8 ms·

America Is Facing a Great Talent Recession

35 points by ushakov 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago
I will believe this when I hear of serious talent retention efforts becoming widespread.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  The problem always precedes the solution. If the problem is starting to be noticed now, the attempted solutions will show up... maybe later this year, in a half-baked way? Maybe in 2023 or 2024, in a decently well-thought-out way?
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Companies have been complaining about dev talent being in short supply for about a decade now. Best way to get a raise is still to quit your job after a year.
    - commandlinefan 5y ago
      > for about a decade Oh, they've been complaining at least since I started in the early 90's.
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      Do you think it's sustainable to raise your entire dev team's comp by 20% or 30% year after year after year? I just don't think that math makes sense after a short period of time.
      - eli_gottlieb 5y ago
        >Do you think it's sustainable to raise your entire dev team's comp by 20% or 30% year after year after year? Is it more or less sustainable than hiring new staff each and every year to replace those who leave?
        missedthecue 5y ago
        Based on the way the market functions, yes the status quo seems to be more sustainable.
convolvatron 5y ago
if the US wants to keep that pipe flowing they need to do a much better job of educating the general populace and steering talent into STEM. we're doing a really crappy job with most of the babies we already have. we don't need lots more babies.
- ushakov 5y ago
  why do we need to steer everyone into STEM? some people want to be entertainers, some want to do charitable work as humanitarians not everyone is suited nor wants to be in STEM
  - UncleOxidant 5y ago
    > why do we need to steer everyone into STEM? We don't want to steer _everyone_ into STEM. But we could be doing a better job of prepping students and giving them the tools they need to enable them to go into STEM if they so choose.
  - convolvatron 5y ago
    sorry, by 'talent' I meant those that show an interest and aptitude for STEM - I agree with you %150, there are multitudes of other ways someone can meaningful contribute to society
  - petre 5y ago
    And some want to be literature or philisophy majors, musicians or artists. Without human sciences society would become dehumanized.
- klyrs 5y ago
  > we're doing a really crappy job with most of the babies we already have. Unnecessarily hot take: UBI should start in the second trimester.
jsnodlin 5y ago
That’s what happens when you cut off H1Bs. Cutting off the pipeline through which the best and brightest from all over the world willing come into your country is going to have consequences.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Why do you want the countries visa holders come from to suffer so much? The United States doesn't have a moral right to suck up all of the world's intellectual talent. Let other nations have a shot at building intellectual capital.
  - 30209554 5y ago
    >Why do you want the countries visa holders come from to suffer so much? The United States doesn't have a moral right to suck up all of the world's intellectual talent. This is a disingenuous frame on two counts: (1) Wanting the US to succeed does not mean that one wants other nations to suffer. Success is not zero-sum. (2) The United States doesn't suck up intellectual talent. Individuals apply for visas and travel here willingly, often at great expense. Providing opportunities to those with talent and ambition is absolutely moral.
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    > Why do you want the countries visa holders come from to suffer so much? Because individuals matter more than countries: the right to pursuit of happiness and all that.
mips_avatar 5y ago
I think we need to be a lot more thoughtful about supporting university students through engineering programs. As a student I saw so many classmates crumple under the academic stress of weed out classes. Big engineering schools do a horrible job of supporting and cultivating the emotional lives of their students. 50% of students dropping out of engineering from freshman -> sophomore year is not normal.
- dpeck 5y ago
  There’s a trade off there though. I want the classes to be incredibly rigorous, and that means that there should be some amount of students who do not want to or cannot do it. And that’s ok, but we shouldn’t expect just because the admissions office let someone into a program that they’re qualified to build bridges after spending 4-5 years on a campus. It shouldn’t be emotionally abusive or anything like that, but I personally want to know that engineers have been put through some serious training so that the buildings I’m in stay standing, the water I’m drinking stays clean, and the electricity that I depend on for all but the barest of life’s essentials keeps flowing. What we need to do is normalize failure being acceptable, and encourage trying. To lean on a sports analogy: Not every kid who plays little league baseball is going to play for their high school team, not every high school player gets a shot in the minors, not every minor leaguer gets into the pros, not every pro is an all star, not every all star is the MVP. And all those are ok, sometimes physical and mental limitations come into play, and sometimes people just decide they’re not interested in pursuing something anymore due to the trade offs required for the next level.
  - mips_avatar 5y ago
    I think it's great to have challenging courses where students have the opportunity to prove themselves. But when a student is having a physical/mental health crisis there shouldn't be a 6 month wait to get counseling services. I know plenty of dropouts who would be great engineers today if someone had cared when they were struggling.
    - Teever 5y ago
marto1 5y ago
When you order your priorities in a way where you value making financial slaves out of your youth over providing them with quality education/apprentice programs there are consequences. Note: I know you can get quality education in the US, but it's a luxury service for most at this point.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  This is the answer. Ideology has optimized for the MBAs not people who discover and create. We can change, but it takes recognizing that profit isn't everything and that ideas themselves are highly valuable in a nonmonetary fashion.
  - marto1 5y ago
    Oh, on the contrary it's very much about profits. Just not the next-quarter-profits MBAs ponder about. Hitting education in such a way circles back a couple of generations down the line and results in lower economic output. Among other scarier things.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      I think I can agree with that viewpoint. Although I might say that a focus on long term profits needs to be combined with building an economical and sustainable business that invests in the community (community is vague and can mean a wide variety of things). I think businesses need a wider viewpoint that encompasses the system in which they operate.
- 11101010001100 5y ago
  Got my PhD in the US and have since returned home. Not making as much as I could in the US, but then again, I make a decent living where I am with no boss and a flexible schedule.
mindslight 5y ago
And yet there is so much talent being squandered on the surveillance industry, wall street, and make-work paper-pushing meta jobs in general. It's not a "shortage", but rather a severe misallocation of labor due to the intertwined issues of inflationary monetary policy, financialization, and MBA-ization. In the productive economy, direct labor has been relegated to being viewed as replaceable human-robots, and so there is little money in actually performing the work. Rather one achieves financial success by getting into the position of managing the work, and the prevailing wisdom is that you're a sucker if you don't do this.
jake_morrison 5y ago
Long term, the aging population means that the US needs immigration to keep things going. The politics are nuts, keeping people out who would do the jobs and not providing a path to citizenship. And they make it hard for people who come to study to stay. The aging population is the same all over the world, and there will be competition for young, talented people. These policies will kill US competitiveness in the next 10-20 years.
russellbeattie 5y ago
Despite the hyperbole of articles like this, the US still allows a larger total number of immigrants per year than any other nation in the world. Over a million people a year - basically the same as all of western Europe combined: "In absolute numbers, the United States has a larger immigrant population than any other country, with 47 million immigrants as of 2015. This represents 19.1% of the 244 million international migrants worldwide, and 14.4% of the United States population. ... According to the 2016 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, the United States admitted a total of 1.18 million legal immigrants (618k new arrivals, 565k status adjustments) in 2016. Of these, 48% were the immediate relatives of United States citizens, 20% were family-sponsored, 13% were refugees or asylum seekers, 12% were employment-based preferences, 4.2% were part of the Diversity Immigrant Visa program..." [1] That's roughly 3,200 new Americans every day, 365 days a year. 1/5 of the world's migrants come to one country: The USA. I personally think this is something to be proud of. We are still a nation of immigrants and though the Trump administration did try to curtail immigration, the system is still functioning and relatively robust. Now, what to do about top international talent avoiding the country because of radical right wing politics that demonize immigrants and conservative lawmakers that consistently try to prevent people coming? I think that's a solution with an obvious answer. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_St...
btrettel 5y ago
There is no overall STEM shortage as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure that hiring is difficult for many employers, but that doesn't mean there is a shortage. Here are some things to consider if you're hiring and you think you're facing a shortage: - Have you examined desk-rejected candidates' applications manually? I know someone who was contacted by some HR quality-control person at one company after never hearing anything back about multiple opportunities they applied to there. As it turns out, HR's automated software incorrectly decided my friend was unqualified and never forwarded their applications to a human. That was despite the fact that my friend was apparently one of the most qualified applicants for those positions. I'm sure this is common. - Are you advertising the job in the right places? A lot of jobs aren't posted widely. I get that you'd have to filter through a lot of unqualified applicants if posted widely, but if you're not getting as many qualified candidates as you want you probably should do something to increase the number of applicants. - Would a qualified candidate decide to apply to the position if they read the job ad? I've read a ton of very vague job ads that I hesitated to apply to. Yet, after applying I got an interview and learned that I was a good fit for the position. It's unclear to me why these ads are so vague. Also annoying are the job ads where the title doesn't describe the position well. Argonne National Laboratory has a ton of positions titled "Postdoctoral Appointee", which basically tells you nothing aside from that you need a PhD to apply. How would I even know to click on that? I have to check each one manually. - Are the job "requirements" actually requirements? I've seen many that list things that would be nice to have or things that are not actually necessary, eliminating many good candidates who may not look like what the employer expects. - Are you proactive in reaching out to candidates? In programming jobs this seems to be the norm (often via quite annoying recruiters) but it's quite rare in my experience outside of programming. - Is the job in a bad location? Does it have relatively low pay? I see the various DOE-funded labs complain a ton about having trouble hiring people, but they seem unwilling to do much anything about the facts that their pay is quite low and their locations are often terrible. - Are your application and interview processes unnecessarily difficult and/or time-consuming? I'm much less likely to apply to a company again if they require me to prepare something first like a presentation and have all-day marathon interviews. That's a huge time investment for a relatively low chance of getting a job. In fact, at this point I might decline to interview once I become aware that's a company's process. - (Added later.) Do you place onerous restrictions on non-work activities of your employees? For example, a lot of IP agreements assign basically everything an employee does on their own time to their employer. I know someone who has turned down a job offer because they considered these clauses to be overly restrictive and the company was unwilling to change the clause to something more reasonable.
TheCoelacanth 5y ago
America is facing an epidemic of whiny business owners. Labor is expensive right now. Deal with it. It's the free market you keep hyping up.
anotherevan 5y ago
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” — Isaac Asimov
yellowcake0 5y ago
My 2¢, I'm currently interviewing for jobs in biotech, and it's been pretty tough. Between all the interviews, take home assignments, coding challenges, presentation and interview prep, I'm putting in 10-12 hour days 7 days a week. I suppose it's possible that there really is a talent shortage, but I've seen little evidence of it personally. Companies are demanding and it's not uncommon for me to be treated in an inconsiderate or discourteous manner.
- atrettel 5y ago
  Yes, this is something that I wish more employers recognized. Applying to jobs can be quite time-consuming, especially once you start to get multiple interview requests. That said, some applications are also time-consuming and can take hours to complete, especially if they require custom documents that explain how your qualifications satisfy the requirements or how your career/research goals fit into the context of the position. I feel like those kind of writing prompts would be better later in the process, perhaps during the interview stage, rather than upfront during the application stage.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
this is what the MAGAs and half of the West has been clamoring for since ages.. no more immigrants. immigrants finally had enough. if the people don't want them and the immigration policies and border patrol officers are more unwelcoming everyday, why should they come? the global population age distributions are set anyways. They can figure out how to fund their social security as retirees go from 20% to 40% of the population. I'll be eating popcorn and watching this episode of "be careful what you wish for" with glee.
phendrenad2 5y ago
This is Bloomberg OPINION so I don't know if it's even worth responding to. It's essentially someone's personal blog, right? Anyway, the premise seems wrong. The post doesn't do a good job convincing me that there is a problem. U.S. employers may have been "crying out in vain for new workers" even before the pandemic, but getting a job was just as hard as ever. If there's a skill shortage, overseas talent can and has been filing it. Most people here seem to be responding to the angle that skilled U.S. workers are a thinning herd. This is likely exacerbated by the fact that getting an education in the U.S. is almost impossible. Most people can't afford college, and financial aid doesn't go far enough.

35 points by ushakov 5y ago

MattGaiser 5y ago

I will believe this when I hear of serious talent retention efforts becoming widespread.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
The problem always precedes the solution. If the problem is starting to be noticed now, the attempted solutions will show up... maybe later this year, in a half-baked way? Maybe in 2023 or 2024, in a decently well-thought-out way?
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Companies have been complaining about dev talent being in short supply for about a decade now. Best way to get a raise is still to quit your job after a year.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    > for about a decade Oh, they've been complaining at least since I started in the early 90's.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Do you think it's sustainable to raise your entire dev team's comp by 20% or 30% year after year after year? I just don't think that math makes sense after a short period of time.
    - eli_gottlieb 5y ago
      >Do you think it's sustainable to raise your entire dev team's comp by 20% or 30% year after year after year? Is it more or less sustainable than hiring new staff each and every year to replace those who leave?
      - missedthecue 5y ago
        Based on the way the market functions, yes the status quo seems to be more sustainable.

convolvatron 5y ago

if the US wants to keep that pipe flowing they need to do a much better job of educating the general populace and steering talent into STEM. we're doing a really crappy job with most of the babies we already have. we don't need lots more babies.

ushakov 5y ago
why do we need to steer everyone into STEM? some people want to be entertainers, some want to do charitable work as humanitarians not everyone is suited nor wants to be in STEM
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  > why do we need to steer everyone into STEM? We don't want to steer _everyone_ into STEM. But we could be doing a better job of prepping students and giving them the tools they need to enable them to go into STEM if they so choose.
- convolvatron 5y ago
  sorry, by 'talent' I meant those that show an interest and aptitude for STEM - I agree with you %150, there are multitudes of other ways someone can meaningful contribute to society
- petre 5y ago
  And some want to be literature or philisophy majors, musicians or artists. Without human sciences society would become dehumanized.
klyrs 5y ago
> we're doing a really crappy job with most of the babies we already have. Unnecessarily hot take: UBI should start in the second trimester.

jsnodlin 5y ago

That’s what happens when you cut off H1Bs. Cutting off the pipeline through which the best and brightest from all over the world willing come into your country is going to have consequences.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Why do you want the countries visa holders come from to suffer so much? The United States doesn't have a moral right to suck up all of the world's intellectual talent. Let other nations have a shot at building intellectual capital.
- 30209554 5y ago
  >Why do you want the countries visa holders come from to suffer so much? The United States doesn't have a moral right to suck up all of the world's intellectual talent. This is a disingenuous frame on two counts: (1) Wanting the US to succeed does not mean that one wants other nations to suffer. Success is not zero-sum. (2) The United States doesn't suck up intellectual talent. Individuals apply for visas and travel here willingly, often at great expense. Providing opportunities to those with talent and ambition is absolutely moral.
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > Why do you want the countries visa holders come from to suffer so much? Because individuals matter more than countries: the right to pursuit of happiness and all that.

mips_avatar 5y ago

I think we need to be a lot more thoughtful about supporting university students through engineering programs. As a student I saw so many classmates crumple under the academic stress of weed out classes. Big engineering schools do a horrible job of supporting and cultivating the emotional lives of their students. 50% of students dropping out of engineering from freshman -> sophomore year is not normal.

dpeck 5y ago
There’s a trade off there though. I want the classes to be incredibly rigorous, and that means that there should be some amount of students who do not want to or cannot do it. And that’s ok, but we shouldn’t expect just because the admissions office let someone into a program that they’re qualified to build bridges after spending 4-5 years on a campus. It shouldn’t be emotionally abusive or anything like that, but I personally want to know that engineers have been put through some serious training so that the buildings I’m in stay standing, the water I’m drinking stays clean, and the electricity that I depend on for all but the barest of life’s essentials keeps flowing. What we need to do is normalize failure being acceptable, and encourage trying. To lean on a sports analogy: Not every kid who plays little league baseball is going to play for their high school team, not every high school player gets a shot in the minors, not every minor leaguer gets into the pros, not every pro is an all star, not every all star is the MVP. And all those are ok, sometimes physical and mental limitations come into play, and sometimes people just decide they’re not interested in pursuing something anymore due to the trade offs required for the next level.
- mips_avatar 5y ago
  I think it's great to have challenging courses where students have the opportunity to prove themselves. But when a student is having a physical/mental health crisis there shouldn't be a 6 month wait to get counseling services. I know plenty of dropouts who would be great engineers today if someone had cared when they were struggling.
  - Teever 5y ago

marto1 5y ago

When you order your priorities in a way where you value making financial slaves out of your youth over providing them with quality education/apprentice programs there are consequences. Note: I know you can get quality education in the US, but it's a luxury service for most at this point.

netizen-936824 5y ago
This is the answer. Ideology has optimized for the MBAs not people who discover and create. We can change, but it takes recognizing that profit isn't everything and that ideas themselves are highly valuable in a nonmonetary fashion.
- marto1 5y ago
  Oh, on the contrary it's very much about profits. Just not the next-quarter-profits MBAs ponder about. Hitting education in such a way circles back a couple of generations down the line and results in lower economic output. Among other scarier things.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    I think I can agree with that viewpoint. Although I might say that a focus on long term profits needs to be combined with building an economical and sustainable business that invests in the community (community is vague and can mean a wide variety of things). I think businesses need a wider viewpoint that encompasses the system in which they operate.
11101010001100 5y ago
Got my PhD in the US and have since returned home. Not making as much as I could in the US, but then again, I make a decent living where I am with no boss and a flexible schedule.

mindslight 5y ago

And yet there is so much talent being squandered on the surveillance industry, wall street, and make-work paper-pushing meta jobs in general. It's not a "shortage", but rather a severe misallocation of labor due to the intertwined issues of inflationary monetary policy, financialization, and MBA-ization. In the productive economy, direct labor has been relegated to being viewed as replaceable human-robots, and so there is little money in actually performing the work. Rather one achieves financial success by getting into the position of managing the work, and the prevailing wisdom is that you're a sucker if you don't do this.

jake_morrison 5y ago

Long term, the aging population means that the US needs immigration to keep things going. The politics are nuts, keeping people out who would do the jobs and not providing a path to citizenship. And they make it hard for people who come to study to stay. The aging population is the same all over the world, and there will be competition for young, talented people. These policies will kill US competitiveness in the next 10-20 years.

russellbeattie 5y ago

Despite the hyperbole of articles like this, the US still allows a larger total number of immigrants per year than any other nation in the world. Over a million people a year - basically the same as all of western Europe combined: "In absolute numbers, the United States has a larger immigrant population than any other country, with 47 million immigrants as of 2015. This represents 19.1% of the 244 million international migrants worldwide, and 14.4% of the United States population. ... According to the 2016 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, the United States admitted a total of 1.18 million legal immigrants (618k new arrivals, 565k status adjustments) in 2016. Of these, 48% were the immediate relatives of United States citizens, 20% were family-sponsored, 13% were refugees or asylum seekers, 12% were employment-based preferences, 4.2% were part of the Diversity Immigrant Visa program..." [1] That's roughly 3,200 new Americans every day, 365 days a year. 1/5 of the world's migrants come to one country: The USA. I personally think this is something to be proud of. We are still a nation of immigrants and though the Trump administration did try to curtail immigration, the system is still functioning and relatively robust. Now, what to do about top international talent avoiding the country because of radical right wing politics that demonize immigrants and conservative lawmakers that consistently try to prevent people coming? I think that's a solution with an obvious answer. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_St...

btrettel 5y ago

There is no overall STEM shortage as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure that hiring is difficult for many employers, but that doesn't mean there is a shortage. Here are some things to consider if you're hiring and you think you're facing a shortage: - Have you examined desk-rejected candidates' applications manually? I know someone who was contacted by some HR quality-control person at one company after never hearing anything back about multiple opportunities they applied to there. As it turns out, HR's automated software incorrectly decided my friend was unqualified and never forwarded their applications to a human. That was despite the fact that my friend was apparently one of the most qualified applicants for those positions. I'm sure this is common. - Are you advertising the job in the right places? A lot of jobs aren't posted widely. I get that you'd have to filter through a lot of unqualified applicants if posted widely, but if you're not getting as many qualified candidates as you want you probably should do something to increase the number of applicants. - Would a qualified candidate decide to apply to the position if they read the job ad? I've read a ton of very vague job ads that I hesitated to apply to. Yet, after applying I got an interview and learned that I was a good fit for the position. It's unclear to me why these ads are so vague. Also annoying are the job ads where the title doesn't describe the position well. Argonne National Laboratory has a ton of positions titled "Postdoctoral Appointee", which basically tells you nothing aside from that you need a PhD to apply. How would I even know to click on that? I have to check each one manually. - Are the job "requirements" actually requirements? I've seen many that list things that would be nice to have or things that are not actually necessary, eliminating many good candidates who may not look like what the employer expects. - Are you proactive in reaching out to candidates? In programming jobs this seems to be the norm (often via quite annoying recruiters) but it's quite rare in my experience outside of programming. - Is the job in a bad location? Does it have relatively low pay? I see the various DOE-funded labs complain a ton about having trouble hiring people, but they seem unwilling to do much anything about the facts that their pay is quite low and their locations are often terrible. - Are your application and interview processes unnecessarily difficult and/or time-consuming? I'm much less likely to apply to a company again if they require me to prepare something first like a presentation and have all-day marathon interviews. That's a huge time investment for a relatively low chance of getting a job. In fact, at this point I might decline to interview once I become aware that's a company's process. - (Added later.) Do you place onerous restrictions on non-work activities of your employees? For example, a lot of IP agreements assign basically everything an employee does on their own time to their employer. I know someone who has turned down a job offer because they considered these clauses to be overly restrictive and the company was unwilling to change the clause to something more reasonable.

TheCoelacanth 5y ago

America is facing an epidemic of whiny business owners. Labor is expensive right now. Deal with it. It's the free market you keep hyping up.

anotherevan 5y ago

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” — Isaac Asimov

yellowcake0 5y ago

My 2¢, I'm currently interviewing for jobs in biotech, and it's been pretty tough. Between all the interviews, take home assignments, coding challenges, presentation and interview prep, I'm putting in 10-12 hour days 7 days a week. I suppose it's possible that there really is a talent shortage, but I've seen little evidence of it personally. Companies are demanding and it's not uncommon for me to be treated in an inconsiderate or discourteous manner.

atrettel 5y ago
Yes, this is something that I wish more employers recognized. Applying to jobs can be quite time-consuming, especially once you start to get multiple interview requests. That said, some applications are also time-consuming and can take hours to complete, especially if they require custom documents that explain how your qualifications satisfy the requirements or how your career/research goals fit into the context of the position. I feel like those kind of writing prompts would be better later in the process, perhaps during the interview stage, rather than upfront during the application stage.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

this is what the MAGAs and half of the West has been clamoring for since ages.. no more immigrants. immigrants finally had enough. if the people don't want them and the immigration policies and border patrol officers are more unwelcoming everyday, why should they come? the global population age distributions are set anyways. They can figure out how to fund their social security as retirees go from 20% to 40% of the population. I'll be eating popcorn and watching this episode of "be careful what you wish for" with glee.

phendrenad2 5y ago

This is Bloomberg OPINION so I don't know if it's even worth responding to. It's essentially someone's personal blog, right? Anyway, the premise seems wrong. The post doesn't do a good job convincing me that there is a problem. U.S. employers may have been "crying out in vain for new workers" even before the pandemic, but getting a job was just as hard as ever. If there's a skill shortage, overseas talent can and has been filing it. Most people here seem to be responding to the angle that skilled U.S. workers are a thinning herd. This is likely exacerbated by the fact that getting an education in the U.S. is almost impossible. Most people can't afford college, and financial aid doesn't go far enough.