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I Don't Agree That There Really Is a Tech Worker Shortage

I know lots of engineers who are unable to find work. I do believe the hiring managers who say they can't find the workers they need. What I don't believe is that the workers aren't out there, hoping to get hired. I speculate that the reasons for the perceived - and ONLY perceived - shortage is that it's far more difficult for employers and potential employees to find each other. Another problem is that us engineers are expected to have real-world, paid experience in whatever technology the hiring company uses, rather than these companies providing on-the-job training. At one time, a college degree and a demonstrable grasp of computing technology was all one needed. Companies were happy to train. No longer. What really kills me is that when a new technology is introduced, one is _immediately_ required to know about it before getting a job where that technology will be used. Consider that Swift, a new programming language that Apple hopes will make it easier to write iOS Apps, has only been available for a few months, yet one cannot get a job writing Swift code, unless one already has PAID Swift experience on one's resume. It's not enough to just read a book. Neither is anyone willing to train.

dalke 12y ago
If you do an HN search for "shortage" you'll see many links, to things like: http://math-blog.com/2014/03/10/stem-shortage-claims-and-facebooks-19-billion-acquisition-of-whatsapp/ http://math-blog.com/2014/03/10/stem-shortage-claims-and-fac... - which points out that it's not "difficult for employers and potential employees", giving an example of how Facebook decided to not employ the people who became the founders of WhatsApp, then paid $19 billion for their company a few years later. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth-of-americas-tech-talent-shortage/275319/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth... - titled "The Myth of America's Tech-Talent Shortage: And what it should mean for immigration reform." If you want the economic details, you might look at at http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis.pdf http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-... , which (among many things) points out that two people get a STEM degree for each STEM job available. The general conclusion is that there is no shortage, and that complaints by various large businesses about a lack of trained people is a strategy to pay lower wages and spend less on training. This has been known for over a decade. Eg, http://www.cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2005/back1305.html http://www.cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2005/back130... concludes """Overwhelmingly, the H-1B program is used to import workers at the very bottom of the wage scale. The wide gap between wages for U.S. workers and H-1B workers helps explain why industry demand for H-1B workers is so high and why the annual visa quotas are being exhausted. Many in industry have called for an increase in the number of H-1B visas, citing the early exhaustion of the cap as reflective of widespread need for skilled workers. However, the fact that very few H-1B workers are earning salaries as high as U.S. workers in the same profession would seem to refute that claim, and should make lawmakers wary of increasing the H-1B quota. The exhaustion of the H-1B quota may reflect employers' interest in lowering labor costs or widespread fraud rather than an insufficient number of visas.""" HN comments include those of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8656028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8656028 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372574 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689383 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804016 and more .. again, search HN for "shortage".
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  H1Bs are used not only to pay lower wages, but to enable employers to treat their employees poorly without fear that they will leave. As a US Citizen, not only can I work for any US employer, I can reside here as well, even if I don't have a job. If I work for someone who treats me poorly, or who I regard as unethical, I will resign. One time I just walked right off the job - I left on a Friday, then never returned, due to an ethical lapse on the part of my employer. I gave no notice at all. By contrast, a close friend who was a UK citizen, who worked with me on an H1B, was treated quite poorly by our employer. He was given a far heavier load, he was never given any help when he asked for it, in general he was taken advantage of. Really he was a far more skilled coder than I was at the time, but I was treated far better than he was. I myself have no objection to foreign workers. If someone comes to the US hoping to make a better life for themselves than they are able to do in their Mother Country, I say more power to them. I know from hard experience that it totally sucks to be poor. But I do feel they should be paid as much as a US Citizen would be.
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - glesica 12y ago
    A possible solution here is for countries to treat labor the way they have started to treat capital and goods and services. Start signing reciprocal free-labor agreements. If country Y is willing to allow anyone who can legally live and work in country X to legally live and work in country Y, then country X will do the same for people who can legally live and work in country Y. In my mind, if companies were serious about this shortage (and not just trying to hire more people they can abuse as you described) they would be pushing for far more than a few more H1Bs. But we haven't really seen that, at least that I know of.
    - dalke 12y ago
      Such exists between many countries in the EU. It's not so simple though. Free movement of labor also requires a correspondence in the national health care and retirement programs, so for example totalization agreements to eliminate dual Social Security coverage. The US has such agreements with only a score or so countries (see http://www.ssa.gov/international/agreements_overview.html http://www.ssa.gov/international/agreements_overview.html ). It gives an example of a 66% tax rate when such an agreement does not exist. As it stands now, there is no such agreement between the US and, say, New Zealand. A NZ citizen working in the US for 8 years before returning to NZ would pay US Social Security taxes for those 8 years, but receive no benefits.
skrebbel 12y ago
Job markets, even in tech, are quite tied to geography. From which area and perspective are you writing this? Knowing might help us discuss this subject better. I live in the Netherlands, where programmer salaries are way lower than in silicon valley, but I don't know of a single half-competent programmer without a job. All the hiring managers are complaining here just as you describe, but the net effect is that everybody gets hired. Even the mediocre folks (note: I'm not referring to skill as in "decades of Swift experience" but "competent engineer, quick learner"). Maybe the exploded salaries of the bay area take away any financial space an employer might have for on-the-job training? People still have to create more value than they cost. (note, I hope this is not the case, because I think programmers are grossly underpaid here in the Netherlands)
- crdoconnor 12y ago
  >Maybe the exploded salaries of the bay area take away any financial space an employer might have for on-the-job training? It's not like employers are keen on training anywhere else in the US either. American business executives have become culturally short-sighted and the unwillingness to train is part of that.
  - zaqokm 12y ago
    > It's not like employers are keen on training anywhere else in the US either. Although I do not live in the US, I gather that like many countries I have lived in is the view is that training is no longer such a large responsibility of the employer and is rather costly. However in my travels and work in Asia, there is a concept of bonding in many countries where an employee is offered a job and training and in return agrees to work for a company for X amount of time or pays the employer. This reduces the overhead in regards to the cost of training.
    - crdoconnor 12y ago
      This doesn't sound like the Asia that I live in.
ryanackley 12y ago
Here is an alternate point of view. I recently went through the process of hiring a programmer. I probably interviewed 30 candidates. All of them had the required knowledge and experience listed on their CV's. Guess how many could write a simple program in the language of their choice? Exactly 3. Yes, there are many people with the right credentials. In my own personal experience, many of these people can't do the work. They either don't really enjoy what they do or they simply aren't smart enough. They got into this field because of the money.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  For the specific reason that resumes are often, if not actually outright faked, at least "enhanced", I've been contemplating starting a business in which I would perform resume screening for folks like you, for a fee. I don't really know how to structure it yet. I don't want to be a recruiter or headhunter. What I would like to do is to offer folks such as yourself, who already have resumes, my opinion as to the qualifications of each candidate. I myself got the very highest-paying job of my career, writing Mac OS X I/O Kit Kernel Extensions - what Apple calls device drivers - because I was the first candidate in six months who knew how to do synchronization in the kernel. That's a very basic requirement for writing a device driver, so it's covered in detail, and quite clearly by the tutorials on Apple's developer site. I expect lots of people figured they could get a cushy, high-paying job, so they just added fake device driver work to their resume. Ironically, the guy who asked me that question was their windows driver engineer. More or less the way it would work is that you'd send me some candidate resumes, and I would tell you which ones I think were worth your time to interview. Quite commonly, references are only checked after an interview, as the last step before making an offer. I wouldn't check their references, so as not to annoy them, but would call or email the HR departments at each of the employers the list, to verify their employment. "Did they work for you from this year to that year?" is a simple yes-or-no question. Also I would verify that those who claimed to have college degrees, really graduated. In my entire life, the only time I've been asked to supply my transcripts to anyone, was when I applied to graduate school, and so I could qualify for a discount on my auto insurance. I've never had a potential employer ask for my transcripts. Would you regard such a service as valuable? If so, have you any suggestions as to how I could get started, or how to market such a service? A lot of people have told me I'd make a good headhunter. I expect I would, but I don't want to do that, because I want the whole practice of third-party technical recruitment to just go away.
mabbo 12y ago
Not all tech workers are equal. My company does not care what language you know, or technology you use- we want people who are smart, capable of working with any technology. And we want the very best of those people, without lowering the quality bar for the sake of having people in seats. We will let people go while we also are hiring for open positions on the same team if we realize the person isn't s good fit after all. I have little job security, but I work with only fantastic people. It's a deal I'm happy with. The pay is nice, and I never feel like the smartest in the room. There are lots of companies like this. We have to complete with them for those top tier people. And we frequently find those good people outside of America. The result? They often come work in our non-USA offices. That's one less job that would have existed in America, with the salary of it being taxed in America. It's a loss for the USA.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  True, there are even Americans working abroad right now (American with a Chinese work visa). Its a global market for talent, not just an American one.
- ExpiredLink 12y ago
  > There are lots of companies like this. They all look for the 3% rock-stars, reject the 97% and complain about tech worker shortage. What a silly 'strategy'!
- S4M 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, what is your company?
lafar6502 12y ago
I'm afraid there's a shortage of good programmers, with proper education in computer science, understanding of how the OS and programs interact, knowing how to use at least one programming language proficiently, fluent in algorithms and data structures - i mean people who know their tools and know what they're doing. Instead we've got lots of excited, half-educated but enthusiastic ctrl-c/ctrl-v specialists, doing whatever they think is right/necessary and not even realizing how broken their products are (or how much better they could be if their authors were a bit more knowledgeable)
- andybak 12y ago
  There's a wide spectrum between copy+paste no-hopers and people with a PhD from MIT who know Knuth and SICP backwards. I would rather employ a self-taught developer with some experience and pragmatism born out of real-world experience than I would someone with impeccable academic credentials. Forgive me if I sound touchy but I'm self-taught, my knowledge of algorithms is extremely patchy - but I think I'm a competent developer in the domains to which I apply myself.
  - lafar6502 12y ago
    I never mentioned academic degree, just expect a person to have the right level of education/knowledge. For example, i'd expect a candidate to be able to explain to me how a hashtable works or what a page fault means. Also, i'm shocked when a person doing 'database stuff' has only a vague idea about what SQL is One (very recent) example of what i'm talking about: There was a system that crashed once or twice a day, running on EC2 instance. I discovered that the program crashes because it runs out of memory, and also that the system runs without a swap file. Then a guy responsible for that setup explained to me that it's a bad sign when a program uses a swap, therefore they disabled it altogether. Curiously, aftere enabling the swap the problem disappeared.
  - dalke 12y ago
    I think you mean only impeccable academic credentials. Self-taught developers do enter MIT graduate school, including after several years of working in industry. For that matter, Chumby hired Andrew "bunnie" Huang as a freshly minted MIT PhD in EE. Or perhaps you mean that the types of problems you work on, like the vast majority of problems in the world, don't require knowing Knuth and "PCIS", or a PhD education? I develop algorithms as part of my work. For example, given 20 molecules, find the largest substructure which is in at least 15 of them. I opened up v3 of Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" last week because it has several pages about a topic that I don't understand. It would take a lot longer to train you to the point where you could be effective at the task, than a Knuth-knowing MIT grad. Which is quite reasonable - I'm in a rather obscure corner of the programming world. Though it's one where Knuth plays a much larger role than SICP. Forgive me if I sound touchy ;) but I'm self-taught, followed by education, followed by experience, and feel exactly the same as you.
pjmlp 12y ago
Fully agree. Recently discussing this issue among friends, not one of them could get hired for specific positions, even though they knew the required technologies. All got the same excuse, the said technologies were being used in side projects, not on their main job.
- nmjohn 12y ago
  What companies are you applying to? I find what you are saying very hard to believe as my own experience has been the complete opposite. When I was interviewing I got asked about my side projects more than everything else combined.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    Just standard European middle size corporations, take your pick.
- hackerboos 12y ago
  I had that excuse tossed at me but still got a job. They did however use it to suppress my salary. I took it anyway because I wanted to work with the tech I used in my spare time.
computerjunkie 12y ago
>>> when a new technology is introduced, one is _immediately_ required to know about it before getting a job where that technology will be used. Well Said. I too am in a similar position you have explained. I have a Computer Science college degree (graduated in November) and I have been applying to junior/graduate level jobs that have inflated expectations of what a regular graduate should know (especially technologies). All these claims of tech worker shortages recruiters talk about is hard to believe. I think there is a communication breakdown with companies and education centers breakdowns when it comes recruitment.
- freshflowers 12y ago
  Try looking at it from an employer perspective. The fact that you have a CS degree tells me absolutely nothing about your engineering talent. So hiring you on that basis alone would be gamble, and the odds for that gamble are hysterically bad. They have better odds taking a year's junior developer salary straight to the casino. The number of people claiming to be able to do the job is a multitude of those actually able to do the job. If you are actually "in a similar position", it should take you less than two months to get out of that position. Teach yourself a stack that is in demand, build a project and put it out there (Github, App store, whatever) and if you show any talent and skill the odds are you'll be hired within a month. Just waving your CS degree around isn't going to make anything happen. Fuck it, you've just graduated in November, you have no proven skills and you're already whining about not getting hired?
  - computerjunkie 12y ago
    >>> Teach yourself a stack that is in demand, build a project and put it out there (Github, App store, whatever) and if you show any talent and skill the odds are you'll be hired within a month. Thanks for the advice. I am currently working on that.
  - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
    "(Github, App store..." Quite commonly I am asked for my Github link, but then regarded as unqualified because I don't have one. That's because you can download my source from my own website. I have some pretty good reason to believe that many of those who want to know my Github, don't know what Github actually is. That is, not only do they not inspect anyone's Github source, if pressed, they could not explain the difference between a github and a hubcap. Almost universally, one is required to have at least on App in the App Store or Google Play. There's no specific requirement as to what the app actually does, whether it works well, whether it's source code makes sense to anyone, whether it gets good reviews - just that one just that that special magic ticket into a mobile development job. Again, I have good reason to believe that few ever actually so much as look at the app store or google play pages, let alone download, install and run the app. Have you ever heard someone say "I'd like to work with you so we can find a way that you can drive a brand new car right off the lot. How about I give you a thousand dollar trade-in on your totally thrashed beater?" I actually had a Toyota saleswoman say just that to me. The reason I was shopping for a new car, is that my thousand dollar trade-in was so unreliable that I was to be fired if I didn't buy a new car Real Soon Now. Now consider that many recruiters are really good at just that kind of sales. It's not that they try to sell anything to the candidates. They sell their, uh, "service" to the hiring managers, by somehow convincing them that its worth paying them tens of thousand of dollars in commissions for placing just one coder.
freshflowers 12y ago
> At one time, a college degree and a demonstrable grasp of computing technology was all one needed. Yep, and that turned out to be a fucking disaster. So we learned how to filter for programming skills, and the results were utterly depressing. The vast majority of those "engineers who are unable to find work" couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. That applies to the majority of applicants unless we start filtering for actual proven experience. Trying to find someone inexperienced who's worth investing in training is a truly depressing exercise most smaller companies really can't afford. Is it really that much to ask that an unemployed engineer who wants a job coding in language X makes a bit of an effort to learn the language by themselves? Employers really don't expect 'paid' experience in something that's brand new, but what they do expect is self-motivation. If you're only willing to learn X when your boss tells you, you're either going to be a pain to work with or you're covering up for your lack of skill. You only learn a language really well over years. That's your paid on-the-job-training. All most hiring managers look for is some sign of skill and motivation. Not to mention the reality that the "cult of new", as we see it on HN and in the start-up scene really fucks over most non-startup employers. Most developers don't stick with any company for more than two or three years because they want green field projects in the latest sexy language and framework, not maintain "boring legacy code" (we're talking code no more than two years old...) in a stack that's just been declared harmful, crap or whatever by the HN hipster engineering in-crowd. So you train someone, invest time in someone, allow them to learn from costly mistakes on real world projects, and just when they are at the peek of their knowledge and productivity, they fuck off again. Regardless of how well they get paid and treated. We bitch a lot about employers not investing in training, but the flip side is that we have actively contributed to a culture of zero loyalty. As far as I can tell, there is a real scarcity of actually talented engineers, but employees and employers are stuck in some destructive loop that just makes the problem a thousand times worse.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  Actually I strive constantly to learn new languages, toolsets, platforms, frameworks and protocols completely on my own. But that doesn't help me get a job. No one has paid me to work with any of those, see. If I can somehow get a job through some other means, then yes, all of my self-study is a huge help to me, to my coworkers and my clients. What people actually ASK of me, when they think they're looking for "actual proven experience", is "how many years of experience" I have with a given technology. No one EVER asks what I actually did with it, whether I shipped a product as a result, whether my code actually worked, whether it got good reviews, or sold well. If I weren't such a nice guy, I know damn well I could totally fabricate my resume, and I'd have $250k and an office with a door I could shut in a heartbeat. It would actually work really well, because you know - I do invest in my own training. So I really could do the work, even if my resume were fabricated. But I'm a nice guy, so I don't fabricate my resume.
Htsthbjig 12y ago
"I know lots of engineers who are unable to find work." I don't. Probably your definition of "engineer" is different from mine. "Another problem is that us engineers are expected to have real-world, paid experience in whatever technology the hiring company uses" Generalization and obviously not true. I have a company, I don't care about paid experience, in fact we hired lots of people from open source projects, or directly from University with no experience at all. "At one time, a college degree and a demonstrable grasp of computing technology was all one needed. Companies were happy to train. No longer." During the dotcom bubble anyone that could click a button was hired. But it was a bubble. The better demonstration of grasping computing technology is actually having done something with a computer. When computers filled a room it was impossible for people to code on their own. Now you could find people with college degree AND experience writing software for others or for their own. "yet one cannot get a job writing Swift code, unless one already has PAID Swift experience on one's resume." This is your belief not reality. "It's not enough to just read a book." Of course. Programming is not about reading books. The better programmer is not the one who reads the most books. In fact, I consider books obsolete. Everybody in my company has free Lynda accounts.
- minthd 12y ago
  could you please expand a bit on considering books obsolete ?
- smikhanov 12y ago
  Boy, I really wouldn't want to work for your company
  - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
    I must cop to the fact that I myself have a hard time finding work because I make it plainly apparent that I have a bad attitude about total jackasses. However, my thesis in this particular topic is not that I myself am unable to find work, but that a great many of my colleagues cannot, despite being highly qualified. I do believe that those who employ coders, cannot find enough qualified staff. I've been hearing that very same complaint from so many people for so many years that I really don't buy the argument that they're just trying to drive our pay scales downwards. I feel that there is a deeper underlying cause.
alexggordon 12y ago
Why is it that there either has to be a shortage or abundance or tech workers? I think as of now the stream of Tech workers is adequately filling seats. Tech is one of those fields that ends up a lot like dating. You know there's people out there that could re-write your whole system overnight--the "rockstars". Because of this I get the feeling that people are turning down tons of job applications just because they feel the applicants aren't "rockstar-y" enough. I think the experience mentioned here also holds true. Companies want people that can get the ball rolling, but also underestimate how much training can help. At my current company, I'm probably at a training, that is beneficial to myself, at least once a week. I know I'm an outlier, but tying this all together, I think hiring managers are to the point where they're expecting too much from applicants, while undershooting the ability of even the mediocre applicants.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  Rockstars blow their paychecks up their nose, cheat on their wives and girlfriends with groupies, trash hotel rooms then die young, or perhaps live to a ripe old age of poverty and destitution. I have gotten to the point that when someone advertises for a rockstar, I don't even apply. Do you know what a bozo filter is? Have a look at mine: http://www.warplife.com/mdc/resume/ http://www.warplife.com/mdc/resume/ At the very top of every single page of my site are links to two essays about my - quite severe - mental illness, as well as the first chapter of a book about how engineers get people killed by screwing up on the job. In the US, it's flatly illegal to discriminate against the mentally ill for reasons of employment. The specific reason I am a coder and not a physicist is that I write good code even when I am hallucinating. If they get past that, then have a look at how a whole bunch of people really have been killed by clueless engineers - as when an incompetently designed truss bridge took the lives of one thousand steelworkers back in the day - perhaps they don't want to hire me because I would hold the entire company to the same standards I hold myself to. I haven't always been that way. I've written a whole lot of code I'd rather that no one ever get to look at. I've written quite a lot of really stupid programs, just because we all knew they would sell really well. But I'll be fifty-one years old soon. I'm concerned about whether anyone will remember me after I'm gone. They sure aren't going to remember that I did a stellar job writing the test tools for Apple's MacTCP.
ninjakeyboard 12y ago
There is no shortage of work. There is a drought of talented engineers though. Most of them are terrible.
- justincormack 12y ago
  You are just repeating this. How do you know there is actually a shortage, rather than a lack of a process for finding them? Or a lack of ways for them to find the good employers? A non functioning market is rather hard to distinguish from inability to find what you want.
  - bobosha 12y ago
    I can speak for myself, I co-founded and run a tech company in Cambridge MA. We are looking for machine-vision programmers and the ones who have experience in thsi space are all either snapped up by amazon, fb and google or doing their own startup. Our choices were to either hire a freshly minted PhD in AI from MIT (H1b) or from the legion of the resume-padded "locals" with made up skill-sets, who expect a job, just because their highness graced our interview and deigned to come to our office. Not to mention that they wouldn't pass a basic programming test. Believe me, I would MUCH rather hire an American than jump through the visa hoops, it costs thousands of dollars upfront, with no certainty of outcome, plus the hire is only with us for 3 years! After 3 years, we lose a trained person
    - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
      I know all about 2-D image processing but not about pattern recognition. I've done some algorithmically complex stuff, like Live Picture, which was a combination vector/bitmap graphic editor, which enabled one to do prepress graphic work for magazines and product packaging, by compositing 200 MB bitmap graphics on a 32 MB 68040 Macintosh. Unfortunately, Adobe's marketing people were far better than ours. Our program was far superior to Photoshop, but no one could figure out how to actually sell it. Given that, could you use me? I'd rather not relocate, but if I did relocate, Cambridge would be a top choice for me. I've been there a few times, and once lived in mid-coast Maine.
option_greek 12y ago
Assuming there is no tech shortage and companies are indeed looking for cheaper labor, how do we explain these offers (It's placement season in India and its raining offers). These seem to be well above the average pay for software developers (considering they are under graduates fresh out of college). Of course all have to first participate in the H1B lottery for them to enter US. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/job-offer-of-rs.-2.03-crore-from-oracle-us-to-iit-bhu-student/1/405389.html http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/job-offer-of-rs... http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-12-04/news/56723158_1_placement-drive-four-students-higher-studies http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-12-04/news... http://www.hindustantimes.com/business-news/campus-calling-40-iit-students-get-rs-1-cr-plus-offers/article1-1293332.aspx http://www.hindustantimes.com/business-news/campus-calling-4...
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bigtimber 12y ago
There is only a shortage of cheap / entry level tech workers. There are plenty of experienced and over-qualified tech workers, but most short-sighted employers don't value older employees.
- smikhanov 12y ago
  Correct. I'll steal someone else's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761424) that illustrates this and corresponds to the OP's experience: Junior programmer (22): makes $80-100k, 120k in the Bay Area. Easily gets jobs. Senior programmer (28): 5-10 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $120-140k, possibly 150k. Serious stock options possible with the right company. Three- month job searches. Expert programmer (37): 3-5 times as valuable as the senior, so 15-50 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $150-200k. Leaves the Bay Area/NYC because he can't afford to raise kids there. Has a defined specialty. Job searches take 6-8 months because he's overqualified for everything but high-level positions, and those in his specialty number in the single-digits nationally. Master programmer (45): TO;DH. This industry pays well at the entry-level (if you went to a reputable college, live in the right city, know where to look and how to play the game) but doesn't have a clue when it comes to rewarding excellence. Getting better tends to backfire when this industry (being run by dumbass MBA types) continues to insist on structuring itself like a pyramid. The entry level for junior programmers is very low and their pay is incomparably higher than in any other industry -- even in finance. Beyond junior stage, it gets harder and harder. If you want to progress further on the career ladder, you have to aim to be like Chris Lattner, like Brian Goetz, like Guido van Rossum.
  - snewman 12y ago
    (47 year old technical founder here; about to plug my startup so feel free to skip) Maybe this is true in general but it's not true everywhere. We're looking for a few great engineers, are happy to pay what they're worth, and understand the value of experience -- where experience means "every year I get better at writing code", not "now I'm an architect and don't have to write code". If you or anyone you know is interested, check us out at scalyr.com. Small team, cool tech (e.g. [1]). We are early stage so equity is a significant portion of compensation, but we can pay a significant cash wage as well, and we have 1.5+ years of runway. [1] http://blog.scalyr.com/2014/05/searching-20-gbsec-systems-engineering-before-algorithms/ http://blog.scalyr.com/2014/05/searching-20-gbsec-systems-en...
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netcan 12y ago
Shortage is a tricky political term. Reality doesn't work like that. X positions and Y candidates. It depends on the quality of candidates and salary. Better programmers, and companies can hire more. Higher salaries and more people will become programmers. That said, 2 counter points. First point is the speed the profession has been expanding. Programming is and has been (barring the dotcom bubble burst) an area of fast growing demand. In many tech fields that aren't so fast growing, "experienced" means 10+ years. There are more working professionals with over 20 years experience than those under 5. The distribution of experience levels you will find among mining engineers is the normal one, not the one you find among software engineers where 36 year olds with 15 years of experience are the grizzled vets. Technical jobs for people with under 2-3 experience is always tricky. Google, Facebook, etc are new companies. They're full of software developers. 10-25 years ago they didn't exists and neither did those jobs. Its hard to believe that in this environment there wouldn't be a shortage. Second point is that the problems you mention are a cost of doing business, part of reality. Whether the shortage could theoretically be solved by improved job-candidate matching is not really relevant unless it can be solved practically. Same for on-the-job training. A company that needs to hire really fast, is small, etc. can't train on the job very easily. On the job training is also less compatible with the shorter cycles in today's world. People average shorter stints at companies. The "shortage" makes job hopping more viable and beneficial. Startups have very short horizons for which they are trying to solve problems. Etc. If you take some of the relatively established and unchanging professions like Law or medicine, they have a long and well established way of apprenticing young professionals. That gets built up over generations when things stay the same. In a fast paced world like software, it's not as easy. Anyway my point is that saying there is not shortage because it could theoretically be relived by optimisations that there is very little way of doing... it's semantics.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  "needs to hire really fast". When I was but a wee pollywog, it was pointed out to me that most open positions are never advertised in any way. Instead, when a position opens up, the hiring manager looks at the pile of resumes that are already on file. For that specific reason, I applied to companies based on whether I'd like to work there, rather than whether they had any openings. One such company interviewed me immediately, but waited two years to actually hire me. That job actually worked out really well. I don't actually know but have reason to believe that that's not commonly the case anymore. That is, my impression is that companies don't solicit resumes unless they have a specific opening. From time to time I find a "Jobs" website that specifically says "We are not accepting applications at this time" or "We have no open positions". By contrast, some others will say "We are always looking for great people, please send us your resume". One might at first think that it's not a big deal for a position to be unfilled for a period of time. But consider that a company typically expects an employee to be worth twice their pay. That is, if a software engineer is paid $100,000.00 per year, then to be considered truly qualified for their job, they must write $200,000.00 worth of software during that same year. That's not $100,000.00 of pure profit. Actually that's the breakeven point - that is, writing $200,000.01 worth of code in a year would yield one cent of profit! There are considerations of office space leasing, all manner of other costs like the equipment and software the employee requires, telephone, internet, electricity. That "twice your salary" figure isn't specific to coders, my understanding is that that's regarded as the rule of thumb for the value of every employee, in every line of work.
MichaelCrawford 12y ago
From time to time I'll see a job posted on Craigslist or the like that says "We only want applicants with Computer Science degrees from Berkeley, MIT or Stanford". I myself have a Physics degree from the University of California Santa Cruz - "Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp". Despite that, I quite commonly find that I'm a better, or more productive coder than colleagues with CS degrees from those schools. Just because you have a degree, it doesn't mean that you have a clue. And just because your degree is from a school that no one has ever heard of, it doesn't mean that you're ignorant.
bobosha 12y ago
One thing that continues to amaze me about the people claiming there is no tech worker shortage, their typical argument - "if only the tech industry paid enough...." That is a self-contradictory proposition if ever there is one. What is that this supposed talented programmer wannabes do, if they are in a position not to take a 100K+ salary? More importantly, if indeed there is such talent and you know how to run a company profitably paying this supposed talent the salary you assume...then why aren't you doing it? You have a perfect arbitrage opportunity, and by your own admission - FB, Google, MS etc. are all "greedy" and only care about their bottom-line. So if you can demonstrate that hiring "American" programmers at 200K+ salaries and deliver high-quality code (better than those crappy Indian outfits), all the luck to you! Why aren't you all doing it? Be the change you want.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  All the headhunters tell me I should be asking for $65.00 per hour.
kellyfj 12y ago
I've been in a hiring manager role (tech lead / manager) for almost 14 years and this has always been true: Lots of knowledge out there - but the ability to write a basic function cleanly and correctly is rare. There are tons of people with credentials and good looking resumes but my experience is that less than 1 in 5 of them can code a Fibonacci function let alone FizzBuzz. I don't care if it's iterative or recursive as long as it's right. I think the core issue is the CS courses emphasize knowledge WAY TOO MUCH over experience of writing tons of code on a team. In addition, resumes have WAY too much noise compared to signal - that's why people's networks (and tools like GitHub) are so important. I've also been in organizations where teams hired people I passed on (they did multiple interviews in our org) and those that did not pass the Fibonacci test not only bombed in their organizations but also hired MORE bad programmers and they all got RIFfed. Those that pass the Fibonacci test do pretty darn good on my teams. Amazing how a simple programming test can be such a solid predictor . . . I also screen for other things - knowledge, good communication skills and if they have a good sense of their own abilities. It also blows my mind how super confident kids walk in expecting to nail an interview - but again can't code a simple function to save their lives. But Fibonacci continues to blow my mind - so simple and yet so hard. Just add two variables in a loop . . . BTW I have found in general women are generally better programmers than men as a percentage of those interviewed.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  My father felt very strongly that women were better naval officers than were men. He also felt very strongly that the soviets were far better than his fellow americans. He regarded most military personnel as total slackers.
MichaelCrawford 12y ago
I seem to have struck a chord with this post. A lot more comments than I expected, and sixty points added to my karma. Thank you for helping me reach an important decision. For some time now I've been puzzling over the idea of offering a consulting service in which I would screen resumes for a fee. After a chat with a friend who is a manager with an eCommerce startup, I've decided to pursue it. I didn't have a clue as to how to get started. He suggested I do it for free for a little while, to build my reputation. That's what I'm going to do. I expect it would help to register a domain for this specific service, rather than use the rather eccentric website I presently have. I don't know yet what the domain will be. I need to catch some ZZZs, so I'll deal with it tomorrow. I mentioned this in one of my comments below. Someone pointed out that background check services already do this. Actually I would be quite different from a background check, in that I would screen resumes _before_ the interviews, so you don't have to interview clearly unqualified candidates. Also I'd be looking into their technical qualifications, not their criminal record or record histories. This is just what headhunters are supposed to do. It's not that they couldn't screen resumes - but they don't. -- Mike

dalke 12y ago

If you do an HN search for "shortage" you'll see many links, to things like: http://math-blog.com/2014/03/10/stem-shortage-claims-and-facebooks-19-billion-acquisition-of-whatsapp/ http://math-blog.com/2014/03/10/stem-shortage-claims-and-fac... - which points out that it's not "difficult for employers and potential employees", giving an example of how Facebook decided to not employ the people who became the founders of WhatsApp, then paid $19 billion for their company a few years later. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth-of-americas-tech-talent-shortage/275319/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth... - titled "The Myth of America's Tech-Talent Shortage: And what it should mean for immigration reform." If you want the economic details, you might look at at http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis.pdf http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-... , which (among many things) points out that two people get a STEM degree for each STEM job available. The general conclusion is that there is no shortage, and that complaints by various large businesses about a lack of trained people is a strategy to pay lower wages and spend less on training. This has been known for over a decade. Eg, http://www.cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2005/back1305.html http://www.cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/articles/2005/back130... concludes """Overwhelmingly, the H-1B program is used to import workers at the very bottom of the wage scale. The wide gap between wages for U.S. workers and H-1B workers helps explain why industry demand for H-1B workers is so high and why the annual visa quotas are being exhausted. Many in industry have called for an increase in the number of H-1B visas, citing the early exhaustion of the cap as reflective of widespread need for skilled workers. However, the fact that very few H-1B workers are earning salaries as high as U.S. workers in the same profession would seem to refute that claim, and should make lawmakers wary of increasing the H-1B quota. The exhaustion of the H-1B quota may reflect employers' interest in lowering labor costs or widespread fraud rather than an insufficient number of visas.""" HN comments include those of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8656028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8656028 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7372574 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689383 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5804016 and more .. again, search HN for "shortage".

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
H1Bs are used not only to pay lower wages, but to enable employers to treat their employees poorly without fear that they will leave. As a US Citizen, not only can I work for any US employer, I can reside here as well, even if I don't have a job. If I work for someone who treats me poorly, or who I regard as unethical, I will resign. One time I just walked right off the job - I left on a Friday, then never returned, due to an ethical lapse on the part of my employer. I gave no notice at all. By contrast, a close friend who was a UK citizen, who worked with me on an H1B, was treated quite poorly by our employer. He was given a far heavier load, he was never given any help when he asked for it, in general he was taken advantage of. Really he was a far more skilled coder than I was at the time, but I was treated far better than he was. I myself have no objection to foreign workers. If someone comes to the US hoping to make a better life for themselves than they are able to do in their Mother Country, I say more power to them. I know from hard experience that it totally sucks to be poor. But I do feel they should be paid as much as a US Citizen would be.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- glesica 12y ago
  A possible solution here is for countries to treat labor the way they have started to treat capital and goods and services. Start signing reciprocal free-labor agreements. If country Y is willing to allow anyone who can legally live and work in country X to legally live and work in country Y, then country X will do the same for people who can legally live and work in country Y. In my mind, if companies were serious about this shortage (and not just trying to hire more people they can abuse as you described) they would be pushing for far more than a few more H1Bs. But we haven't really seen that, at least that I know of.
  - dalke 12y ago
    Such exists between many countries in the EU. It's not so simple though. Free movement of labor also requires a correspondence in the national health care and retirement programs, so for example totalization agreements to eliminate dual Social Security coverage. The US has such agreements with only a score or so countries (see http://www.ssa.gov/international/agreements_overview.html http://www.ssa.gov/international/agreements_overview.html ). It gives an example of a 66% tax rate when such an agreement does not exist. As it stands now, there is no such agreement between the US and, say, New Zealand. A NZ citizen working in the US for 8 years before returning to NZ would pay US Social Security taxes for those 8 years, but receive no benefits.

skrebbel 12y ago

Job markets, even in tech, are quite tied to geography. From which area and perspective are you writing this? Knowing might help us discuss this subject better. I live in the Netherlands, where programmer salaries are way lower than in silicon valley, but I don't know of a single half-competent programmer without a job. All the hiring managers are complaining here just as you describe, but the net effect is that everybody gets hired. Even the mediocre folks (note: I'm not referring to skill as in "decades of Swift experience" but "competent engineer, quick learner"). Maybe the exploded salaries of the bay area take away any financial space an employer might have for on-the-job training? People still have to create more value than they cost. (note, I hope this is not the case, because I think programmers are grossly underpaid here in the Netherlands)

crdoconnor 12y ago
>Maybe the exploded salaries of the bay area take away any financial space an employer might have for on-the-job training? It's not like employers are keen on training anywhere else in the US either. American business executives have become culturally short-sighted and the unwillingness to train is part of that.
- zaqokm 12y ago
  > It's not like employers are keen on training anywhere else in the US either. Although I do not live in the US, I gather that like many countries I have lived in is the view is that training is no longer such a large responsibility of the employer and is rather costly. However in my travels and work in Asia, there is a concept of bonding in many countries where an employee is offered a job and training and in return agrees to work for a company for X amount of time or pays the employer. This reduces the overhead in regards to the cost of training.
  - crdoconnor 12y ago
    This doesn't sound like the Asia that I live in.

ryanackley 12y ago

Here is an alternate point of view. I recently went through the process of hiring a programmer. I probably interviewed 30 candidates. All of them had the required knowledge and experience listed on their CV's. Guess how many could write a simple program in the language of their choice? Exactly 3. Yes, there are many people with the right credentials. In my own personal experience, many of these people can't do the work. They either don't really enjoy what they do or they simply aren't smart enough. They got into this field because of the money.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
For the specific reason that resumes are often, if not actually outright faked, at least "enhanced", I've been contemplating starting a business in which I would perform resume screening for folks like you, for a fee. I don't really know how to structure it yet. I don't want to be a recruiter or headhunter. What I would like to do is to offer folks such as yourself, who already have resumes, my opinion as to the qualifications of each candidate. I myself got the very highest-paying job of my career, writing Mac OS X I/O Kit Kernel Extensions - what Apple calls device drivers - because I was the first candidate in six months who knew how to do synchronization in the kernel. That's a very basic requirement for writing a device driver, so it's covered in detail, and quite clearly by the tutorials on Apple's developer site. I expect lots of people figured they could get a cushy, high-paying job, so they just added fake device driver work to their resume. Ironically, the guy who asked me that question was their windows driver engineer. More or less the way it would work is that you'd send me some candidate resumes, and I would tell you which ones I think were worth your time to interview. Quite commonly, references are only checked after an interview, as the last step before making an offer. I wouldn't check their references, so as not to annoy them, but would call or email the HR departments at each of the employers the list, to verify their employment. "Did they work for you from this year to that year?" is a simple yes-or-no question. Also I would verify that those who claimed to have college degrees, really graduated. In my entire life, the only time I've been asked to supply my transcripts to anyone, was when I applied to graduate school, and so I could qualify for a discount on my auto insurance. I've never had a potential employer ask for my transcripts. Would you regard such a service as valuable? If so, have you any suggestions as to how I could get started, or how to market such a service? A lot of people have told me I'd make a good headhunter. I expect I would, but I don't want to do that, because I want the whole practice of third-party technical recruitment to just go away.

mabbo 12y ago

Not all tech workers are equal. My company does not care what language you know, or technology you use- we want people who are smart, capable of working with any technology. And we want the very best of those people, without lowering the quality bar for the sake of having people in seats. We will let people go while we also are hiring for open positions on the same team if we realize the person isn't s good fit after all. I have little job security, but I work with only fantastic people. It's a deal I'm happy with. The pay is nice, and I never feel like the smartest in the room. There are lots of companies like this. We have to complete with them for those top tier people. And we frequently find those good people outside of America. The result? They often come work in our non-USA offices. That's one less job that would have existed in America, with the salary of it being taxed in America. It's a loss for the USA.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
True, there are even Americans working abroad right now (American with a Chinese work visa). Its a global market for talent, not just an American one.
ExpiredLink 12y ago
> There are lots of companies like this. They all look for the 3% rock-stars, reject the 97% and complain about tech worker shortage. What a silly 'strategy'!
S4M 12y ago
Out of curiosity, what is your company?

lafar6502 12y ago

I'm afraid there's a shortage of good programmers, with proper education in computer science, understanding of how the OS and programs interact, knowing how to use at least one programming language proficiently, fluent in algorithms and data structures - i mean people who know their tools and know what they're doing. Instead we've got lots of excited, half-educated but enthusiastic ctrl-c/ctrl-v specialists, doing whatever they think is right/necessary and not even realizing how broken their products are (or how much better they could be if their authors were a bit more knowledgeable)

andybak 12y ago
There's a wide spectrum between copy+paste no-hopers and people with a PhD from MIT who know Knuth and SICP backwards. I would rather employ a self-taught developer with some experience and pragmatism born out of real-world experience than I would someone with impeccable academic credentials. Forgive me if I sound touchy but I'm self-taught, my knowledge of algorithms is extremely patchy - but I think I'm a competent developer in the domains to which I apply myself.
- lafar6502 12y ago
  I never mentioned academic degree, just expect a person to have the right level of education/knowledge. For example, i'd expect a candidate to be able to explain to me how a hashtable works or what a page fault means. Also, i'm shocked when a person doing 'database stuff' has only a vague idea about what SQL is One (very recent) example of what i'm talking about: There was a system that crashed once or twice a day, running on EC2 instance. I discovered that the program crashes because it runs out of memory, and also that the system runs without a swap file. Then a guy responsible for that setup explained to me that it's a bad sign when a program uses a swap, therefore they disabled it altogether. Curiously, aftere enabling the swap the problem disappeared.
- dalke 12y ago
  I think you mean only impeccable academic credentials. Self-taught developers do enter MIT graduate school, including after several years of working in industry. For that matter, Chumby hired Andrew "bunnie" Huang as a freshly minted MIT PhD in EE. Or perhaps you mean that the types of problems you work on, like the vast majority of problems in the world, don't require knowing Knuth and "PCIS", or a PhD education? I develop algorithms as part of my work. For example, given 20 molecules, find the largest substructure which is in at least 15 of them. I opened up v3 of Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" last week because it has several pages about a topic that I don't understand. It would take a lot longer to train you to the point where you could be effective at the task, than a Knuth-knowing MIT grad. Which is quite reasonable - I'm in a rather obscure corner of the programming world. Though it's one where Knuth plays a much larger role than SICP. Forgive me if I sound touchy ;) but I'm self-taught, followed by education, followed by experience, and feel exactly the same as you.

pjmlp 12y ago

Fully agree. Recently discussing this issue among friends, not one of them could get hired for specific positions, even though they knew the required technologies. All got the same excuse, the said technologies were being used in side projects, not on their main job.

nmjohn 12y ago
What companies are you applying to? I find what you are saying very hard to believe as my own experience has been the complete opposite. When I was interviewing I got asked about my side projects more than everything else combined.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Just standard European middle size corporations, take your pick.
hackerboos 12y ago
I had that excuse tossed at me but still got a job. They did however use it to suppress my salary. I took it anyway because I wanted to work with the tech I used in my spare time.

computerjunkie 12y ago

>>> when a new technology is introduced, one is _immediately_ required to know about it before getting a job where that technology will be used. Well Said. I too am in a similar position you have explained. I have a Computer Science college degree (graduated in November) and I have been applying to junior/graduate level jobs that have inflated expectations of what a regular graduate should know (especially technologies). All these claims of tech worker shortages recruiters talk about is hard to believe. I think there is a communication breakdown with companies and education centers breakdowns when it comes recruitment.

freshflowers 12y ago
Try looking at it from an employer perspective. The fact that you have a CS degree tells me absolutely nothing about your engineering talent. So hiring you on that basis alone would be gamble, and the odds for that gamble are hysterically bad. They have better odds taking a year's junior developer salary straight to the casino. The number of people claiming to be able to do the job is a multitude of those actually able to do the job. If you are actually "in a similar position", it should take you less than two months to get out of that position. Teach yourself a stack that is in demand, build a project and put it out there (Github, App store, whatever) and if you show any talent and skill the odds are you'll be hired within a month. Just waving your CS degree around isn't going to make anything happen. Fuck it, you've just graduated in November, you have no proven skills and you're already whining about not getting hired?
- computerjunkie 12y ago
  >>> Teach yourself a stack that is in demand, build a project and put it out there (Github, App store, whatever) and if you show any talent and skill the odds are you'll be hired within a month. Thanks for the advice. I am currently working on that.
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  "(Github, App store..." Quite commonly I am asked for my Github link, but then regarded as unqualified because I don't have one. That's because you can download my source from my own website. I have some pretty good reason to believe that many of those who want to know my Github, don't know what Github actually is. That is, not only do they not inspect anyone's Github source, if pressed, they could not explain the difference between a github and a hubcap. Almost universally, one is required to have at least on App in the App Store or Google Play. There's no specific requirement as to what the app actually does, whether it works well, whether it's source code makes sense to anyone, whether it gets good reviews - just that one just that that special magic ticket into a mobile development job. Again, I have good reason to believe that few ever actually so much as look at the app store or google play pages, let alone download, install and run the app. Have you ever heard someone say "I'd like to work with you so we can find a way that you can drive a brand new car right off the lot. How about I give you a thousand dollar trade-in on your totally thrashed beater?" I actually had a Toyota saleswoman say just that to me. The reason I was shopping for a new car, is that my thousand dollar trade-in was so unreliable that I was to be fired if I didn't buy a new car Real Soon Now. Now consider that many recruiters are really good at just that kind of sales. It's not that they try to sell anything to the candidates. They sell their, uh, "service" to the hiring managers, by somehow convincing them that its worth paying them tens of thousand of dollars in commissions for placing just one coder.

freshflowers 12y ago

> At one time, a college degree and a demonstrable grasp of computing technology was all one needed. Yep, and that turned out to be a fucking disaster. So we learned how to filter for programming skills, and the results were utterly depressing. The vast majority of those "engineers who are unable to find work" couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. That applies to the majority of applicants unless we start filtering for actual proven experience. Trying to find someone inexperienced who's worth investing in training is a truly depressing exercise most smaller companies really can't afford. Is it really that much to ask that an unemployed engineer who wants a job coding in language X makes a bit of an effort to learn the language by themselves? Employers really don't expect 'paid' experience in something that's brand new, but what they do expect is self-motivation. If you're only willing to learn X when your boss tells you, you're either going to be a pain to work with or you're covering up for your lack of skill. You only learn a language really well over years. That's your paid on-the-job-training. All most hiring managers look for is some sign of skill and motivation. Not to mention the reality that the "cult of new", as we see it on HN and in the start-up scene really fucks over most non-startup employers. Most developers don't stick with any company for more than two or three years because they want green field projects in the latest sexy language and framework, not maintain "boring legacy code" (we're talking code no more than two years old...) in a stack that's just been declared harmful, crap or whatever by the HN hipster engineering in-crowd. So you train someone, invest time in someone, allow them to learn from costly mistakes on real world projects, and just when they are at the peek of their knowledge and productivity, they fuck off again. Regardless of how well they get paid and treated. We bitch a lot about employers not investing in training, but the flip side is that we have actively contributed to a culture of zero loyalty. As far as I can tell, there is a real scarcity of actually talented engineers, but employees and employers are stuck in some destructive loop that just makes the problem a thousand times worse.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
Actually I strive constantly to learn new languages, toolsets, platforms, frameworks and protocols completely on my own. But that doesn't help me get a job. No one has paid me to work with any of those, see. If I can somehow get a job through some other means, then yes, all of my self-study is a huge help to me, to my coworkers and my clients. What people actually ASK of me, when they think they're looking for "actual proven experience", is "how many years of experience" I have with a given technology. No one EVER asks what I actually did with it, whether I shipped a product as a result, whether my code actually worked, whether it got good reviews, or sold well. If I weren't such a nice guy, I know damn well I could totally fabricate my resume, and I'd have $250k and an office with a door I could shut in a heartbeat. It would actually work really well, because you know - I do invest in my own training. So I really could do the work, even if my resume were fabricated. But I'm a nice guy, so I don't fabricate my resume.

Htsthbjig 12y ago

"I know lots of engineers who are unable to find work." I don't. Probably your definition of "engineer" is different from mine. "Another problem is that us engineers are expected to have real-world, paid experience in whatever technology the hiring company uses" Generalization and obviously not true. I have a company, I don't care about paid experience, in fact we hired lots of people from open source projects, or directly from University with no experience at all. "At one time, a college degree and a demonstrable grasp of computing technology was all one needed. Companies were happy to train. No longer." During the dotcom bubble anyone that could click a button was hired. But it was a bubble. The better demonstration of grasping computing technology is actually having done something with a computer. When computers filled a room it was impossible for people to code on their own. Now you could find people with college degree AND experience writing software for others or for their own. "yet one cannot get a job writing Swift code, unless one already has PAID Swift experience on one's resume." This is your belief not reality. "It's not enough to just read a book." Of course. Programming is not about reading books. The better programmer is not the one who reads the most books. In fact, I consider books obsolete. Everybody in my company has free Lynda accounts.

minthd 12y ago
could you please expand a bit on considering books obsolete ?
smikhanov 12y ago
Boy, I really wouldn't want to work for your company
- MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  I must cop to the fact that I myself have a hard time finding work because I make it plainly apparent that I have a bad attitude about total jackasses. However, my thesis in this particular topic is not that I myself am unable to find work, but that a great many of my colleagues cannot, despite being highly qualified. I do believe that those who employ coders, cannot find enough qualified staff. I've been hearing that very same complaint from so many people for so many years that I really don't buy the argument that they're just trying to drive our pay scales downwards. I feel that there is a deeper underlying cause.

alexggordon 12y ago

Why is it that there either has to be a shortage or abundance or tech workers? I think as of now the stream of Tech workers is adequately filling seats. Tech is one of those fields that ends up a lot like dating. You know there's people out there that could re-write your whole system overnight--the "rockstars". Because of this I get the feeling that people are turning down tons of job applications just because they feel the applicants aren't "rockstar-y" enough. I think the experience mentioned here also holds true. Companies want people that can get the ball rolling, but also underestimate how much training can help. At my current company, I'm probably at a training, that is beneficial to myself, at least once a week. I know I'm an outlier, but tying this all together, I think hiring managers are to the point where they're expecting too much from applicants, while undershooting the ability of even the mediocre applicants.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
Rockstars blow their paychecks up their nose, cheat on their wives and girlfriends with groupies, trash hotel rooms then die young, or perhaps live to a ripe old age of poverty and destitution. I have gotten to the point that when someone advertises for a rockstar, I don't even apply. Do you know what a bozo filter is? Have a look at mine: http://www.warplife.com/mdc/resume/ http://www.warplife.com/mdc/resume/ At the very top of every single page of my site are links to two essays about my - quite severe - mental illness, as well as the first chapter of a book about how engineers get people killed by screwing up on the job. In the US, it's flatly illegal to discriminate against the mentally ill for reasons of employment. The specific reason I am a coder and not a physicist is that I write good code even when I am hallucinating. If they get past that, then have a look at how a whole bunch of people really have been killed by clueless engineers - as when an incompetently designed truss bridge took the lives of one thousand steelworkers back in the day - perhaps they don't want to hire me because I would hold the entire company to the same standards I hold myself to. I haven't always been that way. I've written a whole lot of code I'd rather that no one ever get to look at. I've written quite a lot of really stupid programs, just because we all knew they would sell really well. But I'll be fifty-one years old soon. I'm concerned about whether anyone will remember me after I'm gone. They sure aren't going to remember that I did a stellar job writing the test tools for Apple's MacTCP.

ninjakeyboard 12y ago

There is no shortage of work. There is a drought of talented engineers though. Most of them are terrible.

justincormack 12y ago
You are just repeating this. How do you know there is actually a shortage, rather than a lack of a process for finding them? Or a lack of ways for them to find the good employers? A non functioning market is rather hard to distinguish from inability to find what you want.
- bobosha 12y ago
  I can speak for myself, I co-founded and run a tech company in Cambridge MA. We are looking for machine-vision programmers and the ones who have experience in thsi space are all either snapped up by amazon, fb and google or doing their own startup. Our choices were to either hire a freshly minted PhD in AI from MIT (H1b) or from the legion of the resume-padded "locals" with made up skill-sets, who expect a job, just because their highness graced our interview and deigned to come to our office. Not to mention that they wouldn't pass a basic programming test. Believe me, I would MUCH rather hire an American than jump through the visa hoops, it costs thousands of dollars upfront, with no certainty of outcome, plus the hire is only with us for 3 years! After 3 years, we lose a trained person
  - MichaelCrawford 12y ago
    I know all about 2-D image processing but not about pattern recognition. I've done some algorithmically complex stuff, like Live Picture, which was a combination vector/bitmap graphic editor, which enabled one to do prepress graphic work for magazines and product packaging, by compositing 200 MB bitmap graphics on a 32 MB 68040 Macintosh. Unfortunately, Adobe's marketing people were far better than ours. Our program was far superior to Photoshop, but no one could figure out how to actually sell it. Given that, could you use me? I'd rather not relocate, but if I did relocate, Cambridge would be a top choice for me. I've been there a few times, and once lived in mid-coast Maine.

option_greek 12y ago

Assuming there is no tech shortage and companies are indeed looking for cheaper labor, how do we explain these offers (It's placement season in India and its raining offers). These seem to be well above the average pay for software developers (considering they are under graduates fresh out of college). Of course all have to first participate in the H1B lottery for them to enter US. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/job-offer-of-rs.-2.03-crore-from-oracle-us-to-iit-bhu-student/1/405389.html http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/job-offer-of-rs... http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-12-04/news/56723158_1_placement-drive-four-students-higher-studies http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-12-04/news... http://www.hindustantimes.com/business-news/campus-calling-40-iit-students-get-rs-1-cr-plus-offers/article1-1293332.aspx http://www.hindustantimes.com/business-news/campus-calling-4...

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bigtimber 12y ago

There is only a shortage of cheap / entry level tech workers. There are plenty of experienced and over-qualified tech workers, but most short-sighted employers don't value older employees.

smikhanov 12y ago
Correct. I'll steal someone else's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7761424) that illustrates this and corresponds to the OP's experience: Junior programmer (22): makes $80-100k, 120k in the Bay Area. Easily gets jobs. Senior programmer (28): 5-10 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $120-140k, possibly 150k. Serious stock options possible with the right company. Three- month job searches. Expert programmer (37): 3-5 times as valuable as the senior, so 15-50 times as valuable as the junior. Makes $150-200k. Leaves the Bay Area/NYC because he can't afford to raise kids there. Has a defined specialty. Job searches take 6-8 months because he's overqualified for everything but high-level positions, and those in his specialty number in the single-digits nationally. Master programmer (45): TO;DH. This industry pays well at the entry-level (if you went to a reputable college, live in the right city, know where to look and how to play the game) but doesn't have a clue when it comes to rewarding excellence. Getting better tends to backfire when this industry (being run by dumbass MBA types) continues to insist on structuring itself like a pyramid. The entry level for junior programmers is very low and their pay is incomparably higher than in any other industry -- even in finance. Beyond junior stage, it gets harder and harder. If you want to progress further on the career ladder, you have to aim to be like Chris Lattner, like Brian Goetz, like Guido van Rossum.
- snewman 12y ago
  (47 year old technical founder here; about to plug my startup so feel free to skip) Maybe this is true in general but it's not true everywhere. We're looking for a few great engineers, are happy to pay what they're worth, and understand the value of experience -- where experience means "every year I get better at writing code", not "now I'm an architect and don't have to write code". If you or anyone you know is interested, check us out at scalyr.com. Small team, cool tech (e.g. [1]). We are early stage so equity is a significant portion of compensation, but we can pay a significant cash wage as well, and we have 1.5+ years of runway. [1] http://blog.scalyr.com/2014/05/searching-20-gbsec-systems-engineering-before-algorithms/ http://blog.scalyr.com/2014/05/searching-20-gbsec-systems-en...

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netcan 12y ago

Shortage is a tricky political term. Reality doesn't work like that. X positions and Y candidates. It depends on the quality of candidates and salary. Better programmers, and companies can hire more. Higher salaries and more people will become programmers. That said, 2 counter points. First point is the speed the profession has been expanding. Programming is and has been (barring the dotcom bubble burst) an area of fast growing demand. In many tech fields that aren't so fast growing, "experienced" means 10+ years. There are more working professionals with over 20 years experience than those under 5. The distribution of experience levels you will find among mining engineers is the normal one, not the one you find among software engineers where 36 year olds with 15 years of experience are the grizzled vets. Technical jobs for people with under 2-3 experience is always tricky. Google, Facebook, etc are new companies. They're full of software developers. 10-25 years ago they didn't exists and neither did those jobs. Its hard to believe that in this environment there wouldn't be a shortage. Second point is that the problems you mention are a cost of doing business, part of reality. Whether the shortage could theoretically be solved by improved job-candidate matching is not really relevant unless it can be solved practically. Same for on-the-job training. A company that needs to hire really fast, is small, etc. can't train on the job very easily. On the job training is also less compatible with the shorter cycles in today's world. People average shorter stints at companies. The "shortage" makes job hopping more viable and beneficial. Startups have very short horizons for which they are trying to solve problems. Etc. If you take some of the relatively established and unchanging professions like Law or medicine, they have a long and well established way of apprenticing young professionals. That gets built up over generations when things stay the same. In a fast paced world like software, it's not as easy. Anyway my point is that saying there is not shortage because it could theoretically be relived by optimisations that there is very little way of doing... it's semantics.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
"needs to hire really fast". When I was but a wee pollywog, it was pointed out to me that most open positions are never advertised in any way. Instead, when a position opens up, the hiring manager looks at the pile of resumes that are already on file. For that specific reason, I applied to companies based on whether I'd like to work there, rather than whether they had any openings. One such company interviewed me immediately, but waited two years to actually hire me. That job actually worked out really well. I don't actually know but have reason to believe that that's not commonly the case anymore. That is, my impression is that companies don't solicit resumes unless they have a specific opening. From time to time I find a "Jobs" website that specifically says "We are not accepting applications at this time" or "We have no open positions". By contrast, some others will say "We are always looking for great people, please send us your resume". One might at first think that it's not a big deal for a position to be unfilled for a period of time. But consider that a company typically expects an employee to be worth twice their pay. That is, if a software engineer is paid $100,000.00 per year, then to be considered truly qualified for their job, they must write $200,000.00 worth of software during that same year. That's not $100,000.00 of pure profit. Actually that's the breakeven point - that is, writing $200,000.01 worth of code in a year would yield one cent of profit! There are considerations of office space leasing, all manner of other costs like the equipment and software the employee requires, telephone, internet, electricity. That "twice your salary" figure isn't specific to coders, my understanding is that that's regarded as the rule of thumb for the value of every employee, in every line of work.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago

From time to time I'll see a job posted on Craigslist or the like that says "We only want applicants with Computer Science degrees from Berkeley, MIT or Stanford". I myself have a Physics degree from the University of California Santa Cruz - "Uncle Charlie's Summer Camp". Despite that, I quite commonly find that I'm a better, or more productive coder than colleagues with CS degrees from those schools. Just because you have a degree, it doesn't mean that you have a clue. And just because your degree is from a school that no one has ever heard of, it doesn't mean that you're ignorant.

bobosha 12y ago

One thing that continues to amaze me about the people claiming there is no tech worker shortage, their typical argument - "if only the tech industry paid enough...." That is a self-contradictory proposition if ever there is one. What is that this supposed talented programmer wannabes do, if they are in a position not to take a 100K+ salary? More importantly, if indeed there is such talent and you know how to run a company profitably paying this supposed talent the salary you assume...then why aren't you doing it? You have a perfect arbitrage opportunity, and by your own admission - FB, Google, MS etc. are all "greedy" and only care about their bottom-line. So if you can demonstrate that hiring "American" programmers at 200K+ salaries and deliver high-quality code (better than those crappy Indian outfits), all the luck to you! Why aren't you all doing it? Be the change you want.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
All the headhunters tell me I should be asking for $65.00 per hour.

kellyfj 12y ago

I've been in a hiring manager role (tech lead / manager) for almost 14 years and this has always been true: Lots of knowledge out there - but the ability to write a basic function cleanly and correctly is rare. There are tons of people with credentials and good looking resumes but my experience is that less than 1 in 5 of them can code a Fibonacci function let alone FizzBuzz. I don't care if it's iterative or recursive as long as it's right. I think the core issue is the CS courses emphasize knowledge WAY TOO MUCH over experience of writing tons of code on a team. In addition, resumes have WAY too much noise compared to signal - that's why people's networks (and tools like GitHub) are so important. I've also been in organizations where teams hired people I passed on (they did multiple interviews in our org) and those that did not pass the Fibonacci test not only bombed in their organizations but also hired MORE bad programmers and they all got RIFfed. Those that pass the Fibonacci test do pretty darn good on my teams. Amazing how a simple programming test can be such a solid predictor . . . I also screen for other things - knowledge, good communication skills and if they have a good sense of their own abilities. It also blows my mind how super confident kids walk in expecting to nail an interview - but again can't code a simple function to save their lives. But Fibonacci continues to blow my mind - so simple and yet so hard. Just add two variables in a loop . . . BTW I have found in general women are generally better programmers than men as a percentage of those interviewed.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
My father felt very strongly that women were better naval officers than were men. He also felt very strongly that the soviets were far better than his fellow americans. He regarded most military personnel as total slackers.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago

I seem to have struck a chord with this post. A lot more comments than I expected, and sixty points added to my karma. Thank you for helping me reach an important decision. For some time now I've been puzzling over the idea of offering a consulting service in which I would screen resumes for a fee. After a chat with a friend who is a manager with an eCommerce startup, I've decided to pursue it. I didn't have a clue as to how to get started. He suggested I do it for free for a little while, to build my reputation. That's what I'm going to do. I expect it would help to register a domain for this specific service, rather than use the rather eccentric website I presently have. I don't know yet what the domain will be. I need to catch some ZZZs, so I'll deal with it tomorrow. I mentioned this in one of my comments below. Someone pointed out that background check services already do this. Actually I would be quite different from a background check, in that I would screen resumes _before_ the interviews, so you don't have to interview clearly unqualified candidates. Also I'd be looking into their technical qualifications, not their criminal record or record histories. This is just what headhunters are supposed to do. It's not that they couldn't screen resumes - but they don't. -- Mike