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My hypothesis is that all tech people teach themselves whatever is trendy at the time when they are still in school (college, or if they decide not to go that r

by jlgreco 14y ago

My hypothesis is that all tech people teach themselves whatever is trendy at the time when they are still in school (college, or if they decide not to go that route, highschool). Older more experienced candidates of course did the same, but the trendy tech they taught themselves in school is now out of date. There will of course be those golden candidates that have extensive industry experience but also know the modern newfangled hipster shit that any junior in college is hacking away with at the time. I don't see these candidates having trouble finding work. You're a startup. You're trendy; your office is littered with nerf-guns and shit, or whatever trendy startups are doing these days. Your systems are all Node/Go/Ruby/Whatever. ...Do you hire the guy out of college, for an "out-of-college" salary, that has all of this stuff on his resume? Or do you hire the guy with 15 years of experience on his resume who only has "C/C++/Perl" on his resume for a "15 years of experience" salary? Even if you'd go with the 15+ years guy, can you see why companies might become frustrated?

learc83 14y ago
Sorry that doesn't make sense. In my experience there are few college kids with Node/Go/Haskell/Clojure on their resume, and those same kids will have whatever is new and exciting in 10 years on their resume then too. Your average brand new college CS graduate knows Java. The average foreign programmer also knows Java. The average programmer with 10 years experience knows Java and probably C++. The average programmer doesn't work with "modern newfangled hipster ship", and the average employer isn't looking for employees who do. And if you are a startup, you definitely aren't going to find people skilled in Node/Go/Whatever by hiring cheap H1-B workers. In general Colleges are about 10-15 years behind what's considered the new hip thing in programming. Since most new grads only know what they learned in college most new college grads are 10-15 years behind the new hip thing in programming. Startups don't hire new grads because they can ramp up faster, they hire them because they don't have families to take up their time, so they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  > In my experience there are few college kids with Node/Go/Haskell/Clojure on their resume > Your average brand new college CS graduate knows Java. Maybe we are reaching different conclusions because we are looking at different anecdotal evidence. What you are saying in these two lines does not jive with what I have observed at all. Colleges are not teaching that trendy stuff, but CS programs in American universities don't teach any technology anyway (aside perhaps from an OS course or two that focuses on the Linux kernel a bit too much, and the obligatory first freshman quarter with Java/C++). The tech college students come out of school with, from what I have seen, is the stuff they taught themselves outside of their coursework. That stuff is almost invariably the trendy shit. At the very least, the trendier parts of Java. > they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts. Either way, it is either about the ability to do the work for those salaries, or the willingness to to do the work for those salaries. Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent.
  - learc83 14y ago
    >The tech college students come out of school with, from what I have seen, is the stuff they taught themselves outside of their coursework. That's the thing, the majority of students don't teach themselves anything outside their coursework. The ones that do are the top x% that everyone wants to hire, and they are still teaching themselves new stuff when they have 10 years experience. Being passionate about programming has nothing to do with age. > Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent. Of course companies are going to look for cheaper talent, the people doing the hiring for the most part are looking to optimize for the short term. The problem is that it's very hard to accurately and objectively measure programmer productivity, so companies use ineffective proxies. Hiring an inexperienced programmer who works for $25 an hour vs an experienced one who works for $50 an hour may look like a good deal when it's likely that it actually isn't.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      > That's the thing, the majority of students don't teach themselves anything outside their coursework. Right. So I don't know how many recent graduates are like that, I think I am less pessimistic about that than you (I want to collect some of those juicy referral bonuses, but everybody that I know is either employed or plainly incompetent, including everyone I knew in school... By far most of them are employed), but basically I consider those people to be a part of the essentially unemployable pool. There are no doubt a lot of fundamentally unemployable people that want to be in tech (without being willing to crack a book outside of class), but as far as I can tell there is a clear shortage of competent employable people.
- voidlogic 14y ago
  You know why schools teach kids Java/C (the lingua francas of computing) rather than the latest hot 5-min fad? Because it doesn't matter. The kids are taught those languages simply to enable the teaching of computer science theory and software engineering. This is the way it should be. You will learn new tech as needed your entire career, if you have the right preparation it should be a no brainer. You need to learn the theory once. Outside of the west coast most companies realize this and invest in training as needed. It is the hipster too cool for school startup kids that have things wrong. They never went to school, they don't realize that picking up their favorite $language is trivial for anyone with the proper background and just a means to an ends, writing useful software. >>Startups don't hire new grads because they can ramp up faster, they hire them because they don't have families to take up their time, so they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts. This, although foreign workers can be appealing for some of the same reasons.
bad_user 14y ago
> Your systems are all Node/Go/Ruby/Whatever ... Or do you hire the guy with 15 years of experience on his resume who only has "C/C++/Perl" on his resume I tend to prefer the guy with 15 years of experience with "C/C++/Perl" on his resume. Our software is a mix of Python, Scala, Java, CoffeeScript and Obj-C (different components). Scala is the driving force right now for the backend and the code that we've built in it is heavy on concurrency and functional programming. We've also standardized our workstations on Ubuntu (not Windows, not OS X). From my experience, the language or the technologies themselves are NOT THE PROBLEM. The problem is finding people that are able to build software, people that when faced with a problem, they solve it, even if the problem is new to them. Our backends also need to handle massive traffic and we don't have the resources to throw hundreds of servers in the mix for scale. To build efficient backends you need an incredibly difficult to achieve mix of knowledge that I won't even bother to enumerate. We also have to analyse terabytes of logs daily. So besides setting up clusters for map/reduce, those scripts have to infer knowledge from those logs, going into the territory of statistics / machine learning and natural language processing. So you're a hipster that knows Go/Node/Ruby/Whatever. Great, but what can I use you for?
- jlgreco 14y ago
  There are absolutely roles where the developer with more industry experience is unambiguously the correct choice. But if this is widely the case, then is there a labour problem at all? If we are all trying to hire the guys with lots of industry experience and are all willing to let them ramp up on new tech while earning their industry experience salaries, then what is the problem? Everything is great if that is what is going on. However the horror story that I seem to be hearing from other people is that the big names in tech right now are only interested in hiring people straight out of college, hence the "college style" non-monetary perks and whatnot.

by jlgreco 14y ago

learc83 14y ago

Sorry that doesn't make sense. In my experience there are few college kids with Node/Go/Haskell/Clojure on their resume, and those same kids will have whatever is new and exciting in 10 years on their resume then too. Your average brand new college CS graduate knows Java. The average foreign programmer also knows Java. The average programmer with 10 years experience knows Java and probably C++. The average programmer doesn't work with "modern newfangled hipster ship", and the average employer isn't looking for employees who do. And if you are a startup, you definitely aren't going to find people skilled in Node/Go/Whatever by hiring cheap H1-B workers. In general Colleges are about 10-15 years behind what's considered the new hip thing in programming. Since most new grads only know what they learned in college most new college grads are 10-15 years behind the new hip thing in programming. Startups don't hire new grads because they can ramp up faster, they hire them because they don't have families to take up their time, so they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts.

jlgreco 14y ago
> In my experience there are few college kids with Node/Go/Haskell/Clojure on their resume > Your average brand new college CS graduate knows Java. Maybe we are reaching different conclusions because we are looking at different anecdotal evidence. What you are saying in these two lines does not jive with what I have observed at all. Colleges are not teaching that trendy stuff, but CS programs in American universities don't teach any technology anyway (aside perhaps from an OS course or two that focuses on the Linux kernel a bit too much, and the obligatory first freshman quarter with Java/C++). The tech college students come out of school with, from what I have seen, is the stuff they taught themselves outside of their coursework. That stuff is almost invariably the trendy shit. At the very least, the trendier parts of Java. > they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts. Either way, it is either about the ability to do the work for those salaries, or the willingness to to do the work for those salaries. Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent.
- learc83 14y ago
  >The tech college students come out of school with, from what I have seen, is the stuff they taught themselves outside of their coursework. That's the thing, the majority of students don't teach themselves anything outside their coursework. The ones that do are the top x% that everyone wants to hire, and they are still teaching themselves new stuff when they have 10 years experience. Being passionate about programming has nothing to do with age. > Even if I'm off-base and it is entirely the second, it makes sense that companies are going to start looking for some more of the same sort of cheap but effective talent. Of course companies are going to look for cheaper talent, the people doing the hiring for the most part are looking to optimize for the short term. The problem is that it's very hard to accurately and objectively measure programmer productivity, so companies use ineffective proxies. Hiring an inexperienced programmer who works for $25 an hour vs an experienced one who works for $50 an hour may look like a good deal when it's likely that it actually isn't.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    > That's the thing, the majority of students don't teach themselves anything outside their coursework. Right. So I don't know how many recent graduates are like that, I think I am less pessimistic about that than you (I want to collect some of those juicy referral bonuses, but everybody that I know is either employed or plainly incompetent, including everyone I knew in school... By far most of them are employed), but basically I consider those people to be a part of the essentially unemployable pool. There are no doubt a lot of fundamentally unemployable people that want to be in tech (without being willing to crack a book outside of class), but as far as I can tell there is a clear shortage of competent employable people.
voidlogic 14y ago
You know why schools teach kids Java/C (the lingua francas of computing) rather than the latest hot 5-min fad? Because it doesn't matter. The kids are taught those languages simply to enable the teaching of computer science theory and software engineering. This is the way it should be. You will learn new tech as needed your entire career, if you have the right preparation it should be a no brainer. You need to learn the theory once. Outside of the west coast most companies realize this and invest in training as needed. It is the hipster too cool for school startup kids that have things wrong. They never went to school, they don't realize that picking up their favorite $language is trivial for anyone with the proper background and just a means to an ends, writing useful software. >>Startups don't hire new grads because they can ramp up faster, they hire them because they don't have families to take up their time, so they don't mind working 80 hours a week for peanuts. This, although foreign workers can be appealing for some of the same reasons.

bad_user 14y ago

> Your systems are all Node/Go/Ruby/Whatever ... Or do you hire the guy with 15 years of experience on his resume who only has "C/C++/Perl" on his resume I tend to prefer the guy with 15 years of experience with "C/C++/Perl" on his resume. Our software is a mix of Python, Scala, Java, CoffeeScript and Obj-C (different components). Scala is the driving force right now for the backend and the code that we've built in it is heavy on concurrency and functional programming. We've also standardized our workstations on Ubuntu (not Windows, not OS X). From my experience, the language or the technologies themselves are NOT THE PROBLEM. The problem is finding people that are able to build software, people that when faced with a problem, they solve it, even if the problem is new to them. Our backends also need to handle massive traffic and we don't have the resources to throw hundreds of servers in the mix for scale. To build efficient backends you need an incredibly difficult to achieve mix of knowledge that I won't even bother to enumerate. We also have to analyse terabytes of logs daily. So besides setting up clusters for map/reduce, those scripts have to infer knowledge from those logs, going into the territory of statistics / machine learning and natural language processing. So you're a hipster that knows Go/Node/Ruby/Whatever. Great, but what can I use you for?

jlgreco 14y ago
There are absolutely roles where the developer with more industry experience is unambiguously the correct choice. But if this is widely the case, then is there a labour problem at all? If we are all trying to hire the guys with lots of industry experience and are all willing to let them ramp up on new tech while earning their industry experience salaries, then what is the problem? Everything is great if that is what is going on. However the horror story that I seem to be hearing from other people is that the big names in tech right now are only interested in hiring people straight out of college, hence the "college style" non-monetary perks and whatnot.