One problem with America's chip ambitions: Not quite enough staff | Hacker News Reader

One problem with America's chip ambitions: Not quite enough staff

theregister.com

11 pointsLinuxBender7 comments

I graduated from university with a computer engineering degree. There was heavy overlap with computer science so if I never got a job in that field, I could still potentially have a career.

I ended up going down the software route over time. There were little to no recruitment for us at all of the career fairs. I assume that the concentration of jobs in the US were on the West Coast.

Had I taken the one job offered to me in that field, I might have ended up setting my career back because of the little pay and startup nature of it.

It's sad because the actual computer engineering part of my studies were by far the most fun and interesting to me.

In Germany you read articles about skilled worker shortages all the time, except it feels like complete satire. "Shortage of skilled food service workers in Berlin". I am not making this up.

Or even better. Complaints about how software developers in Germany are too expensive and how they prefer to outsource to India instead. At the same time you hear stories about how Polish or Ukrainian developers earn more than that. The wage dumping in Germany is ridiculous.

I am so tired of all this nonsense. From my perspective there are lots of ways to earn money as an independent software developer which at least match a salary of your day job with the potential to let you double or triple your income. The trick is quite simple. Run your business in English and make the entire EU your market.

I just got done having a conversation with someone who experienced this kind of problem in banking. Lack of domain experts and a dry pipeline. I suspect everyone is struggling with finding people who aren't a complete waste of space these days.

Today is one of those days where I feel like I am watching the modern world grind to a halt in real-time. You only have to hop up a few threads to read about how our education system is hopelessly wrecked because of ineffectual leadership/parenting blaming technology and other worthless political nonsense.

How long until certain important semiconductor industry knowledge suffers information theoretic death simply because no one was around to tell it to?

Perhaps we could we radically alter our HR policies and try wild shit like... hire literally anyone who is willing to walk into the clean room, assuming they follow proper protocol. Do we really need to be gate keeping & piss testing our employees when we can't even find candidates anymore? At a certain point, I'd be happy to buy the chips made in the non-compliant clean room by drunkards if they are the only ones available on the shelf.

Businesses who want to hire experts in their niche for pennies on the dollar will have a hard time finding people.

The great thing about people is that they can get really good at things in the right environment.

Build your own experts and recognize the incentive to retain your investment by keeping workers happy.

This is the simple truth. I feel like a lot of companies have over promised and hired people that could not do the job for cheap or simply don’t pay to retain people. The reality is that this has created a race to the bottom for everyone.

Ironically, the erosion of company -> employee loyalty has destroyed employee -> company loyalty, which has made it hard for companies to retain talent they've helped foster. While it might seem attractive for a company to invest little-to-nothing in keeping talent, they're making small short-term gains for a long-term loss. The trouble is that it isn't viewed as a loss, it's viewed as business-as-usual: 'it's so hard to find skilled people'.

The rise of publicly-traded companies doesn't help this, as it tends to encourage short-term tactics over long-term strategy.

Have they tried paying more? I know lots of people that would rather make chips than software but software pays better.

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