And the truth he’s seen in the past decade is that our insecurity is getting the best of us. “The big problem in general is fear,” he says. “To counter their fear, companies make their standards too high and turn down people who would be great at their jobs. ... “Everyone wants the next Steve Wozniak to walk through the door, but really, they should be asking to see if they can do the job. … They want to populate their entire staff with engineering geniuses, and you don’t need the whole staff to be engineering geniuses. You need a couple really bright people who know what they’re doing, and then, just don’t turn down people who can do the job.”
There's definitely a misconception out there that a company can make it on "great engineers" alone. I've been thinking about this lately, trying to come up with a good way to describe to people what I do. So far, the best thing I've been able to come up with is that it's akin to being a load balancer: the person who takes on the tasks that can and will be optimized, but that are (for whatever reasons/ priorities) not yet able to optimized.
So maybe part of "the engineering shortage" is related to the shortage of people with enough technical competence to take on the tasks that the engineers could do, but don't want / like to do. So far in my experience, I've seen far more of a dearth of support people who know what they're doing, than a shortage of good engineers.
There's definitely a misconception out there that a company can make it on "great engineers" alone. I've been thinking about this lately, trying to come up with a good way to describe to people what I do. So far, the best thing I've been able to come up with is that it's akin to being a load balancer: the person who takes on the tasks that can and will be optimized, but that are (for whatever reasons/ priorities) not yet able to optimized.
So maybe part of "the engineering shortage" is related to the shortage of people with enough technical competence to take on the tasks that the engineers could do, but don't want / like to do. So far in my experience, I've seen far more of a dearth of support people who know what they're doing, than a shortage of good engineers.