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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

In Germany there is the word "Schweinezyklus". Pig cycle. It's mostly prevalent in engineering. It works like this: 1. Companies complain about not having enough qualified engineers

2. Everybody gets told to get into engineering in college

3. Boom crashes. Companies lay off engineers. The new engineering graduates don't get hired and are unemployed

4. Everybody flees engineering

5. Back to step 1.

I think we are at the end of step 1 and 2. -

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I don't think this quite captures the situation. Companies aren't complaining about a lack of credentialed developers; they're complaining about a lack of competent developers.

In 2000 there were far more people graduating with computing degrees than in 1995; but the average quality was far far lower. The people who suddenly found that they couldn't get jobs when the dot-com bubble burst? Most of them didn't belong in the industry in the first place.

I knew plenty of people who were top-notch developers who didn't find jobs back then.

I finished undergrad in 2002, and no one was hiring then, even for Stanford CS grads. No one wanted people fresh out of school because there were so many unemployed engineers with 5+ years of experience that there was no incentive to take someone straight out of school.

Anything with delayed results will have cycles. You express cynicism, but there's no great evil behind it. Predicting the number and type of people that should study engineering today for work ten years from now is no easy task. It will always be a little bit wrong.

And at least you end up with educated people and the fruits of engineering work. The alternative is giving up: "I might as well not learn anything very useful, because there might be a period in the future where it's not so useful for a while."

I don't think this cycle is evil. I just want people to be careful when they read stuff like this in the article:

"Are you in college and bothered about the job market ahead of your graduation, should you consider switching majors? maybe. The industry is booming and doesn’t look like it will be slowing down anytime soon. In the middle of all the unemployment, maybe we can take solace in the never ending demand for Engineers."

After a boom there is always a bust. And the bigger the boom, the bigger the bust.

I'd go further and say this is a big problem for any supply-demand system where there is significant latency. Farming, Degrees etc. Wave effects seem inevitable in this case

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