Nobody wants to foot the initial cost. "They'll just take another job elsewhere" is what I always hear, but employers never seem to recognize that junior devs choosing to move on reflects more on the employer than the dev. It's human nature to always think the issue is with someone else...
* If your first year or two was at a "top company". Significantly more difficult if you worked anywhere else.
Or when they want years of experience with a specific framework, library, or other system.
I remember looking at Java positions last year (before I got my current job), and a lot of them would sound nice until I got to the item about "Must have X years of experience with Spring".
Yeah, I have a whole bunch of core Java under my belt, and I made the requirements for everything else, but because I don't have experience with that one library, I'm shut out.
Basically if something looks perfect except for some random "must have X years of experience in Y" requirement, just apply anyway. Most likely it won't be a dealbreaker for them (the hiring manager at a decent-sized company may not even know that that was in the job posting), but the worst case scenario is that you won't get the job but will get some good interview experience.
That's why so many people lie about their experience on their resume, and I don't blame them.
A few years later, I was applying somewhere (Samsung?) for a semiconductor design position - and they wanted 5 years experience on "Mentor Graphics 8"[0]. I was semi-fluent on "Mentor Graphics 6", but that was a no-go.
It sounds as if things haven't changed.
[0] The naming scheme has changed, so this nomenclature is itself a no-go today.
Two weeks later I got a callback from them saying they wanted to offer me a job. I had already accepted a position. This is when I figured out that hiring managers have no idea about the talent pool they're dredging.
This company wasn't even in SV. They should have offered me a job on the spot, because the fact I had any knowledge of Java.
Because you even knew the word "Java"!
We were somehow part of a swirling cloud of folks somehow trying to buy Lycos about then. I don't know that CMU knew how to think about pricing such things. At least not the parts we were talking to. IBM seemed to be getting on with Doug Tygar's Citadel group, though, so it might have just been us that didn't know what we were doing! :-)
Perhaps the metric is inverted. Instead of years per language, it should be languages per year. Any software job today requires people that learn new stuff fast, not experts in 5 year old frameworks.
As far as I'm concerned, if a candidate has experience with Ember or Angular, I would never turn them down because they have not yet had the opportunity to work with React. A little bit of on-the-job training and some trial by fire, and most likely they'll be fine.
If I'm ever on the hunt for a new employer, I'm looking forward to getting turned down because I don't have 2 years experience working with Vue.js. It's idiotic, but I can guarantee it'll happen.
It just isn't possible, given the basic makeup of the company, for there to be anything other than very basic bug fixing going on - the leadership team simply can't cope.
When I was there, I pretty much ran on one-page specs, if there was a written spec at all.
We were violently successful. SFAIK, just because of parts cost, that's all scrapped now. :)
The people that are left are of the "fix one, create three" level. One has a degree in CS but has never actually learned the trade. I did what I could, but he was perpetually interrupted. God bless 'em, but it's true.
In the end, unless your business is critically dependent on software, you may be better off without us.
If you compare this to other fields with a glut, for example English literature majors, you'd see that they only hire rockstars.
That leaves me wondering what force is preventing price from rising in the case of developer talent?
Edit: clarified real wage to real wage vs productivity.
Yes, engineers are professionals and all that, but we are seen as the executors. The final rung on the ladder who finally executes and builds the thing.
So our wages do not scale that great with value of output.
In many cases we are factory workers, maaaybe artisans, in a feature factory --> https://hackernoon.com/12-signs-youre-working-in-a-feature-f...
And I would differ with your assessment that tech wages scale poorly with productivity. Better than many other areas, engineers can leverage their productivity extremely well - especially in software, but even moreso in the future with information and mechanical automation becoming ever more capable.
Go on any job site and you will see tons of openings for people with 5 years experience in <every buzzword tech in the book> for $50k/year. These employers will always struggle to find acceptable talent and will always complain.
A religious belief that labor prices must be kept as low as possible, lest communism ensue.
This is not correct. A shortage is a situation where demand exceeds supply. The only definite statement you can make about such a situation is that it means the market in question cannot be in equilibrium. But there are multiple possible reasons for that. Prices being controlled is actually not one of them: the effect of price controls will not be market disequilibrium but a shifting of the equilibrium.
So the question you should actually be asking is, what is preventing the market from reaching equilibrium? Here are two possible answers:
- Demand is growing faster than supply can keep up.
- Transaction costs (for example, difficulties in employers evaluating candidates' actual potential) are preventing efficient matching of supply to demand.
Demand is characterized by price. Simply saying you want something does not mean you demand something.
I'd love to find programmers for $1/hr, but I haven't increased the demand for programmers by saying that. I have to offer something a programmer is actually willing to take to be considered demand. And so, again, as long as price is rising, you cannot have a shortage. Every time the price goes up, there will be buyers dropping out of the market not willing to pay the new high.
The result is that only those who can afford programmers will be able to hire programmers, and the supply will exactly equal the demand.
No, demand is characterized by the quantity demanded at a given price. More precisely, the demand curve is a curve of quantity demanded vs. price.
> I'd love to find programmers for $1/hr, but I haven't increased the demand for programmers by saying that.
Not by just saying it, but you could post a want ad for programmers at $1/hr in order to investigate the potential supply of programmers at that price. Of course you would find that it was zero, but that just means there's no supply of programmers at that price, not that there's no demand.
> Every time the price goes up, there will be buyers dropping out of the market not willing to pay the new high.
Now you're assuming that there is supply--programmers available at higher prices--but not demand--clients don't want to pay the offered price. (A more precise analysis would say that the quantity supplied at that price is greater than the quantity demanded--some clients will pay that price but not enough to hire all available programmers.) You're right that this is not a shortage, but that's because it's a surplus instead--supply exceeds demand, instead of demand exceeding supply.
You're also ignoring other possibilities. Programmers could decide to accept lower wages instead of higher ones. "Price" is not something magically set by higher authority; it's the output of the market, not an input to it. In the first case above, if you want a programmer you will have to raise your offered price until you find one that is willing to work at that price. In the second case above, if programmers wanted work they would have to lower their prices (on average) until enough clients were willing to hire all of them.
Okay. So, every formalized definition I could find more or less echoes this one:
"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." – http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/demand.asp
But you are telling us that demand is evaluated by interest across the entire price spectrum. Therefore, holding all other factors constant, an increase in price does not change the demand at all, as those holding firm at the lower price are still demand.
Whose definition are you using here?
> Not by just saying it, but you could post a want ad for programmers at $1/hr in order to investigate the potential supply of programmers at that price.
Does your definition of demand always require that the buyer be so formal in their investigation?
> but that just means there's no supply of programmers at that price, not that there's no demand.
Which, by your early definition of shortage meaning demand exceeding supply, means that virtually everything is in shortage. The demand, as you call it, at the price of free is almost infinite for any desirable good. That leaves shortage to not seem like very useful terminology whatsoever. Why even bother using the term shortage at all when we can infer that almost everything is in shortage?
And what is special about the shortage of developers that warrants all the media attention? Especially in light of the severe shortage of Ferraris, which I frequently see people expressing their interest to buy at lower prices in these discussions. I never see in the news calls to fix the Ferrari shortage, nor do I see any government intervention to try and correct the lack of Ferraris being produced.
> Now you're assuming that there is supply--programmers available at higher prices
I'm not sure where you got that idea. We have acknowledged right from the beginning that price can stop rising. That's kind of the entire basis of the discussion.
Have you ever looked at an actual textbook?
Even what you quoted does not define "demand" as price. It says "an increase in the price of a good or service will decrease demand"--which implies that "demand" means quantity demanded (at a given price). Which is how I defined it.
> an increase in price does not change the demand at all
I said demand (more precisely, the demand curve) is quantity demanded as a function of price. I certainly did not claim that quantity demanded does not change if price increases.
> Does your definition of demand always require that the buyer be so formal in their investigation?
No, it just requires a market. "Just saying" something does not constitute a market, but making an offer to buy something at a given price does.
> by your early definition of shortage meaning demand exceeding supply, means that virtually everything is in shortage
No, it doesn't. Let me restate my definition of shortage to make the definitions I have been using explicit: it means that quantity demanded exceeds quantity supplied at the current price. That is certainly not true of "virtually everything".
> I'm not sure where you got that idea
From what you said. You said: "Every time the price goes up, there will be buyers dropping out of the market not willing to pay the new high." Why does the price go up? If buyers aren't the ones setting the price (which is obvious since not all of them are willing to pay it), it must be sellers, i.e., programmers. So for your statement to make sense at all, there must be programmers available at the higher prices.
> We have acknowledged right from the beginning that price can stop rising.
I'm not sure who this "we" is that you refer to. You have claimed that "the price is rising", and that this will continue until there is only one programmer in the world who is working. That doesn't sound like acknowledging that the price can stop rising.
"The world has a severe shortage of large diamonds I can buy for pennies."
Well, it's not Steve Jobs. Not anymore.
Did we see a shortage of American workers who could do the job right away?
YES. Not many people work in the same area of technology. There really aren't many people working in some areas of tech.
Did the employer try to compromise on their requirement of "rockstar coder with 1000 wpm typing speed, PhD in app programming, merge k-sorted arrays in 15 mins with good syntax and no compiler?"
NO. And this is why there is no shortage. It's their demand for rockstars when reality is most companies are mediocre (at best). It's not shortage, your company sucks, interviews suck and nobody wants to work there.