Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randomdata | Hacker News Reader

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Not only interesting, a concerning trend for tech professionals in the Valley who have become accustomed to being able to walk into any job they want and make a fortune doing it.

Employers only worry about placing arbitrary requirements on jobs when they are receiving more applications for jobs than they can handle. The requirements become a fast way to cull the numbers to more manageable levels for personal review. That they are now seeing more applications than they can handle highlights that competition is starting to heat up, and with more competition comes more difficulty in finding work and lower prices as people start to undercut each other to secure a position.

The stereotypical college dropout lifestyle goes part and parcel with the get rich quick view of the Valley. Even five years ago nobody would have ever suggested a tech job in the Valley requires a degree. It wasn't that many years ago that we used to joke that tech employers in the Valley preferred people without a degree. According to the article, that is no longer the case. When one starts to fade, so does the other. But it is all bound to happen eventually. After all, the cure for high prices is high prices.

> According to the article, that is no longer the case

I think this thread is confusing "degree or equivalent knowledge" with "no really honest to god you don't need a degree".

Mid-tech is the latter. Consider the examples given in the article: "...computer systems analyst, computer network architects, and support specialist..."

The Midwest is not replete with jobs held by self-taught software engineers. It's replete with jobs (dubbed mid-tech) that don't require the self-teaching in the first place.

> It's replete with jobs (dubbed mid-tech) that don't require the self-teaching in the first place.

I worked in a job that seems to match the description of computer network architect in high school. It certainly required a fair amount of self-teaching (in my case; I suppose one could replace that with college or on-the-job instruction). Knowledge provided by a source of some kind was necessary. One is typically not born knowing how to do that type of work.

Does a job that does not require teaching (self or otherwise) even exist? I have family in the manufacturing business that I occasionally help out with when they are short-staffed as a favor. From the outside the job looks about as menial as it gets, but actually stepping in and helping leaves me appreciating what those people are capable of doing with the knowledge they have. There is no way, with my limited knowledge and ability in that industry, I'd be hired to work for them if they weren't desperate.

I farm on the side and that is the most intense ramp-up of knowledge requirements I have ever experienced. That experience has been like learning CS and software engineering, forgetting everything you learned, and repeating several more times. And still feeling like you don't know what you are doing. I've been farming for 10 years now and I still feel like a newbie. After 10 years of software development, while I recognized that there is still more to learn, I at least felt pretty confident in having progressed in my knowledge and abilities to a more advanced level. I don't know that anyone who claims farming requires a degree.

If degree here simply means requires an education of some kind, not specifically a degree from an accredited institution, then I'm not sure that there is a job out there that doesn't match that description in SV, the mid-west, or anywhere else. The only explanation here seems to be the expectations of employers, who trend towards setting more arbitrary expectations as the competition for the work increases. If you only have one applicant, you simply can't be choosy about who you hire.

> I worked in a job that seems to match the description of computer network architect in high school.

I worked a job like this in high school. Pretty sure I could've done it earlier, and learning the job was pretty easy. In contrast, I did some software work in high school as well and was out of my depth (thankfully it worked out).

> Does a job that does not require teaching (self or otherwise) even exist?

I guess it's a matter of degree.

> I guess it's a matter of degree.

Literally! But, jokes aside, how is that amount measured? Software development (which I also had a job doing during my time in high school) seemed quite approachable. I've certainly become a better developer over time (along with everything I've continued with), but I'm still proud of what I accomplished back then. I don't feel that it was out of my depth. I was able to deliver real business value and the employer was happy.

Honestly, I find software development has been one of the easier jobs (in terms of knowledge and ability required) that I have had. Granted, I haven't had jobs in every industry out there. I expect there are easier jobs. But software development does not strike me as one that meets the necessary degree here. If someone in high school can walk into the job and deliver real business value, it does not feel like a "degree required" job to me.

In my opinion, the defining factor here seems to be how desperate employers are. On the farm, we are often quite desperate for help. Timing is critical. Leave the crop out for an extra week and you won't have a crop at all. As such, farm work is considered low-skilled work since employers have no room to be choosy. You take what you can get and deal with what comes from it. It is still better than losing the crop.

Contrast that with software developers, where there is no real pressure to hire people. Who really cares if a feature sits in the backlog for a year? It will still be there next year. That allows employers to be more picky. Don't like your current applicants? Just wait longer. As such, this industry is labeled high-skilled work. If there is any pressure to get the job done, it comes from the competition trying to do the same as you, and they are just as likely to have hiring problems in those circumstances. In reality, the amount of actual skill necessary between these two examples is probably quite comparable.

> Software development seemed quite approachable... software development does not strike me as one that meets the necessary degree here

The job title "software developer" is almost meaningless in the context of this conversation given the extraordinarily high variance in what that job title actually entails.

The software development job I had in high school required knowing what for loops are and knowing how to google web shit. The technical content was almost non-existent. The difficult part of that type of job is managing relationships with customers, knowing how to estimate deadlines and working in a team. I would consider most web development a mid-tech job.

At my last software job, I used graduate-level mathematics almost every day. The "at my desk" hours of the day were 60% reading mathematics papers and 40% implementing that stuff. Along with all the soft skills, of course. 100% of the technical problems I faced were not a Google search away, because I was the first person solving those problems.

As far as BLS is concerned, those are the same jobs. Clearly, they are at two extremes of the "skills" spectrum. And the compensation is wildly different. And the availability of talent for these jobs is radically different. But BLS doesn't see that because the job title is the same. Hmph.

> where there is no real pressure to hire people

Again, a HUGE "it depends"!

> The "at my desk" hours of the day were 60% reading mathematics papers

Are you even appropriately labeled a software developer if that is how you spend the bulk of your time? I'm not convinced you are. The 40% definitely sounds like software development, but there are plenty of jobs where development is part of a larger job that are not given the software developer label. The farm, for instance, involves writing some software as a minor part of the job. It still gets the farming title, not software development.

And can we really classify a job where you literally spend most of your time learning how to do the job a "degree required" job? Degree required to me at least implies that you need to already know how to do the job before you are hired. The BLS provides this information to indicate what is needed to get a job. Anyone can read up on how to do something while they are already on the job.

> Again, a HUGE "it depends"!

There are always outliers. We have to be observing the typical or average case for this discussion to have any meaning.

> I'm not convinced you are.

We totally agree here -- these are two different jobs.

My point is that you can't tell that from the job title.

> And can we really classify a job where you literally spend most of your time learning how to do a job a "degree required" job?

Yes. There's a quantum leap between jobs where you're "learning on the job" trivial perturbations to things that hundreds of millions of other people already know and jobs where you're "learning on the job" stuff that no one / 10 other people know.

ALL jobs require learning on the job. Some jobs require you to learn stuff that's not possible to learn without already having a degree or two's worth of background knowledge. Some jobs require you to learn stuff any high schooler can learn. That is the difference between mid-tech and high-tech!

> There are always outliers. We have to be observing the typical or average case for this discussion to have any meaning.

Yes. And I'm pointing out that understanding that typical/average case is difficult for "Software Development" because the job title encompasses so many different types of jobs.

> My point is that you can't tell that from the job title.

Considering that you are not (primarily) a software developer, if you are being classified as a software developer in BLS data, the entire dataset is suspect. How many others are misclassified? What should we take from a dataset that is full of known inconsistencies?

> Some jobs require you to learn stuff that's not possible to learn without already having a degree or two's worth of background knowledge.

For instance? I'm honestly just curious about what you think is especially challenging. Everyone seems to have a different opinion about what this means.

> Some jobs require you to learn stuff any high schooler can learn. That is the difference between mid-tech and high-tech!

So do we agree that software development is, on average, mid-tech? And if so, why do we say it requires a degree? The software I was building in that after-school job in high school isn't a whole lot different to the dominant types of projects I see out there today. In my adult career, I've been involved with Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 500s and this seems to be the type of tech work that is most prevalent for software developers.

I'll agree that a small segment of the industry is working on the fringes, doing things that only 10 other people will encounter in their lifetimes. But this is not the typical case that the BLS is drawing their conclusions from. They are looking at the entire industry as a whole.

> For instance? I'm honestly just curious about what you think is especially challenging

Well, just look up active research labs at any top-tier university. Or peruse the work that's happening in top industry labs. And then realize that there are lots of groups within companies working on similar types of problems.

And then a lot of stuff that's not "research" but still demands lots of background in some field of science/engineering in order to avoid Bad Things. Designing the control software for a new power plant, for example.

> So do we agree that software development is, on average, mid-tech?

I'm not sure the question is even well-formed. It's like asking if "health-care" is mid-tech. Well, certain nurses certainly are. Neurosurgeons certainly aren't.

> The software I was building in that after-school job in high school isn't a whole lot different to the dominant types of projects I see out there today

TBF maybe you shouldn't have been building that software without a lot more training? Maybe the lack of seriousness in the software industry is fundamentally unethical. See Equifax.

As a high schooler I built software that interfaced with a database containing a shitload of social security numbers/dobs/names/addresses. I should not have been allowed to build public-facing interfaces to that database without oversight from a practiced software engineer.

> But this is not the typical case that the BLS is drawing their conclusions from. They are looking at the entire industry as a whole.

Well, yes, that's been exactly my point since the first post...

>a concerning trend for tech professionals in the Valley who have become accustomed to being able to walk into any job they want and make a fortune doing it.

Bubbles pop and fools get hurt when they do. Water is wet.

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