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Re:Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while pay... by machiaweliczny on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:45PM (#26145727)
I think you are overestimating suply of talented ppl. On my lvl there's 100 ppl per year in Poland. So it's 100 per 40M. Guess in other countries it's similar or less and here programming is quite popular.
Re:Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while pay... by burntoutfire on Monday February 15, 2021 @03:00PM (#26146586)
> On my lvl there's 100 ppl per year in Poland.

How do you figure that?

Re:Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while pay... by machiaweliczny on Monday February 15, 2021 @04:47PM (#26147895)
There's only 2/3 top universities (if you are being generous, 1 if honest) that are match worldwide here (have people doing substantial research, funding valuable companies or just working in FANGs) producing around 100 graduates per year (combined). This gives me some ballpark estimate.
Re:Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while pay... by burntoutfire on Monday February 15, 2021 @04:59PM (#26148059)
I myself have a CS degree from a Polish university that's regularly in top1-top3 of the rankings. I don't think it means that much. We've had a fair share of people who didn't enjoy the work that much and did bare minimum. On the other hand, I've worked with plenty of people from lower ranked universities who didn't graduate in CS (but, for example in Maths or Physics) who are very strong contributors. The truth is that university pedigree is not a definitive indicator of on the job performance.

BTW (unrelated) - I think all Polish universities are a joke when it comes to CS. I've never heard of either one of them making you write a compiler or an OS or a database engine from scratch as a part of taking a course, while it seems fairly standard on top US universities. Instead, the workload is superficial and skews towards semester-long BS projects that prepare you for run-of-the-mill jobs in industry (web dev, big data etc.). Anyone who expected hands-on grappling with hard CS problems will be disappointed. The reason for that is because none of the professors, barring maybe a few exceptions, are doing any meaningful research, so they have no understanding of the state of the art.

Re:Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while pay... by machiaweliczny on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:17PM (#26148261)
I also don't think degree means much but anyone with some curiosity gets one here as it's free, so it's still good estimate. Even if you add all outliers, physics and math students then you get max 3x my estimation.

> Anyone who expected hands-on grappling with hard CS problems will be disappointed.

Those people are above my lvl and I estimate them to be max 30 per year.

Re:Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while pay... by piva00 on Tuesday February 16, 2021 @10:27AM (#26154720)
You are only looking at university graduates. This, by far, doesn't tell you the picture in the job market.

I have worked for the past 17 years with a lot of brilliant engineers, some of them didn't even have a university degree, some had from a crappy uni just because they needed a diploma for a job, and others never touched CS and graduated in Biology or Statistics. You can't measure who is at your level or not just by university graduation stats, it's completely biased to your definition of what's a software engineer at your level: someone who graduated from a university considered at the same level or better than yours for research. That's all your metric tells, not how many people per year in Poland can develop/engineer the same feature set or product as you do, with the same time. And that's nigh impossible to measure or even estimate, there's no data available for that estimation.

Re:Spotify is letting employees work from anywhere while pay... by machiaweliczny on Monday February 15, 2021 @01:54PM (#26145837)
This means that India, almost most populus country on earth has around ~3300 per year, correcting for internet/computer access in 20 years ago it's probably 1/3 of that.