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Is there some institutional barrier to training new hires? It seems like the inevitable result if you need an increasingly niche skill. The situation doesn't se

by Kye 4y ago

Is there some institutional barrier to training new hires? It seems like the inevitable result if you need an increasingly niche skill. The situation doesn't seem like it'll get better on its own.

bcrosby95 4y ago
Train by who? How do you start this process? If you never had the expertise, or more unfortunately had it but lost it, it's very expensive to gain it.
- Kye 4y ago
  This seems to be a growing problem across the economy. Companies weren't willing to train for so long that now not only is there no one to hire who knows how to do jobs, there's no one left to train people to do them.
crabbone 4y ago
I work in an infra department, which used to be its own company before it was bought by a bigger one. Out of about 20 developers, one is younger than 30. Most are in their 40s and some are 50+. I know that when I was hired, my job was advertised for over a year, if not longer. They pay may not be stellar, but it's still pretty decent... In my previous position, I was also responsible for screening and hiring, so I also had some insight into what's available on the job market. My impression is that the younger generation simply doesn't even know this kind of job exists. Those who go into programming aspire to be a Web developer, or an ML developer, or a game developer... DevOps is one of those things people have heard about. But, this label was coopted by cloud some time ago. So, those aiming for DevOps role think they need to learn how to use public cloud API... It's actually quite eye-opening to have access to the hiring process. One of the very surprising things to me was that newer generation of programmers tends to be confused about persistent / volatile storage. So, if you asked them to give a description of what a "file" is, more than once I've heard an answer like "a portion of memory". Which, while true in some sense, is a weird way to put it. But then I realized that people who are entering the field today may not have been exposed to PCs. Naively, if anyone asked me to show where the files in the computer live, I'd get them a picture of a hard drive. But people who only ever used laptops probably don't even know what a hard drive looks like. Finally, it's also a chicken and egg problem. You cannot really learn about infra outside of a big org that has its own physical infra. Similar to how you'd never be exposed to configuring BGP if all your exposure to computers is your own PC. A popular method of learning today is to learn online. But, if you do that -- you are almost inevitably driven to the public cloud, because that's the way to provide you with all that virtual infrastructure online. You cannot also practice at home, since the hardware to practice on tends to be very expensive and not very useful for individual users. Other fields get it easier because they have to select from somewhat prepared candidates. When it comes to infra, it's a lot more investment into teaching one.

by Kye 4y ago

Is there some institutional barrier to training new hires? It seems like the inevitable result if you need an increasingly niche skill. The situation doesn't seem like it'll get better on its own.

bcrosby95 4y ago

Train by who? How do you start this process? If you never had the expertise, or more unfortunately had it but lost it, it's very expensive to gain it.

Kye 4y ago
This seems to be a growing problem across the economy. Companies weren't willing to train for so long that now not only is there no one to hire who knows how to do jobs, there's no one left to train people to do them.

crabbone 4y ago

I work in an infra department, which used to be its own company before it was bought by a bigger one. Out of about 20 developers, one is younger than 30. Most are in their 40s and some are 50+. I know that when I was hired, my job was advertised for over a year, if not longer. They pay may not be stellar, but it's still pretty decent... In my previous position, I was also responsible for screening and hiring, so I also had some insight into what's available on the job market. My impression is that the younger generation simply doesn't even know this kind of job exists. Those who go into programming aspire to be a Web developer, or an ML developer, or a game developer... DevOps is one of those things people have heard about. But, this label was coopted by cloud some time ago. So, those aiming for DevOps role think they need to learn how to use public cloud API... It's actually quite eye-opening to have access to the hiring process. One of the very surprising things to me was that newer generation of programmers tends to be confused about persistent / volatile storage. So, if you asked them to give a description of what a "file" is, more than once I've heard an answer like "a portion of memory". Which, while true in some sense, is a weird way to put it. But then I realized that people who are entering the field today may not have been exposed to PCs. Naively, if anyone asked me to show where the files in the computer live, I'd get them a picture of a hard drive. But people who only ever used laptops probably don't even know what a hard drive looks like. Finally, it's also a chicken and egg problem. You cannot really learn about infra outside of a big org that has its own physical infra. Similar to how you'd never be exposed to configuring BGP if all your exposure to computers is your own PC. A popular method of learning today is to learn online. But, if you do that -- you are almost inevitably driven to the public cloud, because that's the way to provide you with all that virtual infrastructure online. You cannot also practice at home, since the hardware to practice on tends to be very expensive and not very useful for individual users. Other fields get it easier because they have to select from somewhat prepared candidates. When it comes to infra, it's a lot more investment into teaching one.