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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

The problem is a dearth of technical talent.

We need to let in more technical workers to address this issue.

Or maybe get better at finding and attracting all the talent that already exists in the US. A lot of people won't go near a SV startup with a 10 ft pole.

Yup. Once and never again. Even as remote.

Shouldn't a lack of talent mean that existing talent should be paid more?

You would think, but management can often have difficulty seeing how macro trends affect them. From their perspective, they shouldn't have to pay more for the same and adding new staff at higher pay than old staff seems unfair.

My previous job had difficulty finding talented engineers, party due to comparatively low salary offers. When I and two others left our team of 8 and two more made it known they were actively looking because we saw all trends outside our office, it became clearer to management. Only when 3/8ths of their staff left did they make major changes to their existing packages. And even then, pay is significantly below market. (Though they have the best time off and fringe benefits in town.)

Maybe I've been trolled, but ... if technical talent is scarce, wouldn't salaries be higher, based on basic economics? I don't see how flooding the market with more technical workers will increase salaries.

Yes. It's a joke: VCs (to include PG) claim that talent is scarce because it is in their self interest to lobby for measures that would increase the talent pool and decrease salaries. They will continue to make this claim no matter what the market says about how scarce talent actually is. carsongross is mocking their fib for transparently contradicting basic economics.

I think the problem is an abundance of math skills. After all, as so many startup engineer blog posts have said, you don't really need math to write web applications.

We need to replace the math courses in a CS degree with something more useful. Maybe some classes on Javascript, NoSQL, and whiteboard coding.

Note to self: sarcasm on the Internet usually doesn't work.

I'm not serious. The primary thrust hat people who have taken the math required by an undergraduate computer science or engineering degree can probably see at a glance that the typical startup salary offer is shit. Thus, I sarcastically suggested we should remove math from the CS curriculum in order to make graduates less able to understand this.[1]

I did so in a way that was also supposed to caricature the "programming doesn't need math" crowd, but apparently I came off as a member of the crowd. I was hoping that my sarcasm would be indicated by throwing in "whiteboard coding" as something a degree should cover. That so many people thought what I intended to be caricature was serious worries me.

[1] Hence the reason I said "abundance of math skills"; potential candidates know too much to be suckered.

Rather than altering CS which is a good course we should really look at creating an alternative for people who are going to be actual programmers and not computer scientists.

For many (including myself) what we do is nearer to been builders than civil engineers and beyond a basic grounding time would be better spent on the other skills that make up a good developer.

Really? I mean math is something irreplaceable in CS. It would be replaceable if it was something like "web apps development" degree.

I'm hoping the parent is making a joke by riffing on the absurd technical requirements demanded by startups for working on what amounts to a glorified CRUD webapp. The math heavy analysis that a CS degree provides just isn't necessary for, oh, 95% of programming jobs. The people who design the systems for reliability or process "big data" at huge companies with real scaling issues (Google, Facebook) need to have such training.

On the other hand, these companies do need talent who never the less have skills that are rleatively rare. They shouldn't need to pay engineers the $200k+ salaries of big companies, but expecting to get median quality engineering without paying more than $110k/yr is as ridiculous as a non-degreed "webdev" expecting $180k/yr because he can slap some customizations on bootstrap and poke around a Ruby codebase.

It depends. If you have a large enough team on a project that you can shield someone from math oriented and efficiency sensitive tasks as well as the planning in place to do it then the math heavy analysis isn't needed. Many start-ups have teams of 1-2 working on entire web apps and need everyone to be able to take on any task. Many people without the math background end up writing n^3 solutions to O(n) problems in code that gets executed at high frequency. The core value of those math skills isn't their explicit use, it's the training the brain gets in writing efficient algorithms and having knowledge of how hard certain problems are. Even in CRUD apps I've often seen requirements that are equivalent to NP-hard problems on large data sets, and I've been able to discuss the efficiency tradeoffs allowing the business team to redesign features when they weren't happy with performance. Without the math background, we'd see build it, put it in production and when the data gets large enough cry about performance and lose users waiting forever for a page to load.

The last piece is in many start-ups I've seen the programming team will own or co-own Analytics because of a lack of statistics skills on the business team. Again with a small team not having a solid math and stats background has huge implications on the data analysis portion of roles.

Absolutely wrong. You don't need a ton of math to wire up a house, so should electrical engineers stop taking math clases? Of course not, you'd be an idiot to hire an electrical engineer for that job. Likewise, if you're just cranking out CSS and javascript, you probably want somebody with a tech degree or a code camp certificate, not a CS degree.

Aside from that, what the heck would you teach in a course on NoSQL? The theoretical underpinnings of key/value mapping? Proper denormalization of data? I'm honestly curious here.

There should be plenty of room for "theoretical" CS courses and practical software engineering courses.

Sarcasm, guys.

I don't think you need to shoe-horn your agenda into this question.

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