buy into it. Or your dumb kids will.
  - qntty 11y ago
    can you explain what you mean by this?
trishume 11y ago
> 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.
- NoCulturalFit 11y ago
  I doubt there is a shortage but if there was one I'd think it's simulated by non-coders hiring coders.
- aianus 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
    - nfriedly 11y ago
      University of Cincinnati has a very similar program (or, at least did ~5 years ago.)
    - 11y ago
NoCulturalFit 11y ago
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?
sz4kerto 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
molecule 11y ago
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10557990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10557990
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
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.
- ci5er 11y ago
  > 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. Public assistance and loan guarantees is how we got outrageously expensive college programs in the first place. Any system will suck up any free floating dollar made available to it.
- quaffapint 11y ago
  The whole idea of you need to be well-rounded and take those $$ general ed courses is such a money grab. You want people to be able to speak, so let them take speech courses. I'm all for apprenticeships - you learn by doing - but will there be enough companies willing to participate?
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Essentially it's a more integrated earned-income tax credit, where the government pays for X% of the employee's wages. All sorts of businesses could take advantage of this, from scaling startups who can't afford to be wrong about their hires as they grow rapidly, to restaurants that experience high turnover among line chefs and have to train new cooks from scratch.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Public subsidized? Government spending on schools is enough; maybe too much. Tech can afford to train their workers, regardless.
jwoah12 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
Mikeb85 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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 11y ago
      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.
_lex 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
  - smaudet 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure they ARE seeing this. Problem is, that's a name-calling game. The employer is just as much a free-loader here. Why should they get skilled people for free? That talent directly benefits them, so why should other people be subsidizing their talent pool?
- 11y ago
wellpast 11y ago
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.
- dboreham 11y ago
  Agree. If you compare to for example lawyers and doctors there is a highly structured, consistent (even consistent across different countries and cultures) route to achieving "made man" status (apologies for using a sexually biased term, but I couldn't think of a better one). This consistent structure, beyond university, is what's missing. This of course is hardly surprising in a field that is roughly 100X less mature.
- taurath 11y ago
  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.
mbesto 11y ago
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
- theklub 11y ago
  Do you know how long it takes to outsource workers? You might as well just train new one's in house. Most of the time these companies just want cheaper employees.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > 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.
BrainInAJar 11y ago
This article is wrong for the wrong reason. There's no talent shortage, companies just aren't willing to pay for talent.
makesnosense 11y ago
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.
- NoCulturalFit 11y ago
  I know how you feel man and I wish I could help you. Been talking with a former colleague of mine who blows most devs out of the water to apply to some jobs where he would be an amazing technical fit but it's hard to convince him to take the "humiliation". I'm sorta the same..
- jcadam 11y ago
  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.
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  I much prefer: "Here's a project, get it back to me in an hour." I get all tense and nervous when people are watching me work. I don't mind showing my work, but not while I do it.
birken 11y ago
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 11y ago
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.
xiaoma 11y ago
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.
padobson 11y ago
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?
vdnkh 11y ago
>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.
- NoCulturalFit 11y ago
  Same here. Been pretty burned by this.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    >Halting Problem What an easy way to confuse someone whose never heard of the term for "does the program stop". It's pedantic.
cryoshon 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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-treating-your-employees-like-it-is-523f48fe90cb https://medium.com/@tikhon/founders-it-s-not-1990-stop-treat...
kumarski 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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).
geis 11y ago
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.
thadd 11y ago
There's not enough tech workers, everyone learn tech!! There's too many tech workers, we're all screwed!! Yawn.
tosseraccount 11y ago
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 ]
tosseraccount 11y ago
If I want a prime ribeye steak; but only want to pay $3 for it, is there a "cow shortage" ?
up_and_up 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
linuxlizard 11y ago
Anyone want to move to Boise, ID for firmware positions? We're looking. (I do not officially speak for my employer.)
arbitrage314 11y ago
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 :).
lowpro 11y ago
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.
jellicle 11y ago
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 11y ago
  This has not been my personal experience as an employee nor as a hiring manager.
ctlby 11y ago
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.
jandrewrogers 11y ago
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.
20years 11y ago
"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.
kator 11y ago
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.
mariopt 11y ago
"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."
wINfo 11y ago
> 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.
mixmastamyk 11y ago
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.

141 points by bpolania 11y ago

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.

samfisher83 11y ago

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.

brianlweiner 11y ago

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.

sotojuan 11y ago
> Definitely tech companies ... don't ... train novice programmers. This is the worst part IMO. As we all know a Computer Science degree isn't a 1:1 match for what people will be doing in the industry. Assuming every candidate had the chance to do side projects or internships[1] instead of spending a couple of weeks training smart grads is an easy way to have a "shortage". [1] Not everyone has time for side projects (work + school), not all internships are the same either
kenko 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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"

anowell 11y ago

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

cynicalkane 11y ago

"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 11y ago
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.
mpweiher 11y ago
> "so there'll be no shortage several years from now" is - present tense will be - future tense

eertami 11y ago

>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.

NoCulturalFit 11y ago
No, they keep leaving little crumbs of this here and there. I usually see it on Kotaku and Polygon but once in a while on Verge and Guardian. It's propaganda by a thousand cuts. Eventually you'll just slowly buy into it. Or your dumb kids will.
- qntty 11y ago
  can you explain what you mean by this?

trishume 11y ago

> 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.

NoCulturalFit 11y ago
I doubt there is a shortage but if there was one I'd think it's simulated by non-coders hiring coders.
aianus 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
  - nfriedly 11y ago
    University of Cincinnati has a very similar program (or, at least did ~5 years ago.)
  - 11y ago

NoCulturalFit 11y ago

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?

sz4kerto 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

molecule 11y ago

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10557990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10557990

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

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.

ci5er 11y ago
> 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. Public assistance and loan guarantees is how we got outrageously expensive college programs in the first place. Any system will suck up any free floating dollar made available to it.
quaffapint 11y ago
The whole idea of you need to be well-rounded and take those $$ general ed courses is such a money grab. You want people to be able to speak, so let them take speech courses. I'm all for apprenticeships - you learn by doing - but will there be enough companies willing to participate?
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Essentially it's a more integrated earned-income tax credit, where the government pays for X% of the employee's wages. All sorts of businesses could take advantage of this, from scaling startups who can't afford to be wrong about their hires as they grow rapidly, to restaurants that experience high turnover among line chefs and have to train new cooks from scratch.
tosseraccount 11y ago
Public subsidized? Government spending on schools is enough; maybe too much. Tech can afford to train their workers, regardless.

jwoah12 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.

Mikeb85 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.

_lex 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
- smaudet 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure they ARE seeing this. Problem is, that's a name-calling game. The employer is just as much a free-loader here. Why should they get skilled people for free? That talent directly benefits them, so why should other people be subsidizing their talent pool?
11y ago

wellpast 11y ago

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.

dboreham 11y ago
Agree. If you compare to for example lawyers and doctors there is a highly structured, consistent (even consistent across different countries and cultures) route to achieving "made man" status (apologies for using a sexually biased term, but I couldn't think of a better one). This consistent structure, beyond university, is what's missing. This of course is hardly surprising in a field that is roughly 100X less mature.
taurath 11y ago
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.

mbesto 11y ago

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

theklub 11y ago
Do you know how long it takes to outsource workers? You might as well just train new one's in house. Most of the time these companies just want cheaper employees.
vonmoltke 11y ago
> 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.

BrainInAJar 11y ago

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

makesnosense 11y ago

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.

NoCulturalFit 11y ago
I know how you feel man and I wish I could help you. Been talking with a former colleague of mine who blows most devs out of the water to apply to some jobs where he would be an amazing technical fit but it's hard to convince him to take the "humiliation". I'm sorta the same..
jcadam 11y ago
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.
CaptSpify 11y ago
I much prefer: "Here's a project, get it back to me in an hour." I get all tense and nervous when people are watching me work. I don't mind showing my work, but not while I do it.

birken 11y ago

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 11y ago

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.

xiaoma 11y ago

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.

padobson 11y ago

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?

vdnkh 11y ago

>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.

NoCulturalFit 11y ago
Same here. Been pretty burned by this.
sokoloff 11y ago
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 11y ago
  >Halting Problem What an easy way to confuse someone whose never heard of the term for "does the program stop". It's pedantic.

cryoshon 11y ago

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 11y ago
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-treating-your-employees-like-it-is-523f48fe90cb https://medium.com/@tikhon/founders-it-s-not-1990-stop-treat...

kumarski 11y ago

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 11y ago
> 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).

geis 11y ago

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.

thadd 11y ago

There's not enough tech workers, everyone learn tech!! There's too many tech workers, we're all screwed!! Yawn.

tosseraccount 11y ago

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 ]

tosseraccount 11y ago

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

up_and_up 11y ago

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 11y ago
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.

linuxlizard 11y ago

Anyone want to move to Boise, ID for firmware positions? We're looking. (I do not officially speak for my employer.)

arbitrage314 11y ago

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 :).

lowpro 11y ago

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.

jellicle 11y ago

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 11y ago
This has not been my personal experience as an employee nor as a hiring manager.

ctlby 11y ago

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.

jandrewrogers 11y ago

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.

20years 11y ago

"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.

kator 11y ago

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.

mariopt 11y ago

"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."

wINfo 11y ago

> 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.

mixmastamyk 11y ago

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.