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So, I can't speak specifically to Qualcomm's case, however there's a weird paradox in Silicon Valley. There's both an excess of jobs and excess of employees. T

So, I can't speak specifically to Qualcomm's case, however there's a weird paradox in Silicon Valley. There's both an excess of jobs and excess of employees. This is probably true in every industry (every Starbucks is hiring, yet everyone complains how hard it is to find a job), but it's especially true in tech. The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. Salaries have gotten so high that even the most mediocre developers are demanding six figures. There's been a huge inflation of salaries in tech, and a decrease in craftsmanship and quality. So, companies are getting less done for more money. It's a gold rush, and we're getting to the point where "3 months experience [1]" is the norm. I've been trying to hire. I'm not worried about high salaries for someone good. However my inbox is full of people who know half a language and want a starting salary of $130k. That's crazy. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/technology/code-academy-as-career-game-changer.html?smid=tw-nytimes http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/technology/code-academy-as...

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- hoodoof 11y ago
  "it's suppose to be a bonanza for everyone involved"...... errrr why?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  How can the owners get good ROI if much of the return is spent on salaries/benefits/bonuses?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  Not exactly. The complaint was people who want big money and don't create a lot of value. The ones who want $130K and you ask them why page loading is so slow and they tell you its because the bubble sort they run on every update takes forever. They create negative value.
  - ForHackernews 11y ago
    Then companies better start paying more. This is how supply and demand works. If $130k only gets you incompetents, then it's time to start offering $200k, or whatever the magic number is. Remember: Any time you hear an employer whining about "lack of qualified candidates" be sure to mentally append "...at the rate we want to pay."
    - T2_t2 11y ago
      And that's a big deal. But if the cost of an employee is > their value, you get massive off-shoring. That's the danger, and as an Australian the opportunity, of Bay Area pricing being so crazy. If the Bay Area wants to keep its advantage - in a world where Alibaba is the lead IPO of the last 5 years - it needs to remain competitive in all ways. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it fell in one.
      - gwright 11y ago
        No need to 'off-shore'. Presumably companies in the Bay area could start (or grow) branch offices in other places in the US that don't have such a high cost of living. It may be that the cost to attract talent to the Bay area is now too high for all but the most profitable businesses. I have no idea if this is true or not but conceptually the giant payrolls needed may finally be overwhelming the benefits of locating a company in the area.
    - volaski 11y ago
      Please explain how offering $200k will keep those incompetent guys from applying. I don't see how your "solution" changes anything
andrewljohnson 11y ago
In trying to hire, where are you posting job ads? Or are you using recruiters? Both?
- gkoberger 11y ago
  My comment was more glib than a real complaint about how hiring is going for us. No good developer spends time on Angellist; it has to be proactive. That being said, we do get dozens of inbound applications every week from dev bootcampers who find us through Hacker News job postings/Angellist/etc. (For any developers looking to work at a cool startup, shameless plug: http://readme.io/careers/ http://readme.io/careers/)
  - andrewljohnson 11y ago
    No good developer applies for jobs Ads can catch good people in transition, or looking for a change. Anecdotally, I've hired truly great people, and interviewed ex-Googlers and other good pedigrees, from Stackoverflow Careers and HN posts. 1) I once hired a pre-Googler on StackOverflow even - a guy who was on his way to Google in the fall, but liked my project, and wanted a summer gig. He intended to spend a few months vacationing, but got bored. 2) Another guy I hired via HN originally just left for Facebook, this month :( 3) And our current, long term, best developer, I found on Careers StackOverflow. I credit him with much of the success of our company. He's a special combination of outdoorsy and amazing coder, but no college or professional pedigree. He was hurling dynamite at avalanche banks when I found him, coding amazing apps with little revenue potential.
    - gkoberger 11y ago
      Joel is more eloquent at expressing the problems with hiring than I: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...
  - MortenK 11y ago
    Why would you even post job listings and ask people to apply, if you think no good developers apply for jobs?
ams6110 11y ago
They need to consider moving outside the valley, if a developer with 3 months experience can get 130K. They can come to the midwest USA and get devs with 10 years experience for well under six figures.
- mahyarm 11y ago
  They cannot get 130k, they just think they can get 130k. They won't pass the interviews, or even the recruiters most of the time.
  - Bahamut 11y ago
    And yet a lot of Bay Area startups (some even YC companies that popup here) think they can get away with offering top notch developers in their field $130k & poor equity. The outrageousness cuts both ways.
    - mahyarm 11y ago
      Usually they are young and don't know how startups work that well. They don't know how the full financial simulation works out.
sbuttgereit 11y ago
Exactly this. Just because you call yourself a programmer/engineer/etc or have held jobs as such doesn't mean that you're competitively skilled or able to perform well in all jobs with the same title. I go into many shops where the people they call 'programmer', for example, really and simply are not. And some of these people have been in these roles for years (many years in some cases). The truth is the mid and lower tiers are easily replaceable and why we see things going off-shore so frequently; and it's also what we have the most of. When it becomes a matter of very highly skilled, very highly talented people for the job: often times talent that you need you have a hard time finding... anywhere. This is why high tech companies are complaining about shortage; sometimes you just need better staff than what's generally on the market to maintain standards.
- learc83 11y ago
  >often times talent that you need you have a hard time finding... anywhere. This is why high tech companies are complaining about shortage; sometimes you just need better staff than what's generally on the market to maintain standards. That's when you pay more. A highly skilled programmer can easily make a million dollars a year for a company, so if demand is really that high and supply that low, there would be far more companies willing to pay $500k salaries.
  - deciplex 11y ago
    > That's when you pay more. A highly skilled programmer can easily make a million dollars a year for a company, so if demand is really that high and supply that low, there would be far more companies willing to pay $500k salaries. A programmer can easily make a million per year for a company and still find himself with almost no leverage within the firm, compared to someone on the business side of things doing the same. I'm in that situation myself, having made the company my salary for the next decade or so within my first year there, and yet you would not know that from looking at the work I'm doing here now or my career prospects here going forward. The fact is it is difficult for non-programmers to properly assess the skill of other programmers, and at the same time existing programmers within just about any company you can name, are low-status enough that their recommendations for salary will go ignored. And so it is easy to see how most of the players on the supply side of the job market for software development, will behave very irrationally.
crdoconnor 11y ago
>The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. The problem is that there's a shortage of companies willing to invest in training.
- techscruggs 11y ago
  That's a rather entitled viewpoint.
  - deciplex 11y ago
    Entitled to what? These firms seem to feel they are entitled to relaxed immigration policy as well, and that wages collusion should be BAU if they don't get their way - yet it's entitled to think that a company should train an employee to do the job they want them to do? Keep in mind that we're not talking about teaching people computer science in the abstract, or turning non-technical people into engineers. People applying for programming jobs should be able to demonstrate some level of general competence of course. But if your HR department has a laundry list of keywords it is pattern-matching CVs against, with the result that many eminently-qualified candidates are dismissed without so much as a phone call or even a Codility screen or whatever, then you either need to take another look at in-house training or quit the constant bleating about a shallow talent pool.
- asuffield 11y ago
  The problem is that there's few companies who can afford to invest in training. Only big established companies can do it (and they do, extensively). Small companies and startups don't have the time or funding to do it. Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    >The problem is that there's few companies who can afford to invest in training. Only big established companies can do it Yes, and since the financial crisis their share of profits as GDP has never been higher yet they still refuse to invest in training themselves. Instead they demand that the immigration floodgates be opened. They don't want to do it because they just don't see employees as people any more. They're resources, to be tapped until they run dry, at which point, they are discarded. This is a marked cultural corporate change from the 50s-70s when the 'job for life' was still a thing, people got defined benefit pensions and CEOs would choose to make long term investments rather than engage in share repurchase shell games that boost next quarter's share price. >Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training. This used to be much less of a problem when companies actually demonstrated loyalty to their employees. A natural side effect of lobbying hard to make it trivial to fire people and doing layoffs as a matter of course is that your employees won't be loyal. Tough shit.
roymurdock 11y ago
I would posit that Starbucks example is the exact reverse of what you're seeing in the tech industry. Starbucks is hiring, but a lot of the workforce that is unemployed is overqualified with bachelor degrees that they thought would guarantee them a safe job on a nice career track. Upon graduation, they are finding that there is a shrinking pool of jobs for them, and that they'll either have to retrain (do a masters or do a crash coding course) or take a job well below what they expected with their degree. Most of these people will have to rely on connections or networking to get a decent job, and the unlucky ones will join the services industry and work as a barista or a waiter, providing the infrastructure for the tech gold rush.
- npalli 11y ago
  This is an interesting viewpoint about Starbucks that I have heard many times. So here is an article [1] talking about how 75% of Starbucks employees don't have a college degree. If you go up the Starbucks hierarchy 50% employees are baristas. 35% are shift supervisors 15% assistant store manager or higher in the hierarchy Which means the odds are overwhelming that every employee you interact with in a normal Starbucks doesn't have a college degree. So why this view that college grads are flocking to Starbucks because they can't find jobs. In fact, Starbucks has started the free college option to make sure that even non-degreed people will find Starbucks attractive enough to apply. [2] [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-10-07/starbucks-is-mostly-paying-for-1-000-employees-to-go-to-college http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-10-07/starbucks-is... [2] https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-offers-full-tuition-reimbursement-for-employees-to-complete-a-bac https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-offers-full-tuitio...
  - roymurdock 11y ago
    Thanks for the insightful comment. I avoided singling out the larger corporations at the end of my comment (Starbucks, McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts) as I don't have any friends who will be working service jobs for these chains. I graduated undergrad a couple of months ago, and I do have a fair amount of friends who gave up looking for work in the finance/startup field full time and are now working at trendy restaurants/bars in the SF NY area to make ends meet while searching on the side. Anecdotal evidence, but that's what I've seen.
shahryc 11y ago
This paradox is explainable because there's a gap in the signal. It usually takes a considerable amount of time/experience to specialize in high skill labor markets (ex. Doctor, lawyer, etc.) ---- therre is a gap in the signal (present vs. future). So, today there may not be enough workers that are familiar with designing chips for wearables (subset of hardware engineers). Then, because of limited supply --- prices go up. Other people see this, and are incentivized to train for the role (takes time, investment, etc.). So, there is always going to be some mismatch between positions employers want to fill vs. the existing pool of labor.
bradleyjg 11y ago
>> The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. ... I've been trying to hire, and my inbox is full of people who know half a language and want a starting salary of $130k. The money isn't the issue; I'd pay way more than that for someone good. But six figures is crazy high for the average developer in SF. >> How much more? $250,000? $500,000? $1,000,000? $3,000,000? Sure, it is plausible that if all the companies in SF tried to pay virtually unlimited amount of money for exceptional programmers, they'd eventually run out of those programmers. After all even in major league baseball there are only so many 100 MPH pitchers to go around. But it's hard to credit claims that we are in that situation rather than one where the money _is_ the issue, when you aren't seeing numbers that would make a BigLaw junior partner or investment bank managing director jealous, much less a professional baseball player.
- cellis 11y ago
  Exactly. You want to know of a true shortage of workers? 7 ft centers who are aggressive, not injury prone, and can hit a free throw. They're so rare that 17% of all 7footers in the US play in the NBA. It's why Deandre Jordan is making 100 million over the next 5? years. A shortage of programmers, ha! There is one kind of shortage though, and one that is adequately compensated; programmers willing to work at below average wages for lottery tickets (read: technical cofounder equity) that happen to hit, and therefore end up making millions -- they don't even need to be exceptionally skilled, just right be in the place and right time (I've known several of these). But show me an Anthony Davis of coding who is paid as such, and I'll show you someone who is a skilled manager/entreprenuer.
  - kev009 11y ago
    This so much. Let's also consider that the middle management layer is earning 2x and upper management at least 3x a senior developer who's stuck somewhere in the 100k range. Trim the fat and you can have as many developers as you want.
    - LoSboccacc 11y ago
      add in that all the show offs have made programmers aware that the system they build for 90k years is making millions and valued at billions. it's about time for (good) engineers to get an appropriate share of the pie.
j_baker 11y ago
Yeah, but you know what? The cost of living has also skyrocketed dramatically in Silicon Valley. I mean, you make it sound like engineers here are on a gravy train where we spend 3 months learning a language and can suddenly move to San Francisco where we just let the money roll in. The truth is it costs a lot to live in the Bay Area these days, and that means that if companies want people to move here they need to pony up and pay a good salary. That $130k starting salary you mention is enough for a person to afford a studio in the Tenderloin these days?
- orthoganol 11y ago
  Certainly one of the more absurd comment I've read on HN. 3 month bootcamp attendees shouldn't make more than $75k. They are junior as hell, and add little if not negative value for a long stretch of time. Even $75k is a reflection of the crazy job market, not their actual value. Your COL & salary analysis for SF is incredibly off. Yeah you'll probably have to sacrifice the excesses of your upper middle class SF lifestyle (boo hoo...). You can easily live on $75/k year in a $1600/mo studio in the Tenderloin, or on the flip side you can have a $1600/mo shared apartment in the Marina. You can't do that if you have a family, (but if you do, that's on you for switching to programming while needing to support a family). Crappy programmer entitlement is just so off the charts (and disjointed from reality) it's a little frustrating.
  - throwaway342526 11y ago
    $1600/mo can get you your own 2br in San Leandro in a safe (though not prestigious) neighborhood. The commute on BART into SF is about 45 minutes.
    - LoSboccacc 11y ago
      so what it gets you is being modern proletariat?
  - j_baker 11y ago
    So what you're saying is that it's "crappy programmer entitlement" to: * Expect to earn the median income * Expect to have a decent lifestyle. * Expect to be able to have a family Sounds like crappy employer entitlement to me.
NhanH 11y ago
Rant time: I'm #1 engineering hire in the current startup I'm at for the past 2 years. I know more than half a dozen programming languages (ie I can read them, and reasonably tell if you're doing something horrific to the code) and I can competently/ confidently work in at least a few. Yes I have one language I'm deep in. I can do reasonable sys admin works, setup aws shit, knowing most of the basic work you need to know to set up <15 servers up and running. I will probably need both my eyes open and a google tab, but I can definitely get it done. And I am definitely at least half competent as the average Google/ FB employees, confirm by a sample size of ... a few (sadly, none of them being my interviewer). Yet, I have failed to get the damning H1B in the last 2 years and have to leave next year. My company do plan to set me up with the green card EB process, but that takes a few years. And startup being startup, sudden death isn't particularly rare, you know the drill. I've been asking people every time I heard their them complaining about h1b and low skill ... and I have never gotten an answer. Also, I'm trying to find a new job in SV for the past few months (thinking that I should live there for a bit before leaving the States), and the job finding process has changed me from self-doubt to angry to disappointed to wtf-is-going-on-up-there. So, unicorn-without-a-horn developer looking for remote job! Will anyone hire me, wink wink ;)?
- keerthiko 11y ago
  Was pretty much in your exact same boat 2 years ago. Had to leave. Spent 2 years outside as a digital nomad, working remotely from Asia. Got my O1 approved last month, and am moving back. On the one hand the last 2 years bouncing about in Asia have been a unique experience that has made me a grow a lot. I would never have done it without being forced into it. On the other hand, I missed SV so much and can't wait to be back. Find my contact info in my profile, feel free to get in touch.
cybojanek 11y ago
Agree - we've been interviewing loads of candidates, and most don't know the difference between a process and a thread.
thaumaturgy 11y ago
I'm about to start looking for work on tomorrow's whoishiring threads -- either freelance or full time, we'll see -- and I've been programming for about 30 years and, honestly, I'm not expecting to get a lot of offers event at around the $75k range. Maybe any at all. If nothing else it'll be interesting to get a glimpse of the prospective employee side of this puzzle.
Vendan 11y ago
That's odd, cause I just left a job where I was juggling 4 programming languages on a weekly bases (AS3, Go, PHP, JS) and I was getting paid shit (sub 50k). I tried and tried to find a programming job, but nobody wanted me, so I ended up going computer security. Love the new job, love the field, but you can't tell me that there's nobody in the US that has the skills and want somewhat decent pay. I was one of those people, and no one wanted me.

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hoodoof 11y ago
"it's suppose to be a bonanza for everyone involved"...... errrr why?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
jsprogrammer 11y ago
How can the owners get good ROI if much of the return is spent on salaries/benefits/bonuses?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Not exactly. The complaint was people who want big money and don't create a lot of value. The ones who want $130K and you ask them why page loading is so slow and they tell you its because the bubble sort they run on every update takes forever. They create negative value.
- ForHackernews 11y ago
  Then companies better start paying more. This is how supply and demand works. If $130k only gets you incompetents, then it's time to start offering $200k, or whatever the magic number is. Remember: Any time you hear an employer whining about "lack of qualified candidates" be sure to mentally append "...at the rate we want to pay."
  - T2_t2 11y ago
    And that's a big deal. But if the cost of an employee is > their value, you get massive off-shoring. That's the danger, and as an Australian the opportunity, of Bay Area pricing being so crazy. If the Bay Area wants to keep its advantage - in a world where Alibaba is the lead IPO of the last 5 years - it needs to remain competitive in all ways. Rome wasn't built in a day, but it fell in one.
    - gwright 11y ago
      No need to 'off-shore'. Presumably companies in the Bay area could start (or grow) branch offices in other places in the US that don't have such a high cost of living. It may be that the cost to attract talent to the Bay area is now too high for all but the most profitable businesses. I have no idea if this is true or not but conceptually the giant payrolls needed may finally be overwhelming the benefits of locating a company in the area.
  - volaski 11y ago
    Please explain how offering $200k will keep those incompetent guys from applying. I don't see how your "solution" changes anything

andrewljohnson 11y ago

In trying to hire, where are you posting job ads? Or are you using recruiters? Both?

gkoberger 11y ago
My comment was more glib than a real complaint about how hiring is going for us. No good developer spends time on Angellist; it has to be proactive. That being said, we do get dozens of inbound applications every week from dev bootcampers who find us through Hacker News job postings/Angellist/etc. (For any developers looking to work at a cool startup, shameless plug: http://readme.io/careers/ http://readme.io/careers/)
- andrewljohnson 11y ago
  No good developer applies for jobs Ads can catch good people in transition, or looking for a change. Anecdotally, I've hired truly great people, and interviewed ex-Googlers and other good pedigrees, from Stackoverflow Careers and HN posts. 1) I once hired a pre-Googler on StackOverflow even - a guy who was on his way to Google in the fall, but liked my project, and wanted a summer gig. He intended to spend a few months vacationing, but got bored. 2) Another guy I hired via HN originally just left for Facebook, this month :( 3) And our current, long term, best developer, I found on Careers StackOverflow. I credit him with much of the success of our company. He's a special combination of outdoorsy and amazing coder, but no college or professional pedigree. He was hurling dynamite at avalanche banks when I found him, coding amazing apps with little revenue potential.
  - gkoberger 11y ago
    Joel is more eloquent at expressing the problems with hiring than I: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDevelopers.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...
- MortenK 11y ago
  Why would you even post job listings and ask people to apply, if you think no good developers apply for jobs?

ams6110 11y ago

They need to consider moving outside the valley, if a developer with 3 months experience can get 130K. They can come to the midwest USA and get devs with 10 years experience for well under six figures.

mahyarm 11y ago
They cannot get 130k, they just think they can get 130k. They won't pass the interviews, or even the recruiters most of the time.
- Bahamut 11y ago
  And yet a lot of Bay Area startups (some even YC companies that popup here) think they can get away with offering top notch developers in their field $130k & poor equity. The outrageousness cuts both ways.
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    Usually they are young and don't know how startups work that well. They don't know how the full financial simulation works out.

sbuttgereit 11y ago

Exactly this. Just because you call yourself a programmer/engineer/etc or have held jobs as such doesn't mean that you're competitively skilled or able to perform well in all jobs with the same title. I go into many shops where the people they call 'programmer', for example, really and simply are not. And some of these people have been in these roles for years (many years in some cases). The truth is the mid and lower tiers are easily replaceable and why we see things going off-shore so frequently; and it's also what we have the most of. When it becomes a matter of very highly skilled, very highly talented people for the job: often times talent that you need you have a hard time finding... anywhere. This is why high tech companies are complaining about shortage; sometimes you just need better staff than what's generally on the market to maintain standards.

learc83 11y ago
>often times talent that you need you have a hard time finding... anywhere. This is why high tech companies are complaining about shortage; sometimes you just need better staff than what's generally on the market to maintain standards. That's when you pay more. A highly skilled programmer can easily make a million dollars a year for a company, so if demand is really that high and supply that low, there would be far more companies willing to pay $500k salaries.
- deciplex 11y ago
  > That's when you pay more. A highly skilled programmer can easily make a million dollars a year for a company, so if demand is really that high and supply that low, there would be far more companies willing to pay $500k salaries. A programmer can easily make a million per year for a company and still find himself with almost no leverage within the firm, compared to someone on the business side of things doing the same. I'm in that situation myself, having made the company my salary for the next decade or so within my first year there, and yet you would not know that from looking at the work I'm doing here now or my career prospects here going forward. The fact is it is difficult for non-programmers to properly assess the skill of other programmers, and at the same time existing programmers within just about any company you can name, are low-status enough that their recommendations for salary will go ignored. And so it is easy to see how most of the players on the supply side of the job market for software development, will behave very irrationally.

crdoconnor 11y ago

>The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. The problem is that there's a shortage of companies willing to invest in training.

techscruggs 11y ago
That's a rather entitled viewpoint.
- deciplex 11y ago
  Entitled to what? These firms seem to feel they are entitled to relaxed immigration policy as well, and that wages collusion should be BAU if they don't get their way - yet it's entitled to think that a company should train an employee to do the job they want them to do? Keep in mind that we're not talking about teaching people computer science in the abstract, or turning non-technical people into engineers. People applying for programming jobs should be able to demonstrate some level of general competence of course. But if your HR department has a laundry list of keywords it is pattern-matching CVs against, with the result that many eminently-qualified candidates are dismissed without so much as a phone call or even a Codility screen or whatever, then you either need to take another look at in-house training or quit the constant bleating about a shallow talent pool.
asuffield 11y ago
The problem is that there's few companies who can afford to invest in training. Only big established companies can do it (and they do, extensively). Small companies and startups don't have the time or funding to do it. Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  >The problem is that there's few companies who can afford to invest in training. Only big established companies can do it Yes, and since the financial crisis their share of profits as GDP has never been higher yet they still refuse to invest in training themselves. Instead they demand that the immigration floodgates be opened. They don't want to do it because they just don't see employees as people any more. They're resources, to be tapped until they run dry, at which point, they are discarded. This is a marked cultural corporate change from the 50s-70s when the 'job for life' was still a thing, people got defined benefit pensions and CEOs would choose to make long term investments rather than engage in share repurchase shell games that boost next quarter's share price. >Not only is it expensive, but training people in transferable skills can all too often result in them quitting right after their training is complete and going to work for a company that invests in paying its employees more money instead of training. This used to be much less of a problem when companies actually demonstrated loyalty to their employees. A natural side effect of lobbying hard to make it trivial to fire people and doing layoffs as a matter of course is that your employees won't be loyal. Tough shit.

roymurdock 11y ago

I would posit that Starbucks example is the exact reverse of what you're seeing in the tech industry. Starbucks is hiring, but a lot of the workforce that is unemployed is overqualified with bachelor degrees that they thought would guarantee them a safe job on a nice career track. Upon graduation, they are finding that there is a shrinking pool of jobs for them, and that they'll either have to retrain (do a masters or do a crash coding course) or take a job well below what they expected with their degree. Most of these people will have to rely on connections or networking to get a decent job, and the unlucky ones will join the services industry and work as a barista or a waiter, providing the infrastructure for the tech gold rush.

npalli 11y ago
This is an interesting viewpoint about Starbucks that I have heard many times. So here is an article [1] talking about how 75% of Starbucks employees don't have a college degree. If you go up the Starbucks hierarchy 50% employees are baristas. 35% are shift supervisors 15% assistant store manager or higher in the hierarchy Which means the odds are overwhelming that every employee you interact with in a normal Starbucks doesn't have a college degree. So why this view that college grads are flocking to Starbucks because they can't find jobs. In fact, Starbucks has started the free college option to make sure that even non-degreed people will find Starbucks attractive enough to apply. [2] [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-10-07/starbucks-is-mostly-paying-for-1-000-employees-to-go-to-college http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-10-07/starbucks-is... [2] https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-offers-full-tuition-reimbursement-for-employees-to-complete-a-bac https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-offers-full-tuitio...
- roymurdock 11y ago
  Thanks for the insightful comment. I avoided singling out the larger corporations at the end of my comment (Starbucks, McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts) as I don't have any friends who will be working service jobs for these chains. I graduated undergrad a couple of months ago, and I do have a fair amount of friends who gave up looking for work in the finance/startup field full time and are now working at trendy restaurants/bars in the SF NY area to make ends meet while searching on the side. Anecdotal evidence, but that's what I've seen.

shahryc 11y ago

This paradox is explainable because there's a gap in the signal. It usually takes a considerable amount of time/experience to specialize in high skill labor markets (ex. Doctor, lawyer, etc.) ---- therre is a gap in the signal (present vs. future). So, today there may not be enough workers that are familiar with designing chips for wearables (subset of hardware engineers). Then, because of limited supply --- prices go up. Other people see this, and are incentivized to train for the role (takes time, investment, etc.). So, there is always going to be some mismatch between positions employers want to fill vs. the existing pool of labor.

bradleyjg 11y ago

>> The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. ... I've been trying to hire, and my inbox is full of people who know half a language and want a starting salary of $130k. The money isn't the issue; I'd pay way more than that for someone good. But six figures is crazy high for the average developer in SF. >> How much more? $250,000? $500,000? $1,000,000? $3,000,000? Sure, it is plausible that if all the companies in SF tried to pay virtually unlimited amount of money for exceptional programmers, they'd eventually run out of those programmers. After all even in major league baseball there are only so many 100 MPH pitchers to go around. But it's hard to credit claims that we are in that situation rather than one where the money _is_ the issue, when you aren't seeing numbers that would make a BigLaw junior partner or investment bank managing director jealous, much less a professional baseball player.

cellis 11y ago
Exactly. You want to know of a true shortage of workers? 7 ft centers who are aggressive, not injury prone, and can hit a free throw. They're so rare that 17% of all 7footers in the US play in the NBA. It's why Deandre Jordan is making 100 million over the next 5? years. A shortage of programmers, ha! There is one kind of shortage though, and one that is adequately compensated; programmers willing to work at below average wages for lottery tickets (read: technical cofounder equity) that happen to hit, and therefore end up making millions -- they don't even need to be exceptionally skilled, just right be in the place and right time (I've known several of these). But show me an Anthony Davis of coding who is paid as such, and I'll show you someone who is a skilled manager/entreprenuer.
- kev009 11y ago
  This so much. Let's also consider that the middle management layer is earning 2x and upper management at least 3x a senior developer who's stuck somewhere in the 100k range. Trim the fat and you can have as many developers as you want.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    add in that all the show offs have made programmers aware that the system they build for 90k years is making millions and valued at billions. it's about time for (good) engineers to get an appropriate share of the pie.

j_baker 11y ago

Yeah, but you know what? The cost of living has also skyrocketed dramatically in Silicon Valley. I mean, you make it sound like engineers here are on a gravy train where we spend 3 months learning a language and can suddenly move to San Francisco where we just let the money roll in. The truth is it costs a lot to live in the Bay Area these days, and that means that if companies want people to move here they need to pony up and pay a good salary. That $130k starting salary you mention is enough for a person to afford a studio in the Tenderloin these days?

orthoganol 11y ago
Certainly one of the more absurd comment I've read on HN. 3 month bootcamp attendees shouldn't make more than $75k. They are junior as hell, and add little if not negative value for a long stretch of time. Even $75k is a reflection of the crazy job market, not their actual value. Your COL & salary analysis for SF is incredibly off. Yeah you'll probably have to sacrifice the excesses of your upper middle class SF lifestyle (boo hoo...). You can easily live on $75/k year in a $1600/mo studio in the Tenderloin, or on the flip side you can have a $1600/mo shared apartment in the Marina. You can't do that if you have a family, (but if you do, that's on you for switching to programming while needing to support a family). Crappy programmer entitlement is just so off the charts (and disjointed from reality) it's a little frustrating.
- throwaway342526 11y ago
  $1600/mo can get you your own 2br in San Leandro in a safe (though not prestigious) neighborhood. The commute on BART into SF is about 45 minutes.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    so what it gets you is being modern proletariat?
- j_baker 11y ago
  So what you're saying is that it's "crappy programmer entitlement" to: * Expect to earn the median income * Expect to have a decent lifestyle. * Expect to be able to have a family Sounds like crappy employer entitlement to me.

NhanH 11y ago

Rant time: I'm #1 engineering hire in the current startup I'm at for the past 2 years. I know more than half a dozen programming languages (ie I can read them, and reasonably tell if you're doing something horrific to the code) and I can competently/ confidently work in at least a few. Yes I have one language I'm deep in. I can do reasonable sys admin works, setup aws shit, knowing most of the basic work you need to know to set up <15 servers up and running. I will probably need both my eyes open and a google tab, but I can definitely get it done. And I am definitely at least half competent as the average Google/ FB employees, confirm by a sample size of ... a few (sadly, none of them being my interviewer). Yet, I have failed to get the damning H1B in the last 2 years and have to leave next year. My company do plan to set me up with the green card EB process, but that takes a few years. And startup being startup, sudden death isn't particularly rare, you know the drill. I've been asking people every time I heard their them complaining about h1b and low skill ... and I have never gotten an answer. Also, I'm trying to find a new job in SV for the past few months (thinking that I should live there for a bit before leaving the States), and the job finding process has changed me from self-doubt to angry to disappointed to wtf-is-going-on-up-there. So, unicorn-without-a-horn developer looking for remote job! Will anyone hire me, wink wink ;)?

keerthiko 11y ago
Was pretty much in your exact same boat 2 years ago. Had to leave. Spent 2 years outside as a digital nomad, working remotely from Asia. Got my O1 approved last month, and am moving back. On the one hand the last 2 years bouncing about in Asia have been a unique experience that has made me a grow a lot. I would never have done it without being forced into it. On the other hand, I missed SV so much and can't wait to be back. Find my contact info in my profile, feel free to get in touch.

cybojanek 11y ago

Agree - we've been interviewing loads of candidates, and most don't know the difference between a process and a thread.

thaumaturgy 11y ago

I'm about to start looking for work on tomorrow's whoishiring threads -- either freelance or full time, we'll see -- and I've been programming for about 30 years and, honestly, I'm not expecting to get a lot of offers event at around the $75k range. Maybe any at all. If nothing else it'll be interesting to get a glimpse of the prospective employee side of this puzzle.

Vendan 11y ago

That's odd, cause I just left a job where I was juggling 4 programming languages on a weekly bases (AS3, Go, PHP, JS) and I was getting paid shit (sub 50k). I tried and tried to find a programming job, but nobody wanted me, so I ended up going computer security. Love the new job, love the field, but you can't tell me that there's nobody in the US that has the skills and want somewhat decent pay. I was one of those people, and no one wanted me.