If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed? | Hacker News Reader

If there's a tech skills shortage, why so many computer graduates unemployed?

techrepublic.com

38 pointsjrs23580 comments

Well my education is in economics and, in general, the way to solve a 'shortage' in labour is to raise wages.

Of course, what they're really talking about is a shortage in engineers willing to do the job at the price they've specified, so they lobby the government to open up immigration to workers from abroad willing to work for less, while at the same time trying to push more and more kids into CS, so that the market will be over-saturated with workers and they'll be able to drive wages down to blue-collar levels...

Edit - guess I should answer the article more directly. There isn't a tech skills shortage. There's lots of tech workers. I personally know a bunch who are unemployed or in other fields. This article has yet more data on it. But the shortage is a useful scapegoat for the practices I described above.

The problem is the shortage is with companies wanting exactly "XYZ" experience in the last 2-3 years.

If there was a real shortage, it wouldn't be a problem. The more a business needs labour, the more flexible the 'requirements'.

Businesses have a hard time quantify the value of IT labor. add a widget maker and he can produce x more units. If the demand is good enough they hire him. with IT its different. I could write thousands of lines of shitty code and it takes a while to figure it out especially if I'm "training".

This article is about the UK software development market, which is significantly different from that of the US.

I agree with this point. A Rutgers University professor did some research on this issue. He is quoted as saying something like "just because I can't find a 60 inch flat screen TV for $100 doesn't mean there's a shortage of flat screen TVs."

Yea, I use the "I want a $10K Ferarri = shortage of Ferarris" example but it's the same thing. The word shortage is meaningless without stating the asking price.

"Shortage" means that even if you payed absurdly high prices you will not get any/not enough, though you would immediately be willing to pay that price.

Likely, raising wages for computer jobs would lead to more people doing jobs, but it may also lead to lower quality. Computer programmers try to have job security and delay or wait until deadlines to get things done. Giving them more money could make them more competitive or they may see more money and more security. It's amazing how much of a difference there is in computer jobs and pay. There's also a chance that some jobs people just don't like and won't accept without a ridiculous amount of money. But then again, if no one wants to do it without a large sum, that may make the job worth the money.

The key word in this definition is "absurdly". Whether or not there is a shortage depends on what people think a reasonable price is, which of course is going to be a matter of debate.

> The key word in this definition is "absurdly". Whether or not there is a shortage depends on what people think a reasonable price is

"absurdly high" is intended to mean an amount of money high enough such that not the money but the supply is the limiting factor.

> the way to solve a 'shortage' in labour is to raise wages.

I wish that was happening in health care. We hear that we have a shortage of people in EMS, but our wages have been stagnant for years. Happening a lot in nursing as well. Keep hearing about shortages, but there are new grads that can't find jobs. Although some of those "shortages" are self-caused too. Not everyone is going to be able to find a new grad nurse job right there in the SF Bay Area. Sometimes you just need to take that job in Sacramento to get things started.

Put another way: "there is no shortage of jobs, just a shortage at the salaries these devs feel entitled to. "

Ah, the old "shortage" "issue". More likely, there is no shortage - just a shortage of engineers willing to be paid the low wages most likely on offer at these companies

Low wages? Silicon valley engineers tend to be fairly highly paid...

Silicon Valley is in the US. This article is about the UK.

SV isn't complaining about a skills shortage.

There are 49.75 states in the country that are not "Silicon Valley."

> Silicon valley engineers tend to be fairly highly paid...

I mean, yes the worlds most pre-eminent software developer culture demands high prices.

What about the 98% (fake statistic) of American software developers who do not live in or around San Francisco ...?

Even they aren't paid that highly. Most of them make chump change compared to a world class lawyer or a doctor.

I guess we can thank Steve Jobs for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

> Low wages? Silicon valley engineers tend to be fairly highly paid...

But as far as I heard the accommodation costs are also strongly increasing - from which I would conclude that the actual wages do not increase so much.

SOME Silicon Valley engineers are fairly highly paid. Especially so if you only read HN, where there's always someone who's brother's girlfriend's roommate knows someone at Google who makes $250K, therefore this must be an average salary.

$250k isn't at all unreasonable for a SWE who works at Google. And there are tens of thousands of them in the Bay Area. These are not imaginary unicorns we're talking about.

"Tens of thousands" of $250k/year engineers in the Bay Area at a company that only employs 67k total people worldwide? I find that hard to believe.

In my experience it's not so much a shortage of people willing to work for peanuts but rather a shortage of "experts" whom the company doesn't have to train at all and will magically sit down in their desk and print money.

Every industry has their own version of the perfect employee but in tech, companies actually expect to get them.

The internet has made that a pernicious aspect of our culture that seems impossible to shake.

"Whatever you need, whatever you want, the perfect answer is out there, somewhere, and you can communicate instantly. You just need to know where to look. All the mountains are flat."

> "Whatever you need, whatever you want, the perfect answer is out there, somewhere, and you can communicate instantly. You just need to know where to look. All the mountains are flat."

This might even be true - but it does not say for which cost/salary it is available. :-)

>> a shortage of "experts"

In such situation, wouldn't using standard tools would benefit companies, but also benefit employees. And from the tecchnical point of view, this seems achievable , because many companies do similar stuff.

But instead we get the currrent situation(one example is javascript frameworks). Why ?

> But instead we get the currrent situation(one example is javascript frameworks). Why ?

Each time you use or refuse to use a particular Javascript framework you make a democratic vote on the situation. So the existence of lots of JS framework is a result of a democratic election.

I've given the advice to many associates to hold out for a job they actually want in their field. Waiting for a higher paying and more satisfying job is worth being unemployed temporarily, especially in tech, where you can be assured the job you want does exist.

> especially in tech, where you can be assured the job you want does exist

That's a very bold claim. I (and I'm sure many other people) have been looking for decades.

I'm hesitant to put 100% of the blame on employers. Like any field, there are people who are good, people who aren't good yet but have potential, and then the rest. I wonder how much of the ~11% who are still looking for jobs fall under the "rest" group?

I'd love to know how many of them were getting 1st round interviews, how many were getting followups, how many were getting job offers.

If they're falling out at the first round and not getting invited back, that would shift some of the blame their way.

From my experience interviewing CS grads in the UK, I'd say the answer is pretty obvious: 'cos most of them are inexplicably rubbish.

For example I recently interviewed someone with CS degree (sorry, "informatics" according to them) and masters from edinburgh uni who couldn't join 2 tables, write fizzbuzz-type code, etc. I don't know if it is because of group work or some other effect, but credentials even from decent unis seem to be hopeless.

How many CS grads commited to open source projects regularly? Do they perform better in interviews?

Some do, not that many. I have interviewed some stellar candidates who were heavily involved in some project they were passionate about (my favourite was one that wrote an emulator for a 90s-era games VM I won't mention) - so there's definitely some relationship between people who code for passion and interest and people who are good at coding - which isn't exactly surprising.

In my experience, very few, but most of those were exceptional people. They contributed to something they were passionate about, and learned all the stuff you don't get in school (writing code that can be maintained for a while, and that's maintainable by others; use of source control and issue trackers, etc).

That said, I can think of two cases where I'm pretty sure they "contributed" because they were told or read that it would be good to do for their resume. One basically just uploaded a couple projects to github (with one commit). The other had contributed a few trivial patches to a couple projects, at least one had some comments that were unaddressed and didn't get merged.

No one seems to understand this. There is a large number of people in a CS college program that don't belong there. They had no interest in anything CS before they got there and they only enrolled because someone told them there was a lot of money in it.

Turns out you still actually have to be good at whatever you do.

Because tech lies at a difficult crossroads between the applied and the theoretic. You build a building, you have an architect, and engineer, a foreman, etc. With applications, you have to be all of them at once. That just isn't whats taught at universities, based on many candidates I've encountered.

It's something that needs to be learned with experience, yet companies don't want to invest time training people who will probably leave in a year or two.

1. Standards to pass university classes are lower than the standards to be worth a salary.

2. Accidentally hiring someone who can't produce is more expensive than passing on a good hire.

I don't think the standards are lower (certainly they weren't at Princeton) -- University standards may not perfectly align with the job market, perhaps?

Maybe they aren't lower at Princeton, but it's entirely possible to coast through a CS degree at a decent university, showing up to class maybe half the time.

I'm, ah, quite familiar with some, ahem, people who did just that.

Your humblebragworthy alma mater is not Flyover State University, home of the Footballs. The Princetons and Stanfords and MITs of the world don't have the bandwidth to fill the industry's demand.

Meh, not all the great programs are on the coasts. Any Big 10 school (carrying on with the football reference lol) is going to be at least decent, and a few are world class:

Carnegie Mellon (not a Big 10 school I know) #1 globally Michigan Illinois Northwestern Purdue Wisconsin Ohio State

to name a few.

I can say that Carnegie Mellon is definitely ranked nationally a Top 10 university in computer engineering and/or computer science.

>I can say that Carnegie Mellon is definitely ranked nationally a Top 10 university in computer engineering and/or computer science.

And it is just one of the numerous examples of non-coastal universities who run quality undergraduate programs producing graduates with the tech skills mentioned by the article.

General consensus that I've seen is that it is not just top 10 but number 1 across the entire planet.

i think both of your points really hinge on lacking on-the-job training

>> 'to be worth a salary'

>> 'who can't produce'

The article mentions 11.7% CS UK grads unemployed after 6 months. This doesn't surprise me nor does it concern me that the bottom ~10% of students are struggling to find work.

What's giving them trouble is probably what plagued them in school: laziness. As a recent US grad in CS, most of my peers (in CS and outside) who couldn't find work after college slept walk through their classes and did next to no extracurricular work.

When you've got below average grades, little to show outside of your degree, and you struggle with interviews (due to your minimal effort in college), don't be surprised if finding a job is difficult.

I can't upvote this enough. I do suppose schools are partly to blame as well - harder exams, harder projects, more people failed is the answer. I've seen Junior year Comp Eng's who somehow passed Digital Logic and Computer Architecture but still don't understand the basic concept of flip flops. Same story with Data Structures classes not being graded hard enough.

Apples and Oranges. For the majority of firms, a "lack of digital skills" isn't solved by hiring more CompSci graduates.

Yeah. I'd like some clarity on what they mean by "digital skills".

I would like to hear from the point of view of a recent computer science graduate here, who is having trouble finding a job.

I can see how you might want to work at one of the big companies, but they want "5 years of Angular" and okay, you don't have that. Maybe you have only 1 year of Angular and you're the most passionate Angular developer out there, but they won't even talk to you. That happens, I can see that. It is disappointing as a job seeker, but common.

"Developer" is not the only job title that involves writing code. I am not a "Developer" but I write shit loads of code.

TL;DR; University diploma != skill

I'm an employer and I can tell you that in the UK a lot of graduates are incredibly ill-equipped. Most of our universities are not teaching the right stuff and not emphasising the correct stuff anywhere near enough.

Knowing only one language like Java (a UK uni. favourite) to a junior standard is simply unacceptable to most employers. Being unable to construct even a simple object model and writing nested mutable state for-loops with the old school "i" and "j" as variable names is also not a good sign.

It's interesting that this is an article about the UK rather than the US. I really enjoyed a recent Econtalk episode on "Learning by doing" that talked about labor markets:

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/05/james_bessen_on.htm...

The example in the episode is about textile mills. For about 50 years after mills were mechanized, productivity in mills had gone up by a lot but employee wages didn't increase even though it was "skilled" labor. The reason (explained in the episode) is that because of a lack of standardization, employees couldn't transfer skills between firms, so they were unable to demand more for their skills on the labor market by shopping for a new employer.

There's no immediate connection to the article but I've been thinking about employees' ability to "shop" and I wonder if maybe these CS graduates would be employed if they had access to the US labor market.

Can someone speak specifically about the UK software market? We seem to wrongly be making statements about the US market, which this article is not about.

From what I've heard it's dismally underpaid in the UK; I have also heard the perspective that costs of living are dramatically lower outside London, and matched with longer vacations and shorter working hours, it evens out.

Here's an article talking about STEM crisis for jobs and workers in US:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663051

The UK doesn't really value software. Costs of living are lower outside of London somewhat, but not in anywhere you can get a decent software job.

Shorter working hours doesn't really apply. Yes, we may be paid for 40 hours, but we still have tons to do. At the companies I've worked at not a single dev works less than 10 hours per day, not to mention the out of hours work that needs to be done.

Longer vacations - well on paper, but you don't always get to take them. Working on holiday isn't time off it's still work.

This is different at larger institutions, but larger institutions don't have a problem paying competitive salaries.

What? I don't know a single developer out of ~10 across multiple companies that would have to work more than 8 hours plus 1hour lunch break. Outside of London you get 37.5 hours weeks. Hell, I know contractors who work 1-2 days a week from home! But yeah, the money is crap mostly.

In San Francisco and the Bay Area, it does feel like there's a shortage of good developers. I say that because I know contractors (with a couple years of experience) who make $250 or $300 per hour. That's very burdensome for startups and the cost is necessarily passed on to consumers.

On the flip side, coming out of academia, I had a hard time landing my first industry job.

Move out of the bay area then. That area is one of the most expensive places on the planet. You're not going to find "cheap" developers because they can't afford to be in expensive.

I've never had a problem finding a job in tech, but that's because I ask for 10% less than the next guy.

There's the rub.

There may be a skills shortage but that has nothing to do with a graduate shortage (or lack thereof). Just because you graduated doesn't mean you have a useful skill set, that you're proficient or employable.

Thats interesting, any unemployed CS-Graduate from the UK here? Is it the lack of opportunities or the wrong opportunities that keep you from getting a job? What do you do to improve the situation?

Indeed-- why!

Seems to me the "shortage" has more to do with labor costs than a skills gap.

The article seems to be mostly about the UK, but from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree). There's also a lot of people who aren't that interested in it or bad at it but still manage to not get weeded out.

Add that to the decades-old "CS != programming at job" dilemma and it's easy to see why so many people are unemployed.

> from my US perspective, there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree)

This sounds a lot like "sorry, we won't take you until you've been trained, but we're not willing to train you."

Yes, that's the problem and it doesn't seem like it'll be fixed any time soon.

From a hiring side, the current industry standard of job-hopping within two years has a significant negative affect on junior hires. The ROI on training someone really isn't there if the their employment expectation boils down to dine-and-dash.

Now that is a very valid point. We recently rejected a very green grad because it was very clear he had no intention of committing to the job more than a couple of years. With a likely 12 month ramp and training period there was no way we were going to put in that level of investment into someone who would vanish a year later.

Umm... Of course they're graduating with no professional coding experience. The entire point is they don't have professional experience yet.

What the hell do you expect them to do? They have to start somewhere.

Do chemical companies refuse to hire newly graduated chemical engineers who don't have professional chemical engineering experience?

That doesn't even make sense.

Projects. Internships.

I would never hire a graduate without at least some combination of those. Typically, getting a 'real' internship requires projects anyway so we can just say internship experience.

And yes, good chem E candidates have internship or project experience, in conjunction with decent grades to show they understand the theory.

How is your company doing overall?

Chemical companies would absolutely refuse to hire a newly graduated chemical engineer who gained no practical experience during their time in college. Same deal with CS grads (or really any discipline for that matter).

> What the hell do you expect them to do? They have to start somewhere.

Internships are the best way, but open source and personal projects... anything like that works. In a perfect world companies would train new grads and stuff, and we can fight and ask for that, but for now it pays off to have something to show your skill.

If I hadn't started teaching myself stuff and coding my own projects after class, I'd probably still be unemployed (I went to a college without a good CS-job network).

Don't they have internships in the UK?

Does co-op not exist any more? This is what I did. After my freshman year at Virginia Tech, I alternated between working a semester and going to school a semester. There wasn an entire university office dedicated to this (co-op program). So, I never had any "time off" months from the day I started to the time I graduated. I worked at a software company in Blacksburg, I stuck with the same company the whole time. I made close to minimum wage, but I was a programmer. I was getting paid to do object-oriented design and implementation. It did take a little longer to graduate, but I had fewer student loans.

edit: and I had 5 job offers when I graduated

> there are just a lot of CS graduates with little to no professional coding experience either out of laziness or lack of knowledge (yes, there are people who expect a job with just a degree)

Why are you expecting fresh college graduates to have professional experience?

I guess I didn't explain my point well. I don't expect new grads to have "professional experience" (bad choice of words in my part), but a lot of companies expect them to have SOME sort of experience, be it an internship, open source stuff, personal projects, etc.

You'd be surprised how many people don't code outside of class and if you think that's fine and companies should train then I agree with you but it's not the reality most students are living in.

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