6 ms·

Tech Dilemma: Unfilled jobs, few workers, lack of confidence in STEM education

11 points by SQL2219 6y ago

siberianbear 6y ago
This topic has been beat to death more than a beat-to-death horse. At 100K a year, there is a huge shortage of engineers. At 500K a year, there is not.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  That is a really simplistic take IMO: 1. Many software projects that would be profitable at 100k per engineer become unprofitable at 500k per engineer, so implying "just pay all your engineers more" isn't actionable advice. 2. If you could pay engineers 500k, without a societal-wide increase in skills, it means those workers would just come from other high-demand jobs, potentially creating a shortage in those areas.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    Same logic: if your product is unprofitable at the market rate for engineers (not saying 500k is!) than you need to re-evaluate your business plan. In the end, inflation kills us all. By 2050 seeing 500k salaries for tech as a norm might be a thing, for now it’s reserved for a very select few companies that pay their engineers more than their sales people.
  - Tehchops 6y ago
    >That is a really simplistic take IMO Yes and it also comes across that the comment author hasn't spent much time trying to hire for "engineering" roles. If it only it were so easy to throw up a post for $engineeringRole promising some multiple of six-figures and expecting a deluge of competent, qualified people to show up. I've worked for one of $FAANGco, and helped run multiple hiring loops. The roles weren't quite in the 500k vicinity, but they were a fair bit more than 100k. Finding competent, qualified, honest people amongst a sea of resumes was a non-trivial investment. I'm not talking about finding some 10x'er who can run circles around leetcode problems and tell me the most efficient way to fill a 737 with ping pong balls flying upside down on the planet Mars. I'm talking about people who actually understood and had experience with the technologies they had listed on their resume. People who had baseline competency with the basic skills required to merely survive at the job. I generally consider myself a pragmatist, and would allow some variance in detail if they communicated an overall "big-picture" understanding. Nope. People who had listed "fluent with Linux" who didn't know basic directory structure. People who listed years with a programming language that couldn't write a for loop. People who explicitly described a multi-technology cloud-stack project they worked on, only to say in the interview that the project was entirely handled by a different department. I estimate my success rate at this stage was maybe 10% in finding solid people. Slide the pay scale up to 500k? An entirely different set of problems. People that can ask for 500k up front with a straight face know exactly why they can ask for 500k up front with a straight face, and so does everyone else who wants to hire them. If you make all jobs, regardless of technology/competency/seniority pay 500k, then you've got a pretty sizable inflationary problem anyways. Either the really skilled people now will ask for 1 million, or the skillset has become commoditized, and the talent is moving to a problem domain that is more lucrative.
sokoloff 6y ago
Kudos to iD Tech’s PR firm. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html > Parents are scrambling to find creative ways to cover a disrupted school year. That is where a handful of operators, like iD Tech, are stepping in to fill the skills gap. > iD Tech teaches cutting-edge topics ranging from virtual robotics to Roblox and 3D printing, and in-demand coding languages like Java, Python, and Unity. It also recently launched a math tutoring service in response to consumer demand. iD Tech alumni often go on to work for companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and also Facebook
- Tehchops 6y ago
  I did a double take when I saw that and realized the entire point of this piece was not to be informative or novel in the slightest.
m0llusk 6y ago
This is wildly off. I am a strongly experienced programmer with most of my years at big well known companies. Many of my friends are also. When we apply for jobs we get very young people asking about steps to reverse linked lists on the white board and other stupid puzzles then maybe later turned down or ghosted.The fact is hiring is hard because qualified applicants have been shut out.
jqpabc123 6y ago
This is the pipeline of talent that companies need, right now. Why is there this persistent and well publicized need and effort to suck "kids" into this pipeline of well paying jobs? Maybe the answer lies on the other end of the pipe? Could it be because large numbers of these "careers" don't last beyond middle age for a multitude of reasons? Could this persistent shortage all be due to the less publicized fact that companies use up, burn out and dispose of STEM workers at an exceedingly high rate? Could it be that the career trajectory for STEM often resembles that of professional baseball with only a tiny fraction of the payout? Could it be that the realistic, overall perspective on these high paying "careers" isn't all rainbows and unicorns?
oceanghost 6y ago
If there's a tech shortage-- why is it that every time I take an interview I'm subjected to hours of arbitrary comp-sci trivia?
notaspecialist 6y ago
A typical adult that has gone into IT, and specifically programming. Do you know what their life expectancy is in that field? 5 years. 80% of them move on after 5 years. Stop teaching kids how to program! You are decreasing the pool of unenlightened idiots we need to keep the industry rolling along.

11 points by SQL2219 6y ago

This topic has been beat to death more than a beat-to-death horse. At 100K a year, there is a huge shortage of engineers. At 500K a year, there is not.

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
That is a really simplistic take IMO: 1. Many software projects that would be profitable at 100k per engineer become unprofitable at 500k per engineer, so implying "just pay all your engineers more" isn't actionable advice. 2. If you could pay engineers 500k, without a societal-wide increase in skills, it means those workers would just come from other high-demand jobs, potentially creating a shortage in those areas.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  Same logic: if your product is unprofitable at the market rate for engineers (not saying 500k is!) than you need to re-evaluate your business plan. In the end, inflation kills us all. By 2050 seeing 500k salaries for tech as a norm might be a thing, for now it’s reserved for a very select few companies that pay their engineers more than their sales people.
- Tehchops 6y ago
  >That is a really simplistic take IMO Yes and it also comes across that the comment author hasn't spent much time trying to hire for "engineering" roles. If it only it were so easy to throw up a post for $engineeringRole promising some multiple of six-figures and expecting a deluge of competent, qualified people to show up. I've worked for one of $FAANGco, and helped run multiple hiring loops. The roles weren't quite in the 500k vicinity, but they were a fair bit more than 100k. Finding competent, qualified, honest people amongst a sea of resumes was a non-trivial investment. I'm not talking about finding some 10x'er who can run circles around leetcode problems and tell me the most efficient way to fill a 737 with ping pong balls flying upside down on the planet Mars. I'm talking about people who actually understood and had experience with the technologies they had listed on their resume. People who had baseline competency with the basic skills required to merely survive at the job. I generally consider myself a pragmatist, and would allow some variance in detail if they communicated an overall "big-picture" understanding. Nope. People who had listed "fluent with Linux" who didn't know basic directory structure. People who listed years with a programming language that couldn't write a for loop. People who explicitly described a multi-technology cloud-stack project they worked on, only to say in the interview that the project was entirely handled by a different department. I estimate my success rate at this stage was maybe 10% in finding solid people. Slide the pay scale up to 500k? An entirely different set of problems. People that can ask for 500k up front with a straight face know exactly why they can ask for 500k up front with a straight face, and so does everyone else who wants to hire them. If you make all jobs, regardless of technology/competency/seniority pay 500k, then you've got a pretty sizable inflationary problem anyways. Either the really skilled people now will ask for 1 million, or the skillset has become commoditized, and the talent is moving to a problem domain that is more lucrative.

sokoloff 6y ago

Kudos to iD Tech’s PR firm. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html > Parents are scrambling to find creative ways to cover a disrupted school year. That is where a handful of operators, like iD Tech, are stepping in to fill the skills gap. > iD Tech teaches cutting-edge topics ranging from virtual robotics to Roblox and 3D printing, and in-demand coding languages like Java, Python, and Unity. It also recently launched a math tutoring service in response to consumer demand. iD Tech alumni often go on to work for companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and also Facebook

Tehchops 6y ago
I did a double take when I saw that and realized the entire point of this piece was not to be informative or novel in the slightest.

m0llusk 6y ago

This is wildly off. I am a strongly experienced programmer with most of my years at big well known companies. Many of my friends are also. When we apply for jobs we get very young people asking about steps to reverse linked lists on the white board and other stupid puzzles then maybe later turned down or ghosted.The fact is hiring is hard because qualified applicants have been shut out.

jqpabc123 6y ago

This is the pipeline of talent that companies need, right now. Why is there this persistent and well publicized need and effort to suck "kids" into this pipeline of well paying jobs? Maybe the answer lies on the other end of the pipe? Could it be because large numbers of these "careers" don't last beyond middle age for a multitude of reasons? Could this persistent shortage all be due to the less publicized fact that companies use up, burn out and dispose of STEM workers at an exceedingly high rate? Could it be that the career trajectory for STEM often resembles that of professional baseball with only a tiny fraction of the payout? Could it be that the realistic, overall perspective on these high paying "careers" isn't all rainbows and unicorns?

oceanghost 6y ago

If there's a tech shortage-- why is it that every time I take an interview I'm subjected to hours of arbitrary comp-sci trivia?

notaspecialist 6y ago

A typical adult that has gone into IT, and specifically programming. Do you know what their life expectancy is in that field? 5 years. 80% of them move on after 5 years. Stop teaching kids how to program! You are decreasing the pool of unenlightened idiots we need to keep the industry rolling along.