3 ms·

> there is a “talent shortage” among Americans I see a bait and switch conducted here all the time, where thinkpiece writers will count up the number of annual

> there is a “talent shortage” among Americans I see a bait and switch conducted here all the time, where thinkpiece writers will count up the number of annual graduates in Computer Science (or sometimes Information Technology in general), subtract the number of new software jobs per year, and conclude that we have massive overproduction of programmers. This is obviously stupid, but I keep seeing it. It ignores CS graduates who stay in academia or take nonprogramming jobs (e.g. in finance). Often it counts "new software engineering positions", a metric which ranges from insufficient (by excluding Sysadmins and similar) to idiotic (by excluding "programmers" and other job titles the author couldn't be bothered to search for). Shockingly often, it counts new positions but doesn't account for positions vacated by people leaving programming (e.g. to management or retirement). And, of course, it ignores employability, pushing an implication that any CS graduate can fill any software job regardless of specialization, experience, or interest. It is a relentlessly stupid 'statistic', but I think one reason for this ongoing perception of surplus talent is that people keep rewriting the same silly article.

conjectures 10y ago
Yup. If we had mature education systems our governments would hire economists to get proper estimates of labour market requirements for different skill sets.
anjc 10y ago
It seems like you're agreeing with the line you quoted? That there isn't a talent shortage? Anyway having said that, good studies check for shortages and overproductions in more complicated ways than just totting up numbers blindly.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I don't think I'm agreeing with that? There are a bunch of negations in the quote, so: I think there is a talent shortage in some domains. My point was that the major sources of the "no shortage" or particularly "surplus" claims are doing shoddy math that over-represents the labor pool and under-represents demand. Also, more importantly, they're conflating all types of programming. There are certainly skillsets/interests where there's no shortage, and there are certainly spaces where there is a shortage. People who don't differentiate 'programming' any further aren't saying something useful, and people who do only disagree on the details. (I realize good studies check for those things, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people saying "but aren't there lots of spare programmers we don't need?" because some hack with an infographic subtracted two numbers and found a surplus. I've seen this error pattern in respectable news on a bunch of occasions.)
  - anjc 10y ago
    You're probably right there. And there's presumably shortages and surpluses in different regions of the US. A telling statistic is the amount of people who graduate with IT or STEM degrees, have intentions of working in their respective industries, but have to leave due to an inability to get work, or...unemployment rates for graduates with certain degrees. It was about 7-12% a couple of years ago for grads from CS, Engineering, and IS, at a time when the national level was lower. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-my... I'm not sure if we're on the same page, but my contention is that western governments are encouraging kids to pursue STEM, knowing that there's already an oversupply of workers due to visas issued to emerging economies, and that the issue is compounding year on year.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      Wow. That's a decently narrow standard, and I had no idea it was so high. I object to some specifics - IS without programming education is quite different from CS/programming - but it's still a potent statistic. More narrowly, my (cynical) take is that CS degrees are decidedly unequal. Having seen multiple companies say they only bother with top-seven job fairs, and some genuinely talented friends struggle to land interviews with third-string universities on their resumes, I get the sense that the "shortage" and "surplus" are capable of existing side-by-side. I completely agree with your conclusion, since it holds regardless of whether I'm right about segmentation within CS degrees: a lot of people are being unhelpfully pushed into "employable" STEM degrees by people who want to look science-friendly, and they're going to be left holding the (unemployment) bag when that doesn't work out.
      - anjc 10y ago
        There's definitely a wide variation in teaching between ostensibly similar courses, which might make some of the simple stats nonsensical. > I get the sense that the "shortage" and "surplus" are capable of existing side-by-side. I guess this is fundamentally the issue
Existenceblinks 10y ago
> implication that any CS graduate can fill any software job regardless of specialization, experience, or interest. Your basic calculation is still right although I'd add more numbers to the opposite site. "Potential graduates" with or without CS can potentially enter to any software sector, or even hardware. Though this is just a small factor.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  This is a good point. Lots of these 'calculations' neglect bootcamp or self-taught programmers, electrical/computer engineers who end up in software, and a lot of other grey-area work like embedded systems programming. The calculations are sloppy enough that I ignore them, but I'm not sure what the total weight of the errors ends up being.

conjectures 10y ago

Yup. If we had mature education systems our governments would hire economists to get proper estimates of labour market requirements for different skill sets.

anjc 10y ago

It seems like you're agreeing with the line you quoted? That there isn't a talent shortage? Anyway having said that, good studies check for shortages and overproductions in more complicated ways than just totting up numbers blindly.

Bartweiss 10y ago
I don't think I'm agreeing with that? There are a bunch of negations in the quote, so: I think there is a talent shortage in some domains. My point was that the major sources of the "no shortage" or particularly "surplus" claims are doing shoddy math that over-represents the labor pool and under-represents demand. Also, more importantly, they're conflating all types of programming. There are certainly skillsets/interests where there's no shortage, and there are certainly spaces where there is a shortage. People who don't differentiate 'programming' any further aren't saying something useful, and people who do only disagree on the details. (I realize good studies check for those things, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people saying "but aren't there lots of spare programmers we don't need?" because some hack with an infographic subtracted two numbers and found a surplus. I've seen this error pattern in respectable news on a bunch of occasions.)
- anjc 10y ago
  You're probably right there. And there's presumably shortages and surpluses in different regions of the US. A telling statistic is the amount of people who graduate with IT or STEM degrees, have intentions of working in their respective industries, but have to leave due to an inability to get work, or...unemployment rates for graduates with certain degrees. It was about 7-12% a couple of years ago for grads from CS, Engineering, and IS, at a time when the national level was lower. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-my... I'm not sure if we're on the same page, but my contention is that western governments are encouraging kids to pursue STEM, knowing that there's already an oversupply of workers due to visas issued to emerging economies, and that the issue is compounding year on year.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Wow. That's a decently narrow standard, and I had no idea it was so high. I object to some specifics - IS without programming education is quite different from CS/programming - but it's still a potent statistic. More narrowly, my (cynical) take is that CS degrees are decidedly unequal. Having seen multiple companies say they only bother with top-seven job fairs, and some genuinely talented friends struggle to land interviews with third-string universities on their resumes, I get the sense that the "shortage" and "surplus" are capable of existing side-by-side. I completely agree with your conclusion, since it holds regardless of whether I'm right about segmentation within CS degrees: a lot of people are being unhelpfully pushed into "employable" STEM degrees by people who want to look science-friendly, and they're going to be left holding the (unemployment) bag when that doesn't work out.
    - anjc 10y ago
      There's definitely a wide variation in teaching between ostensibly similar courses, which might make some of the simple stats nonsensical. > I get the sense that the "shortage" and "surplus" are capable of existing side-by-side. I guess this is fundamentally the issue

Existenceblinks 10y ago

> implication that any CS graduate can fill any software job regardless of specialization, experience, or interest. Your basic calculation is still right although I'd add more numbers to the opposite site. "Potential graduates" with or without CS can potentially enter to any software sector, or even hardware. Though this is just a small factor.

Bartweiss 10y ago
This is a good point. Lots of these 'calculations' neglect bootcamp or self-taught programmers, electrical/computer engineers who end up in software, and a lot of other grey-area work like embedded systems programming. The calculations are sloppy enough that I ignore them, but I'm not sure what the total weight of the errors ends up being.