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Comment by applecore | Hacker News Reader

> The talent — and there's a ton of it — flowing into Silicon Valley cares little about improving these infrastructural elements. What they care about is coming up with more web apps.

Is there evidence that this problem actually exists? This seems likely to be a manufactured story.

The press simply isn't going to write as much about Meraki as they would a popular, consumer-oriented web or mobile startup.

$1.2 billion is a big number (for the acquisition of Meraki), but ultimately it's a "boring" business that sells routers. It's never going to appeal to more than a small audience.

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> Is there evidence that this problem actually exists?

and later on:

> but it's ultimately a boring business that sells routers.

The use of the word "boring" should answer your question. There was a time in the valley that stuff was far-out, interesting, and cool. I know, hard to believe, but I saw it happen, ancient history that it is.

But hey, there was a time when being a mechE building cars was the ultimate in cool. Things change.

I don't think Cisco's problems are a lack of engineers. If it is, they can always pay them more, or train their managers to be good leaders.

I agree - every time I hear, "People aren't going to work in X?" I wonder if there is a systemic imbalance, or something else at work.

If consumers want to pay for apps, who are we as central planners to say otherwise? Maybe we shouldn't subsidize these things, but let the market decide.

You could argue we should be funding basic research, but that's not routers.

Recently, many multi-billion dollars acquisitions made by Google/Yahoo/Facebook have had more than their share of Media attention. It`s not difficult to see where the spotlight shines these days. Hence the seeming reason why so many 'young' people would also want to emulate the acquired Startups ... no?

Well, I'd love to be doing work on the hardware side of things. I'd love to even intern --despite the fact that I'm graduating-- at a company like Freescale or Intel or Qualcomm or Cisco or AMD. As long as I could continue to pay the bills --and feed the student loan monster-- I'd continue to live as a student. I'd consider it a fair trade-off while I was grinding for XP in a field that, for all intents and purposes, can't really be done in your garage any more. Yes, we can all play with 7400 chips and build radios and probe away at some cheap electronic gizmo, but nobody is going to be fabricating 45nm, 6-layer, N-core, superscalar, pipelined, cached, billion-transistor count CPU semiconductors in their basement labs. And nothing but years of experience at the interface of design, verification, and fabrication will ever produce a skilled engineer in those fields that understands all of the delicate interdependencies of that technological pipeline. It should go without saying at this point that no, I don't have any meaningful experience in the current state-of-the-art of semiconductor design, verification, or fabrication and I honestly don't see how it's reasonable to expect me to.

Of course, while I've never had a professional software engineering gig either, I do have previous experience with development and other paid jobs in supporting roles like systems administration. I sometimes think that it's simply a consequence of the barrier to entry being so relatively low. Do you have a computer (or even access to one that you can install software on) and access to the net? Congratulations. You have everything you need to start learning about concepts and tools that are immediately applicable and relevant to the field. And they're Free as in Freedom to boot! So long as you have the time, you have all you need to get to a point where your horns aren't entirely green and the spaces behind your ears aren't entirely soaked. With guidance from more senior devs, you'll get to their level too in no time at all.

But it seems no matter what I do, it's always the software guys that are interested in talking. They're so interested, it seems, that I don't even have to go to them. They'll come to me. Which is honestly shocking, given that I still consider myself a very sophomoric developer. By contrast, even getting the hardware folks to show up seems impossible. There was a recent STEM job fair at my university (Texas State) that really ought to have been billed as the Computer Science job fair. Sure, Freescale and National Instruments were there, but there weren't any members from their hardware or verification teams. It was all software and IT. Samsung was there, but I honestly don't know why. I didn't need a hard copy of the job description that was printed from the online job site. Apple was there, but they were only looking for at-home tech support. Intel wasn't even there. AMD wasn't even there. NVIDIA wasn't even there. Cisco wasn't even there. And those are all companies with established offices in the Austin area.

My heart may be in hardware, but I still love software. And guess who's hiring. And guess who's got student loans to pay off :D

tl;dr: Yes, I'd say the problem does exist. And perhaps the reason why web apps are so dominant and "infrastructural elements" so maligned is that the barriers to entry are so different in each field, and the corresponding willingness to train in each field seemingly reversed.

I don't think applecore was asking "Does the imbalance exist?", but rather, "Is the imbalance a problem?"

>Is there evidence that this problem actually exists? This seems likely to be a manufactured story.

I don't know. I thought he (edit: or she, I suppose) was pretty clear. His description of what the press does and doesn't report (and why) serves as an explanation for the perception of an imbalance that doesn't "actually" exist. I disagree, of course. And I would also assert that the imbalance is indeed a problem.

I used to work in verification at Intel; I was 25. I was the youngest member of the team by easily 8 years. When the tumbleweeds are a blowing, you look around and take the hint.

The last straw was when I overheard two older engineers (not from my group but on the same floor) in the hallway asking themselves where all the younger people were. "Why, they're all doing exciting things like startups, what would they be caught dead doing here?" I took the hint.

Who shows up to the career fair may have more to do with the university you happen to attend than a lack of hardware related internships. Cisco, Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Nvidia all hire college interns, and all go to college career fairs. Apple does hire college interns at college career fairs for more than home tech support.

Companies only hire so many recruiters to go to so many university career fairs (which the company often pays to attend), and this has an unfortunate effect on how easy it is to be hired at a particular company from a particular university.

Indeed. It's kinda depressing to compare the company lists between Texas State and UT Austin [1,2]. Sure, many of the same companies are there. But others --like NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, Raytheon, Toshiba, Verizon-- are only to be found on UT Austin's list. And of course the sizes are quite different. Texas State had 50 something companies in total while UT Austin was able to pull in over 200. And UT Austin certainly seemed able to pull in far more CS companies too. Rackspace's absence at Texas State's career fair was particularly conspicuous to me.

A part of me would love to chalk this up to the privileges of hailing from a more elite alma mater, but I also wouldn't be too surprised if the EE and CE students at UT Austin ran into the same issues that we did here at Texas State. While many of the companies at the Cockrell School of Engineering's "EXPO", as they call it, bill themselves as looking at "Electrical & Computer Engineering" students, the actual "concentration areas" look more like: "Computational Science, Engineering, and Mathematics." Texas Instruments is but one example [3]. Granted, seeing as I'm not a student at UT Austin, I couldn't tell anyone whether my suspicions bear any resemblance to reality or not.

[1] UT-Austin: https://apps.engr.utexas.edu/ecac/events/expo/Students/brows...

[2] Texas State: https://www.myinterfase.com/txstate/Search/ViewEmployers/Ind...

[3] https://apps.engr.utexas.edu/ecac/events/expo/Students/showC...

Qualcomm was and is hiring quite vigorously, so far as I know. Are you studying CS or Computer Engineering?

"Electrical Engineering with a Computer Engineering Focus." Don't ask me why Texas State calls it that. Take a look at my degree plan and it's more or less identical to that of an ECE degree.

Indeed I have heard that Qualcomm is hiring like crazy. And I have applied to several positions both in their Austin office --which does admittedly seem to only be looking for experienced engineers-- and their San Diego office --which has many listings for graduates in various branches of the field.

My frustration with simply filling out an online application form for a company lies in the fact that it bears a striking resemblance to this gesture:

$ cat RESUME.md > /dev/null

Of course, I'm probably being just a tad hyperbolic here :P... but the benefit of actually meeting someone at a job fair --or anywhere else, really-- is that it has far better results. At a bare minimum your details at least seem to go into some priority folders. And you'll likely get an initial phone call, even if nothing further results from it.

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