When I've asked about the greatest problem holding their company back, a number of people have told me plainly that its the tech talent shortage.
Ok. For some businesses that are still growing exponentially, that may well be true. Their growth is simply too fast for a solid talent pipeline to keep up. For others, it is a nice diplomatic, public answer to mask more pressing and recognized issues. I understand that.
Yet I think for many environments there is a very real sense of shortage. I believe it's because we don't know how to evaluate or fully utilize the workers we have and those readily available to us. It's Rumsfield's greatest difficulty: we don't know that we don't know. So we are always short the performance we want. We are always busy and often overwhelmed.
In fact, we have workers we don't fully leverage and pipelines unoptimized or entirely broken. Talent isn't the bottleneck; it's our processes.
It's the old wisdom that we can have it quickly, cheaply, or done well (but choose two!) with some variations for hiring and developing.
We can today get just about any engineer we want for a high enough price (or other critical motivator), but we would need to develop a model that correctly assesses their real cost against their expected quantitative value to the company (people analytics?). We would need to jettison the fixed "we want to pay only this range/make only these accommodations for all engineers at this tier". That is an HR construct; it's a choice independent of the market. Imagine shopping for top-of-the-line audio equipment, deciding you only want to pay so much, but it must be new, not used. You will wait, understanding your choice, but you won't instinctively call it a general shortage. It's a self-imposed shortage and you accept the terms with open eyes.
Sometimes this position or prioritizing of price is entirely and fiscally reasonable, shaped by necessity. Then again, sometimes it's just the default way, assuming that people at a given level in a group are easily replaceable; are commodities rather than individuals who bring their unique energy, insights and abilities. They aren't. Talent in general, beyond tech, isn't. There is no way to compensate for the ideas, initiative and growth that might have been ours, but we passed because it wasn't the price we wanted or they missed a given bullet point on our posted wishlist. Many companies misidentify ability. Others miss the real value. And ultimately they in turn get passed by.
Middling-to-mediocre is however safe and predictable, though no one wants to admit that's what they want in a business. It makes us inevitably vulnerable to the inevitable "disruptors" who measure and value ability better.
I don't know of many tech skills that a good engineer can't learn quickly. How did most of us learn? On platforms that were thrust upon us only after we were hired yet we just figured them out. What a good engineer can learn capably in six months, a mediocre one may take years (and a poor one perhaps never). We measure the current experience (are you an expert on this platform or protocol? do you have this degree/certification?) against our lists. Personality would be a better predictor of your mileage if we were any good at evaluating it. One man's long-won expertise may not help with our next problem; one woman's temporary "I don't know it yet" may be quickly overcome, the same way she'll conquer problem after problem for you going forward.
We rarely hit the ground running in a new place because of workplace process more often than any lack of ability to do something productive. I always look at my first week ("did I do something profitable for the company?") as an imperfect predictor for my future success there, but I've rarely been at full speed until a half-year went by. Most of this was just becoming proficient in how the business does business.
We're not prepared to absorb new hires quickly into our culture and process. Worse, we expect them to often soldier through just as we did. Documentation is scanty, inconsistent. No one has the time to brief or to train. In those critical early months we willingly fail to engage them. Thus we reap the expected dismal performance from this as they either repeat the cycle to become the disaffected seniors, or break it by leaving us with the self-same vacancy to fill again. Out of many places I've worked for, just two had a computer, credentials, and introductory briefing laid out for me as a new employee in the first week (and they did it the first day), but it made an indelible impression. I wanted to go all out for them from day one, and I did. At another very large place I waited three months, half a building away from my team, before I got my first real task, and it was only through the individual kindnesses of a few that I had any sense of what to do. People there complained the loudest about having no time to train and yet just two weeks of thorough introduction would have given them another highly productive hand for the next year it took me to understand it mostly on my own. This is a recipe for persistent, debilitating busy-ness. We're not outcomes driven and we need to be.
Good engineers can become comfortable, if they stay. By then we've lost the best parts of why we hired them. Poor engineers will have consistent but low performance that will put the brakes on any performance train no matter who we hire afterward. The best engineers instinctively need to perform and test themselves so by the time we are piling most of the work on them they are least invested to continue. And then one day we are suddenly back in reactive mode, scrambling to re-parcel an enormous workload to whoever is left.
The real speed of business is not always fast; often solid returns take the hard effort of shoring up the fundamentals of how we do work, to make sure our processes get the results we want and are self-propagating. Except in a few cases, a new hire always takes time to come up to speed just for our processes. This is our time to let them learn what was on the posted wishlist that wasn't related to their drive. Cheaply and done well is a viable option if we view the engineer as more than a commodity; as someone who learns, and we hire people primarily on learning and performance judged by how they've done it in lesser and different ways in their past. And then we risk it again by pushing them into areas that may challenge them further and yield more profit for us. We may instead shake their hand as they leave for another place. Yet, if we shrink from training them so they can leave for our competitor, it is rightly observed that what if we don't train them, and they stay?
If talent is scarce, we need to evolve to use the talent we can get more efficiently. Where this apparent talent shortage appears more profound each year, because we insist on getting workers who can "hit the ground running", are cheap enough (and replaceable), and yet still produce the highest quality work, the best companies are going to quietly "pick two" and invest in the third over time. And they will reap the performance. Everyone else is going to wait as long as they can, and only then pick two and talk about a talent shortage.
Skills can be learned. Work ethic, energy and ingenuity exist only where you find it. The real price is whatever the market will bear for their services.
We need to get out in front of this train and ask ourselves what is the necessary outcome for this position? and make the hard decisions to make it happen. Our fastest competitors are already doing it.
