Sully Syed

The skills gap myth: Survey reveals why companies can’t find “good people”

As a software developer I’m always bemused by the leaders of industry who lament the lack of skilled workers to fill open positions in my field. It seems that too many forget one of the most basic rules of capitalism: If demand is low, you’re not offering enough value. As it fits this scenario: If developers aren’t applying for your position, you’re not offering enough compensation.

This is rather cynical, but I imagine that these pronouncements aren’t for my ears anyways: They’re made to justify keeping “information technology professionals” on the overtime exempt list, or to raise immigration caps for technology workers. (Which is often well justified, but I wonder at the distortion it introduces to the domestic labour pool.)

TIME.com – The Skills Gap Myth: Why Companies Can’t Find Good People

…

The first thing that makes me wonder about the supposed “skill gap” is that, when pressed for more evidence, roughly 10% of employers admit that the problem is really that the candidates they want won’t accept the positions at the wage level being offered. That’s not a skill shortage, it’s simply being unwilling to pay the going price.

But the heart of the real story about employer difficulties in hiring can be seen in the Manpower data showing that only 15% of employers who say they see a skill shortage say that the issue is a lack of candidate knowledge, which is what we’d normally think of as skill. Instead, by far the most important shortfall they see in candidates is a lack of experience doing similar jobs.

Employers are not looking to hire entry-level applicants right out of school. They want experienced candidates who can contribute immediately with no training or start-up time. That’s certainly understandable, but the only people who can do that are those who have done virtually the same job before, and that often requires a skill set that, in a rapidly changing world, may die out soon after it is perfected.

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Sully Syed

Moon approved

On 1st March 1965, OMEGA’s Speedmaster chronograph was “flight-qualified by NASA for all manned space missions“. Aside from this bit of starry eyed trivia, I’ve always thought that the Speedmaster neatly straddled the line between minimalism and showiness. It’s a watch that doesn’t knock anyone’s socks off for being huge or flashy, but is appreciated for those who know of its historical significance and pedigree.

Back in 2009 I acquired a Speedmaster Reduced (3539.50) which, on account of being extremely comfortable to wear, has become something I wear daily. It’s also nice to own an automatic variant of the watch so I don’t have to wind it quite so often.

Sully Syed

We are not now that strength which in old days; Moved earth and heaven

Despite being originally taken in 1962, the above remains a well-recognized photograph: That’s James Meredith, the first black student admitted to the University of Mississippi, walking to class accompanied by U.S. Marshal James McShane on his left and John Doar of the Justice Department to his right.

John Doar was bestowed with the Presidential Medal of Freedom yesterday. Sometimes it seems like the world is running out of men like Mr. Doar; men and women willing to put their lives on the line to take an unpopular stand and do what they think is right.

Sully Syed

Heroku’s Adam Wiggins on how to scale a development team

Not much to say here; I think this is an excellent template for growing a software company and this is my way or preserving copy for when I need it.

Adam Wiggins – How To Scale a Development Team

As hackers, we’re familiar with the need to scale web servers, databases, and other software systems. An equally important challenge in a growing business is scaling your development team.

Most technology companies hit a wall with dev team scalability somewhere around ten developers. Having navigated this process fairly successfully over the last few years at Heroku, this post will present what I see as the stages of life in a development team, and the problems and potential solutions at each stage.

Stage 1: Homebrewing

In the beginning, your company is 2 – 4 guys/gals working in someone’s living room, a cafe, or a coworking space. Communication and coordination is easy: with just a few people sitting right next to each other, everyone knows what everyone else is working on. Founders and early employees tend to be very self-directed so the need for management is nearly non-existent. Everyone is a generalist and works on a little bit of everything. You have a single group chat channel and a single [email protected] mailing list. There’s no real need to track any tasks or even bugs. A full copy of the state of the entire company and your product is easily contained within everyone’s brain.

At this stage, you’re trying to create and vet your minimum viable product, which is a fancy way of saying that you’re trying to figure out what you’re even doing here. Any kind of structure or process at this point will be extremely detrimental. Everyone has to be a generalist and able to work on any kind of problem – specialists will be (at best) somewhat bored and (at worst) highly distracting because they want to steer product development into whatever realm they specialize in.

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Sully Syed

2012 vs. 1984: Comparing the costs of tuition and housing

One of Canada’s best finance journalists, Rob Carrick, wrote this piece in response to the furious protests being held by students in Quebec regarding skyrocketing tuition fees and living expenses.

The Globe And Mail – 2012 vs. 1984: Young adults really do have it harder today

All young adults who think they’re getting a raw deal in today’s economy, let me tell you about how it was back in my day.

In 1984, my final undergraduate year of university, tuition cost more or less $1,000. I earned that much in a summer without breaking a sweat.

When I went looking for a new car in 1986, the average cost was roughly half of what it is now. It was totally affordable.

The average price of a house in Toronto back in 1984 was just over $96,000. I wasn’t buying just then, but it’s worth noting that the average family after-tax income back then was close to $50,000. Buy a first home? Easy to imagine for new graduates of the day.

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Sully Syed

The Hindenburg over Manhattan

20120513-094009.jpg

The Hindenburg floats past the Empire State Building over Manhattan on August 8, 1936, en route to Lakehurst, New Jersey, from Germany. (AP Photo)

— In Focus – 75 Years Since The Hindenburg Disaster

Sully Syed

Soliciting browser type, version, OS and cookie settings from your users

I lost track of this site and happily re-found it – tell your website customers to open http://supportdetails.com/ in a new tab when they have issues with your website and to use the form built in to e-mail you their information. Super handy.

Sully Syed

Infographic: The size of the United States military

The National Post graphics department is amongst the best in the business. After the U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, they did up this infographic about what the size and placement of the U.S. military remains to be. Click the image below to see it at full size.

Sully Syed

A Terms Of Service page done right (or at least better)

The 500px Terms of Service page strikes a great balance (a 50/50 balance, to be precise) between necessary legalese and something the layman can understand.


Sully Syed

Very basic JSONP

JSONP allows you to make HTTP requests outside of your own domain due to the SCRIPT tag not having the same-domain limitation XMLHttpRequest does. The basic form of this workaround is as follows:

var scr = document.createElement('script');
scr.src = 'http://openexchangerates.org/latest.json?callback=formatCurrency';
document.body.appendChild(scr);

function formatCurrency(data) {
	// Do stuff with the data that's been returned.
	1;
}

Lines 1 – 3 of the above create a SCRIPT tag in the DOM, defines the URL to retrieve data from and in line 3 makes the request. To continue the execution cycle, the script at openexchangerates.org must wrap its data in a function:

formatCurrency({ "hello" : "Hi, I'm JSON. Who are you?"})

This calls the locally defined function formatCurrency(), which does whatever it needs to do with the returned data. A quick hack to make your API (assuming you control it) work with JSONP would be as follows:

// assume $json holds the JSON response
if ($GET['callback'] != '') $json = $GET['callback']."( $json )";
return $json;

I have yet to test this, but I imagine you could also be much more daring and avoid having to get the following code uploaded to your API of choice. To do this, execute the first bit of JavaScript on this page, and then execute an eval() statement on the data in the manner of the below:

eval('formatCurrency(' + returned_data + ')');