7 ms·

This is exactly what university students in the U.S. and abroad have been faced with. Most engineers with a paycheck simply don't get the problem. Competition i

This is exactly what university students in the U.S. and abroad have been faced with. Most engineers with a paycheck simply don't get the problem. Competition is higher now than ever for entry, companies do not want to hire graduates, they do not want to invest resources into them. They want the maximum amount of short term profit possible. Build things fast, sell them, next project. We are racing to the bottom and the natural result is the U.S's software dominance will be gone sooner than later. Just like manufacturing we are seeing an exportation of work en mass.

pantalaimon 5y ago
My first job was at a startup and they simply didn't have any money to hire experienced people, so it was petty much only people fresh from uni. You see the same at other smaller companies who will rather hire a student or a fresh graduate because it's much cheaper (and more available).
jorblumesea 5y ago
We're not really exporting work as much as hiring people to come over here. Or, it's not as clear cut as just exporting manufacturing.
thaumaturgy 5y ago
Universities aren't reliably producing CS graduates that can code. If a student enters a collegiate program with some interest or experience in programming, then they're likely to come out of it with solid skills and find some opportunities. If an employer has the resources to select from the best that universities have to offer, then they can find great candidates. But for us that aren't working for FAANG, a university degree doesn't really tell us much, and certainly tells us a lot less than a portfolio of projects or work experience. This is still fundamentally a hiring problem. There's no way to sort candidates by skill that doesn't involve a ton of labor. A CS degree sure ain't it.
- pc86 5y ago
  This is the sweet spot that products like LeetCode or BinarySearch could be used to solve - people who have the academic background, and should know how to code if they're coming out of a good program, but don't have a portfolio of work to show or a catalogue of experience to draw examples and answers from for a typical interview. And all the DSA stuff that is irrelevant for 90% of dev jobs 90% of the time is still fresh in their mind. Ask them 2-3 LC easies/mediums in the language of their choice for them to prove they can actually write code, and that's really all you need. Unfortunately it somehow became "let's have a 5 hour long two-part panel interview where we ask you half a dozen LC hards and oh yeah don't google anything" as a way to hire experienced people who have a decade of work they can talk about the discuss ad nauseum.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Not going to lie, as soon as you mentioned LC I was disinterested. But your suggestion sounds good. A few easy/medium questions and maybe the ability to Google sounds fair. I sort of enjoy basic fizz bang code screenings.
    - pc86 5y ago
      And just to be clear I'm only suggesting it for junior positions. Most of the time I think you can suss out whether someone can code by discussing their direct contributions to previous projects. If not, you can always do one LC problem. I see it as a great way to just run a sanity check that this person who graduated from Random State six months ago can actually code, and as a great way to ensure high quality very senior people refuse to go through your interview (unless you're paying FAANG wages).
  - EVdotIO 5y ago
    I have about a decade of real professional coding experience. Not going to say I'm excellent, or near the caliber of developer FAANG are looking for, but I can write code. I can count on one finger the number of interviews I've got in the past couple years. Zilch. There is a massive disconnect from what you hear on the news, and the reality, where somebody like me is a pariah and the deafening silence of _any_ interest. This is just outsourcing 2.0, this time under the guise of a lack of qualified candidates.
- syshum 5y ago
  Universities today seem to be focusing on quantity of education not quality There goal is to get as much student loan money that they can, they do not seem to care about the quality of education the students are getting This goes for all levels of universities, and all degree programs.
  - idiotsecant 5y ago
    Universities were never job training programs, their product has always been the right to engage in class signaling. By paying the university a pile of money you signified to potential employers (and everyone else) that you were a member of at least the upper middle class, with the financial resources (and sometimes family connections) to support making those payments of time and money. Not having that signifier was a signal that you lacked the time and money to dump into that effort, given that you had to spend so much of it surviving. It's the same human impulse that drives people to bind their feet, value bleached skin, engage in conspicuous consumption, etc. It's all an elaborate signal game designed to convince people of your social status. The problem is that we looked at that system and instead of trying to build something better we dumped more money into it in the form of student loans and expected that now more people will be given access to those class signifiers and thereby raise their social status and standard of living. In actual practice, of course, what we did was raise the bar on what qualifies as a class signifier, forcing a generation into wage slavery with little real benefit to them or to society as a whole (other than those institutions who siphon off those extra dollars and use them to metastasize extra layers of administration and management to little effect) What we need is for education to be more job skills training and less social positioning. Funding for adult education should be linked to the success rate of students leaving those programs. If you have the money to burn studying topics that will indicate to your peers how little you need the money, then great. That's apparently the way we've decided to structure things. For the rest of us though let's try to encourage study of topics that will help society work better instead of vainly trying to convince the rich kids club to let us in.
    - syshum 5y ago
      I agree with all of that....
- giantg2 5y ago
  "Universities aren't reliably producing CS graduates that can code." And companies stereotype all graduates as worth nothing to them. I had a couple simple Android apps when I graduated. Even though they were simple, it would show that I could follow best practices, code, test, and deliver something. I had a decent GPA (3.5), clubs, etc. I still had a hard time finding companies that would even give me an interview. So sure, a degree doesn't mean too much (my masters has done nothing for me). But it seems companies have simply given up and are exacerbating the very problem they are creating.
  - kragen 5y ago
    How are you on leetcode?
    - giantg2 5y ago
      I believe LC wasn't a thing back then, or at least not mainstream. I don't waste my time on LC now. If I get free time, I'd rather work on a personal project or hobby. Granted, I'm actually thinking of moving into some sort of corporate strategy analyst role since I don't really get to code anymore. The past 2 years has been very little coding or business problem solving. It's mostly been config, infrastructure, prod support, and meetings/paperwork. I'm tired of it. I want to solve problems and build substantial things. I assume I'm rusty when it comes to coding now.
      - kragen 5y ago
        Oh, I didn't realize you were talking about a time long ago.
        giantg2 5y ago
        Yeah, I'm old. That was 10+ years ago.
        kragen 5y ago
        Nah, you're a youngster.
- dcposch 5y ago
  I've interviewed a lot of software engineer candidates. It's always surprising how often people with impressive resumes, including computer science degrees from good-to-great universities, can't code at all. I'm not talking about trick "do you remember A* search" questions. I'm talking about the ability to write a basic program and to reason about what it will do. I've seen this across the gamut, from new grads to staff engineers. Part of this is selection bias: those folks probably apply to many companies before they slip through somewhere, so they're overrepresented as interviewees. My sense is that it's becoming more common. Undergrad CS has ever more people who are in it for reasons unrelated to enjoyment or curiosity.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    Plenty of people here on HN will tell you they choke in interview situations. A lot of people just aren't comfortable and it gets to them. That said there are people who really can't code, from my experience working with such folks.
- newsclues 5y ago
  Currently in a Canadian college for cybersecurity and the content of the courses are being nerfed and the quality of the graduates are churning out are largely dogshit.
- trinovantes 5y ago
  I suppose I was once part of the problem back when I marked assignments in grad school. We're heavily incentivized to not fail students. There's virtually no difference in grades between a 10x programmer and someone who can barely code fizzbuzz in their 4th year.
- devwastaken 5y ago
  This is in part due to blue politics in universities pushing for more and more genericism in education, suiciding their skill output. The other part is the companies that should be involved in education and funding educational programs simply don't care to. This is the one single way to know if the "shortage" is real: is the company willing to invest in education? The answer has been no. Fewest scholarships, fewest interns, they don't fund programs, and they treat students as cash cows. It makes sense when looking at the numbers. No use in putting money into U.S. education if they don't have to. The law allows them to import workers from elsewhere, parasiting off of their social educational programs and never having to pay a dime to them. The solution is clear, we have to make it more economically viable to invest in the U.S, and that is by removing or severely limiting the mechanisms by which tech companies employ foreign workers. Or alternatively we start actually taxing these companies.
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  > Universities aren't reliably producing CS graduates that can code Have they ever been?
- 8note 5y ago
  A cs graduate isn't somebody that can code; those are only loosely related to each other
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > There's no way to sort candidates by skill that doesn't involve a ton of labor. This is the exact concept of an IQ test. They aren't labor intensive.
chrisseaton 5y ago
Racing to the bottom by paying talent more and more and more? I feel like companies are investing even more in the long term than ever before, building increasingly ambitious infrastructure projects. I don't see what you see at all.
- Accujack 5y ago
  I haven't seen any company do that in a very long time. What industry are you working in?
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    I work in e-commerce at Shopify. My company is building some great developer experience stuff for the long-term like some truly excellent cloud-development environments. My previous company, Oracle, was developing an entirely new kind of language virtual-machine to run the programming languages of the future as well. I see this in many places.
    - Accujack 5y ago
      That's just long term product planning. The rest of the people here are talking about long term employee development - making your employees more valuable so they produce better products rather than treating them as costs that must be reduced.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        > rather than treating them as costs that must be reduced But employers are paying more and more than ever before?
        endisneigh 5y ago
        Paying more money doesn't mean you're investing into entry level employees necessarily.
holoduke 5y ago
I dont agree with your rather pesimistic view on the matter. I know many companies having fresh new graduates in their hire strategy because that just works in the long rong. Proven fact. Also most companies have smart people not shortsighted and they come up with proper long term strategies. There might be foolish companies as you describe but not the majority.
raz32dust 5y ago
This is not true. I work in a FAANG-like company. Talent shortage is real - we are having to hire entry level grads where we originally wanted experienced candidates. We are even going out of the way to hire candidates from non-traditional backgrounds and train them.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Maybe your company is the exception. The fact that there is a talent shortage seems to point to a long-term issue regarding barriers to entry across the industry.
- colmvp 5y ago
  That's news to me. In December, I applied to a number of blue chip companies for frontend positions and only got callbacks to three of them despite a lot of work experience writing JS for real applications including a YC company. Some YC companies also said to me they wanted someone more experienced in Vue/React instead of potentially allowing me time and space to ramp up my knowledge of it. So clearly there were other applicants who had both a lot of work experience AND the precise tech knowledge they needed, so they didn't have to take a risk on someone who didn't perfectly fit the position. I eventually landed a dream position, but a huge reason why they looked at my application in the first place was because I knew of a long time employee. Obviously I had to pass the technical and behavior interviews, but they had a deluge of applicants and my application would've been lost to the ether had it not been for that connection.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Seems weird. If they're willing to wait many more months to hire their perfect candidate, couldn't they do it faster by hiring somebody good and allowing for some ramp up?
- devwastaken 5y ago
  The "talent shortage" is self caused by FAANG. Your company does not invest in education, yet expects people to be experienced. Accreditation for compsci and others is sorely out of touch with the tech industry, and university programs are not funded. We are literally strangling the life out of young adults with course materials that don't matter, expenses they have to work manual labor to pay, classes that don't teach, and making them have to sort through dumpsters to find an Arduino. It's that bad. What do tech companies do when asked to sponsor a program? No response. They don't care unless it's from a FAANG employee themselves, if that. These companies are meant to be heavily taxed for how much they are taking from society, with those taxes put back into education. Yet here we are.
dvtrn 5y ago
They want the maximum amount of short term profit possible. Build things fast, sell them, next project. Not a graduate but instead an industry veteran. If what you say is accurate then Im happy to have my bias of “maybe it’s time I go the mercenary route” confirmed. Surely the market is there, right?
scsilver 5y ago
The talent abroad ends up working for US companies though, how will dominance dissipate. The market and financing is in the US.

pantalaimon 5y ago

My first job was at a startup and they simply didn't have any money to hire experienced people, so it was petty much only people fresh from uni. You see the same at other smaller companies who will rather hire a student or a fresh graduate because it's much cheaper (and more available).

jorblumesea 5y ago

We're not really exporting work as much as hiring people to come over here. Or, it's not as clear cut as just exporting manufacturing.

thaumaturgy 5y ago

Universities aren't reliably producing CS graduates that can code. If a student enters a collegiate program with some interest or experience in programming, then they're likely to come out of it with solid skills and find some opportunities. If an employer has the resources to select from the best that universities have to offer, then they can find great candidates. But for us that aren't working for FAANG, a university degree doesn't really tell us much, and certainly tells us a lot less than a portfolio of projects or work experience. This is still fundamentally a hiring problem. There's no way to sort candidates by skill that doesn't involve a ton of labor. A CS degree sure ain't it.

pc86 5y ago
This is the sweet spot that products like LeetCode or BinarySearch could be used to solve - people who have the academic background, and should know how to code if they're coming out of a good program, but don't have a portfolio of work to show or a catalogue of experience to draw examples and answers from for a typical interview. And all the DSA stuff that is irrelevant for 90% of dev jobs 90% of the time is still fresh in their mind. Ask them 2-3 LC easies/mediums in the language of their choice for them to prove they can actually write code, and that's really all you need. Unfortunately it somehow became "let's have a 5 hour long two-part panel interview where we ask you half a dozen LC hards and oh yeah don't google anything" as a way to hire experienced people who have a decade of work they can talk about the discuss ad nauseum.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Not going to lie, as soon as you mentioned LC I was disinterested. But your suggestion sounds good. A few easy/medium questions and maybe the ability to Google sounds fair. I sort of enjoy basic fizz bang code screenings.
  - pc86 5y ago
    And just to be clear I'm only suggesting it for junior positions. Most of the time I think you can suss out whether someone can code by discussing their direct contributions to previous projects. If not, you can always do one LC problem. I see it as a great way to just run a sanity check that this person who graduated from Random State six months ago can actually code, and as a great way to ensure high quality very senior people refuse to go through your interview (unless you're paying FAANG wages).
- EVdotIO 5y ago
  I have about a decade of real professional coding experience. Not going to say I'm excellent, or near the caliber of developer FAANG are looking for, but I can write code. I can count on one finger the number of interviews I've got in the past couple years. Zilch. There is a massive disconnect from what you hear on the news, and the reality, where somebody like me is a pariah and the deafening silence of _any_ interest. This is just outsourcing 2.0, this time under the guise of a lack of qualified candidates.
syshum 5y ago
Universities today seem to be focusing on quantity of education not quality There goal is to get as much student loan money that they can, they do not seem to care about the quality of education the students are getting This goes for all levels of universities, and all degree programs.
- idiotsecant 5y ago
  Universities were never job training programs, their product has always been the right to engage in class signaling. By paying the university a pile of money you signified to potential employers (and everyone else) that you were a member of at least the upper middle class, with the financial resources (and sometimes family connections) to support making those payments of time and money. Not having that signifier was a signal that you lacked the time and money to dump into that effort, given that you had to spend so much of it surviving. It's the same human impulse that drives people to bind their feet, value bleached skin, engage in conspicuous consumption, etc. It's all an elaborate signal game designed to convince people of your social status. The problem is that we looked at that system and instead of trying to build something better we dumped more money into it in the form of student loans and expected that now more people will be given access to those class signifiers and thereby raise their social status and standard of living. In actual practice, of course, what we did was raise the bar on what qualifies as a class signifier, forcing a generation into wage slavery with little real benefit to them or to society as a whole (other than those institutions who siphon off those extra dollars and use them to metastasize extra layers of administration and management to little effect) What we need is for education to be more job skills training and less social positioning. Funding for adult education should be linked to the success rate of students leaving those programs. If you have the money to burn studying topics that will indicate to your peers how little you need the money, then great. That's apparently the way we've decided to structure things. For the rest of us though let's try to encourage study of topics that will help society work better instead of vainly trying to convince the rich kids club to let us in.
  - syshum 5y ago
    I agree with all of that....
giantg2 5y ago
"Universities aren't reliably producing CS graduates that can code." And companies stereotype all graduates as worth nothing to them. I had a couple simple Android apps when I graduated. Even though they were simple, it would show that I could follow best practices, code, test, and deliver something. I had a decent GPA (3.5), clubs, etc. I still had a hard time finding companies that would even give me an interview. So sure, a degree doesn't mean too much (my masters has done nothing for me). But it seems companies have simply given up and are exacerbating the very problem they are creating.
- kragen 5y ago
  How are you on leetcode?
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I believe LC wasn't a thing back then, or at least not mainstream. I don't waste my time on LC now. If I get free time, I'd rather work on a personal project or hobby. Granted, I'm actually thinking of moving into some sort of corporate strategy analyst role since I don't really get to code anymore. The past 2 years has been very little coding or business problem solving. It's mostly been config, infrastructure, prod support, and meetings/paperwork. I'm tired of it. I want to solve problems and build substantial things. I assume I'm rusty when it comes to coding now.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Oh, I didn't realize you were talking about a time long ago.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        Yeah, I'm old. That was 10+ years ago.
        kragen 5y ago
        Nah, you're a youngster.
dcposch 5y ago
I've interviewed a lot of software engineer candidates. It's always surprising how often people with impressive resumes, including computer science degrees from good-to-great universities, can't code at all. I'm not talking about trick "do you remember A* search" questions. I'm talking about the ability to write a basic program and to reason about what it will do. I've seen this across the gamut, from new grads to staff engineers. Part of this is selection bias: those folks probably apply to many companies before they slip through somewhere, so they're overrepresented as interviewees. My sense is that it's becoming more common. Undergrad CS has ever more people who are in it for reasons unrelated to enjoyment or curiosity.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Plenty of people here on HN will tell you they choke in interview situations. A lot of people just aren't comfortable and it gets to them. That said there are people who really can't code, from my experience working with such folks.
newsclues 5y ago
Currently in a Canadian college for cybersecurity and the content of the courses are being nerfed and the quality of the graduates are churning out are largely dogshit.
trinovantes 5y ago
I suppose I was once part of the problem back when I marked assignments in grad school. We're heavily incentivized to not fail students. There's virtually no difference in grades between a 10x programmer and someone who can barely code fizzbuzz in their 4th year.
devwastaken 5y ago
This is in part due to blue politics in universities pushing for more and more genericism in education, suiciding their skill output. The other part is the companies that should be involved in education and funding educational programs simply don't care to. This is the one single way to know if the "shortage" is real: is the company willing to invest in education? The answer has been no. Fewest scholarships, fewest interns, they don't fund programs, and they treat students as cash cows. It makes sense when looking at the numbers. No use in putting money into U.S. education if they don't have to. The law allows them to import workers from elsewhere, parasiting off of their social educational programs and never having to pay a dime to them. The solution is clear, we have to make it more economically viable to invest in the U.S, and that is by removing or severely limiting the mechanisms by which tech companies employ foreign workers. Or alternatively we start actually taxing these companies.
bigbillheck 5y ago
> Universities aren't reliably producing CS graduates that can code Have they ever been?
8note 5y ago
A cs graduate isn't somebody that can code; those are only loosely related to each other
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> There's no way to sort candidates by skill that doesn't involve a ton of labor. This is the exact concept of an IQ test. They aren't labor intensive.

chrisseaton 5y ago

Racing to the bottom by paying talent more and more and more? I feel like companies are investing even more in the long term than ever before, building increasingly ambitious infrastructure projects. I don't see what you see at all.

Accujack 5y ago
I haven't seen any company do that in a very long time. What industry are you working in?
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  I work in e-commerce at Shopify. My company is building some great developer experience stuff for the long-term like some truly excellent cloud-development environments. My previous company, Oracle, was developing an entirely new kind of language virtual-machine to run the programming languages of the future as well. I see this in many places.
  - Accujack 5y ago
    That's just long term product planning. The rest of the people here are talking about long term employee development - making your employees more valuable so they produce better products rather than treating them as costs that must be reduced.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > rather than treating them as costs that must be reduced But employers are paying more and more than ever before?
      - endisneigh 5y ago
        Paying more money doesn't mean you're investing into entry level employees necessarily.

holoduke 5y ago

I dont agree with your rather pesimistic view on the matter. I know many companies having fresh new graduates in their hire strategy because that just works in the long rong. Proven fact. Also most companies have smart people not shortsighted and they come up with proper long term strategies. There might be foolish companies as you describe but not the majority.

raz32dust 5y ago

This is not true. I work in a FAANG-like company. Talent shortage is real - we are having to hire entry level grads where we originally wanted experienced candidates. We are even going out of the way to hire candidates from non-traditional backgrounds and train them.

giantg2 5y ago
Maybe your company is the exception. The fact that there is a talent shortage seems to point to a long-term issue regarding barriers to entry across the industry.
colmvp 5y ago
That's news to me. In December, I applied to a number of blue chip companies for frontend positions and only got callbacks to three of them despite a lot of work experience writing JS for real applications including a YC company. Some YC companies also said to me they wanted someone more experienced in Vue/React instead of potentially allowing me time and space to ramp up my knowledge of it. So clearly there were other applicants who had both a lot of work experience AND the precise tech knowledge they needed, so they didn't have to take a risk on someone who didn't perfectly fit the position. I eventually landed a dream position, but a huge reason why they looked at my application in the first place was because I knew of a long time employee. Obviously I had to pass the technical and behavior interviews, but they had a deluge of applicants and my application would've been lost to the ether had it not been for that connection.
- 8note 5y ago
  Seems weird. If they're willing to wait many more months to hire their perfect candidate, couldn't they do it faster by hiring somebody good and allowing for some ramp up?
devwastaken 5y ago
The "talent shortage" is self caused by FAANG. Your company does not invest in education, yet expects people to be experienced. Accreditation for compsci and others is sorely out of touch with the tech industry, and university programs are not funded. We are literally strangling the life out of young adults with course materials that don't matter, expenses they have to work manual labor to pay, classes that don't teach, and making them have to sort through dumpsters to find an Arduino. It's that bad. What do tech companies do when asked to sponsor a program? No response. They don't care unless it's from a FAANG employee themselves, if that. These companies are meant to be heavily taxed for how much they are taking from society, with those taxes put back into education. Yet here we are.

dvtrn 5y ago

They want the maximum amount of short term profit possible. Build things fast, sell them, next project. Not a graduate but instead an industry veteran. If what you say is accurate then Im happy to have my bias of “maybe it’s time I go the mercenary route” confirmed. Surely the market is there, right?

scsilver 5y ago

The talent abroad ends up working for US companies though, how will dominance dissipate. The market and financing is in the US.