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Comment by slackingoff2017 | Hacker News Reader

slackingoff2017

I've worked on the hiring side, worker shortages in tech are 100% bs.

I was hiring for a small local company with no reputation, boring work, and mediocre benefits. This company was about 60 miles out from Chicago in a small town.

We got over 100 applicants for every software position. We didn't even pay for ads, just put stuff on the free sites.

We hardly hired anyone, but the deluge of applications allowed us to low-ball pay and be extremely selective.

The worst kept secret in tech hiring is that everyone knows it pays well and hundreds of thousands are clamoring for open positions. They are "unqualified" because nobody will train them.

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Maybe your experience differs from mine, but getting lots of applications has never been the problem. Finding the handful of those applicants who can actually program effectively is the hard part. I'm consistently stunned by how many candidates either have zero knowledge of specific things they list on their resume or truly can't even write basic code in languages they say they know.

> We got over 100 applicants for every software position.

How many of them passed FizzBuzz?

Chicago outskirts is also not California. Try a software position with low pay, crappy benefits at an unknown software company in California and report back. Bonus points if you try it in the Bay Area.

If they don’t pass FizzBuzz, you try to teach them for 6 months until they do fit into your company.

Is that so hard? Training on the job used to be common, and for entry level positions it should be possible at least.

EDIT: Okay, maybe not FizzBuzz, but the lots of "10 years experience with Angular 4" and co at least, and in general sometimes testing people more on actual tasks than on invented exercises. Even in Germany in the first few weeks you can terminate employees for any reason, so you don’t need to be too selective with hiring.

I think the issue there is determining who is worth training.

But yeah in general I agree with you.

Yes, it is hard. Try it and show your rapidly scaling workforce.

This is not something for startups, indeed.

But not everything has to scale rapidly. Many businesses scale slowly over decades, centuries or millenia.

Whoa there. You should definitely allow time to learn particular frameworks, but FizzBuzz is a fundamental competency issue that even hobbyists should be able to pass.

You're not going to teach a person to be a productive developer in 6 months.

If someone can't pass FizzBuzz, they need a year or two of education to be useful as a programmer, and might never make it. Sure, you can hire someone to do helpdesk and help them try to grow into a programmer, but you can't hire a programmer who knows nothing, and then entrust them to not ruin your company, destroy your data, etc.

I've wondered how it would be to train someone using an apprenticeship model.

I read some posts here by people who took a pay cut to become bootcamp instructors (for a season or two). A lot of them mentioned the satisfaction they got by being able to create real value in someone's life...

I guess only a certain demographic of people would even want to do an apprenticeship. Only apprenticeship programs I've heard of are for lower wage jobs. So, poor people may benefit from an apprenticeship. Mid-career changers might also benefit. CS degrees would be overqualified.

It would require significant time and effort. Not possible without company support. Still, to take a mind that can't see what we see to one that can and the amount of value created as a result, might be worth it.

In this day and age, low level software jobs should be considered as blue collar jobs that replaced manufacturing. When people think about programmer in boring job, the correct metaphor is think about working class mechanic in production line, not an engineer.

I was surprised how little people in US value hard STEM education. I think think that one reason for that is that tech in peoples mind is some type programmer.

When young people ask why should I learn math because I know python, I ask them how many unemployed electrical engineers with signal processing background you know? Programmers for bean counting apps become unemployable when they get older because there is no shortage of code monkeys working for peanuts and knowing some framework from inside out is outdated 10 years from now.

I don't think anyone is talking about worker shortage, but rather about qualified worker shortage.

A lot of the H1Bs are more skilled at resume stuffing than any actual technical skills.

This is as much a sweeping generalization as saying Americans are unqualified for tech jobs. There's an interview process for hiring H1Bs. So if you don't like their technical skills, you're free to not hire them.

and what exactly makes you say that? your own observation of a sample size 0 or 1?

Which also doesn't exist. What does exist is a qualified worker shortage at low salaries.

If virtually none of them were hirable, that would support the claim of a qualified tech shortage. A large number of applications is only informative if they're qualified.

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