calliope@retrolemmy.com 6 months ago
The first sentence of the article shows the problem.
For years, we heard about the tech talent shortage — that there were a glut of jobs and not enough bodies to fill them.
I worked in tech for a long time, at a bunch of different companies, and I never once worked anywhere that there was a glut of jobs and “not enough bodies” to fill them.
The problem wasn’t ever “bodies,” which people have always misunderstood. It’s qualified workers.
The people going into these careers includes a large number of people who want the money but aren’t qualified do what we’re looking for.
a large number of people who want the money but aren’t qualified do what we’re looking for.
Sounds like these businesses should be training their employees instead of expecting the employees to train themselves.
College is a great scam because it puts the onus of training onto the worker, not the business. And like good useful idiots, the average person feels pride in being taken advantage of in this way.
One issue is that you can’t just take a person and train them. Not everyone will excel, so you want proven people instead of playing the lottery. It’s great because now only senior engineers get hired and nobody trains more of them, increasing the shortage so now they want to stay importing them.
Job shortage? Or too low pay?
And this is why I’m not worried about my job, but I do recommend people stay away unless they really like it. I’ve interviewed far too many people who just can’t hack it, yet they have multiple relevant jobs on their resume.
It’s not just that. HR departments (who, let’s be honest, were never exactly super-clear on what tech roles are or do because they’re busy with everything else) have been infected by AI to the point that no one can just see a job and apply for it unless they rearrange everything in the resume to match the job posting verbiage exactly.
Everyone who makes it past that hurdle are sorted lowest-to-highest salary requirements. Oh you have seventeen years experience? Fuck you. Everyone after that is sorted by age/race/ whatever. It’s the perfect system for fucking up tech hiring.
Unless you rebrand everything you do as AI. Then you’ll get 100 million dollars from Zuckabug. (It used to be “cloud” but that was a long time ago now). So the tech manager who knows what they’re looking for gets a bunch of applications from newbies who talk like AI is everything and they don’t want that.
It’s super fucked.
(…) I never once worked anywhere that there was a glut of jobs and “not enough bodies” to fill them.
I have. My first job wasn’t the worst at this but it happened to some extent. My last company had such a huge disparity between work and employees that every single one of their IT projects (dunno about the rest) was in constant state of delays, hotfixing and putting out fires. Things were so bad people were moved between projects on daily basis and at one point management decided to throw everyone in the department (including folks who just joined the company and newbies with little to no programming experience) to triage one of them.
That’s not to mention poaching team members from projects they promised more bodies to (only informing the client about the latter decision) and many other issues. They absolutely needed more people but the way the company is run does little to help with that.
The worst party? They’re still growing as a company while their burnout rate stays unchanged. So yeah, it’s a thing.
Its more than that; companies also continuously propagate the message of “shortage of workers” while continuing to raise the requirements for entry level positions more and more. It reaches a point where “entry level” is not attainable for most fresh grads to get experience, and keeps their starting wages (and continuing wages) very well depressed due to the high supply.
Its a very targeted campaign to make sure educated workers don’t get too many ideas of independence in their heads.
I knew of a company that listed an internal tool as a job requirement so they could claim a skill shortage and hire foreign workers. They coached them to put that tool on their resume.
That’s ridiculous.
I’m glad my company doesn’t mention specifics. We mention some details about our stack, but we’ve hired people with almost no experience in anything in our stack and we’ve been happy. We want competent professionals who are interested in learning our stack.
It’s a bit more nuanced than that. A lot of college grads I’ve interviewed come out expecting to be senior level when they don’t even have a basic foundation of IT. Don’t expect to get paid 6 figures right out of college when you have 0 experience and can’t even provide basic answers to questions that help desk people know. Colleges have lied to them that we(the IT industry) needs them and that they’re special. Show me you have the foundation before telling me how the industry works.
There’s a LOT of training you have to do to get a new grad up to speed. But they can go far once the first couple of years.
can’t even provide basic answers to questions that help desk people know
University is not a job training program though. A degree demonstrates that you have the skills to figure things out, not that you already have everything figured out. Even with decades of experience, it takes me a bit of time to spin up on a new library, framework, programming language, etc.
Companies are supposed to provide this training, not just to new hires, but to all employees. It does take a little extra time to teach new hires, but their salaries are also lower so it should balance out. And if they want to keep those employees around, then they should give them generous pay increases so they don’t just jump for a salary increase.
Sorry but a degree just demonstrates that you can pass exams and follow rules. Almost all new graduates I knew had a big ego, a lack of critical thinking, that combined in a massive Dunning Kruger effect. They are better middle management material than engineers. They can’t even RTFM, like c’mon. And AI is just making all this worse.
I don’t expect you to know everything, but while you’re in college you can still learn AD, spin up a server, make a domain. See the basics of a web server, see how HFWs work…the foundation of IT. Companies shouldn’t be paying you and paying to train you for learning things that, if you’re interested in this career path, you should have learned on your own.
Master in computer science
Doesn’t know how to restart a web server.
I don’t mean “doesn’t know the flavour of Linux” I mean doesn’t conceptually know what a web server is so can’t restart the service running on the box.
Yeah, it’s going to be a couple years before you break into the high earner. The problem is that silly valley was hiring tech grads at $300k total comp when money was cheap. Money isn’t cheap anymore.
Money isn’t cheap anymore.
money has literally never been cheaper. there’s literally never been a time when VC was more willing to invest in new ideas, because the existing stock market can’t grow any larger than it already is, given the way that consumer demand is dwindling.
At least in our university, web dev was an elective, not a required core CS class. It’s totally reasonable for them to not know how to deal w/ a web server when all they’ve done up to that point is algorithms.
We had a Ph.D work for us who struggled w/ that type of thing. They were absolutely brilliant in their niche (complex 3D modeling of fluid simulations), but integrating their work into our web stack was a nightmare for them (but fairly trivial for us). I asked them to structure their code in a way that would be easy for us to plug in to our web stack, and they looked at me like I was speaking Latin, when all I wanted was a simple entry-point with clearly defined inputs (give me a function to call that doesn’t need a bunch of magic numbers).
If you want a web dev, hire someone w/ web dev experience or be willing to teach them. Not everyone in CS has that experience.
The number of times I’ve had to just say “thank you for your time” and cut a interview shoot is way to much. Shit like this is way way to common.
AI money is stupid cheap if you know who to bullshit. And, y’know, have no principles.
Not to mention that many IT degrees are basically worthless as far as practical experience is concerned. You’d be better off spending $100k on certification training.
%100 agreed on that. The amount of on the job training I’ve got to put into fresh college grads is insane.
It doesn’t help that conpanies lie on their requirements in job postings. Even entry level retail jobs are asking for 2-3 years of retail experience. That’s just insulting to those with retail experience and an impossible “entry level” requirement. Leads people to just ignore any requirements.
How much is it that these companies don’t want to train. I have a time believing your job is so advanced and technical you couldn’t find someone qualified at any point.
Training people up would be a great idea when you have the attitude that you’re going to keep working there for 30 years. Those old “company man” jobs are all but gone. If you stay at a job 5 years, people start to wonder if there’s something wrong with you. That’s just starting to be enough time for training to be worth the investment.
If tech was unionized, and the union had the attitude that they are basically a trade guild that will build up your skills, that would change things.
In my experience there is a huge gap between those that are smart and enthusiastic and those that are just average. I consider myself part of the former group and I can’t blame coworkers for just doing their job and go home. But it means the gap just widens.
Average in my mind is what the hiring process should be looking for. I would think the average one is someone who gets the job done.
This has been my experience as well, since I started in community college in the early 2000s.
There is an unfortunately large difference in tech between a person who has an innate interest and someone who is checking the boxes to get and keep a job.
Both would get the job done wouldn’t they?
cole@lemdro.id 6 months ago
This is SO true. I’m hiring for a software engineer position right now. We’ve been looking for MONTHS. Recently, we’ve finally managed to fill the first head.
So many applicants just can’t even code. My company is not a place where you learn how to code, it’s a place where you learn all the stuff which you didn’t think you’d have to do as a software engineer.
We still have a qualified applicants shortage.
calliope@retrolemmy.com 6 months ago
This to me is actually the “secret” of software engineering: it’s frequently doing the stuff you didn’t think you’d have to do as a software engineer.
The hard part is often finding someone who can do both while also wanting to work at your company.
cole@lemdro.id 6 months ago
Hit me up if you want a job where you’ll be forced to learn about inter-satellite laser links (free space optics)!
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 6 months ago
You guys hiring remotely?