7 ms·

An explanation to the global talent shortage

35 points by CalderWhite 7y ago

ordu 7y ago
I cannot agree, that the troubles with a talent caused by some inherent complexity of tech. I got a bachelor degree in psychology, and generally I think that psychology is a much more complex topic than tech. In tech if you do not understand something, you could read a book explaining things. In a psychology mostly you even do not know what you are not understand, because there is a layman's understanding of human mind that you have been learning for decades, and it needs a lot of effort to separate scientific knowledge from intiutive. The most problem with tech is fast change rate. It leads to a troubles with devising good ways to teach. You know, if we look at any teaching process, we'll see that people teach other people by the way they'd learnt themselves. It comes naturally to any people, and therefore we could read that BASIC is the best language for novices: because those who recommend BASIC learn how to code with BASIC. Normally this process of creating curriculum works, generation of professors after generation distill teaching methods. But it does not works with modern tech. If we tried to keep in the curriculum all the stuff we learnt in a college and than add some more, than in a mere 20 years we might come to a situation when students needs 10 more years to get a degree. So we need to throw things out, and no one really know how important rejected bits of knowledge. Because knowledge is not a state of mind, it is not a bunch of bits, it is a process evolving through education and experience. So to replicate knowledge of a person we need to replicate process from the birth. First years of human life backed up by thousands years of parental experience, and they generally work. But the book about Rust was written a several years ago. Than it was rewritten. Maybe a decade more and it come to a state when ownership and borrowing is not difficult at all. There is nothing inherently complex in ownership and borrowing, it just our past experience gets in a way of understanding them. All we need is to create RASIC -- a rust version of BASIC, -- and teach kids to program in RASIC with an intent to introduce them Rust later. Then the next generation would be unable to understand our troubles with ownership and borrowing, they would think that C rules are dumb and they need a specially wicked creative mind to invent them. They would see C rules as we see Brainfuck: someone did his best to invent a language to make things difficult.
- CalderWhite 7y ago
  I agree with you in that the challenge is partially caused by the rapidly changing environment. However, I also believe the combination of the changing environment and the style which technology is taught creates the problem. It is taught in a more specific manner that promotes getting things to "just work". Or at least, that is what a young student might strive for. I am also not trying to compare the "complexity" of the subject to others. I am simply saying that technology is extremely interconnected. All the topics relate to one another. So, when getting something to "just work" without understanding multiple times, this compounds on itself to create a real challenge in the long run.
  - pixl97 7y ago
    The big problem with 'just work', is that is all that seems to be necessary for a viable product in many markets. You could spend a lot of time and effort getting it right, but in few situations is there adequate competition for that to significantly change the profitability of the end product. Even full blown data theft and remote command injection rarely cause the economic impact that demand market change.
  - ordu 7y ago
    I agree, that there is a feedback loop between education and practice. But I meant that any attempt to change something needs to start from the root cause: the rapid pace of tech progress. This pace is a good thing, but it comes with a cost. > I am simply saying that technology is extremely interconnected. All the topics relate to one another. I believe that it is an artifact of our cognition: our understanding of tech is not crystallized enough. To draw borders between topics one needs a lot of time to think and to experiment. It is like developing software by splitting it into separate libraries: you need a lot of time to think to do it perfectly. But in a 10-20 years your separation of a problem domain will stop being perfect because the problem changed.
- Retric 7y ago
  Tech is more than just learning a specific system. It’s like the difference between a musician learning a new instrument and someone starting from scratch learning the same instrument. The specifics of any one system are important, but rote memorization is only useful when you already have a lot of other skills.
tw1010 7y ago
Or, you know, there's no shortage and it's just a narrative ploy from corporations in order to decrease wages.
- boldslogan 7y ago
  A shortage of something increases the price... a corporation ploy to create a fake shortage to increase price, decreases price?
  - toyg 7y ago
    Parent's point is that the message is propaganda aimed at fostering measures that will result in increased availability, hence reducing price.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    The fake shortage is an illusion, but it results in a real increase in supply, which decreases price.
    - cunac 7y ago
      and how that did work so far? All I can see wages are going upward for a years
      - elindbe2 7y ago
        Wages should always be going up at least with inflation and tech has been enormously successful in the past few decades so tech workers should be outpacing inflation. That said, it could quite possibly be even better for tech workers if, for example, the H1B system wasn't abused to bring in cheap overseas labor.
      - deogeo 7y ago
        If the shortage was so bad, companies wouldn't be so picky when it comes to older workers: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/09/ibm_age_iayoffs/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/09/ibm_age_iayoffs/
OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago
what the fuck
MarcScott 7y ago
I don't think that tech is any more complicated than other fields/subjects. Every subject has levels of abstraction, and as you advance the layers are gently stripped away. When I started in this field, I began by learning to use some apps, then progressed to learning a single programming language, then another, then about assembly and binary, then about logic gates and then about transistors. The reason for a talent shortage in tech has more to do with children's education than anything else. I remember giving a talk in front of about 600 developers and asking them, "How many of you chose this field because you were inspired by a teacher at your school?". I'd say about three hands went up. I think if I had been talking at a literature conference, a medical conference or an archaeological conference, there would have been far more hands raised in the air. The majority of successful developers that I know are self-taught. Even those with CS or SE degrees acknowledge that the skills that got them hired were self-taught. There could be thousands of potentially amazing developers out there that will never know their potential because they either never experienced being taught CS at school, or it was taught badly. Early years education is important. We should be introducing the subject as early as we introduce English, Math, Science, History, etc. We've all done history projects on the Romans, or Geography projects on volcanoes, when we were six or seven, why not do projects on Turing machines at the same age? Kids should be programming (Scratch) as soon as they can use a mouse and a keyboard. Unfortunately we have a vicious circle. While there is a tech shortage, we'll have a shortage of tech competent teachers. You're simply not going to get the best of the best, entering the world of education, when there are more lucrative jobs in industry. If we really want to solve the shortage of talent, CS teachers need to be paid an industry competitive salary, and then we need to wait twenty years for the products of their teaching to enter the market place
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago
  > There could be thousands of potentially amazing developers out there that will never know their potential because they either never experienced being taught CS at school, or it was taught badly. In my eyes, the same way it found all of the self-taught developers is the same way it "could have found" the group of potentially unbeknownst developers you are talking about. I'd guess the natural desire to understand how things work (taking apart electronic toys as a child) lead a lot of developers to developing. I find it hard to believe deep down there are generally curious tinkerers who haven't found their way to a programming language of some sort?
dcre 7y ago
To the extent what you describe about depth and breadth is true, it’s true of all knowledge and all subjects. I highly recommend Nathan Ensmenger’s The Computer Boys Take Over for a look at the history of the so-called “skill gap” (which is mostly bullshit) since the 1960s. It has a little to do with the nature of the subject matter, but it has a lot more to do with historical contingencies and internal dynamics at schools and companies. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262517965/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_u1YmDbZVX26FD https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262517965/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_...
schalab 7y ago
Maybe its not an education problem. Maybe the idea that everyone can be an engineer/coder is just as ridiculous as everyone can be a musician.
- madhadron 7y ago
  > as ridiculous as everyone can be a musician. Why is this ridiculous?
  - krisrm 7y ago
    If you don't have any friends that would make the answer to that question apparent, I can introduce you to a few of mine ;)
    - madhadron 7y ago
      If you live in a culture where musical ability isn't ubiquitous, such as the western world decades after the invention of recorded music, this may seem obvious, but it's not. The 20th century saw a precipitous decline in musical ability in the general population of the western world. Being a musician isn't an issue of talent but of training. Very, very few people lack the ability to play music. Most people who claim they can't carry a tune are simply missing a few foundational skills such as pitch matching.
      - DangitBobby 7y ago
        It's not at the lowest levels of musical ability that not everyone has what it takes to be an excellent musician. It's at the highest. It doesn't just take being trained in the basics followed bypractice time; it takes very effective practice time which has a huge compounding effect. And you as an individual have to able to find out what that means for you. Not everyone can.
        RealityVoid 7y ago
        That is a truism for most fields. On the highest echelons of talent you have people with genetic predisposition. But OP was not suggesting that everyone can be a world-class musician, just that the vast majority of people can be musicians. Of course, by definition, only 1% of people can be in the top 1% of something.
sleepysysadmin 7y ago
I have interviewed many people just out of school. They never gained anything from school. They aren't any better equipped for the job than anyone else. Frankly, I know what the textbooks have in them; it's not like the content was missing. Do we blame the teachers or do we blame the students? It really doesn't matter. How about another reason why people quit IT? https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptions-or-special-rules/government-employees-and-professionals#section-3 https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio... In Ontario, Canada if you work in IT, you dont get breaks, lunches, overtime, weekends, you can work until 2am in the morning and then be expected to be at work at 7am. The MSPs in Ontario pretty much all do this. Don't like it? Quit or be fired.

35 points by CalderWhite 7y ago

ordu 7y ago

I cannot agree, that the troubles with a talent caused by some inherent complexity of tech. I got a bachelor degree in psychology, and generally I think that psychology is a much more complex topic than tech. In tech if you do not understand something, you could read a book explaining things. In a psychology mostly you even do not know what you are not understand, because there is a layman's understanding of human mind that you have been learning for decades, and it needs a lot of effort to separate scientific knowledge from intiutive. The most problem with tech is fast change rate. It leads to a troubles with devising good ways to teach. You know, if we look at any teaching process, we'll see that people teach other people by the way they'd learnt themselves. It comes naturally to any people, and therefore we could read that BASIC is the best language for novices: because those who recommend BASIC learn how to code with BASIC. Normally this process of creating curriculum works, generation of professors after generation distill teaching methods. But it does not works with modern tech. If we tried to keep in the curriculum all the stuff we learnt in a college and than add some more, than in a mere 20 years we might come to a situation when students needs 10 more years to get a degree. So we need to throw things out, and no one really know how important rejected bits of knowledge. Because knowledge is not a state of mind, it is not a bunch of bits, it is a process evolving through education and experience. So to replicate knowledge of a person we need to replicate process from the birth. First years of human life backed up by thousands years of parental experience, and they generally work. But the book about Rust was written a several years ago. Than it was rewritten. Maybe a decade more and it come to a state when ownership and borrowing is not difficult at all. There is nothing inherently complex in ownership and borrowing, it just our past experience gets in a way of understanding them. All we need is to create RASIC -- a rust version of BASIC, -- and teach kids to program in RASIC with an intent to introduce them Rust later. Then the next generation would be unable to understand our troubles with ownership and borrowing, they would think that C rules are dumb and they need a specially wicked creative mind to invent them. They would see C rules as we see Brainfuck: someone did his best to invent a language to make things difficult.

CalderWhite 7y ago
I agree with you in that the challenge is partially caused by the rapidly changing environment. However, I also believe the combination of the changing environment and the style which technology is taught creates the problem. It is taught in a more specific manner that promotes getting things to "just work". Or at least, that is what a young student might strive for. I am also not trying to compare the "complexity" of the subject to others. I am simply saying that technology is extremely interconnected. All the topics relate to one another. So, when getting something to "just work" without understanding multiple times, this compounds on itself to create a real challenge in the long run.
- pixl97 7y ago
  The big problem with 'just work', is that is all that seems to be necessary for a viable product in many markets. You could spend a lot of time and effort getting it right, but in few situations is there adequate competition for that to significantly change the profitability of the end product. Even full blown data theft and remote command injection rarely cause the economic impact that demand market change.
- ordu 7y ago
  I agree, that there is a feedback loop between education and practice. But I meant that any attempt to change something needs to start from the root cause: the rapid pace of tech progress. This pace is a good thing, but it comes with a cost. > I am simply saying that technology is extremely interconnected. All the topics relate to one another. I believe that it is an artifact of our cognition: our understanding of tech is not crystallized enough. To draw borders between topics one needs a lot of time to think and to experiment. It is like developing software by splitting it into separate libraries: you need a lot of time to think to do it perfectly. But in a 10-20 years your separation of a problem domain will stop being perfect because the problem changed.
Retric 7y ago
Tech is more than just learning a specific system. It’s like the difference between a musician learning a new instrument and someone starting from scratch learning the same instrument. The specifics of any one system are important, but rote memorization is only useful when you already have a lot of other skills.

tw1010 7y ago

Or, you know, there's no shortage and it's just a narrative ploy from corporations in order to decrease wages.

boldslogan 7y ago
A shortage of something increases the price... a corporation ploy to create a fake shortage to increase price, decreases price?
- toyg 7y ago
  Parent's point is that the message is propaganda aimed at fostering measures that will result in increased availability, hence reducing price.
- deogeo 7y ago
  The fake shortage is an illusion, but it results in a real increase in supply, which decreases price.
  - cunac 7y ago
    and how that did work so far? All I can see wages are going upward for a years
    - elindbe2 7y ago
      Wages should always be going up at least with inflation and tech has been enormously successful in the past few decades so tech workers should be outpacing inflation. That said, it could quite possibly be even better for tech workers if, for example, the H1B system wasn't abused to bring in cheap overseas labor.
    - deogeo 7y ago
      If the shortage was so bad, companies wouldn't be so picky when it comes to older workers: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/09/ibm_age_iayoffs/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/09/ibm_age_iayoffs/

OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago

what the fuck

MarcScott 7y ago

I don't think that tech is any more complicated than other fields/subjects. Every subject has levels of abstraction, and as you advance the layers are gently stripped away. When I started in this field, I began by learning to use some apps, then progressed to learning a single programming language, then another, then about assembly and binary, then about logic gates and then about transistors. The reason for a talent shortage in tech has more to do with children's education than anything else. I remember giving a talk in front of about 600 developers and asking them, "How many of you chose this field because you were inspired by a teacher at your school?". I'd say about three hands went up. I think if I had been talking at a literature conference, a medical conference or an archaeological conference, there would have been far more hands raised in the air. The majority of successful developers that I know are self-taught. Even those with CS or SE degrees acknowledge that the skills that got them hired were self-taught. There could be thousands of potentially amazing developers out there that will never know their potential because they either never experienced being taught CS at school, or it was taught badly. Early years education is important. We should be introducing the subject as early as we introduce English, Math, Science, History, etc. We've all done history projects on the Romans, or Geography projects on volcanoes, when we were six or seven, why not do projects on Turing machines at the same age? Kids should be programming (Scratch) as soon as they can use a mouse and a keyboard. Unfortunately we have a vicious circle. While there is a tech shortage, we'll have a shortage of tech competent teachers. You're simply not going to get the best of the best, entering the world of education, when there are more lucrative jobs in industry. If we really want to solve the shortage of talent, CS teachers need to be paid an industry competitive salary, and then we need to wait twenty years for the products of their teaching to enter the market place

MuffinFlavored 7y ago
> There could be thousands of potentially amazing developers out there that will never know their potential because they either never experienced being taught CS at school, or it was taught badly. In my eyes, the same way it found all of the self-taught developers is the same way it "could have found" the group of potentially unbeknownst developers you are talking about. I'd guess the natural desire to understand how things work (taking apart electronic toys as a child) lead a lot of developers to developing. I find it hard to believe deep down there are generally curious tinkerers who haven't found their way to a programming language of some sort?

dcre 7y ago

To the extent what you describe about depth and breadth is true, it’s true of all knowledge and all subjects. I highly recommend Nathan Ensmenger’s The Computer Boys Take Over for a look at the history of the so-called “skill gap” (which is mostly bullshit) since the 1960s. It has a little to do with the nature of the subject matter, but it has a lot more to do with historical contingencies and internal dynamics at schools and companies. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262517965/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_u1YmDbZVX26FD https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262517965/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_...

schalab 7y ago

Maybe its not an education problem. Maybe the idea that everyone can be an engineer/coder is just as ridiculous as everyone can be a musician.

madhadron 7y ago
> as ridiculous as everyone can be a musician. Why is this ridiculous?
- krisrm 7y ago
  If you don't have any friends that would make the answer to that question apparent, I can introduce you to a few of mine ;)
  - madhadron 7y ago
    If you live in a culture where musical ability isn't ubiquitous, such as the western world decades after the invention of recorded music, this may seem obvious, but it's not. The 20th century saw a precipitous decline in musical ability in the general population of the western world. Being a musician isn't an issue of talent but of training. Very, very few people lack the ability to play music. Most people who claim they can't carry a tune are simply missing a few foundational skills such as pitch matching.
    - DangitBobby 7y ago
      It's not at the lowest levels of musical ability that not everyone has what it takes to be an excellent musician. It's at the highest. It doesn't just take being trained in the basics followed bypractice time; it takes very effective practice time which has a huge compounding effect. And you as an individual have to able to find out what that means for you. Not everyone can.
      - RealityVoid 7y ago
        That is a truism for most fields. On the highest echelons of talent you have people with genetic predisposition. But OP was not suggesting that everyone can be a world-class musician, just that the vast majority of people can be musicians. Of course, by definition, only 1% of people can be in the top 1% of something.

sleepysysadmin 7y ago

I have interviewed many people just out of school. They never gained anything from school. They aren't any better equipped for the job than anyone else. Frankly, I know what the textbooks have in them; it's not like the content was missing. Do we blame the teachers or do we blame the students? It really doesn't matter. How about another reason why people quit IT? https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptions-or-special-rules/government-employees-and-professionals#section-3 https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio... In Ontario, Canada if you work in IT, you dont get breaks, lunches, overtime, weekends, you can work until 2am in the morning and then be expected to be at work at 7am. The MSPs in Ontario pretty much all do this. Don't like it? Quit or be fired.