Within 2 years, 90% of organizations will suffer a critical tech skills shortage

If you are a "leader" trying to hire a "skilled" AI worker you are probably trying just trying to buy the ability to say "AI" a lot in your press releases. Save your money, just say "AI" a lot, you'll be better off than your competitors - trying to shoehorn The New Clippy™ into every corner of their app. To wit:

> It showed that 40% of 2,000 C-level executives surveyed plan to use genAI tools such as ChatGPT to cover critical skills shortages through the automation of tasks.

And even if you find a skilled AI worker, they'll just try to convince you not to build a chatbot. So much golf time wasted!

> “If there’s a desire to delegate critical activities and functions to genAI, it is essential that senior management first develops a deeper understanding of the data management processes, including what data can and cannot be used to train these systems,” said David Emm, Kaspersky’s principal security researcher.

This reminds me of every tech craze before it. I remember when executives thought they could just 'buy' a website and be done with it all that bother. So we got stuck with shitty online banking for most of a decade.

AI is most certainly not a new field. NN are decades old, it's only modern LLM transformer tech that is new.

Perhaps look at a primer on NN feed forward, RNN and transformer evolution.

There's also GOFAI, genetic algorithms, pattern matching algorithms (image recognition is a subset of NN), rules based algorithms (e.g. Bayesian) and others.

As a tech lead dev, I hire ML specialists and most can't even tell me what GPT stands for in ChatGPT, but some actually have a the full background I mention above, and there's very few of these, even less of those understand the mathematics, but just how to use Langchain or AWS services.

So it's true there is a skills shortage, but it's heavily polluted by people jumping on the AI bandwagon to try and get a lucrative/high paying job, and this is probably what you are seeing.

It's mostly not except to the degree that for some things expectations were set unrealistically high compared to any reasonable historical norm.

We just experienced the low end of the 10-15 year cycle.

> With AI ‘sucking the air out of almost all non-AI investments in the whole tech world,’ companies are cutting what they believe are unnecessary jobs

Not enough AI on your CV. Is there a php or perl scripting AI yet? I imagine a future of lots of little AIs that know their own out-of-fashion domain talking to a bigger AI. Maybe layers and layers of AIs. I wonder if they'll have meetings or chats.

Maybe we can give them ambition to self-automate or create new layers.

That's because the shortage is of underpayed tech skills.

Going by the article, I guess that would be because the applicants don't have the skills that are in demand. The top one being "Business AI skills (i.e. prompt engineers, low/no code developers, business analysts)". Much fewer respondents cited a gap in "Software development skills", which I guess is what most applicants here have.

Causality is the other way—the job market being in the toilet is causing the skills shortage. Why don't companies staff up, then?

Yeah, good question. I think they're trying to see how long they can ride along on "what we've got now is good enough" and then when they've find out they can't, it's going to hurt.

Is the job market in the toilet? "Friday's job report may mark longest stretch of sub-4% unemployment since early 1950s"

https://www.marketwatch.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-...

Honestly in the past year or two I have been fairly impressed with recent grads I have worked with. On the other hand I've run across several people that got laid off from one of the big tech companies and I am shocked how little they know. Things that should have taken a week or two such as setting up an api endpoint to return records or consuming one of our apis ends up taking 4+ months for them to complete.

CompSci grad != skilled technical worker (by default).

Amazing what kind of mess fresh grads from top tier schools can make.

A basic coding interview doesn't really cover what companies are looking for. There's a lot of talk about devops and cloud development, which means they're looking for people who are already familiar with developing software that's cloud native rather than just general software development ability.

At my day job, we actually spend a significant amount of time working with juniors to get them up to speed on deploying to kubernetes (writing manifest/helm files, building cloud-ready configurations, handling autoscaling etc). The company I work at sees a lot of value in investing senior engineer time into teaching new grads the ropes but I feel like a lot of companies would rather just hire people who already know how to do this stuff.

The technical term is bullshit

> Why do they add up to much more than 100%?

Because there is a skill shortage in Data Science? :-))

My only guess is that it was a "pick as many as apply" question. It's the only way it makes sense to me.

It's also easy to just not want to pay more for a role than the value it brings to the company.

Companies always think they have a skills shortage. They also can only onboard (and offboard) a finite number of people and they are unable as a viable business proposition to simply outbid every other company for talent.

What skills are considered as part of the shortage here?

That Gartner whitepaper your CEO read last week.

Accountable signals are going to be much more valuable than unaccountable noise.

If you factor in something that doesn’t exist and still may not?

It makes sense to me, if enough people are able to get by without developing their own skills anymore.