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Comment by NTDF9 | Hacker News Reader

Even as an immigrant to the US, I agree with this. A large part of the shortage is self-inflicted.

Did we see a shortage of American workers who could do the job right away?

YES. Not many people work in the same area of technology. There really aren't many people working in some areas of tech.

Did the employer try to compromise on their requirement of "rockstar coder with 1000 wpm typing speed, PhD in app programming, merge k-sorted arrays in 15 mins with good syntax and no compiler?"

NO. And this is why there is no shortage. It's their demand for rockstars when reality is most companies are mediocre (at best). It's not shortage, your company sucks, interviews suck and nobody wants to work there.

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There are tons of articles on the "STEM shortage", but frightfully few about how to get graduates into their first job. Moving around once you've gotten a year or two under your belt is easy. I have seen lots of perfectly qualified people do other things because they couldn't get their foot in the door.

Nobody wants to foot the initial cost. "They'll just take another job elsewhere" is what I always hear, but employers never seem to recognize that junior devs choosing to move on reflects more on the employer than the dev. It's human nature to always think the issue is with someone else...

> Moving around once you've gotten a year or two under your belt is easy.

* If your first year or two was at a "top company". Significantly more difficult if you worked anywhere else.

> Did the employer try to compromise on their requirement of "rockstar coder with 1000 wpm typing speed, PhD in app programming, merge k-sorted arrays in 15 mins with good syntax and no compiler?"

Or when they want years of experience with a specific framework, library, or other system.

I remember looking at Java positions last year (before I got my current job), and a lot of them would sound nice until I got to the item about "Must have X years of experience with Spring".

Yeah, I have a whole bunch of core Java under my belt, and I made the requirements for everything else, but because I don't have experience with that one library, I'm shut out.

Apply anyway.

Eh, that was a year ago. I've since moved on to a position I like at a company I like.

I remember shortly after Oak was renamed Java (so, maybe 1995? Certainly before the Java 1.0 release), at my startup, we wanted a Java person even if we had to retrain a C person. I gave my must-have/nice-to-have sheet to whoever was responsible for staffing and was surprised a week later to see a "Must have 5 years experience with Java" on the posting. When I asked her about it, she said that she had cribbed it from a Tivoli recruiter!

A few years later, I was applying somewhere (Samsung?) for a semiconductor design position - and they wanted 5 years experience on "Mentor Graphics 8"[0]. I was semi-fluent on "Mentor Graphics 6", but that was a no-go.

It sounds as if things haven't changed.

[0] The naming scheme has changed, so this nomenclature is itself a no-go today.

I graduated in 2000, and I applied for a company doing telemetry processing in Java. I learned Java in 1997 (because Gosling was a PhD student at CMU a little before that time; we eat our own dog food). When I interviewed they asked me all sorts of questions about Java (GC, JIT, JVM, bytecode, etc) and I passed with flying colors. However, they said they wanted someone with more Java experience and I was rejected.

Two weeks later I got a callback from them saying they wanted to offer me a job. I had already accepted a position. This is when I figured out that hiring managers have no idea about the talent pool they're dredging.

This company wasn't even in SV. They should have offered me a job on the spot, because the fact I had any knowledge of Java.

Hilarious but said.

Perhaps the metric is inverted. Instead of years per language, it should be languages per year. Any software job today requires people that learn new stuff fast, not experts in 5 year old frameworks.

> because the fact I had any knowledge of Java.

Because you even knew the word "Java"!

We were somehow part of a swirling cloud of folks somehow trying to buy Lycos about then. I don't know that CMU knew how to think about pricing such things. At least not the parts we were talking to. IBM seemed to be getting on with Doug Tygar's Citadel group, though, so it might have just been us that didn't know what we were doing! :-)

In my experience, almost all of those "must have X years of experience with Y" requirements are written up by HR people who are loosely interpreting poorly understood requirements told to them by either the hiring manager, or other HR people. In many or most cases, the people writing up those job postings are not the same people who would be interviewing or hiring you, and they're more aspirational requirements than anything else. They hope that someone with X years of experience with Spring will magically come out of the woodwork and send them a resume, but they're just as likely to hire a fresh grad who doesn't know anything about Spring other than what they skimmed on Wikipedia right before going to the interview. And the people doing the interviewing and hiring might actually be fine with that.

Basically if something looks perfect except for some random "must have X years of experience in Y" requirement, just apply anyway. Most likely it won't be a dealbreaker for them (the hiring manager at a decent-sized company may not even know that that was in the job posting), but the worst case scenario is that you won't get the job but will get some good interview experience.

Why would I want to apply to a company that has demonstrated they don't know much about technology?

Because (taking the comment in its context) you need to get a first job so you haven't so many options and you have nothing to lose. If you're some genius maybe Google had already recruited you right from uni.

You'll normally get screened out by their automated filtering tools if you leave anything off.

That's why so many people lie about their experience on their resume, and I don't blame them.

That's a huge problem in the Javascript space, especially considering how quickly it moves.

As far as I'm concerned, if a candidate has experience with Ember or Angular, I would never turn them down because they have not yet had the opportunity to work with React. A little bit of on-the-job training and some trial by fire, and most likely they'll be fine.

If I'm ever on the hunt for a new employer, I'm looking forward to getting turned down because I don't have 2 years experience working with Vue.js. It's idiotic, but I can guarantee it'll happen.

If people shopped for food like they hire engineers, they'd starve to death. I have to wonder if there's not some "corporate anorexia" thing that shares pathology with food disorders.

I cringe when I see "More than 10 years experience in Ruby on Rails required" or "5 years experience in React required"

The definitive example: https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768

Last job I had, we were doing quite well but market conditions changed. They effectively now have a 0.00% software presence.

It just isn't possible, given the basic makeup of the company, for there to be anything other than very basic bug fixing going on - the leadership team simply can't cope.

When I was there, I pretty much ran on one-page specs, if there was a written spec at all.

We were violently successful. SFAIK, just because of parts cost, that's all scrapped now. :)

The people that are left are of the "fix one, create three" level. One has a degree in CS but has never actually learned the trade. I did what I could, but he was perpetually interrupted. God bless 'em, but it's true.

In the end, unless your business is critically dependent on software, you may be better off without us.

That reminds me of a "C" level boss I had at a tech company. In a private meeting he said, "George, I think this team is not world class." Like he had discovered a crucial flaw that needed to be fixed. The product (that made them millions) was not world class in its design or engineering. The management of the company and its strategy was not in my opinion the best in the world. Sometimes there is this fever dream of excellence that prevents managers from being realistic about what is really necessary to get a thing done.

What you described is exactly how a labor shortage feels. When unemployment is low employees can be extremely picky.

If you compare this to other fields with a glut, for example English literature majors, you'd see that they only hire rockstars.

A shortage, by definition, requires a situation where the price cannot rise. Of course, if the price is rising, then the poorer businesses are priced out of the market and no longer need developers. As long as price can rise, a shortage is impossible. Even if there was only one developer in the entire world, the services would eventually go to the highest bidder and everyone else would be priced out of the market, leaving no demand for other developers.

That leaves me wondering what force is preventing price from rising in the case of developer talent?

>That leaves me wondering what force is preventing price from rising in the case of developer talent?

Well, it's not Steve Jobs. Not anymore.

It's because many companies are overly oriented towards cost accounting and labor is classed as a cost. Some people might just say that's just a normal business calculation, and to some extent it is. But there is a another aspect to it which could be viewed through more of a class-conflict viewpoint (not necessarily a upper vs middle sense but a capital vs labor sense). This isn't just in the STEM areas - if one looks at real wage growth vs productivity, STEM areas are one of the few employment areas that are given a more generous allocation of produced benefits to labor ... leading to language of a "shortage".

Edit: clarified real wage to real wage vs productivity.

We make things, we don't manage people. As such we are below the people setting wages.

Yes, engineers are professionals and all that, but we are seen as the executors. The final rung on the ladder who finally executes and builds the thing.

So our wages do not scale that great with value of output.

In many cases we are factory workers, maaaybe artisans, in a feature factory --> https://hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-f...

To the suits, we are little better than chimps.

If it makes you feel better, in MBA speak you're a "direct contributor" (unlike everyone else who has to justify the value they supposedly provide) and all those suits are stuck in the "overhead" bucket (i.e. "a burden, not contributing to revenue in any way").

Doctors and lawyers are direct executors in a sense. Do they have a similar problem?

And I would differ with your assessment that tech wages scale poorly with productivity. Better than many other areas, engineers can leverage their productivity extremely well - especially in software, but even moreso in the future with information and mechanical automation becoming ever more capable.

Doctors and lawyers have controls in place to limit the supply of labor.

This is the kind of logic only an economist could love. People still gotta get work done at the end of the day and they gotta stay in budget. Perfectly elastic markets are a fictional construct about as real as a perfectly round sphere oscillating in a perfectly sinusoidal fashion.

Go on any job site and you will see tons of openings for people with 5 years experience in <every buzzword tech in the book> for $50k/year. These employers will always struggle to find acceptable talent and will always complain.

Managers have to earn more than their underlings.

>That leaves me wondering what force is preventing price from rising in the case of developer talent?

A religious belief that labor prices must be kept as low as possible, lest communism ensue.

> A shortage, by definition, requires a situation where the price cannot rise.

This is not correct. A shortage is a situation where demand exceeds supply. The only definite statement you can make about such a situation is that it means the market in question cannot be in equilibrium. But there are multiple possible reasons for that. Prices being controlled is actually not one of them: the effect of price controls will not be market disequilibrium but a shifting of the equilibrium.

So the question you should actually be asking is, what is preventing the market from reaching equilibrium? Here are two possible answers:

- Demand is growing faster than supply can keep up.

- Transaction costs (for example, difficulties in employers evaluating candidates' actual potential) are preventing efficient matching of supply to demand.

I find that the whole terminology/model falls apart when you get people putting the price into the definition of the thing... Whether explicitly or as an unspoken part of their argument.

"The world has a severe shortage of large diamonds I can buy for pennies."

> A shortage is a situation where demand exceeds supply.

Demand is characterized by price. Simply saying you want something does not mean you demand something.

I'd love to find programmers for $1/hr, but I haven't increased the demand for programmers by saying that. I have to offer something a programmer is actually willing to take to be considered demand. And so, again, as long as price is rising, you cannot have a shortage. Every time the price goes up, there will be buyers dropping out of the market not willing to pay the new high.

The result is that only those who can afford programmers will be able to hire programmers, and the supply will exactly equal the demand.

> Demand is characterized by price.

No, demand is characterized by the quantity demanded at a given price. More precisely, the demand curve is a curve of quantity demanded vs. price.

> I'd love to find programmers for $1/hr, but I haven't increased the demand for programmers by saying that.

Not by just saying it, but you could post a want ad for programmers at $1/hr in order to investigate the potential supply of programmers at that price. Of course you would find that it was zero, but that just means there's no supply of programmers at that price, not that there's no demand.

> Every time the price goes up, there will be buyers dropping out of the market not willing to pay the new high.

Now you're assuming that there is supply--programmers available at higher prices--but not demand--clients don't want to pay the offered price. (A more precise analysis would say that the quantity supplied at that price is greater than the quantity demanded--some clients will pay that price but not enough to hire all available programmers.) You're right that this is not a shortage, but that's because it's a surplus instead--supply exceeds demand, instead of demand exceeding supply.

You're also ignoring other possibilities. Programmers could decide to accept lower wages instead of higher ones. "Price" is not something magically set by higher authority; it's the output of the market, not an input to it. In the first case above, if you want a programmer you will have to raise your offered price until you find one that is willing to work at that price. In the second case above, if programmers wanted work they would have to lower their prices (on average) until enough clients were willing to hire all of them.

> No, demand is characterized by the quantity demanded at a given price.

Okay. So, every formalized definition I could find more or less echoes this one:

"Demand is an economic principle that describes a consumer's desire and willingness to pay a price for a specific good or service. Holding all other factors constant, an increase in the price of a good or service will decrease demand, and vice versa." – http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/demand.asp

But you are telling us that demand is evaluated by interest across the entire price spectrum. Therefore, holding all other factors constant, an increase in price does not change the demand at all, as those holding firm at the lower price are still demand.

Whose definition are you using here?

> Not by just saying it, but you could post a want ad for programmers at $1/hr in order to investigate the potential supply of programmers at that price.

Does your definition of demand always require that the buyer be so formal in their investigation?

> but that just means there's no supply of programmers at that price, not that there's no demand.

Which, by your early definition of shortage meaning demand exceeding supply, means that virtually everything is in shortage. The demand, as you call it, at the price of free is almost infinite for any desirable good. That leaves shortage to not seem like very useful terminology whatsoever. Why even bother using the term shortage at all when we can infer that almost everything is in shortage?

And what is special about the shortage of developers that warrants all the media attention? Especially in light of the severe shortage of Ferraris, which I frequently see people expressing their interest to buy at lower prices in these discussions. I never see in the news calls to fix the Ferrari shortage, nor do I see any government intervention to try and correct the lack of Ferraris being produced.

> Now you're assuming that there is supply--programmers available at higher prices

I'm not sure where you got that idea. We have acknowledged right from the beginning that price can stop rising. That's kind of the entire basis of the discussion.

> every formalized definition I could find

Have you ever looked at an actual textbook?

Even what you quoted does not define "demand" as price. It says "an increase in the price of a good or service will decrease demand"--which implies that "demand" means quantity demanded (at a given price). Which is how I defined it.

> an increase in price does not change the demand at all

I said demand (more precisely, the demand curve) is quantity demanded as a function of price. I certainly did not claim that quantity demanded does not change if price increases.

> Does your definition of demand always require that the buyer be so formal in their investigation?

No, it just requires a market. "Just saying" something does not constitute a market, but making an offer to buy something at a given price does.

> by your early definition of shortage meaning demand exceeding supply, means that virtually everything is in shortage

No, it doesn't. Let me restate my definition of shortage to make the definitions I have been using explicit: it means that quantity demanded exceeds quantity supplied at the current price. That is certainly not true of "virtually everything".

> I'm not sure where you got that idea

From what you said. You said: "Every time the price goes up, there will be buyers dropping out of the market not willing to pay the new high." Why does the price go up? If buyers aren't the ones setting the price (which is obvious since not all of them are willing to pay it), it must be sellers, i.e., programmers. So for your statement to make sense at all, there must be programmers available at the higher prices.

> We have acknowledged right from the beginning that price can stop rising.

I'm not sure who this "we" is that you refer to. You have claimed that "the price is rising", and that this will continue until there is only one programmer in the world who is working. That doesn't sound like acknowledging that the price can stop rising.

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