But you want to know why you can’t find people. Look at the tech industry.

1. Older tech employees are considered dried up and beyond innovation.

2. Entry to Mid level jobs are drying up. Most are being outsourced. Programmers are treated like chained dogs. If they complain it is pointed out that 100 people in India want thier job.

3. Tech jobs require more knowledge, a far bigger part of your income training and keeping up as your career progresses and you will forever be working in “Cost” center instead of a “Profit” center and be treated as a second class citizen as a result.

For 20 years now I’ve been listening to my fellow Techies tell high school students to RUN RUN RUN to anything else but technology.

Also IT is becoming more and more like the construction industry. You have to pack up and move on every few years to stay employeed. In a world where husband and wife need to work to have a decent standard of living that’s a problem.

Look at the Wall street salaries up till the bust and the fact that an MBA is still a more reliable degree to stay employeed than a programming degree and it’s easy to understand why you can’t find enough IT guys.

Lack of people willing to get technical degrees is a problem that’s been build for years and it’ll take many years to fix it.

The industrial realignment that was predicted with irrational exuberance ten years ago during the “dot com” boom and bust; is finally happening; later and slower than its proponents expected, but still happening.

The coming economy is the product of a new industrial revolution – only this time, it’s an information revolution. The industrial revolution amplified the power of Man’s arm. The information revolution amplifies the power of Man’s brain…

A writer in the Scientific American magazine, about 15 years ago, had it right; in suggesting that the economic gap between the knowledge-”haves” and the knowledge-”have nots” would radically widen. Those who out-compete the rest of us by a small margin will be able to “earn” an increasing share (indeed, an increasingly unfair share) of the available economic rewards, in the future; unless something is done to rebalance the system and make it fair again.

There’s only one way to fix this economy. It’s not by reducing taxes. It’s by radically INCREASING taxes on the wealthiest and most privileged, to pay for the perpetual retraining of displaced workers who despite talent and hard work invested heavily in the “wrong” industries. Obsolescence will become an increasing problem in the future, and it will happen multiple times in the average worker’s career…

The question is, will we fix the system BEFORE America becomes a chattel, pawn and playground of a new aristocracy? Will America be a land of mercy and justice, or a land of misery and exploitation?

(from a computer science graduate)

If we had corporate environments or intellectual property right laws more friendly to compatibility, open source or parallel development we’d have a better shot at being innovative. Instead, several start-ups and projects have been scuttled by the threat of patent law suits, inter-compatibility is scuttled by the DMCA and open source projects have run into issues building on top of changeable proprietary APIs. The other reason less money would lead to more innovation is that it would result in fewer lawyers chomping at the bit; early programming productivity enhancements profited greatly from not being worth suing over.

Sorry, the problem is really bad/lazy/stupid HR people and their retarded “applicant tracking systems”.

Also, everyone here in SV knows that Apple is a terrible place to work. There are much better options out there and people are taking them.

The most common fall-back for senior management is to blame the workers (don’t work hard, not good enough, lack skills etc.). You see it in these claims, teaching in the school systems, the auto industry collapse etc.

Brooks was writing about this with respect to programming 4 decades ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27_l aw

He also pointed out that the most productive programmers are 10 times as productive as the average programmer. As a result, small projects can be highly efficient if they have one of the good guys. Unfortunately, it is not possible to have an industry filled with above-average programmers, so large projects cannot be as efficient as small projects.

On big projects, the efficiency and innovation have to come out of how the hive is managed. Good managers mean on-time projects, within budget, while identifying innovations that arise. A bad management team could tank the same thing.

Sorry for sounding sarcastic, but this piece is really asking for it.

Yes, demand in one layer is going to take engineers away from low-level cloud systems. But the whole point of “the cloud” is that everyone gets to outsource that level of their stack to people who are really good at it, so you should need fewer of these people overall. And if you move further up the stack, startups like MongoDB or Parse are now able to build cloud middleware on top of lower-level cloud systems.

That said, I think money is a little easy for startups these days, and it does create a talent war/drain when talented people go to unsustainable startups. But I don’t think “the cloud” is hurting.

Your use of one or two anecdotes is inappropriate to draw the conclusions you do (even though you commonly do it). That said, I think your opening proposition (that you pretty much neglected after the opening) that there is less pure innovation during boom times may in fact have legs, although for somewhat different reasons.

Last, it doesn’t take large companies/lots of engineers per se as much as it does enough servers to be able to promote a cloud infrastructure standard. You didn’t mention Rackspace, for example, and as someone else mentioned, there continues to be a lot of innovation in open source, although open source tends to lag commercial R&D by a year or two.

Apple is on top of the world right now, so we can be pretty sure this is either an isolated misfire or is inaccurately reported. But if someone actually tried to fill job openings this way (cloud computing hackers!?!) their doom would be fairly inevitable not matter what the venture-capital situation looked like.
Felix, you aren’t a techie but are fairly plugged-in; did you not see at once what a howler this is?

There’s a big chunk of the problem right there. Someone has called up HR and asked for “cloud computing hackers” rather than computing hackers who could develop cloud computing support software. There’s a huge difference, but you might have to wait a few weeks and invest in a little training – some text books, maybe a seminar – before you started getting output from your new hire. This is generally considered unacceptable in the modern corporation, so they suffer from this kind of “shortage”. Every time there is a new buzz word, they create a new shortage, rather than figuring out what skills they really need, hiring appropriately and investing in their staff.

Cloud services, for example, have been around since the mid-70s when the first networked file systems and servers were developed. By the 80s, the basic pieces and concepts of what we now call cloud computing were in place, generally in familiar forms. There are lots and lots of software people who can get up to speed doing cloud computing given a few weeks of start up time, but managers are looking for buzzwords, not skills or knowledge. There is no way that HR would even recognize that an engineer even worked on a cloud computing project since that buzzword might not have existed at the time.

Since the buzzwords change frequently, we get the myth of the outdated hacker. Some of it is age discrimination. It has been completely internalized, partly because more experienced and more productive hackers tend to cost more, and HR considers body count and average salary management more important than getting the job done. There job is to hire, not build systems in the cloud. It isn’t outdated skills that limit the duration of STEM careers, but rather buzzword change. Instead of looking for cloud computing hackers, look for distributed networking hackers or oxygen file system hackers. You can probably find all the old buzz words on the internet these days in a matter of minutes. You can then hire at your leisure, though you might have to convince your targets to quit their post-STEM career and return to the fray.

First of all, let’s get it straight – the boom in ad-supported websites is not a “tech” bubble. Yes, technology is used to create those sites, but it is used for just about everything these days. Blame FedEX, blame Wal-Mart, blame BankofAmerica (they deserve it anyway) whoever – they all are absorbing web programmers to expand and maintain their sites. But it’s not a tech bubble, it’s the assimilation of the most recent medium for mass communications.

As for the latest dot com bubble stifling the cloud bubble, investors should be happy, for this will save them money. The cloud is just the internet, and those selling the cloud are just using buzzwords and other marketing babble to sell their services. Without the ad-supported website bubble to exhaust the supply of web engineers, cloud companies would be a sinkhole for capital, for once people find out that any savings realized by the scaling of data centers is more than offset by overhead and profit margin, they will revert back to operating their own “cloud”. At least when long distance fiber lines were overbuilt in the 90s, they eventually became useful when all that bandwidth started being utilized. By the time there is an oversupply of cloud data centers, they will be obsolete, and will be turned into efficient, ultra-modern warehouses.