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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 pr

by 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.

by netcan 12y ago

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.