Even if it's part time work while pursuing a PhD, if there was anything resembling a real shortage, these things wouldn't happen. And it's not a rare story.
There is definitely a shortage of developers, a shortage which tech companies have regularly been complaining about.
Unfortunately, politicians and journalists just hear "we need more nerds" so assume there is a STEM shortage (in their non-technical minds, nerds are all equivalent). Thus the broad and pointless push for STEM graduates when what's really needed is a specific subsection of Technology.
Even this isn't quite true - I'd qualify 'developers' with 'good'. There are a lot of average/bad developers out there and companies don't really want to hire them...but many don't have a huge pool of candidates like Facebook and Google.
So I would argue that it's a problem with an asymmetrical job marketplace and poor long term decision making on the part of employers.
Besides, all you need is some books and open source software and you can train yourself, at least to the level that you're hirable. OK, some things you have to learn from experience in ways that are hard to accomplish outside of working for a big company (large scale distributed systems) but most of the companies that have large scale distributed systems are willing to hire straight out of college and, effectively, train them!
So, the rational thing to do is to let the "ok" developers develop their own skills and then hire the ones that end up being good. But then, I don't think the standard is unreasonably high in the first place.
There are too many tech fads and trends for a developer to self-train on everything a potential employer could possibly want before knowing exactly what that is.
In my opinion, tech employers should stop being so specific with their requirements and simply allocate some time for the new people to adjust to their in-house way of doing things. As many of us know well, every development team has its own slightly different way of doing things, which has to be learned in order to work more effectively. Nobody "hits the ground running", because the tech skills are hardly ever the limiting factor in hitting full productivity.
And I assure you that any company that wants to hire people to "hit the ground running" will forget to mention their new hires will be doing that running as a steeplechase over mismanagement hurdles.
Training doesn't improve the quality of a candidate. It assures the candidates you can find at the price level you have chosen are familiar with the specific technologies and processes that your company uses.
I worked for too long with Lua, and noone hires a Lua coder, so I am screwed :(
The mix is very heavily influenced by geographical locale. Around me, the market is mostly the large-but-not-huge companies that hire a lot of software developers but never promote them. So there's my bias. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, et al. do not have a presence here, so they cannot improve the behavior of other companies with their competitive pressure.
In the 1990s (and probably earlier), a lot of for-profit educational institutions, in collaboration with a number of large tech companies, produced a lot of "certifications" which tried to fill this gap. It failed pretty miserably for everyone but the for-profit educational institutions.
What's left? Most of the employers want to hire at a lower pay level than most of the qualified applicants are willing to take, especially since regular pay increases have dried up in many markets.
I've been on both sides of this coin, though. I know it's difficult to hire people even if you have plenty of good applicants, because, even when you're willing to train people on the specifics of the position you're hiring them to fill, truly qualified applicants may not work out after 6 months.
In a perfect world (sometimes called "once upon a time"), companies take all of this into account and consider it a part of doing business. In the modern world, companies have found that they can get more work out of their existing employees and out of new-hires by behaving as if all training can be done on-the-job. You might give the new-hires a little less work to compensate for the extra load of learning the job, but the rest of the team has to make sure the job is still getting done AND train the new-hire.
I've also seen C++ shops that quiz you on C++ trivia. Either they were doing a poor job or they were very small and worked only in C++ so it was reasonable for them to ask questions that you'd know the answer to if you just read a book before the interview.
There are things that can help teach OK developers to become good developers though.
"Oh, we're looking to hire a virologist. Or a algebreic geometer. Mechanical engineer maybe. Something like that."
The problem is managers aren't scientists, few companies care about pure research and long term benefits coming from it, and nobody is willing to spend effort and resources training inexperienced average graduates any more.
It is also, in many ways, too easy to get a STEM degree by learning how to be a good University student as opposed to learning your subject well.
The core problem is university needs to be something special and uncommon, not something necessary. Most jobs have little to do with the University training that comes with them and there's not the budget for 1/3 of the population to do science.
Compare that to the pharmco carousel that you can see in action today in Boston and San Diego. The major players are IP brokers that buy startups with promising compounds (good if you are a lawyer or in marketing), but the science is done by university startups which are either bought out or fail, and the number of very capable people on postdocs (because they are between startups) is plain staggering. Try putting your kids through college doing that.
Is anyone surprised that I'm very suspicious of anyone preaching the startup gospel? They are inevitably venture capitalists or marketeers, or fresh out of college and still very green.
What's wrong with doing a postdoc? I'm in the UK, but here a postdoc is a normal part of the science career path. It pays reasonably well for academia and is a first step towards being a lecturer (assistant professor).
This model takes the "scientists are cogs in a machine" paradigm to a new level. Of course med. chemists are cogs in machines, lead discovery is nothing but finding ligands for targets (perhaps it's also finding the proper target), and your scientific training hopefully equipped you for that. If one project fails, there will be others, and it's management that chooses those that will go forward. But it used to be that you didn't change your employer with your project, Big Pharmco always had plenty of projects going. Nowadays it's the employee that bears all the risks, and that includes the risk of poor management. It's no longer cogs in machines, it's cogs with legs.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/inquiring-min...
Basically, fewer positions, more PhDs, less NIH money to fewer scientists and the situation becomes pretty terrible.
Then what should they do? There is no industrial demand. We could theoretically replace almost the entire service industry overnight with autonomous vehicles and online ordering.
Sounds like a record on repeat nowadays but labor is dying. It takes one person to feed a thousand, and if you average all the labors required to supply ones needs it comes out to less than a whole person by a lot. IE, the sum of plumbing, electrical, power production, road maintenance, car construction, furniture building, home building, medical, agricultural, etc production necessary per person is less than a whole person, and thus you have an excess of people who have no real value add labor to do.
Science is really the only thing you can propose in a labor vacuum - well, we don't need welders or farmers or auto mechanics or factory workers or people digging holes, so why not go figure out the next big thing? Too bad, one, not everyone can do that, and two, research has to be paid for by someone, and considering the gross wealth concentration in the US, its either philanthropy or the government paying for it. And as can be evidenced by real demand for science, nobody is.
We need to push into space further, attack cancer, deal with antibiotic resistance, dig into groundbreaking physics, etc. R and D is only 3% of US government budget.
But what's being said is we need more STEM grads.
74% of STEM grads don't work in their fields. That's not a small percentage.
http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-130....
1. It says they don't work in STEM fields, not just their fields. My guess would be that the percentage would be much higher for people who don't work in their field, but in many cases it's still just a statistic.
2. There is no path for job growth in many STEM fields except out of STEM and into management. Most people staying in a STEM job for 20+ years find themselves under pressure to move to management, in part because it is somehow easier for companies to pay the salary in middle management than in STEM for someone with a lot of time in the field.
Still, some people just change their minds, or actually want to work in business or some field considered non-STEM, but do their undergraduate work in STEM. Additionally, many STEM fields require a level of specialization that usually requires an advanced degree or long-term work in the field to acquire that specialized knowledge. Many people get discouraged by this when they see their student debt and their lack of employment options after getting a Bachelor's degree, so, if they continue in higher education at all, they look at getting a degree in something else (like an MBA).
After all, the United States isn't the only place to find them.
I am 27 (or I will be in some hours... right now 26, in some hours 27).
I am jobless for a while, and in my country, industry research showed that the companies are hiring less and less people in their 20s and hiring more people that are 50+
Any position I see with reasonable pay (ie: pay more than my rent + food) requires 20 years of experience+ since I am 27 I cannot have 20 years of experience (I learned to code at 6, but I don't got my first job at 7 :P)
But general stats on US jobs (not the TI industry stats) also show the same pattern.