28 ms·

Tech Companies Want You to Believe America Has a Skills Gap

64 points by known 6y ago

known 6y ago
https://archive.vn/mFIF5 https://archive.vn/mFIF5
strikelaserclaw 6y ago
I've worked with H1 software engineers in the past, their skills ranged from highly capable to not very capable (same distribution i found among American software engineers), but one thing that stood out to me was how hard they worked for their average to below average wages due to the fact that they feared getting laid off and being sent back to their home countries. I knew a guy who was at the beck and call of our then manager almost 24/7, this definitely creates unhealthy expectations in the labor market in general.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- net2net2net 6y ago
  I can't stand the abuse of H1Bs. While I may have personal feelings on labor from immigration, these people are still people. In a similar flavor I never liked it when I worked at $BIGCO and people treated you differently if you were an employee v a contractor. It wasn't a privacy or trust-level thing - it was just social status stupidity.
  - h1bthrow 6y ago
    As a F-1 OPT holder who is starting at a job with $200k base and almost double that in TC, I hate the claim that H1B is abusive. Can you tell me how I am being abused by my employer, who has helped me through every step of the way? No, I don’t think H-1B is abusive, it’s an opportunity for hardworking people to prove themselves just as, or more capable than the locals. I don’t think you’re truly concerned about my wellbeing, I think you’d just rather have my job.
    - net2net2net 6y ago
      No offense intended, but the majority of work visa holders (H1B) are not in your scenario. I'm glad you are in a good situation (money wise). I have seen them work for market average pay, but tolerate extreme hours and expectations that non-H1Bs would obviously reject. The companies know what game they are playing in these scenarios - it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
    - wool_gather 6y ago
      You've misread something here. They didn't say it was inherently abusive, they said they hate seeing people abused because of it.
      - h1bthrow 6y ago
        I don’t think having to work hard is abusive. Investment bankers famously work 70, 80 hour weeks voluntarily. Why can’t software engineers work a bit more than 40 hours a week if they wanted to? The ‘low pay’ that people claim is well above market average in most of the world, and above the median US income. People are mostly happy to have the opportunity to work here. I think that complaints of abuse are thinly veiled xenophobia. You pretend to be helping us, but you just want to protect your own overly inflated salaries from market forces.
        ashayh 6y ago
        Wow :) You should save this comment and revisit it when you are 35ish. This attitude is exactly what companies want. It's Apple charging $1000 for a phone, and makes (say) $300 profit but you willingly hand over $1500 to them. Would you do that?
        h1bthrow 6y ago
        I've worked very hard to get to where I am, so working hard isn't difficult for me. I chose to work here because it provides the best life for me, not because anyone forced me to. Would you rather take this choice away from me?
- innagadadavida 6y ago
  Fixing the immigration is needed to address these issues, but so far it’s been impossible to pass anything meaningful in congress and different parties have their own pet agendas.
- president 6y ago
  > due to the fact that they feared getting laid off and being sent back to their home countries > this definitely creates unhealthy expectations in the labor market in general. I have always assumed this was the goal; a way to skirt labor laws/protections and overtime normalize overworking and manager worship because American workers are "lazy".
- CM30 6y ago
  > but one thing that stood out to me was how hard they worked for their average to below average wages due to the fact that they feared getting laid off and being sent back to their home countries. Part of me wonders whether this is also because of their expectations for a reasonable salary/conditions. If you come from a country where wages are much lower than in the US, even a terrible wage from a tech company must seem like an amazing one. This then makes the comparison even more stacked towards the H1 worker. Of course they'll 'work harder' for that wage, it seems like a decent one for them and (as mentioned), there's a risk of being sent back. Meanwhile any US based employee you can get for similar money will probably be far below average in terms of skills/mindset, since no one with any real expertise will work for these wages.
- noskllzgap88 6y ago
  That’s the real “skills gap” tech companies mean. Americans are too aware of the game. Most office job coding work these days is filling out templated layers of indirection via frameworks and APIs. Google doesn’t have an information advantage. It has a capital advantage. It’s the same old math belying all those algorithms. They’re trying to sell the idea they possess an information advantage over less developed nations as Americans/westerners don’t buy their story anymore. They’re bored and gonna charge more to fill in the new templates of indirection.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  If I want to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup or A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop my only path forward is H1. They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?
giorgioz 6y ago
I'm a software engineer from Italy and went to work for Intel with an H1B visa back in 2012. The process of getting a H1B visa used to be quite complicated and long even before Trump started dismantle it piece by piece. My salary was perfectly in the range of salaries from other US workers with comparable education and skills. I know that because I had plenty of opportunities and offers to switch company. FAANGS strongly compete for software engineer talent and if one of them (ex company X) would start offering lower salaries the others would likely poach as many employees as they can from company X. I do suspect though that outside of competitive technology driven companies like FAANGS there is plenty of companies that indeed don't care much about technology and innovation and just want to cut the budget. This is especially true for consulting. The USA will loose its edge with the loss of the influx of young talented skilled professionals.
goatinaboat 6y ago
The US and UK both produce more STEM graduates than there are jobs for at all levels, whether BSc or PhD. Computing hoovers many of them up, but not all.
carlosdp 6y ago
Anyone who's interviewed software engineers for a tech company knows there's a skills gap, and it's very real
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Having been on both ends it's also very true that there's a difference between "skills needed to pass interview" and "skills needed to do the job." The gap in the former is arbitrary depending on how pedantically silly the interview is made and it does not necessarily correlate to an equal gap in the latter.
  - Kalium 6y ago
    Very true. That said, sometimes they're basic skills. In one job a few back, I did a lot of resume-reading and phone screening. I used basic questions. A solid 50% of screenees failed FizzBuzz. Now, it's absolutely possible that many of these were just nerves. Not everyone handled interview tension well! But it strains credulity for me to accept that being nervous makes half of software engineers forget how to do a loop, conditional, and modulo.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      As a note, that doesn't mean 50% of engineers lack the skill. Those lacking skills will interview the most so for any position the distribution will be biased towards them. For example, if 10% of people on the market lack skills but they interview at 9 times as many places (failing at each) then each company will see 50% of applicants lacking skills.
      - Kalium 6y ago
        Also true! That said, it continues to strain credulity that 50% of interviewees for engineering jobs suffer from forgetting the most fundamental of tools in the face of an interview. So I am led inescapably to the conclusion that there are indeed many people out there who only have skills on paper.
supernova87a 6y ago
Well, whenever someone complains that there's not enough supply of something, what that usually actually means is that there's not enough supply for the price they're willing to pay. (Unless the elasticity of supply has hit some real limits.) News reporters seem not to be very good about following up on that detail, and the person will usually not volunteer or wish to draw attention to the $ they want to pay. Because they want cheap labor. Now, the price at which you believe the market should be allowed to settle at before resorting to foreign talent/immigration is for companies to weigh in on, and Congress / policy makers to decide. But maybe that process is broken at the moment, so we resort to simplistic 1 line summaries to get what party <x> wants. And aside from any of that, educating more people in what we want supply of is a good choice, any time.
- maerF0x0 6y ago
  Additionally, if the talent pool exists in another locale, then farming the work abroad is always an option. But companies want their cake and to eat it too. Lower like foreign prices AND on prem for supervision + time synchronization
president 6y ago
In a previous company (large fortune 500 tech co) where all our QA engineers were doing manual GUI testing, the overwhelming number of them were H1-B visa holders. I always wondered why we needed to bring in "skilled foreign labor" when any kid with a high-school diploma could essentially do the job.
- Gunax 6y ago
  Because the job requires a master's degree. Or alternatively, why hire a local when you can get someone with a master's degree for the same price?
  - rafiki6 6y ago
    Because you can hire someone without a masters degree for much less, and they have the skills to do the job. By putting over qualified people in roles that don't use their skills, you have done no one any favors.
qppo 6y ago
Anecdotally I believe tech companies, because the numbers and proportions listed by the article do not line up with job applications that I've seen. Imo there are a lot of overlapping problems, but none of them are a conspiracy alluded to by the title. A big one is that companies are bad at segmenting work between engineers and technicians (or whatever term you want to apply there) and if they don't make the distinction they'll have the same hiring requirements, or worse - treat the segmentation as a division of seniority and not skill set. I'd like to see us start investing more in associates degrees for CS and value the graduates like we do other tradesmen.
Gunax 6y ago
I've done my share of interviews, and I don't believe there is one. Yes, 80% of the recent grads we interview are unhirable. By unhirable I mean can't answer things like: -how to reverse a string -how to remove an element from a linked list -time complexity of hashsets vs linear searching. But we do have applicants who do those things (the other 20%). And we have plenty of them. So many that we end up filtering many out for other reasons. These prestigious companies try to put out an aura that they only hire the top 1%, but then claim there's a skill gap... Seems contradictory to me. Google has a culture that reportedly claims that they would rather not hire 10 good candidates than hire 1 bad one... So how can you claim there is a skill gap when you're rejecting so many qualified people who almost passed your test?
- avgDev 6y ago
  I am a full-stack dev, I write enterprise applications. Using SQL, DB2, .Net MVC5/Core. Reversing a string is trivial but honestly I have not used linked list in a while, and I probably would have a hard time answering that question. I can do the job, I can quickly debug and find errors. This is what sucks about software, you can have many years of experience and fail a question about a linked list, if you have not utilized it in a while. I solve business problems, read documentation that is my age to work with legacy systems, etc. I keep up to date with the web dev area I'm working in but this is much different than college data structure and algo knowledge.
  - amf12 6y ago
    > I have not used linked list in a while, I think the point of these questions for entry level devs is that they should be able to figure out how to remove an element from a linked list even if they have never used one. It's pretty trivial if you think about it and have some basic understanding of objects and references. Also these types of questions are not usually asked for experienced devs.
  - salamander014 6y ago
    The solution to removing an element from a linked list is so simple I Googled it because I thought I was missing something. Anyone who cannot remove an element from a linked list simply does not understand what a linked list is. And that's OK, but in order for companies to make progress, they use questions like these to make sure they are hiring people that are knowledgeable and capable of solving certain kinds of problems. The other thing is, people that can answer these simpler kinds of programming problems correct are more likely to write clean code, make better decisions, and be an asset to a team. It is just an easy way to weed out bad candidates. That doesn't mean all candidates who can't answer the question are bad, but likely that all bad candidates cannot answer the question; there's a big distinction there. Unfortunately a lot of people with good experience get left behind. But the other problem is just because somebody has good experience doesn't mean they are the right fit for the position. And that's just life.
zadkey 6y ago
There's a lot of things going on with this article. There is a skill's gap, but it's not the skill's gap that the article thinks it is. This article confuses different things. This article incorrectly equates computer science graduates as people able to fill open positions at tech companies in IT positions. For example, when I graduated college, I had an academic background in Java. So when I graduated, I started looking for Java developer positions. To my surprise, in the job market at that time, there were about 30 senior level positions per entry level position that companies were hiring for. At that time I would have said the skills gap was that people wanted senior level engineers but weren't wiling to train their mid levels and hire entry level or junior engineers to back-fill internally promoted employees. And of course my academic work did not include enterprise java stuff either. Or more succinctly, there gap was between what experience level was available in the market vs what experience level companies wanted. Now later in my career, as a .Net developer, the skills gap I see is a different one. I see a skills gap between academic computer science and what actual software engineers use. And not just the programming languages people use more commonly in the industry like C++ vs C# etc. Never in my college was there any Full-Stack development approach to anything. Everything was done in isolation. Here's a few courses how front-end web development works. Here's a few courses how a back-end language works. Here's a few courses on how a database works. Never in academia did we put it all together. And let's not talk about useful discreet math turned out to be. Bottom line is neither academia nor companies that hire you seem very willing to train you in real-world skills. Universities would prefer to maintain academic purity and hiring companies would prefer someone who already knows whatever language or frameworks or development approach they are already using. So I wouldn't say the skill gap is non-existent like the article suggests. And I wouldn't say that more computer science graduates would fix the skill gap. I also wouldn't say more H1B visas would provide a permanent solution for the skill gap. None of these address the underlying problem. Something else needs to happen to fix this kind of skill gap. I'm updating this to reflect something I agree with in other comments. There is also is a gap in practical coding skills.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Yes, the gap from trying to hire CS grads for SW Engineer positions is one of the oldest facets of the problem.
XYZG2002 6y ago
Old news. Surprised this is still making any headlines -- people have been writing about this STEM myth for the better part of the decade now.
ta1548177231 6y ago
Throwaway because I know I'll get downvoted into oblivion. Many jobs require an IQ > 1SD above the mean. This means there are about 16% of pop (if I recall my stats correct) who could possibly do the job, and everyone else could not even if we gave them a free education on the job training or any other benefit. I believe STEM+Medical as a whole is suffering from this issue. One benefit is low/nocode solutions are pushing some of these challenges into the mainstream audiences.
- qes 6y ago
  It sounds a bit elitist but I think there's truth to what you're saying. I've seen it clearly in both directions from me - code I've written that I could easily pick out 10 peers I've worked with and be certain that they would not be able to solve the problem within the constraints, period - and I've also seen work others have done and be certain that I could not have independently done similar, certainly not within any span of time that's worth considering. I've also seen companies crumble and fail from only having "average" developers where no one could tackle the difficult problems that inevitably come up.
known 6y ago
5 million India diaspora is running an Organized mafia in USA http://www.petition2congress.com/20324/expel-indian-americans-from-usa http://www.petition2congress.com/20324/expel-indian-american...
known 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking companies need H1Bs aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves to cut costs and to generate profits

64 points by known 6y ago

https://archive.vn/mFIF5 https://archive.vn/mFIF5

I've worked with H1 software engineers in the past, their skills ranged from highly capable to not very capable (same distribution i found among American software engineers), but one thing that stood out to me was how hard they worked for their average to below average wages due to the fact that they feared getting laid off and being sent back to their home countries. I knew a guy who was at the beck and call of our then manager almost 24/7, this definitely creates unhealthy expectations in the labor market in general.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
net2net2net 6y ago
I can't stand the abuse of H1Bs. While I may have personal feelings on labor from immigration, these people are still people. In a similar flavor I never liked it when I worked at $BIGCO and people treated you differently if you were an employee v a contractor. It wasn't a privacy or trust-level thing - it was just social status stupidity.
- h1bthrow 6y ago
  As a F-1 OPT holder who is starting at a job with $200k base and almost double that in TC, I hate the claim that H1B is abusive. Can you tell me how I am being abused by my employer, who has helped me through every step of the way? No, I don’t think H-1B is abusive, it’s an opportunity for hardworking people to prove themselves just as, or more capable than the locals. I don’t think you’re truly concerned about my wellbeing, I think you’d just rather have my job.
  - net2net2net 6y ago
    No offense intended, but the majority of work visa holders (H1B) are not in your scenario. I'm glad you are in a good situation (money wise). I have seen them work for market average pay, but tolerate extreme hours and expectations that non-H1Bs would obviously reject. The companies know what game they are playing in these scenarios - it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
  - wool_gather 6y ago
    You've misread something here. They didn't say it was inherently abusive, they said they hate seeing people abused because of it.
    - h1bthrow 6y ago
      I don’t think having to work hard is abusive. Investment bankers famously work 70, 80 hour weeks voluntarily. Why can’t software engineers work a bit more than 40 hours a week if they wanted to? The ‘low pay’ that people claim is well above market average in most of the world, and above the median US income. People are mostly happy to have the opportunity to work here. I think that complaints of abuse are thinly veiled xenophobia. You pretend to be helping us, but you just want to protect your own overly inflated salaries from market forces.
      - ashayh 6y ago
        Wow :) You should save this comment and revisit it when you are 35ish. This attitude is exactly what companies want. It's Apple charging $1000 for a phone, and makes (say) $300 profit but you willingly hand over $1500 to them. Would you do that?
        h1bthrow 6y ago
        I've worked very hard to get to where I am, so working hard isn't difficult for me. I chose to work here because it provides the best life for me, not because anyone forced me to. Would you rather take this choice away from me?
innagadadavida 6y ago
Fixing the immigration is needed to address these issues, but so far it’s been impossible to pass anything meaningful in congress and different parties have their own pet agendas.
president 6y ago
> due to the fact that they feared getting laid off and being sent back to their home countries > this definitely creates unhealthy expectations in the labor market in general. I have always assumed this was the goal; a way to skirt labor laws/protections and overtime normalize overworking and manager worship because American workers are "lazy".
CM30 6y ago
> but one thing that stood out to me was how hard they worked for their average to below average wages due to the fact that they feared getting laid off and being sent back to their home countries. Part of me wonders whether this is also because of their expectations for a reasonable salary/conditions. If you come from a country where wages are much lower than in the US, even a terrible wage from a tech company must seem like an amazing one. This then makes the comparison even more stacked towards the H1 worker. Of course they'll 'work harder' for that wage, it seems like a decent one for them and (as mentioned), there's a risk of being sent back. Meanwhile any US based employee you can get for similar money will probably be far below average in terms of skills/mindset, since no one with any real expertise will work for these wages.
noskllzgap88 6y ago
That’s the real “skills gap” tech companies mean. Americans are too aware of the game. Most office job coding work these days is filling out templated layers of indirection via frameworks and APIs. Google doesn’t have an information advantage. It has a capital advantage. It’s the same old math belying all those algorithms. They’re trying to sell the idea they possess an information advantage over less developed nations as Americans/westerners don’t buy their story anymore. They’re bored and gonna charge more to fill in the new templates of indirection.
908B64B197 6y ago
If I want to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup or A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop my only path forward is H1. They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?

giorgioz 6y ago

I'm a software engineer from Italy and went to work for Intel with an H1B visa back in 2012. The process of getting a H1B visa used to be quite complicated and long even before Trump started dismantle it piece by piece. My salary was perfectly in the range of salaries from other US workers with comparable education and skills. I know that because I had plenty of opportunities and offers to switch company. FAANGS strongly compete for software engineer talent and if one of them (ex company X) would start offering lower salaries the others would likely poach as many employees as they can from company X. I do suspect though that outside of competitive technology driven companies like FAANGS there is plenty of companies that indeed don't care much about technology and innovation and just want to cut the budget. This is especially true for consulting. The USA will loose its edge with the loss of the influx of young talented skilled professionals.

goatinaboat 6y ago

The US and UK both produce more STEM graduates than there are jobs for at all levels, whether BSc or PhD. Computing hoovers many of them up, but not all.

carlosdp 6y ago

Anyone who's interviewed software engineers for a tech company knows there's a skills gap, and it's very real

marcinzm 6y ago
Having been on both ends it's also very true that there's a difference between "skills needed to pass interview" and "skills needed to do the job." The gap in the former is arbitrary depending on how pedantically silly the interview is made and it does not necessarily correlate to an equal gap in the latter.
- Kalium 6y ago
  Very true. That said, sometimes they're basic skills. In one job a few back, I did a lot of resume-reading and phone screening. I used basic questions. A solid 50% of screenees failed FizzBuzz. Now, it's absolutely possible that many of these were just nerves. Not everyone handled interview tension well! But it strains credulity for me to accept that being nervous makes half of software engineers forget how to do a loop, conditional, and modulo.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    As a note, that doesn't mean 50% of engineers lack the skill. Those lacking skills will interview the most so for any position the distribution will be biased towards them. For example, if 10% of people on the market lack skills but they interview at 9 times as many places (failing at each) then each company will see 50% of applicants lacking skills.
    - Kalium 6y ago
      Also true! That said, it continues to strain credulity that 50% of interviewees for engineering jobs suffer from forgetting the most fundamental of tools in the face of an interview. So I am led inescapably to the conclusion that there are indeed many people out there who only have skills on paper.

supernova87a 6y ago

Well, whenever someone complains that there's not enough supply of something, what that usually actually means is that there's not enough supply for the price they're willing to pay. (Unless the elasticity of supply has hit some real limits.) News reporters seem not to be very good about following up on that detail, and the person will usually not volunteer or wish to draw attention to the $ they want to pay. Because they want cheap labor. Now, the price at which you believe the market should be allowed to settle at before resorting to foreign talent/immigration is for companies to weigh in on, and Congress / policy makers to decide. But maybe that process is broken at the moment, so we resort to simplistic 1 line summaries to get what party <x> wants. And aside from any of that, educating more people in what we want supply of is a good choice, any time.

maerF0x0 6y ago
Additionally, if the talent pool exists in another locale, then farming the work abroad is always an option. But companies want their cake and to eat it too. Lower like foreign prices AND on prem for supervision + time synchronization

president 6y ago

In a previous company (large fortune 500 tech co) where all our QA engineers were doing manual GUI testing, the overwhelming number of them were H1-B visa holders. I always wondered why we needed to bring in "skilled foreign labor" when any kid with a high-school diploma could essentially do the job.

Gunax 6y ago
Because the job requires a master's degree. Or alternatively, why hire a local when you can get someone with a master's degree for the same price?
- rafiki6 6y ago
  Because you can hire someone without a masters degree for much less, and they have the skills to do the job. By putting over qualified people in roles that don't use their skills, you have done no one any favors.

qppo 6y ago

Anecdotally I believe tech companies, because the numbers and proportions listed by the article do not line up with job applications that I've seen. Imo there are a lot of overlapping problems, but none of them are a conspiracy alluded to by the title. A big one is that companies are bad at segmenting work between engineers and technicians (or whatever term you want to apply there) and if they don't make the distinction they'll have the same hiring requirements, or worse - treat the segmentation as a division of seniority and not skill set. I'd like to see us start investing more in associates degrees for CS and value the graduates like we do other tradesmen.

Gunax 6y ago

I've done my share of interviews, and I don't believe there is one. Yes, 80% of the recent grads we interview are unhirable. By unhirable I mean can't answer things like: -how to reverse a string -how to remove an element from a linked list -time complexity of hashsets vs linear searching. But we do have applicants who do those things (the other 20%). And we have plenty of them. So many that we end up filtering many out for other reasons. These prestigious companies try to put out an aura that they only hire the top 1%, but then claim there's a skill gap... Seems contradictory to me. Google has a culture that reportedly claims that they would rather not hire 10 good candidates than hire 1 bad one... So how can you claim there is a skill gap when you're rejecting so many qualified people who almost passed your test?

avgDev 6y ago
I am a full-stack dev, I write enterprise applications. Using SQL, DB2, .Net MVC5/Core. Reversing a string is trivial but honestly I have not used linked list in a while, and I probably would have a hard time answering that question. I can do the job, I can quickly debug and find errors. This is what sucks about software, you can have many years of experience and fail a question about a linked list, if you have not utilized it in a while. I solve business problems, read documentation that is my age to work with legacy systems, etc. I keep up to date with the web dev area I'm working in but this is much different than college data structure and algo knowledge.
- amf12 6y ago
  > I have not used linked list in a while, I think the point of these questions for entry level devs is that they should be able to figure out how to remove an element from a linked list even if they have never used one. It's pretty trivial if you think about it and have some basic understanding of objects and references. Also these types of questions are not usually asked for experienced devs.
- salamander014 6y ago
  The solution to removing an element from a linked list is so simple I Googled it because I thought I was missing something. Anyone who cannot remove an element from a linked list simply does not understand what a linked list is. And that's OK, but in order for companies to make progress, they use questions like these to make sure they are hiring people that are knowledgeable and capable of solving certain kinds of problems. The other thing is, people that can answer these simpler kinds of programming problems correct are more likely to write clean code, make better decisions, and be an asset to a team. It is just an easy way to weed out bad candidates. That doesn't mean all candidates who can't answer the question are bad, but likely that all bad candidates cannot answer the question; there's a big distinction there. Unfortunately a lot of people with good experience get left behind. But the other problem is just because somebody has good experience doesn't mean they are the right fit for the position. And that's just life.

zadkey 6y ago

There's a lot of things going on with this article. There is a skill's gap, but it's not the skill's gap that the article thinks it is. This article confuses different things. This article incorrectly equates computer science graduates as people able to fill open positions at tech companies in IT positions. For example, when I graduated college, I had an academic background in Java. So when I graduated, I started looking for Java developer positions. To my surprise, in the job market at that time, there were about 30 senior level positions per entry level position that companies were hiring for. At that time I would have said the skills gap was that people wanted senior level engineers but weren't wiling to train their mid levels and hire entry level or junior engineers to back-fill internally promoted employees. And of course my academic work did not include enterprise java stuff either. Or more succinctly, there gap was between what experience level was available in the market vs what experience level companies wanted. Now later in my career, as a .Net developer, the skills gap I see is a different one. I see a skills gap between academic computer science and what actual software engineers use. And not just the programming languages people use more commonly in the industry like C++ vs C# etc. Never in my college was there any Full-Stack development approach to anything. Everything was done in isolation. Here's a few courses how front-end web development works. Here's a few courses how a back-end language works. Here's a few courses on how a database works. Never in academia did we put it all together. And let's not talk about useful discreet math turned out to be. Bottom line is neither academia nor companies that hire you seem very willing to train you in real-world skills. Universities would prefer to maintain academic purity and hiring companies would prefer someone who already knows whatever language or frameworks or development approach they are already using. So I wouldn't say the skill gap is non-existent like the article suggests. And I wouldn't say that more computer science graduates would fix the skill gap. I also wouldn't say more H1B visas would provide a permanent solution for the skill gap. None of these address the underlying problem. Something else needs to happen to fix this kind of skill gap. I'm updating this to reflect something I agree with in other comments. There is also is a gap in practical coding skills.

mixmastamyk 6y ago
Yes, the gap from trying to hire CS grads for SW Engineer positions is one of the oldest facets of the problem.

XYZG2002 6y ago

Old news. Surprised this is still making any headlines -- people have been writing about this STEM myth for the better part of the decade now.

ta1548177231 6y ago

Throwaway because I know I'll get downvoted into oblivion. Many jobs require an IQ > 1SD above the mean. This means there are about 16% of pop (if I recall my stats correct) who could possibly do the job, and everyone else could not even if we gave them a free education on the job training or any other benefit. I believe STEM+Medical as a whole is suffering from this issue. One benefit is low/nocode solutions are pushing some of these challenges into the mainstream audiences.

qes 6y ago
It sounds a bit elitist but I think there's truth to what you're saying. I've seen it clearly in both directions from me - code I've written that I could easily pick out 10 peers I've worked with and be certain that they would not be able to solve the problem within the constraints, period - and I've also seen work others have done and be certain that I could not have independently done similar, certainly not within any span of time that's worth considering. I've also seen companies crumble and fail from only having "average" developers where no one could tackle the difficult problems that inevitably come up.

known 6y ago

5 million India diaspora is running an Organized mafia in USA http://www.petition2congress.com/20324/expel-indian-americans-from-usa http://www.petition2congress.com/20324/expel-indian-american...

known 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking companies need H1Bs aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves to cut costs and to generate profits