Tech Dilemma: Unfilled jobs, few workers, lack of confidence in STEM education
mactech.com
mactech.com
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
> Parents are scrambling to find creative ways to cover a disrupted school year. That is where a handful of operators, like iD Tech, are stepping in to fill the skills gap.
> iD Tech teaches cutting-edge topics ranging from virtual robotics to Roblox and 3D printing, and in-demand coding languages like Java, Python, and Unity. It also recently launched a math tutoring service in response to consumer demand. iD Tech alumni often go on to work for companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and also Facebook
At 100K a year, there is a huge shortage of engineers.
At 500K a year, there is not.
1. Many software projects that would be profitable at 100k per engineer become unprofitable at 500k per engineer, so implying "just pay all your engineers more" isn't actionable advice.
2. If you could pay engineers 500k, without a societal-wide increase in skills, it means those workers would just come from other high-demand jobs, potentially creating a shortage in those areas.
Yes and it also comes across that the comment author hasn't spent much time trying to hire for "engineering" roles.
If it only it were so easy to throw up a post for $engineeringRole promising some multiple of six-figures and expecting a deluge of competent, qualified people to show up.
I've worked for one of $FAANGco, and helped run multiple hiring loops. The roles weren't quite in the 500k vicinity, but they were a fair bit more than 100k.
Finding competent, qualified, honest people amongst a sea of resumes was a non-trivial investment.
I'm not talking about finding some 10x'er who can run circles around leetcode problems and tell me the most efficient way to fill a 737 with ping pong balls flying upside down on the planet Mars.
I'm talking about people who actually understood and had experience with the technologies they had listed on their resume. People who had baseline competency with the basic skills required to merely survive at the job. I generally consider myself a pragmatist, and would allow some variance in detail if they communicated an overall "big-picture" understanding.
Nope. People who had listed "fluent with Linux" who didn't know basic directory structure. People who listed years with a programming language that couldn't write a for loop. People who explicitly described a multi-technology cloud-stack project they worked on, only to say in the interview that the project was entirely handled by a different department.
I estimate my success rate at this stage was maybe 10% in finding solid people.
Slide the pay scale up to 500k? An entirely different set of problems. People that can ask for 500k up front with a straight face know exactly why they can ask for 500k up front with a straight face, and so does everyone else who wants to hire them.
If you make all jobs, regardless of technology/competency/seniority pay 500k, then you've got a pretty sizable inflationary problem anyways. Either the really skilled people now will ask for 1 million, or the skillset has become commoditized, and the talent is moving to a problem domain that is more lucrative.
Why is there this persistent and well publicized need and effort to suck "kids" into this pipeline of well paying jobs? Maybe the answer lies on the other end of the pipe?
Could it be because large numbers of these "careers" don't last beyond middle age for a multitude of reasons? Could this persistent shortage all be due to the less publicized fact that companies use up, burn out and dispose of STEM workers at an exceedingly high rate? Could it be that the career trajectory for STEM often resembles that of professional baseball with only a tiny fraction of the payout?
Could it be that the realistic, overall perspective on these high paying "careers" isn't all rainbows and unicorns?
Stop teaching kids how to program! You are decreasing the pool of unenlightened idiots we need to keep the industry rolling along.