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Billionaire tech execs should also invest in training themselves instead of preaching about the low cost of false negatives right before they say they can't find people. But at least they make fair offers and invest in peoples' career (class action non poaching lawsuit may have helped.) I will note that some of them do have some programs for this already as well, Zuckerberg gave a lot to Newark and others have some programs.

Yes! Which is what I've done. But can I stop my taxpayer money being used to subsidize flooding the labor market with my supply skills because "startups can't afford to train people" and those poor VCs need highly skilled (but financially naive) employees to fool into building their empires?

I know I harp on the same topics over and over again, but they're relevant because the VCs are in bed with the Democrats. Just look at the Ellen Pao case - who was she not invited to dinner with? Al Gore. Who did the CEO of my last company advise on his presidential campaign? John Kerry. DeBlasio, a Democrat, just spent $10 million of New Yorker taxpayer money to train workers for tech companies, and Obama just spent $100 million of federal money to do the same. Meanwhile, the VCs start at $500k a year and get promoted to $3 million a year, now that Pao has aired out their dirty laundry in a high profile court case.

I can't help but feel that this may all be a new corporate structure where the financiers are still in charge, but instead of expectations for corporations to offer real benefits, career progression, R&D budgets, and training of entry level people, we have the perfect excuse to avoid all of that - "we're a startup, and we just can't afford it." I'm not sure it's as healthy as it sounds when you just romanticize entrepeneurship for it's own sake, especially when they make no qualms that taking investor money is part of the goal.

Its a good idea but its a huge time waster if they don't ban the multiple companies that ran bait-and-switch games on me. Also their fee is very high, which employers claim not to care about but definitely do.

I agree there's some grey zone, and I was definitely a young brogrammer who it appealed to, but I'm now seeing the errors of my ways and I hope younger engineers listen to what I'm saying and avoid those cultures.

You are misunderstanding my point. I am fine with ping-pong tables and beer on tap, if they come with professionalism, where professionalism includes things like not sexually harassing women. Alcohol especially needs to be handled with care, and encouraging employees to have more than one drink is downright irresponsible. My point was that there is a contingent of business-types whose gameplan is to use the fun stuff as an excuse to drop professionalism, as in, why should you ask for a raise when you're having so much fun here? It's one big party!

The reason I say this is that I was recently job interviewing and I had one company that acted like this, and even brought me into a Friday happy hour as part of the interview process, where a bunch of young males were playing beer pong. First of all, how is that not a hostile environment for a woman? Secondly, I didn't want to drink, so was I supposed to look like I was no fun or bend my principles? Finally, when I complained to the recruiter, I was told they _only_ did that for engineers, and it was clear to me that it was a general strategy of indoctrination to avoid paying market rate, because it was all fun and games until we started talking compensation. And the company I most recently worked with before was more or less the same, the startup industry is filled with companies exactly like this.

We have a culture of brogrammers because the VCs create it to avoid paying engineers. And if you think programmers are all men, take a look at the VC and senior management gender diversity sometime.

You know, I'm all about being laid back and rejecting traditional corporate culture, because you can be serious without a suit. But you still need the "be serious" part, which somehow got lost between all the ping pong tables and beer on tap. I actually think a big chunk of the industry encourages unprofessionalism, because professionals do really obnoxious things like negotiate compensation. I really hope that the tech scene can hold on to the fun parts of what makes it special, while getting rid of terrible things like this. But, in my opinion, culture and professionalism starts at the top, even if it's easy to go after the low-status, low-political-power programmers at the bottom. The typical company will give you sexual harassment training and fire people who do inappropriate things, but the same companies encourage their 20-somethings to get wasted at Friday happy hours and have few to no women on their board of directors or executive management positions, and that culture of men-in-charge inevitably trickles down.

You don't need to explain to me why the current 'standard' arrangement is designed to please and protect VCs at the expense of engineers. But that's exactly why we have a proliferation of VCs and startups and a 'shortage' of engineers willing to work for them. The classic argument for liquidation preference is because VCs are putting up money, but so is the engineer if he's taking a salary cut, and the only reason you find it ridiculous that I suggest engineers get preferred stock is because you are stuck in an old school mindset where financial professionals are in charge, and they loop in a few chosen engineers (founders) to bamboozle the rest into bad deals, and "work hard because we're a startup and have ping-pong tables". Not surprisingly, you are VP of engineering and trying to hire, so you're invested in the status quo that rewards founders and VCs. I think the echo chamber has made startups so 'cool' that I decided to bet against the herd mentality and get a good deal from a big tech company. I'd love to re-enter the startup industry at some point in the distant future, I just want to challenge the status quo and see an arrangement where engineers are actually partners and true, first-class owners. If this scares away some VC money, good, there are a lot of questionable startups out there already, it would be better for the industry as a whole if some of these startup engineers started collaborating instead of every single one needing to be founder or at least VP of engineering, because the only engineers willing to work for less than that are naive or inexperienced.

I assure you I do, and if I didn't you would be able to elaborate.

Preferred shares and invitations to board meetings. If I'm taking a pay cut, I'm an investor and want to be treated like one. If you're so big that you can't offer real equity, you're not a startup, youre an established business, so you should start paying competitive salaries and not use the "We're a startup" excuse to distort the market to your benefit. And competitive means it actually competes, not "competitive".

I think they're worthless because of the nature of liquidation preference. There are a select few elite startups like Dropbox that I would value common options at, but those companies will obviously IPO. Clearly the person who I responded to is at a company that is not going to IPO, exercising options is extremely expensive, and there are well known avenues to making common shares worth $0 and so it's an enormous financial risk. Again, if you're not invited to board meetings, how much do they value you, and how much do they consider you a co-owner and partner? If they don't, and you're in the dark about so much critical information, taking that financial risk is even more of a bad play.

Are you invited to board meetings? If not, considering yourself a "potential owner" when you're not invited to the meetings where owners decide things means you are very confused about things. There's a reason why when a company goes public, the quarterly minutes at board meetings become public as well, because you aren't really an owner if you're excluded from even learning about the biggest of decisions.

What you should do depends heavily on whether you have common or preferred shares. If you have the options to buy common shares, which you probably do, they're worthless so don't even bother exercising them, the people who are invited to the board meetings have all sorts of routes they can take so that your options will become meaningless, so to spend the money to exercise and pay the capital gains on them is madness.

My advice is to recognize that you have a sunk cost (look up sunk cost fallacy) and jump ship. Keep applying to companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and other larger companies until one makes you an offer, and those companies will give you real compensation packages and stock plans that you will be able to easily turn into American dollars in a year.

It's really unfortunate, because there are many engineers like me who would gladly take a pay cut if we were brought in as collaborators and offered real equity deals. Instead we are brought in as serfs to build their 'vision', with no input of our own or recourse if bad management runs our projects into the ground, and offered financial instruments that are obviously rigged against us. No engineer who understands personal finance and seriously values his tech career would be an employee at a startup over an established tech company today.

Founders still behave like VC money is scarce and engineering talent is plenty. I am seeing many of these companies struggle to ship competitive products due to lack of engineering talent, and so I am hoping we see these startups fail and lose to big tech companies that value their engineers, and force the VC funded startup scene to totally re-evaluate their 'standard' offers so that those of us who would prefer smaller teams can join one on fair terms.

I think declarative programming is real programming.

The most obvious use case is when you have some sort of list of rules or constraint satisfaction problem.

Gerrit uses its for that use case: https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/prolog-...

One of my college professors has a language that's heavily influenced by Prolog and designed to solve NLP problems called Dyna (I think because many NLP parsing problems can be solved by dynamic programing approaches that logic programs can easily express and optimize for).

https://github.com/nwf/dyna

I actually think the real reason we don't see more Prolog or Prolog-like languages is not because they are bad approaches, but because it's relatively easy to make your own half-baked constraint satisfaction backtracking solver in a language like Python, and then write rules for it to evaluate, so smart people just write it that way rather than busting out Prolog.

http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

I don't care about trophies, certificate, gift cards, etc. What sounds most positive to me about your internal hack days is your effort to productionize the efforts. That means you actually realize that all those smart, ambitious people you hire might actually have good ideas.

I recently left an NYC ed-tech startup that would have 'hack days', but during the hack days there were games, distractions, and once even a live band. Now I like parties, but it indicated to me that the non-technical CEO was allowing the hack day because Facebook did it, and he viewed it more as a recruiting effort than something he took seriously. I won one of the categories once and received no followup whatsoever, and the impression that I got was that if I wanted to work on it nights and weekends after the fact, then maybe it would be considered. Lots of people did do 'real work' during hack day, and most of the projects were fluff or things that were obviously going to be on the product roadmap anyway. To me, the entire thing was a waste of time, which is unfortunate, because I really wish more companies looked for creativity out of their engineers. Many companies (especially NYC ones) will begrudgingly pay you for your coding skills, but then put you at the whim of a product manager with no experience building anything. I always say that if you think about why designers/coders learned these skillsets, it's often because they are extremely interested in the end-products and that's what motivated them to learn to build products in the first place, and so to totally ignore their input and put them in pure heads-down coding roles is really unfortunate. This blog post indicates to me that you're not that type of company.

As for external hackathons, to me they are a waste of time as a coder because nobody actually checks that your implementation works. And worse, they hire people like journalists to judge (looking at you Angelhack). What that means is that the 'hackathon' really turns into a 'pitchathon', and the winners go to the best designers (which I can at least respect), or slide decks and charismatic pitches (which I don't). Getting the judging right so that time spent actually coding is valued is really difficult, but something more hackathon organizers should consider.

I find the self in the method call parameters slightly awkward, but other than that I like writing a lot of 'self'. One of the biggest reasons I prefer Python to Ruby or Perl is that I really agree "Explicit is better than implicit.", and adding the self before your instance variables and method calls explicitly labels their namespace/scope, and I don't find it too distracting. I sometimes do it in Java too, prefixing instance variables and method calls with 'this'.

I do agree that OOP approaches can be a bit overused (especially if someone's been coding too much Java), and I've always appreciate that Python doesn't shove it down your throat. I like that you can lean towards more functional code like this example, or towards simple imperative code. But when I do want some classes, I find the Python mechanism mostly ok.

He kept several years of tax returns hidden, had shady offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, and while I don't expect him to pay more taxes than legally required, it would be nice if he acknowledged or addressed as a policy issue that he made orders of magnitudes more money than a middle class person yet paid a quarter of their effective tax rate. Capital gains taxes are bad, but so are income taxes, and I don't think it's coincidence we keep the ones that is largely shouldered by the middle class high.

It's actually not zero-sum unless their marketing is misleading customers into buying products they actually would want less given perfect information. If their marketing introduces new customers who prefer their product, then it's positive sum. Even if those customers are spending money on this instead of something else, they are spending it on this because they derive more utility (of some type) and therefore there's more economic value. Economists don't consider marketing zero-sum - read the article you linked more closely.

Saying it's a pay issue could also imply it's a macro issue, meaning that if salaries went up higher, the field would be more attractive and would attract more talent from other better compensated fields (i.e. medicine, big law), creating more hireable engineers in the long term.

No, this is totally wrong. Doctors create wealth too, contributing more healthcare to society is in no way zero sum. There are already plenty of sick patients left over, not everybody gets world class healthcare at affordable costs. If you had more of them healthcare costs would go down and so the capital saved could go to other endeavours. Secondly, you heal people who contribute more to the pie. Finally, healthiness IS the pie, it is itself a type of wealth, arguably one of the most important.

And yes, skilled immigrants create wealth. But the same reasonable arguments that can be made for bringing in skilled tech immigigrants (NOT on indebtured servant visas) could be made for bringing in skilled healthcare immigrants. The reason the former happens a lot more than the latter is because of political representation. Doctors have the AMA carefully controlling the supply of doctors, tech workers have Google and Microsoft doing the opposite.

I think there's actually a lot of caveats, all jobs are not equal, there isn't perfect information about all available jobs (hence the need for recruiting), etc.

But on the other hand, this 'shortage' is being used as a political tool to depress engineering salaries, even though if you applied the same logic to other professions you would find there are worse shortages there. Clearly it would be useful from a healthcare cost perspective if we had more doctors but we aren't expanding visa quotas there. Salary is a huge issue and most jobs want to pay engineers as little as possible. Of course they will rant about how competitive their pay is but if it was so competitive they would probably advertise it, instead of trying to use information asymmetry so they can negotiate them down lower. Then of course, they only hire the best, but salary negotiations inevitably revert to 'market wages', then after all this they can't hire people so they need more immigrants who get deported if they fire them.

For some reason, if you can't afford an accountant, you don't get an accountant, if you can't afford a private lawyer, you don't get a private lawyer, but if you can't afford a programmer, there is a talent shortage and we need more skilled immigrants and to subsidize more STEM graduates.

*Shortage of talent at the price you are willing to pay.

There are all sorts of legal work and questions I would love to have done if I could get a top-notch lawyer for $10/hr. That doesn't mean there is a shortage of top-notch lawyers, it means that I am priced out by the rest of the market who are offering them better wages. Sounds like you are priced out of the market, if you offer market wages, you will find people by definition of market wage i.e. the price that it costs to successfully hire people, not the price off of salary.com.

As always, it depends on the person and their specific goals, but I think diving in before learning the fundamentals is a better strategy for the reasons he's getting at in the blog. The biggest decider in whether you will be successful at a new skill is if you put in the hours, and you are more likely to put in the hours if you are having fun and engaged. If putting together a crappy web app makes you stick with it better than learning data structures, then it's better. Plus, for the majority of us, the end product is the real goal, and we only care about algorithms as far as it helps us achieve those goals. Lessons on code maintainability and algorithms will seem much more relevant and engaging once you tried to add features to your spaghetti code base or figure out why your application was so slow. Also, for some people who have a specific end goal in mind, maintainability or algorithms really don't actually matter because they have smaller goals.

To me it's similar to learning an instrument. Learning scales and doing finger exercises may be more useful practice than just playing songs you like all the time, but again, what's more important is that you consistently practice. As you learn more songs, you might struggle on parts or want to improvise and then you will be more engaged to learn technique or scales, and some people will be happy they can strum a few chords and never worry about more. In short, 1000 hours of mediocre practice will usually beat 10 hours of perfect practice, especially because the mediocre practice provides the motivation for the perfect practice.

With exceptions, salaries aren't advertised in job openings. However you can look at average software engineering salaries to learn that most salaries are south of 100k, and it seems unlikely that on average higher salaries are getting turned down for much lower ones. Furthermore, specific examples are unnecessary. I originally asked for metric that proved there was a developer shortage, and explained why job openings are a bad indication of one. There have been none other proposed to my knowledge, so you're really just nitpicking details irrelevant to my original point.

You are totally missing my point. Yes, I realize MIT programmers make more and you need to pay them well to hire them. However, if you look at average software engineering salaries, you will realize most people do not pay as well as prestigious tech companies. Yet their job openings are used to indicate a shortage. Shortages are just low bids in a market, the fact that lots of people want to buy gold at $1 an ounce does not mean there is a shortage of gold. It's a bad metric if you understand anything about economics, and yet I've yet to see another metric used to argue for a 'shortage'.

That's why it's a job 'opening'. My point was that it doesn't get filled but people classify it as an opening, but if someone wanted a Harvard lawyer for $60k it wouldn't even get listed.

Your two data points don't mean much because we're talking about macro trends and whether a 'shortage' actually exists. Specifically I'm asking someone to justify the assertion that there is a shortage of good programmers with some numbers, and I pointed out that job openings is essentially just market 'bids' and therefore not a very good metric since all markets have lots of 'bids' at well below market price. For some reason in the world of programming we take those low bids more seriously than in other fields which is inconsistent. The best metric that I know of, market price, does not indicate a shortage relative to legal and medical work, since both doctors and lawyers both have higher averages, and yet you rarely hear about shortages in those fields and how we need to more aggressively train more. So your point about how you individually make a lot of money is a bit of non-sequitur.

As for legal work, the median starting salary for the top 14 schools (remember, there is a shortage of 'good' programmers) is still 160K+. How many good programmers start there? Sure lower-grade lawyers don't make much, but neither do lower-grade programmers. Facebook and Microsoft both have reasonably high hiring standards and are complaining about a shortage of people over their threshold. As for 'the rest of us', the average lawyer salary is higher than the average software engineer salary. There are a lot of low paid software engineers too, it's absurd to compare only the highest paid software engineers to all lawyers which it seems you tried to do.

The fact that you can see the average lawyer salary being higher than the average software engineer salary, and still claim there a meltdown in the former industry while the second is struggling for people, just shows how deeply ingrained our cultural perspective of what job markets and compensation for a given career 'should be', and how it skews our perspective away from the simple econ 101 supply and demand curves that tell the real story. Markets are a lot more honest than PR releases from billionare tech executives.

But on a side note I did like your blog post, I just think it's irrelevant to this conversation.

Can you explain to me what actual evidence there is that there's a shortage of good programmers? Good programmers still make less money than a good doctor or lawyer, indicating that those are even shorter in supply. Surely addressing that shortage would be a higher priority? Lots of people could use more legal services if the price was lower, and yet if someone wanted to hire a Harvard lawyer for $60k a year, we wouldn't even seriously consider it, but when someone wants an MIT programmer for $60k a year we consider it a job opening and thus a 'shortage.' Thus I find the 'job openings' a ridiculous metric of supply and demand, and I would use the metric people have always used - the market price. Using this more reasonable metric, there are careers with much more severe shortages of talent. As usual, nobody is surprised that those heavily invested in hiring programmers want a larger supply to drive down market wages.

There are big differences between a language being derived from another language, having it's interpreter written in another language, and actually being a framework written in the same language. Your "Don't learn Latin before French" analogy makes sense for those claiming you should learn C before Ruby. But jQuery doesn't derive from Javascript, it's a framework written in Javascript. If you write jQuery, you will run into Javascript issues, because you are writing Javascript. Even if you could make the argument it's a similar philosophical idea, anybody with experience will know in practice that a jQuery coder will run into Javascript issues much, much more frequently than a C++ or assembly issue. The leap is much, much smaller. The best analogy I can think of along the human language lines is instead of a French student learning Latin, it would be a student of business French being encouraged to better understand all of spoken French.

With all that said, I also lean towards "just learn what you want or need to know" train of thought. I think those of us who enjoy learning what's under the hood overestimate it's necessity for "getting things done". I don't think there's anything wrong with learning and using jQuery without diving into the messier details of vanilla Javascript unless necessary. Also, for many of us, those ugly situations when we are forced to figure out what's going on behind the scenes is when we actually understand it anyway.

Well, I'm a nerd but I do agree with the bully. I don't think that the severity of a crime should be judged by a victim's reaction to it. While I see how a suicide might bring notoriety to a problem, I don't think it changes the nature of what was done. It's similar to the Tyler Clementi case, who killed himself because he was being videotaped in gay acts by his roommate. I never thought it was fair that the bully in this case would be held accountable for essentially the entirety of our society's homophobia just because his actions were the final straw. He should have been punished the same that anybody would be for video taping their roommate in a sexual act and publishing it online (which I do recognize as severe bullying and very wrong). I believe that his official charges were along those lines, but it was clear it was being taken more seriously because of the suicide.

The other thing I hate is the concept of "The" Bully. It's easy to imagine a sick, hateful person, most importantly someone else, and individual bullies certainly exist, but I think the far more common situation is where the bully is a group of people. I think one way to 'Stop Bullying' is to help people understand when they are bullying, instead of just imagining it's something someone else does. I doubt there that many people that never had an adolescent moment where they 'ganged up' on someone (verbally) to feel like they belonged more in a group, or just to give an outsider or a 'runt' of the group a hard time, because it's such an instinctive thing to do. So much so that it's a huge theme of Lord of the Flies, a book everybody reads in high school, but rarely views within the context of their own life.

The most ironic thing about these stop bullying campaigns is so very, very often they reflect the same group bullying mentality they purport to be fighting. All these people 'ganging up' on the prosecutors in this case are example of that. I'm not saying this wasn't a failure of our justice system that should be fixed, only that it at times this is seeming awfully like a witch hunt.