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ToxicSlurpee posted:
This is common in any STEM field that doesn't require grad school for meaningful employment. It's why the conspiracy theories about people wanting STEM graduates to push down STEM wages always ring kind of hollow to me. Even if that was the intent, they hosed up massively in actually getting those graduates to market. asdf32 posted:Well most openings are for experience because most of the workforce has some. But companies aren't dumb. Entry people can do tedious work and if employers are lucky, deliver near senior results after a couple years for much less pay. So entry positions will open up. Except they have massive preference towards people with internships. So basically even if you studied your butt off and did well in school, you're still hosed.
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Mar 13, 2016 15:53
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computer parts posted:This is common in any STEM field that doesn't require grad school for meaningful employment. It's why the conspiracy theories about people wanting STEM graduates to push down STEM wages always ring kind of hollow to me. Even if that was the intent, they hosed up massively in actually getting those graduates to market. Really I think that's another major issue; not everybody in school realizes just how important internships are. A lot are just focused on getting from enrollment to graduation without starving. Some may just plain not be able to do an internship for some reason or another.
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Mar 13, 2016 16:18
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Some may just plain not be able to do an internship for some reason or another. I wonder what rea$on$ people might have for being unable to do internship$. $ome people have trouble $ecuring the opportunity in the fir$t place.
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Mar 13, 2016 16:43
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computer parts posted:This is common in any STEM field that doesn't require grad school for meaningful employment. It's why the conspiracy theories about people wanting STEM graduates to push down STEM wages always ring kind of hollow to me. Even if that was the intent, they hosed up massively in actually getting those graduates to market. Wait why is that a conspiracy. The effect of more grads entering the market should be to push down wages. From an economic perspective this is fine and good. The entire economy functions best when its balanced. Right now it's not. Some fields like tech command high wages because there arn't enough actually talented people and then other lower skill fields have far too many people which drives wages down. Anything that balances this out helps the whole economy because every high skill person requires a certain number of lower skill support/technician/administrative/etc people. This is why its actually a no-brainer that as a country we should be getting our hands on anyone with any highly valued skills any way we can whether its immigration or training. If that levels out wages that's expected and good.
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Mar 13, 2016 16:43
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asdf32 posted:Wait why is that a conspiracy. The effect of more grads entering the market should be to push down wages. The two dueling theories are (more or less) either: A) The number of STEM jobs is fairly constant (maybe a constant % of population, etc) and increasing STEM eligible workers is primarily to make those jobs pay less than now. B) The number of STEM jobs is increasing disproportionate to population/historical trends so a similar disproportionate amount of eligible workers is required to fill those spots. A) is typically believed by more left-leaning or labor friendly people, and B) is the stated reason for why we're actually pushing so many graduates (and I honestly believe that it's the main reason why businesses want them).
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Mar 13, 2016 16:47
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DrNutt posted:Reading this thread as someone who graduated with a non-tech degree in 2007 makes me want to jump off a bridge. Hearing people toss out figures like 80,000-200,000 as no big deal is extremely disheartening. Someone talk me down, please.  Okay, first, people who make normal amounts of first-world money can still live enjoyable lives, and even retire early. There's many books and a whole subforum on the subject. Second, I'm 2008, dual major philosophy and "history of math and science" (ie high-school-level poo poo). My current web development career is due to having the privilege to occupy my dad's house for several months of self-study, and agreeing to let a recruiting agency shop me around (and leaving jobs quickly, as noted above). Nowadays there are many accelerated training programs which combine these two functions. Some of them are free and online, designed to be done like night school. I've referred fellow idiot liberal artsers to them, and they now have that precious first development job. Programming isn't for everyone, but it might be for you. Third and least, it's a bubble and winter is coming, as this entire thread is about.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:00
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computer parts posted:The two dueling theories are (more or less) either: Every website that's broken or product that's shipped with half baked firmware or banking breach is evidence to me that there is still room for additional talent in engineering. And in case someone is tempted to say so, these things aren't just corporate corner cutting.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:05
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LeJackal posted:I wonder what rea$on$ people might have for being unable to do internship$. $ome people have trouble $ecuring the opportunity in the fir$t place. Programming internships are almost universally paid at close to market rate. You can expect to make ~20k for 4 months at Google/FB/Apple etc
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Mar 13, 2016 17:07
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asdf32 posted:Every website that's broken or product that's shipped with half baked firmware or banking breach is evidence to me that there is still room for additional talent in engineering. And in case someone is tempted to say so, these things aren't just corporate corner cutting. More likely it's an issue with project management, specifically scope creep or inaccurate budgeting. In general, the easiest part is actually doing the gruntwork (whether it's coding or construction or whatever).
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Mar 13, 2016 17:07
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Doc Hawkins posted:
I'd love to know more. I'm in the PNW so the jobs are there, I just chose poorly wrt my degree and am dying to get out of customer service. I even have some contacts I'd be able to utilize with the right training.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:16
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So what happens after the bubble pops?
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Mar 13, 2016 17:19
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We empty the cities and mobilize the communal farms
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Mar 13, 2016 17:21
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ohgodwhat posted:So what happens after the bubble pops? The risk of a Bay Area real estate prices derail in any given thread declines for a brief but blissful time
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Mar 13, 2016 17:33
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computer parts posted:More likely it's an issue with project management, specifically scope creep or inaccurate budgeting. First, technical leadership just falls under a broader definition of engineering. Second, I disagree.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:37
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asdf32 posted:First, technical leadership just falls under a broader definition of engineering. I agree on the first point (though very few STEM students are learning those skills). I'm interested in your second point.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:43
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computer parts posted:I agree on the first point (though very few STEM students are learning those skills). I'm interested in your second point. That the easy part is doing the grunt work? That's not easy. Again, if it was easy companies wouldn't pay 6 figures for it.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:45
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asdf32 posted:That the easy part is doing the grunt work? That's not easy. Lots of easy jobs pay well and lots of hard jobs pay poo poo. The reason why companies pay 6 figures for programmers is because other companies pay 6 figures for programmers. I don't know of a specific study that exists, but pretty much every story I've heard about failed projects derives from either 1) the scope of the work changing mid project or never being clearly determined or 2) someone wanting to save a little money upfront and do things outside of specifications. That's a (perhaps technical) management issue.
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Mar 13, 2016 17:53
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ToxicSlurpee posted:But it's always "do you have three year's experience? No? Then go away." It's like...if nobody wants to let you get experience then you don't get experienced employees. the talent deficit posted:Programming internships are almost universally paid at close to market rate. You can expect to make ~20k for 4 months at Google/FB/Apple etc I note also that Google notoriously, until quite recently, required all candidates to submit their transcripts. Vint loving Cerf was asked to submit a transcript. This prioritizes education over experience, which again tends to favor the young. No, Vint isn't young, but who wouldn't want to hire him? e: computer parts posted:pretty much every story I've heard about failed projects derives from either 1) the scope of the work changing mid project or never being clearly determined or 2) someone wanting to save a little money upfront and do things outside of specifications. That's a (perhaps technical) management issue. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 18:02
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Furthermore, I used to work at one of the most desired employers, and I know for a fact that at the time I worked there, you had to have gone to one of a specified set of colleges to have a chance of getting an offer. Again, not everybody can afford to go to the big name colleges. Big name colleges cost the same as third tier toilet colleges, and perversely, the best universities also have the best financial aid for people truly in need. lovely colleges are the most likely to leave students with huge debts and no job. It makes a lot of sense not to bother recruiting or even looking at resumes from non-target schools. No point in sifting through hay when there are reliable sources of top talent in the amounts you want at top universities.
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Mar 13, 2016 18:17
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the talent deficit posted:Programming internships are almost universally paid at close to market rate. You can expect to make ~20k for 4 months at Google/FB/Apple etc You people really need to stop talking about literally the biggest, most desirable tech companies in the world as if they're representative of anything. Even SV pay scales aren't representative of the industry as a whole. $60k/year is pretty close to the nationwide median salary for software developers so, no, companies don't "universally" pay their interns that much. Edit- Not trying to be a dick or anything, it just seems like D&D has an unusually high number of people who either work for or have worked for these companies, and that is absolutely not the typical career path for software developers. It ends up taking these discussions in odd directions. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 18:23
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Yes. That totally sucks. The deal used to be (decades ago) that companies hired inexperienced employees, they trained them, and then the employees stayed for several years afterward. Then companies stopped being loyal to their employees, and the employees returned the favor. The other catch you're dealing with is that companies are starting to look at new programmers' github checkins on open-source projects and prefer those pre-tested coders. The ability to donate time to open source is also a luxury item, of course. And yet at every single job I've ever had the boss has complained about employee turnaround, nobody liking their jobs, and how we need to be loyal to the company. While knowing full well that anybody that's been there a decade and is actually making non-terrible wages has crosshairs on them and will be fired at the slightest provocation. Management would often be actively looking for excuses to fire anybody that had been there for a long time so they could replace them with a new, cheaper employee. Experience got you slightly better than starting when you inevitably moved somewhere else but you had to take a pay cut and repeat the cycle. Then the companies actively screwing their employees demanded higher morale because I guess it's the work force's fault that they get unhappy when you pay them starvation wages and dick them over any way you can get away with. What I think some people fail to realize is that they'd do the same to programmers and computer science people if given the chance. The only reason they can't right now is because the demand for programmers is so high right now, especially good ones but even then if you try to pay somebody who could get $160K somewhere half that then you bet your rear end they'll have no loyalty. Create a situation where an employee's best option is to actively court your competitors, bounce around, and only get promotions/major raises when they jump ship you can bet your rear end they won't be loyal. Then you get into the fact that HR needs more people to track all this crap and go through resumes, recruiters expect to be paid, and job-hunting websites don't work free and...yeah. I get that businesses by default want to reduce their expenses as much as possible but in this case it seems like they're just shooting themselves in the foot. Arsenic Lupin posted:Again, not everybody can afford to go to the big name colleges. Yeeeaaaah and I think that's another issue; I didn't go to CMU or MIT or anything but I can sit down and show people that I am, in fact, a decent (if inexperienced...I graduated in December) programmer but even getting first interviews for anything at all is hard. The school I went to had a pretty well-rated program for CS but it wasn't one of Those Schools so I don't have recruiters banging down my door. The primary reason I went where I did was lack of choice; it was local, it was cheap, and I could commute. Did the best I could given the situation but now I'm all "hey can I have a job please? I can write code." So far the answer has been "lolnope go away stupid, broke noob." The costs to get to the right school and the right internship while living in the right area to get a tech job is just plain out of reach to gently caress loads of people. I think simple statistics is also fouling things up; you have just plain fewer people with the resources to go big in tech. How does a poor kid afford CMU, an internship 3,000 miles away, and then moving to California? They don't. That's how. Doesn't matter how bright the kid is; he can be completely hammered by his situation.
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Mar 13, 2016 18:23
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It always blows my mind when people who are supposedly liberal talk about depreciating wages like it's a good thing they're hoping will happen. Not every programmer is a VC-funded silicon valley employee. Programming and its variants is literally just a skilled trade with the same pressures on its labor force as any other trade. Like, most programming unions stake their foundation on the fact that programmers are often exploited as salaried employees who work well over 40 hours. For example people itt are talking about colleges being unfairly weighted during employee selection like it's proof of tech egotism and not a common, universal bias. Is there just something about the joy of hating on techbros that makes everyone conflate all tech into facebook + google horror stories? In the same vein this discussion about internships is extremely narrow. I did a programming internship in college which paid less than my manual-labor construction job the prior years. In high school I worked the whole summer at a government internship writing c code for 5k, which was competitive with minimum wage but just barely. Now I have a programming job working at a not-for-profit. There are a lot of really accessible internship opportunities in tech if you aren't expecting to start your first job at google and friends. TheresNoThyme fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 18:30
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No one cares about building human capital anymore because it's not something you can amortize on a fixed schedule to improve your bottom line, and half these companies have no plan to be in business 5 years down the line except maybe as a subsidiary or division of a big tech company so why give a gently caress about training? We're so disruptive that the world is gonna be totally different by then and training will be useless and outdated anyways!
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Mar 13, 2016 18:30
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rscott posted:No one cares about building human capital anymore because it's not something you can amortize on a fixed schedule to improve your bottom line, and half these companies have no plan to be in business 5 years down the line except maybe as a subsidiary or division of a big tech company so why give a gently caress about training? We're so disruptive that the world is gonna be totally different by then and training will be useless and outdated anyways! The companies that care most about human capital (elite consulting and law) use a brutal system of up or out so that the average tenure is only around 2-3 years at a company. The system is often called the Cravath system, and it works.
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Mar 13, 2016 18:42
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Arsenic Lupin posted:"Google, Facebook, Apple" is not "almost universally". Those are the most desired employers, and contrariwise those are employers willing to spend money to get the most desired graduates. Furthermore, I used to work at one of the most desired employers, and I know for a fact that at the time I worked there, you had to have gone to one of a specified set of colleges to have a chance of getting an offer. Again, not everybody can afford to go to the big name colleges. TheresNoThyme posted:It always blows my mind when people who are supposedly liberal talk about depreciating wages like it's a good thing they're hoping will happen. Not every programmer is a VC-funded silicon valley employee. Programming and its variants is literally just a skilled trade with the same pressures on its labor force as any other trade. Like, most programming unions stake their foundation on the fact that programmers are often exploited as salaried employees who work well over 40 hours. The only broken thing about our labor market is that you can work 40 hours a week and not be able to provide for your family. cheese fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 18:50
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Yes. That totally sucks. The deal used to be (decades ago) that companies hired inexperienced employees, they trained them, and then the employees stayed for several years afterward. Then companies stopped being loyal to their employees, and the employees returned the favor. The other catch you're dealing with is that companies are starting to look at new programmers' github checkins on open-source projects and prefer those pre-tested coders. The ability to donate time to open source is also a luxury item, of course. I sympathize with all of these points as they are all true to some extent. However, lawyers and doctors put in 90 hour weeks as students/residents/associates in order to 'earn' their high salaries as attendings/partners. Lawyers and doctors who want to just work 40 hours a week from the day they graduate basically don't exist. Programming is not that different. If you want to work 40 hour weeks and not even think about programming on the weekends/in the evenings that is fine, but you are going to be a less desirable candidate employee than someone who works 40 hour weeks and puts in a further 20 working on professional development. It doesn't have to be open source contributions. It could also be things like reading groups, networking events, research, side projects, etc. Anything that demonstrates that you have genuine interest and ability. As for internships, they exist outside the big silicon valley companies. I work for a startup based in Toronto and we pay our interns $65k prorated over the time they work for us. We also have trouble sourcing interns so I assume other companies are making internship offers competitive to ours. Google's hiring process is bullshit, no one is going to argue that. They also pay enough that they can easily hire despite that.
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Mar 13, 2016 19:26
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I recently read an entire article about coding job interview bullshit. Turns out when you give millions of dollars to idiot kids they don't necessarily know how to spend it wisely.DrNutt posted:I'd love to know more. I'm in the PNW so the jobs are there, I just chose poorly wrt my degree and am dying to get out of customer service. I even have some contacts I'd be able to utilize with the right training. Well, of the candidates I've interviewed from coding bootcamps (note this would be biased towards ones based in the bay area), the most consistently impressive have been from Hack Reactor. The full course of that is 12 weeks and 17 grand, and they cheat by not taking absolute beginners ("we're more about 60-100 than 0-60," a rep told me), but if you can get in and graduate, yes, you are definitely hireable. If you're more of a beginner, check out their remote prep course, for only 600. If that still seems risky, look at CodeAcademy, which is free and self-directed. Please PM me if you want to know more (that goes for anyone reading this). Doc Hawkins fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 19:28
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ToxicSlurpee posted:But it's always "do you have three year's experience? No? Then go away." It's like...if nobody wants to let you get experience then you don't get experienced employees. Like in job searches I see secretarial jobs that are extremely basic where they still want 3-5 years' experience in that position to get it. Post-2008 companies have little to no interest in training people at all, especially because they could get very experienced people to take jobs for way less because their old jobs no longer existed.
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Mar 13, 2016 19:45
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FlamingLiberal posted:This is seemingly happening in every industry now Entry level positions requiring 3 years experience is a trope that has existed since at least the early 90's. (It may have been earlier but you would have to have been much older than I to know for sure.) I am mid-career and I have never witnessed a company invest in their staff outside the occasional one day communications seminar. This is not a new behaviour.
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Mar 13, 2016 19:55
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One of the most valuable lessons I got early in my career was that the company has no loyalty to you, so you owe no loyalty to them. Does it encourage crappy behavior on both sides? Of course it does.... But that's the world we live in. All the comments on job hopping are right on the spot.
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Mar 13, 2016 20:08
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FlamingLiberal posted:This is seemingly happening in every industry now I've seen programming jobs described as "entry-level" that required a decade of experience in a variety of technologies, a master's degree, and previous experience in more than one field. That is not entry level by any stretch of the phrase. That's something that's been going on for a while though and is coupled with the "everybody goes to college now" thing. The cost of job training gets shunted off to the workers while the business goes "yay more profit!" With the student loan crisis you end up mandating that literal teenagers gamble with their futures if they want to even have a future in the first place. Mix in some stagnating wages on top of rampant youth unemployment and you have the shitstorm of a century.
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Mar 13, 2016 20:08
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Doc Hawkins posted:I recently read an entire article about coding job interview bullshit. Turns out when you give millions of dollars to idiot kids they don't necessarily know how to spend it wisely.
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Mar 13, 2016 20:10
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cheese posted:A friend of my fiances was recently hired to work at one of the "big" tech companies to act as a recruiter/interviewer, and this person was shocked at this practice. There is a list of ~15-20 colleges and if you are not graduating from one of them, they will literally not even look at your application. They visit these colleges and recruit at them in a very competitive way (Apple, Good, Facebook, Amazon, etc are all trying to get these grads), but that is IT. Doing well at Stanford or Berkeley? Awesome, we want to talk to you. Top of your class at Northwestern or Florida State? You don't exist. To be fair to tech companies, biotech/pharma is pretty similar, and really probably anything that gets a lot of applicants and requires a degree is similar. I am in California, and everyone is either from a top UC, Stanford, Harvard etc. Out of hundreds of people, I have only met one person from a CSU, even though the state has something like 40 of them, and that person was close to 60 years old and probably got into biotech when it was first starting and there were less people with science degrees concentrated in the area? In a way it makes sense when jobs are getting 500 applicants, it makes it easy for the recruiter to narrow down the list of resumes without actually having to read them. I think once you can get some experience the school does not matter as much anymore, but to get a job as a random person from a random mid tier school you need to outcompete people with previous experience applying to the job (I have had people with 20 years of experience apply to entry level positions), and then you need to outcompete people from top tier universities who have similar experience to yourself. I graduated from a top school and it still would take 3-4 months to find a job with less than 2 years experience when the economy was strong. I have no idea how someone from a less prestigious school would even get an interview with no experience (they probably just don't). Once you get to 5 years of experience you can have 3 offers in a month.
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Mar 13, 2016 20:29
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You are receiving this broadcast as a dream...We are transmitting from the year one nine... nine nine ...You are receiving this broadcast in order t
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It's the same with finance/consulting campus recruiting. If you have 10,000 CVs, an easy first cut is throwing out the 9500 CVs not from a target school and working from there. Having done recruiting for finance analyst and then consulting associate roles, I've come to the conclusion that top firms make the hiring process onerous more for the signalling/prestige effect than necessarily just finding the "best" talent. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations for recruitment expenses at my current firm and I'd estimate that it spends 6-figures on the interview process to convert each successful hire.
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Mar 13, 2016 20:57
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on the left posted:Big name colleges cost the same as third tier toilet colleges, and perversely, the best universities also have the best financial aid for people truly in need. lovely colleges are the most likely to leave students with huge debts and no job. There is a social divide going on here, not just an intelligence divide. Upper-class kids have family connections that can help pull them into big-name schools. Upper-class kids' parents can afford to pay for coaches to help them with tests, and with admissions. Upper-class kids can afford the music lessons, dance lessons, sports coaches, ... that demonstrate "well rounded" applicants. Upper-class kids' parents don't depend on their kids' incomes, so that the kids can spend summer vacations and so on volunteering in Haiti. e: ToxicSlurpee posted:I've seen programming jobs described as "entry-level" that required a decade of experience in a variety of technologies, a master's degree, and previous experience in more than one field. BTW, it's another piece of evidence of the desperation economy that people with a decade of experience and a master's degree are even applying to entry-level jobs. Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Mar 13, 2016 |
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Mar 13, 2016 21:01
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Arsenic Lupin posted:The most hilarious one I ever saw was one that required 5 years' Java experience ... even though Java had only existed for three years, and that's if you count Oak. It would make sense if it was more like people looking at their current career and wanting a change. Like "yeah I have 20 years experience doing X but I decided I hated doing X so I'm here to do Y instead. Yes I know it pays less" but the banks just had to accidentally the whole economy. So it goes.
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Mar 13, 2016 21:07
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shrike82 posted:Having done recruiting for finance analyst and then consulting associate roles, I've come to the conclusion that top firms make the hiring process onerous more for the signalling/prestige effect than necessarily just finding the "best" talent. It also just makes practical sense. If you're desirable enough as an employer to be competing for only the best potential hires, why bother sifting through a huge number of potential applicants when you can just recruit graduates who will definitely want the job from the "best" schools? There's nothing particularly bad about doing this, it's just that the effect it ultimately has on the rest of the labor pool is horrible.
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Mar 13, 2016 21:12
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Google et al. are basically saying they think someone mediocre from a top university is always better than the best from a normal university. Just because something is easy doesn't mean it's clever or good.
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Mar 13, 2016 21:25
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Which planet are you from? Even the best colleges require students to take out loans, and don't allow them to live at home. Kids who graduate from the best colleges on financial aid graduate hundreds of thousands in debt. In any case, there are a lot of personal circumstances that don't let students go to target schools even if they get in. Family responsibilities (to parents, not just to children). Ability to live at home (free) versus paying for dormitories and food service. Ability to stretch out degree over multiple years so you can earn money in the off-terms. Your guidance counselor never even mentioning that your GPA/SATs/student history would qualify you to apply to a target school. Why are sob stories relevant to corporate recruiting? There are plenty of poor people that do manage to get into these schools and do well. Maybe these costs mean that students on the margins won't get be able to go, but most top universities have stellar financial aid.
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Mar 13, 2016 21:30
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Google et al. are basically saying they think someone mediocre from a top university is always better than the best from a normal university. Not really. They're saying that they can still find enough qualified hires even if they limit their pool to top universities only. I'm not familiar enough with Google's hiring process to say this for sure, but I assume they literally don't just look at top schools and offer jobs to every single graduate with the right degree. It's perfectly fine as a hiring practice even if you assume that the distribution of talented graduates is identical at all schools.
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Mar 13, 2016 21:40
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