> I can't help but feel that something has gone dreadfully wrong in society in that we've decided to start incentivizing people with no talent or interest to participate in the technology space. Many of them are extremely wide awake in other areas, be it sports, art, mathematics, whatever. Unfortunately for complex reasons related to some sectors having more money than they know what to do with, large organizations being impossibly hard to run well, ...
While I agree with his point to a large degree, this line of thinking leads to some interesting possible conclusions:
1. Tech hiring processes, across the board, are "several levels" more sub-optimal than even people in the business complain about. Even when looking for fresh talent, maybe what companies screen for is wrong.
2. There are extremely poor financial incentives for any long-tailed vocation (professional sports, arts, etc). Addressing the problem the author identifies probably involves addressing this problem too, which itself is a rabbit hole.
> But since they're producing nothing anyway, or are a net negative to society accounting for opportunity cost
3. If the situation is so bad, why aren't companies training their staff directly, on the job?
4. We seem to never ask whether this opportunity cost is more expensive than Universal Basic Income because private and public sector decision making tends to be orthogonal these days.
I teach Software Engineering at the university level. I can definitely tell the students in my intro classes that are in it for the money and have no talent or real interest in software development. Provided they make it through the program it's anyone's guess how they'll do in their career assuming they even get a software development job.
> 3. If the situation is so bad, why aren't companies training their staff directly, on the job?
Short-term and wrong-headed thinking. Most places seem to consider all employees basically "fully trained", and bizarrely treat on-the-job training as a favour to the employee. This is probably connected (influencing, influenced by, or both, who knows) to how tech workers have short stints at each company.
Salaries going up in tech are an indication that there are not enough programmers. Most growth in the US economy is now based on programming/technology.
While I agree with his point to a large degree, this line of thinking leads to some interesting possible conclusions:
1. Tech hiring processes, across the board, are "several levels" more sub-optimal than even people in the business complain about. Even when looking for fresh talent, maybe what companies screen for is wrong.
2. There are extremely poor financial incentives for any long-tailed vocation (professional sports, arts, etc). Addressing the problem the author identifies probably involves addressing this problem too, which itself is a rabbit hole.
> But since they're producing nothing anyway, or are a net negative to society accounting for opportunity cost
3. If the situation is so bad, why aren't companies training their staff directly, on the job?
4. We seem to never ask whether this opportunity cost is more expensive than Universal Basic Income because private and public sector decision making tends to be orthogonal these days.