The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie | Hacker News Reader

The Tech Talent Shortage Is a Lie

techcrunch.com

29 pointsdoppp14 comments

I teach several technical courses every year - usually to Fortune 50's but occasionally a public class too. And I routinely have people who have been laid-off - often people over 45. They may have skills (java/web/database), but they find that they can't get interviews or a job. At the same time, I talk to hiring managers who say that they can't find people with the skills they need.

My impression is that the expectations put on the hiring managers is to hire someone who already knows everything and is willing to work any number of hours. So people who would be great employees in a sane job market are seen as "too old" (or the usual euphemism of "not high energy".) I think we need to find some way to force companies to hire our citizens.

I've seen this as well. We interviewed a guy, for a crummy position in our division of a Fortune 1000 company. This guy was friendly, personable, had worked at Bell Labs and elsewhere, and knew the technical details back and forth. The management didn't want to hire him though - and this was after we had looked at hundreds of resumes and had interviewed well over a dozen people. The only answer I got was "I don't think he'd like it if we called him at 3 AM to do something".

Then these people go out and cry about how they can't find talented developers.

Haha who would 'like' that?

The problem is that companies that need developers are on really short timelines. They just took a round of funding and need to get profitable within 2 years, so there's literally no time to spend training or mentoring someone.

As well, software companies are really bad at human processes. They are filled with "heroes", who drop in to save the day whenever something happens, instead of having a process that anyone can follow. This means that whenever a "hero" leaves, you need to replace them with another hero, lest your "city" fall victim to the "bad guys". And if you need to grow, you need to hire more heroes, rather than replicating a process across a number of new employees.

I know a number of smart, hardworking engineers who cannot find jobs now, even when they are doing everything they can to make sure their skill sets are up to date. The unifying factor among them is that they are not kids anymore, and have wives and families. Yet I still keep hearing about the supposed "talent shortage."

One guy is in his mid-40s, and was a UNIX sysadmin whose company went bankrupt in the dotcom bomb. He's survived several recessions. He's quite proficient at Python scripting, and he's learning JS and Ruby. But companies won't hire him, I guess because of "culture fit" which seems to be a code phrase for "we want our team to gel around interests and work styles common among single millennials." The worst-case scenario is when a company thinks "culture fit" means "we only hire hipsters proficient in Amazeballs framework and BeardyScript."

Some other problems I've observed: finding mentorship is tough, particularly for women and minorities, because the very people in a position to be great mentors are the same people running startups, and don't have time to mentor. It's a Catch-22.

If there really were a tech shortage, you'd see salaries rising and more training and mentorship instead of the collusion among major companies regarding salary caps and non-poaching agreements. A lot of US-based companies are afraid to train qualified people, like some firms do successfully in the UK (training humanities students from Oxford or Cambridge in software engineering), because they think other companies will poach their talent and therefore their training budget will be spent on their competitors. I think that's a short-sighted view, but that's what I see now.

> you'd see salaries rising

Residents of the Bay Area looking for housing would beg to differ.

Not all Bay area residents are software engineers.

There is another side to this than age. "Culture". A lot of people don't buy into the startup "culture" and won't be a good fit no matter how hard they work or how good they are.

I know people my age (30~) who can't get a foot in because they don't fit in with the hipster-frames-hoovering-art-director types who apart from being well connected founders also part time as diversity activists.

The article's content does not support the headline.

Yes, we could absolutely do more to develop tech talent. But that doesn't change the fact that there is currently a shortage of talented developers.

Sometimes it seems like two different things get discussed when this topic comes up. On the one hand, we might have shortages of people with very specific skills in certain industries (maybe Fortran / mainframe programmers are hard to find, for example.)

On the other hand, the BLS data, various studies, and other sources like CEPR agree with him in the more general case:

http://www.cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/is-there-a-shortage-of-w...

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-201508...

I think "sowing the seeds" is something that should be developed early on into the company culture even at a smaller scale. Otherwise, it won't magically implement itself when you get busier (at later stage of the company).

I suspect this is a concern rage clickbait piece from techcrunch. Just because one CEO with a limited view of the entire industry says something doesn't make it true. I work in a tech field at an advanced level and there are so many other vast and varying fields that I simply don't stand a chance of getting a job in another. It simply couldnt be the case that the US has an abundance of experts in all these fields.

Just another Marxist failing to explain shit about the problem. Look away, people

Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

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