7 ms·

The "tech shortage" is a real myth. The ultimate problem is that people want "unicorns for peanuts" and no one (including Shelly Palmer) wants to take the risk

The "tech shortage" is a real myth. The ultimate problem is that people want "unicorns for peanuts" and no one (including Shelly Palmer) wants to take the risk of hiring and developing potential talent. If all you can accept is demonstrated talent, you should be ready to outbid other companies who are looking for demonstrated talent. And if $500K isn't cutting it, that could mean you aren't offering enough (it could also mean your company is in a field that can't really attract top talent, but that's not the case here)

ferentchak 9y ago
Off topic: I just started using your open source library and it is helping me out a ton. Thanks!
xux 9y ago
> The "tech shortage" is a real myth Except that's wrong. As much as you may dislike the tech industry, you can't contradict the data that shows there are more job openings than developers in the Bay Area
- jdc0589 9y ago
  The Bay Area is a good indicator for some things, but I'm not so sure it is here. More and more people don't want to live in the Bay area due to the insane cost of living.
- fictioncircle 9y ago
  And yet every job I've applied to tells me I'm asking for too much money if I ask for my current salary + 10%.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- maxsilver 9y ago
  A lot of job postings are fake (position doesn't exist, position is exclusively for an internal hire only, job posting just for marketing purposes, job intentionally way underpays to justify hire a H1B, etc) If you simply count job openings, you'll overestimate actual available work by a really large margin.
  - Top19 9y ago
    This is true. For some reason at my company, if you want to do an internal transfer, for the transfer to go through, manager has to post it to job board, and then you apply like a regular person, and then it goes through. This takes a few days, while it sits out there on the internet, luring everyone in pointlessly. Also...someone applied to a product manager position at my girlfriend's job. They were well qualified. A week later they get an email saying "hey you aren't being considered as we're going to focus on other candidates but we'll keep your resume on file." Turns out...they had cancelled the position about three weeks before, basically forgot to take it down, and then sent out the same standard rejection letter to everybody. And I should mention this company is one of the larger Internet job boards, so even more ironic. Also I get how not following up or "ghosting" maybe happens in dating, but there needs to be a higher standard in recruiting. With all the waiting and guessing, we're causing a lot of friction in the economy. Indeed Prime has this thing where if you don't explicitly respond to a message within 72 hours I think, they suspend your account for a week. Stuff like that could help out.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Those job openings want senior devs at junior salaries. There are enough jobs out there that senior devs can laugh those off. That's not a tech shortage - that's a sanity shortage on behalf of the startups (often new MBA grads with no experience who think their Hot Idea funded by their VC friend deserves devs taking pay-cuts for their lottery ticket options. News flash: senior devs have played the game too long to be bilked for suckers like that)
- MrLeap 9y ago
  I'd love to serve some bay area companies, but I'd really prefer to not live there. None of the companies I've spoken to so far have any interest in remote help. One west coast company has interviewed me. The company recruiter sent me like 14 "how to prep for tech screens" links and recommended I check them out days before the actual tech screen. I'm on a job right now so I don't have time to be doing that sort of thing so I didn't prep. It made me expect I was going to have to implement a BSP decompiler with a hand tied behind my back. The guy who called me allotted 50 minutes to solve 1 problem "two if I finished the first early" on collabedit. I finished both in 6 minutes. I'm a good, experienced developer but I'm no genius. Their tech screen was so ludicrously easy it made me wonder what the current standard is for developers. After I finished the guy said "huh I normally don't have to end these early. Great I guess." I pressed him a little and he went on to say his questions had done a great job invalidating candidates. Most people couldn't do it. It's pretty beguiling since my midwest salary demands would be peanuts compared to my west coast equivalent. There'd have to be >60% remote-related productivity penalty for it not to be a no brainer to hire people like me. The last few years has taught me that job seekers and dev seekers both have a hard time connecting.
  - adviceadam 9y ago
    Were these fizz-buzz level questions or were they more difficult?
    - MrLeap 9y ago
      A little tougher than fizz-buzz. I'd hope that people who take 6 minutes on fizz-buzz aren't calling themselves good and experienced. Am I taking crazy pills? Here's basically what they asked me to do: #1) Write a function that accepts one parameter. An array of numbers. Convert those numbers to pseudo-binary strings. Instead of "0" use "Y" and instead of "1" use "X" #2) Do the reverse, Write a function that accepts an array of pseudo binary and convert it to an array of numbers.
      - fictioncircle 9y ago
        > Their tech screen was so ludicrously easy it made me wonder what the current standard is for developers. Just fyi, its probably because many developers don't touch binary. I work with numbers all day but they are currency transactions and accounting data. I haven't cared about transforming something to/from binary in 10+ years and couldn't do it without googling. However, the number of devs (and accountants) who can't figure out a 4-4-5 calendar reliably is quite impressive.
- thesmallestcat 9y ago
  Or, smart developers have figured out that 130k is not good pay in the bay or NYC. But this is the median for non-BigCorp senior positions in those metro areas. It's laughable.
- JamesBarney 9y ago
  I could post 10,000 job openings tomorrow to indeed.com for lawyers @ a very reasonable price, but this wouldn't prove there is a lawyer shortage. A much more accurate measure of supply and demand is salaries. And runaway salary inflation has not happened. If you need a developer you can simply pay them more. This site is filled with developers willing to leave their job for a large pay bump. And if you're not willing to pay them more, it's not a shortage, it's just a wish for cheaper labor.
- hajile 9y ago
  All the evidence (especially salary) shows that there isn't a national dev shortage, but there must be one because the Bay area has problems finding devs. According to cost of living calculators, I would have to make almost a half of a million every year living/working in the bay area to keep my current standard of living. Are they going to offer me that salary to relocate? I don't think so (and most don't want me to work for them remotely either). The blame is on the founders who choose overpriced locations and either cannot or will not pay correspondingly high wages.
- geebee 9y ago
  I hear this comment every now and then. Because so many people say this, I really do mean this as a sincere question and opening to a discussion: have you considered the concept of supply and demand curves? At a low price, the market will demand a lot of a good or service, but there's less incentive to supply. At a high price, the market will demand less of a good or service, but there will be more incentive to supply. Let's apply this to developers. At minimum wage, there would be a lot of demand for developers. However, there wouldn't be much incentive to become a developer. As a result, there would be far more job openings than people interested in working the job. At 500k a year, fewer people would want the services of developers, because they'd only be needed for very high value projects. However, lots of people would be lining up to take the job. Economic theory tells us that supply and demand will meet at an equilibrium. So if there are far more job openings than developers, that suggests that the curves are not yet in equilibrium. As salaries for developers rise, demand will fall, until they are in balance. Markets aren't perfect, and the real world is messy. But supply and demand are still in effect, and your comment suggests that you haven't even considered this. Saying that is a shortage of developers at 100k a year makes as much sense as saying there's high unemployment among developers who will only work for 500k a year. Except that even that rarely happens. People who talk of a shortage of developers, amazingly enough, most often don't even mention salary. It's as if they have no concept of how salary affects both supply and demand. Now, in this particular iteration, we do have a number, $500,000 a year. However, many of us on this forum are calling malarkey. Show us some numbers that you're actually offering and paying this salary and we'll talk. Otherwise, many of us suspect this is all bluster.
jondubois 9y ago
The 10x software developer is a myth. There are 10x ReactJS developers, 10x Angular2 developers, 10x MongoDB developers, 10x Tensor flow developers, etc... But there is no such thing as a general-purpose 10x developer. I guarantee you that a 10x heart surgeon won't do as good a job fixing your teeth as a 1x dentist. The reason why so called 10x developers don't get paid 10x is because business owners and founders who actually have that kind of money are too smart to believe it.
- nerdy 9y ago
  Learning a language, library, or framework isn't prohibitively difficult for an experienced developer. The problem with developer inexperience is more related to understanding broad concepts and pragmatically applying techniques while managing risk (including debt) and understanding business rules.
  - JamesBarney 9y ago
    Learning a language/framework to the point where you can be productive doesn't take very long. Learning a language/framework to the point there you are maximally productive is a much larger and more costly commitment.
- fav_collector 9y ago
  > 10x ReactJS developers, 10x Angular2 developers, Are there really? I don't see many language/framework experts having 10x impact. Maybe Herb Sutter and Bjarne Stroustrup.
  - jondubois 9y ago
    If you understand your tools really well, you will be a 10x because you will know what patterns to use and which ones to avoid. For example, I've written an open source project related to real-time web systems and so I can build chat systems 10x faster and probably 10x better than a typical senior developer but ask me to program a drone and I will be 1/10th as fast as someone who is an expert in that field and I probably won't be as good. After you become a senior software engineer and have honed your skills in critical thinking and problem solving, all that is left to differentiate yourself are your specializations. There are lots of generic senior level developers but very few in any given niche.
hackermailman 9y ago
Wallstreet/Fin-tech managed to figure this out. They don't look for unicorns they look for developers who can implement a specification and are willing to learn, then sit them beside finance domain experts and mathematicians. Here's a typical HFT entry level job posted by a recruiter note the emphasis on how they are willing to teach and knowledge in any specific language is not necessary http://www.biviumgroup.com/search_job_details.php?job_id=707&url=%2Fsearch.php%3Fnavi%3Dsearch.php%253Fcategory_id%253D-1%26job_search_text%3Dtrading%26search_jobs%3Dtrue%26search_jobs%3DSearch%2BJobs http://www.biviumgroup.com/search_job_details.php?job_id=707...
iaw 9y ago
> The "tech shortage" is a real myth. Could you provide data or at least anecdotal evidence to back this statement?

ferentchak 9y ago

Off topic: I just started using your open source library and it is helping me out a ton. Thanks!

xux 9y ago

> The "tech shortage" is a real myth Except that's wrong. As much as you may dislike the tech industry, you can't contradict the data that shows there are more job openings than developers in the Bay Area

jdc0589 9y ago
The Bay Area is a good indicator for some things, but I'm not so sure it is here. More and more people don't want to live in the Bay area due to the insane cost of living.
fictioncircle 9y ago
And yet every job I've applied to tells me I'm asking for too much money if I ask for my current salary + 10%.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
maxsilver 9y ago
A lot of job postings are fake (position doesn't exist, position is exclusively for an internal hire only, job posting just for marketing purposes, job intentionally way underpays to justify hire a H1B, etc) If you simply count job openings, you'll overestimate actual available work by a really large margin.
- Top19 9y ago
  This is true. For some reason at my company, if you want to do an internal transfer, for the transfer to go through, manager has to post it to job board, and then you apply like a regular person, and then it goes through. This takes a few days, while it sits out there on the internet, luring everyone in pointlessly. Also...someone applied to a product manager position at my girlfriend's job. They were well qualified. A week later they get an email saying "hey you aren't being considered as we're going to focus on other candidates but we'll keep your resume on file." Turns out...they had cancelled the position about three weeks before, basically forgot to take it down, and then sent out the same standard rejection letter to everybody. And I should mention this company is one of the larger Internet job boards, so even more ironic. Also I get how not following up or "ghosting" maybe happens in dating, but there needs to be a higher standard in recruiting. With all the waiting and guessing, we're causing a lot of friction in the economy. Indeed Prime has this thing where if you don't explicitly respond to a message within 72 hours I think, they suspend your account for a week. Stuff like that could help out.
abritinthebay 9y ago
Those job openings want senior devs at junior salaries. There are enough jobs out there that senior devs can laugh those off. That's not a tech shortage - that's a sanity shortage on behalf of the startups (often new MBA grads with no experience who think their Hot Idea funded by their VC friend deserves devs taking pay-cuts for their lottery ticket options. News flash: senior devs have played the game too long to be bilked for suckers like that)
MrLeap 9y ago
I'd love to serve some bay area companies, but I'd really prefer to not live there. None of the companies I've spoken to so far have any interest in remote help. One west coast company has interviewed me. The company recruiter sent me like 14 "how to prep for tech screens" links and recommended I check them out days before the actual tech screen. I'm on a job right now so I don't have time to be doing that sort of thing so I didn't prep. It made me expect I was going to have to implement a BSP decompiler with a hand tied behind my back. The guy who called me allotted 50 minutes to solve 1 problem "two if I finished the first early" on collabedit. I finished both in 6 minutes. I'm a good, experienced developer but I'm no genius. Their tech screen was so ludicrously easy it made me wonder what the current standard is for developers. After I finished the guy said "huh I normally don't have to end these early. Great I guess." I pressed him a little and he went on to say his questions had done a great job invalidating candidates. Most people couldn't do it. It's pretty beguiling since my midwest salary demands would be peanuts compared to my west coast equivalent. There'd have to be >60% remote-related productivity penalty for it not to be a no brainer to hire people like me. The last few years has taught me that job seekers and dev seekers both have a hard time connecting.
- adviceadam 9y ago
  Were these fizz-buzz level questions or were they more difficult?
  - MrLeap 9y ago
    A little tougher than fizz-buzz. I'd hope that people who take 6 minutes on fizz-buzz aren't calling themselves good and experienced. Am I taking crazy pills? Here's basically what they asked me to do: #1) Write a function that accepts one parameter. An array of numbers. Convert those numbers to pseudo-binary strings. Instead of "0" use "Y" and instead of "1" use "X" #2) Do the reverse, Write a function that accepts an array of pseudo binary and convert it to an array of numbers.
    - fictioncircle 9y ago
      > Their tech screen was so ludicrously easy it made me wonder what the current standard is for developers. Just fyi, its probably because many developers don't touch binary. I work with numbers all day but they are currency transactions and accounting data. I haven't cared about transforming something to/from binary in 10+ years and couldn't do it without googling. However, the number of devs (and accountants) who can't figure out a 4-4-5 calendar reliably is quite impressive.
thesmallestcat 9y ago
Or, smart developers have figured out that 130k is not good pay in the bay or NYC. But this is the median for non-BigCorp senior positions in those metro areas. It's laughable.
JamesBarney 9y ago
I could post 10,000 job openings tomorrow to indeed.com for lawyers @ a very reasonable price, but this wouldn't prove there is a lawyer shortage. A much more accurate measure of supply and demand is salaries. And runaway salary inflation has not happened. If you need a developer you can simply pay them more. This site is filled with developers willing to leave their job for a large pay bump. And if you're not willing to pay them more, it's not a shortage, it's just a wish for cheaper labor.
hajile 9y ago
All the evidence (especially salary) shows that there isn't a national dev shortage, but there must be one because the Bay area has problems finding devs. According to cost of living calculators, I would have to make almost a half of a million every year living/working in the bay area to keep my current standard of living. Are they going to offer me that salary to relocate? I don't think so (and most don't want me to work for them remotely either). The blame is on the founders who choose overpriced locations and either cannot or will not pay correspondingly high wages.
geebee 9y ago
I hear this comment every now and then. Because so many people say this, I really do mean this as a sincere question and opening to a discussion: have you considered the concept of supply and demand curves? At a low price, the market will demand a lot of a good or service, but there's less incentive to supply. At a high price, the market will demand less of a good or service, but there will be more incentive to supply. Let's apply this to developers. At minimum wage, there would be a lot of demand for developers. However, there wouldn't be much incentive to become a developer. As a result, there would be far more job openings than people interested in working the job. At 500k a year, fewer people would want the services of developers, because they'd only be needed for very high value projects. However, lots of people would be lining up to take the job. Economic theory tells us that supply and demand will meet at an equilibrium. So if there are far more job openings than developers, that suggests that the curves are not yet in equilibrium. As salaries for developers rise, demand will fall, until they are in balance. Markets aren't perfect, and the real world is messy. But supply and demand are still in effect, and your comment suggests that you haven't even considered this. Saying that is a shortage of developers at 100k a year makes as much sense as saying there's high unemployment among developers who will only work for 500k a year. Except that even that rarely happens. People who talk of a shortage of developers, amazingly enough, most often don't even mention salary. It's as if they have no concept of how salary affects both supply and demand. Now, in this particular iteration, we do have a number, $500,000 a year. However, many of us on this forum are calling malarkey. Show us some numbers that you're actually offering and paying this salary and we'll talk. Otherwise, many of us suspect this is all bluster.

jondubois 9y ago

The 10x software developer is a myth. There are 10x ReactJS developers, 10x Angular2 developers, 10x MongoDB developers, 10x Tensor flow developers, etc... But there is no such thing as a general-purpose 10x developer. I guarantee you that a 10x heart surgeon won't do as good a job fixing your teeth as a 1x dentist. The reason why so called 10x developers don't get paid 10x is because business owners and founders who actually have that kind of money are too smart to believe it.

nerdy 9y ago
Learning a language, library, or framework isn't prohibitively difficult for an experienced developer. The problem with developer inexperience is more related to understanding broad concepts and pragmatically applying techniques while managing risk (including debt) and understanding business rules.
- JamesBarney 9y ago
  Learning a language/framework to the point where you can be productive doesn't take very long. Learning a language/framework to the point there you are maximally productive is a much larger and more costly commitment.
fav_collector 9y ago
> 10x ReactJS developers, 10x Angular2 developers, Are there really? I don't see many language/framework experts having 10x impact. Maybe Herb Sutter and Bjarne Stroustrup.
- jondubois 9y ago
  If you understand your tools really well, you will be a 10x because you will know what patterns to use and which ones to avoid. For example, I've written an open source project related to real-time web systems and so I can build chat systems 10x faster and probably 10x better than a typical senior developer but ask me to program a drone and I will be 1/10th as fast as someone who is an expert in that field and I probably won't be as good. After you become a senior software engineer and have honed your skills in critical thinking and problem solving, all that is left to differentiate yourself are your specializations. There are lots of generic senior level developers but very few in any given niche.

hackermailman 9y ago

Wallstreet/Fin-tech managed to figure this out. They don't look for unicorns they look for developers who can implement a specification and are willing to learn, then sit them beside finance domain experts and mathematicians. Here's a typical HFT entry level job posted by a recruiter note the emphasis on how they are willing to teach and knowledge in any specific language is not necessary http://www.biviumgroup.com/search_job_details.php?job_id=707&url=%2Fsearch.php%3Fnavi%3Dsearch.php%253Fcategory_id%253D-1%26job_search_text%3Dtrading%26search_jobs%3Dtrue%26search_jobs%3DSearch%2BJobs http://www.biviumgroup.com/search_job_details.php?job_id=707...

iaw 9y ago

> The "tech shortage" is a real myth. Could you provide data or at least anecdotal evidence to back this statement?