Older IT Workers Left Out Despite Tech Talent Shortage
wsj.com
wsj.com
Instead employers consistently use bullshit to filter, puzzles without any relation to the job, etc in their hiring. That's a strong indicator that there's no shortage. If employers are making up things to filter candidates, then they have too many options.
If I had to guess, this is probably just more propaganda from the large tech companies to get more people into the field and an increased visa cap, so they can drive down wages.
Isn't this happening right now in software with coding bootcamps and no minimum degree reqs ?
What's the new grad salary for an engineer at a top N firm in 2019 compared to 2011 ?
Fully agreed with you. You don't even need to go as far as 2011. Even compared to 3 years ago, new grad comp is noticeably higher at top N tech companies now than it was back then.
I'm 28yrs old and I make ~$400K/yr. That doesn't happen when there's some major abundance of talent sitting around.
Just to give some real numbers, the median household income in the US is $63,688. Unfortunately I couldn't find reliable numbers for dual income families in the US, but it appears to be over 60% (I saw numbers anywhere between 60-69%, but unfortunately no authoritative references).
Rough histogram of income distribution is:
10th percentile: < $15K
20th percentile: $15K <=> $25K
30th percentile: $25K <=> $35K
40th percentile: $35K <=> $50K
50th percentile: $50K <=> $65K
60th percentile: $65K <=> $80K
70th percentile: $80K <=> $130K
80th percentile: $130K <=> $160K
90th percentile: > $160K
I constructed this from a variety of different sources since I couldn't find anything that stated it explicitly. It is not entirely accurate, but it should give you a rough idea of the distribution. Would be nice if someone could find better data.
https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...
I browse job ads on indeed frequently and see offerings in the $40-50K range for IT positions in the NYC area.
What do people think that offshore employees of an American IT company are paid? I haven't any definite figures for places I've worked, but I have gotten the impression from Indian job ads that $10K/year is in the ballpark. Why would a typical company pay more than five times that for US-based employees?
...and they don't have to represent more than a fraction of what's out there.
Also, "bog standard" is not something real Amurricans recognize.
As far “bog standard”, I’m referring to a CRUD developer doing “enterprise software” that may never see the light of day outside of the company or your yet another software as a service developer. They don’t spend all day worrying about “computer science” and algorithms and they don’t spend time worrying about the complexity of reversing a b-tree on a whiteboard.
Pay scale for programmers at large organizations I'm aware of starts around $55K and tops out around $100K. And non-profits or small businesses pay even less.
That’s clearly not the case in the US for any of the top markets even if you exclude the west coast and NYC. It’s easy to find average salaries in major US cities.
Why are companies willing to pay more? Because they have to to even get your bog standard CRUD developer. Outsourcing to other countries is either not an option or come with its own share of issues.
Whenever you think you know what the average is, you should ask yourself whether the population being averaged is remotely complete (or representative), and whether the data points are remotely trustworthy.
And what do you mean by "outsourcing to other countries is...not an option"? The largest and best known companies, including members of FAANG outsource work to lesser known US companies that use offshore labor. There are plenty of loopholes, even for things that you'd think would require US or EU citizens.
As a matter of fact, I do know firsthand about some jobs that are restricted to US citizens due to security requirements, so I have some specific data that points to those starting upwards of $80K. That makes me more confident that my estimate of the others is accurate.
I’m using readily accessible sites that have publicly available numbers.
Do the top 20 cities in the US have most of the developers, or an unbiased sample? If you haven't considered that, fine, but without some idea, I, again, don't feel motivated to question my opinion.
The rest of us do not make that and haven't seen much change in wages in the last 5-10 years. At most in the midwest I'd top out at $150k as a Senior dev and that's if I busted my ass. The exception is if I worked for FANG but just like me, 95% of devs couldn't pass a FANG interview even if they put in some real effort.
Personally my dream is to have a side-business anyway, so I put up with my $100k salary because it's low-stress and I have energy for my own projects. If there was a real shortage I would be paid more. But there isn't a shortage for average devs who get shit done. Google just wants the top 5%.
Google's hiring is like if Google visited a homeless dog shelter and said to the employee (Federal Gov) that there's not enough cute puppies. "We need to import some dogs from Asia. There's a cute-puppy shortage here, let's get some Visas for more dogs."
You're just f-ing picky Google. Those dogs in the shelter are good dogs.
I see it as a matrix with two axes.
Salary: High/Low
Skills and Training: High specific skills/Low skills and require training after being hired
This creates four different quadrants.
1) When companies say they are having difficultly hiring, what they really mean is they are having difficulty hiring someone with specific high skills at a relatively low salary.
2) If the company is willing to pay a much higher salary, then the company will not have a problem finding someone.
3) If the company is willing to hire someone with less skill, and train them on the job, then the company will not have a problem finding someone.
4) If the company does both, pays a relatively high wage, and is willing to take someone with less skill, and train them on the job, then the company will not have a problem finding someone.
Some recent graduate will have looked at all this recently and easily pass this barrier, get the job and move on in a short amount of time while they can.
Is there a IT staff shortage? There probably is a shortage of people who don't spend their spare time on hacker-rank or don't really feel motivated enough to spend a day on a bullshit contrived project. There are plenty of you people who don't mind.
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/7/18166951/skills-gap-modestino-s...
I'm much more interested in attempts to quantify age-related hiring discrimination, something that I have been fortunate enough not to encounter (yet), but that my brother (50) currently feels like he is running up against.
Usually even before a dollar figure has even been discussed.
#1 is real, I'm sure, but #2 likely happens a lot, as well, due to the American worker expectation of yearly raises and seniority-based pay, regardless of performance.
Raises are how workers get a share of the profit being generated. Otherwise it nearly all goes to shareholders.
Try getting hired after being out for 12 or more months after having a heart attack, or cancer, or whatever. Even if you're medically cleared. From personal experience, it can be difficult regardless of reputation.
Edit: And yes, I also tried the whole "took some time off to be with my family" thing as well, and that turned potential employers off even more (had one tell me, "we're not really interested in hiring people who aren't driven to work every single workday" regarding my "time off"). Happily, I did find a good company several years ago that pays well and offers a great environment, but it took significantly longer than I had hoped.
A better short-term disability policy would have helped me, but health insurance wouldn't have helped me find a job.
But that didn't have anything to do with finding a job after I got better.
Yes, precisely. Even if you try to say something like "took time off for family reasons" or "ran my own company and contracted for a year", they seem to sense something's up. In fact, I think hiding the reason why I was off hurt me more than it helped, because people tend to assume the worst (ie, "I can tell this guy's hiding something, wonder what it was...maybe he was in jail!").
In the end, I only got interviewed by those places I was honest to about being out for medical reasons (and one of those places was where I ended up working). And just getting that handful of interviews was fairly challenging, given the supposed high demand for people like me (I have experience/expertise in a high-demand area).
When asked what you did, just say that you wanted to become an independent contractor, but in the end you realized that you were a much better programmer than a salesperson, so you had really happy clients but not enough of them.
Or maybe you wanted to start a SAS, but again couldn't get enough customers.
Companies die all the time, take your pick.
Case in point are the interviews at many big tech companies that require leetcode/algorithms interviews. Companies are ready to reject any candidate that makes even a small mistake on one of their solutions, or misses the exact optimal solution. If they really needed top talent and couldn't find it, they wouldn't be so careless in their hiring rejections.
Another issue is also that its really difficult to quickly shift tech stacks on a dime. As much as people like to claim it to be possible, even just upgrading from Hadoop/MapReduce/Older big data technologies to Apache Spark is a massive time investment. The paradigms are the same, the technology when used in practice is different. Workers can see their whole knowledge base become useless in the span of two years.
As an individual worker, if this happens three times in 8 years, I think burnout would be expected. Anyone who is capable of constantly updating their technology knowledge to a T is probably already CTO of a company somewhere. Maintaining the ability to memorize and understand inane minutia over a few decades span is rare, and is probably coupled with severe disabilities in other areas of life.
Younger people are less experienced, have less opinions and in most case less life lessons. Tech companies want to move fast and make money, not question what is ethical.
I find this almost always to be the opposite.
IME, older workers were raised not to discuss politics or religion at work.
However, as I've grown and gained experience I have become more pragmatic and willing to let my good work speak for itself, reserving my more vocal moments for the times I have most impact.
As I've gotten older I've become far less likely to express opinions unless the issue I am offering an opinion on is one that's important, and one that I am able to offer some new perspective on. I wasn't that way at 25.
Older workers have gained the confidence to ask for what they are worth. Employers do not appreciate this. They may have a more efficient way of working or may not have a singular definition of self (work == my identity) and obligations like family outside of work.
I’m not even 40, though close to it, and I’m already here. The company I’ve worked for has routinely offered 4x10 work schedules to its employees but the group I am now in is considering whether to end that practice. I will quit if that happens even though I probably wouldn’t have just five years ago. I have no interest in commuting one more day and losing a day off (and a weekday off, no less, when I can get personal appointments and leisure things done).
With every day that passes, I weight time away from work and time for leisure far more than I do money. Even though I have nowhere near enough to retire and any “low-stress” job wouldn’t pay me enough to live in my metro area, I would still walk away and consider what to do next if that benefit is revoked.
Previous blue-chip job history with 100% application success rate, through my 20s and 30s.
Have now left the industry due to what I and various recruitment professionals had to conclude was age discrimination.
It exists.
I am 38, I am in the gap they point out, and I almost fell in it because for too long I thought deep learning was a hype that would eventually die out. I had to have a client force me to look into it to realize that half of my skillset in computer vision became obsolete almost overnight, and the other half is eroding quickly.
We think we know better than the youngsters and in several fields, that's painfully obvious, but let's not be oblivious to the fact that tech still evolves and that half of our job is catching up with it.
I think the most important thing to keep reminding yourself is that your career will hopefully last 40-45 years! The pace change of technology is increasing, rather than decreasing. If you think the flavour of the month JS frameworks are hard to keep track of now, wait 10 years when there are 4 to 5 times as many programmers working and what's hot changes practically every day.
You are not "safe" with any technology. Even ML techniques will change completely an absurd number of times in the 45 years of your career. Your only hope of staying employed as a programmer for the entire time is to build yourself as someone who can pick up and work on anything at the drop of a hat. Similarly, you need a "story" that explains why you are worth more money than a person with 2-3 years of experience that has specifically trained for the flavour of the month that the company is using now. They will happily chew up and spit out those young programmers and pick up new ones when they go with the new technology. Why would they spend a premium on you? You need an answer (and a good answer) for that question. (I was going to try to answer that question for you, but it's probably better for you to figure it out for yourself... Plus any answer I give is undoubtedly piss off a bunch of people who will identify overmuch with the group I'm marketing myself as "better than" ;-) )
For example:
1) docker / container - an OS process (circa 1960). Basic OS design (os/360) did not change in 50 years.
2) Computer architecture (Von Numan) did not change in 50 years.
3) Basic DS and alg (not ML), did not change in 50 years.
4) Programming lang (C based).
5) Database/SQL (50 years)
The only things changing today are (as you mentioned):
1) JS frameworks. but not so much as react won (probably vue js)
2) ML. Here again, most of the work is abstract by pytorch/tensorflow.
3) cloud-native app design. This is a major shift.
However, in parallel, there was a massive productivity boost due to free tools / cloud / open source. So today's programmer should be equal to a team of 10 , 10 years ago, and a team of 20 , 20 years ago.
I'm also older, over 50, and I'm frustrated at all these people who are similarly experienced and complain that companies don't recognize their abilities. You have to update your skills and be able to talk about the current stuff. You are foolish if you don't practice before an interview. Before I switch jobs, I take it seriously and do something like 1 hour practice every day for a month. I look at current software engineering topics (I'm usually wasting time on hackernews so I'm up to date on the latest gossip). You have to try, people!
My point is that becoming an expert in a particular language, framework or technology and expecting it to pay you for your whole career is a recipe for unemployment eventually.
It is almost reluctantly that they taught us a programming language, knowing it may become obsolete by the time we finish our curriculum. But they spent a lot of time explaining notions in algorithmics, architecture, mathematics and electronics constraints that I could easily get into the new techs as they arrived.
Maybe I was not clear in my previous message. No, computer vision is not less relevant, quite the contrary. But a lot of the techniques we used to have, and where I was kind of pretty expert, were replaced by much better DL models.
I saw that in a very direct way. In a previous job (I am a freelancer) I had to make a classifier to judge if a robotic gripper worked correctly. Did not look too hard. I got a few hundreds of OK/NOK cases, fired up my OpenCV custom program and started hacking. I found some good parameters, found that by extracting some blob and computing the diameter/area ratio I could make a good classifier for most cases and managed to get a decent classifier for a huge class of the remaining samples.
After 3 days of work, I had a classifier with a 80% accuracy. That's pretty good for that amount of work. But in the end the client decided to go with deep learning. "Oh, they'll be back" I thought, pretty sure they would find out it is just hype and they did not have enough data. They did not come back.
Two months later, a client asks me to evaluate some deep learning techniques and pays me enough so that I can spend two weeks getting up to speed in it. I fire up all the tutorials I can find (FastAI classes are very good for people in my case) and one of them is doing transfer learning using VGG. I thought about the previous problem I had and thought that I would give it a go.
First run, no tweaking of parameters, no normalization, ugly scaling, no change in the model, I got 87% of accuracy. Using a tutorial anyone can do in 3 hours outperformed what I did in 3 days with (what I thought were) valuable and hard-earned skills.
I know specialize in deep learning but still retain a lot of very useful knowledge from classic computer vision and robotics.
CS is a field were experience is less automatic than in others. Experience can actually be a drag for an old engineer who stops to learn. We are in a Faustian pact with technology: we are surfing the wave a bit in front of the others but the day you stumble, you are going to fall back-first on the cutting reefs.
My main advice would be to always learn and read new things. Reading tech articles, trying new libs, new frameworks while at work? This is not procrastinating, this is staying alive.Take time to understand new tech in details. To go deeper than just "going by" requires. Don't understand why SSDs require new kind of databases with different constraints? Well maybe you need to take a dive into database design and IO bottlenecks. Don't understand why Facebook pushes for a new type of float for parallel computing? Time to dive into IEEE 754 and brush up your maths skills.
And yes, this is engineering work. Your employers will often see engineering like a bit of black magic. They are not sure how it works, but they want it. Staying up to date is a part of this magic that they need without knowing they need it. But at one point, you'll be the one your boss turns to (trying to hide his confused look) when asked by a client if you can support Kulisch accumulation and will be very happy that you read about it during your work time.
I’d gladly take 20% pay cut to get Fridays off, but I’d get laughed out of my current gig if I asked for that.
It seems like most gigs are full-time, usually with an on-call rotation, and if those aren’t compatible with your schedule, good luck.
Um, what? AI isn't taking any tech jobs. Maybe once we figure out how to have the robots program themselves...
As you get older, you need to understand that you need to adapt. It's easier to get in the trap of thinking that the old ways are better (and sometimes, indeed they are), but it doesn't matter. You have to go with the flow.
Another important thing is that you shouldn't get too attached to technologies. Move with the times, be aggressive with learning.
Appreciate new languages, new paradigms. Yes, it sucks when you spent hours honing your skills with Hadoop and then one day you find out that all the cool kids are doing spark. But, the thing is, the people that are doing spark now are the people that were doing Hadoop yesterday, some of them even older than you. It was you that got in the comfort zone and didn't see that the field was evolving. While you were satisfied doing Hadoop, some people were thinking of how the job could be done in a different way. And I am not telling here that you should be doing open source, but you should have kept yourself on the loop. It is not unfair, and it's not unique to our profession. there was a time where lobotomy was the hot thing on psychiatry, people probably spent hours honing their skills on it, and then, someday, science evolved and we figured out that those skills were not only useless but also dangerous. Maybe this happens way faster in our profession, but also it is a lot easier for us to keep ourselves current on the state of the art than for a surgeon.
But, I did hear my manager (50+), who is very technical and often gets so sick of the process to get things done, he will pull up an IDE and do a POC himself, bemoan the fact that older developers are good for backend development and architecture but not as good at modern front end development.
I’m not taking any chances. I’m moving more into cloud architecture but hopefully I can stay more in the professional services/development/consulting than the Visio creating/Project Management/Solutions Architect role.
But, I’m definitely not spending the energy keeping up with the latest $cool_kids front end stack.
Also, I purposefully work for small companies that are in alignment with the technologies I want to learn or be in. Another benefit to working for small companies after you have the reputation, you can really make a lot of choices when it comes to the how and you get to do as much of the stack as you want.
My two pronged approach to getting older in the workforce is to make sure there are people older than me at my work place, and have an exit strategy for when the jobs dry up completely.
Is that others’ experience?
This article stresses me out and makes me feel like if I don't get my next good job in a year or so I am basically locked out of a career...
I hope this is not true!
American age discrimination laws only protect people over 40 from discrimination, they don't protect people under 40 from being discriminated against.
This means you could advertise roles only for people over 40. If these people are being excluded for age and not for real reasons like ability then they are undervalued by the market.
It'd be interesting to have roles that are explicitly only for people 40+. I'd want to do this and pair them with younger kids out of college who are just learning how to be effective SWEs as part of the role.
Seems like a big potential hiring advantage if the ageism is a real thing.
Are you sure about that? Do any lawyers want to weigh in?
Explicitly hiring only 40+ for any given role seems like it would be a lawsuit magnet.
This means you could advertise roles only for people over 40.
In short, they outwit their own positions.
Management can hire 2 fresh grads, roughly same cost as 1 senior candidate
Software Development is one of the most aggressive industries that are out there. Tech evolves daily with major trends shifting monthly. It's extremely hard to keep up!
And it's extremely easy to become "part of the road" if you don't invest heavily in your professional development by studying the "steamroller". What if older software developers are just the road, modern tech "steamroller" is rolling over? There are quite a few percent of the bright and knowledgeable older software engineers, but what about the "average" ones? Ones who got tired, have families and just don't want to be bothered with making themselves uncomfortable by trying to "keep up"? What about those who were sitting comfortably a decade with the oldest tech you can imagine that was "current" in early 2000, and now wind has changed? It seems logical to assume that a job search for those is gonna be tough!
Also about bootcamps, Erik Meijer makes an interesting point about "amateurs in our industry", that people who live, sleep, and breath code for 20+ years should be able to comfortably retire near 40, meaning this problem we are discussing here should never be a problem to begin with.
Maybe I should get my tinfoil hat checked out, but every time I see a giant tech company with one of those "everyone can learn to code!" pushes, all I see are executives hoping to play the long game and reduce the cost of engineering talent.
In this industry there seems to be no place for someone experienced who thinks that working 50-60 hours a week is bullshit, and would like to work half that. That tells me there's no "talent" shortage, since the employers aren't flexible at all when it comes to working part time and receiving proportionally lower pay. The moment you ask to work less than 40 hours a week the employer immediately assumes that either there's something wrong with you or you're willing to work for peanuts.
Once you start interviewing people, you will realize how utterly incompetent most of them are. I am talking about people with multiple years of full-time experience in the field and a relevant degree who cannot even implement a basic FizzBuzz. And I am not exaggerating it for comedic value, I legitimately met many people like that by now. Prior to seeing this myself, I could've sworn this was just a joke people used to describe incompetent people, but this is real. And being able to pass FizzBuzz doesn't even scratch the surface of being competent, but a lot of people cannot manage to get past that stage.
People with experience have more dignity than to perform a dog-and-pony show for some startup on a whiteboard. Remember, in this market you need them more than they need you.
Every single engineer who was or is employed at any big tech company has went through whiteboard interviews. If you are trying to imply that big tech companies cannot manage to attract experienced people, then I question the validity of that.
Have you considered the possibility that you're asking the wrong questions? Or perhaps your organization isn't good at identifying candidates with low skills but high potential?
Why waste time interviewing incompetent people?
Just ask for code samples (github, stackoverflow, anything else) and make a 5-minute screening call via Skype to filter out incompetent people.
I'm sure all of them can implement FizzBuzz, just not on the interview under pressure. It has absolutely nothing to do with competence, but understanding that requires just a little bit of background in human psychology.
All of these things matter more the older you get since older engineers tend to already have a home and don't want to move to California, have a more involved personal life, and expect things like medical benefits. You might be discriminating on age without consciously knowing it.
1. Increasing wages.
2. Increasing benefits. (More vacation time, paying for employee education, shorter work-weeks.)
3. Lowering the hiring bar, and spending more effort on mentoring and educating new employees.
4. Hiring remotely.
These all, of course, come with costs, and trade-offs.
If you don't mind me asking, are you looking for FAANG-level talent? If so, are you paying FAANG-level wages, or providing MicroFaceGoog[1]-level work-life balance?
[1] Yes, there are obviously teams at all of those companies that work on death march schedules. They are, generally speaking, the exception.
And lets be honest, looking at most job postings, most people have absolute ridiculous expectations of candidates. Most things you can and should be able to train to some extent on the job.
You're reading too much into those requirements. Nice-to-haves are not must-haves. I've been involved in hiring processes for a front-end position that listed non-trivial experience with React and among the half dozen candidates who applied the company even considered a high-schools dropout who only had to show a 50-hour HTML online course.
That would be the case if we had too many applicants! It seems we need to use a recruiter or something, everyone here seems to think its ridiculous that we can't find people.
I'm not. I'm an engineer on the team and I wrote my comment (passive-aggressively) because my workload is ridiculous. As I understand it, we're having a very difficult time finding people.
Another possibility is that they don't have enough money to hire another developer, but don't want to admit it to you. Start-up life can be harsh.
Don't burn yourself out. I can tell you from experience that it gets harder and harder to come back from burnout each time it happens. If your workload is ridiculous, it may be talk to your boss about adjusting timelines/expectations to something more realistic, or even time to start looking for another job.
Generally I’ve just gone by industry reputation, for where to go. But I wonder if there are any hidden gems out there.
Companies in the US don't advertise pay ranges, but they are easily Google-able, people have friends, Glassdoor is a thing, etc.
A junior at Facebook will make ~160k/year, someone good with ~5 years experience (at FB) will make ~300k/year.
Most startups want to hire the latter person for the salary of the former, while getting them to work harder, for fewer benefits, and fewer vacation days, all in exchange for...
An equity carrot, that has a 1/500 chance of materializing into anything more than lunch money?
A chance to 'change the world' - as if writing an app for ordering dogsitters on demand is the moral equal to providing clean drinking water to poor villages - or curing cancer.
A chance to be a big fish in a tiny pond? You'll still probably be second fiddle to the CTO, and employees 2 through 5...
Meh, glassdoor is off by a factor of 3x when checking in with a few of the companies I just interviewed with. They seem to require an account, but it’s similar to reports like this which are comically wrong:
https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Software-Engineer-Salaries-a...
Sure, you can reach through your network, but price discovery seems pretty bad if you have to do word of mouth.
You are posting in probably one of the most fertile places to find talent...and there is no link in your bio to your company or personal email.
No wonder why you can't find talent.
Sorry for the snarky tone, but it should be evident by now that the real shortage is for "highly talented souls willing to work for peanuts"--which is kind of oxymoronic. People want to hire "highly talented" and smart individuals, but expect them to be dumb enough to sell themselves short?
The startup offers I've seen in the bay area for SWE a couple years out of school are pretty high, $150k - $185k which is pretty good cash comp from a startup.
Higher than that is probably not a realistic expectation for most startups that are not flush with cash. They'd probably be happy to pay it or more for John Carmack, but you're probably not John Carmack.
For the same reason it's easier to hire an actor in LA.
I agree that is pretty good for a Bay Area startup, but it is far below the total compensation a FAANG company offers today.
After several years, the RSUs at a FAANG could pay out more every year than the salary, and they are immediately sellable on the open market. Startup options are likely to be worthless.
This is why startups have a hard time hiring. A lot of engineers would rather work for FAANG or similar large companies, where they will make a lot more money with much less risk.
OP seemed to suggest that startups have trouble hiring because they don't pay enough and I think that's not entirely true from what I've seen. They don't pay more than FAANG which is expected, but they're not underpaying for that trade-off.
I do agree though that FAANG salaries have gotten extreme so it's a harder opportunity cost than it used to be. If you can swing $350k at Netflix or $200-400k+ total comp at the others and you work there for 5-10 years that's basically a small startup exit. I think it used to be less dramatic.
I think the misery of the technical interview process is actually the thing that limits mobility most. Some of my extremely capable friends (that do work at FAANGs) don't optimize on moving around or income as much as they could because the process is so painful and anxiety inducing.
> Higher than that is probably not a realistic expectation for most startups that are not flush with cash.
Then isn't this an admission that there is no talent shortage? Again, that just means there is a shortage of talents who are willing to take the offer and work for $150k.
If you imagine there is only one employable tech worker, it'd be strange to claim that there is no shortage because you can hire away the one worker for a 20million dollar salary (or whatever the highest salary is to outbid all of the others).
Not everyone is good at being an investor, but it's not entirely luck, there is skill in determining what companies are good and what companies are not.
> We can't find anyone worth interviewing right now
How can both statements be simultaneously true.
Why not post a link to your job?
1: The definition also includes the fact that employers are more reluctant to lower wages than they are to increase them, all else equal.
If you are willing to deal with a bit of hassle, hire Canadians. Same timezones, same CS educations, same language, probably a little cheaper (sorry, fellow Canadians), lots of interest in US startups.
There is enough research in job markets showing that companies get more picky and advertise more demanding and complicated job requirements as more candidates are available. So your claim is empty, since this is how companies behave regardless of supply. And if you were to measure it, how big artificial barriers or filters are for someone to get hired could be the measure of oversupply, not shortage. With shortage there would be no barriers, everyone applying would be interviewed and likely hired. But given current hazing hours long interview practices it's pretty clear that companies are drowning in oversupply.
shortage is real. We can't find anyone worth interviewing
Perhaps a mention of your specialty and location is in order. Your HN public profile is blank.
If that conspiracy theory had any bearing in reality then we wouldn't see a) tech workers receiving elite athlete-level salaries, or b) candidates with no formal education being paid handsomely to work in entry level/low complexity positions.
"...elite athletes..."
(any elite soccer player plays in Europe)
That depends on what level of experience you are looking at. In particular, based on my experiences, your premise is the reverse of what is happening:
> to increase the supply with younger, less expensive workers who are more easily exploited for long hours and poor conditions
In the U.S. this does not match what I see. Instead, there are a ton of positions for "senior" positions that are filtering on specific amounts of experiences in such a way that there just aren't enough people that match. Likewise, the field is VERY CROWDED with newer devs that lack experience - they fight over a relative handful of positions that have truly absurd entrance requirements.
This also results in some layers -
- The layer of places that abuse their newer developers and get away with it because that initial field is so crowded. This would seem to support your premise, except they aren't the ones pushing the "tech shortage" narrative - they are just profiting from it. Devs that can claw their way of out of this layer are well-positioned for "time", but likely lacking in the specific experiences and breadth that the other layers want.
- The layer of "top" places that want devs with enough experience and mix of skills that they have a hard time hiring for them. These places pay top dollar and work on their reps to help attract talent - they also are trying to resolve their shortages by getting new grads as interns. This layer is the primary cause of the problems, as I'll note below.
- The layer of "middle" places that are trying to use devs to help generate or streamline profits. They want people with enough experience and independence that they are drawing on the same pool as the "top" places. Because they have to compete with the marketing and budgets of the top places, they never have enough people, so they try to make up for it by getting more "senior" people, which only helps feed the scarcity for the "top" and the lack of jobs for the newer devs in the "lower" layers.
What you end up with is a weird divide - the top jobs pay great, but demand you have things like a degree (it's rapidly becoming a requirement DESPITE so many successful pros that either don't have a degree or have an unrelated degree), that you solve increasingly complex algorithm problems despite that rarely being a demand of the job, and wanting a breadth of depth of experience that few jobs will prepare you for. They face a tech shortage and feed it. Meanwhile the lower jobs have lots of supply, so they can abuse their devs, but rarely provide the necessary qualifications for people to advance to the other tiers. And in the middle you have companies doubling down on their chase after the same smaller pool of devs that the top layer has rather than taking in from the huge supply of less experienced devs and growing their own talent.
In the 3 companies I've worked for in the last 10 years (prior to that I had no input/visibility into hiring decisions), each one ramped up their entrance requirements to the point where I almost certainly wouldn't qualify despite being a successful and apparently valued employee at each of them.
> executives hoping to play the long game
This is contrary to my experiences with executives both personally and in most companies. Indeed, the "long game" seems to be invoked in words far more often than in actual consideration. YMMV.
Are you in SV? It's almost exactly the opposite in the metropolitan area I live in (one of the markets on this list [1]). There are many hundreds of hiring junior dev jobs open at any time, and constant emails about junior or what are essentially junior jobs.
But there are only a very small handful of senior jobs.
I'm very happy where I'm at right now, but it makes me uneasy. Based on my experience with applying to jobs for which I was "overqualified" as a recent college grad in the 1990s, I wouldn't be able to snag any of these junior jobs regardless of the salary I was willing to accept.
1. https://www.aitp.org/blog/aitp-blog/2018/10/23/tech-town-usa...
While the ratio of junior:senior jobs isn't as low as it is in SV, it's not nearly as bad as I made it out to be. There are still more non-junior jobs here, my previous statement notwithstanding.
Most of the candidates you see either can't pass fizz buzz (no joke), are very junior (have no practical experience building real services), have severe behavioral problems (need to be told exactly what to do, can't be trusted to own a service, etc.), or are washed up enterprise technicians who need someone to build all their scaffolding for them and can't solve simple problems if there isn't an IDE for it (.NET/etc. lifer).
The "smart" version of those archetypes often do OK at places like amazon, which provides scaffolding and oversite, but they will absolutely gut a small startup dev team.
(source: personal experience regretting startup hires who seemed "ok" when we were desperate, who subsequently left a trail of sadness and surprises in their wake through inattention, stupidity, and general failure to care)
I think this is particularly difficult for companies with non-technical founders that might lack strong technical leadership out the gate.
The reality of most 'talent shortages', and this goes for people outside of tech, is the people with capital don't want to adjust their business model to deal with changing market conditions.
Tech companies complain about 'talent shortages' in a time... when you could literally hire any programmer anywhere in the world to work remotely! It's insane.
So it's obvious there isn't a shortage of talent, but a shortage of local talent. But why do they need local talent?
It's like the US military complaining they can't get tech people. But if you work for them you can't smoke weed (even with a medical rec), you have to be in on time, wear a tie, punch in, sit in a horrible cubicle with horrible lighting and comply with a million bureaucratic minutia. So they don't get good candidates.
Somehow the responsibility of of BOTH sides (labor and capital) to adapt to an ever changing environment seems lost on some people. They can see why one side should adapt, but not the other. The right sees that labor should adjust, and they are right, but likewise capital should also adjust when market forces push them, and not cry foul.
I'll believe there are labor shortages when labor is paid the same percentage of GDP as it was in the 1960s, and when compensation packages include greater variety. After all, truly competitive markets will offer greatly different options. For labor, that could include working remotely, offering more days off, more vacation time, the CHOICE of private offices and/or open office, better indoor lighting, etc.
Note: I'm a realistic capitalist who has actually read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
you have to be in on time, wear a tie, punch in, sit in a horrible cubicle with horrible lighting
We did have cubicles, though... which I prefer immensely to open desk plans. And I'd be happy to bring in my own adjustable-spectrum light if they haven't upgraded lighting in (mumble) years.
didn't twitter ban people for saying this at one point :D
Younger employees (especially single ones) are usually subconsciously also looking for buddies to have fun with. Which eliminates a lot of older people who just want to work and go home.
Further, younger employees also expect older candidates to be some super goddamn geniuses. Even if they are, the interview process never looks for that genius. Also, not all old candidates are genius and its hard for young kids to acknowledge because they just dont know any better.
On the other hand, old farts sometimes think too much of themselves. Also, some older candidates just dont want to relocate. Which reduces options A LOT. Very few old candidates want to relocate from rural Indiana to SF bay area.
The jobs exist, the talent shortage exists. But the demand isn't meeting supply and when it does, the evaluators are usually incompetent.