> Why, then, do policymakers and business leaders continue to focus on reskilling? Lafer thinks it gives them an easy way out by laying the blame for workers’ dim employment prospects on their failure to acquire the right skills rather than facing up to deeper structural changes in the economy. He says that a better option might be a push for better pay and conditions in other in demand industries that employ lots of people but are poorly rewarded such as construction, healthcare and education.
I subscribe to the Keynesian philosophy that the government should at the very least hire displaced workers to dig holes in the ground and fill them back up. Even better - use that effort to build roads, clean our cities, provide services, etc.
>I subscribe to the Keynesian philosophy that the government should at the very least hire displaced workers to dig holes in the ground and fill them back up.
Keynes didn't actually advocate this. He just said that it would be stimulative to do this - i.e. that it was sufficient as a means of escaping a liquidity trap.
He was much more keen on public works programs "government as an employer of last resort" that built things like the Lincoln tunnel.
I find it deeply ironic that this myth of what he said is most popular among gold bugs - people who advocate digging up gold and subsequently burying it.
Installing renewables, as well as installing EV charging stations and upgrading electrical infrastructure is going to be a Herculean effort, lots of good jobs to provide for folks in that domain.
I believe many on Native American lands still don’t have running water, internet, or power. Should be a top priority for such a jobs corps.
When Alaska and Wyoming have the same number of senators as California and New York, the problem becomes not the lack of resources or even the wild inefficiency of serving rural communities, which are problems everywhere in the world that nonetheless have better infrastructure, but plainly, Republicans, which only exist here.
As someone currently living in Wyoming, I’m really disconcerted by SanFran when I visit, as an example. At least Wyoming’s low taxes (no state income tax) and low population explain the state of the infrastructure. SanFran? Not so much, it’s a golden child of incredible economic success, liberal ideals, and horrible (political) mis-management. The issues on infrastructure in the US run much more than Red vs Blue. It’s deeply ingrained in the modern American culture across the board.
As a former Bay Area resident and a progressive, I agree. Progressives in urban areas should focus more on improving things at the state and local levels where they live, and less on what their fellow countrymen in more conservative areas are doing.
Indian reservations are independent from their surrounding states and semi-sovereign (technically at least) but essentially managed by the federal government by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Many conservatives believe the state of many Indian reservations are due in part to the mismanaged “welfare state” policies of the BIA that hinder NA’s from improving their lives. Personally I don’t know enough about the situation to say. I was only a child the last time I lived on an Indian reservation and barely remember it.
> I subscribe to the Keynesian philosophy that the government should at the very least hire displaced workers to dig holes in the ground and fill them back up
This is what the TSA is and largely the US military/defense (based on dollars spent compare to task success rate)
I picked those examples as jobs that I don’t imagine require any specialist training (at entry levels), with requisite skills being learned via on-the-job training.
I don't work in any of these areas, but I hesitate to presume that just because they are considered "blue collar" jobs they require no training.
Here's a pamphlet [1] put together by the Federal Highway Administration, called "A Playbook to Build Tomorrow's Highway Construction Workforce". On the first page you learn that there is a shortage of heavy equipment operators, cement masons, and iron workers. These jobs look non-trivial to me. I don't think you become a cement mason or iron worker overnight, or that you can just learn "on the job".
They bury the lede: "In reality, employers report difficulty hiring because the wages they offer don’t match the skills they’re after, she says"
Also: "In a 2018 paper, he and colleagues showed that only about 60 to 70% of US computing and engineering graduates land jobs in STEM, dropping to between 10 and 50% for those studying life sciences, physical sciences and maths."
> "In reality, employers report difficulty hiring because the wages they offer don’t match the skills they’re after, she says"
I can't imagine that someone whose sole credential in software engineering is a three month course is going to be offered any amount that is too low for their current skill level. You are basically hiring someone to train on the job. That can work out well for both parties, but imagining that 3 months of training makes you worth $100k per year is delusional.
In reality, employers report difficulty hiring because the wages they offer don’t match the skills they’re after, she says
AND
only about 60 to 70% of US computing and engineering graduates land jobs in STEM
I don't know man?
The implication there is that there exist up to 30-40% of new computing and engineering grads who on the one hand are without jobs in STEM, and on the other are willing to leave the STEM jobs that offer lower wages on the table.
It's been decades since I was a new STEM grad, but I still remember being a new grad. Only my opinion, but I feel something else must be going on.
When I graduated with a CS degree in '07 (US) the first job offer I received was for $25k. I was so angry at that offer. I told the hiring manager that I couldn't possibly work for less than $35k they scoffed at that, I told them no thanks. I could make more money flipping burgers.
I kept looking for work.
Had another offer for $32k with one week of vacation a year, and no health care.
It took me over a year to land my first gig, only making $45k a year. No job since has paid me more.
I had phone interviews that last for less than two minutes because I didn't have industry experience when the posting clearly no experience needed/ will train.
I've had my time wasted by recruiters who send me to interviews that I'm not qualified for.
Interviewed with Amazon at one point, got invited to onsite interview, when my contact ghosted me while trying to arrange travel.
I've worked some programming jobs, all of them have been horrible in their own way. Alcoholics, cliques and fiefdoms, to being left to my own devices working alone often forgotten.
At this point my wife thinks its time for me to go back to school and get another degree, leave programming behind. I love computers. I'm a good programmer. I have no idea what I would do if I wasn't in technology.
What frustrates me the most, is the number of people I know in my personal life, that never got programming degrees that are now well paid programmers. All of them have degrees in non engineering fields, started non programming jobs that turned into programming jobs because they needed something coded up.
The second thing that frustrates me is the sheer number of people that I have interacted with that have pulled the ladder up behind them once they make it out.
It is frustrating knowing I am a good programmer and seeing bad programmers getting well paying jobs.
I guess where I'm trying to go with this, is that for some of us, we just can't seem to get ahead. Maybe we are just unlucky. Maybe we have been beaten down by the interview process or jobs and we don't want to deal with it anymore.
I know for a fact that had I just taken a regular 9-5 non-stem job I'd be ahead of where I am right now. And what scares me is the thought that if I keep trying, I might not ever do better in STEM.... I love STEM...
I see a few possibilities that explain your situation --a couple of which you've already mentioned.
1) You've gotten unlucky i.e. each job you've applied to had a 5% acceptance rate, and you've just happened to roll 1-19 out of 20, n times in a row. If this is the case, keep your head down and apply to more places. .95^30 > 20% but .95^90 < 1%
2) You're not applying to the right places. There are literally thousands of startups that would kill to hire a good, remote software engineer for $45K. Take a look at workatastartup.com
3) You're not actually a good programmer. This may sound harsh, but some of us don't have the points of reference to accurately determine how our skillset stacks up against others.
4) You're not easy to get along with or manage. When hiring for junior positions, companies are less likely to put up with jerks than for senior positions.
I realize some of this may sound harsh. My intention is to help you.
My advice is to apply to startups and offer to work for free for a month. Do this 3 times, and there's almost no chance you will not get an offer if you're good programmer who's easy to get along with.
5) You might be a good programmer but your skillset in terms of technology stack(s) might not match up with what employers/recruiters are looking for.
We interviewed a junior dev a couple of years back who had exclusively RPM and mainframe experience. We're a .NET/C#/SQL Server/TypeScript/React shop, with a bit of R and Python thrown in outside of the core technology team.
I couldn't work out whether he couldn't get his head round our pair programming task (which isn't any kind of ridiculous invert a red/black tree type whiteboard problem) because he wasn't a good programmer or because the mental model was so different to what he was used to, and he really seemed to struggle with C#. I didn't give him a job because I thought the risk of having to let him go during probation was too high, which would have sucked given that he'd have been leaving a steady job to join us.
Contrast this with another interviewee who was a nurse, and a self-taught programmer, who really did seem to get it. He nailed our assessments, and we made him an offer. He joined us and has worked out really well.
It's not that I'm against hiring people with mismatched skills, or from an unusual professional background - far from it - but I need to see some glimmer of a good match during the selection process, particularly if somebody would be leaving stable employment to join us (not that we're unstable, but there's the probation period to successfully navigate) and/or - not really an issue now we're all WFH - they're planning to relocate to work with us.
I don’t think it would be legal for a company to allow someone to work for free (or anything less than minimum wage in the state in question). However offering to work at a very low hourly wage on a temporary/probationary basis could work.
>It is frustrating knowing I am a good programmer and seeing bad programmers getting well paying jobs.
Yes, welcome to the real world of employment where your ability to network, sell yourself well, make your boss happy, be likable and play the politics game is what will make you successful rather than your ability to 1337 code.
I know it's bitter, and most don't like to admit this, but tech is by no means a meritocracy even though the PR likes to make it one.
People often talk about these aspects of human behaviour and interaction like they're an inherently bad thing. And, oc rouse, we have to be honest enough to admit that sometimes it can be a bad thing. We can all point to examples of toxic behaviour and nepotism as a result of people sucking up and playing politics.
However, humans are social creatures, and we get things done by cooperating with eachother, so I think it's fair to argue that those social skills are also pretty important for building software.
Like any other social activity or grouping, that can work well, or it can be toxic, but the need for those social skills as a software engineer isn't inherently evil. Likewise, the fact that people with "better" social skills often "do better" isn't necessarily wrong either because those skills are incredibly important for any cooperative endeavour, and particularly for leadership.
I'm really sorry to hear this. It's a bit of a surprise -- I'd have assumed that not being able to get a job would be the problem, rather than the one of not being fairly compensated. And while nothing is a meritocracy, shame that horrible programmers aren't eventually exposed.
I worked in Kansas and made 45k at a small agency. It was one of the larger college towns and I worked my way up from $12/hr as the company grew, thanks to my help.
Rural Kansas dev might aspire to 45k but even then. I think they might just live in a small town and don’t want to look for work elsewhere. Which is fine, just know the salary comes with the territory. Half the reasons tech pays what it does is because a lot of the jobs are in expensive cities.
I was in a medium sized city with college and engineering firms. I've moved to a major metro for my first job and then several times since for my partner, to non-tech heavy cities as their career is more specialized and isn't available everywhere.
Current city has repressed wages across the board. It's a place with a "low cost of living" and several universities that pump out local students who want to stay here at any cost and a very healthy foreign worker scene.
Even $45k sounds ridiculously low if you have a few years of experience. Is there any reason you haven't tried getting a remote job? I can't imagine anywhere even offering less than $60k for someone with a few years and is remote (and is US based).
I made less than that starting in a small city (just under a million in the MSA) in a poor state working for the state government (one of the employers constantly hiring and willing to take a chance on an uneducated kid with a couple of years of freelance experience) and this was after mass applying to positions all over the country.
There were a ton of issues on my part and things I still don’t understand and can only ascribe to chronic poor luck, though I won’t go into it all in this particular comment. I make better money now, more than most people my age probably make on average, but probably significantly less than most developers with similar experience. I probably won’t be able to recover the rough start which is likely annoying seeming as for the amount of money I’m likely to cap out at I probably could have done something much more interesting.
I make better money now, more than most people my age probably make on average, but probably significantly less than most developers with similar experience
You might be surprised. The salaries reported in this forum are higher than normal, because of the large membership from the west coast/FAANG.
Here in the DC suburbs, I'd expect a non-FAANG developer without a TS/poly to earn $100k-$150k (straight out of college, more like $85k-$100k). Add a TS/poly, working in a SCIF for a 3-letter agency or military, add $20k-$50k to the ends of that range. Yes, many earn more, either working for a FAANG in the area, or in niche areas, or in some sort of management/ownership/partnership arrangement (BAH consultants, etc).
I'd say unless you have really experienced it first hand, or know someone who has, it is hard explaining to others how having a short stent of misfortune can really snowball and keep you down. As much as we hear the great fortune of those that get lucky at the right time, we never hear about those that miss out at the wrong time.
I spent the first two years of my post college time deeply unemployed and then severely underpaid for a few months. I get it. I had to interview with about 80 companies and do over 15 half-day or full-day onsites to get an okay job. Even that job was terrible in its own ways and I left only a year or so later.
So, I get it. I just don’t get the part where it seems like you’ve given up.
> The second thing that frustrates me is the sheer number of people that I have interacted with that have pulled the ladder up behind them once they make it out.
Certainly, what I mean here is people that have been helped out to get where they are, then not pay it forward or in fact go out of their way to not help out their peers.
I've seen this happen many times. Not just to friends, but co-workers and people that I have met along the way.
In one case I had a friend who was hired by a former classmate to a local firm. After a year there they started hiring more programmers company wide. This friend refused to interview people who had graduated from our department or pass along resumes. Instead they started hiring other people from non-engineering departments that they thought they could train to program. This guy is now a C-level and still refuses to hire people that graduated from our department.
I'd wager that it's just a feature of my particular network and people I've come across. As my partner is the opposite, and their network helps each other out.
> This friend refused to interview people who had graduated from our department or pass along resumes. Instead they started hiring other people from non-engineering departments that they thought they could train to program. This guy is now a C-level and still refuses to hire people that graduated from our department.
I'm not doubting your story for an instant, but this is incredibly strange behaviour and not something I'd consider normal.
Companies I've worked at love hiring referrals because you generally get higher quality and skip all the hassle of dealing with external agencies, dozens or hundreds of applicants, etc. Something like half my team is made up of people I've worked with at other companies in the past - I was overjoyed when they applied for jobs with us - and I still keep a mental rolodex of people I was at university with 20 years ago who I'd be happy to work with.
Cambridge is a bit of an odd place, in that plenty of companies have a bias for Cambridge graduates. That's fine as far as it goes, but I'm generally happy to hear from anyone with a CS background from any university, and am absolutely open to other STEM graduates who demonstrate that they can do the work.
Employee from University X would make a referral for everyone from University X that would apply. And let me just say the signal to noise ratio from that institution was horrible to say the least.
Real CS degree from a college of engineering at a large state university.
Obviously this isn't some top 40 program. Had I known then what I do now, I would have applied to some of those programs.
Back then, I wasn't aware of other programs or even names of universities known for computing (other than MIT). I came from a small town that didn't have many opportunities for kids interested in tech in the late 90's early 00's. So you pretty much went to one of the State Universities.
Another possibility is that despite graduating from a computing or engineering program, many of these people still lack the skills STEM employers are looking for.
The article specifically references people going through a 3 month coding bootcamp. They are basically looking for an employer willing to pay to give them on the job training. This can work well, but their salary expectations need to be somewhat in line with what their skill sets are.
I don't see the inconsistency you see? Every company I've talked to set their hiring standards to the top quartile, and doesn't want to pay more than the median wage.
The large number of low salary jobs available doesn't mean there are any jobs for anyone not in the top quartile or many jobs someone in the top quartile should take.
There are good paying jobs outside STEM. Finance, consulting, media, law (especially IP law if you have a bachelors in STEM), etc.
If an engineering grad decides to become an actuary or management consultant or investment banker, that doesn't necessarily mean they couldn't find a STEM job.
Ontario Society of Professional Engineers did a study on engineering labour maker in Ontario 5 years ago. Their findings show that this is not the reason behind the majority of people with engineering degrees doing non-engineering work. I don't know how the results compare to those in the US or UK, but it certainly is an eye-opening data point. Some highlights:
- According to the 2011 NHS, only 29.7 per cent (67,045 out of 225,490) of employed individuals in Ontario with bachelor’s degrees or higher in engineering were working as engineers or engineering managers. A further 37 per cent (83,365 out of 225,490) worked in professional positions that normally require a university degree. In other words, only just over 65 per cent of employed Ontarians with engineering degrees were gainfully employed in professions that normally require or benefit from having a university degree.
- Those who were not working as engineers and were working in positions that don’t necessarily require a degree made up fully 33.3 per cent (75,090 out of 225,490) of the total.
So, as an engineering graduate, you are more likely to work in a job that does not require a degree, than in a job that requires an engineering degree.
All of those are among the professions which require a degree. The 1/3 who end up in professions that does not require any degree are not those who have gone into management or finance.
I assumed it was professions that have a licensing requirement where you must have a specific degree (like having an MD to practice medicine) vs some areas of finances where you don't need a particular diploma to pass the required SEC exams or certifications.
I have not read the full methodology. But if I were to make an educated guess, I would say they used NOC (National Occupation Code) for determining what does or does not require a degree. NOC divides all occupations into 4 skill levels, from A (occupations that usually require university education) to D (occupations that usually do not require even a secondary school diploma). Most probably, they used the same framework and tallied the number of people in engineering, other A level occupations, and everyone else. Finance and consulting are definitely A level.
Yes. I was responding to the parent, which talked about STEM in general. This report is mostly about the E, although it mentions the T and M as well, for example in Figure 4 on page 10.
A good number of lifescience graduates at regional colleges aim for nursing, also because it's about the only paying career that's left. The Department of Education reports a median salary of 54.5 kUSD for a nursing graduate at my regional college, meanwhile a chemical contract manufacturer nearby recently advertised a skilled BSc job for 35 kUSD. It's a mystery how you can make rent and student loan payment on that and have money left over for food.
It's even more fun when you look at data from elsewhere in the world.
I've worked with incredible engineers from France... here in America. And yet the other day there was this poster whining he couldn't find great engineering talent in France.
He blamed it on French people being lazy, of course.
The biggest thing from the employer side is that the cost of a single bad hire can be potentially enormous. This is a combination of legal (threat of wrongful termination lawsuits, COBRA) and cultural (nobody likes to feel like a jerk boss, morale problems among the remaining employees). The rule of thumb among managers is don't hire anybody unless you're 90% sure they'll work out for at least a year.
That creates a major roadblock for entry-level employees. No matter how much formal training somebody's had, they've still never actually performed the role before. That makes it substantially riskier that they won't fit. Even just a couple years of experience is a credible signal that the person has basic competence in the actual job.
What we need is another category of transitional employment, with both much lighter regulatory barriers to turnover as well as more relaxed cultural expectations about job security. In the olden days we'd call this an "apprentice". Today it might be an "intern", but the general expectation is that only applies to very young workers- not those reskilling to make a lateral move.
> The rule of thumb among managers is don't hire anybody unless you're 90% sure they'll work out for at least a year.
This used to be the the way people thought, but the trend I've seen is it's becoming more and more common to just continuously fire people.
In my last two jobs at very different companies it was pretty insane the rate that good employees got fired based on "culture mismatch" related issues. Amazon and Netflix have basically normalized PIP culture at larger places, where the strategy is basically hire like crazy and then find a reason to pip anyone you don't like. The most recent startup I was at was absurdly trigger happy, gleefully firing anyone that wasn't able to read the minds of "leadership" or in anyways challenged the status quo (even if they were supposed hired to do just that).
It used to be my experience that anyone who was let go within a year was obviously a bad hire to anyone at the company. Now I see constant confusion among employees about why some of their favorite coworkers are being let go. Maybe I'm just unlucky in places I've been recently, or very lucky about places I've been before, but it certainly looks like a strange shift in the environment.
Believe it or not, there is no legal precedent or basis around Performance Improvement Plans. Their use as some kind of magic lawsuit shield hasn’t been tested in any court, ever, by anyone, and it has no basis, especially those words “performance improvement plan,” in any law or regulation, at least in California, Delaware or Georgia (some places I’ve checked before). “PIP culture” is more like “PIP cargo cult.”
> Their use as some kind of magic lawsuit shield hasn’t been tested in any court, ever, by anyone.
If nobody is even willing to take it to court to try to test it, then it sounds like it is working as an amazingly effective lawsuit shield to me. No company wants to defend anything in court, they want to never go to court.
I don’t think there really is anything to test in court here though. In the US generally all an employer needs to show is that an employee was fired for a valid job-related-reason of some kind, and not for the quite narrow set of reasons that would make it illegal. All a PIP does is make sure managers/supervisors are documenting reasons properly, while at the same time showing the employee that they have documented reasons that they would show should it ever go to court. Plus, the added benefit of being able to tell the court “See, we even tried to help them improve before we fired them.” Unless the employee has unambiguous hard evidence of an “actual” reason for firing that was not legal, then there really is nothing to take to court.
That all applies to non-contract employment in US only of course, and I am not familiar with all states just those I have worked in, so there could be some states where it’s more complicated.
This single bad hire myth needs to die. It's just simply not true. Organizations should have feedback loops in place to monitor and mitigate the issue. And if you don't, then the person doing the hiring should take on that responsibility. This is the cost of doing business and should be factored in.
Transactional employment exists in FAANGs and other big tech. They are called contractors.
Can’t up-vote this enough. The myth is just laziness in not wanting to have hard conversations and establish feedback that corrects behavior or fills gaps in skill sets. Invest in your people. That “bad apple” may have some things going on at home that they are unaware of how it’s affecting them.
That “bad apple” could have a grievance no one is willing to listen to.
That “bad apple” could have a better idea that was shutdown during an “open discussion” meeting.
Before you go and point the finger at the new hire, it’s best to fully examine yourself.
I fully agree on-the-job training should be much more common, especially in larger companies, and in many fields you can end up with a better fit by just training someone in exactly what you need rather then trying to find someone who knows it all already. That being said, I have firsthand experience hiring/training/supervising in fields that are almost entirely on-the-job training, and it can be very difficult to determine if a potential new-hire will learn well, and you will always have more then a few new-hires who will still struggle with the most basic aspects of the job even after many weeks of hand-holding.
> That “bad apple” may have some things going on at home
Dealing with this is a potential minefield from a legal perspective though. The answer you get here could very well suggest an abusive domestic situation, suicidal feelings, or worse. You need someone with special training to even ask this question. Once asked, at best the answer is usually something you can’t do anything about, at worst it’s something you ethically have to do something about that involves police or lawyers. Within that, you have a whole class of answers that you cannot do anything about, but also put you in a position where should you need to terminate the employee afterwards for ANY reason, you leave yourself open to wrongful termination suites.
To be clear -- I'm not saying this is how it should be; I would much prefer to live in a world where everyone looked out for everyone else, but a business (especially a public company) can't base it's policies on an ideal world, they have to base their policies on the litigious/capitalist framework they currently exist in.
The whole equation is different between a new-hire vs long-term employee of course, but it’s never without risk.
> have a grievance … was shutdown
These are more nuanced, and the exact situation/details would matter, but unless they were shut-down in a unprofessional way, or the grievance is a serious issue from the business’s perspective, a new-hire not doing their job just because they are upset about something like this is a pretty big red-flag in my book. These things happen to everyone, in every company, at some point. It would be worth having a discussion with the employee about it, but from my experience, this is a personality trait, and not a behavioral issue that can easily be changed.
I don’t think you can say it’s a myth if it’s a “cost of doing business” though. Companies are incentivized to reduce costs and risks that do not provide a return. If an employer can hire someone experienced with a solid track record, and reduce any risk of them needing further training or not working out for other reasons, how is that any different (from a pure business perspective) then any other cost or risk reduction strategy?
I’m not saying this is how it should be necessarily, but it’s the reality for employers in the existing system.
The way contractors are currently used isn’t really anything like an apprenticeship, and functionally couldn’t be as contractors are usually required to produce specific results on a timetable. That’s not to say that contracts couldn’t be used to create this kind of relationship, something like a “work-to-hire” agreement, or a co-op/internship with more well-defined way to transition to full employment. From a legal perspective though, that could involve the same (or new) risks, especially when it’s a new and untested kind of business relationship.
The concept of the apprentice has come back into vogue here in the UK. It doesn't work eveywhere, but I know a couple of firms who bring in cohorts of apprentices in the same way they do with graduates. They use a local company to do the first few months of training and then have a continuous development programme.
A friend is a senior manager at one of them and he loves it, he's been really impressed with the calibre of the apprentices and how quickly they've picked things up.
> What we need is another category of transitional employment, with both much lighter regulatory barriers to turnover as well as more relaxed cultural expectations about job security.
I'd usually call this a „trainee”.
> The biggest thing from the employer side is that the cost of a single bad hire can be potentially enormous.
You haven't mentioned the „lost” time for other developers. Unless the hiring company has a very efficient onboarding process, any new and „bad” hire will cost _a lot_ in terms of productivity. Some people are certainly able to contribute meaningfully after a 3 month bootcamp and continue their self-study on the job. But many just won't cut it in an environment where everyone else had a 3 year acadamic/vocational training or other meaningful experience before even being considered as a hire.
Companies need to get over themselves. Employees, particularly new employees, shouldn't be expected to 'hit the ground running' in every circumstance. It is unfair to the employee to have no expectation of on-the-job training.
Morale is an issue. The constant understaffing and overwork of current employment is often much more taxing than a bad hire. Yes, a bad hire can have a spoiler effect but in those circumstances it is worth the paperwork to remove them. I argue that an indecisive manager who refuses to do the work necessary to manage and staff for the need is far more detrimental than one lower level employee.
Employment regulations protect employees, not the company, and for good reason. Removing them is not going to make it easier for job-seekers, it just makes it easier to exploit them.
> What we need is another category of transitional employment, with both much lighter regulatory barriers to turnover
In the USA (based on COBRA mention I assume you're in the USA) employees can be let go for no reason whatsoever effective immediately and without any notice.
There can't possibly exist a "lighter regulatory barrier" than that!
I think the biggest cost isn't termination itself, but rather the paperwork/overhead involving with a new full-time employee combined with the risk of wrongful termination lawsuits. Even if such a lawsuit is entirely baseless, it takes time and money to deal with.
It's the reason so many companies prefer contractors to short-term full-time employees. You avoid all the new-hire overhead, and you can always renew someone's contract for another six months, but if/when you want to let them go you just let the contract end and that's it.
> It's the reason so many companies prefer contractors to short-term full-time employees.
I don't know that they do, at least not here in Silicon Valley.
Finding short-term and/or part-time contract/consulting roles is difficult. I did consulting here for a few years (2017-18) and it was a challenge since companies only want regular full time employees. Eventually I quit swimming against the current and went back to a full time role.
I've always been under the impression that the norms in Silicon Valley are often different from the rest of the country, so that's not surprising. My experience is limited to the North-East/East-Coast though, so it's possible that this is a more regional thing, or possibly even specific to the industries I work in.
It's possible that state-level laws come into play here too. For example the fact that non-competes are not enforceable in California, where they are generally enforceable on the East-Coast could be a factor in the kind of relationships companies favor.
> What we need is another category of transitional employment, with both much lighter regulatory barriers to turnover as well as more relaxed cultural expectations about job security. In the olden days we'd call this an "apprentice". Today it might be an "intern", but the general expectation is that only applies to very young workers- not those respelling or making a lateral move.
I agree that this is a good idea, but the market won't accommodate this kind of labor change without government help. Employers have been able to shift responsibility for training off onto other organizations (i.e. coding bootcamps) to get individuals trained and prepared for jobs. Nowadays, workers themselves largely have to bear the financial burden of training in hopes that they land a good-paying job.
What you're suggesting essentially places the financial burden of training and skill development back on companies through apprenticeship programs. That's not going to happen voluntarily.
> I agree that this is a good idea, but the market won't accommodate this kind of labor change without government help.
Why do you think that? It seems to me it is the government that is creating the financial and legal risk of hiring the wrong person or the base cost of hiring an unskilled laborer.
You also seem to be thinking about a subset of jobs that require some sort of advanced training/skills. But things like a universal minimum wage are examples of government regulation that increase the cost of labor for even the most basic of jobs.
If that is the case, why are internship positions still so popular? It's a great way for a company to "try out" new employees, and get them up to speed before actually hiring them. I know lots of places offer internships.
On a related note changing tech stacks and industries is hugely more difficult than I expected. I started in C++ in a steel company and moving to Java with Financial services was so different it was like starting from scratch. Now I'm trying to move more JS/Python in tech land and again its much harder than I expected just to get basic tooling, workflow done, let alone trying to get someone to hire you.
I don't know why you're being downvoted but I found the same.
Changing industries and stacks is massively difficult if you're doing it for getting a new job and not just for a hobby as most employers won't value your previous experience if it's not needed, so all that is just useless baggage now rather than an asset.
I tried going from algos/embedded SW development to backend/devops and it took me almost a year of rejections despite my best efforts to self study(in Europe).
Yeah, be careful into which stack/domain you pigeonhole yourself into as, depending on the market you're in, it might not be easy to change course later despite you being a skilled generalist. Not every employer will have the time and resources to verify or value your general skill set and will instead focus on going for sure-hires who better match their specific tech stack.
Just to +1 the two of yours assertions, I've been experiencing the same.
I recall one agency had a tagline "specialization is for insects" but the reality I've found for applying is a number of tech teams have pretty rigid requirements of x years experience with specific languages/libraries and won't consider what other valuable assets you bring to the table or how fast you're able to pick up material. Which I guess makes sense for senior level positions but junior/intermediate?
I've experienced this as well, even after years of experience. The fundamentals all transfer, but ramping up on an entirely different language/stack/toolchain, an entirely different business/industry, and an entirely different company culture/management/process all at the same time can be a really big challenge, especially in more senior roles where expectations of autonomy are high.
But eventually you finally get over the hurdle and it starts to click. I've done it a few times, and each time I have to remind myself that I've done it before and I can get through it.
Fortunately, so much of being an effective senior engineer is not about programming. But it's hard to remind myself of that when I feel like a "bad" programmer in a new stack for a while.
Some of the people they are talking to here have just done 3 month courses. They are competing against people who have 4+ year degrees and people with more experience. They are going to have to build up their resumes with smaller things whether its a project of their own or small jobs for other people.
But where are they going to get the experience if no one will hire them at the full wages they have heard software engineers get? :)
To get to the point where they are on par with a college graduate, they would need to pay an employer to give them on the job training for several years and then try to get a paying job.
No matter how many training and reskilling courses they go on 5% of the dogs will remain unemployed.
The fundamental problem is a lack of jobs, because there is no market mechanism by which the private sector will create sufficient jobs to hire everybody who wants work.
It's time to restore the Beveridge condition. Jobs should wait, not people.
> The fundamental problem is a lack of jobs, because there is no market mechanism by which the private sector will create sufficient jobs to hire everybody who wants work.
This is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.
Self-evident that the market can't provide enough jobs for everyone?
The labor market in nearly every country -- certainly every wealthy one -- is highly regulated, so it's hard to know how one could even have experience with this, let alone claim it to be self-evident.
Unless your claim is (unlike the parent poster, perhaps) that the US's highly-regulated labor market doesn't provide enough jobs...which I would agree with...but we'd probably disagree on the cause!
Actually it's phrased as a negative. Isn't it up to the positive side to come up with the evidence? Alternatively, pick it apart and expose it as a positive claim and ask for evidence.
How it’s phrased is irrelevant to who bears the burden of proof. You are the one making the claim, therefore the burden of proof is on you to back up your claim, no?
This is true regardless of how extraordinary the claim is. I find your claim that “markets cannot provide full employment” not at all obvious, regardless of phrasing, and am asking for evidence.
Your response suggests you don’t have any.
By this logic, if I say something like “there was no moon landing”, I could demand that you offer evidence to the contrary instead of offering any of my own.
> How it’s phrased is irrelevant to who bears the burden of proof.
It's a principle that the person who presents a positive case is the one who needs to come up with the evidence. I can say "there's no god" without evidence, it's the guy who says the God of the Bible is real who has to explain what he means.
> I find your claim...
Note the reply chain, I didn't claim anything.
> By this logic, if I say something like “there was no moon landing”, I could demand that you offer evidence to the contrary instead of offering any of my own.
The contrary would be that there was a moon landing, and indeed the person who claims it happened would be required to come up with the evidence. Luckily there's a lot of it.
Come on, friend — the very first accepted response there is:
> I would say that generally, the burden of proof falls on whomever is making a claim, regardless of the positive or negative nature of that claim.
If your intent was to convince me that I’m right, you are doing a wonderful job. :)
I might add: your selective quoting of this link also throws some doubt on your claim in another thread that we can solve all of confirmation bias through the educational system...glass houses, stones, etc. - we all preferentially seek out evidence that supports our prior beliefs, and we do it throughout our lives. It takes crazy, sustained effort to avoid, not just a lesson in separating fact from fiction!
There's a lot more to if if you read it. He says the fact that we tend to place the burden on the positive side is because it's essentially impossible to prove the negative, for a lot of cases.
If every claim and it's negative need to be proven, how do you think we proceed? Add in that you can formulate the negative without using standard polarity flippers like "not" and "never". We have to start somewhere, and generally the guy who says "God exists" is the guy who has to make the case. The one who says "There's no god" might need to explain what he means, but he doesn't need to go get a bunch of evidence. I doubt that you disagree with that example.
The question of which is the positive claim arises because it's possible with some fancy footwork to act like you're not saying "God Exists". This is what needed to be picked apart, or not, in the case of the economic argument at the top of the thread.
> I might add: your selective quoting
I didn't quote anything, I referenced the entirety. Part of the point of that is so we avoid picking out a headline and then claim to be finished.
But the fact remains, in school we don't spend much time thinking about all those critical thinking skills. If we at least tried it, kids would be better at it. Much like physical training, it's something that should be brought to our attention in school but needs to be maintained.
From my point of view, reskilling will be the main discussion for the next decade. Here is my experience about reskilling: I quit my banking career 3-4 years ago with the thought of career transition. I thought the daily routine that I had could easily be automated. Therefore, I made the decision to leave my job quite easily after having a burnout. First I took a gap year in a foreign country to recover from burnout totally. I came back to my country in the beginning of 2019 start learning to code immediately. I learnt Python. It was, and still is, a popular language, so learning Python should be a logical decision for me. I thought 6 months would be enough to learn fundamentals and transition your career. First I took a bootcamp that lasted 6 months and applied for jobs after I finished it. It didnt go as it planned. I couldnt find a job. Now it has been more than 1 and half years. Still no job. I have started my master degree in IT and am specializing in Data Analysis/Science to be more specific. I consider my undergraduate degree relevant to Data Science, which is Mathematics. Still no positive response from employers. I completed all necessary stuff to put on my resume like end-to-end projects and MOOC specializations(yes it's more than one) Luckily, I am earning my living by tutoring and no financial concerns for near future. My point is reskilling and learning to code are not always guarantee someone a new job as the caption suggests. At least, I love spending time with computers and totally enjoy what I do whether I can find a job or not.
At my workplace (of 10+ years), when we recruit for entry-level positions, we typically get 15-50 applicants. We are not a software company so we do not use deep algorithm testing as part of our evaluation process.
Most applicants (probably 80% or more) have a computer science or information systems 4 year BS degree. The other 20% typically have a STEM degree with some programming courses or experience. Probably 20%-30% have some type of graduate degree as well - we sometimes have career changers who have picked up a MS in computer science from some coursework-only MS program at a small school.
My experience has been that of that candidate pool, we will have 3-6 candidates with well documented programming projects or job experience. These tend to be the candidates we interview - we use a simple rubric with yes/no for 5-10 categories we evaluate. The categories are broad ("Has this candidate written code in either personal projects or previous employment?") and minimally skill-specific. We do tend to have some bias towards database (SQL) skills and some hands-on experience with Linux, but not specific "hard" requirements for either (don't care if MS SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, or Debian vs Ubuntu vs CentOS, etc).
We have had success with non-traditional candidates - we have team members with backgrounds ranging from BS in History to PhD in Bioinformatics, so we aren't super-credential sensitive.
All these details seem to add up to a rather stark observation - there is NO shortage of highly qualified applicants for these types of jobs. Our geographic region has many tech employers so we aren't the only option for job seekers. We probably aren't even in the top 25% of employers for salary in our area.
Candidates with only three months of training are just not going to be successful getting to the front of the hiring line in the deeper pools of applicants we get.
> All these details seem to add up to a rather stark observation - there is NO shortage of highly qualified applicants for these types of jobs. Our geographic region has many tech employers so we aren't the only option for job seekers. We probably aren't even in the top 25% of employers for salary in our area.
Where is that?
> We are not a software company so we do not use deep algorithm testing as part of our evaluation process [...] My experience has been that of that candidate pool, we will have 3-6 candidates with well documented programming projects or job experience. These tend to be the candidates we interview - we use a simple rubric with yes/no for 5-10 categories we evaluate
You should try it. Right now it seems you are skewing toward hiring folks who already have experience vs fresh grads for entry level positions.
Whiteboard, if done right, gives a chance to college hires to prove themselves. Especially if there are other tech companies in the area. The pool of candidates that have one year of experience and are already looking to jump ship is very different than fresh grads (where everyone is looking for a job).
Our rubric is for deciding who to interview. We definitely have new grads who have resumes with meaningful programming projects who get into the interview pool. We have hired new grads over experienced candidates on the strength of the interview.
During an interview, we usually have a whiteboard abstract design and pseudo-code guided exercise. I also very much like to ask candidates to walk us through one of their projects and experience with that as well. Occasionally, someone who doesn't do very well with other parts of the interview will really open up on a school or personal project and show unexpected insight and ability.
I wish we could do a blinded work-sample test, but there are HR policies that prevent us from using one.
> During an interview, we usually have a whiteboard abstract design and pseudo-code guided exercise. I also very much like to ask candidates to walk us through one of their projects and experience with that as well. Occasionally, someone who doesn't do very well with other parts of the interview will really open up on a school or personal project and show unexpected insight and ability.
That's the correct way of doing algorithmic screening. Relatively self-contained problem that has several possible solutions.
I think a seasoned developer needs about 3 months to get familiar with a new framework/toolset within the same environment e.g. moving from React to Angular. What can a person without prior in-depth knowledge learn in a Three-month, full-time software-engineering course?
This does not sound to me a programme wherein they genuinely want people to get into software development.
But disprove me please, if you have experience about this.
I did a 9 week bootcamp and I've been a productive developer for 5 years now (I was an unproductive developer for the first year). I was incredibly lucky to find a company willing to take a chance on me, because I was completely useless at first. This is not an advisable strategy for changing careers, especially for someone with dependents.
That is the kind of outcome I would expect from a bootcamp like that: it gives the impression whether the person has the interest and the aptitude for software engineering and then a long way to get good at it. The article does not get into details about the course which is mentioned and I do not want to make presumptions but if they advertise their course as an entry ticket into the IT job market - especially in the current circumstances - then to me it is a borderline malevolent type of business model.
I agree. Most of my cohort dropped out in the first week and only one or two of my classmates, out of the original 30, actually ended up with tech jobs.
The argument could be made that you had a lot of valuable experience though. If I were looking to hire a new programmer, and had someone with experience as a reporter, I’d be thinking about all the places that experience would be useful. It would suggest to me that you’re a good writer, communicator, you can deal with the general public, and function reasonably well in a high-paced, short-deadline, office environment. A decent programmer who is an excellent communicator is hard to find and can be incredibly valuable, and if I couldn’t get you up to speed as a programmer, you could still make an great technical documentation specialist, marketer, etc.
If I was looking at someone with the same amount of programming training who had previously flipped burgers or been the proverbial “ditch digger” I’m not going to see many parallels for those skills.
Reskilling is tough in a world where you have to compete with people with many year degrees for an entry level job. If you imagined people reskilling twice in their careers, that's two extra times through college. Say they can skip the general education reqs the second time through and it's just 3 years. That's still 10+ years of undergrad in a 50 year career.
I think educational specialization is going to be a massive issue going forward. In the past, one industry had to compete with another for labor. As time goes on, it's increasingly only within-industry competition that matters, because workers have sunk too much time and money into simply getting their feet in the door to switch.
If you could spend three months and $20k to switch industries, you're much more likely to move compared to the friction of spending a few years and many tens of thousands (and who knows if that specialty will be flooded a few years later when you finish?).
It seems to me the title would have been better named "Why reskilling will probably not guarantee you a new job". The first two thirds of the article about how and why this doesn't happen, and it sums up with what appears to be the exception.
That said, I couldn't agree with the closing more: "You've got to work so hard at it and do all these extra activities and just immerse yourself fully. Without that passion, I can't see them getting anywhere." Trying to gain new skills with the mindset that it's a burden does not pan out. Instead, finding a topic that has lots of natural interest yields the best results, and is way more fun!
I find this passion argument accurate, yet distasteful. We as a society should not expect adults with dependents to do the "passionate, young, single developer" grind just to get a steady job because their old one is automated or outsourced. This is not healthy even for the stereotypical CS grad, much less your average out-of-work auto plant worker.
I think it's more about the energy level needed to get over the learning curve. Like learning a new language, if you aren't really serious it isn't going to happen, and going at it slower makes it take disproportionately longer, making it disproportionately more likely you'll get frustrated and give up before you succeed at it.
As for younger versus older, I'd say this is a screening process that filters young people out even more if anything. When it comes to students in a MS program, older students are much more able to handle it in my experience.
This is why I think on-the-job training is important. I know there isn't much of an economic argument for a company to take on older candidates and teach them how to be a productive developer, but maybe subsidies would help? I don't know, I just don't think we can reasonably expect people to retrain on their own time... especially if they're dealing with financial stress already.
> I don't know, I just don't think we can reasonably expect people to retrain on their own time... especially if they're dealing with financial stress already.
Many govt programs criticized in the article do support people through the training. It was more about people being encouraged to reskill into the wrong fields when it comes to programming (which I didn't agree with, by the way).
A "pull based" system where companies recruit people to train based on their needs does have benefits over letting people guess and run up debt on their own (the current system, which crashes and burns when people make bad predictions). The govt does this, e.g. where the military will pay for your education in return for service. But do we really want people deeply indebted to private employers? Otherwise they'd only be willing to risk training people a limited amount, since trained employees will subsequently only stay a limited duration on average. The is how it more or less already is.
Same. In three years of immersing myself in my passion (pentesting/vuln research), I've tripled my income and vastly improved my quality of life. A lot of it was just going after my area of interest vs listening to other people tell me what I "need" to do before I go there.
Again, probably not the route if you aren't interested in it though... Not saying you need to wake up, hack, sleep, repeat, but you probably won't be able to "tough it out for a paycheck"... There needs to be a substantial level of passion/interest in the subject for it to work. IMO, that's where it goes wrong for a lot of people. They get excited about buying a bootcamp or whatever, but then quickly find out that it isn't for them and lose interest, or worse, go through the motions and then wonder why it isn't working...
Same here, its going to be the same overall if you found something that you are passionate and really spend your time immersing yourself in it(and of course talent in that field counts). Find that and you will probably succeed
This article speaks to me. I had experience on mainframe and wanted to get a job in Java. I learned Java however the interviewer would always say I was missing something. It could be J2ee, Jboss etc. with the Java ecosystem so large, can someone please help me how to learn. Is J2ee still in use or has all development moved to cloud. Where do I even begin to learn modern technologies. TIA.
Did you have working projects you could show them? Usually the reason companies are looking for someone with job experience in a technology is because they want to see if know how to get things done beyond the syntax.
Showing a web application you are running for fun, or other hobby projects where you've demonstrated your ability to deliver is a good way to do that if you don't have the job experience to point to.
That sounds like suboptimal interviewing on their part. So long as you understand programming fundamentals, you should have no trouble looking up documentation on the fly while on the job, as opposed to memorizing everything before the interview. It might take you a little bit to get ramped up and productive, but that’s normal.
I have only been asked once to answer specifics about the idiosyncrasies of a particular language or framework. Everything else I’ve been asked is about generic algorithms and data structures. Sorry that this doesn’t help much, I just find the kind of interview you encountered pretty frustrating.
Have all the companies you applied to been like that? Because clearly you and I have different interviewing experiences.
I attended 3 interviews. In addition to Java, one interviewer asked for solr experience. Another asked for 5+ years of experience on J2ee. Another spoke yo me, took my details and never came back. All 3 interviews ended unsuccessfully.
J2ee is now called just Java EE afaik (for a while now). I think Spring was new hotness a few years back and java ee was waning could be totally something new now.
I think 3 months of full-time study is more that enough time to get the fundamentals of software development and land an entry level dev job. This is especially true when paired with a career preparation program.
Many bootcamps have 90+% verified placements rates after graduation
I'm extremely skeptical of bootcamps, especially after learning that some of the TA's at Lambda are hired to help with teaching as little as two months into the program as students[0]. I guess that counts toward their "placement" stats!
Not only that, but Lambda (probably the most notorious bootcamp out there) seems so desperate that they will offer a fresh grad at no cost to any company for a 4 week trial period. [1]
I've worked with some Lambda grads who I considered worthwhile hires. They had previous degrees that had prepared them for the type of critical reasoning that makes a good programmer.
I subscribe to the Keynesian philosophy that the government should at the very least hire displaced workers to dig holes in the ground and fill them back up. Even better - use that effort to build roads, clean our cities, provide services, etc.