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The problem is a dearth of technical talent. We need to let in more technical workers to address this issue.

intortus 12y ago
Or maybe get better at finding and attracting all the talent that already exists in the US. A lot of people won't go near a SV startup with a 10 ft pole.
- busterarm 12y ago
  Yup. Once and never again. Even as remote.
op00to 12y ago
Maybe I've been trolled, but ... if technical talent is scarce, wouldn't salaries be higher, based on basic economics? I don't see how flooding the market with more technical workers will increase salaries.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  Yes. It's a joke: VCs (to include PG) claim that talent is scarce because it is in their self interest to lobby for measures that would increase the talent pool and decrease salaries. They will continue to make this claim no matter what the market says about how scarce talent actually is. carsongross is mocking their fib for transparently contradicting basic economics.
ssharp 12y ago
Shouldn't a lack of talent mean that existing talent should be paid more?
- zecho 12y ago
  You would think, but management can often have difficulty seeing how macro trends affect them. From their perspective, they shouldn't have to pay more for the same and adding new staff at higher pay than old staff seems unfair. My previous job had difficulty finding talented engineers, party due to comparatively low salary offers. When I and two others left our team of 8 and two more made it known they were actively looking because we saw all trends outside our office, it became clearer to management. Only when 3/8ths of their staff left did they make major changes to their existing packages. And even then, pay is significantly below market. (Though they have the best time off and fringe benefits in town.)
vonmoltke 12y ago
I think the problem is an abundance of math skills. After all, as so many startup engineer blog posts have said, you don't really need math to write web applications. We need to replace the math courses in a CS degree with something more useful. Maybe some classes on Javascript, NoSQL, and whiteboard coding.
- nawitus 12y ago
  There should be plenty of room for "theoretical" CS courses and practical software engineering courses.
- StrLght 12y ago
  Really? I mean math is something irreplaceable in CS. It would be replaceable if it was something like "web apps development" degree.
  - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    I'm hoping the parent is making a joke by riffing on the absurd technical requirements demanded by startups for working on what amounts to a glorified CRUD webapp. The math heavy analysis that a CS degree provides just isn't necessary for, oh, 95% of programming jobs. The people who design the systems for reliability or process "big data" at huge companies with real scaling issues (Google, Facebook) need to have such training. On the other hand, these companies do need talent who never the less have skills that are rleatively rare. They shouldn't need to pay engineers the $200k+ salaries of big companies, but expecting to get median quality engineering without paying more than $110k/yr is as ridiculous as a non-degreed "webdev" expecting $180k/yr because he can slap some customizations on bootstrap and poke around a Ruby codebase.
    - TimPC 12y ago
      It depends. If you have a large enough team on a project that you can shield someone from math oriented and efficiency sensitive tasks as well as the planning in place to do it then the math heavy analysis isn't needed. Many start-ups have teams of 1-2 working on entire web apps and need everyone to be able to take on any task. Many people without the math background end up writing n^3 solutions to O(n) problems in code that gets executed at high frequency. The core value of those math skills isn't their explicit use, it's the training the brain gets in writing efficient algorithms and having knowledge of how hard certain problems are. Even in CRUD apps I've often seen requirements that are equivalent to NP-hard problems on large data sets, and I've been able to discuss the efficiency tradeoffs allowing the business team to redesign features when they weren't happy with performance. Without the math background, we'd see build it, put it in production and when the data gets large enough cry about performance and lose users waiting forever for a page to load. The last piece is in many start-ups I've seen the programming team will own or co-own Analytics because of a lack of statistics skills on the business team. Again with a small team not having a solid math and stats background has huge implications on the data analysis portion of roles.
nathanvanfleet 12y ago
I don't think you need to shoe-horn your agenda into this question.
carsongross 12y ago
Sarcasm, guys.

Or maybe get better at finding and attracting all the talent that already exists in the US. A lot of people won't go near a SV startup with a 10 ft pole.

busterarm 12y ago
Yup. Once and never again. Even as remote.

op00to 12y ago

Maybe I've been trolled, but ... if technical talent is scarce, wouldn't salaries be higher, based on basic economics? I don't see how flooding the market with more technical workers will increase salaries.

jjoonathan 12y ago
Yes. It's a joke: VCs (to include PG) claim that talent is scarce because it is in their self interest to lobby for measures that would increase the talent pool and decrease salaries. They will continue to make this claim no matter what the market says about how scarce talent actually is. carsongross is mocking their fib for transparently contradicting basic economics.

ssharp 12y ago

Shouldn't a lack of talent mean that existing talent should be paid more?

zecho 12y ago
You would think, but management can often have difficulty seeing how macro trends affect them. From their perspective, they shouldn't have to pay more for the same and adding new staff at higher pay than old staff seems unfair. My previous job had difficulty finding talented engineers, party due to comparatively low salary offers. When I and two others left our team of 8 and two more made it known they were actively looking because we saw all trends outside our office, it became clearer to management. Only when 3/8ths of their staff left did they make major changes to their existing packages. And even then, pay is significantly below market. (Though they have the best time off and fringe benefits in town.)

vonmoltke 12y ago

I think the problem is an abundance of math skills. After all, as so many startup engineer blog posts have said, you don't really need math to write web applications. We need to replace the math courses in a CS degree with something more useful. Maybe some classes on Javascript, NoSQL, and whiteboard coding.

nawitus 12y ago
There should be plenty of room for "theoretical" CS courses and practical software engineering courses.
StrLght 12y ago
Really? I mean math is something irreplaceable in CS. It would be replaceable if it was something like "web apps development" degree.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  I'm hoping the parent is making a joke by riffing on the absurd technical requirements demanded by startups for working on what amounts to a glorified CRUD webapp. The math heavy analysis that a CS degree provides just isn't necessary for, oh, 95% of programming jobs. The people who design the systems for reliability or process "big data" at huge companies with real scaling issues (Google, Facebook) need to have such training. On the other hand, these companies do need talent who never the less have skills that are rleatively rare. They shouldn't need to pay engineers the $200k+ salaries of big companies, but expecting to get median quality engineering without paying more than $110k/yr is as ridiculous as a non-degreed "webdev" expecting $180k/yr because he can slap some customizations on bootstrap and poke around a Ruby codebase.
  - TimPC 12y ago
    It depends. If you have a large enough team on a project that you can shield someone from math oriented and efficiency sensitive tasks as well as the planning in place to do it then the math heavy analysis isn't needed. Many start-ups have teams of 1-2 working on entire web apps and need everyone to be able to take on any task. Many people without the math background end up writing n^3 solutions to O(n) problems in code that gets executed at high frequency. The core value of those math skills isn't their explicit use, it's the training the brain gets in writing efficient algorithms and having knowledge of how hard certain problems are. Even in CRUD apps I've often seen requirements that are equivalent to NP-hard problems on large data sets, and I've been able to discuss the efficiency tradeoffs allowing the business team to redesign features when they weren't happy with performance. Without the math background, we'd see build it, put it in production and when the data gets large enough cry about performance and lose users waiting forever for a page to load. The last piece is in many start-ups I've seen the programming team will own or co-own Analytics because of a lack of statistics skills on the business team. Again with a small team not having a solid math and stats background has huge implications on the data analysis portion of roles.

nathanvanfleet 12y ago

I don't think you need to shoe-horn your agenda into this question.

carsongross 12y ago

Sarcasm, guys.