8 ms·

"what is a company to do today if it finds itself part of the 71 percent of employers that claim they can't find suitable technology candidates?" Increase the

"what is a company to do today if it finds itself part of the 71 percent of employers that claim they can't find suitable technology candidates?" Increase the salary of what you are paying in order to attract more qualified devs. "they're reinvesting the money saved from hiring less-expensive engineers to create "farm teams" within their organizations" Aha! It is not about being able to "find suitable technology candidates" it is about being able to acquire "less-expensive engineers" Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of companies investing in apprenticeship programs but let's call it what it is. Not a talent shortage but a willing to pay top dollar shortage.

graycat 9y ago
One question: For the people hiring, do they pay enough for an employee to buy a house within a 20 minute commute to the office, support a family, and save for retirement?
- 20years 9y ago
  Bingo!! In my particular location, companies try and hire devs for $25/hr but the average starter home is $500k. Then they wonder why all of the talent leaves.
  - graycat 9y ago
    Yup, those houses selling for $500K are really expensive, so expensive "no one can afford them"!
- briffle 9y ago
  I'm upper 30's, married, with kids.. There is no way in hell I'm applying for a job in SV no matter the pay (well, maybe if it looked like a phone number, but that is not realistic)..
- downrightmike 9y ago
  Whoa there, for most companies outside of the bay bubble: pick only one.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
- brianwawok 9y ago
  New grads are a really bad value for their first year or two. If you are only looking for the bang for your buck approach, you would hire people with 1-3 years of experience. Anything under is negative value. Anything over is overpriced.
  - ska 9y ago
    Anything over is overpriced. Or so you can tell yourself, until the longer term costs roll in.
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      Oh I know, I am not advocating this as the correct way to build a business. But for throwing up some crappy CRUD app, you are going to get the best bang for your buck either oursourcing it or hiring 1-3 years of experience guys. It's going to be buggy and not scale, but it can still do stuff.
jressey 9y ago
I worked for a Fortune 50 up until about a year ago. In the 5 years I was there every single strong developer that I met left. They were paying sr. devs the same as 'business analysts' that simply repeated their managers instructions to the devs. In my last week I told a director there, who was my manager when I first started that 'you guys don't pay enough for good devs' and he looked at me like I pissed in his Cheerios, I think I hit a nerve. Since then they've had another purge of overpaid project managers and analysts and are now trying to train up the remaining people there to be developers. It is a completely pathetic endeavor from what I've heard from the people that I still know there. It sounds like the farm team is not working for them.
ryandrake 9y ago
Have you heard? There's a shortage of new Ferarris. I've been trying to buy one for $5000 for years now, and just can't find a single one. We need to do something about this shortage. EDIT: The first paragraph of this article is straight out of la-la-land. In any market, if there is really a shortage of a good, the price of it would rise to the point where supply met demand. So why is the price of tech talent not rising (consequently demand falling) to the point where the existing supply meets demand? A half a million open computing jobs. LOL. It's pointless to claim you have an open job you can't fill when you're not willing to pay what the market is demanding. I'll hire someone for a dollar an hour to do my personal web site. Should that count among these half a million open jobs? It's just as serious an opportunity as most of them.
- jchin 9y ago
  Yes, but isn't the article basically saying you could buy a cheaper non-Ferrari and do a little work on it to make it comparable to a Ferrari? And in the end, it would be cheaper than buying the Ferrari outright. I think the premise is reasonable. Why do you need a $5000 Ferrari? Is it to transport you from one place to another? Because then another car would do. And I think that's what this article is saying about these companies. They believe they can ignore all those Ferrari devs out there because they can build their own that will reasonably do the same thing at a price that is "suitable" for the company's needs. EDIT: typo
- draw_down 9y ago
  No, see, market logic is only sound when it doesn't suggest that laborers be paid more. If that happens, there must be something wrong with the market.
  - xaa 9y ago
    You're really quite correct. Businesses are all "small government, low regulations, free market" until government, regulation, oligopoly, etc., would help them.
- wai1234 9y ago
  Your economics are incomplete. You can't buy your way out of an aggregate shortage. The price will rise until only the rich can afford what is in short supply, and then, eventually, only the richest rich, and so on. The rest do without. These companies have created their own shortage by insisting they will only hire the top 1% and be unwilling to invest in anyone less 'capable' regardless of the quality of their so-called filter at identifying talent. So now they have 'discovered' the concept of actually helping people they would have ignored yesterday to grow into the talent they need (and absorbing the marginal costs of that investment). An idea boldly entering the 1950s as an innovation. The revolving door hiring in SV has maxed out with virtually all the 'suitable' talent in play and still many openings unfilled despite plenty of reasonably capable but sub-superstar talent pushed to the margins. The lid has been maintained on salaries mostly by agreements between the usual suspects, not market forces. The fact is that many perfectly good developers will be ignored by SV at any price and that's now biting the companies hard.
pinaceae 9y ago
We can't even get enough qualified resumes. Pay doesn't even come into play. And my associate engineers make more dough than my parents ever did. You should try hiring once, before dropping such simplistic statements. The upcoming H1B squeeze won't help. White CS grads do. not. want. to work in boring tech such as QA, etc. Remove Eastern Europeans and Asians and we're back to outsourcing whole departments to their home countries. That's reality. The US is utterly failing in creating enough homegrown talent, university education is far too expensive, everything below is useless as there is no good education available below. Just a little bit more and some other country/region will take that whole business, that's how the economy works. Unlimited salaries never happens.
- vonmoltke 9y ago
  > We can't even get enough qualified resumes. What do you define as "qualified"? We're swimming in qualified resumes. I'd say about 50% of the 200 or so applications we have received in the past few months are passed on to a phone screen. A disturbing number fail there, but the pipeline isn't the problem.
  - lj3 9y ago
    > A disturbing number fail there That's the problem. :) This has been beaten to death, but I'll say it again: the interview process of most companies are designed to weed out all but the top 1% of applicants nation wide. If you're not paying as much as Amazon and Google are, but you're recruiting and interviewing exclusively from the same candidate pool, then you're going to have a bad time finding 'qualified' candidates.
- wai1234 9y ago
  "We can't even get enough qualified resumes." Says who? It might be you are bad at promoting your openings or you have a bad reputation on Glassdoor. It also might be that you use the word 'qualified' without knowing what it means. If you expect someone else to have done all the training for you so you just buy the finished product, you're the problem. Do you look at universities as the produce aisle or the bakery?
- 9y ago
jlewis7272 9y ago
Bingo! This falsehood needs to be quashed. There are too many stories of companies using this as an excuse to rid themselves of having to pay for the pensions of their current workforce. Just look at say Disney bringing in foreign workers under the h1b visa program (meaning they can't find qualified devs) and then turn around and have the existing dev employees train them before being let go, as an example.

graycat 9y ago

One question: For the people hiring, do they pay enough for an employee to buy a house within a 20 minute commute to the office, support a family, and save for retirement?

20years 9y ago
Bingo!! In my particular location, companies try and hire devs for $25/hr but the average starter home is $500k. Then they wonder why all of the talent leaves.
- graycat 9y ago
  Yup, those houses selling for $500K are really expensive, so expensive "no one can afford them"!
briffle 9y ago
I'm upper 30's, married, with kids.. There is no way in hell I'm applying for a job in SV no matter the pay (well, maybe if it looked like a phone number, but that is not realistic)..
downrightmike 9y ago
Whoa there, for most companies outside of the bay bubble: pick only one.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

brianwawok 9y ago
New grads are a really bad value for their first year or two. If you are only looking for the bang for your buck approach, you would hire people with 1-3 years of experience. Anything under is negative value. Anything over is overpriced.
- ska 9y ago
  Anything over is overpriced. Or so you can tell yourself, until the longer term costs roll in.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    Oh I know, I am not advocating this as the correct way to build a business. But for throwing up some crappy CRUD app, you are going to get the best bang for your buck either oursourcing it or hiring 1-3 years of experience guys. It's going to be buggy and not scale, but it can still do stuff.

jressey 9y ago

I worked for a Fortune 50 up until about a year ago. In the 5 years I was there every single strong developer that I met left. They were paying sr. devs the same as 'business analysts' that simply repeated their managers instructions to the devs. In my last week I told a director there, who was my manager when I first started that 'you guys don't pay enough for good devs' and he looked at me like I pissed in his Cheerios, I think I hit a nerve. Since then they've had another purge of overpaid project managers and analysts and are now trying to train up the remaining people there to be developers. It is a completely pathetic endeavor from what I've heard from the people that I still know there. It sounds like the farm team is not working for them.

ryandrake 9y ago

Have you heard? There's a shortage of new Ferarris. I've been trying to buy one for $5000 for years now, and just can't find a single one. We need to do something about this shortage. EDIT: The first paragraph of this article is straight out of la-la-land. In any market, if there is really a shortage of a good, the price of it would rise to the point where supply met demand. So why is the price of tech talent not rising (consequently demand falling) to the point where the existing supply meets demand? A half a million open computing jobs. LOL. It's pointless to claim you have an open job you can't fill when you're not willing to pay what the market is demanding. I'll hire someone for a dollar an hour to do my personal web site. Should that count among these half a million open jobs? It's just as serious an opportunity as most of them.

jchin 9y ago
Yes, but isn't the article basically saying you could buy a cheaper non-Ferrari and do a little work on it to make it comparable to a Ferrari? And in the end, it would be cheaper than buying the Ferrari outright. I think the premise is reasonable. Why do you need a $5000 Ferrari? Is it to transport you from one place to another? Because then another car would do. And I think that's what this article is saying about these companies. They believe they can ignore all those Ferrari devs out there because they can build their own that will reasonably do the same thing at a price that is "suitable" for the company's needs. EDIT: typo
draw_down 9y ago
No, see, market logic is only sound when it doesn't suggest that laborers be paid more. If that happens, there must be something wrong with the market.
- xaa 9y ago
  You're really quite correct. Businesses are all "small government, low regulations, free market" until government, regulation, oligopoly, etc., would help them.
wai1234 9y ago
Your economics are incomplete. You can't buy your way out of an aggregate shortage. The price will rise until only the rich can afford what is in short supply, and then, eventually, only the richest rich, and so on. The rest do without. These companies have created their own shortage by insisting they will only hire the top 1% and be unwilling to invest in anyone less 'capable' regardless of the quality of their so-called filter at identifying talent. So now they have 'discovered' the concept of actually helping people they would have ignored yesterday to grow into the talent they need (and absorbing the marginal costs of that investment). An idea boldly entering the 1950s as an innovation. The revolving door hiring in SV has maxed out with virtually all the 'suitable' talent in play and still many openings unfilled despite plenty of reasonably capable but sub-superstar talent pushed to the margins. The lid has been maintained on salaries mostly by agreements between the usual suspects, not market forces. The fact is that many perfectly good developers will be ignored by SV at any price and that's now biting the companies hard.

pinaceae 9y ago

We can't even get enough qualified resumes. Pay doesn't even come into play. And my associate engineers make more dough than my parents ever did. You should try hiring once, before dropping such simplistic statements. The upcoming H1B squeeze won't help. White CS grads do. not. want. to work in boring tech such as QA, etc. Remove Eastern Europeans and Asians and we're back to outsourcing whole departments to their home countries. That's reality. The US is utterly failing in creating enough homegrown talent, university education is far too expensive, everything below is useless as there is no good education available below. Just a little bit more and some other country/region will take that whole business, that's how the economy works. Unlimited salaries never happens.

vonmoltke 9y ago
> We can't even get enough qualified resumes. What do you define as "qualified"? We're swimming in qualified resumes. I'd say about 50% of the 200 or so applications we have received in the past few months are passed on to a phone screen. A disturbing number fail there, but the pipeline isn't the problem.
- lj3 9y ago
  > A disturbing number fail there That's the problem. :) This has been beaten to death, but I'll say it again: the interview process of most companies are designed to weed out all but the top 1% of applicants nation wide. If you're not paying as much as Amazon and Google are, but you're recruiting and interviewing exclusively from the same candidate pool, then you're going to have a bad time finding 'qualified' candidates.
wai1234 9y ago
"We can't even get enough qualified resumes." Says who? It might be you are bad at promoting your openings or you have a bad reputation on Glassdoor. It also might be that you use the word 'qualified' without knowing what it means. If you expect someone else to have done all the training for you so you just buy the finished product, you're the problem. Do you look at universities as the produce aisle or the bakery?
9y ago

jlewis7272 9y ago

Bingo! This falsehood needs to be quashed. There are too many stories of companies using this as an excuse to rid themselves of having to pay for the pensions of their current workforce. Just look at say Disney bringing in foreign workers under the h1b visa program (meaning they can't find qualified devs) and then turn around and have the existing dev employees train them before being let go, as an example.