[jandrewrogers]

I think it is important to acknowledge that it takes much longer to train juniors in systems software today than a couple decades ago because the nature of the problems have changed. It now takes several years to get someone to an acceptable level for a lot of systems software work. In many cases that’s longer than the entire development cycle — a junior would never really be productive on the project. And yes, this is creating a vicious feedback loop where we are no longer producing many new people with these skills despite a lot of demand.

The minimum level of sophistication required to be effective in systems software has increased dramatically since the 1990s, when I first started doing systems software. The kinds of systems software we were putting in production in back then would be considered a trivial toy today. This shift has placed an enormous amount of upward pressure on the minimum level of experience and skill that would allow someone to become productive within a useful amount of time.

It is no longer feasible in many cases to have companies effectively subsidize the development of highly skilled systems software people. The training time has become so long that companies will never recoup the investment. It is easy to see how the incentives have created the current situation and it is not clear how to address the shortage. Even before the current situation, it was widely noted that most systems software developers were self-taught over many years rather than trained up in a structured environment.

[johnnyanmac]

>And yes, this is creating a vicious feedback loop where we are no longer producing many new people with these skills despite a lot of demand.

if the company would rather burn out and age out all their talent than invest in the future, I don't know what to say. For niche domains, you can't treat talent a a pure business expense. That's how you lose out all that talent to China and suddenly you can't compete at all. If anything, training should be treated like insurance.

>It is no longer feasible in many cases to have companies effectively subsidize the development of highly skilled systems software people.

"subsidize" implies that somehow engineers are saving money by choosing to take these more niche paths. It doesn't make sense. You have a product and you need talent to develop and maintain it to compete. There's no "subsidies" in a business relationship like this.

your choices are few and simple: train in-house, lobby schools to train for you, or publicize your tech and hope people train themselves for you again. It seems like these days companies aren't looking out long term though and just want to jump the ship that has plenty of time to steer past the iceberg everyone sees ahead.