Or maybe set up an office with a fat pipe in Detroit where you can buy a house for $5k, rather than forcing them in to San Fran. Every large city could have a small office.
My startup is 100% remote and we've been doing it for the past 4 years. We are very collaborative, and for that to work remotely, you need good & reliable internet. And that is turning out to be a problem sometimes. You can't just work from any random beach or forest.
Right now I live in a big city but I want to move out to the country. Well, lots of places in the country don't even have cable or dsl. You can only get "wireless" internet which is shit.
So yeah, until it's easy to get broadband even out in the country, I don't think remote work is going to catch on. Because if you live in a city, you're probably just going to get a non-remote job. Half the advantages for working remotely is that it allows you to live out in the country, but without good internet, a big chunk of remote work is just not doable.
I wonder how much it costs to lay the cable. If you offered $10k/20k to your ISP, they might be able to come up with a solution for you even in a rural area.
Damn, how remote are we talking here? I live in the middle of nowhere in New York State (1 hour drive to the nearest town, 2 to the nearest C-list city, 4 to Toronto, 10 to NYC). We've had high speed cable internet since 1999.
> You can only get "wireless" internet which is shit.
Depends on where you are. WISPs with a microwave connection are usually faster than cable, if run properly. More and more of them are popping up in rural areas because you don't have the high cost of running cable or fiber.
While some will want to be digital nomads, the majority of remote workers will simply work from home, where they have access to a good internet connection.
Are you in the US? I ask because I'm suprised that not everywhere gets cable of ADSL (I'm in Scotland, and many places have fibre. It's really rare not to have access to at least ADSL nowadays, even for somewhere fairly remote).
As I see it, one of the advantages of working remotely is that I'm not constrained to jobs and salaries on offer in my city.
Yea, I don't really understand why tech companies don't just do this with the hundreds of qualified candidates who have 4 year degrees and actual work experience that they say no to.
My guess is that it's another way to hire people who don't know what they're worth and underpay them for a few years until the employees figure it out. Kind of like what the industry already does with new grads.
I briefly glanced at LinkedIn's apprenticeship program (linked in the article). It's 6 months. There's probably some sort of legal/HR benefit where if the apprentice doesn't work out, LinkedIn can cut ties.
Is that a negative? Seems like if you're the candidate and you don't work out after 6 months, you wouldn't have to claim you were fired. You can just say you completed the apprenticeship and decided to move on.
"what is a company to do today if it finds itself part of the 71 percent of employers that claim they can't find suitable technology candidates?"
Increase the salary of what you are paying in order to attract more qualified devs.
"they're reinvesting the money saved from hiring less-expensive engineers to create "farm teams" within their organizations"
Aha! It is not about being able to "find suitable technology candidates" it is about being able to acquire "less-expensive engineers"
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of companies investing in apprenticeship programs but let's call it what it is. Not a talent shortage but a willing to pay top dollar shortage.
New grads are a really bad value for their first year or two. If you are only looking for the bang for your buck approach, you would hire people with 1-3 years of experience. Anything under is negative value. Anything over is overpriced.
Oh I know, I am not advocating this as the correct way to build a business. But for throwing up some crappy CRUD app, you are going to get the best bang for your buck either oursourcing it or hiring 1-3 years of experience guys.
It's going to be buggy and not scale, but it can still do stuff.
I worked for a Fortune 50 up until about a year ago. In the 5 years I was there every single strong developer that I met left. They were paying sr. devs the same as 'business analysts' that simply repeated their managers instructions to the devs.
In my last week I told a director there, who was my manager when I first started that 'you guys don't pay enough for good devs' and he looked at me like I pissed in his Cheerios, I think I hit a nerve.
Since then they've had another purge of overpaid project managers and analysts and are now trying to train up the remaining people there to be developers. It is a completely pathetic endeavor from what I've heard from the people that I still know there. It sounds like the farm team is not working for them.
Have you heard? There's a shortage of new Ferarris. I've been trying to buy one for $5000 for years now, and just can't find a single one. We need to do something about this shortage.
EDIT:
The first paragraph of this article is straight out of la-la-land. In any market, if there is really a shortage of a good, the price of it would rise to the point where supply met demand. So why is the price of tech talent not rising (consequently demand falling) to the point where the existing supply meets demand?
A half a million open computing jobs. LOL. It's pointless to claim you have an open job you can't fill when you're not willing to pay what the market is demanding. I'll hire someone for a dollar an hour to do my personal web site. Should that count among these half a million open jobs? It's just as serious an opportunity as most of them.
Yes, but isn't the article basically saying you could buy a cheaper non-Ferrari and do a little work on it to make it comparable to a Ferrari? And in the end, it would be cheaper than buying the Ferrari outright.
I think the premise is reasonable. Why do you need a $5000 Ferrari? Is it to transport you from one place to another? Because then another car would do. And I think that's what this article is saying about these companies. They believe they can ignore all those Ferrari devs out there because they can build their own that will reasonably do the same thing at a price that is "suitable" for the company's needs.
No, see, market logic is only sound when it doesn't suggest that laborers be paid more. If that happens, there must be something wrong with the market.
You're really quite correct. Businesses are all "small government, low regulations, free market" until government, regulation, oligopoly, etc., would help them.
Your economics are incomplete. You can't buy your way out of an aggregate shortage. The price will rise until only the rich can afford what is in short supply, and then, eventually, only the richest rich, and so on. The rest do without.
These companies have created their own shortage by insisting they will only hire the top 1% and be unwilling to invest in anyone less 'capable' regardless of the quality of their so-called filter at identifying talent. So now they have 'discovered' the concept of actually helping people they would have ignored yesterday to grow into the talent they need (and absorbing the marginal costs of that investment). An idea boldly entering the 1950s as an innovation.
The revolving door hiring in SV has maxed out with virtually all the 'suitable' talent in play and still many openings unfilled despite plenty of reasonably capable but sub-superstar talent pushed to the margins. The lid has been maintained on salaries mostly by agreements between the usual suspects, not market forces. The fact is that many perfectly good developers will be ignored by SV at any price and that's now biting the companies hard.
What do you mean by "aggregate shortage"? Since you reference economics:
There's a supply curve, there's a demand curve, and QS/QD/price are set by where they intersect. The fallacy in this article (and in your first paragraph) is pretending that the supply curve for programmers is vertical; i.e., that the same amount of people would be programmers (i.e., QS), no matter the salary. Patently false. For that matter, demand being inelastic is false as well which is what GP is pointing out with his website job.
AFAIK, shortages only exist if either price or quantity produced is held static by some external force.
There is no shortage here. The demand curve for programmers is just such that employers are unwilling to pay for the quantity they SAY they'd like. The very nature of demand curve is such that the people who are willing to pay most will get the item "first", no shortage required.
Please re-read my comment. The quantity produced is held static by an external force: the ridiculous filter used by the SV bigs that exclude 99% of developers sight unseen. They create a shortage for themselves and then complain there is a shortage because the world isn't producing enough 'geniuses' to meet their needs (without also requiring any investment by them). It's a self-inflicted problem for which they accept no blame. This 'farm team' notion is just the light dimly dawning on some of them that they might be able to solve their own bind by actually engaging (and investing) in the solution and not just whining. By cutting themselves off from the vast majority of the potential talent supply, they have, in essence, stranded themselves on a desert island of their own manufacture.
Side rant: Directed at many posts already in this tree. Economics 101 does not describe any real market and the labor market is about as unreal as it gets. Developers are not interchangeable goods, and the flexibility in supply is almost non-existent. There will not be 100 new universities founded this fall to 'sell' into this 'market'. The market for DaVinci's would never clear if he were alive in a way that would make all buyers happy. Not. Going. To. Happen.
I take it your point is that programmers are not fungible. So higher-quality programmers are worth more than lower-quality programmers. Sure. And when they say there is a "shortage", they mean there is a limited number of programmers that are "good enough" by whatever metric (they would not add the important qualification at the current salary).
Suppose then there are really two markets here: one for "good" programmers and one for "mediocre" ones. My rejoinder still holds if it is really the case that they can only do with good programmers and not mediocre ones (doubtful). And since it is presumably possible to transition from non-programmer to mediocre to good with effort, the fact that "not enough" people are doing so still implies the price is not high enough.
I am mainly taking umbrage at your use of "shortage". The preferences of the market participants themselves are certainly not an external force. I think we should not concede to them that there is a shortage when there is not because then they go on to use that as justification for all kinds of counterproductive legislative proposals.
BTW, more than half of Keynes' GTEIM is about employment. The original question impelling modern economics is "how do we get to full employment? and what does that mean anyway"? Of course the model is an approximation. But don't use "economics" to justify an argument and then turn around and say economics doesn't model the real world.
Anyone that looks at SV salaries knows that they are incredibly high (and the much freer markets around them, like housing, know it :) The fact is that they could offer $1,000,000 starting salaries tomorrow and the pool of 'qualified' applicants would not change because salary is not the determining factor here. If everyone east of the Mississippi suddenly moved to SV drawn by those mouth watering numbers, what would happen? "Well, you didn't attend Stanford, so...". BTW, does anyone actually graduate from Stanford anymore?
They're "high" relative to some (most) jobs and not others. It sounds like you may be implying something like "programmers make enough already". Perhaps true on a moral plane, has nothing to do with economics though. Why is gold so expensive? Because it's demanded. There is no inherent correct price to anything absent a market.
> The fact is that they could offer $1,000,000 starting salaries tomorrow and the pool of 'qualified' applicants would not change because salary is not the determining factor here.
OK. I think this is the core of the matter. Let's assume the number of "qualified" programmers is fixed over the short term.
The market is made of actors/companies. If a company wants more of the qualified programmers, and they pay $1M starting salary, that company will get them. And then the market price will rise. The fact that it hasn't risen to $1M implies the companies don't really want them that badly.
And in the long term, a price raise would encourage more programmers to become qualified and the problem would be rectified. But if what you are saying is true, and they really only want Stanford grads or equivalents, why would they care about H1Bs? It's not. They want to keep the price down.
Even if we assumed the number of qualified programmers were constant, there would be no more of a "shortage" than there is a shortage of gold. We don't say there's a gold shortage even though its quantity is "fixed" and presumably everyone would like more of it if it were cheaper.
I think people make a stronger argument for a shortage in the labor market WRT doctors. In that case there is a cartel (the AMA) keeping the quantity artificially low. There is no such phenomenon in programming. There's nothing stopping a university hiring all top-notch CS profs and becoming the next CMU/Stanford, and charging students a bundle...if the price were right.
What about the people who went to Stanford, and have all the right and necessary chops, but are doing more lucrative work outside of development? The Valley especially has many, many examples of these people. Part of the perceived charm of the valley is that you can make crazy amounts of money, which a day job as a developer does not provide (It's a decent living, but not crazy money).
You don't believe there is ever a monetary point that you could convince them that development is a better deal than what they are currently doing? You don't think $1M, $100M, $1B wouldn't temp them in the least?
Employees aren't a manufactured product. The claim is the supply is inelastic in the short term. You can outbid your competitors for talented developers but a rise in average salaries won't make weak developers better or get lawyers to take a code bootcamp. The only short term ways to increase supply are immigration and outsourcing.
> The only short term ways to increase supply are immigration and outsourcing.
Which is why the parent says that rising price eliminates any superfluous demand.
Demand is an economic principle that describes a consumer's
desire and willingness to pay a price for a specific good
or service. Holding all other factors constant, an increase
in the price of a good or service will decrease demand, and
vice versa.
If we take it to the logical extreme and assume there is only one good developer in a local area, the business most willing to pay the price will get that person. Those not willing to pay the price are not demand, and thus don't necessitate supply.
A shortage, by definition, is a scenario where price is unable to rise. For instance, where the government enforces a price ceiling. In my local jurisdiction that happens for medical care providers. A shortage of doctors is very much possible. It is less clear what could cause a shortage of developers.
Having said that, there is another way to increase the supply: Attract others (back) into industry. There are plenty of people who find themselves doing other, perhaps more lucrative, things that would be suitable for the kinds of jobs these companies seek. For the right amount you can attract them into these jobs, but without better offers there is no incentive for them to stop doing what they are already doing.
> The claim is the supply is inelastic in the short term.
That is correct, and it may be true. The reason I'm very skeptical is that we have been hearing this same spiel for 5 years at least. If companies are unwilling to raise salaries short-term, it will not incentivize long-term migration into this sector.
If you substitute "programmers" with "widgets", it is obvious what is going on here. Companies want "trade" (immigration) barriers lowered so they can get their widgets more easily and at a lower price. They don't care whether their widgets come from endogeneous US production or from abroad, so long as it is at a minimal price. Best of all for them if there are tons of widgets available both domestically and internationally, so that the price will be minimal.
Agreed. My big problem with the H1B isn't that increases immigration, but that it does this in a very narrow way that distorts markets.
For instance, suppose that land can be used to grow either lemons or avocados. Avocados suddenly become very popular and fetch a high price. Land that was formerly used to grow lemons is now used to grow avocados. So the price of a lemon now reflects the opportunity cost of not growing an avocado.
Because people can no longer get lemons at the price they used to pay, or at a 50% markup, they claim there is a "shortage" of lemons. They create an immigration system where someone is allowed to come into the US and farm land - on the condition that they grow lemons. The immigrant is not allowed to grow avocados, nor is the immigrant allowed to do something other than farming. You're here to grow lemons buddy, because there's a shortage of lemons. Ok, fine, grow lemons for 7 years, and we'll give you freedom, but only after you've made a massive investment in setting up a lemon operation and costs of changing would be high.
What this does is ensure that absolutely nobody with the freedom to decide what to grow will ever grow lemons. It will also ensure that the price of lemons will never reflect the opportunity cost, so the market signals that would bring prices back into equilibrium, encouraging people who can choose to grow avocados instead will now be suppressed.
This is why a lot of people have no problem with immigration, but are opposed to "employer sponsored" (corporate controlled) immigration designed to fill specific shortages. What these programs end up doing is creating market distortions that make long term problems even worse, all while limiting personal freedom.
It's not that hard to solve, just say that immigrants are free to study what they wish and work in what fields they wish. Employers don't get a say in this. If they aren't offering pay and work conditions strong enough to draw immigrants into programming, any more than for people born here, fine. I see absolutely no reason let corporations tell immigrants they have to be programmers rather than real estate agents, lawyers, nurses, drywall installers, or sandwich shop owners, just so employers can get to hire programmers at salaries that aren't good enough to draw people with freedom into the field.
Very interesting argument. While the "serfdom" aspect of this is definitely morally repugnant, the most optimistic interpretation I can see for the H1B program is that it is supposedly a way to encourage or select for immigrants with high economic value.
It absolutely does distort the market, but if we are under a political constraint that we can only have X immigrants per year, it does make sense to take the ones that will be working in high-wage sectors, if we are out to maximize GDP.
> It will also ensure that the price of lemons will never reflect the opportunity cost, so the market signals that would bring prices back into equilibrium
Hm, I'm not sure. It seems like restricted immigration would basically move the supply curve for lemons to the right by decreasing cost of wages for lemons (only). Then because avocados are competing for the same land, avocado supply curve will move left.
The result will be more lemons at a lower price and less avocados at a higher price, but they will both still be in "equilibrium". In either case, the rate of return per unit land should be equal for both avocados and lemons, yes?
It seems the main effect of interest to us would be that wages for avocado-growing employees would be higher and lemon-growing employees lower under a restricted immigration policy vs an unlimited one. So, back to reality, I have never thought about the fact that H1Bs are actually good for everyone else's wages (outside the affected sectors) compared to unrestricted immigration.
If we concerned about "fairness", we could note that it might therefore also be more morally sound to restrict immigration to high-wage jobs because it would actually compress wage inequality and the low-wage natives would benefit. The losers in this scenario are high-skill natives and low-skill foreigners.
Yes, your last point is astute. Sandwich shop owners, for instance, benefit from the presence of more people here to buy sandwiches but who are prohibited by visa restrictions from entering the sandwich shop business.
In theory, we all benefit from more immigration. Yes, some of the immigrants will compete directly with us for jobs and customers, but others will provide us with services and be clients and customers. Again, in theory, the increased economies of scale leave everyone better off.
The thing is, job-specific immigration restrictions don't allow the market to work properly. If immigration forces people to be programmers, then homegrown programmers will be disproportionally affected by immigration. Sorry for no cite, but I did read a study suggesting that programmers are one of the few educated groups in the US whose wages may have diminished because of immigration. I don't think this would have happened had immigration been "free", because immigrants would be able to respond to market signals and spread into the general workforce in the way I described above. So I don't "blame" immigration per se, I blame the highly coercive nature of the program.
As to high vs low skill... yes, this would impact high skill workers more, but I think the distortions would would be manageable as long as we kept the definition of "high skill" very general. I think the H1B visa is too narrowly defined, and too dominated by high tech, to qualify as the more general "high skill" approach that would avoid these kinds of market distortions.
[1] I find some merit to this, but I do believe there are costs associated with very high levels of immigration that are often left out of this kind of analysis.
Oh, my. If you had said "average GDP per capita" or "total real GDP" or even "many people" better off, OK. Free immigration is very much like free trade: it makes the system as a whole more efficient, but there definitely are winners and losers in the process. In the limiting case of 1 immigrant, employees in that immigrant's field lose (slightly), and everyone else wins, including that immigrant's employer.
So, in my view, these things should be controlled in such a way to try to make sure the winners aren't people already winning and vice-versa. But not to the point of cutting off our nose to spite our face; there is this tradeoff between equity and efficiency.
> If immigration forces people to be programmers, then homegrown programmers will be disproportionally affected by immigration...I don't think this would have happened had immigration been "free"
Well, I agree, and this is pretty close to a tautology. As the "high-skill natives" in an H1B field, we're the primary losers from the policy, whereas most people benefit.
I'm coming at this from the assumption that there is some number of immigrants per year, X, that society is willing to tolerate. Would we prefer X Albert Einsteins or X random people? You are arguing that the former would cause a market distortion; maybe true, but still preferable, I'd say.
And I think that it doesn't really matter whether immigrants are enslaved to a particular company, or whether they're simply selected for a particular set of skills. If you allow only programmer immigrants, most of them will program, whether or not they're required to, because their alternative is unskilled labor.
> I think the H1B visa is too narrowly defined
I agree, but that's the power of lobbying for you. Actually I'm not in programming per se, but science (with computing aspects). Tons of H1Bs here for science as well.
It would make more sense if it were defined by salary rather than field, although may be hard to implement.
Interesting points. I generally agree, though I'll expand on it a bit anyway.
For starters, yes, I agree that "everyone better off" isn't the right way to put this. Not much to discuss there, I agree for the reasons you've outlined.
Your second part, though, about the filter. While I would prefer a system that allows programmer immigrants to leave the field and enter other fields if they choose to, this freedom has limited value if immigrants are forced to make heavy up front investments in STEM education as a condition of entering the US. Agreed, If you only allow programmer immigrants, it's likely that most of them will continue to program.
This is particularly true if the sunk cost is heavy. For instance, there's a lot of talk of "stapling a green card" to every MS or PhD in a STEM field. While this would leave immigrants free to pursue other fields after getting their degrees, it requires immigrants to make a huge up front investment in a STEM education.
For example, imagine if we said "there's a shortage of lawyers, therefore, we will staple a green card to all law degrees earned by international students. But of course, these students are free to pursue whatever path they wish after they receive their law degree and pass the bar."
That's better than not allowing it, but we'd have forced everyone to go through a $150,000+ law degree as a cost of coming to the US, as well as giving up 3 years of their life. Options are now considerably more limited.
It's a similar thing for STEM degrees. I read a study of the value add of a MS degree, and it turns out that engineering and STEM MS degrees, while valuable compared to arts and humanities MA degrees, really don't pay like JDs or MBAs, or various Medical MS degrees (let alone MD degrees).
In short, it's rational to avoid getting an MS in a STEM field, because pay and working conditions aren't as good as the options highly talented students can find in other fields. If these workers were really as critical and hard to find as businesses claim, they'd be paid as well as MBA, Medical MD/MS, and JD holders.
However there's a big difference in the equation once someone has already been forced to obtain one of these degrees as a condition of living and working in the US. It may be more rational to get a JD or MBA instead of an MS in Engineering, but it may not be rational to get one once you've put the years and effort into getting that MS. At that point, it may be more rational to just work as an engineer.
This is why I oppose efforts to allow corporations to control the conditions under which immigrants are allowed to come to the US. It's not enough to grant a green card once that person is hired, because it still allows corporations to force immigrants into a high up front cost.
As you've said, though, that's the power of lobbying. I enjoy discussing and debating this on HN, but large powerful corporations are likely to get their way. I have no illusions about ever changing this. Probably the real take-away/lesson is that if you have the freedom to choose your job path, you might want to avoid the ones corporations can force immigrants into. Ironically, in other words, if you hear corporations talking about a "shortage" in a field, it may be rational to avoid that field if you're a citizen with freedom to choose your job and educational path.
One area where I may disagree with you a bit is on the Einstein thing. I consider this a bit of a red herring. There aren't 80,000+ Einsteins coming into the country every year, and there isn't much disagreement that we should allow in all the "Einsteins". Even ardent opponents of the H1B visa absolutely agree that there are a few thousand individuals who should be allowed in. This tends to be around he EB-1 visa, which again, really isn't controversial.
> I enjoy discussing and debating this on HN, but large powerful corporations are likely to get their way.
Haha, so true. I think it's fun and worthwhile to at least figure out what's going on. At some point I have transitioned my interest in politics from "I want to change the world for the better!" to a more detached, curiosity-based position.
WRT STEM MS, my understanding is that in "hard" engineering (electrical, mechanical, etc), MS is economically worthwhile. In science and probably math, it is useless, you need a Ph.D. Not sure the breakdown for CS. In general, there is always a salary increase for each level of education, but the difference b/t fields is in how many years it will take to "pay back" the investment.
But more generally, I'm not completely sure what you're proposing as the ideal solution here. When you say:
> This is why I oppose efforts to allow corporations to control the conditions under which immigrants are allowed to come to the US
Do you mean you oppose "chaining" to a particular company, selection of particular skillsets, or what? Are you saying you support an immigration quota with no particular selection criteria (minus specific "Einstein" exceptions)?
Much of your argument seems to boil down to the idea that it's unfair to would-be immigrants to make them sink costs in education to have an uncertain shot at coming to the U.S. Maybe, but that has no bearing on what is in the U.S.'s (i.e., median US voter's) best interests.
> Ironically, in other words, if you hear corporations talking about a "shortage" in a field, it may be rational to avoid that field if you're a citizen with freedom to choose your job and educational path.
Yes!!! This was my takeaway as well. "Shortage" talk is a giveaway that a sector is trying to apply some kind of pressure to reduce salaries in that sector. Even in a field like nursing, where there is supposedly a "shortage", but there is no prospect of getting immigration to fill the gap, what is happening is they are trying to sucker young people into this field in which the salary is simply too low after you account for all the headaches like weird hours, stress, etc.
Such an "odd" correlation that the fields with so-called "shortages" are always ones with higher than median salary-to-education ratio.
But perhaps it is not so clear. Because there would be no "shortage" talk in the first place unless the job were already economically attractive. The rational decision probably depends on how successful you expect the sector to be in bringing down the sector's wage towards the national median.
Another thing you've helped me realize in the course of this conversation is that all the talk of "job creation", as if the number of jobs is a static thing independent of wage, is totally ridiculous. "We need policy change X to create jobs in sector Y" is code for "we want to reduce salaries in sector Y". In this regard "job creation" may be regarded as equivalent in goals and deceptiveness to "shortage".
> One area where I may disagree with you a bit is on the Einstein thing. I consider this a bit of a red herring.
I meant "Einstein" to be a stand-in for "person with high potential economic/cultural/scientific value". The implicit question was, should we maximize immigration for highest value-per-immigrant (however that is defined), or should we select random immigrants?
We can't even get enough qualified resumes. Pay doesn't even come into play. And my associate engineers make more dough than my parents ever did.
You should try hiring once, before dropping such simplistic statements.
The upcoming H1B squeeze won't help.
White CS grads do. not. want. to work in boring tech such as QA, etc.
Remove Eastern Europeans and Asians and we're back to outsourcing whole departments to their home countries.
That's reality.
The US is utterly failing in creating enough homegrown talent, university education is far too expensive, everything below is useless as there is no good education available below.
Just a little bit more and some other country/region will take that whole business, that's how the economy works. Unlimited salaries never happens.
What do you define as "qualified"? We're swimming in qualified resumes. I'd say about 50% of the 200 or so applications we have received in the past few months are passed on to a phone screen. A disturbing number fail there, but the pipeline isn't the problem.
That's the problem. :) This has been beaten to death, but I'll say it again: the interview process of most companies are designed to weed out all but the top 1% of applicants nation wide. If you're not paying as much as Amazon and Google are, but you're recruiting and interviewing exclusively from the same candidate pool, then you're going to have a bad time finding 'qualified' candidates.
Says who? It might be you are bad at promoting your openings or you have a bad reputation on Glassdoor. It also might be that you use the word 'qualified' without knowing what it means. If you expect someone else to have done all the training for you so you just buy the finished product, you're the problem. Do you look at universities as the produce aisle or the bakery?
QA is a function that is distinct from development and both are distinct from operations. SRE and DevOps are merging development and operations. QA is disappearing because of automated testing. It is a separate career track altogether and is usually significantly less lucrative than development.
People have weird feelings about certain markets. Examples include housing, labour, health care, and education. These weird feelings result in irrational behaviour and irrational claims like "there is a tech shortage" when prices aren't rising to compensate.
Comparison to your parents salary or the salary of any other industry is a red herring. The market always clears if participants are willing to pay market price. Your refusal to pay market price might be why you have trouble filling your resume funnel.
They are, and frankly it shows. Someday we're going to realise that (especially for tools that the developers can't or won't dogfood extensively) it's a terrible loss.
I have hired. I allow remote work though and pay going rate for devs. I understand however that hiring remote isn't a realistic option for all.
"We can't even get enough qualified resumes"
Why? What are your qualification requirements? Where are you located?
A lot of devs won't waste their time applying if pay isn't listed and if your qualifications requirements are steep.
I agree with CS grads. Out the gate many want to work in a start up or a Google. Let them go through that for a few years.
I also agree with "university education is far too expensive". I actually like the bootcamp concept to get new developers started. That coupled with a year or 2 of hands-on experience can be a good investment imo. Problem is, I see many companies trying to hire for senior dev skills but at bootcamp grad pay.
Developers and 'QA' were the same people at the best companies I've worked at.
That solves that ridiculous 'prestige' problem you mentioned which is really just diva-developer behavior of a different flavor. If someone can't/won't write a test for a feature they've developed or fix the test suite when it breaks, I don't want to work with them.
There's a reason CS (race not relevant) won't do borning "tech". They have a computer science degree. If you want to pay someone to do a low skill task, hire a low skill person. There's a glut of humanities majors that would probably do better at QA type tasks than CS people just because they're more skilled at soft-skills like communication. They cost half as much to boot.
The credential fetish is the blight poisoning the tech industry. You don't need the best and the brightest to build and test your basic CRUD app.
> White CS grads do. not. want. to work in boring tech such as QA, etc.
Speaking as a longtime QA professional, if engineering teams want to interest and retain good people in QA, then stop. crapping. on. QA. people.
That means equal pay for equal talent. That means building career growth paths for testers to become SDETs or other QA specializations. That means any dev who talks down to QA gets to have a nice little conversation with their manager and HR about professional respect in the workplace.
Outside of a few die-hards, the software industry is not going to get good QA people until that happens.
I'm finding it's not a lack of qualified resumes, but a lack of qualified interviewers. I've encountered:
- the I've done this too many times to bother detailing what I'm asking code challenge
- the obscure hack I came up with, can you guess it? code challenge
- "You're excellent at UI code (for a UI role), but we're not sure you'll pass the code challenge because it's sorting algorithms, etc"
- backend coder as dev team manager doubting the need for proper UI/UX code for their 1.9 star-rated mobile app ("good product is a luxury")
- "we don't hire unicorns" (I have 15+ years of code experience, but I've designed for 20+)
- "Where do you see yourself in the future? Product manager? Engineers can't do that, so nevermind."
- "You shouldn't say you're here to learn the industry so you can start your own company someday. I mean, I'm cool with it, but other managers might not like it."
I'm not posting this list to complain, only to point out bugs. FWIW, I have also had very good interviews that didn't work out for rational reasons.
> We can't even get enough qualified resumes. Pay doesn't even come into play
So you aren't stating the salary range on the job ads? If you want to entice people to move from their current job you have to pay better and they have to know that.
Bingo! This falsehood needs to be quashed. There are too many stories of companies using this as an excuse to rid themselves of having to pay for the pensions of their current workforce. Just look at say Disney bringing in foreign workers under the h1b visa program (meaning they can't find qualified devs) and then turn around and have the existing dev employees train them before being let go, as an example.
One question: For the people hiring, do they pay enough for an employee to buy a house within a 20 minute commute to the office, support a family, and save for retirement?
Bingo!! In my particular location, companies try and hire devs for $25/hr but the average starter home is $500k. Then they wonder why all of the talent leaves.
I'm upper 30's, married, with kids.. There is no way in hell I'm applying for a job in SV no matter the pay (well, maybe if it looked like a phone number, but that is not realistic)..
Grooming newly trained engineers to be comfortable with a proprietary tech stack, a particular delivery cadence and a company’s cultural values results in a shorter and more seamless onboarding process and quicker contributions to the team.
I.e. "We want interchangeable developers to slot into our process, rather than people who arrive with established ideas and -- probably -- a desire for some degree of autonomy.
rather than people who arrive with established ideas
If those established ideas conflict with the prevailing mindset at $COMPANY and - more importantly - aren't objectively better by a sufficient margin, then it might make sense to not want that person around. Especially if they're going to spend a lot of energy and time creating conflict, arguing with other people, creating controversy, etc.
and -- probably -- a desire for some degree of autonomy.
I've been there, and in hindsight, I was an asshole about it. I've come to realize that if you're part of a team (and a company is a team of sorts) there are limits on how much autonomy you can really have. On the flipside, I believe the core responsibility of higher leadership is to create a vision and direction, and get people to buy into moving towards that vision, as opposed to simply leading by fiat. But if a given player is constantly rowing in the opposite direction, or even perpendicular, to the direction of everybody else, they're causing problems and you might actually be better off without them.
That just made me a day. My searching for a job is generally like this: I send a CV, then there is a short call (or email) with this one question at the end: "How much do you want?". Then I usually don't want to reply, but I got convinced with "I cannot go with you further without this information".
So I give them some number, usually something like I'm getting at that moment.
Then I get no reply or "we cannot pay you that much".
The last time I got that from a huge international company, where I really wanted to work. That company has been publishing the same job offers for the last year. I wrote something that I expected maybe some proposal from there side, etc. The answer was really funny "we are not negotiating salaries at this moment of the process".
And all that was even before any technical interview.
And that company is still publishing the same job offers :)
So I'm really confused. I have over 15 years of experience in many different areas, and still the recruitment process is so broken that only sometimes I can get to the technical interview.
> The answer was really funny "we are not negotiating salaries at this moment of the process" [...] And all that was even before any technical interview.
I wouldn't expect any company to start a salary negotiation prior to interviews - because how you perform in the interviews is going to drastically impact how willing they are to negotiate with you.
A company that is struggling to fill all the jobs they need filled doesn't have much of a bargaining position to begin with. May as well get it out of the way and save everyone some time if it is found to not agreeable. Imagine going through several interviews and then still told "we can't afford you".
In fact, companies that are struggling to find people should be advertising how much they can pay right from the job ad. If it is sufficient, it will help attract the talent they seek. Plenty of developers don't bother looking for new work because they believe, rightly or wrongly, it means taking a pay cut. If not sufficient, at least everyone can be saved the effort of trying.
You're not McDonalds who has a new applicant to hire every five minutes. You can't play by their rules.
The problem is different, this question is before any interview. This is the main main thing they want to know just before any technical talk. I wouldn't name a short call with some non-technical person where I just read my CV an interview.
Wouldn't you rather know as soon as possible that they can't pay you what you want to be paid? Isn't spending days or weeks in interviews, or waiting for an answer, only then to hear that they can only pay you a pittance, worse?
While this article is mostly fluff, I question the comparison to a "farm team". Few players from farm teams ever make it to the big leagues. Assuming the comparison is similar in this case, what happens to the tech workers who have just invested a year of their lives learning some proprietary stack and incorporating themselves into a company's culture and get let go because they didn't make the cut? That won't look great on a resume. Also, what metrics will they use? Will people move into permanent positions based on performance reviews? Hopefully they don't apply the same old-hat ideas to these groups and try to rethink how they grow their teams from the ground up.
Also, I'm not really sure how this differs from hiring interns to test them out before going full time? It just feels like the same thing with a snazzy name.
Hmmm. So, they're saying they should hire people with basic training in the necessary skills but who did not hatch out of the egg already knowing everything they will ever need to know. They then imagine they might need to invest time and energy into something I will refer to as 'training' that will help those people reach full productivity over time. And, they will risk that some of them might not work out perfectly.
This is truly shocking and innovative. Maybe they could come up with something so we can move heavy loads without using rollers and a way to prepare food so we don't have to eat it raw.
/snark
If you needed evidence that SV occupies a hermetically sealed mental bubble, there's your sign.
I don't get this train of thought...Why minorities? should it not be - hire the best for the job? (and if you don't get the best, then you are not paying well enough?)
Not trying to be sarcastic, just wanted to know a more in-depth view point.
If that's the case, then say it. We don't believe in diverse work environments. We don't care if every employee is a white male. They asked for diversity, this is how you get it.
Not trying to be sarcastic, but your argument assumes a meritocracy.
Companies hire the best college graduates. Colleges take the best high schoolers. The best high schools are in rich, mostly white areas. Who's to blame?
Most CEO's, founders, and senators are white men. Either it's not a meritocracy or white supremacy is real.
I believe it's not a meritocracy. More opportunity for minorities is one step in fixing this.
It sounds like you're saying meritocracies won't hire minority candidates because they won't measure up. This is blatantly false. A few of the brightest guys I know are minorities and they were hired because they were smart as hell.
> The best high schools are in rich, mostly white areas. Who's to blame?
The system of government where school funding is tied to local taxes. Always blame the root cause, don't try to gaffer tape society into something you want.
"There are more than half a million open computing jobs in America today"
What does this even mean? Doesn't basic economics tell us about supply and demand. At a low salary, demand for developers will be high, and supply will be low. At a high salary, demand will be lower, and supply will be higher.
What does this "half a million openings" say other than that the supply and demand curves are out of whack because employers aren't paying enough?
There's another little problem here - being a software developer, even one of those "CRUD" developers, is actually very difficult. Just try getting a basic web app with a database back end and a new fangled javascript framework running. Now get specs from a client. Host it on a server. Keep the server up and running. Fix bugs. Make estimates. Deal with business requirements that don't fit easily into the technical framework. Negotiate, explain, do demos. Upgrade as your javascript framework goes out of date every 6 months. Realize that the upgrade requires massive refactoring. Add developers and bring them up to speed, use git properly. Do code reviews, explain difficult sections to a group at the whiteboard. Articulate complex logic and how it relates to business requirements. Track down and fix obscure server log errors. Migrate data. Migrate it back when the new data structure doesn't work...
This takes substantial reading comprehension, presentation skills, business acumen, writing, negotiating. People who can do this well and are free to choose their procession without fear of deportation really do have a lot of options. They don't have to be software developers.
Now, ask them to work in a big open office with limited autonomy and middling salaries (really - out here in SF, the median salary for an application developer is a little more than for a dental hygienist, and less than a registered nurse[1]). Don't be surprised if people with choice choose other fields. It really isn't a head scratcher.
All in all? Being a dev is an OK job, it can be a rational choice to become a developer, but I don't see anything close to the kind of gap that would have me scratching my head about a "shortage" of developers or worrying about "a half a million unfilled jobs." Honestly, every observation I have suggests that people with the ability to become devs may be rationally choosing to do other things, as you'd expect in a free labor market (note - many of the people who work as devs in the bay area are not free members of the labor market, they are required to work as devs as a condition of living in the US - this may be partly why the market hasn't adjusted).
[1] I've learned that I should always add this bit - I have no objection to nurses being paid well, more than devs. And I'm aware the salaries are higher for nurses in the Bay Area, devs often earn more in other regions - however, the Bay Area is ground zero for this supposed "shortage", so I think it's reasonable to consider regional salaries here.
> What does this even mean? Doesn't basic economics tell us about supply and demand. At a low salary, demand for developers will be high, and supply will be low. At a high salary, demand will be lower, and supply will be higher.
It means, "we're trying to convince people to get into this field because then supply will increase and we will have to pay less". Obviously, any individual company could fill as many positions as it wanted if the price were right.
You are quite right that "half a million open jobs" is a meaningless statement missing a variable, like quantifying speed by saying my sailboat moved 500 meters.
Calling this is a "farm team" is completely bullshit. It's an apprenticeship on an existing team.
If it was truly a "farm team", it would be a completely separate group working on a different product. Now, that would actually be something interesting to try. Throw together 2 senior level developers as "coaches" and 20 new grads all on a team working on stuff that the other dev teams don't have time for. They could be fixing bugs in products owned by another team, or working on their own completely separate projects.
I'd love to see a big company try something like that!
What I see is a lot of companies building essentially the same systems. I suspect this is because they can almost find enough people willing to work on it. Or maybe they feel like they can't find tools that do what they need.
About half of my jobs have had huge chunks of the work that felt like the same problem space.
Having multiple companies work on similar things is true of every industry. There isn't a soda glut because both pepsi, coke, and many others make soda which is very similar.
89 comments
[ 9.4 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadRight now I live in a big city but I want to move out to the country. Well, lots of places in the country don't even have cable or dsl. You can only get "wireless" internet which is shit.
So yeah, until it's easy to get broadband even out in the country, I don't think remote work is going to catch on. Because if you live in a city, you're probably just going to get a non-remote job. Half the advantages for working remotely is that it allows you to live out in the country, but without good internet, a big chunk of remote work is just not doable.
> You can only get "wireless" internet which is shit.
Depends on where you are. WISPs with a microwave connection are usually faster than cable, if run properly. More and more of them are popping up in rural areas because you don't have the high cost of running cable or fiber.
Are you in the US? I ask because I'm suprised that not everywhere gets cable of ADSL (I'm in Scotland, and many places have fibre. It's really rare not to have access to at least ADSL nowadays, even for somewhere fairly remote).
As I see it, one of the advantages of working remotely is that I'm not constrained to jobs and salaries on offer in my city.
My guess is that it's another way to hire people who don't know what they're worth and underpay them for a few years until the employees figure it out. Kind of like what the industry already does with new grads.
Increase the salary of what you are paying in order to attract more qualified devs.
"they're reinvesting the money saved from hiring less-expensive engineers to create "farm teams" within their organizations"
Aha! It is not about being able to "find suitable technology candidates" it is about being able to acquire "less-expensive engineers"
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of companies investing in apprenticeship programs but let's call it what it is. Not a talent shortage but a willing to pay top dollar shortage.
It's going to be buggy and not scale, but it can still do stuff.
In my last week I told a director there, who was my manager when I first started that 'you guys don't pay enough for good devs' and he looked at me like I pissed in his Cheerios, I think I hit a nerve.
Since then they've had another purge of overpaid project managers and analysts and are now trying to train up the remaining people there to be developers. It is a completely pathetic endeavor from what I've heard from the people that I still know there. It sounds like the farm team is not working for them.
EDIT:
The first paragraph of this article is straight out of la-la-land. In any market, if there is really a shortage of a good, the price of it would rise to the point where supply met demand. So why is the price of tech talent not rising (consequently demand falling) to the point where the existing supply meets demand?
A half a million open computing jobs. LOL. It's pointless to claim you have an open job you can't fill when you're not willing to pay what the market is demanding. I'll hire someone for a dollar an hour to do my personal web site. Should that count among these half a million open jobs? It's just as serious an opportunity as most of them.
I think the premise is reasonable. Why do you need a $5000 Ferrari? Is it to transport you from one place to another? Because then another car would do. And I think that's what this article is saying about these companies. They believe they can ignore all those Ferrari devs out there because they can build their own that will reasonably do the same thing at a price that is "suitable" for the company's needs.
EDIT: typo
These companies have created their own shortage by insisting they will only hire the top 1% and be unwilling to invest in anyone less 'capable' regardless of the quality of their so-called filter at identifying talent. So now they have 'discovered' the concept of actually helping people they would have ignored yesterday to grow into the talent they need (and absorbing the marginal costs of that investment). An idea boldly entering the 1950s as an innovation.
The revolving door hiring in SV has maxed out with virtually all the 'suitable' talent in play and still many openings unfilled despite plenty of reasonably capable but sub-superstar talent pushed to the margins. The lid has been maintained on salaries mostly by agreements between the usual suspects, not market forces. The fact is that many perfectly good developers will be ignored by SV at any price and that's now biting the companies hard.
There's a supply curve, there's a demand curve, and QS/QD/price are set by where they intersect. The fallacy in this article (and in your first paragraph) is pretending that the supply curve for programmers is vertical; i.e., that the same amount of people would be programmers (i.e., QS), no matter the salary. Patently false. For that matter, demand being inelastic is false as well which is what GP is pointing out with his website job.
AFAIK, shortages only exist if either price or quantity produced is held static by some external force.
There is no shortage here. The demand curve for programmers is just such that employers are unwilling to pay for the quantity they SAY they'd like. The very nature of demand curve is such that the people who are willing to pay most will get the item "first", no shortage required.
Side rant: Directed at many posts already in this tree. Economics 101 does not describe any real market and the labor market is about as unreal as it gets. Developers are not interchangeable goods, and the flexibility in supply is almost non-existent. There will not be 100 new universities founded this fall to 'sell' into this 'market'. The market for DaVinci's would never clear if he were alive in a way that would make all buyers happy. Not. Going. To. Happen.
Suppose then there are really two markets here: one for "good" programmers and one for "mediocre" ones. My rejoinder still holds if it is really the case that they can only do with good programmers and not mediocre ones (doubtful). And since it is presumably possible to transition from non-programmer to mediocre to good with effort, the fact that "not enough" people are doing so still implies the price is not high enough.
I am mainly taking umbrage at your use of "shortage". The preferences of the market participants themselves are certainly not an external force. I think we should not concede to them that there is a shortage when there is not because then they go on to use that as justification for all kinds of counterproductive legislative proposals.
BTW, more than half of Keynes' GTEIM is about employment. The original question impelling modern economics is "how do we get to full employment? and what does that mean anyway"? Of course the model is an approximation. But don't use "economics" to justify an argument and then turn around and say economics doesn't model the real world.
> The fact is that they could offer $1,000,000 starting salaries tomorrow and the pool of 'qualified' applicants would not change because salary is not the determining factor here.
OK. I think this is the core of the matter. Let's assume the number of "qualified" programmers is fixed over the short term.
The market is made of actors/companies. If a company wants more of the qualified programmers, and they pay $1M starting salary, that company will get them. And then the market price will rise. The fact that it hasn't risen to $1M implies the companies don't really want them that badly.
And in the long term, a price raise would encourage more programmers to become qualified and the problem would be rectified. But if what you are saying is true, and they really only want Stanford grads or equivalents, why would they care about H1Bs? It's not. They want to keep the price down.
Even if we assumed the number of qualified programmers were constant, there would be no more of a "shortage" than there is a shortage of gold. We don't say there's a gold shortage even though its quantity is "fixed" and presumably everyone would like more of it if it were cheaper.
I think people make a stronger argument for a shortage in the labor market WRT doctors. In that case there is a cartel (the AMA) keeping the quantity artificially low. There is no such phenomenon in programming. There's nothing stopping a university hiring all top-notch CS profs and becoming the next CMU/Stanford, and charging students a bundle...if the price were right.
You don't believe there is ever a monetary point that you could convince them that development is a better deal than what they are currently doing? You don't think $1M, $100M, $1B wouldn't temp them in the least?
Which is why the parent says that rising price eliminates any superfluous demand.
If we take it to the logical extreme and assume there is only one good developer in a local area, the business most willing to pay the price will get that person. Those not willing to pay the price are not demand, and thus don't necessitate supply.A shortage, by definition, is a scenario where price is unable to rise. For instance, where the government enforces a price ceiling. In my local jurisdiction that happens for medical care providers. A shortage of doctors is very much possible. It is less clear what could cause a shortage of developers.
Having said that, there is another way to increase the supply: Attract others (back) into industry. There are plenty of people who find themselves doing other, perhaps more lucrative, things that would be suitable for the kinds of jobs these companies seek. For the right amount you can attract them into these jobs, but without better offers there is no incentive for them to stop doing what they are already doing.
That is correct, and it may be true. The reason I'm very skeptical is that we have been hearing this same spiel for 5 years at least. If companies are unwilling to raise salaries short-term, it will not incentivize long-term migration into this sector.
If you substitute "programmers" with "widgets", it is obvious what is going on here. Companies want "trade" (immigration) barriers lowered so they can get their widgets more easily and at a lower price. They don't care whether their widgets come from endogeneous US production or from abroad, so long as it is at a minimal price. Best of all for them if there are tons of widgets available both domestically and internationally, so that the price will be minimal.
For instance, suppose that land can be used to grow either lemons or avocados. Avocados suddenly become very popular and fetch a high price. Land that was formerly used to grow lemons is now used to grow avocados. So the price of a lemon now reflects the opportunity cost of not growing an avocado.
Because people can no longer get lemons at the price they used to pay, or at a 50% markup, they claim there is a "shortage" of lemons. They create an immigration system where someone is allowed to come into the US and farm land - on the condition that they grow lemons. The immigrant is not allowed to grow avocados, nor is the immigrant allowed to do something other than farming. You're here to grow lemons buddy, because there's a shortage of lemons. Ok, fine, grow lemons for 7 years, and we'll give you freedom, but only after you've made a massive investment in setting up a lemon operation and costs of changing would be high.
What this does is ensure that absolutely nobody with the freedom to decide what to grow will ever grow lemons. It will also ensure that the price of lemons will never reflect the opportunity cost, so the market signals that would bring prices back into equilibrium, encouraging people who can choose to grow avocados instead will now be suppressed.
This is why a lot of people have no problem with immigration, but are opposed to "employer sponsored" (corporate controlled) immigration designed to fill specific shortages. What these programs end up doing is creating market distortions that make long term problems even worse, all while limiting personal freedom.
It's not that hard to solve, just say that immigrants are free to study what they wish and work in what fields they wish. Employers don't get a say in this. If they aren't offering pay and work conditions strong enough to draw immigrants into programming, any more than for people born here, fine. I see absolutely no reason let corporations tell immigrants they have to be programmers rather than real estate agents, lawyers, nurses, drywall installers, or sandwich shop owners, just so employers can get to hire programmers at salaries that aren't good enough to draw people with freedom into the field.
It absolutely does distort the market, but if we are under a political constraint that we can only have X immigrants per year, it does make sense to take the ones that will be working in high-wage sectors, if we are out to maximize GDP.
> It will also ensure that the price of lemons will never reflect the opportunity cost, so the market signals that would bring prices back into equilibrium
Hm, I'm not sure. It seems like restricted immigration would basically move the supply curve for lemons to the right by decreasing cost of wages for lemons (only). Then because avocados are competing for the same land, avocado supply curve will move left.
The result will be more lemons at a lower price and less avocados at a higher price, but they will both still be in "equilibrium". In either case, the rate of return per unit land should be equal for both avocados and lemons, yes?
It seems the main effect of interest to us would be that wages for avocado-growing employees would be higher and lemon-growing employees lower under a restricted immigration policy vs an unlimited one. So, back to reality, I have never thought about the fact that H1Bs are actually good for everyone else's wages (outside the affected sectors) compared to unrestricted immigration.
If we concerned about "fairness", we could note that it might therefore also be more morally sound to restrict immigration to high-wage jobs because it would actually compress wage inequality and the low-wage natives would benefit. The losers in this scenario are high-skill natives and low-skill foreigners.
In theory, we all benefit from more immigration. Yes, some of the immigrants will compete directly with us for jobs and customers, but others will provide us with services and be clients and customers. Again, in theory, the increased economies of scale leave everyone better off.
The thing is, job-specific immigration restrictions don't allow the market to work properly. If immigration forces people to be programmers, then homegrown programmers will be disproportionally affected by immigration. Sorry for no cite, but I did read a study suggesting that programmers are one of the few educated groups in the US whose wages may have diminished because of immigration. I don't think this would have happened had immigration been "free", because immigrants would be able to respond to market signals and spread into the general workforce in the way I described above. So I don't "blame" immigration per se, I blame the highly coercive nature of the program.
As to high vs low skill... yes, this would impact high skill workers more, but I think the distortions would would be manageable as long as we kept the definition of "high skill" very general. I think the H1B visa is too narrowly defined, and too dominated by high tech, to qualify as the more general "high skill" approach that would avoid these kinds of market distortions.
[1] I find some merit to this, but I do believe there are costs associated with very high levels of immigration that are often left out of this kind of analysis.
Oh, my. If you had said "average GDP per capita" or "total real GDP" or even "many people" better off, OK. Free immigration is very much like free trade: it makes the system as a whole more efficient, but there definitely are winners and losers in the process. In the limiting case of 1 immigrant, employees in that immigrant's field lose (slightly), and everyone else wins, including that immigrant's employer.
So, in my view, these things should be controlled in such a way to try to make sure the winners aren't people already winning and vice-versa. But not to the point of cutting off our nose to spite our face; there is this tradeoff between equity and efficiency.
> If immigration forces people to be programmers, then homegrown programmers will be disproportionally affected by immigration...I don't think this would have happened had immigration been "free"
Well, I agree, and this is pretty close to a tautology. As the "high-skill natives" in an H1B field, we're the primary losers from the policy, whereas most people benefit.
I'm coming at this from the assumption that there is some number of immigrants per year, X, that society is willing to tolerate. Would we prefer X Albert Einsteins or X random people? You are arguing that the former would cause a market distortion; maybe true, but still preferable, I'd say.
And I think that it doesn't really matter whether immigrants are enslaved to a particular company, or whether they're simply selected for a particular set of skills. If you allow only programmer immigrants, most of them will program, whether or not they're required to, because their alternative is unskilled labor.
> I think the H1B visa is too narrowly defined
I agree, but that's the power of lobbying for you. Actually I'm not in programming per se, but science (with computing aspects). Tons of H1Bs here for science as well.
It would make more sense if it were defined by salary rather than field, although may be hard to implement.
For starters, yes, I agree that "everyone better off" isn't the right way to put this. Not much to discuss there, I agree for the reasons you've outlined.
Your second part, though, about the filter. While I would prefer a system that allows programmer immigrants to leave the field and enter other fields if they choose to, this freedom has limited value if immigrants are forced to make heavy up front investments in STEM education as a condition of entering the US. Agreed, If you only allow programmer immigrants, it's likely that most of them will continue to program.
This is particularly true if the sunk cost is heavy. For instance, there's a lot of talk of "stapling a green card" to every MS or PhD in a STEM field. While this would leave immigrants free to pursue other fields after getting their degrees, it requires immigrants to make a huge up front investment in a STEM education.
For example, imagine if we said "there's a shortage of lawyers, therefore, we will staple a green card to all law degrees earned by international students. But of course, these students are free to pursue whatever path they wish after they receive their law degree and pass the bar."
That's better than not allowing it, but we'd have forced everyone to go through a $150,000+ law degree as a cost of coming to the US, as well as giving up 3 years of their life. Options are now considerably more limited.
It's a similar thing for STEM degrees. I read a study of the value add of a MS degree, and it turns out that engineering and STEM MS degrees, while valuable compared to arts and humanities MA degrees, really don't pay like JDs or MBAs, or various Medical MS degrees (let alone MD degrees).
In short, it's rational to avoid getting an MS in a STEM field, because pay and working conditions aren't as good as the options highly talented students can find in other fields. If these workers were really as critical and hard to find as businesses claim, they'd be paid as well as MBA, Medical MD/MS, and JD holders.
However there's a big difference in the equation once someone has already been forced to obtain one of these degrees as a condition of living and working in the US. It may be more rational to get a JD or MBA instead of an MS in Engineering, but it may not be rational to get one once you've put the years and effort into getting that MS. At that point, it may be more rational to just work as an engineer.
This is why I oppose efforts to allow corporations to control the conditions under which immigrants are allowed to come to the US. It's not enough to grant a green card once that person is hired, because it still allows corporations to force immigrants into a high up front cost.
As you've said, though, that's the power of lobbying. I enjoy discussing and debating this on HN, but large powerful corporations are likely to get their way. I have no illusions about ever changing this. Probably the real take-away/lesson is that if you have the freedom to choose your job path, you might want to avoid the ones corporations can force immigrants into. Ironically, in other words, if you hear corporations talking about a "shortage" in a field, it may be rational to avoid that field if you're a citizen with freedom to choose your job and educational path.
One area where I may disagree with you a bit is on the Einstein thing. I consider this a bit of a red herring. There aren't 80,000+ Einsteins coming into the country every year, and there isn't much disagreement that we should allow in all the "Einsteins". Even ardent opponents of the H1B visa absolutely agree that there are a few thousand individuals who should be allowed in. This tends to be around he EB-1 visa, which again, really isn't controversial.
Haha, so true. I think it's fun and worthwhile to at least figure out what's going on. At some point I have transitioned my interest in politics from "I want to change the world for the better!" to a more detached, curiosity-based position.
WRT STEM MS, my understanding is that in "hard" engineering (electrical, mechanical, etc), MS is economically worthwhile. In science and probably math, it is useless, you need a Ph.D. Not sure the breakdown for CS. In general, there is always a salary increase for each level of education, but the difference b/t fields is in how many years it will take to "pay back" the investment.
But more generally, I'm not completely sure what you're proposing as the ideal solution here. When you say:
> This is why I oppose efforts to allow corporations to control the conditions under which immigrants are allowed to come to the US
Do you mean you oppose "chaining" to a particular company, selection of particular skillsets, or what? Are you saying you support an immigration quota with no particular selection criteria (minus specific "Einstein" exceptions)?
Much of your argument seems to boil down to the idea that it's unfair to would-be immigrants to make them sink costs in education to have an uncertain shot at coming to the U.S. Maybe, but that has no bearing on what is in the U.S.'s (i.e., median US voter's) best interests.
> Ironically, in other words, if you hear corporations talking about a "shortage" in a field, it may be rational to avoid that field if you're a citizen with freedom to choose your job and educational path.
Yes!!! This was my takeaway as well. "Shortage" talk is a giveaway that a sector is trying to apply some kind of pressure to reduce salaries in that sector. Even in a field like nursing, where there is supposedly a "shortage", but there is no prospect of getting immigration to fill the gap, what is happening is they are trying to sucker young people into this field in which the salary is simply too low after you account for all the headaches like weird hours, stress, etc.
Such an "odd" correlation that the fields with so-called "shortages" are always ones with higher than median salary-to-education ratio.
But perhaps it is not so clear. Because there would be no "shortage" talk in the first place unless the job were already economically attractive. The rational decision probably depends on how successful you expect the sector to be in bringing down the sector's wage towards the national median.
Another thing you've helped me realize in the course of this conversation is that all the talk of "job creation", as if the number of jobs is a static thing independent of wage, is totally ridiculous. "We need policy change X to create jobs in sector Y" is code for "we want to reduce salaries in sector Y". In this regard "job creation" may be regarded as equivalent in goals and deceptiveness to "shortage".
> One area where I may disagree with you a bit is on the Einstein thing. I consider this a bit of a red herring.
I meant "Einstein" to be a stand-in for "person with high potential economic/cultural/scientific value". The implicit question was, should we maximize immigration for highest value-per-immigrant (however that is defined), or should we select random immigrants?
You should try hiring once, before dropping such simplistic statements.
The upcoming H1B squeeze won't help. White CS grads do. not. want. to work in boring tech such as QA, etc. Remove Eastern Europeans and Asians and we're back to outsourcing whole departments to their home countries.
That's reality.
The US is utterly failing in creating enough homegrown talent, university education is far too expensive, everything below is useless as there is no good education available below.
Just a little bit more and some other country/region will take that whole business, that's how the economy works. Unlimited salaries never happens.
What do you define as "qualified"? We're swimming in qualified resumes. I'd say about 50% of the 200 or so applications we have received in the past few months are passed on to a phone screen. A disturbing number fail there, but the pipeline isn't the problem.
That's the problem. :) This has been beaten to death, but I'll say it again: the interview process of most companies are designed to weed out all but the top 1% of applicants nation wide. If you're not paying as much as Amazon and Google are, but you're recruiting and interviewing exclusively from the same candidate pool, then you're going to have a bad time finding 'qualified' candidates.
Says who? It might be you are bad at promoting your openings or you have a bad reputation on Glassdoor. It also might be that you use the word 'qualified' without knowing what it means. If you expect someone else to have done all the training for you so you just buy the finished product, you're the problem. Do you look at universities as the produce aisle or the bakery?
People have weird feelings about certain markets. Examples include housing, labour, health care, and education. These weird feelings result in irrational behaviour and irrational claims like "there is a tech shortage" when prices aren't rising to compensate.
Comparison to your parents salary or the salary of any other industry is a red herring. The market always clears if participants are willing to pay market price. Your refusal to pay market price might be why you have trouble filling your resume funnel.
They are, and frankly it shows. Someday we're going to realise that (especially for tools that the developers can't or won't dogfood extensively) it's a terrible loss.
Functional QA is the very first user of a new feature.
Automation handles the rest of the work.
But not having a human go through the software as it is intended is a mistake.
"We can't even get enough qualified resumes" Why? What are your qualification requirements? Where are you located?
A lot of devs won't waste their time applying if pay isn't listed and if your qualifications requirements are steep.
I agree with CS grads. Out the gate many want to work in a start up or a Google. Let them go through that for a few years.
I also agree with "university education is far too expensive". I actually like the bootcamp concept to get new developers started. That coupled with a year or 2 of hands-on experience can be a good investment imo. Problem is, I see many companies trying to hire for senior dev skills but at bootcamp grad pay.
That solves that ridiculous 'prestige' problem you mentioned which is really just diva-developer behavior of a different flavor. If someone can't/won't write a test for a feature they've developed or fix the test suite when it breaks, I don't want to work with them.
That's an odd metric to choose.
The credential fetish is the blight poisoning the tech industry. You don't need the best and the brightest to build and test your basic CRUD app.
Speaking as a longtime QA professional, if engineering teams want to interest and retain good people in QA, then stop. crapping. on. QA. people.
That means equal pay for equal talent. That means building career growth paths for testers to become SDETs or other QA specializations. That means any dev who talks down to QA gets to have a nice little conversation with their manager and HR about professional respect in the workplace.
Outside of a few die-hards, the software industry is not going to get good QA people until that happens.
- the I've done this too many times to bother detailing what I'm asking code challenge
- the obscure hack I came up with, can you guess it? code challenge
- "You're excellent at UI code (for a UI role), but we're not sure you'll pass the code challenge because it's sorting algorithms, etc"
- backend coder as dev team manager doubting the need for proper UI/UX code for their 1.9 star-rated mobile app ("good product is a luxury")
- "we don't hire unicorns" (I have 15+ years of code experience, but I've designed for 20+)
- "Where do you see yourself in the future? Product manager? Engineers can't do that, so nevermind."
- "You shouldn't say you're here to learn the industry so you can start your own company someday. I mean, I'm cool with it, but other managers might not like it."
I'm not posting this list to complain, only to point out bugs. FWIW, I have also had very good interviews that didn't work out for rational reasons.
So you aren't stating the salary range on the job ads? If you want to entice people to move from their current job you have to pay better and they have to know that.
Maybe they're also discovering they get the best signal from actually working together on real projects.
Grooming newly trained engineers to be comfortable with a proprietary tech stack, a particular delivery cadence and a company’s cultural values results in a shorter and more seamless onboarding process and quicker contributions to the team.
I.e. "We want interchangeable developers to slot into our process, rather than people who arrive with established ideas and -- probably -- a desire for some degree of autonomy.
If those established ideas conflict with the prevailing mindset at $COMPANY and - more importantly - aren't objectively better by a sufficient margin, then it might make sense to not want that person around. Especially if they're going to spend a lot of energy and time creating conflict, arguing with other people, creating controversy, etc.
and -- probably -- a desire for some degree of autonomy.
I've been there, and in hindsight, I was an asshole about it. I've come to realize that if you're part of a team (and a company is a team of sorts) there are limits on how much autonomy you can really have. On the flipside, I believe the core responsibility of higher leadership is to create a vision and direction, and get people to buy into moving towards that vision, as opposed to simply leading by fiat. But if a given player is constantly rowing in the opposite direction, or even perpendicular, to the direction of everybody else, they're causing problems and you might actually be better off without them.
So I give them some number, usually something like I'm getting at that moment.
Then I get no reply or "we cannot pay you that much".
The last time I got that from a huge international company, where I really wanted to work. That company has been publishing the same job offers for the last year. I wrote something that I expected maybe some proposal from there side, etc. The answer was really funny "we are not negotiating salaries at this moment of the process".
And all that was even before any technical interview.
And that company is still publishing the same job offers :)
So I'm really confused. I have over 15 years of experience in many different areas, and still the recruitment process is so broken that only sometimes I can get to the technical interview.
I wouldn't expect any company to start a salary negotiation prior to interviews - because how you perform in the interviews is going to drastically impact how willing they are to negotiate with you.
In fact, companies that are struggling to find people should be advertising how much they can pay right from the job ad. If it is sufficient, it will help attract the talent they seek. Plenty of developers don't bother looking for new work because they believe, rightly or wrongly, it means taking a pay cut. If not sufficient, at least everyone can be saved the effort of trying.
You're not McDonalds who has a new applicant to hire every five minutes. You can't play by their rules.
Also, I'm not really sure how this differs from hiring interns to test them out before going full time? It just feels like the same thing with a snazzy name.
This is truly shocking and innovative. Maybe they could come up with something so we can move heavy loads without using rollers and a way to prepare food so we don't have to eat it raw. /snark
If you needed evidence that SV occupies a hermetically sealed mental bubble, there's your sign.
Not trying to be sarcastic, just wanted to know a more in-depth view point.
Not trying to be sarcastic, but your argument assumes a meritocracy.
Companies hire the best college graduates. Colleges take the best high schoolers. The best high schools are in rich, mostly white areas. Who's to blame?
Most CEO's, founders, and senators are white men. Either it's not a meritocracy or white supremacy is real.
I believe it's not a meritocracy. More opportunity for minorities is one step in fixing this.
The system of government where school funding is tied to local taxes. Always blame the root cause, don't try to gaffer tape society into something you want.
What does this even mean? Doesn't basic economics tell us about supply and demand. At a low salary, demand for developers will be high, and supply will be low. At a high salary, demand will be lower, and supply will be higher.
What does this "half a million openings" say other than that the supply and demand curves are out of whack because employers aren't paying enough?
There's another little problem here - being a software developer, even one of those "CRUD" developers, is actually very difficult. Just try getting a basic web app with a database back end and a new fangled javascript framework running. Now get specs from a client. Host it on a server. Keep the server up and running. Fix bugs. Make estimates. Deal with business requirements that don't fit easily into the technical framework. Negotiate, explain, do demos. Upgrade as your javascript framework goes out of date every 6 months. Realize that the upgrade requires massive refactoring. Add developers and bring them up to speed, use git properly. Do code reviews, explain difficult sections to a group at the whiteboard. Articulate complex logic and how it relates to business requirements. Track down and fix obscure server log errors. Migrate data. Migrate it back when the new data structure doesn't work...
This takes substantial reading comprehension, presentation skills, business acumen, writing, negotiating. People who can do this well and are free to choose their procession without fear of deportation really do have a lot of options. They don't have to be software developers.
Now, ask them to work in a big open office with limited autonomy and middling salaries (really - out here in SF, the median salary for an application developer is a little more than for a dental hygienist, and less than a registered nurse[1]). Don't be surprised if people with choice choose other fields. It really isn't a head scratcher.
All in all? Being a dev is an OK job, it can be a rational choice to become a developer, but I don't see anything close to the kind of gap that would have me scratching my head about a "shortage" of developers or worrying about "a half a million unfilled jobs." Honestly, every observation I have suggests that people with the ability to become devs may be rationally choosing to do other things, as you'd expect in a free labor market (note - many of the people who work as devs in the bay area are not free members of the labor market, they are required to work as devs as a condition of living in the US - this may be partly why the market hasn't adjusted).
[1] I've learned that I should always add this bit - I have no objection to nurses being paid well, more than devs. And I'm aware the salaries are higher for nurses in the Bay Area, devs often earn more in other regions - however, the Bay Area is ground zero for this supposed "shortage", so I think it's reasonable to consider regional salaries here.
It means, "we're trying to convince people to get into this field because then supply will increase and we will have to pay less". Obviously, any individual company could fill as many positions as it wanted if the price were right.
You are quite right that "half a million open jobs" is a meaningless statement missing a variable, like quantifying speed by saying my sailboat moved 500 meters.
If it was truly a "farm team", it would be a completely separate group working on a different product. Now, that would actually be something interesting to try. Throw together 2 senior level developers as "coaches" and 20 new grads all on a team working on stuff that the other dev teams don't have time for. They could be fixing bugs in products owned by another team, or working on their own completely separate projects.
I'd love to see a big company try something like that!
What I see is a lot of companies building essentially the same systems. I suspect this is because they can almost find enough people willing to work on it. Or maybe they feel like they can't find tools that do what they need.
About half of my jobs have had huge chunks of the work that felt like the same problem space.