7 ms·

This article is playing word-games. When employers and economists talk about talent, they mean capability, regardless of whether it's natural or comes from har

by dspeyer 14y ago

This article is playing word-games. When employers and economists talk about talent, they mean capability, regardless of whether it's natural or comes from hard work. Your dictionary may say "natural aptitude or skill", but that's irrelevant to the job market.

apaitch 14y ago
I didn't mean to get into the debate between natural talent and skills acquired by work - probably should've cut the "natural" part out of the definition to make that clear. I was thinking of the "potentiality" aspect of talent. I agree that employers want capable employees - preferably able to contribute from day one. I think investing in employees who have the potential to be great contributors but are not quite there yet is worthwhile, and is something that's under-emphasized in most recruitment strategies. To me, "talent" is when a master finds an apprentice he knows could be great with the right guidance. The job market demands masters (dubbed "talent"), but few are willing to help create masters by actualizing the potential of those who are less experienced. Note: I'm not talking about on-the-job training from someone who doesn't know what a computer is to a master programmer. I'm talking about allowing people who are less immediately capable into the workplace and mentoring/growing them into strong contributors.
- snowwindwaves 14y ago
  Growing talent at a company seems to be a bit of a lost concept. I think it went out the door when the company man disappeared: layoffs and lack of raises reducing loyalty.
- dspeyer 14y ago
  Ah, I see. I'll admit I haven't seen a lot of explicit on-the-job training (besides that dealing with internal technologies), but I have seen a lot of people who's first job is less challenging than their later ones, who use it as a growing experience and a stepstone. The real question is whether a large number of programmers don't reach their full potential or do so significantly later than they would have with proper mentoring. A difficult thing to find evidence for either way.
coryl 14y ago
I hope most people know by now that "natural talent" isn't real. See books: Outliers, The Talent Code
- michaelt 14y ago
  Gladwell's theory, as I've heard it, is that mastery demands 10,000 hours of good quality practice. When your developers cost $75 an hour including overheads, paying people for those 10,000 hours is an extremely costly proposition.
  - coryl 14y ago
    Not sure what your point is, with due respect. Everyone wants to hire master engineers, but it's not like master engineers are available for hire.
  - JamesLeonis 14y ago
    Gladwell was arguing that it takes 10,000 hours to go from a knowing nothing to becoming a master at any craft. At 8 hours a day, every single day, is ~3.5 years. For programmers, most of the initial chunk of that time is through hobby programming or through formal training at a college or the like. That's 3000 hours that the company didn't pay for. That's probably the experience most programmers walk in to any company as a Jr Developer, and they are paid accordingly. Nobody is being offered $150k/yr with that level of experience. Maybe $30-$40 depending on where they are working, and then are promoted and given raises above that.
    - michaelt 14y ago
      When I say $75 an hour including overheads I don't mean a salary of $150,000 - I mean a salary of $60,000 plus tax plus health insurance plus pension contribution plus office space plus a desk plus a computer plus the calls to IT Helpdesk plus the line manager's time plus any commercial software plus other developers' time coaching plus the 20% cut paid to the recruiter plus the HR and payroll people's time plus networking and internet connection plus the backed up storage space on file and mail servers plus the car parking space plus a phone line plus cleaning plus the break room food and coffee. Of course these things are company-dependent, but I'm a comparatively junior developer and for purposes of internal costing my employer costs my time at $75 an hour.
tikhonj 14y ago
Exactly. The "talent shortage" is a lack of employable programmers period, not just a lack of exceptional programmers. And this is easy to see: everybody I know in my class (also Berkeley, coincidentally) has managed to get an internship or full time job without much effort. This includes both people with and without experience before college. I managed to get a couple of interesting offers despite never sending my resume out, attending career fairs or even answering recruiter emails. Clearly the market is in the programmer's favor--every programmer's favor. As far as I can tell, pretty much everybody graduating that wants a job gets a job. Naturally, not everybody goes to work for Google or Facebook, but this includes people even worse than the presumably hypothetical "John". Also, people like "Norman" are just as likely to get snapped up by Google and then still work in relative obscurity. Well-paid, enjoyable relative obscurity with great benefits and a great culture, but relative obscurity nonetheless. Really, the talent shortage works like this: you, as a company, would love a "Norman". You'd be happy with a "John". You'd probably be content with anybody who can program. Instead you get "Barry" who can't write a FizzBuzz program in any language. All this puts upward pressure on programmer salaries and benefits (good) and motivates recruiters to spam me about openings for senior Java developers (bad). Also, a lot of companies do claim to want very good engineers. But I've found this to be empty rhetoric as often as not: for every company claiming that and actually having a stringent interview process and difficult technical problems there's a company willing to accept anybody to work on their CRUD app but wants their ad to sound cool. Anyhow: there is some shortage of programmers of any but minimal competence. That is what "talent shortage" actually means, and, as far as I can tell, it's actually accurate.
- apaitch 14y ago
  From the outside looking in, it certainly doesn't seem like everyone is eager to snatch up mediocre graduates. I can't say I've done much research on the subject or crunched numbers, but I noticed two things: 1) Complaints about "talent shortages" from top companies and startups in the Valley and otherwise. 2) Companies evaluating people based on experience, GitHub profiles, open source contributions, etc. Not that it's wrong to evaluate based on that criteria. However, for people like the hypothetical John it's quite hard to keep up with a good CS program and manage to do impressive things on the side. So you end up with people with strong potential, much of it not yet actualized, who spend the first years of their careers in a job of questionable usefulness (excel macros?). I think there are more of those people than commonly assumed, and I do think they can contribute well in much better places. They may be slow at first, but give them 6 months and they will be strong members of the team. Granted, a startup may not have 6 months to give, but once you've got some resources under your belt a green-but-talented engineer can be a great investment.
rmc 14y ago
"Dictionary defintions" are usually a red flag during an argument,

by dspeyer 14y ago

apaitch 14y ago

I didn't mean to get into the debate between natural talent and skills acquired by work - probably should've cut the "natural" part out of the definition to make that clear. I was thinking of the "potentiality" aspect of talent. I agree that employers want capable employees - preferably able to contribute from day one. I think investing in employees who have the potential to be great contributors but are not quite there yet is worthwhile, and is something that's under-emphasized in most recruitment strategies. To me, "talent" is when a master finds an apprentice he knows could be great with the right guidance. The job market demands masters (dubbed "talent"), but few are willing to help create masters by actualizing the potential of those who are less experienced. Note: I'm not talking about on-the-job training from someone who doesn't know what a computer is to a master programmer. I'm talking about allowing people who are less immediately capable into the workplace and mentoring/growing them into strong contributors.

snowwindwaves 14y ago
Growing talent at a company seems to be a bit of a lost concept. I think it went out the door when the company man disappeared: layoffs and lack of raises reducing loyalty.
dspeyer 14y ago
Ah, I see. I'll admit I haven't seen a lot of explicit on-the-job training (besides that dealing with internal technologies), but I have seen a lot of people who's first job is less challenging than their later ones, who use it as a growing experience and a stepstone. The real question is whether a large number of programmers don't reach their full potential or do so significantly later than they would have with proper mentoring. A difficult thing to find evidence for either way.

coryl 14y ago

I hope most people know by now that "natural talent" isn't real. See books: Outliers, The Talent Code

michaelt 14y ago
Gladwell's theory, as I've heard it, is that mastery demands 10,000 hours of good quality practice. When your developers cost $75 an hour including overheads, paying people for those 10,000 hours is an extremely costly proposition.
- coryl 14y ago
  Not sure what your point is, with due respect. Everyone wants to hire master engineers, but it's not like master engineers are available for hire.
- JamesLeonis 14y ago
  Gladwell was arguing that it takes 10,000 hours to go from a knowing nothing to becoming a master at any craft. At 8 hours a day, every single day, is ~3.5 years. For programmers, most of the initial chunk of that time is through hobby programming or through formal training at a college or the like. That's 3000 hours that the company didn't pay for. That's probably the experience most programmers walk in to any company as a Jr Developer, and they are paid accordingly. Nobody is being offered $150k/yr with that level of experience. Maybe $30-$40 depending on where they are working, and then are promoted and given raises above that.
  - michaelt 14y ago
    When I say $75 an hour including overheads I don't mean a salary of $150,000 - I mean a salary of $60,000 plus tax plus health insurance plus pension contribution plus office space plus a desk plus a computer plus the calls to IT Helpdesk plus the line manager's time plus any commercial software plus other developers' time coaching plus the 20% cut paid to the recruiter plus the HR and payroll people's time plus networking and internet connection plus the backed up storage space on file and mail servers plus the car parking space plus a phone line plus cleaning plus the break room food and coffee. Of course these things are company-dependent, but I'm a comparatively junior developer and for purposes of internal costing my employer costs my time at $75 an hour.

tikhonj 14y ago

Exactly. The "talent shortage" is a lack of employable programmers period, not just a lack of exceptional programmers. And this is easy to see: everybody I know in my class (also Berkeley, coincidentally) has managed to get an internship or full time job without much effort. This includes both people with and without experience before college. I managed to get a couple of interesting offers despite never sending my resume out, attending career fairs or even answering recruiter emails. Clearly the market is in the programmer's favor--every programmer's favor. As far as I can tell, pretty much everybody graduating that wants a job gets a job. Naturally, not everybody goes to work for Google or Facebook, but this includes people even worse than the presumably hypothetical "John". Also, people like "Norman" are just as likely to get snapped up by Google and then still work in relative obscurity. Well-paid, enjoyable relative obscurity with great benefits and a great culture, but relative obscurity nonetheless. Really, the talent shortage works like this: you, as a company, would love a "Norman". You'd be happy with a "John". You'd probably be content with anybody who can program. Instead you get "Barry" who can't write a FizzBuzz program in any language. All this puts upward pressure on programmer salaries and benefits (good) and motivates recruiters to spam me about openings for senior Java developers (bad). Also, a lot of companies do claim to want very good engineers. But I've found this to be empty rhetoric as often as not: for every company claiming that and actually having a stringent interview process and difficult technical problems there's a company willing to accept anybody to work on their CRUD app but wants their ad to sound cool. Anyhow: there is some shortage of programmers of any but minimal competence. That is what "talent shortage" actually means, and, as far as I can tell, it's actually accurate.

apaitch 14y ago
From the outside looking in, it certainly doesn't seem like everyone is eager to snatch up mediocre graduates. I can't say I've done much research on the subject or crunched numbers, but I noticed two things: 1) Complaints about "talent shortages" from top companies and startups in the Valley and otherwise. 2) Companies evaluating people based on experience, GitHub profiles, open source contributions, etc. Not that it's wrong to evaluate based on that criteria. However, for people like the hypothetical John it's quite hard to keep up with a good CS program and manage to do impressive things on the side. So you end up with people with strong potential, much of it not yet actualized, who spend the first years of their careers in a job of questionable usefulness (excel macros?). I think there are more of those people than commonly assumed, and I do think they can contribute well in much better places. They may be slow at first, but give them 6 months and they will be strong members of the team. Granted, a startup may not have 6 months to give, but once you've got some resources under your belt a green-but-talented engineer can be a great investment.

rmc 14y ago

"Dictionary defintions" are usually a red flag during an argument,