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> Structural unemployment happens when the skills of the work force don't match the needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring. An

> Structural unemployment happens when the skills of the work force don't match the needs of employers, so there is both unemployment and difficulty hiring. Any study on why there would be this kind of mismatch in the tech industry? I'd imagine that tech industry is the most transparently competitive and least regulated sector so there should be a reasonable balance between the supply of skills and the demand. In addition, there are so much resource that teaches people all kinds of tech skills, so people should be able to move from one skill set to another if really needed.

shagie 2y ago
The easy problems are solved. Crud with the preferred language and framework is a known quantity and can be "ok here we are and go" and you can get a boot camp or new grad and have them do that. Let's say that we need to solve a new problem. The shop language is Scala. Who can learn how to program in Scala? Can the boot camp who learned how to do NodeJS be trained in Scala? If so, how long will it take? If we spend a year to get them to being an acceptable Scala dev, will they get a new job immediately? If we are paying a "we are training you low rates" can we get any applicants? If we are paying a "we assume you to be a skilled Scala dev in a year and we expect to get 2-3 years of productive work beyond training" rate and they leave immediately after getting them sufficiently trained... what then? As many developers see themselves as a "Java developer" or "React front end developer" rather than a software engineer, the mismatch is akin to asking "why can't we get plumbers to do electrical work?" The people who are Java developers or React front end developers are skilled in the trade rather than as a knowledge worker in software engineering.
- g9yuayon 2y ago
  This sounds like the trend is good for the incumbents? That is, it's hard for the supply to catch up with the demand in broad scope, so people with solid experience will be marketable for a while.
  - shagie 2y ago
    It is good for people who can, as knowledge workers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker ) are able to continue to gain and market their ability to learn new things within the domain and apply their knowledge. There are incumbents who are not able (don't have the skill scaffolding to support a broader understanding) or are unwilling to spend time to continue to be able to work or are a "follow instructions". I've quipped that... A junior dev follows instructions A mid dev completes tasks A senior dev solves problems In this simplified model, I know a lot of junior devs (even with a decade of experience) who for whatever reason are unable to partition their software development tasks themselves to be able to be given a task to complete. Likewise, I know a number of devs who can be given tasks but if you give a broader "this is a problem that the organization needs to solve" are hopelessly lost and apply and reapply the patterns that they have learned to try to make the problem fit into a solution they know. I do not believe that everyone has the skills / aptitude to move from one to the next. Those that do will have the ability to navigate the new market. Those that lack the ability to move up will eventually be overtaken either by younger (cheaper) workers, or improving automation.

shagie 2y ago

The easy problems are solved. Crud with the preferred language and framework is a known quantity and can be "ok here we are and go" and you can get a boot camp or new grad and have them do that. Let's say that we need to solve a new problem. The shop language is Scala. Who can learn how to program in Scala? Can the boot camp who learned how to do NodeJS be trained in Scala? If so, how long will it take? If we spend a year to get them to being an acceptable Scala dev, will they get a new job immediately? If we are paying a "we are training you low rates" can we get any applicants? If we are paying a "we assume you to be a skilled Scala dev in a year and we expect to get 2-3 years of productive work beyond training" rate and they leave immediately after getting them sufficiently trained... what then? As many developers see themselves as a "Java developer" or "React front end developer" rather than a software engineer, the mismatch is akin to asking "why can't we get plumbers to do electrical work?" The people who are Java developers or React front end developers are skilled in the trade rather than as a knowledge worker in software engineering.

g9yuayon 2y ago
This sounds like the trend is good for the incumbents? That is, it's hard for the supply to catch up with the demand in broad scope, so people with solid experience will be marketable for a while.
- shagie 2y ago
  It is good for people who can, as knowledge workers ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker ) are able to continue to gain and market their ability to learn new things within the domain and apply their knowledge. There are incumbents who are not able (don't have the skill scaffolding to support a broader understanding) or are unwilling to spend time to continue to be able to work or are a "follow instructions". I've quipped that... A junior dev follows instructions A mid dev completes tasks A senior dev solves problems In this simplified model, I know a lot of junior devs (even with a decade of experience) who for whatever reason are unable to partition their software development tasks themselves to be able to be given a task to complete. Likewise, I know a number of devs who can be given tasks but if you give a broader "this is a problem that the organization needs to solve" are hopelessly lost and apply and reapply the patterns that they have learned to try to make the problem fit into a solution they know. I do not believe that everyone has the skills / aptitude to move from one to the next. Those that do will have the ability to navigate the new market. Those that lack the ability to move up will eventually be overtaken either by younger (cheaper) workers, or improving automation.