# The skills gap- Fact or fiction? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 30, 2016, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450 "2016-11-30T13:29:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2016, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/41 "2016-12-01T21:39:46Z")
> [@filmore](#): > > An experienced programmer will be able to quickly get to the point of fluency in the new programming language, but most employers want them to be product-level proficient in the language on the first day. Yeah, but a lot of [employers have trouble finding programmers](https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/) who can code _at all_, so I doubt they’d be able to tell an experienced clojurescript programmer from a _really_ experienced clojurescript programmer. The whole reason they supposedly “need” an industry expert is because they don’t know anything about clojurescript themselves, right? And speaking of “needs”, I am a consulting engineer. A big part of my job is telling customers that what they think they “need” is wrong, and they actually need something else, often something much cheaper. Employees who illustrate that their employers don’t actually need ten years experience in language-du-jour are most likely doing them a favor. “Look, I can solve your problem, and I’m cheap. Stop wasting your money on an endless search for the perfect ‘ninja rock star’ who won’t actually improve your bottom line.” ---
**Author:** ![filmore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@filmore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmore)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2016, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/42 "2016-12-01T21:51:58Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > Yeah, but a lot of [employers have trouble finding programmers](https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/) who can code _at all_, so I doubt they’d be able to tell an experienced clojurescript programmer from a _really_ experienced clojurescript programmer. The whole reason they supposedly “need” an industry expert is because they don’t know anything about clojurescript themselves, right? It’s typically the case that the new-hire will be joining an existing team. They already are developing products in clojurescript and they need more developers. It’s very likely part of the interview will be spent with the existing development team, during which the interviewee will be asked to solve some problems on the whiteboard using clojurescript. You can likely get past the the HR gatekeeper who doesn’t know anything about clojurescript and won’t be asking any probing questions to verify proficiency. But the level of proficiency will come up when meeting with the actual team which is doing the work. The team likely doesn’t care about the number of years of experience. They’re more concerned about proficiency. If you actually have been using the language in the real world for some time, you’ll likely be fine. But if you’ve only been learning about it for a few weeks, you likely won’t be proficient enough to get past the group interview. ---
**Author:** ![DrCube](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a3d4f5/32.png) [@DrCube](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrCube)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2016, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/43 "2016-12-01T22:17:14Z")
Then how do people end up getting hired who can’t write a [fizz buzz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizz_buzz) program? ---
**Author:** ![blondebear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/blondebear/32/1022_2.png) [@blondebear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/blondebear)\ **Post date:** [December 1, 2016, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/44 "2016-12-01T22:34:40Z")
Re: companies looking for the “best and brightest”…in our office that approach has proven counter-productive. What we really need is someone who is reasonably smart, reliable, and able to follow instructions. There is some technical ability needed, but honestly the job isn’t that hard for someone who is halfway on the ball. What the company advertises for, though, is a “Systems Engineer” with qualifications way _way_ beyond anything needed. We’ve had two people come in and realize after a few weeks that the “Systems Engineer” job was massively oversold, and leave within a month. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 8:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/45 "2016-12-02T08:26:40Z")
> [@adaher](#): > > It’s half true from what I can see. When employers say they can’t find employees to fill a job, what they usually mean is, “we can’t find an employee who has the skills we need at the pay we are willing to offer”. Sometimes it’s more along the lines of, “We can’t find an employee who has the skills in the local area, although if we cast a wider net and considered remote candidates or candidates who are willing to relocate, we could find someone”. And sometimes the truth is, “We can’t find someone with the skills, but we do have employees we could develop from within, but nah, we don’t feel like making the effort.” > But yes, it can be difficult to fill some positions. The problem is that companies take the easy way out and ask for an H-1B so they can just bring someone qualified in at the rate they want to pay. This is the orthodox and rather dismissive response to the problem and, IMHO, elides a great deal of the subtlety of the actual debate. I’ve been involved a couple of times in candidate searches where the compensation is essentially uncapped for the right person and it can still be challenging for a variety of reasons: - Increasing salary does not improve the number of qualified candidates coming in through passive channels - The only people looking at job boards are those actively looking for work and they tend to apply to anything that looks relevant to them. Having a salary that’s too low will stop some people from applying but having a salary way above market doesn’t magically appear a bunch of people who weren’t previously looking. Furthermore, if you post something that’s way above market rate, you actually end up getting flooded with a ton of unqualified candidates who figure they’ll take a shot in the hopes that they can con you into a job. - There’s no active search process where increasing spend can increase quality. All recruitment agencies are scum and they’ll send you the same firehose of shitty, unqualified candidates no matter how much you pay them. There’s no secret reserve of amazing candidates that recruitment agencies keep in their back pocket for just the people with the biggest wallets. - A lot of hiring is constrained by time, not money. If you’re in a position where you’re willing to shell out big bucks for someone, you’re probably stretched thin as it is. Getting enough bandwidth to even vet candidates properly can be tricky. - Content marketing is hit or miss and totally independant of salary. Sometimes, you write the right targeted blog post and put a PS: We’re hiring link at the bottom and you get 5 super qualified candidates the next day and it’s amazing. But the process is totally independant on salary. As long as your compensation is fair in the offer stage, whether someone chooses to accept generally has far more to do with perceived cultural fit. - In rapidly expanding fields, people at the right level of experience don’t just magically appear. Some skills can only be developed over time and senior candidates are incredibly hard to find. If what you’re looking for only became hot 3 years ago, finding someone with 5 years of experience is going to be tricky, no matter what. You can find a ton of junior people being pumped out by bootcamps but they’re useless unless they have a senior person managing and mentoring them. - Internal training is a non-viable option. If we could somehow lock employees into mandatory 10 year service contracts, then we could afford to train them but we can’t because that would be involuntary servitude. What ends up happening is we take up some percentage of an already scarce senior employee’s time to train a junior employee and then they immediately get poached by some other company desperate for senior talent and willing to throw cash at the problem. In a previous era of jobs-for-life, all of the giant conglomerates had amazing training programs because they knew they could depend on 30 years of reliable service from every employee but with all the upsides of the more fluid employment market also comes the downsides. In short, the skills gap is real and fatuous suggestions of “just pay more” don’t really help the situation. The labor market generally takes 5 - 10 years to respond to any shifts in demand which, because of the way the business cycle works, often means we’re dumping a glut of talent onto the market at exactly the wrong time. For example, post 9/11 we had an enormous need for arabic translators and not enough people to do it at any price. By the time universities were capable of hiring enough staff to accommodate the number of students who wanted to enroll and those students had graduated, it was 2008 and we dumped a bunch of people with arabic knowledge onto the market just as we were winding down the war and even senior people were having problems finding work. ---
**Author:** ![moldmonkey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ee59a6/32.png) [@moldmonkey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/moldmonkey)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/46 "2016-12-02T15:37:43Z")
> [@](#): > > - Internal training is a non-viable option. If we could somehow lock employees into mandatory 10 year service contracts, then we could afford to train them but we can’t because that would be involuntary servitude. When I was starting out, I would have signed up for something like that if it was a two way street such as a guaranted job and pay increases as skills increase. Something like a concept that has been around for hundreds of years and other countries still manage to do called an apprenticeship. Loyalty goes both ways and in my 20 years in the trades, I have yet to work for a place that didn’t have layoffs after the first bad quarter. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/47 "2016-12-02T18:24:22Z")
> [@bump](#): > > I actually saw the writing on the wall with regard to this kind of thing when I was just out of college in 1997, and I saw a job advertisement requesting experience in a language that was longer than the language had actually been available! (it was Java, FTR- they wanted 3 years of experience in Java in early 1998, and it didn’t get released until mid-1995) The company I worked for in 1998 ran that ad too, only they wanted 5 years of experience. I didn’t score any points when I pointed out that they weren’t likely to find many programmers who could fit that bill. :smack: I am sort of on the other end of the curve - I got my present job because there aren’t many old dinosaurs like myself, and they needed someone who had that very-much-legacy skillset. And a friend of mine made a buttload of money coming out of retirement during Y2K because they couldn’t find COBOL programmers. The project I am working on is scheduled to complete one year before I am scheduled to retire. I’ve been lucky - I wouldn’t recommend concentrating on mainframe coding to students. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/48 "2016-12-02T18:41:12Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > I’m not in software, but can’t you lie about this? Clearly you’re smart enough to come up to speed on this wireframe tool in about a day or two, so why can’t you just cram before the job interview? Because they want three years demonstrated employment with [name your tool or language or skill here]. Could I come up to speed on a particular wireframe tool in a matter of days, applying literally decades of design, layout, UI and navigation experience to a fairly stupid reimagining of how those tasks get done? Absolutely. Done it many times in my career. The tool is never, ever, ever the job… but as others have said with respect to languages, once a clueless department manager decides that only someone with two years using v2.1.6a of a particular tool can possibly do the job, everyone else may as well stay home and play Doom. ---
**Author:** ![OldOlds](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/a3d4f5/32.png) [@OldOlds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldOlds)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/49 "2016-12-02T21:47:01Z")
> [@moldmonkey](#): > > I’ve been a machinist for 20 years and yes it’s hard to find someone skilled, willing to show up, and pass a drug test. > > The reason we don’t have skilled people is that no one wants to train people anymore. Even if they come out of a vo tech or community college program, they need more training and it doesn’t happen or its hit and miss. Theres lots of one shop wonders out there who can do the work they had been doing but don’t have the broad skills and background to jump to another job. Also with modern tech, there will be one skilled guy and a bunch of button pushers. Those button pushers don’t have the opportunity to learn > from experience. > > I also see a real lack of training with engineers. Companies will take a fresh grad and tell him to design stuff but college teaches theory not practical design and industry specific institutional type of knowledge. Around these parts, there is a lot of precision and high tech manufacturing, and the companies are always complaining that the schools aren’t training the students (I believe we’re talking high schools here, though they never say) in the specific skills they need. But my thought when I hear that is that a school should be teaching a set of foundational and critical reasoning skills- English, math, logic, history, science, etc. and the companies should be teaching the job-specific skills. It always sounds to me like what they really want is for the public schools to create bespoke employee creation programs. I’m curious if you think I’m off base with this? (FWIW, this impression comes from the topic being a regular on the local NPR station’s chat shows) ---
**Author:** ![lazybratsche](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/ba8739/32.png) [@lazybratsche](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lazybratsche)\ **Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/50 "2016-12-02T22:04:16Z")
> [@Shalmanese](#): > > This is the orthodox and rather dismissive response to the problem and, IMHO, elides a great deal of the subtlety of the actual debate. I’ve been involved a couple of times in candidate searches where the compensation is essentially uncapped for the right person and it can still be challenging for a variety of reasons: > > … > > In short, the skills gap is real and fatuous suggestions of “just pay more” don’t really help the situation. All good points, but it doesn’t really seem relevant to the motivations of businesses that complain the loudest about a lack of skilled workers. Every time I’ve heard this line of argument, it’s in support of some government program that will increase the supply of cheap workers: a new state-funded university department or vocational training program, an expansion of H1B visas, etc. And the final result of these sorts of programs is a supply of cheap, disposable, government-subsidized, and/or minimally qualified workers that are directly competing with more experienced workers. ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2016, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/51 "2016-12-03T01:17:31Z")
> [@OldOlds](#): > > Around these parts, there is a lot of precision and high tech manufacturing, and the companies are always complaining that the schools aren’t training the students (I believe we’re talking high schools here, though they never say) in the specific skills they need. But my thought when I hear that is that a school should be teaching a set of foundational and critical reasoning skills- English, math, logic, history, science, etc. and the companies should be teaching the job-specific skills. It always sounds to me like what they really want is for the public schools to create bespoke employee creation programs. > > I’m curious if you think I’m off base with this? No, you are not off base at all. Very few employers want to do any real training or allow for any ramp-up period even for potentially great employees. They want a certain list of skills and they want them now. I work for one of the few companies that still does it in consulting and that is simply because of necessity. The consultants are the product and we all have to be ahead of the curve on every new technology that comes along so that we can sell our services. My long-time client does it too but that is only because it is an extremely regulated industry where standards and procedures are extremely strict, many are proprietary and they change all the time. That doesn’t mean that people like me get any real training though. The expectation is that we are self-learners and they tell us what to learn and then you figure out a way to do it on your own. If you can pass the myriad of written or oral tests that are required every year, you are in. If you can’t do it in three tries, you lose your job. In their defense, I could get tuition reimbursement to pursue a higher degree in my own time but that doesn’t work well when you are on call from 6am - 9pm on weekdays and 6am - 2pm on Saturdays. Online college classes are the only viable option for someone like me and I am not interested in spending Sundays working on them. It is just easier to teach myself what I actually need to know. ---
**Author:** ![Jonathan\_Chance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jonathan_chance/32/701_2.png) [@Jonathan\_Chance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jonathan_Chance)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2016, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/52 "2016-12-08T02:09:01Z")
> [@boffking](#): > > There has been a lot of talk recently about bringing good jobs back to the US . I occasionally hear about the skills gap, and how there are vast numbers of high paying jobs going unfilled because they can’t find qualified workers. Is there any truth to this? boffking, you were told months ago that if you wish to start threads you must participate in them. This is a warning for violating that instruction. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2016, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450/53 "2016-12-08T02:54:39Z")
> [@DrCube](#): > > Then how do people end up getting hired who can’t write a [fizz buzz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizz_buzz) program? Upper management. Intern programs, connections, etc. If you go to a contracting company, for example, and ask for a programmer, your average non-tech manager will assume that they will be sent a programmer. Managers will sometimes request a certain headcount and statistically it tends to net them at least a few people who can code, and a bunch who just take a check each month. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-skills-gap-fact-or-fiction/773450.md?page=2)