A Hacker School That Helps Solve Silicon Valley's Hiring Problem - Hackruiter

I agree wages should increase. There are some signs that's happening already, and I hope it continues.

To be honest, we're much more excited about the education side of things, but the press seems to focus largely on the recruiting and hiring angle. For us, our current referral setup is a fortuitous model that lets us continue experimenting and growing the school, but it's a means to an end and not the end itself.

But I think you've taken it too far by defining "shortage" in such a way that it's impossible. If I said "A profitable company with sane hours is having trouble finding high-quality engineers at $120k+ a year" it's a little more reasonable to say, "Hmm, maybe that means that there's a 'shortage' of good engineers, in the sense that society and the economy as a whole would benefit from having more talented engineers." Just saying "look elsewhere" or "pay more" completely sidesteps the whole point, which is that where there's a "shortage" there's an obvious opportunity to profitably address it in a way that benefits the economy and society.

To use your analogy, if the beef supply was constrained such that the cheapest hamburger was $100, would you say, "There's no shortage: supply and demand have met at a price of $100?" Or would you say, "Wow, hamburger prices increased by like 20x, there's a shortage of hamburgers?" I think most people would say the latter; the former simply isn't a useful definition of the word "shortage." It means that relative to some general idea of "normal" (as defined by previous conditions, or conditions in related markets), the market seems distorted by a lack of supply.

1. Our goal is to help people who love programming become even better programmers. We don't aim directly for employability or hiring.

2. We explicitly don't focus on web apps, prototypes, or products. Instead, most of the code people write at Hacker School is code for other programmers, e.g., frameworks, libraries, command-line utilities, etc. People at Hacker School work on projects that are technically interesting and one step beyond their current skill level.

3. Hacker School is three months, not a couple weeks. And we don't think people can become great hackers in three months. We do, however, think people can improve dramatically in that time if that's their primary focus and they're surrounded by smart, motivated and intellectually curious people who also love coding and want to grow.

Yes, Silicon Valley is desperate for engineers. However, Silicon Valley is desperate for engineers who are in the 0.1% of the engineer population in terms of intellect, motivation, adaptability, etc.

These are hard to find, first of all because it's 0.1% of the population (so it just boils down to a numbers game), and second of all because often these individuals will rather work on their own thing rather then work under someone else's orders.

If you have the potential of a John Resig, Ben Kamens, or Craig Silverstein, you won't have any trouble finding a job, and you'll have every startup at your feet. If you're "just" an OK engineer, then SV is not going to move mountains for you, unlike what some have said.