Why reskilling won’t always guarantee you a new job
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I subscribe to the Keynesian philosophy that the government should at the very least hire displaced workers to dig holes in the ground and fill them back up. Even better - use that effort to build roads, clean our cities, provide services, etc.
Keynes didn't actually advocate this. He just said that it would be stimulative to do this - i.e. that it was sufficient as a means of escaping a liquidity trap.
He was much more keen on public works programs "government as an employer of last resort" that built things like the Lincoln tunnel.
I find it deeply ironic that this myth of what he said is most popular among gold bugs - people who advocate digging up gold and subsequently burying it.
I believe many on Native American lands still don’t have running water, internet, or power. Should be a top priority for such a jobs corps.
Sure, urban areas have challenges, but to say “stay in your lane” is whataboutism in this instance.
This is what the TSA is and largely the US military/defense (based on dollars spent compare to task success rate)
https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/works-progre...
Government as employer of last resort.
Here's a pamphlet [1] put together by the Federal Highway Administration, called "A Playbook to Build Tomorrow's Highway Construction Workforce". On the first page you learn that there is a shortage of heavy equipment operators, cement masons, and iron workers. These jobs look non-trivial to me. I don't think you become a cement mason or iron worker overnight, or that you can just learn "on the job".
[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/innovativeprograms/centers/workforc...
Also: "In a 2018 paper, he and colleagues showed that only about 60 to 70% of US computing and engineering graduates land jobs in STEM, dropping to between 10 and 50% for those studying life sciences, physical sciences and maths."
I can't imagine that someone whose sole credential in software engineering is a three month course is going to be offered any amount that is too low for their current skill level. You are basically hiring someone to train on the job. That can work out well for both parties, but imagining that 3 months of training makes you worth $100k per year is delusional.
AND
only about 60 to 70% of US computing and engineering graduates land jobs in STEM
I don't know man?
The implication there is that there exist up to 30-40% of new computing and engineering grads who on the one hand are without jobs in STEM, and on the other are willing to leave the STEM jobs that offer lower wages on the table.
It's been decades since I was a new STEM grad, but I still remember being a new grad. Only my opinion, but I feel something else must be going on.
When I graduated with a CS degree in '07 (US) the first job offer I received was for $25k. I was so angry at that offer. I told the hiring manager that I couldn't possibly work for less than $35k they scoffed at that, I told them no thanks. I could make more money flipping burgers.
I kept looking for work.
Had another offer for $32k with one week of vacation a year, and no health care.
It took me over a year to land my first gig, only making $45k a year. No job since has paid me more.
I had phone interviews that last for less than two minutes because I didn't have industry experience when the posting clearly no experience needed/ will train.
I've had my time wasted by recruiters who send me to interviews that I'm not qualified for.
Interviewed with Amazon at one point, got invited to onsite interview, when my contact ghosted me while trying to arrange travel.
I've worked some programming jobs, all of them have been horrible in their own way. Alcoholics, cliques and fiefdoms, to being left to my own devices working alone often forgotten.
At this point my wife thinks its time for me to go back to school and get another degree, leave programming behind. I love computers. I'm a good programmer. I have no idea what I would do if I wasn't in technology.
What frustrates me the most, is the number of people I know in my personal life, that never got programming degrees that are now well paid programmers. All of them have degrees in non engineering fields, started non programming jobs that turned into programming jobs because they needed something coded up.
The second thing that frustrates me is the sheer number of people that I have interacted with that have pulled the ladder up behind them once they make it out.
It is frustrating knowing I am a good programmer and seeing bad programmers getting well paying jobs.
I guess where I'm trying to go with this, is that for some of us, we just can't seem to get ahead. Maybe we are just unlucky. Maybe we have been beaten down by the interview process or jobs and we don't want to deal with it anymore.
I know for a fact that had I just taken a regular 9-5 non-stem job I'd be ahead of where I am right now. And what scares me is the thought that if I keep trying, I might not ever do better in STEM.... I love STEM...
1) You've gotten unlucky i.e. each job you've applied to had a 5% acceptance rate, and you've just happened to roll 1-19 out of 20, n times in a row. If this is the case, keep your head down and apply to more places. .95^30 > 20% but .95^90 < 1%
2) You're not applying to the right places. There are literally thousands of startups that would kill to hire a good, remote software engineer for $45K. Take a look at workatastartup.com
3) You're not actually a good programmer. This may sound harsh, but some of us don't have the points of reference to accurately determine how our skillset stacks up against others.
4) You're not easy to get along with or manage. When hiring for junior positions, companies are less likely to put up with jerks than for senior positions.
I realize some of this may sound harsh. My intention is to help you.
My advice is to apply to startups and offer to work for free for a month. Do this 3 times, and there's almost no chance you will not get an offer if you're good programmer who's easy to get along with.
5) You might be a good programmer but your skillset in terms of technology stack(s) might not match up with what employers/recruiters are looking for.
We interviewed a junior dev a couple of years back who had exclusively RPM and mainframe experience. We're a .NET/C#/SQL Server/TypeScript/React shop, with a bit of R and Python thrown in outside of the core technology team.
I couldn't work out whether he couldn't get his head round our pair programming task (which isn't any kind of ridiculous invert a red/black tree type whiteboard problem) because he wasn't a good programmer or because the mental model was so different to what he was used to, and he really seemed to struggle with C#. I didn't give him a job because I thought the risk of having to let him go during probation was too high, which would have sucked given that he'd have been leaving a steady job to join us.
Contrast this with another interviewee who was a nurse, and a self-taught programmer, who really did seem to get it. He nailed our assessments, and we made him an offer. He joined us and has worked out really well.
It's not that I'm against hiring people with mismatched skills, or from an unusual professional background - far from it - but I need to see some glimmer of a good match during the selection process, particularly if somebody would be leaving stable employment to join us (not that we're unstable, but there's the probation period to successfully navigate) and/or - not really an issue now we're all WFH - they're planning to relocate to work with us.
Yes, welcome to the real world of employment where your ability to network, sell yourself well, make your boss happy, be likable and play the politics game is what will make you successful rather than your ability to 1337 code.
I know it's bitter, and most don't like to admit this, but tech is by no means a meritocracy even though the PR likes to make it one.
However, humans are social creatures, and we get things done by cooperating with eachother, so I think it's fair to argue that those social skills are also pretty important for building software.
Like any other social activity or grouping, that can work well, or it can be toxic, but the need for those social skills as a software engineer isn't inherently evil. Likewise, the fact that people with "better" social skills often "do better" isn't necessarily wrong either because those skills are incredibly important for any cooperative endeavour, and particularly for leadership.
Rural Kansas dev might aspire to 45k but even then. I think they might just live in a small town and don’t want to look for work elsewhere. Which is fine, just know the salary comes with the territory. Half the reasons tech pays what it does is because a lot of the jobs are in expensive cities.
Current city has repressed wages across the board. It's a place with a "low cost of living" and several universities that pump out local students who want to stay here at any cost and a very healthy foreign worker scene.
Currently, I'm willing to move.
There were a ton of issues on my part and things I still don’t understand and can only ascribe to chronic poor luck, though I won’t go into it all in this particular comment. I make better money now, more than most people my age probably make on average, but probably significantly less than most developers with similar experience. I probably won’t be able to recover the rough start which is likely annoying seeming as for the amount of money I’m likely to cap out at I probably could have done something much more interesting.
You might be surprised. The salaries reported in this forum are higher than normal, because of the large membership from the west coast/FAANG.
Here in the DC suburbs, I'd expect a non-FAANG developer without a TS/poly to earn $100k-$150k (straight out of college, more like $85k-$100k). Add a TS/poly, working in a SCIF for a 3-letter agency or military, add $20k-$50k to the ends of that range. Yes, many earn more, either working for a FAANG in the area, or in niche areas, or in some sort of management/ownership/partnership arrangement (BAH consultants, etc).
I'd say unless you have really experienced it first hand, or know someone who has, it is hard explaining to others how having a short stent of misfortune can really snowball and keep you down. As much as we hear the great fortune of those that get lucky at the right time, we never hear about those that miss out at the wrong time.
So, I get it. I just don’t get the part where it seems like you’ve given up.
Could you expand on that?
I've seen this happen many times. Not just to friends, but co-workers and people that I have met along the way.
In one case I had a friend who was hired by a former classmate to a local firm. After a year there they started hiring more programmers company wide. This friend refused to interview people who had graduated from our department or pass along resumes. Instead they started hiring other people from non-engineering departments that they thought they could train to program. This guy is now a C-level and still refuses to hire people that graduated from our department.
I'd wager that it's just a feature of my particular network and people I've come across. As my partner is the opposite, and their network helps each other out.
I'm not doubting your story for an instant, but this is incredibly strange behaviour and not something I'd consider normal.
Companies I've worked at love hiring referrals because you generally get higher quality and skip all the hassle of dealing with external agencies, dozens or hundreds of applicants, etc. Something like half my team is made up of people I've worked with at other companies in the past - I was overjoyed when they applied for jobs with us - and I still keep a mental rolodex of people I was at university with 20 years ago who I'd be happy to work with.
Cambridge is a bit of an odd place, in that plenty of companies have a bias for Cambridge graduates. That's fine as far as it goes, but I'm generally happy to hear from anyone with a CS background from any university, and am absolutely open to other STEM graduates who demonstrate that they can do the work.
Employee from University X would make a referral for everyone from University X that would apply. And let me just say the signal to noise ratio from that institution was horrible to say the least.
With a real CS degree?
Obviously this isn't some top 40 program. Had I known then what I do now, I would have applied to some of those programs.
Back then, I wasn't aware of other programs or even names of universities known for computing (other than MIT). I came from a small town that didn't have many opportunities for kids interested in tech in the late 90's early 00's. So you pretty much went to one of the State Universities.
The large number of low salary jobs available doesn't mean there are any jobs for anyone not in the top quartile or many jobs someone in the top quartile should take.
If an engineering grad decides to become an actuary or management consultant or investment banker, that doesn't necessarily mean they couldn't find a STEM job.
- According to the 2011 NHS, only 29.7 per cent (67,045 out of 225,490) of employed individuals in Ontario with bachelor’s degrees or higher in engineering were working as engineers or engineering managers. A further 37 per cent (83,365 out of 225,490) worked in professional positions that normally require a university degree. In other words, only just over 65 per cent of employed Ontarians with engineering degrees were gainfully employed in professions that normally require or benefit from having a university degree.
- Those who were not working as engineers and were working in positions that don’t necessarily require a degree made up fully 33.3 per cent (75,090 out of 225,490) of the total.
So, as an engineering graduate, you are more likely to work in a job that does not require a degree, than in a job that requires an engineering degree.
https://www.ospe.on.ca/public/documents/advocacy/2015-crisis...
Engineering filters heavily for analytical skills and is math heavy.
I assumed it was professions that have a licensing requirement where you must have a specific degree (like having an MD to practice medicine) vs some areas of finances where you don't need a particular diploma to pass the required SEC exams or certifications.
https://noc.esdc.gc.ca/Structure/NocProfile/36841eebd34e457e...
https://noc.esdc.gc.ca/Structure/NocProfile/f9c47da9dd2644f3...
I'm sure there's a percentage of them enrolling in engineering with absolutely no intention of practicing it either.
Yes. And that percentage is 1%. Figure 1 in the linked report addresses this.
Intents of 2013 Ontario engineering students after graduation to work in engineering:
- 57% Yes, I definitely will
- 35% Yes, I probably will
- 7% No, I probably won’t
- 1% No, I definitely won’t
I've worked with incredible engineers from France... here in America. And yet the other day there was this poster whining he couldn't find great engineering talent in France.
He blamed it on French people being lazy, of course.
That creates a major roadblock for entry-level employees. No matter how much formal training somebody's had, they've still never actually performed the role before. That makes it substantially riskier that they won't fit. Even just a couple years of experience is a credible signal that the person has basic competence in the actual job.
What we need is another category of transitional employment, with both much lighter regulatory barriers to turnover as well as more relaxed cultural expectations about job security. In the olden days we'd call this an "apprentice". Today it might be an "intern", but the general expectation is that only applies to very young workers- not those reskilling to make a lateral move.
This used to be the the way people thought, but the trend I've seen is it's becoming more and more common to just continuously fire people.
In my last two jobs at very different companies it was pretty insane the rate that good employees got fired based on "culture mismatch" related issues. Amazon and Netflix have basically normalized PIP culture at larger places, where the strategy is basically hire like crazy and then find a reason to pip anyone you don't like. The most recent startup I was at was absurdly trigger happy, gleefully firing anyone that wasn't able to read the minds of "leadership" or in anyways challenged the status quo (even if they were supposed hired to do just that).
It used to be my experience that anyone who was let go within a year was obviously a bad hire to anyone at the company. Now I see constant confusion among employees about why some of their favorite coworkers are being let go. Maybe I'm just unlucky in places I've been recently, or very lucky about places I've been before, but it certainly looks like a strange shift in the environment.
If nobody is even willing to take it to court to try to test it, then it sounds like it is working as an amazingly effective lawsuit shield to me. No company wants to defend anything in court, they want to never go to court.
I don’t think there really is anything to test in court here though. In the US generally all an employer needs to show is that an employee was fired for a valid job-related-reason of some kind, and not for the quite narrow set of reasons that would make it illegal. All a PIP does is make sure managers/supervisors are documenting reasons properly, while at the same time showing the employee that they have documented reasons that they would show should it ever go to court. Plus, the added benefit of being able to tell the court “See, we even tried to help them improve before we fired them.” Unless the employee has unambiguous hard evidence of an “actual” reason for firing that was not legal, then there really is nothing to take to court.
That all applies to non-contract employment in US only of course, and I am not familiar with all states just those I have worked in, so there could be some states where it’s more complicated.
Transactional employment exists in FAANGs and other big tech. They are called contractors.
That “bad apple” could have a grievance no one is willing to listen to.
That “bad apple” could have a better idea that was shutdown during an “open discussion” meeting.
Before you go and point the finger at the new hire, it’s best to fully examine yourself.
> That “bad apple” may have some things going on at home
Dealing with this is a potential minefield from a legal perspective though. The answer you get here could very well suggest an abusive domestic situation, suicidal feelings, or worse. You need someone with special training to even ask this question. Once asked, at best the answer is usually something you can’t do anything about, at worst it’s something you ethically have to do something about that involves police or lawyers. Within that, you have a whole class of answers that you cannot do anything about, but also put you in a position where should you need to terminate the employee afterwards for ANY reason, you leave yourself open to wrongful termination suites.
To be clear -- I'm not saying this is how it should be; I would much prefer to live in a world where everyone looked out for everyone else, but a business (especially a public company) can't base it's policies on an ideal world, they have to base their policies on the litigious/capitalist framework they currently exist in.
The whole equation is different between a new-hire vs long-term employee of course, but it’s never without risk.
> have a grievance … was shutdown
These are more nuanced, and the exact situation/details would matter, but unless they were shut-down in a unprofessional way, or the grievance is a serious issue from the business’s perspective, a new-hire not doing their job just because they are upset about something like this is a pretty big red-flag in my book. These things happen to everyone, in every company, at some point. It would be worth having a discussion with the employee about it, but from my experience, this is a personality trait, and not a behavioral issue that can easily be changed.
I’m not saying this is how it should be necessarily, but it’s the reality for employers in the existing system.
The way contractors are currently used isn’t really anything like an apprenticeship, and functionally couldn’t be as contractors are usually required to produce specific results on a timetable. That’s not to say that contracts couldn’t be used to create this kind of relationship, something like a “work-to-hire” agreement, or a co-op/internship with more well-defined way to transition to full employment. From a legal perspective though, that could involve the same (or new) risks, especially when it’s a new and untested kind of business relationship.
A friend is a senior manager at one of them and he loves it, he's been really impressed with the calibre of the apprentices and how quickly they've picked things up.
I'd usually call this a „trainee”.
> The biggest thing from the employer side is that the cost of a single bad hire can be potentially enormous.
You haven't mentioned the „lost” time for other developers. Unless the hiring company has a very efficient onboarding process, any new and „bad” hire will cost _a lot_ in terms of productivity. Some people are certainly able to contribute meaningfully after a 3 month bootcamp and continue their self-study on the job. But many just won't cut it in an environment where everyone else had a 3 year acadamic/vocational training or other meaningful experience before even being considered as a hire.
Morale is an issue. The constant understaffing and overwork of current employment is often much more taxing than a bad hire. Yes, a bad hire can have a spoiler effect but in those circumstances it is worth the paperwork to remove them. I argue that an indecisive manager who refuses to do the work necessary to manage and staff for the need is far more detrimental than one lower level employee.
Employment regulations protect employees, not the company, and for good reason. Removing them is not going to make it easier for job-seekers, it just makes it easier to exploit them.
In the USA (based on COBRA mention I assume you're in the USA) employees can be let go for no reason whatsoever effective immediately and without any notice.
There can't possibly exist a "lighter regulatory barrier" than that!
It's the reason so many companies prefer contractors to short-term full-time employees. You avoid all the new-hire overhead, and you can always renew someone's contract for another six months, but if/when you want to let them go you just let the contract end and that's it.
I don't know that they do, at least not here in Silicon Valley.
Finding short-term and/or part-time contract/consulting roles is difficult. I did consulting here for a few years (2017-18) and it was a challenge since companies only want regular full time employees. Eventually I quit swimming against the current and went back to a full time role.
It's possible that state-level laws come into play here too. For example the fact that non-competes are not enforceable in California, where they are generally enforceable on the East-Coast could be a factor in the kind of relationships companies favor.
I agree that this is a good idea, but the market won't accommodate this kind of labor change without government help. Employers have been able to shift responsibility for training off onto other organizations (i.e. coding bootcamps) to get individuals trained and prepared for jobs. Nowadays, workers themselves largely have to bear the financial burden of training in hopes that they land a good-paying job.
What you're suggesting essentially places the financial burden of training and skill development back on companies through apprenticeship programs. That's not going to happen voluntarily.
Why do you think that? It seems to me it is the government that is creating the financial and legal risk of hiring the wrong person or the base cost of hiring an unskilled laborer.
You also seem to be thinking about a subset of jobs that require some sort of advanced training/skills. But things like a universal minimum wage are examples of government regulation that increase the cost of labor for even the most basic of jobs.
Changing industries and stacks is massively difficult if you're doing it for getting a new job and not just for a hobby as most employers won't value your previous experience if it's not needed, so all that is just useless baggage now rather than an asset.
I tried going from algos/embedded SW development to backend/devops and it took me almost a year of rejections despite my best efforts to self study(in Europe).
Yeah, be careful into which stack/domain you pigeonhole yourself into as, depending on the market you're in, it might not be easy to change course later despite you being a skilled generalist. Not every employer will have the time and resources to verify or value your general skill set and will instead focus on going for sure-hires who better match their specific tech stack.
I recall one agency had a tagline "specialization is for insects" but the reality I've found for applying is a number of tech teams have pretty rigid requirements of x years experience with specific languages/libraries and won't consider what other valuable assets you bring to the table or how fast you're able to pick up material. Which I guess makes sense for senior level positions but junior/intermediate?
But eventually you finally get over the hurdle and it starts to click. I've done it a few times, and each time I have to remind myself that I've done it before and I can get through it.
Fortunately, so much of being an effective senior engineer is not about programming. But it's hard to remind myself of that when I feel like a "bad" programmer in a new stack for a while.
To get to the point where they are on par with a college graduate, they would need to pay an employer to give them on the job training for several years and then try to get a paying job.
No matter how many training and reskilling courses they go on 5% of the dogs will remain unemployed.
The fundamental problem is a lack of jobs, because there is no market mechanism by which the private sector will create sufficient jobs to hire everybody who wants work.
It's time to restore the Beveridge condition. Jobs should wait, not people.
This is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.
The labor market in nearly every country -- certainly every wealthy one -- is highly regulated, so it's hard to know how one could even have experience with this, let alone claim it to be self-evident.
Unless your claim is (unlike the parent poster, perhaps) that the US's highly-regulated labor market doesn't provide enough jobs...which I would agree with...but we'd probably disagree on the cause!
This is true regardless of how extraordinary the claim is. I find your claim that “markets cannot provide full employment” not at all obvious, regardless of phrasing, and am asking for evidence.
Your response suggests you don’t have any.
By this logic, if I say something like “there was no moon landing”, I could demand that you offer evidence to the contrary instead of offering any of my own.
It's a principle that the person who presents a positive case is the one who needs to come up with the evidence. I can say "there's no god" without evidence, it's the guy who says the God of the Bible is real who has to explain what he means.
> I find your claim...
Note the reply chain, I didn't claim anything.
> By this logic, if I say something like “there was no moon landing”, I could demand that you offer evidence to the contrary instead of offering any of my own.
The contrary would be that there was a moon landing, and indeed the person who claims it happened would be required to come up with the evidence. Luckily there's a lot of it.
Absolutely not. Both positive and negative claims need evidence.
> It's a principle that the person who presents a positive case is the one who needs to come up with the evidence
Great, a nice positive claim — where’s your evidence for it?
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/678/does-a-ne...
It boils down to negative claims being quite sweeping, eg "there's no life on other planets" would be on the face of it quite hard to show.
> I would say that generally, the burden of proof falls on whomever is making a claim, regardless of the positive or negative nature of that claim.
If your intent was to convince me that I’m right, you are doing a wonderful job. :)
I might add: your selective quoting of this link also throws some doubt on your claim in another thread that we can solve all of confirmation bias through the educational system...glass houses, stones, etc. - we all preferentially seek out evidence that supports our prior beliefs, and we do it throughout our lives. It takes crazy, sustained effort to avoid, not just a lesson in separating fact from fiction!
If every claim and it's negative need to be proven, how do you think we proceed? Add in that you can formulate the negative without using standard polarity flippers like "not" and "never". We have to start somewhere, and generally the guy who says "God exists" is the guy who has to make the case. The one who says "There's no god" might need to explain what he means, but he doesn't need to go get a bunch of evidence. I doubt that you disagree with that example.
The question of which is the positive claim arises because it's possible with some fancy footwork to act like you're not saying "God Exists". This is what needed to be picked apart, or not, in the case of the economic argument at the top of the thread.
> I might add: your selective quoting
I didn't quote anything, I referenced the entirety. Part of the point of that is so we avoid picking out a headline and then claim to be finished.
But the fact remains, in school we don't spend much time thinking about all those critical thinking skills. If we at least tried it, kids would be better at it. Much like physical training, it's something that should be brought to our attention in school but needs to be maintained.
Most applicants (probably 80% or more) have a computer science or information systems 4 year BS degree. The other 20% typically have a STEM degree with some programming courses or experience. Probably 20%-30% have some type of graduate degree as well - we sometimes have career changers who have picked up a MS in computer science from some coursework-only MS program at a small school.
My experience has been that of that candidate pool, we will have 3-6 candidates with well documented programming projects or job experience. These tend to be the candidates we interview - we use a simple rubric with yes/no for 5-10 categories we evaluate. The categories are broad ("Has this candidate written code in either personal projects or previous employment?") and minimally skill-specific. We do tend to have some bias towards database (SQL) skills and some hands-on experience with Linux, but not specific "hard" requirements for either (don't care if MS SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, or Debian vs Ubuntu vs CentOS, etc).
We have had success with non-traditional candidates - we have team members with backgrounds ranging from BS in History to PhD in Bioinformatics, so we aren't super-credential sensitive.
All these details seem to add up to a rather stark observation - there is NO shortage of highly qualified applicants for these types of jobs. Our geographic region has many tech employers so we aren't the only option for job seekers. We probably aren't even in the top 25% of employers for salary in our area.
Candidates with only three months of training are just not going to be successful getting to the front of the hiring line in the deeper pools of applicants we get.
Where is that?
> We are not a software company so we do not use deep algorithm testing as part of our evaluation process [...] My experience has been that of that candidate pool, we will have 3-6 candidates with well documented programming projects or job experience. These tend to be the candidates we interview - we use a simple rubric with yes/no for 5-10 categories we evaluate
You should try it. Right now it seems you are skewing toward hiring folks who already have experience vs fresh grads for entry level positions.
Whiteboard, if done right, gives a chance to college hires to prove themselves. Especially if there are other tech companies in the area. The pool of candidates that have one year of experience and are already looking to jump ship is very different than fresh grads (where everyone is looking for a job).
Our rubric is for deciding who to interview. We definitely have new grads who have resumes with meaningful programming projects who get into the interview pool. We have hired new grads over experienced candidates on the strength of the interview.
During an interview, we usually have a whiteboard abstract design and pseudo-code guided exercise. I also very much like to ask candidates to walk us through one of their projects and experience with that as well. Occasionally, someone who doesn't do very well with other parts of the interview will really open up on a school or personal project and show unexpected insight and ability.
I wish we could do a blinded work-sample test, but there are HR policies that prevent us from using one.
That's the correct way of doing algorithmic screening. Relatively self-contained problem that has several possible solutions.
This does not sound to me a programme wherein they genuinely want people to get into software development.
But disprove me please, if you have experience about this.
If I was looking at someone with the same amount of programming training who had previously flipped burgers or been the proverbial “ditch digger” I’m not going to see many parallels for those skills.
I think educational specialization is going to be a massive issue going forward. In the past, one industry had to compete with another for labor. As time goes on, it's increasingly only within-industry competition that matters, because workers have sunk too much time and money into simply getting their feet in the door to switch.
If you could spend three months and $20k to switch industries, you're much more likely to move compared to the friction of spending a few years and many tens of thousands (and who knows if that specialty will be flooded a few years later when you finish?).
That said, I couldn't agree with the closing more: "You've got to work so hard at it and do all these extra activities and just immerse yourself fully. Without that passion, I can't see them getting anywhere." Trying to gain new skills with the mindset that it's a burden does not pan out. Instead, finding a topic that has lots of natural interest yields the best results, and is way more fun!
As for younger versus older, I'd say this is a screening process that filters young people out even more if anything. When it comes to students in a MS program, older students are much more able to handle it in my experience.
Many govt programs criticized in the article do support people through the training. It was more about people being encouraged to reskill into the wrong fields when it comes to programming (which I didn't agree with, by the way).
A "pull based" system where companies recruit people to train based on their needs does have benefits over letting people guess and run up debt on their own (the current system, which crashes and burns when people make bad predictions). The govt does this, e.g. where the military will pay for your education in return for service. But do we really want people deeply indebted to private employers? Otherwise they'd only be willing to risk training people a limited amount, since trained employees will subsequently only stay a limited duration on average. The is how it more or less already is.
Again, probably not the route if you aren't interested in it though... Not saying you need to wake up, hack, sleep, repeat, but you probably won't be able to "tough it out for a paycheck"... There needs to be a substantial level of passion/interest in the subject for it to work. IMO, that's where it goes wrong for a lot of people. They get excited about buying a bootcamp or whatever, but then quickly find out that it isn't for them and lose interest, or worse, go through the motions and then wonder why it isn't working...
Did you have working projects you could show them? Usually the reason companies are looking for someone with job experience in a technology is because they want to see if know how to get things done beyond the syntax.
Showing a web application you are running for fun, or other hobby projects where you've demonstrated your ability to deliver is a good way to do that if you don't have the job experience to point to.
I have only been asked once to answer specifics about the idiosyncrasies of a particular language or framework. Everything else I’ve been asked is about generic algorithms and data structures. Sorry that this doesn’t help much, I just find the kind of interview you encountered pretty frustrating.
Have all the companies you applied to been like that? Because clearly you and I have different interviewing experiences.
Or, they just didn't like you for another reason and that's an easy excuse.
Who would have guessed?
The inverse claim would be the interesting one. If reskilling regardless of how that was defined guaranteed you a job.
Many bootcamps have 90+% verified placements rates after graduation
Not only that, but Lambda (probably the most notorious bootcamp out there) seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]
[0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job-p...