Austin tech firms head to California to recruit talent (sales, real estate)

[colombiunpride]

Originally Posted by Dr.Mom

It's diappointing that they are not putting more efforts into recruiting home grown talent. Is there a cache in the industry to have recruited employees from CA? Personally, I'd like to see the Austin Technology Council partner with local high schools and/or ACC to develop the skills that they are looking for.

As an example, we have a very good local technical high school, but it is underenrolled for certain specialties and the big push here is for all kids to attend college. The small local HVAC company I use could never find enough techs, so they partnered with the tech hs and the community college to offer school credits for time worked. They also started their own apprenticeship program for people who wanted to learn HVAC skills. If one little company in the suburbs can do this, I don't understand why a multi-company council in a metro area cannot do something similar.

Originally Posted by mimimomx3

In Austin, we’ve fallen into a trap of fighting over existing talent, especially in engineering, programming and software development roles,” said Rod Favaron, serial Austin entrepreneur, and presently CEO

I think what he means is that he's tired of paying top dollar for tech talent, and needs a bigger supply to drive down costs.

It's not the dollar amount that is the issue at all. Every company I talked to so far needs to fill up positions fast. They just are all growing too fast.
They keep telling me that despite UT Austin having a top engineering program, the number of graduating students can't keep up with demand.
What also doesn't help is that those same graduates tend to look at Silicone Valley over Austin.

I had a job offer from HP in San Diego offering 65K. The job I'm interviewing with in Austin offers 65K to 70K for the same type of entry level position.
I prefer Austin however because of the local UT Austin talent.

@Dr. Mom:

The Tech talent they are referring to is basically Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering grads. That basically covers software development and circuit designers. It's a whole different ball game from IT jobs.

Don't get me wrong, we need IT people, but IT tends to be vocational compared to actual engineering disciplines. Though I know some IT people in the industry that can make six figures with a few years of industry experience.

[Dr.Mom]

Originally Posted by colombiunpride

@Dr. Mom:

The Tech talent they are referring to is basically Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering grads. That basically covers software development and circuit designers. It's a whole different ball game from IT jobs.

Don't get me wrong, we need IT people, but IT tends to be vocational compared to actual engineering disciplines. Though I know some IT people in the industry that can make six figures with a few years of industry experience.

So what about offering a retraining program for the unemployed? I understand that these companies need people NOW, but that type of short term thinking is not going to help them down the road. If they retrain capable people, they will get exactly the skills they need as well as someone who is grateful for their job and won't be on the first Nerd Bird to CA when the economy turns around. They'll still need skilled employees in 5 and 10 years, so I don't understand such short term thinking.

[Austin97]

Originally Posted by Dr.Mom

So what about offering a retraining program for the unemployed? I understand that these companies need people NOW, but that type of short term thinking is not going to help them down the road. If they retrain capable people, they will get exactly the skills they need as well as someone who is grateful for their job and won't be on the first Nerd Bird to CA when the economy turns around. They'll still need skilled employees in 5 and 10 years, so I don't understand such short term thinking.

The problem is you need people who have the top 1-5% of intelligence. The people that you are talking about simply dont have the intelligence to perform the jobs. The top 1-5% are already going to the best schools and dont really need retraining programs.

It is like saying, lets retrain all these people to be architects and civil engineers to build our buildings when most americans have no capability to do any kind of physics or complex math.

[austinnerd]

Originally Posted by Austin97

The problem is you need people who have the top 1-5% of intelligence. The people that you are talking about simply dont have the intelligence to perform the jobs. The top 1-5% are already going to the best schools and dont really need retraining programs.

It is like saying, lets retrain all these people to be architects and civil engineers to build our buildings when most americans have no capability to do any kind of physics or complex math.

It looked to me that Dr.Mom was referring specifically to colombiunpride's comment about IT folks. You don't need to be "top 1-5%" to be an IT person (exceptions of course abound), hence why it's a good occupation for more traditional vocational training. You don't need to know physics, math, etc to handle many of the requirements for what the majority of IT folks do.

[XLadylawX]

Dr. Mom, I think you have some valid points but the typical CS or Engineering Degree takes 5 years to obtain due to the math requirements and then the graduate needs 3-5 years of experience to achieve true competency. These tech companies need the talent now. I say we should demand that our educational institutions do their part for the future but in the meantime we must recruit from outside.

On another note, perhaps Texas should look into the founding of a top tier Polytechnic or an Institute of Technology. If Austin is going to be the next Tech Mecca then we also need some top Tech higher education institutions to provide the talent.

UT is great and all but it cannot be "all thing."

Perhaps though, we would not call it the Texas Institute of Technology. Eeek!! Maybe we should stick to a Polytechnic name.

[Dr.Mom]

Originally Posted by XLadylawX

Dr. Mom, I think you have some valid points but the typical CS or Engineering Degree takes 5 years to obtain due to the math requirements and then the graduate needs 3-5 years of experience to achieve true competency. These tech companies need the talent now. I say we should demand that our educational institutions do their part for the future but in the meantime we must recruit from outside.

On another note, perhaps Texas should look into the founding of a top tier Polytechnic or an Institute of Technology. If Austin is going to be the next Tech Mecca then we also need some top Tech higher education institutions to provide the talent.

UT is great and all but it cannot be "all thing."

Perhaps though, we would not call it the Texas Institute of Technology. Eeek!! Maybe we should stick to a Polytechnic name.

I LOVE the Polytechnic Institute idea! Perfect! Actually, I was thinking about all of the unemployed teachers when I was writing my previous posts. Surely some of the HS math teachers would be easily retrained. It's time we started to think outside the box. These are good jobs with healthy salaries and benefits - we should be training our people to fill them (and fill them well, so they're not shipped overseas).

[austinnerd]

Originally Posted by XLadylawX

Dr. Mom, I think you have some valid points but the typical CS or Engineering Degree takes 5 years to obtain due to the math requirements and then the graduate needs 3-5 years of experience to achieve true competency. These tech companies need the talent now. I say we should demand that our educational institutions do their part for the future but in the meantime we must recruit from outside.

On another note, perhaps Texas should look into the founding of a top tier Polytechnic or an Institute of Technology. If Austin is going to be the next Tech Mecca then we also need some top Tech higher education institutions to provide the talent.

UT is great and all but it cannot be "all thing."

Perhaps though, we would not call it the Texas Institute of Technology. Eeek!! Maybe we should stick to a Polytechnic name.

One of the things they can do is to dump a good portion of the "math requirements", at least on the software side. While there are obviously some branches of software development where having a strong math background is helpful, one can probably take care of the significant majority of software problems with no more than a high school level of math.

Which brings up a point about UT and your mention of having some type of tech focused campus (Texas Advanced Technology And Sciences?). One of the biggest issues with UT and software engineers is that IMHO UT was way way to focused on the academics of software vs creating software developers. Other programs (e.g. Texas State) who don't have nearly the funding to be so esoteric generally do a far better job of producing "journeyman" developers than UT (which cranks out smart folks but who are often sorely lacking in any practical expertise out of the box). So having a more industry centric school would definitely help to increase the available pool of software folks.

[XLadylawX]

Originally Posted by austinnerd

Which brings up a point about UT and your mention of having some type of tech focused campus (Texas Advanced Technology And Sciences?).

Did you mean to say "Texas Institute of Technology and Sciences?"

[Tycho Brahe]

Originally Posted by Austin97

The problem is you need people who have the top 1-5% of intelligence. The people that you are talking about simply dont have the intelligence to perform the jobs. The top 1-5% are already going to the best schools and dont really need retraining programs.

It is like saying, lets retrain all these people to be architects and civil engineers to build our buildings when most americans have no capability to do any kind of physics or complex math.

I would not say intelligence is a determining factor of a good software engineer.

Software development is like painting: your mind understands how to break down a subject and create something from smaller pieces. Not everyone can paint (well) and all that is required is to apply simple brush strokes to a canvas. Great painters have the gift of understanding how the brush strokes work. A good coder sees a problem and knows how to tackle it. Schools only teach you the tools; the ability to understand the problem and how to solve it is something innate.

I hate to be placed in the "IT" category. As mentioned, IT and development are different beasts.

[hoffdano]

Originally Posted by XLadylawX

Dr. Mom, I think you have some valid points but the typical CS or Engineering Degree takes 5 years to obtain due to the math requirements and then the graduate needs 3-5 years of experience to achieve true competency. These tech companies need the talent now. I say we should demand that our educational institutions do their part for the future but in the meantime we must recruit from outside.

On another note, perhaps Texas should look into the founding of a top tier Polytechnic or an Institute of Technology. If Austin is going to be the next Tech Mecca then we also need some top Tech higher education institutions to provide the talent.

UT is great and all but it cannot be "all thing."

Perhaps though, we would not call it the Texas Institute of Technology. Eeek!! Maybe we should stick to a Polytechnic name.

The typical CS or engineering degree plan requires 12-15 hours of math through differential equations, assuming calculus was taken in high school. That's not a crazy amount of math. These same degree programs probably have 130-135 credit hours of class work. There is no reason for this to take five years.

I see no reason at all to create new institutions. Simply strengthening the tier 2 programs like Texas Tech, U of H, UTSA, etc. would do it.

As for re-training unemployed math teachers - it isn't a horrible idea. But I question whether they have the drive and motivation to take another 30 hours of computer science or similar, when they didn't have that drive when they were 18-22 years old. Employment for teachers will return, since at a basic level as enrollment levels continue to rise we will hire/rehire teachers to meet the need.