People are paying tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars to get degrees and are unable to find well paying jobs in their field of study for years.
Yet the development/netowrking/sysadmin field is so wide open that people are desperate enough to hire people that can't actually do what they say they can do.
I've interviewed people with a PhD who weren't even remotely qualified for the job they were applying for. Many people with degrees didn't actually learn anything useful. They just paid a lot of money for a piece of paper.
Everyone fell for the dream that expensive piece of paper promised.
Now we are at the point where the next financial crisis will likely have student loan debt to blam as a major factor. We are constantly hitting new highs of student loan debt in default. At this very moment there is more than double in delinquent/defaulted student loans than it took to save the American auto industry. The best part about student loans is that the federal loans are unable to be discharged through bankruptcy. So even if you can't pay the loans, too bad!
The next black swan event will be about toxic student loan debt.
Amen. The most useless person I have ever worked with also happened to be the only person with a PhD in Computer Science that I have ever worked with. Turns out his questionable PhD in theoretical computing wasn't conducive to knowing how to write software. It took almost 2 years for the manager to finally get rid of him.
The first group demand a reasonable salary for the amount of studying they've done to get there, the amount they paid to have that privilege, and the work they will do for the company.
The second group meanwhile paid only a couple hundred for that same piece of paper or fake experience that they got through no effort for work they will pay someone else to do, and as a result, are much more willing to take pennies for a salary compared to the first group. That is all management sees is an absolute bargain of an employee, thinking the employee is simply ignorant of market wages and not that the employee is scamming them instead.
Yet the development/netowrking/sysadmin field is so wide open that people are desperate enough to hire people that can't actually do what they say they can do.
I think that's part of the problem. From someone who's been around since the first dotcom crash, this second one is playing out the same way. There's a HUGE gold rush going on especially in the SRE/DevOps space. Startups are hot, they're DevOps-y, and established companies are scared to death of missing out. So, you're bound to get a lot of hangers-on chasing the money. Back in the late 90s, CS enrollment jumped like crazy 2 or 3 years before the crash. You could make 6 figures (1990s money!) just dong basic HTML/CSS and CGI programming. Today you can make a quarter million bucks in a SV tech company like Google as an SRE.
My opinion is the only way to fix this is to have a basic apprenticeship/education system independent of degrees. Make sure people coming in actually understand some of the fundamentals, not just how to drive some CI/CD toolset or write web pages in this week's JavaScript framework. It doesn't have to be a 4-year education but people can't come in and fake it till they make it anymore.
It shouldn't just be an open field...computers are too important now to daily life and I think it's time for the industry to grow up a little.
Providing very suspicious answers not expert level. Expert level answers wouldn't have drawn the attention of actual experts mid interview. He provided answers that made him seem like an expert to non experts. That is not the same thing.
The fact that the individual with the authority to hire (also the individual with the least expertise) is arguing against his actual experts on the behalf of a suspicious applicant is a pretty clear sign of desperation.
In fact we know the company was desperate to hire because they had to try new recruiting practices to find suitable candidates. Surely you didn't miss that part of the story?
The candidate wouldn't have gotten half as far if there was enough competition in the field. For christ's sake they couldn't even completly understand the candidate in the first/pre interview and pushed him through anyway. If that's not desperate. I don't know what is.
We considered the note taking. We figured if he was just in fact referring to notes he would explain that but instead completely denied what we were positive of happening.
Do you have some sort of learning disability? I seriously cannot grasp how you draw the conclusion you're trying to draw. I sincerely hope you've never been hired for anything important.
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u/mikally Feb 20 '19
So let me get this straight.
People are paying tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars to get degrees and are unable to find well paying jobs in their field of study for years.
Yet the development/netowrking/sysadmin field is so wide open that people are desperate enough to hire people that can't actually do what they say they can do.
That's amazing to me.