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If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?
- orestes910 10y agoBecause tech lies at a difficult crossroads between the applied and the theoretic. You build a building, you have an architect, and engineer, a foreman, etc. With applications, you have to be all of them at once. That just isn't whats taught at universities, based on many candidates I've encountered.
- drewrv 10y agoIt's something that needs to be learned with experience, yet companies don't want to invest time training people who will probably leave in a year or two.
- presidentender 10y ago1. Standards to pass university classes are lower than the standards to be worth a salary. 2. Accidentally hiring someone who can't produce is more expensive than passing on a good hire.
- mrcactu5 10y agoI don't think the standards are lower (certainly they weren't at Princeton) -- University standards may not perfectly align with the job market, perhaps?
- vkou 10y agoMaybe they aren't lower at Princeton, but it's entirely possible to coast through a CS degree at a decent university, showing up to class maybe half the time. I'm, ah, quite familiar with some, ahem, people who did just that.
- presidentender 10y agoYour humblebragworthy alma mater is not Flyover State University, home of the Footballs. The Princetons and Stanfords and MITs of the world don't have the bandwidth to fill the industry's demand.
- muninn_ 10y agoMeh, not all the great programs are on the coasts. Any Big 10 school (carrying on with the football reference lol) is going to be at least decent, and a few are world class: Carnegie Mellon (not a Big 10 school I know) #1 globally Michigan Illinois Northwestern Purdue Wisconsin Ohio State to name a few.
- jacoblambda 10y agoI can say that Carnegie Mellon is definitely ranked nationally a Top 10 university in computer engineering and/or computer science.
- CompanionCuube 10y ago>I can say that Carnegie Mellon is definitely ranked nationally a Top 10 university in computer engineering and/or computer science. And it is just one of the numerous examples of non-coastal universities who run quality undergraduate programs producing graduates with the tech skills mentioned by the article.
- muninn_ 10y agoGeneral consensus that I've seen is that it is not just top 10 but number 1 across the entire planet.
- therobot24 10y agoi think both of your points really hinge on lacking on-the-job training >> 'to be worth a salary' >> 'who can't produce'
- mamon 10y agoTL;DR; University diploma != skill
- draw_down 10y agoIndeed-- why! Seems to me the "shortage" has more to do with labor costs than a skills gap.
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- astanway 10y agoAh, the old "shortage" "issue". More likely, there is no shortage - just a shortage of engineers willing to be paid the low wages most likely on offer at these companies
- noamsml 10y agoLow wages? Silicon valley engineers tend to be fairly highly paid...
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- dsp1234 10y agoSilicon Valley is in the US. This article is about the UK.
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- sp332 10y agoSV isn't complaining about a skills shortage.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoThere are 49.75 states in the country that are not "Silicon Valley."
- criley2 10y ago> Silicon valley engineers tend to be fairly highly paid... I mean, yes the worlds most pre-eminent software developer culture demands high prices. What about the 98% (fake statistic) of American software developers who do not live in or around San Francisco ...?
- wingless 10y agoEven they aren't paid that highly. Most of them make chump change compared to a world class lawyer or a doctor. I guess we can thank Steve Jobs for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- mfoy_ 10y agoApples and Oranges. For the majority of firms, a "lack of digital skills" isn't solved by hiring more CompSci graduates.
- thenadamgoes 10y agoYeah. I'd like some clarity on what they mean by "digital skills".
- sotojuan 10y agoThe article seems to be mostly about the UK, but from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree). There's also a lot of people who aren't that interested in it or bad at it but still manage to not get weeded out. Add that to the decades-old "CS != programming at job" dilemma and it's easy to see why so many people are unemployed.
- majormajor 10y ago> from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree) This sounds a lot like "sorry, we won't take you until you've been trained, but we're not willing to train you."
- sotojuan 10y agoYes, that's the problem and it doesn't seem like it'll be fixed any time soon.
- lloyd-christmas 10y agoFrom a hiring side, the current industry standard of job-hopping within two years has a significant negative affect on junior hires. The ROI on training someone really isn't there if the their employment expectation boils down to dine-and-dash.
- zzalpha 10y agoNow that is a very valid point. We recently rejected a very green grad because it was very clear he had no intention of committing to the job more than a couple of years. With a likely 12 month ramp and training period there was no way we were going to put in that level of investment into someone who would vanish a year later.
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- danblick 10y agoIt's interesting that this is an article about the UK rather than the US. I really enjoyed a recent Econtalk episode on "Learning by doing" that talked about labor markets: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm... The example in the episode is about textile mills. For about 50 years after mills were mechanized, productivity in mills had gone up by a lot but employee wages didn't increase even though it was "skilled" labor. The reason (explained in the episode) is that because of a lack of standardization, employees couldn't transfer skills between firms, so they were unable to demand more for their skills on the labor market by shopping for a new employer. There's no immediate connection to the article but I've been thinking about employees' ability to "shop" and I wonder if maybe these CS graduates would be employed if they had access to the US labor market.
- Mikeb85 10y agoWell my education is in economics and, in general, the way to solve a 'shortage' in labour is to raise wages. Of course, what they're really talking about is a shortage in engineers willing to do the job at the price they've specified, so they lobby the government to open up immigration to workers from abroad willing to work for less, while at the same time trying to push more and more kids into CS, so that the market will be over-saturated with workers and they'll be able to drive wages down to blue-collar levels... Edit - guess I should answer the article more directly. There isn't a tech skills shortage. There's lots of tech workers. I personally know a bunch who are unemployed or in other fields. This article has yet more data on it. But the shortage is a useful scapegoat for the practices I described above.
- sharemywin 10y agoThe problem is the shortage is with companies wanting exactly "XYZ" experience in the last 2-3 years.
- Mikeb85 10y agoIf there was a real shortage, it wouldn't be a problem. The more a business needs labour, the more flexible the 'requirements'.
- sharemywin 10y agoBusinesses have a hard time quantify the value of IT labor. add a widget maker and he can produce x more units. If the demand is good enough they hire him. with IT its different. I could write thousands of lines of shitty code and it takes a while to figure it out especially if I'm "training".
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- linkregister 10y agoThis article is about the UK software development market, which is significantly different from that of the US.
- throwmeOct7 10y agoI would like to hear from the point of view of a recent computer science graduate here, who is having trouble finding a job. I can see how you might want to work at one of the big companies, but they want "5 years of Angular" and okay, you don't have that. Maybe you have only 1 year of Angular and you're the most passionate Angular developer out there, but they won't even talk to you. That happens, I can see that. It is disappointing as a job seeker, but common. "Developer" is not the only job title that involves writing code. I am not a "Developer" but I write shit loads of code.
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- JetSetWilly 10y agoFrom my experience interviewing CS grads in the UK, I'd say the answer is pretty obvious: 'cos most of them are inexplicably rubbish. For example I recently interviewed someone with CS degree (sorry, "informatics" according to them) and masters from edinburgh uni who couldn't join 2 tables, write fizzbuzz-type code, etc. I don't know if it is because of group work or some other effect, but credentials even from decent unis seem to be hopeless.
- LeanderK 10y agoHow many CS grads commited to open source projects regularly? Do they perform better in interviews?
- JetSetWilly 10y agoSome do, not that many. I have interviewed some stellar candidates who were heavily involved in some project they were passionate about (my favourite was one that wrote an emulator for a 90s-era games VM I won't mention) - so there's definitely some relationship between people who code for passion and interest and people who are good at coding - which isn't exactly surprising.
- gregmac 10y agoIn my experience, very few, but most of those were exceptional people. They contributed to something they were passionate about, and learned all the stuff you don't get in school (writing code that can be maintained for a while, and that's maintainable by others; use of source control and issue trackers, etc). That said, I can think of two cases where I'm pretty sure they "contributed" because they were told or read that it would be good to do for their resume. One basically just uploaded a couple projects to github (with one commit). The other had contributed a few trivial patches to a couple projects, at least one had some comments that were unaddressed and didn't get merged.
- thenadamgoes 10y agoNo one seems to understand this. There is a large number of people in a CS college program that don't belong there. They had no interest in anything CS before they got there and they only enrolled because someone told them there was a lot of money in it. Turns out you still actually have to be good at whatever you do.
- snarfy 10y agoI've never had a problem finding a job in tech, but that's because I ask for 10% less than the next guy. There's the rub.
- linkregister 10y agoCan someone speak specifically about the UK software market? We seem to wrongly be making statements about the US market, which this article is not about. From what I've heard it's dismally underpaid in the UK; I have also heard the perspective that costs of living are dramatically lower outside London, and matched with longer vacations and shorter working hours, it evens out.
- sharemywin 10y agoHere's an article talking about STEM crisis for jobs and workers in US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663051
- werty1 10y agoThe UK doesn't really value software. Costs of living are lower outside of London somewhat, but not in anywhere you can get a decent software job. Shorter working hours doesn't really apply. Yes, we may be paid for 40 hours, but we still have tons to do. At the companies I've worked at not a single dev works less than 10 hours per day, not to mention the out of hours work that needs to be done. Longer vacations - well on paper, but you don't always get to take them. Working on holiday isn't time off it's still work. This is different at larger institutions, but larger institutions don't have a problem paying competitive salaries.
- koder2016 10y agoWhat? I don't know a single developer out of ~10 across multiple companies that would have to work more than 8 hours plus 1hour lunch break. Outside of London you get 37.5 hours weeks. Hell, I know contractors who work 1-2 days a week from home! But yeah, the money is crap mostly.
- werty1 10y agoThe UK doesn't really value software. Costs of living are lower outside of London somewhat, but not in anywhere you can get a decent software job. Shorter working hours doesn't really apply. Yes, we may be paid for 40 hours, but we still have tons to do. At the companies I've worked at not a single dev works less than 10 hours per day, not to mention the out of hours work that needs to be done. Longer vacations - well on paper, but you don't always get to take them. Working on holiday isn't time off it's still work. This is different at larger institutions, but larger institutions don't have a problem paying competitive salaries.
- LeanderK 10y agoThats interesting, any unemployed CS-Graduate from the UK here? Is it the lack of opportunities or the wrong opportunities that keep you from getting a job? What do you do to improve the situation?
- Old_Thrashbarg 10y agoIn San Francisco and the Bay Area, it does feel like there's a shortage of good developers. I say that because I know contractors (with a couple years of experience) who make $250 or $300 per hour. That's very burdensome for startups and the cost is necessarily passed on to consumers. On the flip side, coming out of academia, I had a hard time landing my first industry job.
- muninn_ 10y agoMove out of the bay area then. That area is one of the most expensive places on the planet. You're not going to find "cheap" developers because they can't afford to be in expensive.
- nbevans 10y agoI'm an employer and I can tell you that in the UK a lot of graduates are incredibly ill-equipped. Most of our universities are not teaching the right stuff and not emphasising the correct stuff anywhere near enough. Knowing only one language like Java (a UK uni. favourite) to a junior standard is simply unacceptable to most employers. Being unable to construct even a simple object model and writing nested mutable state for-loops with the old school "i" and "j" as variable names is also not a good sign.
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- skciva 10y agoThe article mentions 11.7% CS UK grads unemployed after 6 months. This doesn't surprise me nor does it concern me that the bottom ~10% of students are struggling to find work. What's giving them trouble is probably what plagued them in school: laziness. As a recent US grad in CS, most of my peers (in CS and outside) who couldn't find work after college slept walk through their classes and did next to no extracurricular work. When you've got below average grades, little to show outside of your degree, and you struggle with interviews (due to your minimal effort in college), don't be surprised if finding a job is difficult.
- drakonandor 10y agoI can't upvote this enough. I do suppose schools are partly to blame as well - harder exams, harder projects, more people failed is the answer. I've seen Junior year Comp Eng's who somehow passed Digital Logic and Computer Architecture but still don't understand the basic concept of flip flops. Same story with Data Structures classes not being graded hard enough.
- doctorwho 10y agoThere may be a skills shortage but that has nothing to do with a graduate shortage (or lack thereof). Just because you graduated doesn't mean you have a useful skill set, that you're proficient or employable.