And wages as a whole have diverged from productivity since the 70s. That we're happy that wages are once again keeping pace with inflation --another way of saying "well, at least we're no longer losing money"-- is depressing in this context.
>What might help? Easing the parts of the regulatory thicket without societal benefits. Providing public financing for the sorts of early-stage scientific research and physical infrastructure that the private sector often finds unprofitable. Long term, nothing is likely to matter more than improving educational attainment, from preschool through college (which may have started already).
So... we socialize the substantial costs of doing business (infrastructure and research), cut back on "the parts of the regulatory thicket without societal benefits," --whatever that means-- and just keep pumping people through college. Has Leonhardt being paying attention at all?
We already subsidize infrastructure and research costs. Hell, it's become standard policy that no corporation shall break ground anywhere unless the host promises it special favors and decreased (or absolutely no) taxes. Regulations are more industry specific. The big ticket ones however typically revolve around finance and environment. Perhaps we should ask --well, damn near anyone-- how the year 2009 was for them financially. Perhaps we should ask the Chinese just how "without societal benefits" all of those environmental regulations are. And college? We're putting more students through than ever before. And they are predictably finding that, as the number of people with degrees rises, the value placed on their own degree decreases. And what does the hiring company look for? Experience.
>Many business executives and economists also point to immigration policy. Done right, an overhaul could make a difference, many say, by allowing more highly skilled immigrants to enter the country and by making life easier for those immigrants already here. Historically, immigrants have started more than their share of new companies.
AND we need more H-1B's? This guy's a real piece of work. We already have the ability to bring in extraordinary talent. We don't need 50,000 more outsource firm slots.
==========
Here's the thing: businesses will hire exactly as many employees as they need. No more. Perhaps less, if they can get away with it. And if they run the remaining folks at break-neck pace long enough, that level will become the new "need" level. No amount of policy or regulatory finagling is going to make a lick of difference. By bending over for Corporate America, all you're doing is throwing taxpayer money at them with the vague and unsubstantiated hope that they'll take on a few more employees. This is beyond stupid. As business becomes more automated --not mechanized, automated, as in no human required-- you can expect fewer jobs to remain and for the employment rates to level off or decline.
> AND we need more H-1B's? This guy's a real piece of work. We already have the ability to bring in extraordinary talent. We don't need 50,000 more outsource firm slots.
Being on the hiring side of things, America needs all the talent it can get. Hiring good software engineers is seriously hard.
Maybe the problem is just connecting people with jobs, but given the low unemployment rate in the tech sector, I really doubt it.
Having to interview 5 candidates before finding one who just knows how malloc works isn't fun.
Indeed, one of our high quality engineers had to be sent back to his home country after his work visa expired, we are hoping to get him in on H-1B, and I believe he got approved, but now we have to sit and wait for government wheels to churn.
America should make it as easy as possible for highly motivated and talented individuals to come here. Jobs, heck, entire new industries will be created.
Isn't that the entire lesson from start-up culture? Get talented highly motivated people together, let them achieve their dreams (with someone who knows business and finances overseeing things!), and the economy will grow.
I'm not against H1 for other reasons, but I'm a little skeptical of the trickle-down benefits of software engineers. Civil engineers, industrial engineers, sure. But who else do we add to a company's payroll? A few sales, HR, here and there. A little business to local grocery stores, restaurants, etc. But I don't see software as a leveraged job-creation industry.
> I'm not against H1 for other reasons, but I'm a little skeptical of the trickle-down benefits of software engineers.
Video Games are a great example.
How many jobs has Halo created?
Well there are all the various paraphernalia that goes along with the series. From artists hired to design custom Xbox face plates, to the sales person selling the t-shirts, to statues, action figures, etc.
Then there are the advertisers who make the TV spots. The writers who run the various alternate reality games before releases. The musicians who do the score, the voice actors, directors, texture modelers, and so on and so forth.
Then there are the gaming bars that draw patrons in with Halo tournaments. The additional drinks sold, the chairs for spectators, extra food that is sold, and so on and so forth.
> A little business to local grocery stores, restaurants, etc. But I don't see software as a leveraged job-creation industry.
Ask Puget Sound and Silicon valley what the economic impact is!
Those areas are tech hubs. I've lived in Silicon Valley for 18 years, and most companies I've worked for are about half engineering. So, for every foreign engineer we bring in, perhaps the company can add one position on the other side of the house, in marketing, accounting, HR, etc. And then some small trickle-down effect as the engineer and his counterpart spend their salaries locally. It's good, better than nothing, but it's not like the old days of setting up a car factory and then bringing in thousands of relatively low-skilled new jobs.
The Halo example is good, but balance it out with things like Google's self driving cars. It's a relatively small team that will probably eliminate all of the taxi and truck driving jobs in the developed world. It will probably make vehicle sharing radically more efficient as well which will take a lot of cars off the road and eliminate more jobs there too.
All in all, I believe we're competing with foreign engineers no matter where they are so it makes sense to have them here. I'm just not seeing much evidence that we are creating jobs faster than we are eliminating them.
How many stores have employees dedicated just to selling electronics? How many video game t-shirts get sold? Entire comic strips like Penny Arcade, and all the associated goods that go with it.
Just an anthology book of comics, the printers, the person who does the page layout, the binding, the paper mill that makes the paper for the book, the factory that makes the glossy ink, everything is connected together.
Hiring top talent is certainly expensive. And if you're searching for the best of the best, it will always be hard by virtue of the fact that you're looking for people at the extreme of a bell curve, no matter how large the sample set is.
As for knowing how malloc works: fewer and fewer universities are even touching C. It's all C++ or, better yet, Java (no need to understand memory management _at all_ in that case). The only guys left that are into reimplementing malloc are the minority of Computer Science or Computer Engineering graduates that are into embedded work or HA scenarios.
And just to quench my own personal curiosity, since you're on the hiring side and I'm not: why is it that every company absolutely must find someone who fits the bill exactly? What is with this aversion to spending any amount of time training people?
> And just to quench my own personal curiosity, since you're on the hiring side and I'm not: why is it that every company absolutely must find someone who fits the bill exactly? What is with this aversion to spending any amount of time training people?
We don't have an aversion to training, but when someone has supposedly 8+ years of development experience and cannot answer simple questions, well, on to the next candidate.
I personally do always look for potential, I believe it is the most important aspect when hiring. But potential means having a drive to learn independently. I really do understand why a lot of employers are just saying "screw it" and not hiring anyone who isn't on Stack Overflow, or has a tech blog, or some sort of presence that said "I am passionate about this field."
(I'd be doomed by that metric, I don't have a github or Stack Overflow account! I'm on this site and /r/programming, however I do have a somewhat maintained tech blog.)
> As for knowing how malloc works: fewer and fewer universities are even touching C. It's all C++ or, better yet, Java (no need to understand memory management _at all_ in that case). The only guys left that are into reimplementing malloc are the minority of Computer Science or Computer Engineering graduates that are into embedded work or HA scenarios.
Ugh I know. My college still teaches native, and in fact the majority of the curriculum (last time I checked, its been a few years) was native, but they are unfortunately the exception to a general trend.
The thing is, managed languages are pretty damn nice for teaching software engineering principles in, but bad for hands on "this is how it works" explaining.
Covering how the JVM or CLR does stuff on a PowerPoint slide isn't the same thing as having students write an allocator. Which sort of sucks when they go on the job and have to write an allocator!
I wonder if your hiring process isn't more narrow and exclusionary of independent learners than you think. It is really quite easy in 2013 to have racked up 8 years of real high-quality development experience without having any idea how memory allocation works at a detailed level. For some portion of the people with 8 years experience it will be easy for them to go and independently figure out how it works and for others it won't. You want people in the first group, but you can't find them just by asking them questions about memory allocation.
(Also, do you do something having to do specifically with memory allocation or is it just your pet entry on the list of things you think everybody should know about to not be dumb?)
Honest question: what field are you in which means your candidates are going to need to write custom allocators on a regular basis?
What problems need custom allocators? I'm a fan of lower level details and all, but surely you can get away with one of the many existing allocator implementations when the problem to be solved isn't "sudo make me an allocator"?
> Honest question: what field are you in which means your candidates are going to need to write custom allocators on a regular basis?
Embedded. :P
> What problems need custom allocators? I'm a fan of lower level details and all, but surely you can get away with one of the many existing allocator implementations when the problem to be solved isn't "sudo make me an allocator"?
Memory is being counted in kilobytes. Processing time in cycles.
I'm loving it, but finding others who feel the same, and who are serious about software engineering, isn't easy!
>who feel the same, and who are serious about software engineering, isn't easy!
So what you're saying is that you have a hard time finding people experienced and passionate about your extremely small niche? I'm sure I'd have a hard time finding qualified child neurologists willing to work for < 200k as well.
I'd hardly call embedded work an extremely small niche. Now, what he's doing on them may or may not be. But microcontrollers on the whole are a much bigger industry than personal computing. You'll find many more 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers in any given house than you will Intel or AMD 32/64 bit general purpose microprocessors. Last I checked approximately half of all CPUs sold globally were 8-bit.
Have you (or your company) given any thought to telecommuting? I know of one software engineer who would love to return to the embedded space, but would not be willing to move (he is right now, on a "working vacation" for the next three months some six times zones away from his current place of employment; his employers put up with this because he is that good at what he does).
Heck, I might be interested in the embedded space. I certainly have experience with Assembly language (several different CPUs) and C (for twenty years now). It would certainly be a change from testing call processing.
Covering how $a or $b does stuff on a PowerPoint slide
isn't the same thing as having students write a $thing.
Which sort of sucks when they go on the job and have to
write a $thing!
That statement is true for many different projects in many different niches. Colleges can't possibly teach them all. If they try, then classes spend less time on CS fundamentals and employers are unhappy. If kids learn about $thing, that means less time for theory and employers are unhappy. (Not to mention that practically speaking, less time on theory means they won't be passing "top tech" interviews at all.)
"We need people who know $thing" does not imply that "colleges should teach kids $thing" is true. Is $thing important because you know it and use it, or do you know it and use it because it's important?
> That statement is true for many different projects in many different niches. Colleges can't possibly teach them all. If they try, then classes spend less time on CS fundamentals and employers are unhappy.
Well yes, very true, I believe in fundamentals.
But the 3 types of common memory storage (stack, static, heap), and how each is commonly implemented, seems like it should be covered. :)
Likewise, common GC algorithms should also be gone over!
CS curriculums really are over stuffed, just from a theory point of view there is so much that is already not covered.
> America should make it as easy as possible for highly
> motivated and talented individuals to come here. Jobs,
> heck, entire new industries will be created.
America also needs to remember that the high quality engineer they sent home has the world at his feet - if he has migrated out of his home country, the world is his oyster. He can migrate to any other country offering him a job and will not have to limit himself to the H1B.
Anyway.
>Average wages are no longer trailing inflation.
And wages as a whole have diverged from productivity since the 70s. That we're happy that wages are once again keeping pace with inflation --another way of saying "well, at least we're no longer losing money"-- is depressing in this context.
>What might help? Easing the parts of the regulatory thicket without societal benefits. Providing public financing for the sorts of early-stage scientific research and physical infrastructure that the private sector often finds unprofitable. Long term, nothing is likely to matter more than improving educational attainment, from preschool through college (which may have started already).
So... we socialize the substantial costs of doing business (infrastructure and research), cut back on "the parts of the regulatory thicket without societal benefits," --whatever that means-- and just keep pumping people through college. Has Leonhardt being paying attention at all?
We already subsidize infrastructure and research costs. Hell, it's become standard policy that no corporation shall break ground anywhere unless the host promises it special favors and decreased (or absolutely no) taxes. Regulations are more industry specific. The big ticket ones however typically revolve around finance and environment. Perhaps we should ask --well, damn near anyone-- how the year 2009 was for them financially. Perhaps we should ask the Chinese just how "without societal benefits" all of those environmental regulations are. And college? We're putting more students through than ever before. And they are predictably finding that, as the number of people with degrees rises, the value placed on their own degree decreases. And what does the hiring company look for? Experience.
>Many business executives and economists also point to immigration policy. Done right, an overhaul could make a difference, many say, by allowing more highly skilled immigrants to enter the country and by making life easier for those immigrants already here. Historically, immigrants have started more than their share of new companies.
AND we need more H-1B's? This guy's a real piece of work. We already have the ability to bring in extraordinary talent. We don't need 50,000 more outsource firm slots.
==========
Here's the thing: businesses will hire exactly as many employees as they need. No more. Perhaps less, if they can get away with it. And if they run the remaining folks at break-neck pace long enough, that level will become the new "need" level. No amount of policy or regulatory finagling is going to make a lick of difference. By bending over for Corporate America, all you're doing is throwing taxpayer money at them with the vague and unsubstantiated hope that they'll take on a few more employees. This is beyond stupid. As business becomes more automated --not mechanized, automated, as in no human required-- you can expect fewer jobs to remain and for the employment rates to level off or decline.