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Comment by zzleeper | Hacker News Reader

> Their lobbyists claim there is a “talent shortage” among Americans and thus that the industry needs more of such work visas. This is patently false

There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial.

> most Silicon Valley firms sponsor their H-1B workers, who hold a temporary visa, for U.S. permanent residency (green card) [...] sponsorship renders the workers de facto indentured servants; though they have the right to move to another employer, they do not dare do so, as it would mean starting the lengthy green card process all over again.

Then the problem might be with how long the gov takes to process these things, and not with the H1B visas?

> the H-1B program is an enabler of rampant age discrimination in the tech industry [...] Almost all the H-1Bs are young

Younger people are more willing to move to another country. Also, many students apply for an H1b after their F1 runs out, so of course you get younger people.

And this is just from the first page. I feel like the author is just throwing every possible argument against the H1B, instead of making one good coherent point. =/

View on HN

> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial.

Is this a fact or a feeling? Economics allows us to directly measure these things and the price of labor hasn't gone up in the last 30 years at rates indicating a shortage with executive pay and corporate profits at all time highs.

> Then the problem might be with how long the gov takes to process these things, and not with the H1B visas?

I think his point was the visa system is designed to take advantage of the inefficiencies in the bureaucracy to the benefit of the employer.

> Younger people are more willing to move to another country. Also, many students apply for an H1b after their F1 runs out, so of course you get younger people.

If the H1B visa didn't exist there wouldn't be as many foreign students.

You should read his blog, he makes repeated coherent arguments against the H1B visa system and its detrimental effects on the employment outlook for older citizens. He is a CS professor at a respected US university and has an interesting perspective.

Economics allows us to directly measure these things and the price of labor hasn't gone up in the last 30 years...

Real compensation per hour (for workers as a whole) has gone up 40% since 1987. This number is adjusted for inflation.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

Pay in software has been rising more rapidly than pay for the country as a whole. Is this even remotely in doubt?

http://insights.dice.com/2013/01/22/tech-professionals-enjoy...

There are studies performed on this stuff by actual economists out there, to save you using self-reporting surveys from online recruitment companies.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...

http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi...

>The average hourly wage for college-educated workers in computer and math occupations rose 5.3 percent over 11 years, from $37.27 in 2000 to $39.24 in 2011 (in 2012 dollars), which translates to an average wage increase of less than half a percent per year. If a labor shortage existed in these occupations, one would expect wages to rise sharply as employers try to lure scarce workers to their firms.

2000? At the peak of the dot-com boom?

Yeah, that's the part that had me scratching my head. Any study that makes no attempt to smooth out dramatic outlier time periods is highly suspect.

If your study is claiming that software engineer compensation rose no more rapidly than the population at as a whole (they also saw a 5% increase), then something is deeply wrong with your study.

Note that "Computer and math occupations" is a broad catch-all term which includes all sorts of professions, such as:

Computer User Support Specialist: Provide technical assistance to computer users. Answer questions or resolve computer problems for clients in person, or via telephone or electronically. May provide assistance concerning the use of computer hardware and software, including printing, installation, word processing, electronic mail, and operating systems. Excludes "Network and Computer Systems Administrators" (15-1142).

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes150000.htm

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151151.htm

No one claimed that the guy who fixes your printer or helps you change the font in word experienced large pay increases.

If your contention that it rose is based on your experience in SV or NY or similar, then you're probably not getting a complete picture of the state of the industry.

Here in flyover country, companies are paying new-grad software engineers 30-38k.

Here in dirt poor arizona new grad software engineers make $70K+

And how does cost of living compare? Median salary?

Don't get me wrong, the cost of living is much lower than SV, but there are several major industries here that pay 2-3x that rate for less skilled work. Even many service-type jobs pay better. A buddy of mine that dropped out of college was making more money than I did right out of school managing McDonald's.

I personally left software engineering (regretfully, I love it, and still do what personal projects I can) to do a government job that is at least somewhat technical that constituted a massive raise over my old salary - and as I worked there for a few years and was a high performer, I did get several big raises before leaving.

Do you have an actual tech sector where you're at though. I also live in a flyover state and the average salary for a software engineer is $91,894, and that's well below the national average.

For S&G, I looked up salaries for software engineers in some random cities in the middle of nowhere and I have yet to find a place with an average salary close to that. Edmond, OK: 73,005; Eden Prairie, MN: 77,325 (23% below the national average); and the worst so far: Tuscaloosa, AL: $62,020.

Perhaps a few companies can get away paying so little, but it's hard to say that's the norm when they are so far below average, even for towns in the middle of nowhere.

I am in Indiana. We pay new grads about 70k. Senior software engineers (10y/xp) are earning 100-130k+bonus.

For American workers as a whole, the average hourly wage has about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

Congrats - you've discovered that compensation has shifted from taxable wages to untaxed benefits.

If you want to solve this then ban employer sponsored health care, matched 401k contributions, and all that.

The WWII-era holdover of making American employers be responsible for their employee healthcare is definitely something that should be gradually reformed out of existence. It used to be an incentive, not a necessity.

And as for 401(k)s, well that's another can of worms that needs to be dealt with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13304027

So, 1.1% annualized? Do you have numbers for productivity?

It's entirely possible (I am not claiming either way) that both are true: that the H1B system has benefited employers by allowing lower wages and technology growth has increased by access to a broader talent pool than was available in the US alone.

There are very few clean economic metrics - in this case you can't directly measure the effect because you don't have data from an equivalent system without the effect of H1b wages in it. So in the end, as with most economic arguments, it is more art than science.

> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial.

It's controversial because a number of people, like me, think many companies in SB have arbitrarily high hiring bars, and that a company who claims to tailor their hiring process to minimize false positives at the expense of false negatives has no moral standing to crow about "talent shortages". The shortage is largely irrational and self-inflicted.

> there is a “talent shortage” among Americans

I see a bait and switch conducted here all the time, where thinkpiece writers will count up the number of annual graduates in Computer Science (or sometimes Information Technology in general), subtract the number of new software jobs per year, and conclude that we have massive overproduction of programmers.

This is obviously stupid, but I keep seeing it. It ignores CS graduates who stay in academia or take nonprogramming jobs (e.g. in finance). Often it counts "new software engineering positions", a metric which ranges from insufficient (by excluding Sysadmins and similar) to idiotic (by excluding "programmers" and other job titles the author couldn't be bothered to search for). Shockingly often, it counts new positions but doesn't account for positions vacated by people leaving programming (e.g. to management or retirement). And, of course, it ignores employability, pushing an implication that any CS graduate can fill any software job regardless of specialization, experience, or interest.

It is a relentlessly stupid 'statistic', but I think one reason for this ongoing perception of surplus talent is that people keep rewriting the same silly article.

Yup. If we had mature education systems our governments would hire economists to get proper estimates of labour market requirements for different skill sets.

It seems like you're agreeing with the line you quoted? That there isn't a talent shortage?

Anyway having said that, good studies check for shortages and overproductions in more complicated ways than just totting up numbers blindly.

I don't think I'm agreeing with that? There are a bunch of negations in the quote, so: I think there is a talent shortage in some domains.

My point was that the major sources of the "no shortage" or particularly "surplus" claims are doing shoddy math that over-represents the labor pool and under-represents demand. Also, more importantly, they're conflating all types of programming.

There are certainly skillsets/interests where there's no shortage, and there are certainly spaces where there is a shortage. People who don't differentiate 'programming' any further aren't saying something useful, and people who do only disagree on the details.

(I realize good studies check for those things, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people saying "but aren't there lots of spare programmers we don't need?" because some hack with an infographic subtracted two numbers and found a surplus. I've seen this error pattern in respectable news on a bunch of occasions.)

You're probably right there. And there's presumably shortages and surpluses in different regions of the US. A telling statistic is the amount of people who graduate with IT or STEM degrees, have intentions of working in their respective industries, but have to leave due to an inability to get work, or...unemployment rates for graduates with certain degrees.

It was about 7-12% a couple of years ago for grads from CS, Engineering, and IS, at a time when the national level was lower.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-my...

I'm not sure if we're on the same page, but my contention is that western governments are encouraging kids to pursue STEM, knowing that there's already an oversupply of workers due to visas issued to emerging economies, and that the issue is compounding year on year.

Wow. That's a decently narrow standard, and I had no idea it was so high.

I object to some specifics - IS without programming education is quite different from CS/programming - but it's still a potent statistic. More narrowly, my (cynical) take is that CS degrees are decidedly unequal. Having seen multiple companies say they only bother with top-seven job fairs, and some genuinely talented friends struggle to land interviews with third-string universities on their resumes, I get the sense that the "shortage" and "surplus" are capable of existing side-by-side.

I completely agree with your conclusion, since it holds regardless of whether I'm right about segmentation within CS degrees: a lot of people are being unhelpfully pushed into "employable" STEM degrees by people who want to look science-friendly, and they're going to be left holding the (unemployment) bag when that doesn't work out.

There's definitely a wide variation in teaching between ostensibly similar courses, which might make some of the simple stats nonsensical.

> I get the sense that the "shortage" and "surplus" are capable of existing side-by-side.

I guess this is fundamentally the issue

> implication that any CS graduate can fill any software job regardless of specialization, experience, or interest.

Your basic calculation is still right although I'd add more numbers to the opposite site. "Potential graduates" with or without CS can potentially enter to any software sector, or even hardware. Though this is just a small factor.

This is a good point. Lots of these 'calculations' neglect bootcamp or self-taught programmers, electrical/computer engineers who end up in software, and a lot of other grey-area work like embedded systems programming. The calculations are sloppy enough that I ignore them, but I'm not sure what the total weight of the errors ends up being.

There is a big difference between foreign workers who are great and add value, and foreign workers who are brought over, are subsequently exploited, and who are also used to depress the income of the local workforce. Seen it happen.

Then there are the "Indian Mafias" in places like Microsoft, where over 50% of an organization is Indian because they got into a cultural hiring spiral. And the products from those groups are generally pretty awful, because everyone seems to want to be a manager or see how high the next re-org will take them, and not do good designs or write good code.

H1Bs shouldn't be used for job shops, and they shouldn't be used to bring in cheap labor, but that's largely what they're used for now.

A lot of really good Indian engineers are going to get hurt, and that will suck.

>> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial.

Mainly because we have over 7 million people unemployed. The controversy is why are we bringing in so many foreign workers when we have so many people out of work here?

The argument basically comes down to what would we need to do to get some of these unemployed people here trained to be able to take some of these jobs? and if so, what's that cost compared to these H1-B's were bringing in? Also, at the end of the day, how motivated are those unemployed people to go through the rigorous training in order to be able to take these jobs? If you've spent 20 years putting hubcaps on cars in a factory, are you going to want to take six months to learn basic .Net or Javascript?

I don't have any of the answers, these are just some of the rumblings I've heard from executives I know at various large corporations.

Realistically, most of our 7 million unemployed are unemployed by choice. They are unwilling to do many jobs they perceive as being "below their station" and they are unwilling to move to places where the jobs are.

We need to import a better working class to pay for our leisure class since pushing our leisure class into work is considered socially unacceptable.

Here's a great first person account of this: http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/12/19/13956666/unemploy... "There have been times where I’ve wondered if I should just get a temporary service or manual labor...I would be too humiliated...a neighbor or friend [might]...see me working the cash register or pumping gas. "

See also NPR's expose on disability fraud: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

Again a few examples that are often used to justify calling 7 million people lazy. If the visas are being used for for cash register and pumping gas jobs (how many states pump gas for you?) then this might make some sense but these are just isolated events and fit a narrative convenient to corporations to justify many practices that are mainly beneficial to the corporation.

The last major study I saw on this showed that a large proportion of IT and STEM graduates had to move into unrelated industries due to an inability to find employment.

This meme that there are hordes of people who would choose poverty because of an unwillingness to work is disgusting.

60% of poor adults choose not to work. I'm sorry you consider reality to be "disgusting".

http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication... Table 3 Page 21

My uncited study says that your uncited study is wrong and the authors of your study are Nazis.

> 60% of poor adults choose not to work. I'm sorry you consider reality to be "disgusting".

Which is not evidence of them being lazy. They could be acting in their own economic best interest by being in a welfare trap.

Not sure what your point is here, other than some welfare programs are poorly structured.

My point is that contra ajnc, there are hordes of people who "choose poverty because of an unwillingness to work".

Where are you getting 60%? Are you adding up the two years?

And I presume you're in the US, but from an external observer's perspective, 'poverty' in the US is extreme and is almost incomprehensible to people the rest of the Western world. These are not people "choosing" to not work, they're the most decrepit, uncared-for group in the developed world.

Table 3 and division.

And I presume you're in the US, but from an external observer's perspective, 'poverty' in the US is extreme and is almost incomprehensible...

I spend about half my time in the US, half in India. So as a semi-external observer, all I can do is laugh at you. Most middle class people would love to live as well as the American poor do. Actually so would many Europeans - Bulgarian GDP/capita is about 1/2 of what the average poor American consumes.

No matter how much you might scoff and sputter, most poor American adults chose not look for work even once in the past year. That's just the basic fact of the matter.

I can't see what you mean in the Table. I can only see 30% of people who had no work experience in the year in question. I presume that you aren't adding up both years. And I presume that you also noticed that ~15% have a disability.

Yeah I'm sure middle class people in India would love to live "as well" as the American poor do. I was talking about the firmly developed world. Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU and they still have access to free and competent healthcare. Compare that the US where the poor people considered by that table sometimes die because of bad teeth and no immediate access to care.

Take the number of poor between 18 and 64, divide by the number of poor between 18 and 64 who did not work, and you get 61.7%

Of course, the question of whether they "choose" not to work, "choose" to be poor, or if they are "lazy" are judgements not supported by the numbers.

(More worrying is the 40% of the poor who did work.)

Oh yeah I see now, thanks. I was misinterpreting the first column.

Obviously it's impossible to glean motivations from a table, but it's telling to me that among the general population the majority of workers work full time, whereas among the poor it's the opposite, with most working part time for the entire year.

These people would probably be called the 'working poor' in my country; they're trying to work, but unfavourable economic and employment conditions make it difficult to maintain stable/consistent/quality employment. But in comparison to other developed countries, the proportion of workers (in that table) for a poor demographic is relatively high. Which would also signal to me that not only is the demographic not choosing NOT to work, but that they're choosing to work in higher numbers than in other countries despite their poverty (or maybe because of it).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/74/Pov_crossnatl...

I still maintain that people don't choose not to work en-masse for extended periods, evidenced by the fact that the US has had full employment for many periods.

...modulo inverting the result.

Math is hard.

"Table 3 and division."

Or, how about page 24:

Work Experience

In 2014, 6.9 percent of workers aged 18 to 64 were in poverty. The poverty rate for those who worked full time, year round was 3.0 percent, while the poverty rate for those working less than full time, year round was 15.9 percent. None of these rates were statistically different from the 2013 poverty rates (Table 3).

Among those who did not work at least 1 week in 2014, the poverty rate and the number in poverty were 33.7 percent and 16.4 million in 2014, not statistically different from the 2013 estimates (Table 3). Those who did not work in 2014 represented 24.7 percent of all people aged 18 to 64, compared with 61.7 percent of people aged 18 to 64 in poverty.

...which is poorly written.

A large proportion of IT and STEM grads aren't qualified to do engineering tech jobs.

Surely most aren't. I know in my graduating class in the late 2000s, maybe only 10% had any experience upon graduating. My point here is that the H1B policy has put these grads into an impossible situation, whereby they're competing against people from emerging economies who do have the skills for these entry level jobs, where 10 years ago grads would be hired and get up to speed on the job.

So there isn't an undersupply of willing workers, there's an unwillingness for companies to accept that entry level workers aren't commodities that you buy, ready-packaged to go.

There is no other industry in the world where lobbyists can say "grads don't have the proprietary skills that we need, so give us more visas to issue to Indians!" and keep a straight face. Training is a normal part of every industry.

Realistically, the only thing in support of a ridiculous statement like "most of our 7 million unemployed are unemployed by choice" is that one article, where a person, for multiple reasons not explicitly stated in the article might not want to take a certain demanding manual labor job.

I would suggest coming up with better arguments for the debunked supply side economics you're trying to push.

>unemployed by choice

>they are unwilling to move to places where the jobs are.

How exactly would an unemployed person move? security deposit/down payment, moving costs, etc all cost real money, and without an income, I'm not sure how you would expect someone to move across the country.

Humans are on average risk averse - and certainly no one would advise someone to move out to california on their credit card, in hopes of immediately finding a well paying job.

Its not like someone who has been unemployed for two years is so attractive that theyd be getting offers with relocation included thrown at them.

Strangely, illegal Mexicans seem to have solved this problem. In fact, they solved it so well that we plan to build a wall to keep them out.

This is why I say we need to import a better working class. Our own leisure class seems completely incapable of doing anything!

Have you ever met an illegal immigrant? been to their home? asked them about their experience coming to the US?

Its interesting to see you assume so much about illegal immigrants, when you clearly dont have even a foundational understanding of their lives here or in mexico.

Do you have a substantive argument, or merely the vague supposition that somewhere out there there must be some personal anecdote that invalidates what I said?

Could you clarify what "assume so much" refers to? I'm pretty sure that the only assumption I made is that most illegal immigrants are not non-workers collecting benefits.

Do you have a substantive argument, or is assuming that all illegal immigrants come here with 0 cash your argument?

It's possible illegal immigrants saved money - the question then arises why the Americans didn't.

sure, we can complete the circle i guess.

because they are unemployed.

The "Shortage of Engineers" myth that just won't die. If you're going to claim there's a shortage of a good, you need to mention the price you're willing to pay. I want a new BMW for $10K, but can't find one. Therefore there's a shortage of BMWs.

> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years.

These two statements are not linked. One can agree that without foreign talent, SV would not have grown to what it is. On the flip side, this doesn't mean their is a shortage of talent.

Simply that their is a shortage of talent that is willing to sell that talent for lower wages and less perks. I can't see how raising the minimum salary will hurt.

If you are correct, and the value of this talent is amazing enough, even $130,000 is a paltry sum considering what they should be capable of doing. If raising the minimum salary on all of H1-B visas to $130,000 is too much, one could easily make the assertion that the talent is simply not there.

In the end, if there is a talent shortage, salaries should be rising, and they aren't.

> Younger people are more willing to move to another country.

And they are willing to work for less, too.

> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years

I don't think you can prove this point, because you're arguing a counterfactual without proving the base claim that foreign talent was in fact necessary or that similar development wouldn't have otherwise happened.

You're also confusing what is meant be a labour shortage, which isn't about the absolute number of qualified candidates per se, but the number available at a given price. That is to say that there may be a sufficient pool of workers, but they demand a higher wage than firms would like to pay. As a result firms choose H-1Bs to suppress wages.

I've been at a startup where a few key hires (one an h1B) led to 140 jobs.

And H1B holders can work anywhere. Why do we want them to work overseas for our competitors?

> Why do we want them to work overseas for our competitors?

We don't necessarily. As with many aspects of economic policy, it's a bit of a balancing act. You need enough immigration to satisfy demand for talent, but not so much that your drive down wages, and diminish taxable income while also upsetting constituents. You also don't want visa policies that encourage skilled workers to come, stay long enough to learn how to copy American businesses, and leave (sort of IP/business process remittance).

Generally I'm pro skilled immigration but H-1B as implemented is too easy to use for wage suppression vis-a-vis contracting through outsourcing consultancies like TCS or Infosys.

>> There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years.

I think the key thing is that there is a shortage of talent at a price they are willing to pay.

> I think the key thing is that there is a shortage of talent at a price they are willing to pay.

Exactly. I know several SV companies that refuse to pay software engineers over 80-100k, and they complain about not being able to hire.

The endless talent shortage is a farce. Every tech company I've worked at rejects well over 90% of their applicants and has an interview process that would be considered insane in almost any other field.

I would say the opposite is true based solely on hiring practices. Look at Google for example, who hire around 1/5000 people that apply.

The shortage is artificially maintained because it works in companies favor. It makes engineers more willing to work for low salaries since they have to work so hard to get an offer, and makes it possible for them to import "talent" which is 95% of the time an excuse to import cheap foreign labor.

Look at what these H1B's are mostly used for. Yeah sometimes it's specialized jobs but usually just generic "developer" or "consultant". Is it really true that you need to hire an H1B because you can't find a "developer"?. The visa process is meant to be used for skills you can't find in the US, and with this in mind it's clearly failed its purpose

Every tech company I've worked at rejects well over 90% of their applicants and has an interview process that would be considered insane in almost any other field.

Joel Spolsky explains why this does not imply what you think it implies.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html

tl;dr; Imagine 1 low quality developer who applies to 9 places and gets rejected. There's also 1 high quality developer who applies to 1 place and gets accepted. Look, 90% of applications have been rejected!

Inc.com is a really bad source for such information... As if they would be expected to be neutral in such a situation.

If this was true you would see it across professions and at every level of position, yet it's something fairly unique to software development.

I can attest that this is true for mechanical/automotive industry.

Joel Spolsky makes important points in the article. Disregarding them because you don't like the web site that they're posted on is fallacious reasoning.

Inc is a publication targeted towards business owners. Nothing about the site is meant to be neutral. It's like learning about Democrats from a Republican website.

I wouldn't disregard it so quickly if the source was more neutral.

And that's how echo chambers of thought develop. Only listen to the sources of information that you wish to and disregard others without evaluating what they are providing.

Sorry, but Spolsky is normally extremely insightful and if you read the article, he makes many excellent points that are worth considering no matter which angle you're approaching the problem from.

Indeed, thanks to Spolsky & co getting a scripting job entails a three ring circus of burdens and hazing to get an offer. They are looking for any excuse to not hire you rather than trying to fill a position.

You aren't asking Inc for a recommendation, if you did their bias would be an issue. Thinking clearly means focusing on facts of the argument, not Joel's job or the site's business.

If inc.com is your problem, Joel makes the same argument on his blog here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/

Total BS. I have seen this first hand both as a hiring manager and as an applicant. I have been rejected from jobs based on totally insane interview questions that have nothing to do with the job. In one case I interviewed at 2 competitors. One gave me nothing but trick whiteboard questions, the other emphasized my experience and gave me a real world interview. I was rejected by the whiteboard company and hired by the competitor. My first day on the job I sat down and commited code that ended up in production the very next day and did that for many years afterwords.

I have also hired people that had to pass insane interviews due to the company culture and watched them fail at being a developer. I know many good devs that cannot pass these interviews that would run circles around these super whiteboard problem solvers.

You bring up another reason why 90% of applications might be rejected: false negatives.

Consider a hiring filter which rejects 90% of good applicants and 99% of bad applicants. In such a world, consider a population of 10 good applicants. These 10 applicants will go on 100 interviews, be rejected on 90 of them and each will find a job. So in this world where every applicant finds a job, you still get 9/10 applications being rejected.

This seems to agree with your (anecdotal, and likely biased [1]) experience.

[1] "I got rejected after an interview, therefore hiring is broken" is a perennial topic on HN.

I think this is probably close to being the case. The Google interview is an "any given Sunday" thing, with a huge amount of luck involved as to choice of interviewer and interview questions. I suspect that a person who got an offer, if forced to re-interview, would fail 9/10 times.

I've come to accept that I'm no good at whiteboard interviews. The only way I can get hired nowadays is either via a personal referral and/or an employer so desperate (or serious enough about hiring someone in a reasonable time-frame) that they short-circuit their interview process and skip the whole whiteboard hazing process.

For my current job, I had a total of 2 phone conversations (first with a recruiter, second with the hiring manager) over the course of a week when they all of a sudden dropped an offer on me. I was a bit surprised by it -- "What? An offer already? Uh, I was expecting some sort of interview first?"

I actually nearly walked away at that point, but was... talked into accepting after a little back-and-forth on the salary.

But anyway, I just ignore cold-call/emails from recruiters anymore, because I know it will just end in wasted time (like getting rejected after 4 rounds of hazing and a weekend-stealing homework project) and stress/frustration I don't need. Most companies are obviously being overwhelmed with large numbers of high quality applicants for every open position ;)

I'd love to have an interview where I got to show off what I know with some whiteboard problems. Every interview I've ever had usually goes like "So tell us about the kind of projects you've done in school or on your own." I don't have any huge personal projects, just a million little ones and for the most part, my school projects have been very uninteresting and not 100% towards the interests I have. I end up sounding pretty dull and lazy. If I was given some whiteboard problems, I would at least be able to show off what I know rather than just talking about it. In interviews, I'm always afraid of sounding like I'm bullshitting something when I'm not an expert in something but know enough to carry a conversation about the subject. The job I got hired for, the skills they were looking for were things I've done as a hobby in my spare time. I was surprised they offered me the job since I figured there had to be a bunch of masters grads out there much more qualified than me. Now I sit here and feel like I'm maybe a bit too underqualified for the job. It's going to take a bit of time just getting up to the knowledge level that I think they were expecting me to have. If I had some whiteboard-style questions during the interview, maybe I would have gotten weeded out. Maybe they really are looking for someone of my experience. I'm really not 100% sure but I'm not about to tip my hand and be branded as a bullshitter. I really do like the job and the projects they already have me working on are way cooler than I'd ever imagine. But I wish I was a bit more prepared for the level of knowledge required before coming in here.

apply for amazon, you'll have fun.

Seems like it's because the industry has accepted that there's a fixed number of good applicants, and so employers are engaged in a zero-sum game to dig them out, overlooking the notion that average programmers can become better with guidance.

This seems to agree with your (anecdotal, and likely biased [1]) experience.

Spolsky's observations are no less anecdotal and no more data-driven than the previous poster's experiences.

This is exactly what happens. The hiring bar is so arbitrarily high that companies can say there's a shortage when they reject 5-10 good applicants for every position.

In a true labor shortage this would be completely unsustainable. Trying to justify rejecting 90% of your good applicants to avoid "false negatives" and extending that logic to say that there's a shortage... Obviously retarded if you think about it.

Hardly. If the cost of 10 interviews exceeds the cost of 1 bad hire, then my 90/99 filter is probably worth it.

If you think it's retarded, try and work out the arithmetic yourself.

Does that include the accounting for recruiter salaries, the time taken away from employees to conduct interviews, etc.? You'd think that CA being an at-will state would encourage more performance-related terminations. Fail early, fail fast- with your talent pool.

There's a lot wrong with that article, you're right. Another way the article is BS is that Joel assumes that it is only possible to get good candidates by being the employee's first employer, since "they already have jobs. Stimulating jobs. Jobs where their employers pay them lots of money and do whatever it takes to keep them happy." It's impossible! Here's a pro-tip for all you hopeless employers trying to hire these inscrutable "top engineers", who are unfairly entrenched in their existing jobs. Ready to be blown away? Write it down, who knows when this post will go away!

Offer them a stimulating job, and pay them lots of money, more stimulating than their current employer, and more money than their current employer.

There you go, glad I could help.

If there is this "floating population of applicants in your industry that apply for nearly every opening posted online" as Joel puts it, then I'll offer that the software job market is also flooded with a floating population of "dog jobs" that are uninteresting, low pay, crappy company/work conditions, etc. that never get filled without paid recruiters spamming thousands of people daily. When you search job boards, nearly 100% of the jobs are such. When you get another LinkedIn message, it's more than likely a dog job. Don't get me wrong, I like hearing from recruiters, and I appreciate the opportunity of getting a heads up about the kinds of jobs that are out there, but the pickins of GOOD JOBS, jobs that I would leave my employer for, are pretty slim.

Improve job quality and you'll improve your candidate pool. Pay bananas, get monkeys.

This exactly.

Right now I would love to be working on amazing challenging stuff for these companies. Instead I have to decide if i want to go gungho studying my ass off for whiteboard interviews...and if I am insanely lucky I will get offered a salary already in line with my current one at a company that doesn't have billions in the bank...like all these SV companies that are so convinced there is some shortage.

Tech companies also reject applicants because they are "software engineers wannabe" that are just a bunch of phonies coveting the high salaries.

Tying up visas effects only to wage diminution is just a big mistake. But I can't wait to witness the effect of being a lot more selective on visas. We'll see!

Visas are currently the "easy way out" to get decent developers for cheap. The problem, that's not what they were designed for. Their purpose is to find specialized skills that cannot be sourced otherwise.

The most immediate effects of fixing the visa system will be employers suddenly offering "on the job training" to fill these lowly skilled jobs. It's hard to see this as anything but a net positive for US workers

If there's not a shortage of skilled engineers, then why is Google paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars a year? While it's true that the industry has a bit of myopia and tends to focus on a specific subset of engineers as "skilled," there is absolutely a huge shortage of them and massive competition to hire them.

Google is one of the few companies hiring H1B's for their true purpose. If you look at where most of these visas are going it's clear that a large majority are low quality jobs.

It's a disservice to the brilliant visa holders I know as well as US citizens. it's extremely hard for them to get a job at a good company because so many of the visas are getting soaked up by those abusing the system.

If there was a huge engineer shortage you would see companies step in to provide developer training problems. This is clearly not happening.

What? That is happening.

I'm not saying the H1B system isn't abused. It absolutely is, and should be reformed.

What I'm disputing is this notion that there's no shortage of qualified developers. There absolutely is—that's why you see substantial salary growth for senior engineers.

What exactly do you think bootcamps are? They're outsourced developer training programs whose entire business model depends on the high tech salaries.

I've run interviews for a consulting company. Most all of the best applications were from H1B holders.

Sorry to say this but you've probably got pretty strong selection bias.

At least from my experience (I used to be a consultant) consulting jobs mostly attract people that can't get a job elsewhere. They generally include low pay, long hours, and a lot of client interaction.

It's no surprise to me that the nation's biggest software consultancies are largely considered the worst places to work as a software developer.

H1B's know to apply at these jobs because they have a much better chance of getting them. They have a better chance of getting them because these same companies are generally the ones abusing the system to hire software developers below market rates.

Tech companies have a strict interview process because a mediocre engineer is actively harmful.

At most companies, the hiring manager and interviewers, who are predominantly other engineers, get to decide whether or not to hire a candidate. There simply isn't a mechanism for upper management to manipulate the process in the way you suggest.

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