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Comment by rubicon33 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like a broken record, but I'm going to say it anyways.

There is NOT a shortage of software developers. That myth was developed by big tech, and pushed all the way up the ladder, to the top of government. The goal? Reduce labor costs.

Big tech has always been 1 step ahead of the employee, just like coal, and metal working was. They saw the huge need for developers and realized their costs would increase unless they actively pursued ways to prevent that from happening.

And that's how you get organizations like code.org. That's how you get President Obama on the big screen, telling everyone to learn to code. That's how you get a GREAT job, and make it BLUE COLLAR.

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I’m so tired of feeling constantly at war with the industry to justify my own existence. The business people desperately need you but they hate you for what they have to pay. They’re always thinking what if?

What if we could outsource this to some magic 3rd world slave mine? What if we could hire some recent graduates or interns instead? What if we could get someone on an H1B and chain them to the desk?

It’s the natural result of being labor. Don’t like it? Be an owner.

The only alternative I can think of is for software to become a true profession with licensing and standards. This makes a lot of sense in a world fraught with security risks and ethics concerns about the usage of data.

In the meantime, I’m getting ready to hang up the keyboard. All the dynamism and potential has been ground out of this career path. What’s left is crushing demands and compensation that just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Wow I thought I was the only one. I dont know how many years experience you have, but with 5 years experience my sentiments are the same. When I interview now it feels like "Dance monkey Dance", or dealing with a gatekeeper. Had plenty of interviews that were a waste of time, or I personally felt I was just invited to interview just for the Hiring Manager to deny and say they couldn't find the right "Talent"

I agree every interview I’ve had has just been a variation of a coder wars puzzle with no help and asking for help renders you an inferior programmer not worth their time.

Or you could fight for a strong socialist state and recognize that this whole article supports the labour theory of value. Especially when the other option aside becoming an oppressor is to build stronger walls around your slightly nicer gated community.

I've been at a Fortune 50 firm that thought they could do this. They went through two rounds of offshore firms, got burnt each time (large contractors delivered nothing, L1 workers cycled through every 4 months as they job hopped, etc., slick talkers did the sales and left the company holding a bag full of barely-legible-English workers actually trying to deliver the promised work)

After two cycles, they started treating their local employees well. This was a big firm with much momentum. A small firm could be ruined by this. Sometimes the firm just needs to see the grass isnt necessarily greener on the other side. I got paid well and my business counterparts always know that when I said 3mo, I meant 3mo.

Unions are the immediate solution. We need an industry wide union so it's hard to hire scabs and easy for us to refer each other after layoffs.

The longer term, better solution is to be owners. Worker owned tech companies only don't exist because they're not our currently accepted default. If people stop defaulting to the venture backed capital model we can turn this industry around.

Trying to teach “everyone” to code is like teaching everyone to draw in high school art classes. It gives a lot of people exposure to what it means to code/draw, the fundamental steps of coding/drawing but doesn’t increase the supply of coders/artists in the world to the point where the skilled artists/programmers become commonplace.

I think you are making the mistake that enterprises who employ thousands of developers are looking for quality over butts in seats.

Yup. And they're missing the point that this isn't 1985 anymore. A high school student with a week of JavaScript and HTML could write AirBnB. Or at least, JavaScript and similar languages make programming much, much easier (and hence the barrier to entry much easier).

As coding difficulty drops, and supply increases, the net effect will be a much higher demand for jobs than supply. And that's exactly where big tech wants it to be.

edit: here comes the javascript developer downvotes.

I see this hyperbole a lot, any kid within a week can copy an online tutorial on how to make a static site, but it takes a long time to begin to think in a way that let's you do interesting/useful things on your own.

I fall victim to it myself at times.

It's classic expert talk, "oh, that's easy." Perhaps to you :)

>Yup. And they're missing the point that this isn't 1985 anymore. A high school student with a week of JavaScript and HTML could write AirBnB.

Sorry is this a joke? Because I'm missing it.

I dont think this is a joke -- because sellers (workers) believe it and because buyers (employers) believe it...until they realize the project

- crashes under load,

- cannot scale to even 5% the traffic,

- doesnt have all the myriad required compliance and transnational side systems

- has underinvested in accounting and all support systems

- is un-maintainable, etc. etc.

And that is when serious businesses realize you get what you pay for and that you need to pay for real experience to real systems.

> A high school student with a week of JavaScript and HTML could write AirBnB.

Yeah, that could definitely happen. /s

All I can say is LOL.. good luck with that. Maybe if they were Little Man Tate. Knowing where to start, the permutations of frameworks & libraries & algorithmic knowledge & design patterns etc.. That's like the whole.. I know how to build a blog when all you did was click a button on digital ocean to deploy wordpress and now you think you know how to deploy it. Then client says they need it to be on GCE or AWS. Yes you can always use PAAS products, but experience plays a role.

You're exaggerating, but it's basically true that on the technical side everything from AirBnB to Zillow are just CRUD apps, with varying degrees of nice UI stuff on the front-end. Once you've built one, you could kind of build any of them. (Not sure a high-schooler with a week of JS would be up to it though, LOL.)

Anyway it's important to note that coming up with the business idea and then executing it well is kinda where the money comes from, not from the app itself per se. A business may have a website; it might even use a web app to deliver its core business value; but having a website or web app doesn't necessarily mean you have a business.

These kids would be competing with incredibly prolific web developers who not only output an insane amount of code themselves but manage OSS at massive scales. One example is Jordan Harband, responsible for:

1. Enzyme, the current top used React testing library 2. NVM, kind of the only game in town for managing node versions 3. qs, a tool for converting search to json objects and back 4. tc39 proposals, the committee that determines new JS features

This is all in addition to his developer work at Airbnb. I would like to see a high schooler have that kind of maturity, drive, and focus.

nit: `n` is way better than `nvm`

+1 to n for the homebrew installation. nvm team is notoriously hardheaded about not wanting to maintain availability through different tools.

I disagree with the direction gp is taking, big projects involving money and people are not easy. On the other hand your example might support his argument.

You've drawn attention to an Airbnb engineer with a bunch of other interests that don't seem directly related to the infrastructure behind the company. I'm sure they use these things, but they aren't going to be critical to the success or failure of the site. That suggests the technical challenges of Airbnb aren't enough to keep someone with a large amount of maturity, drive and focus busy and interested.

That's totally possible but if you're the CTO of Airbnb would you want the high schooler for cheap (who may be unreliable when it comes to managing schedules, following protocols, having the maturity to deal with failing systems) or do you want the guy who's been managing all of these OS products for years? It's a person issue, not really a competency issue.

> A high school student with a week of JavaScript and HTML could write AirBnB

I actually love it when a developer says something like this, because it tells me way more than even 2 full days of pairing or interviewing could: They know absolutely nothing about software at scale, and are probably extremely arrogant to boot.

I don't know - I still think that you can replace twitter in a weekend. You just need a couple of markov chain outrage bots shouting at each other, porn scraping bot and a bare metal web server that can process couple of million requests per second.

Jokes aside - the biggest error this software developer makes is not realizing that software is not the crtitcal part of AirBNB success. It is the thousand manyears of boots in streets promoting the app and getting people onboard.

Great software has never cause a company to succeed. Bad enough software will always cause a company to fail.

Wow, looks like "here cometh the downvotes" homeboy couldn't take the criticism and flagged every comment he disagreed with.

You can't downvote a direct sub-comment.

I actually love it when I get a response just like yours.

It informs me that you're probably a JQuery developer, personally offended because you believe that your work is incredibly advanced and challenging. In reality, what you do is probably some of the easiest "coding" to have ever come to fruition. Yet, you toss out the "at scale" comment ad nauseam because you think it'll make you sound important.

Just by the fact that you denounce anyone who recognizes the simplicity of it modern development tools shows me you probably fail to recognize the simplicity yourself. Or you don't want to admit the simple fact that programming has gotten much easier. That's been intent of so many modern languages, yet we're always going to have someone like you who claims we all don't know what we're talking about because we've never built anything "at scale".

Your 10,000 hits / day blog isn't "scale" buddy.

Yeah all those useless frontend engineers (sorry, "jQuery developers") at Facebook and Google, being paid $500k+ / year to work on their 10k hits / day blog.

Edit: Also, I'm not your buddy, pal.

What you say is true, but it's also true that the bar is lower than it was 20 years ago and it continues to move that direction, at least when we talk about simple "apps" as opposed to bleeding edge technologies now.

For example, "Chart.js" makes it really easy to create beautiful charts in a web app. Because of tools like that it's much easier to learn how to build a feature rich app now than 20 years ago.

Still, the guy who can create "Chart.js" (an artist) should be getting paid a lot more than a guy who can only use it (a craftsmen).

> Still, the guy who can create "Chart.js" (an artist) should be getting paid a lot more than a guy who can only use it (a craftsmen).

Why? One without the other is pretty pointless. I can accept the roles are different but not that either is particularly harder.

Because there is one of him vs thousands of the other

Some people can do both, but choose the second (using a library) because of all the reasons reusing existing libraries instead of rolling your own. From this point of view, I'd rather hire someone who doesn't suffer from the "not invented here" syndrome.

I did a coding boot camp and oh man half the class was IMO unemployable as far as a job coding goes.

It's one thing to code what you see in front of you, another to think about problems and solve them thoughtfully, research, debug, and etc. Troubleshooting(debugging) in particular is a hard thing to learn.

You honestly sounds like a broken record, looking at the cynicism from your comment history. If someone coming from just trainings on "code.org" is threatening your job safety, or god forbid making you "blue collar" like "those people", perhaps you should rethink whether your skill sets are adequate.

Stop blaming other people.

Remember that time that the FAANGs admitted they stole a few hundred billion dollars from employees by forming a cartel?

Start blaming other people, because they are out to get you.

I don't think it's that cynical. It's a known fact that Google and Apple created an agreement not to poach each other's talent to keep salaries low.

Maybe it would be a good time to unionize more to have bigger hammer to fight with..

It's an inherently high-paying field with room for both huge advancement and a lot of specificity/niches, not to mention that by its nature software engineering creates more software engineering jobs.

God forbid we open that up to people who should be resigned to whatever you think "blue collar" means?

When you increase supply, wages decrease. Wages will decline if you open the field up to everyone. Understandably, not everyone in tech wants wages to decline. If you want your wage to decline in the name of opportunity, that is your choice to make, but it is not your choice to have someone else's wages decline. What you're saying is, "God forbid you care about your quality of life so much you're not willing to keep running harder, faster on a treadmill until you lose your job and are no longer able to find another one due to so many candidates applying per job". No thanks.

There's nothing wrong with trades and blue collar work. There's a reason you can't outsource plumbers, electricians, and other technicians who must be on site to practice their craft. But there's also a reason that work is so expensive: the skills required take time to acquire, and there's a limited pool of talent with those skills.

Disclaimer: My personal stance is I want the labor market as tight as possible, for as long as possible, to push wages up for as many people as possible, while using government policy to put backstops in place that are progressively ratcheted forward.

>If you want your wage to decline in the name of opportunity, that is your choice to make, but it is not your choice to have someone else's wages decline.

Why is it your choice to make? Shouldn't it be the new people trying to get into the computer science industry who get to make that choice?

It feels like what you're saying is "God forbid someone else tries to join your industry and tries to make a better life for themselves, and god forbid others for trying to help them."

> Why is it your choice to make?

It's not my choice. It's the technology industry's collective choice to decide how welcoming the technology industry is to newcomers. I hope you have a more compelling argument than, "It's not fair." Life ain't fair; people have mortgage payments to make, kids to feed, and aren't likely to be willing to support emotional appeals that are going to decrease their quality of life, without any benefit to them.

Your argument is "I got mine fuck everyone else" which I think is about as uncompelling as an argument gets.

My argument is that getting more people into tech increases opportunities and raises the standards of living for everyone. When entire industries are disappearing due to automation I think it is rather ridiculous to try to restrict people from becoming programmers.

You are right, it is not your choice, and thankfully society is making a very different choice.

We restrict immigrants to the US so we don’t flood the country with low skilled labor. Most first world countries do this. We’re reducing H1Bs, as they were used to depress wages. This is no different, and it saddens me that you think this is “I got mine fuck you”. Is that what you think of the GM workers losing their jobs in Ohio? I desire high wages for as many workers as possible.

Good point.

> it is not your choice to have someone else's wages decline

By your own logic, every time I help someone learn something to do with coding - for free - I undermine the wages of everybody else in the market whose job that person is going to be able to "steal" now.

And yet it is my choice to do so.

It is your choice, and I fully support you having that choice. I speak of doing so at scale. You alone aren’t going to cause industry wide wage depression.

1000X yes. It’s the result of a PR campaign to increase the H1B Visa allotment. Love H1B employees, they are just delicious! Low wages and zero bargaining power otherwise it’s out of the country with you.

It’s also funny because this creates a problem where wages have been driven down to a point where skilled workers can barely afford to support a family in tech zones. So because of these depressed wages in software engineering, there are fewer skilled workers living in these regions. Make no mistake this is software engineering specific. Otherwise show me roles in tech where there are lots of H1B visa employees.

I keep hearing this 'H1B low wages'. Here's my startup idea.

You create a website with a list of job skills that 'slave wage companies (SWC)' are claiming to need to fill.

You collect resumes from unemployed U.S.candidates with these skills and send them to the SWCs. If the candidate gets hired you keep a recruiters fee.

If the candidate is rejected your startup lawyers sue the pants of the SWC for violating U.S H1B law. You pass on the settlement money to the rejected U.S. candidate keeping a percentage for your lawyer and your retirement fund.

US H1B law is clearly explained online [0], there are searchable databases [1] and most recruiting/HR people will gladly spill the loophole secrets that they have (posting jobs in obscure local newspapers, tailoring job description to an existing known foreign candidate etc).

[0] https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker... [1] https://h1bdata.info/index.php

You will be protecting American jobs and making money in the process.

> If the candidate is rejected your startup lawyers sue the pants of the SWC for violating U.S H1B law.

Is this an easily winnable lawsuit? Can't the company just show that the candidate failed their interview process suggesting they lacked the actual job skills required?

Wonder what would happen if we:

- Set high minimum wage for H1B ($150,000+ annual salary, set to increase in response to inflation in technology salaries)

- Incorporated an automatic green card "path to citizen" into the process, which will be portable between employers (with a decent provision for unemployment or family leaves).

Seems like:

- Dramatic improvement in living conditions for higher end H1B roles (less beholden to employer, more career mobility)

- Immediately eliminates abusive lower-tier H1B roles (you could grandfather existing arrangements for the duration)

- Opens up entry level tech roles to native-born trainees

- Opens up unencumbered path to citizenship for top talent

I'm sure there's a way for politicians to screw this up... but seems like this might be a good first step towards ending the current abuses within this system...

It wouldn't be implemented. There's also demand for cheap labour.

Talent shortage, also known as cheap labour shortage.

Did you know that in Australia, overseas people are hired to deliver mail?

https://www.smh.com.au/national/post-turning-blind-eye-to-45...

Capitalist: I firmly believe in demand and supply economics. That is why I raise my prices all the time!

Also capitalists: I refuse to raise my wages in response to a low supply labour market for my labour demands. I will instead lobby the government to let me hire wage slaves that I can abuse from overseas labour markets where living costs are much lower.

This "H1B causes low wages" meme need to stop. It is such lazy thinking it is amazing. On this very thread people are commenting about outrageous salaries in the valley and peanuts pay in Europe and Canada. Guess which place is full of H1Bs.

H1B is a response to the high salaries and is a mitigation strategy, cause goes a bit too too far.

There is so much to disagree with here, but #1 is the disparaging attitude towards manual labor.

I can’t agree with this enough.

The field of software is growing. It will change. That change may be for the better or worse.

But I feel it’s unethical for those of us privileged to be in this field to act as gatekeepers and prevent others from having the same opportunities I (and I suspect many others had) when I entered it.

If you want to keep making the big bucks, continue to provide meaningful value and skills that justify it.

Which is ironic, given what the plumber quoted us this week.

>There is NOT a shortage of software developers.

What would have to be true for you to agree that there is a shortage of software developers? Big tech cos have total comp of ~$600k/engineer. Would you think there is a shortage if they had to pay $6m/engineer? $60m? How do you define "shortage"?

Even after paying $600,000 per employee, Facebook still makes $600,000 profit per employee.

So it is currently at a 50/50 split of the value created between the employee and the company.

I would expect, in a skills shortage, that the employee would be able to demand a much greater share, something closer to -- or even temporarily above -- 100%.

The absolute number, $60,000 or $600,000 or $6,000,000 doesn't seem relevant.

> I would expect, in a skills shortage, that the employee would be able to demand a much greater share, something closer to -- or even temporarily above -- 100%.

It would be really interesting to compare salary/profit ratio of the tech industry to recognized labor shortages in other industries.

I think much of what people are trying to say here is that there is no such thing as a labor shortage in any industry (assuming no artificial wage controls). Also, in the USA you often hear about insufficient supply of workers in certain work categories: software engineer, nurse, teacher. Are those the very highest paid work categories? If not, why aren't the highest paid categories said to be suffering from insufficient supply?

You are of course right that the ratio of profit per employee and salary is irrelevant.

Those aren’t market wages. Those are compensation packages awarded to long tenured employees at cash cow companies as a form of golden handcuff to keep experts on specific in-house systems. They are paid out to keep employees from taking company secrets to competitors. They work because these compensation packages are so far off market that these employees would suffer a huge pay drop if they moved. So in no way do these rates reflect the market. However it is great food for this skill shortage narrative BS.

I'd argue that this is closer to a market rate than it seems because, as you mention, on the open market they can go somewhere else and paying them this much is needed for them to not do that.

How are you defining market rate if not by how much someone thinks they need to pay an employee to stay?

> That myth was developed by big tech, and pushed all the way up the ladder, to the top of government. The goal? Reduce labor costs.

Normally supply shortage --> higher costs.

Let's be absolutely clear the goal was simply to bring in foreign workers to reduce salary costs.

Do you have anything to back this up? The OP article is a lot of complaining but almost no data except what seems like to be one lousy anecdote. I actually had been a hiring manager desperately needing people to fill open positions I had. I'm not saying I got zero resumes. The problem was that most resumes were sort of "I learned JavaScript and HTML 3 month ago" or "I'm a founder of my own company with 3 funky iOS apps". Nothing wrong with that but the folks I needed for my jobs had to have some experience with distributed computing, solid CS background with high performance algorithms design skills (yes, we actually used those complicated graph algorithms you only find in CS textbooks). These stuff you can't learn by going in to code school for a month. These skills requires years to master and possibly CS education. I would probably come across may be 1 candidate with anywhere close to this kind of background per month total. It would take me 3-6 months to fill one position - if I'm lucky. Often such candidates will have multiple offers and the probability that they would actually come onboard is less than 50%. Think about that for a bit and you should feel the frustration you might have if you actually were hiring manager for such positions.

Sounds like you are looking at junior resumes for some reason, when what you need are experienced folks. You know, older people. If they need a refresher on an algorithm or two, well then you hand them a book or teach them. Like in the old days.

Industry today wants a solution on a silver platter but the universe doesn’t work that way.

150% - devs are slowly waking up to this fact. Behind the efforts to teach everybody to code are more sinister motives: lowering the salaries for engineers.

However,the reality is that most people simply can't do it. Take an average office and try to teach everyone how to code. after a month, 99% will know how to output text to console, 10% would probably be able to write a loop or two and maybe 1 or 2 guys will realise that development is their real calling. Those 2 guys will spend the next 5-7 years just to get to the point where people would start taking them serious and some senior engineer may even listen to what they have to say about system design. Writing a simple web based calculator is easy, however doing a proper enterprise level solution isn't something any bootcamp student gets anywhere near without 10 years of experience..

Companies are long-term thinking. Who gives a shit if it takes 10 years, they can wait.

A lot of the major tech companies are just barely ten years old themselves.

Also, don't forget that development is pretty difficult job on its own,so as soon as it becomes a commodity,people will stop training and applying for these jobs,as there are plenty other jobs that are easier to do and pay the same.

and yet the exact opposite is happening to software engineer salaries, their growth is outpacing tons of other fields.

That mitigation strategies are not entirely effective immediately does not fundamentally change their nature.

Depends on the dev; most higher level coding roles require proficiency in many domains and a certain level of polish. Frequently to cover the tail of the person hiring them.

I've been paid quite a bit for coding... but the premium was due to the projects requiring: a) statistical expertise, b) finance & pricing knowledge, c) transaction system design, d) discretion to deal with HR / restructuring information, e) quality assurance required for contentious BOD projects, and f) willingness to accept a fair amount of uncertainty, screwed up schedules, and outright abuse from senior level leaders without snapping back or ripping their heads off.

Good luck finding that at boot camp!

This is just market at work. If it becomes cheaper to invest into teaching and grooming more engineers than it is to pay exorbitant salaries to the existing limited supply, then companies will do so.

I don’t think it works this way. Sure, you can hire cattle for almost nothing, but don’t expect them to produce much more than shit.

I'll say the same thing about security people. There's an executive who's been whining on LinkedIn about the major skills shortage in this area. Here's an ad his company put up. I've had it confirmed every individual line is non-negotiable.

https://imgur.com/a/UX5wPDB

Good you wouldn't want to work for someone with that level of missing neurons anyway.

all he has to do is go to defcon, and not care about certs. You'll find great security folks.

On the contrary. He could go to Defcon and find it just validates his views. After all, it's a huge security gathering and noone meets his requirements.

>There is NOT a shortage of software developers. That myth was developed by big tech, and pushed all the way up the ladder, to the top of government. The goal? Reduce labor costs.

What is the line of reasoning than goes from 'there is a shortage of developers' to 'therefore, we need to pay less.'?

They don’t want to pay market rates, so promote a story to slow or reverse wage inflation.

But “don’t wanna pay” (when companies and 1%ers are hoarding like never before) doesn’t equal a shortage.

If there is a shortage, by supply and demand, wages should go up.

If they want to pay less, they should be out saying that there is an over supply and they can get workers for whatever wage they actually want.

You haven't explained how a shortage can lead to paying less on the part of companies... I still don't understand this logic.

> You haven't explained how a shortage can lead to paying less on the part of companies.

There is no shortage. They promote the story of the shortage to pressure government to let in more indentured foreigners, with the slower goal of encouraging more locals to pursue those careers.

You'll notice that "paying more" (the classical/rational economic solution) doesn't seem to be an option.

But nurse practitioners... God forbid they prescribe you antibiotics.

Uhhh, they can prescribe antibiotics just like prescribing any other non-controlled drug.

I know, the fight was prolonged to even get to that point. These days you still only have nurse practitioners in hospitals, at least where I live.

Oh I get you. Credentialism is another level in health care.

The best coders are always going to be paid like the best lawyers and doctors, even if there are a billion JavaScript developers out there.

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