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Just a note, there is a followup paper to "The Camel Has Two Humps". From the abstract:

Two years ago we appeared to have discovered an exciting and enigmatic new predictor of success in a first programming course. We now report that after six experiments, involving more than 500 students at six institutions in three countries, the predictive effect of our test has failed to live up to that early promise.

http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper3.pdf

Also, assuming this were not the case, it's hardly clear that searching for magic programming gear is a commons problem. Why couldn't Google/Facebook administer the simple tests and keep the results secret?

I forgot, they already try to do this, but it doesn't give them enough applicants: http://www.mentalfloss.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/Google... http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php

Or why couldn't a trusted third party, like Microsoft, Cisco or Red had charge journalism majors/unemployed adults to take the test?

I forgot, they already try to do this, but they just don't do a very good job and their tests have little predictive power: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/community/certifications/c... http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcse.a... http://www.redhat.com/certification/rhce/

The new paper didn't say that the problem wasn't correct, just that their original solution (test) didn't work out. It's true that it seems to be hard to come up with a reliable test for this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible.

The magic market fairy can't help supply and demand equilibrate until the simple test exists, right?

My only point is that the problem isn't creation of a public good, the problem is that reliably identifying good people/good matches is really hard.

That was amusingly written but I'm not sure it rebuts the comment it responds to. Yes, you can also work to increase underlying supply instead of bidding up the price. And?

Smart companies already do things to skirt credentialized recruitment paths, because credentials (especially academic ones) are extremely inefficient, at least in software.

This isn't so much "insightful" as it is a basic obvious direct result of the law of supply and demand.

The Market Economics Fairy doesn't work here because there is such a large lead-in time to making money as a programmer. I have had 2 or 3 friends want to become programmers just because they want to make more money, and also because they see the opportunity to make their own apps etc.

I helped them as much as I could but none of them are now programmers because it's just too much work for no return to learn this stuff. You have to be interested in it, and supply and demand doesn't make more people actually interested in it...

If the salaries start getting higher and higher, and wages in other industries continue to stagnate, then more and more people are going to start getting interested in programming, natural inclinations be damned.

Let's put it this way: how many people who go into investment banking are actually interested in investment banking? How many fooled around with financial models in middle school, then realized they wanted to parlay that passion into a career at Goldman Sachs? Maybe the odd freakshow here and there, but by and large, people enter the field for the moolah.

Right now, programming is still dominated by people who became programmers because they enjoy it. That they're well compensated is nice, but many of these people would probably be programming even if it didn't pay handsomely.

The Market Economics Fairy would indicate, however, that that'll change eventually. More and more would-be business or marketing or even journalism majors are going to choose CS when the salary average disparity becomes wider and more widely known.

> a mass effort to take . . . smart unemployed adults, and administer some simple tests to see if they have large amounts of hidden programming talent, screw the college degree.

This is the huge fucking source of programming talent that has remained largely untapped ever since CompSci became a recognized standard for employment qualification, due to the "monkey see, monkey do" best practices effect in businesses across the US. That blind best practices urge in hiring processes, in fact, keeps many actual programmers unemployed while firms in need of programming talent lobby congress to make it easier to import talent from other countries to fill the void created by their own hiring practices.

It's a perverse market right now.