A Hacker School That Helps Solve Silicon Valley's Hiring Problem - Hackruiter

http://www.fastcompany.com/1815287/a-hacker-school-that-helps-solve-silicon-valleys-hiring-problem

by pitdesi • 14 years ago

32 23 14 years ago

There is no shortage of workers. This is a myth. Always has been.

In economics, supply = demand. There's never a surplus. there's never a shortage. If you want more engineers, raise wages. They will come. If you don't want to raise wages, then you really didn't want them. Saying there's an engineering shortage is like saying there's a hamburger shortage because I don't want to pay more than 25 cents for a hamburger. If I pay $5, I could get a nice hamburger .and ... ta da ... end of "the great hamburger shortage" in this case.

Silicon Valley has the wealthiest people in the world and is a very expensive place to live. Engineering careers are quite short and living in an efficiency and washed up at 38 is not as inviting as our "we need more workers" mantra repeaters would have us beleive.

If they raise wages, they'll get what they want. Another alternative of those giant visionary West Coast capventure brains is use the principle of "capital mobility": just move the capital to where the labor is cheap. Not very hard, folks.

eli_gottlieb• 14 years ago

I was going to say, myself: if they want more workers, they could try moving out of the San Francisco-Seattle bubble. Portland, Boston-Cambridge, Texas, Raleigh and New York all have good supplies of tech workers who would love to work on Silicon Valley-grade projects earning Silicon Valley-grade salaries but who won't abandon our entire lives to move to Silicon Valley.

untog• 14 years ago

I'm in New York and I'd say that it also has the same problems that Silicon Valley does, these days. Places like Austin and Raleigh seem like very viable destinations, though.

anamax• 14 years ago

> if they want more workers, they could try moving out of the San Francisco-Seattle bubble

"more workers" isn't the only problem.

And, even if it is, do those other people have enough of the relevant workers?

nicholasjbs3• 14 years ago

(Hacker School cofounder here)

I agree wages should increase. There are some signs that's happening already, and I hope it continues.

To be honest, we're much more excited about the education side of things, but the press seems to focus largely on the recruiting and hiring angle. For us, our current referral setup is a fortuitous model that lets us continue experimenting and growing the school, but it's a means to an end and not the end itself.

akeefer2• 14 years ago

It's true that many people who say "there's a shortage" are really saying "I can't find a top 1% engineer who will work 60 hours a week for $80k a year in Silicon Valley." Well, duh: raise wages, provide better working conditions, or look elsewhere.

But I think you've taken it too far by defining "shortage" in such a way that it's impossible. If I said "A profitable company with sane hours is having trouble finding high-quality engineers at $120k+ a year" it's a little more reasonable to say, "Hmm, maybe that means that there's a 'shortage' of good engineers, in the sense that society and the economy as a whole would benefit from having more talented engineers." Just saying "look elsewhere" or "pay more" completely sidesteps the whole point, which is that where there's a "shortage" there's an obvious opportunity to profitably address it in a way that benefits the economy and society.

To use your analogy, if the beef supply was constrained such that the cheapest hamburger was $100, would you say, "There's no shortage: supply and demand have met at a price of $100?" Or would you say, "Wow, hamburger prices increased by like 20x, there's a shortage of hamburgers?" I think most people would say the latter; the former simply isn't a useful definition of the word "shortage." It means that relative to some general idea of "normal" (as defined by previous conditions, or conditions in related markets), the market seems distorted by a lack of supply.

Retric2• 14 years ago

Market's don't work that way. Developers are worth different amounts of money to different companies. Google gains something like 1 million in value per year per developer and they would still be profitable if the market rate for a talented Dev was 600k/year. Most companies are not that flexible and there are a lot more dev's out than just what Google needs which drives down salary's until some companies barely breakeven by adding staff and some dev's move on to better paying opportunity's.

retroafroman2• 14 years ago

Is a couple week "school" really going to produce the kind of potential hires that SV is looking for? From what I've heard, the interviews at the companies there allow only recent CS grads from top tiered universities who have been programming for fun since 12 to succeed, let alone excel. After casually programming for the past few years, I'm pretty sure I could probably figure out Ruby basics and bang out some half decent web app/data analysis tools (which I'm planning to do if I switch careers in the near future). From the sounds of it, that's about what they're doing in this program. Does that make me hire worthy to any companies in the Bay Area? (Honest question)

nicholasjbs3• 14 years ago

A few clarifications, since I don't think it comes through clearly in the press we've gotten so far:

1. Our goal is to help people who love programming become even better programmers. We don't aim directly for employability or hiring.

2. We explicitly don't focus on web apps, prototypes, or products. Instead, most of the code people write at Hacker School is code for other programmers, e.g., frameworks, libraries, command-line utilities, etc. People at Hacker School work on projects that are technically interesting and one step beyond their current skill level.

3. Hacker School is three months, not a couple weeks. And we don't think people can become great hackers in three months. We do, however, think people can improve dramatically in that time if that's their primary focus and they're surrounded by smart, motivated and intellectually curious people who also love coding and want to grow.

retroafroman2• 14 years ago

Thank you for the detailed response. Your words do a much better (and less sensational) job of explaining what it is you do than the article. It sounds like a cool opportunity and I may apply in the future.

mtr• 14 years ago

On a related note does anyone know of any Python/Django crash courses?

meric• 14 years ago

Go through the Django tutorials.

Toddward2• 14 years ago

Seconded - the Django tutorial is very well written and extremely informative. Django's documentation in general is a valuable resource.

TheCapn3• 14 years ago

So please bare with me as these are the questions of an outsider looking in.

For background: I'm a Canadian software engineering graduate, I'm working towards my P.Eng. and have a IEEE Computer Society certification.

What sort of "shortage" does Silicon Valley have? tosseraccount's post leans more towards the idea that there is this huge disconnect between available worker's expectations and potential employer's expectations. Am I lead to believe there is this gap with two groups of people staring at each other?

When I graduated one of my profs dropped an offer for me to apply to somewhere in California. I had already accepted a position with a place that I wanted to work at locally because I was not really willing to move out of my country for something that was very sudden and - seemingly - insecure as far as job security goes. With posts like these it makes me believe that his offer was more legitamate than I had given it at the time.

Is the Silicon Valley hub really desperate for engineers? This peaks my interest in the sense of possibly regaining contact with him to see what he has to pitch.

GuiA• 14 years ago

To put it in a concise (and possibly politically incorrect) way:

Yes, Silicon Valley is desperate for engineers. However, Silicon Valley is desperate for engineers who are in the 0.1% of the engineer population in terms of intellect, motivation, adaptability, etc.

These are hard to find, first of all because it's 0.1% of the population (so it just boils down to a numbers game), and second of all because often these individuals will rather work on their own thing rather then work under someone else's orders.

If you have the potential of a John Resig, Ben Kamens, or Craig Silverstein, you won't have any trouble finding a job, and you'll have every startup at your feet. If you're "just" an OK engineer, then SV is not going to move mountains for you, unlike what some have said.

TheCapn3• 14 years ago

Well, I don't blame them. If you're walking a thin line between success/failure you want "the best" with you and often "the best" want to do it on their own (like you said). Makes perfect sense; thanks for the reply.

Toddward2• 14 years ago

I applied, interviewed for, and then (stupidly) realized that I couldn't attend the coming batch. But I did get a chance to chat with Nick for 45 minutes or so - these guys seem very with it and I really admire how the primary focus of the school is to help people become better hackers. The press they've received in the past couple of weeks has focused more on the business/recruitment aspect of the operation - the feeling I got was that that's more of a peripheral advantage of the program.

I hope I have the opportunity to attend in a coming batch - if nothing more than to become a better hacker.

A Hacker School That Helps Solve Silicon Valley's Hiring Problem - Hackruiter

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