14 ms·

STEM Shortage Claims and Facebook's $19 Billion Acquisition of WhatsApp

174 points by acangiano 13y ago

jarrett 13y ago
Speaking from personal experience, it is hard to find engineers who can truly take a project and run with it. For any given job posting, there are typically hundreds of applicants. Yet often, not a single one of the applicants could build a non-trivial application without intensive mentoring. Many of them couldn't do it even with mentoring. I don't know what this says about our economy. Maybe nothing--maybe it just says something about the nature of engineering. I can offer only my anecdotes. I'm not in a position to draw from those anecdotes a conclusion about what our economy needs.
doktrin 13y ago
I wonder if we as an industry will continue to practice almost blatant age discrimination as the current generation of engineers grows older. If we continue to obsess over youth, the job market will be remarkably unpleasant 15 years from now.
- mattgreenrocks 13y ago
  Perhaps this is why tech companies have so little ambition: a constant stream of new blood ensures some things change (yak shaving), but never anything substantial that requires extensive experience. Instead, everyone just props up the technological status quo for their CRUD website.
  - wes-exp 13y ago
    Some of the most fascinating and, frankly, lucid technology discussions I have had were with highly experienced (dare I say, older) engineers who actually know a thing or two. I find it completely scandalous that, in addition to these guys getting punished in the hiring process, the industry does not really seem to learn from them. Software engineering seems like a field that does not tend to advance in any real sense, except at a snail's pace. Most of the programmers I know (who are mostly young) are merely trying to reach a level of understanding that allows them to participate in the status quo, let alone challenge it. By the time they have sufficient experience to drive meaningful change, I suppose they will be old by industry standards, pushed out, and the cycle repeats.
    - mattgreenrocks 13y ago
      Programming really is a pop culture.
  - tempodox 13y ago
    That's why every new non-CRUD idea requires a new startup and starry-eyed investors.
    - mattgreenrocks 13y ago
      Worse, non-CRUD ideas are 'risky.' And we can't have that, it's too scary!
- Tohhou 13y ago
  Claims of age discrimination is like claims that there is untapped cheap labor in hiring women in first world countries. If the claims were true anyone could hire up all of the cheap labor and stomp their discriminating competitors. That doesn't happen. Either it's really a grand conspiracy like some claim or the situation is not so simple. I think it's more likely older people expect to get paid more for their experience, are less likely to learn new things on their own like younger people are, are less likely to start up their own companies like younger people are because doing so is risky. You see people obsessing over youth. They are not. They are valuing risk takers, people who know modern tech, people who don't expect to be paid so much just because they know more less useful to the current situation skills and knowledge. The quality of a low age itself is irrelevant. It will be the same 15 years from now. Current younger people will feel more entitled to higher pay, will feel less willing to compromise or settle for jobs which their younger peers would be happy to get. Ultimately if someone brings value to a job it's the stupidity of the employer to not understand their value. If a company can make 10x more from hiring someone why wouldn't they? Companies which don't hire the best value makers don't do as well, which allows those companies which do hire those people to float to the top. It is the same thing with women. Any sane businessperson would hire people no matter their gender if those people can make them more money, and anyone who is leaving value on the table by being discriminatory despite the lost potential leaves room for their competitors to destroy them. If you think older people can make you more money ultimately then you hire them and rule the tech world.
  - mikaraento 13y ago
    Although I roughly agree with the sentiment ('if you think everybody else is leaving money at the table, you should be picking it up rather than complaining about it') - there is evidence to the contrary. A large part of the post-WWII economic growth of the Soviet Union has been attributed to the integration of women into the labour force - and the final stagnation to the fact that at that point there were no more women to integrate, everybody was already working.
  - techmatters 13y ago
    > I think it's more likely older people expect to get paid more for their experience, Myth : The highest paid are in the 30-40 age bracket. See http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_241497.pdf http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_241497.pdf (UK-focussed, but the US is probably similar) > are less likely to learn new things on their own like younger people are, ...but they already know so much more that learning is less important. They know it already! > are less likely to start up their own companies like younger people are because doing so is risky. Myth : http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/education-and-tech-entrepreneurship http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educatio...
- imjk 13y ago
  My guess is that as "our" generation ages, age discrimination will subside greatly. There are a few factors I think currently contributing to the the current age discrimination practices that are unique. First is that the consumer web is relatively young and that our generation was the first to adopt it on a mass scale. And second, the most prominent and visible tech success stories of the past decade have revolved around social media, in which the most innovative products were heavily driven by younger demographics. This is still true; the more "innovative" social media products, or most widely adopted (ie Instagram, Snapchat, etc) are still heavily driven by younger demographic users. In these cases, it was important to have employees get the product, which seemed to be most adopted early by "our" young generation. I think as we move past the social media dominant consumer web, we'll see less of this age discrimination.
  - waterlesscloud 13y ago
    Consumer web is 20 years old. Those engineers in their late 40s / early 50s invented the thing.
    - sizzle 13y ago
      but do they understand the culture of the generation below them well enough to successfully capture market share? I'd argue that most older people are clueless to the rapidly changing millennial culture.
      - baldeagle 13y ago
        If: A) technology is accelerating B) the bar for status quo keeps lowering through enabling technologies C) only people that grew up in the new 'system' will be fluid at it Then: A) most of the new ideas will come from a newer and newer cohort B) age-ism will become even more prevalent
        sizzle 13y ago
        Do you see phenomenon A and B occurring today?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
wil421 13y ago
I really dont see the STEM shortage that people are talking about. Last year I graduated from a local college and we had no shortage of STEM from Biology to Comp Science to Information Systems. We recently bought an engineering school full of students so next year our STEM foot print will be even larger. Lets be honest here sometimes its cheaper to use foreign labor and that is why these companies are doing it. I dont necessarily agree with it but a lot of companies out there are doing it including my employer.
- moron4hire 13y ago
  "Lets be honest..." Yes, let's. I want Mark Zuckerburg to admit out loud that the reason he can't find qualified engineers is because he's not willing to pay. No more of this "they don't exist" lie. This, coupled with the Google/Apple/Intel/Adobe/etc. collusion to prevent salary negotiation wars, it's very clear: Silicon Valley companies aren't special anymore. They are now just like every other corporation in America. They're focused on nothing but the bottom dollar. They have their HR departments spewing morale boosting propaganda and they do their damnedest to keep those employees locked in as wage slaves. Free lunches! Games in the break room! Climbing walls! All that shit is designed to keep you in the office, to entice you into working overtime, for free. When I'm looking at job listings, I look for the tell-tale lie on their websites: If they say something like, "our employees are our greatest asset," I know they doth protest too much. They really treat employees like fungible commodities. Unfortunately, I've let my judgement be blinded too many times and have had to learn the hard way that it is true in every case.
  - wil421 13y ago
    Employees are now commodities. Other industries have realized this and now the tech sector is realizing it as well. Especially now that people are more computer literate than they were 20 years ago combined with globalization plus the internet. The pool is much bigger than yesterday.
    - coldcode 13y ago
      Ah, no. Being computer literate is not the same as having skill in programming, QA, DB, UX or whatever you need. Being tall does not mean you can dominate in the NBA. I was the same size and weight as Michael Jordan but that doesn't translate into 6 NBA championships. If you need skill you have to pay for it, not just fill in the blanks with random people who work cheaper.
roberjo 13y ago
No one seems to want to discuss the idea that Yahoo! and Facebook were simply adhering to their illegal agreement to not poach talent from each other. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/15/silicon_valley_hiring_cartel_apple_google_and_other_accused_of_driving_down.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/15/silicon_valle...
- jerf 13y ago
  That agreement doesn't seem to cover new talent. If the companies are screaming about lacking talent, that they could only acquire more engineers by hiring from each other would be positive evidence for that claim.
- tomp 13y ago
  > According to news reports, both Acton and Koum “took a year off to tour South America” not long before applying to work at Facebook, giving both a recent period of prolonged unemployment.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mccr8 13y ago
  I haven't seen any mention of Facebook participating in the hiring cartel in these various news reports, including the one you linked to.
- puppetmaster3 13y ago
  Yup.
- roberjo 13y ago
  Ahem... http://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-brin-hiring-apple-2014-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-br...
  - roberjo 13y ago
    Double AHEM.. http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/google-viewed-facebook-poaching-defcon-2-event-new-emails-reveal http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/google-viewed-fac...
jhoechtl 13y ago
Where is the problem? The risk was outsourced, so were the investments. When it looks like a worthwhile project, the knowledge get's in-sourced. Don't see the recruitment fail in this particular happening of things.
- doktrin 13y ago
  Is this satire? We're talking about $19 billion here. In either case, your statement is almost completely incorrect. The WhatsApp founders were turned down before WhatsApp even existed. Therefore, it was not some bold tactical decision on the part of FB. Their technical acumen was up to snuff, so they were rejected based on some other criteria (not necessarily age).
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    The funny part is that if Facebook had hired them when they had the chance, they probably wouldn't have built anything resembling WhatsApp or whatever Facebook was trying to achieve by acquiring WhatsApp.
- PaulHoule 13y ago
  More to the point, these guys probably wouldn't have done anything interesting at all had they been hired by Facebook. They certainly wouldn't have had the freedom and the resources to develop something like WhatsApp. I interviewed with Google not too long ago and it was clear to me that Google was the place to go work if I wanted to get a paycheck without having any impact on anything at all.
  - sizzle 13y ago
    Or have any free time, from the insidious nature of comfort perks they supply
chollida1 13y ago
Interesting article. Whenever an article like this pops up the usual chorus is, there is no skill shortage, just a shortage at the price the employer is willing to pay. Sadly I've seen myself as someone on the hiring side of the table fall into a few of these traps listed in the article. A newly minted Phd, is one type of person that I've found myself having trouble hiring. Same with an newly minted Masters. The reason is that often their area of specialization doesn't really help in the role I'm hiring and therefore I wouldn't give them any bump in pay for their extra schooling. On the other side of the table, especially for a Phd, they often expect a bump in pay for their additional schooling so its tough for me to hire someone like that. EDIT to clarify, I don't reject these people out of hand, infact it helps them get an interview over others, but when it comes to offer time ie salary, I don't give any real value to a masters or Phd. Or put another way, if the salary I'm willing to offer is $125,000 its the same regardless of education. To be clear, In a fund with 12 people, we have 5 Phd's and one more with a masters, so we do hire well educated people:) Post grad education might get you interviewed first, but will have almost no bearing at all on if I extend a job offer or not. The same can be said for what school you went to. MIT education, great I'll put you at the top of the interview pile, but when it comes time to extend an job offer, where you went to school doesn't factor into what we offer at all. Too far along in their career can also be tough. Often this is due just to salary demands not fitting a junior role. A new grad has no job they are quitting so they don't need a "bump" in pay to leave. Someone who is well into their career might be a good fit but is making a good salary where they are so they require a sizable pay increase to leave. Given this, it often makes sense to go with the younger candidate whose salary fits the role. EDIT To flesh out the senior developer comment a bit more. There are really 3 areas I've had trouble with in the past. 1) The 10 year developer who has 1 year of experience 10 times over. This is just a junior developer who wants the salary of a senior developer. 2) Its harder to find senior developers, regardless of what you pay. As Joel once said the good developers always have jobs, hence his internship program. 3) the hire bar is, umm..., higher for senior developers as they are expected to do more, mentor, design architecture, etc. This means I'm more picky as to who I hire. Having said that, there are times where experience rules, and in this case you get what you pay for. NOTE This post has generated more upvote and downvotes than almost any other post I've written. So half the people agree with me and half disagree?
smackfu 13y ago
I don't know that rockstar companies really say that much about the industry as a whole. I also don't put much stock in that Zuckerberg quote about "hiring as many talented engineers as we can find", unless they define talented as a very high bar, in which case the statement is meaningless. Who wouldn't want to hire as many crazy good programmers as they can?
- logfromblammo 13y ago
  Someone with a finite budget for software development, perhaps?
bartkappenburg 13y ago
The author is forgetting one thing: under qualified devs (at the time of a FB interview) can also be lucky and learn the job while building and scaling a product which has gotten traction. Given the numerous applicants they deny, what are the chances that a few of them get lucky? I'm estimating, with my limited math knowledge, that this will be closer to 1 than one may think beforehand.
cletus 13y ago
This post is largely about discrimination and uses Brian Acton as a timely centerpiece. The truth is however more complex (IMHO): - Culture matters a lot in hiring. By this I mean a Stanford grad is much more likely to hire another Stanford grad in a field of qualified candidates. This isn't simply a form of nepotism as such. Two grads from the same college will share a larger common cultural base; - The culture the founders bring shapes the organization. Many startups are started by Stanford and MIT grads. It shouldn't surprise you that this biases the makeup of their workforces and what they look for; - Speaking as someone who has interviewed in the field of programming there are many frauds. I don't even necessarily mean deliberate frauds but there are clearly people who are employed as programmers/engineers who have no business being such. It's astounding how you can stump someone with 5-10 years of experience by asking them to code a simple loop (seriously); - If people are worried about foreign labour putting downward pressure on wages, the indentured servitude that is the US work visa and immigration system should be the target of your anger. It allows bodyshops to hire people from, say, China and India and pay them a pittance because they know those people can't leave for 8+ years if they ever want a green card. Make a green card automatic after, say, 6 years on an H1B, even if you change jobs, and a lot of those problems would go away. As for other fields, I can't speak to those, other than anecdotally a lot of fields seem to have the earning potential of being a waiter in Manhattan.
- moron4hire 13y ago
  "Cultural fit" is just another name for racism, sexism, and ageism. Yeah, all of those things can be culture. Why should it be any less wrong to discriminate based on college attendance than on race? What else is cultural fit? "Sorry, you don't fit our culture of being heterosexual here." We're supposed to be adults. We're supposed to know how to get along and play nicely with others, regardless of how different we are from each other. This "cultural fit" line is bullshit apologia for real discrimination.
  - ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
    And "cultural fit" can also be code for classism. Too bad for you that you didn't go to Stanford, Harvard, etc.
raverbashing 13y ago
Well, it's really simple FB's (and Google's and Yahoo's) definition of talent is whoever passes their "quiz show" interview However, yes, you don't need to know the worse case complexity of shell sort for most tasks, especially at the beginning of a project where load demands are smaller.
- danielweber 13y ago
  The more people you reject, the more selective your hiring process is, and the better your employees are. QED!
- groby_b 13y ago
  Here's the odd thing - if I meet a candidate who knows about shellsort, I'd already be impressed. Many people I interview have trouble with much more basic concepts than that. And of course, it is worth keeping in mind that when you hire an employee that hopefully at some point, the load demands are higher. And it's kind of awkward if your product hits rapid growth, but your engineers are currently busy learning about algorithmic efficiency. Nobody sane asks about "worst-case efficiency of shell sort" unless you yourself suggest shell sort as an algorithm. But it is expected that you get the general idea of O notation, because it actually does matter for day-to-day work. And, as a practical interview tip: It's perfectly OK to say "I don't know about this specific case" - just follow it up with "for most sorts, O(n^2) is an upper bound, so if I'd guess, I'd go with O(n^2).", or something like that. It tells the interviewer that you know general principles. That's the big problem in most interviews - candidates treat it like a test, where there's just the right answer, and nothing else. It's not a test. It's an attempt to somehow, within an hour usually, find out what you know and how you think. Throw the interviewer a bone or two, and help them do that. Silence and short "I don't know" answers really just waste time for everybody.
  - raverbashing 13y ago
    " That's the big problem in most interviews - candidates treat it like a test, where there's just the right answer, and nothing else. " Humm no. Google interviews are (or at least were) pretty much right or wrong answers mostly. The best interviewers could do what you say, but for the most part, no.
not_paul_graham 13y ago
Very well written article and I can add some context being in the unhired category of engineers. I graduated from Georgia Tech sometime in the last couple of years with a 3.64 GPA. I know that GPA doesn't mean much but really at Georgia Tech they make you work for it like a dog. I have some projects on GitHub and well I thought companies would come knocking at my door. Boy was I mistaken. So I started applying late into my graduation semester. I got interviews with Amazon / Google and another Tech giant. I got turned down without an interview from Facebook / Palantir and some other older startups. I did not apply to a lot of companies, and I feel that was the real difference bw me and friends that got offers from all of those companies that I've mentioned above. Past summers I had worked at management consulting companies and ultimately after not getting any offers from Tech companies, I moved back home to Asia. And although I did feel a little crushed at the time, I'm working at a big engineering company back home, and I don't make as much money, I'm learning to like what I do. Perhaps after a couple of years of nursing my self-esteem, I'll try again. Till then yea it sucks to not fit in. It sucks to not be a culture fit. It sucks to be told that you are not adequate after slogging it out at a supposedly "world class" engineering school. The best reason that I got rejected was because other candidates felt coding was their calling and I didn't seem all that committed. wtf! I'm of Asian descent and well was on a F1 Visa (non-resident/citizen) with a horrible accent. Perhaps there were other factors that resulted in me not being hired because I did make it through the phone screens for some companies, and also because I have other asian friends that did get offers. . But yea atleast it feels good to know that there are PhDs out there that can't get jobs either so it wasn't all me.
- raverbashing 13y ago
  Not surprising to me. Although it is a top school, a recent graduate has lots of "gotchas" for companies. The corporate world has a lot of differences from the academic world, and in my point of view, it is, on average, better.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Considering that 3.55 is the cut-off for highest graduation honors at GT, you have nothing to be ashamed of there! If you decide to take another stab at things, there is no reason to limit yourself to Amazon/Google/etc. The southern east coast has a perfectly healthy tech ecosystem, from Atlanta up to D.C., and the GT brand carries well there.
tempodox 13y ago
Surprise! Double standards, discrimination, illegal practices and plain incompetence in the hiring business. Those self-absorbed tech rock star companies are actually not smarter than the rest.
flurie 13y ago
> However, in this era of e-mail, Skype, and many people working successfully in the technology business from a large distance (e.g. India or China), why exactly couldn’t the desperate “starving” technology companies offer him a job he could do from Texas? I feel like there's a blindness by some STEM professionals to the fact that not all jobs can be done nearly anywhere, least of all those available to semiconductor engineers. I blame the acronym for bundling us all together unnecessarily.
julesbond007 13y ago
I said this long time ago on my blog: http://julesjaypaulynice.com/good-software-engineers/ http://julesjaypaulynice.com/good-software-engineers/
- puppetmaster3 13y ago
  agree.
xyzzyz 13y ago
While there certainly are companies whose business model is to get cheap workforce from India or China on H1B (just take a look at H1B stats), there is something I don't get. Where and how this pay inequality for local vs. imported workforce manifests for more desirable companies like Google or Facebook? As a student outside United States I had a chance to do internships in the US several times (on J1 visa), and as I am finishing my degree soon, it was natural for me to try and get a job there. My observation is that the salary and benefits I was offered at Google, Microsoft and Facebook wasn't much different than if I was American - if any, it was even slightly higher than what they pay American new grads (data based on talking with American peers and reading Quora posts). My non-American friends who also got a job in the US also didn't complain about getting lower than their American peers. Thus, should I expect fewer bonuses/pay raises? Smaller chance to get promotion? Less desirable project?
- puppetmaster3 13y ago
  H1s get to work with worse bosses on worse projects and less chance of promotion/raises. Or you get shipped back.
  - shas3 13y ago
    What is the basis of your assertion? There are at least 250,000 H1B workers in the USA. Do you seem to suggest this is true across the board? In my experience in most 'good' companies (e.g. Texas Instruments that is discussed in the article), such exploitation doesn't occur, based on the anecdotal evidence that I've heard.
    - spiralpolitik 13y ago
      Look at the top 5 companies requesting H-1Bs between 2010 and 2012. All are outsourcing companies. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/top-10-companies-request-visas-foreign-workers/t/story?id=20730536 http://abcnews.go.com/Business/top-10-companies-request-visa... These companies typically exploit their workers with lower pay and threats to send them home if they don't play ball. Or are employing people to offshore jobs. The "good" companies that use H-1Bs are a fairly small percentage of the number of visas issued.
cyberaleck 13y ago
I think that there is great opportunity for some company to do "Moneyballs". There are great A-players that are completely ignored by traditional hiring processes. The company that will tap into that source will probably become the next Google.
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
>> $19 billion in cash and stock (slightly less than the inflation adjusted cost of the Manhattan Project) Holy Crap !!! That cannot be right - surely not.... Edit: According to Wikipedia : "The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (about $26 billion in 2014 dollars)." So, if you allow 7bn to be slightly less, then yes. It is right. And there is worse to come - also according to wikipedia and the BBC, the US spends around 50bn pa, (the UK an embarrassing 4.6bn a year) on science funding - but really, half of US science spending on a mobile IM app. How utterly depressing.
- FD3SA 13y ago
  A fellow kindred spirit. That is also the point that jumped out at me and made me wonder what in the hell society has devolved into. The disciples of Rand spend their money on the strangest things.
- logfromblammo 13y ago
  There may be a disparity based upon how inflation is calculated. Plus or minus 40% after an interval of 75 years is not unreasonable for the purposes of an "about this big" comparison. A Paasche index will understate price inflation, while a Laspeyres index will overstate it, due to demand elasticity. Governments may change the formula used to report changes in the money supply, using different measures like M1, M2, M3, and MZM, along with the average velocity of money. This obscures the amount of value intentional inflation extracts from the productive economy, at the cost of mathematical accuracy. You could buy exactly one Manhattan project with 1939-1946 dollars for $2billion, of which 90% was production, and 10% R&D. You could buy exactly one Apollo Program with $25.4billion in 1961-1972 dollars. One LHC costs $9billion 2008 dollars. Tevatron was a bargain next to that at only $120million 1980 dollars. Put into that sort of scale, with $19billion in 2014 cash, you could do any one of the following: Build an entire city designed for 50000 inhabitants supplied entirely by renewable energy sources. Build an entire archipelago of artificial islands. Bury an Interstate highway under Boston. Build 3 international-class airports. Build two subway lines under an existing major city. Replace 5 long-span highway bridges. Buy 6 Human Genome Projects. Replicate the Channel Tunnel. Does that bring it into perspective?
michaelochurch 13y ago
Acq-hires are proof of dysfunction. Companies like Yahoo have talent, but can't recognize it at the bottom because the middle-management filter is so defective. So they buy market-verified talent at a panic price. That's shitty for the individual (well, great for 0.05% of them and shitty for 99.95%) because there's so much noise. The problem is that the VC-funded world is full of soft-skulls who never grew up (some are old, but not mature; those tend to be investors). They make workplaces that are culturally defective and mean-spirited but have the superficial trappings of college because they're halfway houses for frat boys. "Culture fit" is about wanting to work with the same people you'd go drinking with or (for most non-tech roles) have sex with. I ask: Why? You should hire the people who'll do awesome work and lead, and some of those are 65-year-old women. If you don't, your halfway-house/I-could-live-here "utopia" will underperform and forever be beholden to the VCs. Reality: if you make one real friend per job, call yourself lucky. My experience is that it's Poisson(0.75). That "culture fit" camaraderie is bullshit. Don't take seriously or trust anyone who wouldn't have your back (and give you a reference, even if you needed him to lie) if you got fired on bad terms. Another lesson from the old (30): your life should be diversified outside of your job, because you can lose the latter at any time for any reason. Losing a job is bad enough as it is, but if you have nothing outside of it, it's catastrophic. The "culture fit" workplace is bullshit. Just build something awesome worth giving a shit about.
- seivan 13y ago
  'Companies like Yahoo have talent, but can't recognize it at the bottom because the middle-management filter is so defective.' This.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    It's not quite that - it's that the organizational structure prevents middle-managers from acting on their knowledge even if they do recognize talent. Imagine that you are responsible for a department of people, all of whom need to work together to accomplish a big job. Assume that talent is normally distributed - maybe you have 1 superstar and 1 idiot, 10 high performers and 10 laggards, and 100 average developers. Also assume that the boundaries between categories are fuzzy - it's not that there's 1 superstar who absolutely stands out, it's that there are 2-3 people who are really good, and one is obviously better to you but that isn't apparent to everyone else, and another 20 or so people are just a bit behind them. What do you do? If you preference your best programmer, give him the pick of assignments and a lot of latitude to choose projects, you will demotivate all the people who are just below him. Ironically, a lot of michaelochurch's past comments are examples of this - his perspective on the "Real Googler line", and even the grandparent comment, is what things look like for someone who is talented and high-performing and yet right below the line. These folks become bitter, demotivated, subversive, and ultimately toxic to the organization. Moreover, you destroy the effectiveness of your superstars as well. To accomplish anything in a large organization, you need cooperation from your peers. When your peers resent your special treatment or want to sabotage your rise, you won't get this. So the only way to succeed as a superstar in a large organization is to act very subtly and bring a lot of people with you, which usually means keeping your more radical ideas to yourself and only saying things that can be heard. (Which, really, is how it should be - think of how unpleasant it is to work in an environment with a "golden kid" who's always running around with the latest technologies, not answerable to anyone else, and yet has management's favor.) This is also why getting rid of laggards is far more important for organizational health than hiring superstars. If you populate an organization full of folks who understand compilers, or understand immutability, or can work with multiple languages, or who understand design patterns, then those techniques become part of the general culture that the whole eng organization can use. If you lack that critical mass, any superstars that understand why those concepts are important will not have the freedom to use those techniques because of the political issues above. There's very good evidence that the middle-managers know exactly who their star performers are. When they quit to found their own company, who do they call? You often have groups of programmers that have worked together through multiple companies, and as soon as you hire one the whole group comes on board within a year. But within a company, the constraints of organizational politics prevent them from favoritism, which is probably how it should be.
Mc_Big_G 13y ago
Facebook can't hire good engineers because good engineers don't want to work there.
aestra 13y ago
I find that hiring practices can often discriminate against those who grew up poor/not middle class. I remember someone writing about how they hired saying things like "I look for evidence of interest in technology from a young age." Well, I had tons of interest in technology from a young age, but my resume can't reflect that. I didn't have a computer until I was about 13 or 14 because we couldn't afford one earlier, even though my parents really wanted one. I think our school library might have had one computer for the whole school, which was not available. I certainly couldn't go to expensive tech camps or the like, we couldn't afford it. I did get all the science books from the public library and read them as much as I could. I didn't start programming until college. I get very very positive reviews from all the jobs I ever worked though, but my resume might be passed up because I didn't have the opportunities others had.
skywhopper 13y ago
Sounds like Facebook et al should be investing some of this money into university CS/CE/CIS programs along with internal training programs if they are truly concerned about the lack of qualified personnel. A billion dollars goes a long way.
mnglkhn2 13y ago
Brian Acton's rejection by Facebook is used as a pro argument for the idea that tech companies are just pretending to not find qualified candidates, when there are plenty. I am not sure which way it is but the argument used is flawed. Brian Acton never stated that he went to Facebook to be a programmer. Not even a senior one. At that moment he already had managerial experience, having lead large dev teams at Yahoo. It way more likely that his Facebook interview was centered around a managerial role and the fit, for one reason or another was not there. Not taking any sides, I want to say that Brian Acton's example is just a nice/easy/convenient media story. Not at all indicative of anything related to availability or lack of STEM people.
- 100k 13y ago
  Thank you for pointing this out. I've seen no indication that he interviewed as a programmer at Facebook or Twitter. Considering he was managing a large team at Yahoo, it's unlikely that he would be. He might even have been interviewing for a director or VP-level position.
moron4hire 13y ago
Can we talk about the other elephant in the room: that Facebook can afford the inflation-adjusted equivalent of the Manhattan project budget with a product that it does not charge its users to use?
- sizzle 13y ago
  Google can afford even more than that. Times have changed, and these tech juggernauts are essentially printing their own money with how invested the general public is into their products.
craigyk 13y ago
For perspective, the budget of the NIH, which funds a huge percentage of all the biomedical research in the US is about 31B. This is research that subsidizes and lays a foundation for many of the medical advances we have today. For additional perspective, this 31B in public money is about equivalent to all the private R&D spending done on medical research. So the thought that someone would spend 19B on a messaging platform, which is an already solved problem, is sad. 19B probably isn't "cure cancer" kind of money, but you'd be able to solve some pretty real problems with it.
puppetmaster3 13y ago
One thing not talked about is potentially superior EU education relative to US. Who would make a better impact for you?
cottonseed 13y ago
Idea I had a while back: Monster.com for anonymous interviews. Purge race, age and gender information from the interview process. Getting a broader range of candidates to the final interview would already be a huge step. I'm not even sure in-person or phone interviews are necessary or beneficial. I'm aware of a top philosophy dept. that does professor hiring completely be application materials. Why? They found application materials were a better predictor of success than in-person judgements.
- sizzle 13y ago
  Yeah but you can't have diverse teams if you hire from the same mold
Glyptodon 13y ago
Basically companies have to either pay/accommodate people or train them, but instead they'd rather whine. Know it all too well, as someone who has tried to avoid living in California for lifestyle reasons, which limits a lot of options.
mcguire 13y ago
I recently had to have one aspect of this issue pointed out to me, since it was never a major concern of mine and I'd been completely blind to it: seniority. I do not currently work for a start-up, or even what you would typically consider a technology company. However, the group I work with, the program in the businessy sense, is not very old. The original kernel of the group began less than ten years ago, and has grown in fits and spurts. Many, if not most, of the "founders" are still here, as well. When the program started, many of the founders were young and relatively inexperienced. Today, they're still young but are more experienced---in this specific project. And at least some of the people who have been hired since are older or more experienced---at least in terms of having worked in a wider variety of environments---or both. As a result, in some situations, someone with more experience and skills is being supervised, managed, or lead by someone with significantly less experience. The situation isn't improved by weird incentives that place emphasis on some jobs more than others, similar to the cliche about sales versus engineering. So, how's this for a weird situation: people who would be senior are doing junior work, because "job market"; people who would likely be junior are in charge, because of good timing (For those of you who plan to be future Zuckerbergs, what are you going to do when you really do need to hire a rocket scientist?); people who are ready to move up can't, because nobody is leaving or dying off; and people who might be better off leaving won't, because they would be taking a pay and prestige cut. [Note: I am absolutely not talking about myself. I knew what I was doing when I got here. I have no real urge to "move up" in the world. I'm a technical guy. I'm mechanism, not policy.]
geebee 13y ago
Zuckerberg quoted as saying: "Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. The whole limit in the system is just that there aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today." Two huge unanswered questions. What do you mean by "trained and have these skills?" And at what price? At $50,000 a year, I would also like to hire as all the engineers. I will place them into jobs that pay 100K a year, and I will keep 50k. How many times would I like to do this? Answer: all of the times. Now, suppose I have to pay them 125K a year, and I can hire them out at 100k a year. How many times would I like to do this? Answer: none of the times. So there's a massive shortage of 50k/yr engineers, but a huge glut of $125k a year engineers. It sounds like there's a severe shortage of programmers willing to work for far less than they're worth. How is this different from any other field?
Balgair 13y ago
When they say they can't find the right person, they mean that Frank's cell phone ran out of juice. So, my brother used to work in a small clock shop. These were really precise clocks (nanosecond) and they did distributed timing. You have an oil field, maybe, and want to know the size of it? Send out a blast pulse and record the echos. But the recorders need to really know where and when they hear the echo over a few hundred square miles. Its not easy stuff to deal with. But the company had Frank. Frank had been there since the beginning. He had written all the code for the clocks, he built and wired the entire place, he knew the whims of the servers and the phone system, the slight burning smells that meant an imminent failure. Frank was the company, and the rest of them where there to make sure Frank was working and happy. Yeah, he owned a bit of the equity, not a major share, but a bit. No-one else knew all the passwords or the files like Frank. Frank barely had time for his kids, let alone to train anyone else. To keep things going, Frank was the ONLY person. So, this worried the owners a lot. If Frank got cancer or in an accident, they were screwed. Hell, everyone was screwed. But to train anyone up was near impossible. Because Frank didn't have the time between putting out the little fires in the code and sleeping and making money for the owners. Frank didn't have them in a bind as much as Frank himself was in a bind. He wanted time to see soccer games, but he wanted his kids to go to college more, and that meant the money came first. So, what was everyone supposed to do? They needed a new Frank. But anyone they brought on was just confused by the spaghetti of wires and the nonsense code that Frank had made 20 years ago to solve some problem half drunk at 2am on a Saturday. There was no record because there was no time to make one. You had to just clone Frank's brain, because nothing else would do in time. My brother left that company because trying to untangle the Gordian Knot that Frank and the comapny were committed to was a noose. But there are a few thousand Franks out there. There are a ton of companies that are in this bind. They have 2 or 3 guys that can actually do the job. And trying to replace that team is impossible. When the Zuck merps out that they can't find anyone, he is not lying, but mis-speaking. He means that Frank's phone is out of juice.

174 points by acangiano 13y ago

Speaking from personal experience, it is hard to find engineers who can truly take a project and run with it. For any given job posting, there are typically hundreds of applicants. Yet often, not a single one of the applicants could build a non-trivial application without intensive mentoring. Many of them couldn't do it even with mentoring. I don't know what this says about our economy. Maybe nothing--maybe it just says something about the nature of engineering. I can offer only my anecdotes. I'm not in a position to draw from those anecdotes a conclusion about what our economy needs.

doktrin 13y ago

I wonder if we as an industry will continue to practice almost blatant age discrimination as the current generation of engineers grows older. If we continue to obsess over youth, the job market will be remarkably unpleasant 15 years from now.

mattgreenrocks 13y ago
Perhaps this is why tech companies have so little ambition: a constant stream of new blood ensures some things change (yak shaving), but never anything substantial that requires extensive experience. Instead, everyone just props up the technological status quo for their CRUD website.
- wes-exp 13y ago
  Some of the most fascinating and, frankly, lucid technology discussions I have had were with highly experienced (dare I say, older) engineers who actually know a thing or two. I find it completely scandalous that, in addition to these guys getting punished in the hiring process, the industry does not really seem to learn from them. Software engineering seems like a field that does not tend to advance in any real sense, except at a snail's pace. Most of the programmers I know (who are mostly young) are merely trying to reach a level of understanding that allows them to participate in the status quo, let alone challenge it. By the time they have sufficient experience to drive meaningful change, I suppose they will be old by industry standards, pushed out, and the cycle repeats.
  - mattgreenrocks 13y ago
    Programming really is a pop culture.
- tempodox 13y ago
  That's why every new non-CRUD idea requires a new startup and starry-eyed investors.
  - mattgreenrocks 13y ago
    Worse, non-CRUD ideas are 'risky.' And we can't have that, it's too scary!
Tohhou 13y ago
Claims of age discrimination is like claims that there is untapped cheap labor in hiring women in first world countries. If the claims were true anyone could hire up all of the cheap labor and stomp their discriminating competitors. That doesn't happen. Either it's really a grand conspiracy like some claim or the situation is not so simple. I think it's more likely older people expect to get paid more for their experience, are less likely to learn new things on their own like younger people are, are less likely to start up their own companies like younger people are because doing so is risky. You see people obsessing over youth. They are not. They are valuing risk takers, people who know modern tech, people who don't expect to be paid so much just because they know more less useful to the current situation skills and knowledge. The quality of a low age itself is irrelevant. It will be the same 15 years from now. Current younger people will feel more entitled to higher pay, will feel less willing to compromise or settle for jobs which their younger peers would be happy to get. Ultimately if someone brings value to a job it's the stupidity of the employer to not understand their value. If a company can make 10x more from hiring someone why wouldn't they? Companies which don't hire the best value makers don't do as well, which allows those companies which do hire those people to float to the top. It is the same thing with women. Any sane businessperson would hire people no matter their gender if those people can make them more money, and anyone who is leaving value on the table by being discriminatory despite the lost potential leaves room for their competitors to destroy them. If you think older people can make you more money ultimately then you hire them and rule the tech world.
- mikaraento 13y ago
  Although I roughly agree with the sentiment ('if you think everybody else is leaving money at the table, you should be picking it up rather than complaining about it') - there is evidence to the contrary. A large part of the post-WWII economic growth of the Soviet Union has been attributed to the integration of women into the labour force - and the final stagnation to the fact that at that point there were no more women to integrate, everybody was already working.
- techmatters 13y ago
  > I think it's more likely older people expect to get paid more for their experience, Myth : The highest paid are in the 30-40 age bracket. See http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_241497.pdf http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_241497.pdf (UK-focussed, but the US is probably similar) > are less likely to learn new things on their own like younger people are, ...but they already know so much more that learning is less important. They know it already! > are less likely to start up their own companies like younger people are because doing so is risky. Myth : http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/education-and-tech-entrepreneurship http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/2009/04/educatio...
imjk 13y ago
My guess is that as "our" generation ages, age discrimination will subside greatly. There are a few factors I think currently contributing to the the current age discrimination practices that are unique. First is that the consumer web is relatively young and that our generation was the first to adopt it on a mass scale. And second, the most prominent and visible tech success stories of the past decade have revolved around social media, in which the most innovative products were heavily driven by younger demographics. This is still true; the more "innovative" social media products, or most widely adopted (ie Instagram, Snapchat, etc) are still heavily driven by younger demographic users. In these cases, it was important to have employees get the product, which seemed to be most adopted early by "our" young generation. I think as we move past the social media dominant consumer web, we'll see less of this age discrimination.
- waterlesscloud 13y ago
  Consumer web is 20 years old. Those engineers in their late 40s / early 50s invented the thing.
  - sizzle 13y ago
    but do they understand the culture of the generation below them well enough to successfully capture market share? I'd argue that most older people are clueless to the rapidly changing millennial culture.
    - baldeagle 13y ago
      If: A) technology is accelerating B) the bar for status quo keeps lowering through enabling technologies C) only people that grew up in the new 'system' will be fluid at it Then: A) most of the new ideas will come from a newer and newer cohort B) age-ism will become even more prevalent
      - sizzle 13y ago
        Do you see phenomenon A and B occurring today?

deleted 13y ago

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wil421 13y ago

I really dont see the STEM shortage that people are talking about. Last year I graduated from a local college and we had no shortage of STEM from Biology to Comp Science to Information Systems. We recently bought an engineering school full of students so next year our STEM foot print will be even larger. Lets be honest here sometimes its cheaper to use foreign labor and that is why these companies are doing it. I dont necessarily agree with it but a lot of companies out there are doing it including my employer.

moron4hire 13y ago
"Lets be honest..." Yes, let's. I want Mark Zuckerburg to admit out loud that the reason he can't find qualified engineers is because he's not willing to pay. No more of this "they don't exist" lie. This, coupled with the Google/Apple/Intel/Adobe/etc. collusion to prevent salary negotiation wars, it's very clear: Silicon Valley companies aren't special anymore. They are now just like every other corporation in America. They're focused on nothing but the bottom dollar. They have their HR departments spewing morale boosting propaganda and they do their damnedest to keep those employees locked in as wage slaves. Free lunches! Games in the break room! Climbing walls! All that shit is designed to keep you in the office, to entice you into working overtime, for free. When I'm looking at job listings, I look for the tell-tale lie on their websites: If they say something like, "our employees are our greatest asset," I know they doth protest too much. They really treat employees like fungible commodities. Unfortunately, I've let my judgement be blinded too many times and have had to learn the hard way that it is true in every case.
- wil421 13y ago
  Employees are now commodities. Other industries have realized this and now the tech sector is realizing it as well. Especially now that people are more computer literate than they were 20 years ago combined with globalization plus the internet. The pool is much bigger than yesterday.
  - coldcode 13y ago
    Ah, no. Being computer literate is not the same as having skill in programming, QA, DB, UX or whatever you need. Being tall does not mean you can dominate in the NBA. I was the same size and weight as Michael Jordan but that doesn't translate into 6 NBA championships. If you need skill you have to pay for it, not just fill in the blanks with random people who work cheaper.

roberjo 13y ago

No one seems to want to discuss the idea that Yahoo! and Facebook were simply adhering to their illegal agreement to not poach talent from each other. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/15/silicon_valley_hiring_cartel_apple_google_and_other_accused_of_driving_down.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/01/15/silicon_valle...

jerf 13y ago
That agreement doesn't seem to cover new talent. If the companies are screaming about lacking talent, that they could only acquire more engineers by hiring from each other would be positive evidence for that claim.
tomp 13y ago
> According to news reports, both Acton and Koum “took a year off to tour South America” not long before applying to work at Facebook, giving both a recent period of prolonged unemployment.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mccr8 13y ago
I haven't seen any mention of Facebook participating in the hiring cartel in these various news reports, including the one you linked to.
puppetmaster3 13y ago
Yup.
roberjo 13y ago
Ahem... http://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-brin-hiring-apple-2014-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-br...
- roberjo 13y ago
  Double AHEM.. http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/google-viewed-facebook-poaching-defcon-2-event-new-emails-reveal http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/google-viewed-fac...

jhoechtl 13y ago

Where is the problem? The risk was outsourced, so were the investments. When it looks like a worthwhile project, the knowledge get's in-sourced. Don't see the recruitment fail in this particular happening of things.

doktrin 13y ago
Is this satire? We're talking about $19 billion here. In either case, your statement is almost completely incorrect. The WhatsApp founders were turned down before WhatsApp even existed. Therefore, it was not some bold tactical decision on the part of FB. Their technical acumen was up to snuff, so they were rejected based on some other criteria (not necessarily age).
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  The funny part is that if Facebook had hired them when they had the chance, they probably wouldn't have built anything resembling WhatsApp or whatever Facebook was trying to achieve by acquiring WhatsApp.
PaulHoule 13y ago
More to the point, these guys probably wouldn't have done anything interesting at all had they been hired by Facebook. They certainly wouldn't have had the freedom and the resources to develop something like WhatsApp. I interviewed with Google not too long ago and it was clear to me that Google was the place to go work if I wanted to get a paycheck without having any impact on anything at all.
- sizzle 13y ago
  Or have any free time, from the insidious nature of comfort perks they supply

chollida1 13y ago

Interesting article. Whenever an article like this pops up the usual chorus is, there is no skill shortage, just a shortage at the price the employer is willing to pay. Sadly I've seen myself as someone on the hiring side of the table fall into a few of these traps listed in the article. A newly minted Phd, is one type of person that I've found myself having trouble hiring. Same with an newly minted Masters. The reason is that often their area of specialization doesn't really help in the role I'm hiring and therefore I wouldn't give them any bump in pay for their extra schooling. On the other side of the table, especially for a Phd, they often expect a bump in pay for their additional schooling so its tough for me to hire someone like that. EDIT to clarify, I don't reject these people out of hand, infact it helps them get an interview over others, but when it comes to offer time ie salary, I don't give any real value to a masters or Phd. Or put another way, if the salary I'm willing to offer is $125,000 its the same regardless of education. To be clear, In a fund with 12 people, we have 5 Phd's and one more with a masters, so we do hire well educated people:) Post grad education might get you interviewed first, but will have almost no bearing at all on if I extend a job offer or not. The same can be said for what school you went to. MIT education, great I'll put you at the top of the interview pile, but when it comes time to extend an job offer, where you went to school doesn't factor into what we offer at all. Too far along in their career can also be tough. Often this is due just to salary demands not fitting a junior role. A new grad has no job they are quitting so they don't need a "bump" in pay to leave. Someone who is well into their career might be a good fit but is making a good salary where they are so they require a sizable pay increase to leave. Given this, it often makes sense to go with the younger candidate whose salary fits the role. EDIT To flesh out the senior developer comment a bit more. There are really 3 areas I've had trouble with in the past. 1) The 10 year developer who has 1 year of experience 10 times over. This is just a junior developer who wants the salary of a senior developer. 2) Its harder to find senior developers, regardless of what you pay. As Joel once said the good developers always have jobs, hence his internship program. 3) the hire bar is, umm..., higher for senior developers as they are expected to do more, mentor, design architecture, etc. This means I'm more picky as to who I hire. Having said that, there are times where experience rules, and in this case you get what you pay for. NOTE This post has generated more upvote and downvotes than almost any other post I've written. So half the people agree with me and half disagree?

smackfu 13y ago

I don't know that rockstar companies really say that much about the industry as a whole. I also don't put much stock in that Zuckerberg quote about "hiring as many talented engineers as we can find", unless they define talented as a very high bar, in which case the statement is meaningless. Who wouldn't want to hire as many crazy good programmers as they can?

logfromblammo 13y ago
Someone with a finite budget for software development, perhaps?

bartkappenburg 13y ago

The author is forgetting one thing: under qualified devs (at the time of a FB interview) can also be lucky and learn the job while building and scaling a product which has gotten traction. Given the numerous applicants they deny, what are the chances that a few of them get lucky? I'm estimating, with my limited math knowledge, that this will be closer to 1 than one may think beforehand.

cletus 13y ago

This post is largely about discrimination and uses Brian Acton as a timely centerpiece. The truth is however more complex (IMHO): - Culture matters a lot in hiring. By this I mean a Stanford grad is much more likely to hire another Stanford grad in a field of qualified candidates. This isn't simply a form of nepotism as such. Two grads from the same college will share a larger common cultural base; - The culture the founders bring shapes the organization. Many startups are started by Stanford and MIT grads. It shouldn't surprise you that this biases the makeup of their workforces and what they look for; - Speaking as someone who has interviewed in the field of programming there are many frauds. I don't even necessarily mean deliberate frauds but there are clearly people who are employed as programmers/engineers who have no business being such. It's astounding how you can stump someone with 5-10 years of experience by asking them to code a simple loop (seriously); - If people are worried about foreign labour putting downward pressure on wages, the indentured servitude that is the US work visa and immigration system should be the target of your anger. It allows bodyshops to hire people from, say, China and India and pay them a pittance because they know those people can't leave for 8+ years if they ever want a green card. Make a green card automatic after, say, 6 years on an H1B, even if you change jobs, and a lot of those problems would go away. As for other fields, I can't speak to those, other than anecdotally a lot of fields seem to have the earning potential of being a waiter in Manhattan.

moron4hire 13y ago
"Cultural fit" is just another name for racism, sexism, and ageism. Yeah, all of those things can be culture. Why should it be any less wrong to discriminate based on college attendance than on race? What else is cultural fit? "Sorry, you don't fit our culture of being heterosexual here." We're supposed to be adults. We're supposed to know how to get along and play nicely with others, regardless of how different we are from each other. This "cultural fit" line is bullshit apologia for real discrimination.
- ZanyProgrammer 13y ago
  And "cultural fit" can also be code for classism. Too bad for you that you didn't go to Stanford, Harvard, etc.

raverbashing 13y ago

Well, it's really simple FB's (and Google's and Yahoo's) definition of talent is whoever passes their "quiz show" interview However, yes, you don't need to know the worse case complexity of shell sort for most tasks, especially at the beginning of a project where load demands are smaller.

danielweber 13y ago
The more people you reject, the more selective your hiring process is, and the better your employees are. QED!
groby_b 13y ago
Here's the odd thing - if I meet a candidate who knows about shellsort, I'd already be impressed. Many people I interview have trouble with much more basic concepts than that. And of course, it is worth keeping in mind that when you hire an employee that hopefully at some point, the load demands are higher. And it's kind of awkward if your product hits rapid growth, but your engineers are currently busy learning about algorithmic efficiency. Nobody sane asks about "worst-case efficiency of shell sort" unless you yourself suggest shell sort as an algorithm. But it is expected that you get the general idea of O notation, because it actually does matter for day-to-day work. And, as a practical interview tip: It's perfectly OK to say "I don't know about this specific case" - just follow it up with "for most sorts, O(n^2) is an upper bound, so if I'd guess, I'd go with O(n^2).", or something like that. It tells the interviewer that you know general principles. That's the big problem in most interviews - candidates treat it like a test, where there's just the right answer, and nothing else. It's not a test. It's an attempt to somehow, within an hour usually, find out what you know and how you think. Throw the interviewer a bone or two, and help them do that. Silence and short "I don't know" answers really just waste time for everybody.
- raverbashing 13y ago
  " That's the big problem in most interviews - candidates treat it like a test, where there's just the right answer, and nothing else. " Humm no. Google interviews are (or at least were) pretty much right or wrong answers mostly. The best interviewers could do what you say, but for the most part, no.

not_paul_graham 13y ago

Very well written article and I can add some context being in the unhired category of engineers. I graduated from Georgia Tech sometime in the last couple of years with a 3.64 GPA. I know that GPA doesn't mean much but really at Georgia Tech they make you work for it like a dog. I have some projects on GitHub and well I thought companies would come knocking at my door. Boy was I mistaken. So I started applying late into my graduation semester. I got interviews with Amazon / Google and another Tech giant. I got turned down without an interview from Facebook / Palantir and some other older startups. I did not apply to a lot of companies, and I feel that was the real difference bw me and friends that got offers from all of those companies that I've mentioned above. Past summers I had worked at management consulting companies and ultimately after not getting any offers from Tech companies, I moved back home to Asia. And although I did feel a little crushed at the time, I'm working at a big engineering company back home, and I don't make as much money, I'm learning to like what I do. Perhaps after a couple of years of nursing my self-esteem, I'll try again. Till then yea it sucks to not fit in. It sucks to not be a culture fit. It sucks to be told that you are not adequate after slogging it out at a supposedly "world class" engineering school. The best reason that I got rejected was because other candidates felt coding was their calling and I didn't seem all that committed. wtf! I'm of Asian descent and well was on a F1 Visa (non-resident/citizen) with a horrible accent. Perhaps there were other factors that resulted in me not being hired because I did make it through the phone screens for some companies, and also because I have other asian friends that did get offers. . But yea atleast it feels good to know that there are PhDs out there that can't get jobs either so it wasn't all me.

raverbashing 13y ago
Not surprising to me. Although it is a top school, a recent graduate has lots of "gotchas" for companies. The corporate world has a lot of differences from the academic world, and in my point of view, it is, on average, better.
rayiner 13y ago
Considering that 3.55 is the cut-off for highest graduation honors at GT, you have nothing to be ashamed of there! If you decide to take another stab at things, there is no reason to limit yourself to Amazon/Google/etc. The southern east coast has a perfectly healthy tech ecosystem, from Atlanta up to D.C., and the GT brand carries well there.

tempodox 13y ago

Surprise! Double standards, discrimination, illegal practices and plain incompetence in the hiring business. Those self-absorbed tech rock star companies are actually not smarter than the rest.

flurie 13y ago

> However, in this era of e-mail, Skype, and many people working successfully in the technology business from a large distance (e.g. India or China), why exactly couldn’t the desperate “starving” technology companies offer him a job he could do from Texas? I feel like there's a blindness by some STEM professionals to the fact that not all jobs can be done nearly anywhere, least of all those available to semiconductor engineers. I blame the acronym for bundling us all together unnecessarily.

julesbond007 13y ago

I said this long time ago on my blog: http://julesjaypaulynice.com/good-software-engineers/ http://julesjaypaulynice.com/good-software-engineers/

puppetmaster3 13y ago
agree.

xyzzyz 13y ago

While there certainly are companies whose business model is to get cheap workforce from India or China on H1B (just take a look at H1B stats), there is something I don't get. Where and how this pay inequality for local vs. imported workforce manifests for more desirable companies like Google or Facebook? As a student outside United States I had a chance to do internships in the US several times (on J1 visa), and as I am finishing my degree soon, it was natural for me to try and get a job there. My observation is that the salary and benefits I was offered at Google, Microsoft and Facebook wasn't much different than if I was American - if any, it was even slightly higher than what they pay American new grads (data based on talking with American peers and reading Quora posts). My non-American friends who also got a job in the US also didn't complain about getting lower than their American peers. Thus, should I expect fewer bonuses/pay raises? Smaller chance to get promotion? Less desirable project?

puppetmaster3 13y ago
H1s get to work with worse bosses on worse projects and less chance of promotion/raises. Or you get shipped back.
- shas3 13y ago
  What is the basis of your assertion? There are at least 250,000 H1B workers in the USA. Do you seem to suggest this is true across the board? In my experience in most 'good' companies (e.g. Texas Instruments that is discussed in the article), such exploitation doesn't occur, based on the anecdotal evidence that I've heard.
  - spiralpolitik 13y ago
    Look at the top 5 companies requesting H-1Bs between 2010 and 2012. All are outsourcing companies. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/top-10-companies-request-visas-foreign-workers/t/story?id=20730536 http://abcnews.go.com/Business/top-10-companies-request-visa... These companies typically exploit their workers with lower pay and threats to send them home if they don't play ball. Or are employing people to offshore jobs. The "good" companies that use H-1Bs are a fairly small percentage of the number of visas issued.

cyberaleck 13y ago

I think that there is great opportunity for some company to do "Moneyballs". There are great A-players that are completely ignored by traditional hiring processes. The company that will tap into that source will probably become the next Google.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

>> $19 billion in cash and stock (slightly less than the inflation adjusted cost of the Manhattan Project) Holy Crap !!! That cannot be right - surely not.... Edit: According to Wikipedia : "The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (about $26 billion in 2014 dollars)." So, if you allow 7bn to be slightly less, then yes. It is right. And there is worse to come - also according to wikipedia and the BBC, the US spends around 50bn pa, (the UK an embarrassing 4.6bn a year) on science funding - but really, half of US science spending on a mobile IM app. How utterly depressing.

FD3SA 13y ago
A fellow kindred spirit. That is also the point that jumped out at me and made me wonder what in the hell society has devolved into. The disciples of Rand spend their money on the strangest things.
logfromblammo 13y ago
There may be a disparity based upon how inflation is calculated. Plus or minus 40% after an interval of 75 years is not unreasonable for the purposes of an "about this big" comparison. A Paasche index will understate price inflation, while a Laspeyres index will overstate it, due to demand elasticity. Governments may change the formula used to report changes in the money supply, using different measures like M1, M2, M3, and MZM, along with the average velocity of money. This obscures the amount of value intentional inflation extracts from the productive economy, at the cost of mathematical accuracy. You could buy exactly one Manhattan project with 1939-1946 dollars for $2billion, of which 90% was production, and 10% R&D. You could buy exactly one Apollo Program with $25.4billion in 1961-1972 dollars. One LHC costs $9billion 2008 dollars. Tevatron was a bargain next to that at only $120million 1980 dollars. Put into that sort of scale, with $19billion in 2014 cash, you could do any one of the following: Build an entire city designed for 50000 inhabitants supplied entirely by renewable energy sources. Build an entire archipelago of artificial islands. Bury an Interstate highway under Boston. Build 3 international-class airports. Build two subway lines under an existing major city. Replace 5 long-span highway bridges. Buy 6 Human Genome Projects. Replicate the Channel Tunnel. Does that bring it into perspective?

michaelochurch 13y ago

Acq-hires are proof of dysfunction. Companies like Yahoo have talent, but can't recognize it at the bottom because the middle-management filter is so defective. So they buy market-verified talent at a panic price. That's shitty for the individual (well, great for 0.05% of them and shitty for 99.95%) because there's so much noise. The problem is that the VC-funded world is full of soft-skulls who never grew up (some are old, but not mature; those tend to be investors). They make workplaces that are culturally defective and mean-spirited but have the superficial trappings of college because they're halfway houses for frat boys. "Culture fit" is about wanting to work with the same people you'd go drinking with or (for most non-tech roles) have sex with. I ask: Why? You should hire the people who'll do awesome work and lead, and some of those are 65-year-old women. If you don't, your halfway-house/I-could-live-here "utopia" will underperform and forever be beholden to the VCs. Reality: if you make one real friend per job, call yourself lucky. My experience is that it's Poisson(0.75). That "culture fit" camaraderie is bullshit. Don't take seriously or trust anyone who wouldn't have your back (and give you a reference, even if you needed him to lie) if you got fired on bad terms. Another lesson from the old (30): your life should be diversified outside of your job, because you can lose the latter at any time for any reason. Losing a job is bad enough as it is, but if you have nothing outside of it, it's catastrophic. The "culture fit" workplace is bullshit. Just build something awesome worth giving a shit about.

seivan 13y ago
'Companies like Yahoo have talent, but can't recognize it at the bottom because the middle-management filter is so defective.' This.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  It's not quite that - it's that the organizational structure prevents middle-managers from acting on their knowledge even if they do recognize talent. Imagine that you are responsible for a department of people, all of whom need to work together to accomplish a big job. Assume that talent is normally distributed - maybe you have 1 superstar and 1 idiot, 10 high performers and 10 laggards, and 100 average developers. Also assume that the boundaries between categories are fuzzy - it's not that there's 1 superstar who absolutely stands out, it's that there are 2-3 people who are really good, and one is obviously better to you but that isn't apparent to everyone else, and another 20 or so people are just a bit behind them. What do you do? If you preference your best programmer, give him the pick of assignments and a lot of latitude to choose projects, you will demotivate all the people who are just below him. Ironically, a lot of michaelochurch's past comments are examples of this - his perspective on the "Real Googler line", and even the grandparent comment, is what things look like for someone who is talented and high-performing and yet right below the line. These folks become bitter, demotivated, subversive, and ultimately toxic to the organization. Moreover, you destroy the effectiveness of your superstars as well. To accomplish anything in a large organization, you need cooperation from your peers. When your peers resent your special treatment or want to sabotage your rise, you won't get this. So the only way to succeed as a superstar in a large organization is to act very subtly and bring a lot of people with you, which usually means keeping your more radical ideas to yourself and only saying things that can be heard. (Which, really, is how it should be - think of how unpleasant it is to work in an environment with a "golden kid" who's always running around with the latest technologies, not answerable to anyone else, and yet has management's favor.) This is also why getting rid of laggards is far more important for organizational health than hiring superstars. If you populate an organization full of folks who understand compilers, or understand immutability, or can work with multiple languages, or who understand design patterns, then those techniques become part of the general culture that the whole eng organization can use. If you lack that critical mass, any superstars that understand why those concepts are important will not have the freedom to use those techniques because of the political issues above. There's very good evidence that the middle-managers know exactly who their star performers are. When they quit to found their own company, who do they call? You often have groups of programmers that have worked together through multiple companies, and as soon as you hire one the whole group comes on board within a year. But within a company, the constraints of organizational politics prevent them from favoritism, which is probably how it should be.

Mc_Big_G 13y ago

Facebook can't hire good engineers because good engineers don't want to work there.

aestra 13y ago

I find that hiring practices can often discriminate against those who grew up poor/not middle class. I remember someone writing about how they hired saying things like "I look for evidence of interest in technology from a young age." Well, I had tons of interest in technology from a young age, but my resume can't reflect that. I didn't have a computer until I was about 13 or 14 because we couldn't afford one earlier, even though my parents really wanted one. I think our school library might have had one computer for the whole school, which was not available. I certainly couldn't go to expensive tech camps or the like, we couldn't afford it. I did get all the science books from the public library and read them as much as I could. I didn't start programming until college. I get very very positive reviews from all the jobs I ever worked though, but my resume might be passed up because I didn't have the opportunities others had.

skywhopper 13y ago

Sounds like Facebook et al should be investing some of this money into university CS/CE/CIS programs along with internal training programs if they are truly concerned about the lack of qualified personnel. A billion dollars goes a long way.

mnglkhn2 13y ago

Brian Acton's rejection by Facebook is used as a pro argument for the idea that tech companies are just pretending to not find qualified candidates, when there are plenty. I am not sure which way it is but the argument used is flawed. Brian Acton never stated that he went to Facebook to be a programmer. Not even a senior one. At that moment he already had managerial experience, having lead large dev teams at Yahoo. It way more likely that his Facebook interview was centered around a managerial role and the fit, for one reason or another was not there. Not taking any sides, I want to say that Brian Acton's example is just a nice/easy/convenient media story. Not at all indicative of anything related to availability or lack of STEM people.

100k 13y ago
Thank you for pointing this out. I've seen no indication that he interviewed as a programmer at Facebook or Twitter. Considering he was managing a large team at Yahoo, it's unlikely that he would be. He might even have been interviewing for a director or VP-level position.

moron4hire 13y ago

Can we talk about the other elephant in the room: that Facebook can afford the inflation-adjusted equivalent of the Manhattan project budget with a product that it does not charge its users to use?

sizzle 13y ago
Google can afford even more than that. Times have changed, and these tech juggernauts are essentially printing their own money with how invested the general public is into their products.

craigyk 13y ago

For perspective, the budget of the NIH, which funds a huge percentage of all the biomedical research in the US is about 31B. This is research that subsidizes and lays a foundation for many of the medical advances we have today. For additional perspective, this 31B in public money is about equivalent to all the private R&D spending done on medical research. So the thought that someone would spend 19B on a messaging platform, which is an already solved problem, is sad. 19B probably isn't "cure cancer" kind of money, but you'd be able to solve some pretty real problems with it.

puppetmaster3 13y ago

One thing not talked about is potentially superior EU education relative to US. Who would make a better impact for you?

cottonseed 13y ago

Idea I had a while back: Monster.com for anonymous interviews. Purge race, age and gender information from the interview process. Getting a broader range of candidates to the final interview would already be a huge step. I'm not even sure in-person or phone interviews are necessary or beneficial. I'm aware of a top philosophy dept. that does professor hiring completely be application materials. Why? They found application materials were a better predictor of success than in-person judgements.

sizzle 13y ago
Yeah but you can't have diverse teams if you hire from the same mold

Glyptodon 13y ago

Basically companies have to either pay/accommodate people or train them, but instead they'd rather whine. Know it all too well, as someone who has tried to avoid living in California for lifestyle reasons, which limits a lot of options.

mcguire 13y ago

I recently had to have one aspect of this issue pointed out to me, since it was never a major concern of mine and I'd been completely blind to it: seniority. I do not currently work for a start-up, or even what you would typically consider a technology company. However, the group I work with, the program in the businessy sense, is not very old. The original kernel of the group began less than ten years ago, and has grown in fits and spurts. Many, if not most, of the "founders" are still here, as well. When the program started, many of the founders were young and relatively inexperienced. Today, they're still young but are more experienced---in this specific project. And at least some of the people who have been hired since are older or more experienced---at least in terms of having worked in a wider variety of environments---or both. As a result, in some situations, someone with more experience and skills is being supervised, managed, or lead by someone with significantly less experience. The situation isn't improved by weird incentives that place emphasis on some jobs more than others, similar to the cliche about sales versus engineering. So, how's this for a weird situation: people who would be senior are doing junior work, because "job market"; people who would likely be junior are in charge, because of good timing (For those of you who plan to be future Zuckerbergs, what are you going to do when you really do need to hire a rocket scientist?); people who are ready to move up can't, because nobody is leaving or dying off; and people who might be better off leaving won't, because they would be taking a pay and prestige cut. [Note: I am absolutely not talking about myself. I knew what I was doing when I got here. I have no real urge to "move up" in the world. I'm a technical guy. I'm mechanism, not policy.]

geebee 13y ago

Zuckerberg quoted as saying: "Our policy is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find. The whole limit in the system is just that there aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today." Two huge unanswered questions. What do you mean by "trained and have these skills?" And at what price? At $50,000 a year, I would also like to hire as all the engineers. I will place them into jobs that pay 100K a year, and I will keep 50k. How many times would I like to do this? Answer: all of the times. Now, suppose I have to pay them 125K a year, and I can hire them out at 100k a year. How many times would I like to do this? Answer: none of the times. So there's a massive shortage of 50k/yr engineers, but a huge glut of $125k a year engineers. It sounds like there's a severe shortage of programmers willing to work for far less than they're worth. How is this different from any other field?

Balgair 13y ago

When they say they can't find the right person, they mean that Frank's cell phone ran out of juice. So, my brother used to work in a small clock shop. These were really precise clocks (nanosecond) and they did distributed timing. You have an oil field, maybe, and want to know the size of it? Send out a blast pulse and record the echos. But the recorders need to really know where and when they hear the echo over a few hundred square miles. Its not easy stuff to deal with. But the company had Frank. Frank had been there since the beginning. He had written all the code for the clocks, he built and wired the entire place, he knew the whims of the servers and the phone system, the slight burning smells that meant an imminent failure. Frank was the company, and the rest of them where there to make sure Frank was working and happy. Yeah, he owned a bit of the equity, not a major share, but a bit. No-one else knew all the passwords or the files like Frank. Frank barely had time for his kids, let alone to train anyone else. To keep things going, Frank was the ONLY person. So, this worried the owners a lot. If Frank got cancer or in an accident, they were screwed. Hell, everyone was screwed. But to train anyone up was near impossible. Because Frank didn't have the time between putting out the little fires in the code and sleeping and making money for the owners. Frank didn't have them in a bind as much as Frank himself was in a bind. He wanted time to see soccer games, but he wanted his kids to go to college more, and that meant the money came first. So, what was everyone supposed to do? They needed a new Frank. But anyone they brought on was just confused by the spaghetti of wires and the nonsense code that Frank had made 20 years ago to solve some problem half drunk at 2am on a Saturday. There was no record because there was no time to make one. You had to just clone Frank's brain, because nothing else would do in time. My brother left that company because trying to untangle the Gordian Knot that Frank and the comapny were committed to was a noose. But there are a few thousand Franks out there. There are a ton of companies that are in this bind. They have 2 or 3 guys that can actually do the job. And trying to replace that team is impossible. When the Zuck merps out that they can't find anyone, he is not lying, but mis-speaking. He means that Frank's phone is out of juice.