If there's a tech skills shortage, why are so many computer graduates unemployed?

Parents Forum
101

OK, so I have worked in Tech and outside of Tech. Really not much is really outside Tech, but it is not my role any longer.

Here is my observation over the years. Unless the CEO happens to be a techie in his or her own right, there is often a huge disconnect between management and tech in terms of what is possible and what it takes to get it done. The BS goes both ways. Tech departments get bloated with more and more bodies because the kids coming out of colleges cannot code as well as their less-educated peers in industries that are not married to a degree. Management tries to pinch pennies and hires better coders for less money, but those coders cannot really understand the nuances of the business end, often due to miscommunication.

You also have a problem with kids coming out of college in general who expect starting salaries that are enormous. This further drives the actions of business to a cheaper route.

To be sure, this is an overall trend and you will find much anecdotal evidence to the contrary as well. Just my observations.

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@1Wife1Kid re: # 99 – I’m very familiar with that model. My own high school mirrored a very similar curriculum/approach (New England boarding school, with a 6-days-per week/2hrs-per day sports requirement (games twice a week, practice 4 days a week), as well as compulsory chapel attendance and talks, formal dining twice a week in the dining hall, Saturday morning classes, the whole bit). Be careful when speaking of “American schools,” if that is the sole basis of your reference point.

From what I’ve witnessed through my daughter’s academic journey, American public schools are not held within the ken of the private school mindset. It is an entirely different world. A different world view. A different world’s expectation of that world’s students. And there certainly is NOT an athletic EC requirement! LOL! The Greek ideal of scholar-athlete has long been neglected and really, fully abandoned by OUR educational system. Your view is skewed wrt to “American schools.” Not sure if it is skewed in other knowledge categories. But then again, whose isn’t?!

I don’t know why so many CS grads are unemployed, or if that is even true. I do know that there’s a heck of a push to address the “tech skills shortage” in American public schools these days. They are pushing them, cramming them into the mouth of the pipeline. The question is, what will show up at the other end in another 4 or 5 or 6 years?

@Torveaux – your comments (along with much of this thread) have helped me resolve a recurrent dilemma: Go with the flow of the STEM tide or step aside and let it flow past me/her/us? I’m in tech myself. It satisfies well enough for me, I suppose. It might suffice for her. But she doesn’t need to chase it. If she’s destined for a career using “tech skills”, she’s smart enough, and determined enough, to learn them as the need arises. I have no doubt about that. Trying to sell STEM as this amazing thing is bs. It’s like trying to insist circuit boards are cute and cuddly and soft and fuzzy. They aren’t. We’re not fooling anybody. Especially our kids.

What they really need to learn, in the meantime, is how to write, and how to present, how to work effectively in a group, and how to communicate. You are absolutely right about that, @Torveaux!

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There is a distinction between CS / development jobs and IT / management (of computers) jobs, even though people here seem to use “IT” to refer to both. The former are more likely to be part of companies’ core intellectual property, while the latter are often seen as more of a cost to be cut. The latter seem to be more vulnerable to being subcontracted out to the lowest bidder.

Also, as noted many posts ago, productivity in CS / development jobs can vary by an order of magnitude between different employees, even though pay levels (within the same country) do not vary by anywhere near as much. Job and career prospects for the most productive are much better than for the least productive. It is certainly possible for there to be a shortage of high end talent in this area, while less talented practitioners are unable to find work.

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@ucbalumnus – I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. However, your point #2 isn’t restricted to CS, it’s true in most professions. If you’re good at something and, most importantly, take on extra challenges you generally advance faster. Note that my experience is limited to the PC and internet world. I imagine things are different in other CS arenas (where I would be bored to tears).

I didn’t recommend majoring in CS to my D18 but rather for her to learn how to program to help her wherever she ends up. Many times I’ve seen people in other fields use various levels of programming ability to advance their careers over others. It may be simple php stuff on websites, python scripts for scientific work, C/C++ for numerical modeling, etc. Those people become the go-to folks in their offices. D18 went from not being interested at all in CS a year ago to taking AP-CSP this year and wants a CS-minor in college (which I think is the perfect combo).

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ucbalumnus, Without a doubt back office IT will/have been outsourced first as it is low skill work. But even in core software development, back in the 90s I had my first experience with my then employer’s India Development Center. I was told that I would be given 4 developers in India for each developer that I replace in the USA. Now that India salaries have gone up, perhaps the 1:4 ratio doesn’t hold. I built that team and it was really successful. However, my life became miserable with the timezone gap and constant travel, and the broader organization was extremely resistant to having to document everything.

I worked at one of the two hottest software IPOs in the late 80s (the googles and facebooks of that time), in case you are wondering who my employer was. It is going strong even today.

106

If you do not like the phrase that “profit is the only thing that matters” then think of it this way: risk is the only thing that matters and the people who take the risks are the ones who benefit and should benefit the most and should benefit first as well. And the way the risk takers are paid back is by profit, nothing else.

My company would not have existed if it were not for investors who took the risk and invested money and took the risk that I would make that money work for them. There were years that I was on the hook for millions. That money was not meant to work for employees and others because those people did not put a dime into starting the company - their risk was zero. The stark reality is employees are the direct beneficiaries of and simply live off of the successful risk-taking of others who came in long before any employee was ever hired.

If this seems strange to you, then think about it personally as it applies to personal finances - if someone lends you $40K to go to school to get a degree, do you give other people money left over after your primary expenses first or is it your fiduciary duty to pay back the entity that took the risk on you and loaned you money long before you had money to pay them?

Do not try it because you would find yourself in serious legal trouble rather quickly if you do not pay back your personal risk takers first, as they are legally first in line to be paid back and they have the right to profit from your success first, not other people who did not take the risk on you.

Now, if you understand the personal example above, then just apply it to a business and understand that if there is no profit to pay back the risk takers, then there would be no company and the employees would not have a job to go to because the risk takers would call in their investment loan. Same as you would be personally bankrupt if you failed to pay back your student loans from your paycheck.

Bottom line- if profit is not maximized to give the promised return the risk takers, there is no company for the employees to go to. Which is better to have, a profitable company to go to and actually have work or no company and no work?

107

As a parent of a recent/still unemployed CS grad (who graduated with honors from a respected program), I’d say what’s true in Britain is also true to some extent in the US. Where are the entry level jobs? Everything requires experience.
Or knowlege of two dozen very specific things. And each job requires a different set of specific knowledge/experience–2/3 of which is mostly unfamiliar to S. When I read a job listing, it is hard for me to imagine that there is a single person on the planet who matches those requirements. Is that why jobs go unfilled? S could learn quickly on the job, but employers want someone who knows it all and has experience already. Any advice from those who say it is easy to find jobs? H and I would like to help our son, but we are not CS people.

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awcntdb - Would your company survive without the workers? If not, then they are an important piece of your business and they make it possible for you to pay your investors back. You should treat them kindly and with respect.

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Employment is a business transaction. The workers are selling their time and skills for money. They want more money, because they have the same profit motive as employers. Otherwise employees would be willing to work for free.

Same profit motive applies to employers.

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What a demeaning comment about “back office IT” from @1Wife1Kid. A majority of our economy is now service based. The systems for banks, health care corporations, and insurance companies are a few examples that aren’t software companies, but are highly dependent on systems and data within their businesses. Back-office strikes me as talking about the original computer systems for accounting and payroll. But service companies today need sophisticated fraud detection, electronic medical records, systems that give them an integrated look at a customer’s relstuonship with them, and portals to allow customers to conduct business with them. These systems are core to the company’s products – in many cases, data IS the company’s product. Offshore mission critical systems work at your own risk.

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@atomom – your son could talk to former classmates to see if they know of any openings, he could simply send a cover letter+resume to a large company saying he wants to work there without a specific listing and see what happens, etc. Right now he should be using his time to create simple iOS or Android apps and get them in the Stores. The development tools are free and he’ll gain experience along the way.

Is there anything in CS he’s particularly interested in doing? Business-oriented software, consumer-oriented, scientific?

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@atomom

  1. If you don't know a technology, do a project and use that to learn that technology. Projects done outside of school also play great on resumes.
  2. This is unfortunately retroactive, but hopefully this helps others - internships, internships, internships! A lot of tech companies look to grow talent up from these programs, and you need to develop your experience somewhere.
  3. Apply to every job you can. Don't let a lack of experience in language X or stack Y stop you. The worst they can do is not call you. A lot of jobs want experience, but it doesn't have to be in that specific tech. Again though, this is where internships come in handy. As you said, very few hit every requirement. So don't let that stop you. As long as you have something relevant, they will at least read your resume for that second or two longer, and your chances of an interview go up.
  4. If you're in a rural area, relocation may be the reality. Look in other cities - many companies will pay for relocation in tech.
  5. If he simply isn't hearing back from anyone, there could be some red flag mistake on his resume. Make sure to proofread. If he's getting interviews but no offers, practice interviewing. "Cracking the Coding Interview" is a great book to start with. Another possibility is that he isn't good at communicating his ideas - everyone has this stereotype of the odd nerd that doesn't talk to anyone and codes while drinking mountain dew in his mother's basement (and according to some presidential candidates, is 400 pounds in size). The reality is that no company wants that, and few people do match that stereotype. The point being, social interactions and your ability to work with others is incredibly important, and showing that in interviews is a big positive.

A note:

Few to none in CS hiring care about GPA or honors. As long as it’s above a 3.0, they won’t even look at the numbers after the decimal point. As you said, experience is what they are looking for. You have to develop that outside the classroom. If you simply go through a CS degree and nothing more with it, you won’t be ready to work.

113

Of course not.

However, for many years the employees were paid directly from the investment funds provided by the risk-takers for there was no revenue because the product was not finished yet. In fact, I often brought in the investors so employees had a clue who to thank for their jobs,as it was not me directly. I encouraged the investors to just drop by whenever they wanted.

Exactly where did I say or imply I did not treat employees kindly and without respect? You are projecting some made up thing that I did not say or imply. No need to make things up. Please stick to the facts of what I wrote.

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@awcntdb

To #112:

This implies a higher value to “risk takers” and implies that employees basically have a parasitic relationship with their company. This whole thread, the business and profit argument has been discussing how companies are dehumanizing their working so much that profit becomes more important than supporting people locally, aka offshoring (there’s a much larger globalization argument here that I’ll skip over, because honestly, no company doing offshoring is doing it for that reason). To then additionally imply the former about employees paints a picture of disregard and disrespect. You didn’t explicitly say it, yes. But the implication is certainly there. Context and perspective matter.

To your original post in response to mine:

I don’t necessarily disagree with many of your steps at each point in your argument - it just doesn’t follow that profit is all that matters in life, and companies are going to offshore more development. As far as offshoring, It’s not cost-effective for them, as detailed in the past pages of the thread.

To the latter, I am well aware that you are talking the business world only. My disagreement is with exactly that - the idea of framing this with only a business, profit/loss perspective. Many companies are finding that they attract better employees when they explicitly move away from that framing. I’ve seen jobs where they will pay employees to use 10% of their time a week for community service - you can boil that down to more productive employees for the company, sure, but you’d be missing the bigger picture. That is my core problem with the framing.

The idea that the world is just a bunch of risk takers and people living off them is not very reflective of what’s actually going on - it is from a business perspective, but again, life is not just business, and why in the world would we care about work more than actual life. After all, aren’t most people only working to survive and retire and do what they actually want? It’s a bit sad really, and you should enjoy what you do, but that’s been a reality for quite some time. So, if a company is just a group of people who want to be happy, they should first be framing their actions and decisions by life, not by business. Money often buys happiness, but there’s no guide or rules on where to buy happiness, and

Business is now an enabling tool of life, and thus that makes profit one as well - it’s just not the end all be all, and that is why “profit is the only thing that matters” just doesn’t hold up. In a business scope, sure. Not in the larger one. The arguments in this thread seemed to discount or forget any greater context of profit. It’s treated like an end along with happiness when it is far from it.

I’ve probably already written enough to derail this thread, but I’d really like this to be the end of this tangent. We have some key fundamental disagreements here, and I don’t think either of us are going to move from those due to how rooted they are in a greater perspective difference that would take a very long journey down a rabbit hole to reconcile and eventually find that we still hold our positions I just wanted to scratch the surface of the deeper argument, because it isn’t about capitalistic business not being about profit, because by definition capitalism is. It’s again, about context.

Going back to the original topic, some summary points:

  1. The CS job market in the US is not the same as CS in the UK
  2. IT is not the same thing as CS by a longshot, and the jobs and availability and market conditions change dramatically between them.
  3. Simply getting a degree in a skill based field isn't enough - the degree content helps you develop the truly valuable skills in a professional context. You have to take that step. Other steps are also detailed, as suggested by many. @CollegeAngst had some good info.
115

It is absolutely stunning that people have not a clue that the money they have left over after cashing their paychecks and paying their expenses is their “personal profit,” and it is this “personal profit” that they are trying to increase with higher pay. People are not trying to work harder and get higher pay to increase their expenses relative to their pay and be left with the same or lower after-tax “personal profit.” People work harder for higher pay so that their calculated net worth increases.

Hint: Employers are doing the exact same thing as you are - working harder to increase revenue, reduce relative expenses, gain higher after-tax profits, and ultimately to increase calculated net worth of the company. Companies can only do this be producing a better product at lowering overall cost, and employees can only do it personally by improving their skills, as staying in the same job is equivalent to a company never improving its product.

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@awcntdb wrote:

@PengPhils responded:

What I stated is a straight-forward economic truth.

Philosophically, your use of term parasite is just plain wrong. A parasite takes and damages and gives nothing in return. An employee provides a service for his pay, so the employer gets something in return and hopefully grows/improves. Nothing improves with a parasite; it only goes downhill.

However, no employees provide their service for free, so until there is revenue to pay them independent of investors (truth be told - there never really is money independent of risk-takers), the employees are effectively living off the risk-takers - a simple economic fact. You may not like it, but that is the way it is.

Economically, of course there is higher value given to the risk-takers, as they are directly funding the jobs of the employees, as the employees are not funding themselves. It is quite naive to think that the people paying your salary is equal to you in terms of value and risk. No, those people are in deep water because they are paying for you to be there without having a clue if they would ever get their money back. In contrast, no employee would work unless he knows he would get paid every two weeks.

It is undeniable that the employees are beneficiaries of the risk-takers. Now, the employee is doing a particular job, but that job is not FREE, and the employee is not doing the employer any favors because the employer is paying for the service of the employee. As one poster stated above, employment is a contract.

However, the one group doing everyone a favor is the risk-takers who are putting up the money to pay everyone hoping to get a return.

When an employee decides to work for free in hopes of getting return, then I would equate him to the risk-takers. Until then, best not to think you are equivalent to the hand that feeds you. And no need to project that because people are not equal in a relationship that it means people are being mean and not treating others kindly - that is just made up stuff.

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@atomom, I agree with everything that PengsPhil wrote but will also add maybe consider getting a Masters. The local paper in Austin had an article last year about how many tech employers here did not even consider a resume unless the candidate had 3 to 5 years of experience or a Masters. They said they just threw them in the trash. But in the same article, they were complaining that they could not find and hire the right people. My DD was able to get a job right out of school but it was thru an internship with a very large, established, older company that is looking long term and is willing to invest some time and money in her.

So your son should keep sending out resumes but he might consider getting a masters. I have been told that is worth about 3 years of work experience and in our area increases the beginning salary by about $20,000/yr, so it pays for itself.

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@icbihtsu Yes, I will admit that my HS freshman (who has attended public school since first grade) has done Hour of Code. BUT, she has also been required to participate in science fairs, National History Day, foreign language festivals, visual and performing arts, and athletics. In HS, they have a bit more flexibility, but the required curriculum includes equal amounts of math, science, history, English, and foreign language but also includes either a semester of computer science and a year of PE, fine arts, and communications. So, computer science is actually the least required of anything. The school does offer an array of CS classes for those included to take them, including two AP classes.

My children don’t particularly enjoy coding enough to make a career out of it, but they will admit that they are glad they learned it. Even if students don’t make a career out of computer science, they are still probably going to need a strong foundation in it to enter other fields. I have a degree in journalism, work in public relations, and I’m learning to code so that I can work on our website. It is predicted that by 2020 that more than half of workers will be self-employed. I would imagine that these workers are going to need strong computer skills in running those businesses.

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@atomom Your son may aggressively seek volunteer work related to his major/interests. That may lead to getting paid months later and more doors opened soon after that.

Ideally for a kid interested in CS, start having CS related work experience in high school.

120

A couple of things:

  • Where you live matters?
  • Is your kid not getting any interviews? Or is he (presumably) getting interviews but no offers? While the first one is harder to diagnose, the second one makes me wonder if there's a little je ne sais quoi exhibited in or missing from the interview process.

In my area (Seattle metro), companies are falling all over themselves to hire people for entry-level positions. Assumption: person has a semi-relevant degree, is articulate and quantitative, and can connect* with the interviewers in some way. For a kid who’s having trouble launching, I’d suggest another internship as try before you buy reduces risk for both parties and the bar is significantly lower. Finally, beyond the 3 attributes above, we don’t really require any particular level of experience.

*one of my former employees used to call this the “do I want to spend another 45 minutes in a room with you?” test. The best way to pass it has little to do with what you know and more to do with gauging whether or not you could work though a technical problem with this person.