[vladtaltos]

what you say may be true for web-development but afaik there is not too much PhD requirements for web-dev work.

I'm in the computer vision and pattern recognition field and as you can guess from its popularity there's definitely a shortage - not just in the US but all over the world.

I'm in France and in my company we are trying aggressively to hire new people in the field but everybody good is already working somewhere or they're working on their own ideas. About 80% of our research/engineering team is from abroad: 2 Swiss, 2 Italian, 3 Turkish, 3 American, 1 Israeli, 2 Russian, 2 Canadian, 2 Spaniard, 1 Iranian - and only 5 French. finding talent in this day and age is a world-wide problem. there's not enough experienced people around for cutting edge companies and there's no way you can hire someone good in the field cheap local or away. that's a very absurd notion...

As I said, I'm currently not located in US and I'm not a US citizen. So, if I decide to work again there I'll need an H1B but as I'm already making quite well where I'm now, I wouldn't consider uprooting my life and returning back to US for no less than $200-250k. if this is considered cheap work, then so be it. exploiting imperialist bastards...

[Iftheshoefits]

How much of the CV/pattern recognition talent shortage you're describing is because of an unwillingness to consider candidates who don'match exactly. That is, do you have a condition where something like only "PhD in Machine Learning with extensive CV experience" resumes are considered when it is arguably the case that, e.g., "MS/PhD in math/engineering/physics with programming experience" would be equally able to do the work with a (very) modest learning curve to adapt to the specific jargon/processes?

[vladtaltos]

I myself have electronics engineering background (telecommunications sub-specialty), 5 others are similarly with ee backgrounds and 3 or 4 people are from applied maths departments. I believe we have only 2 mechanical eng people and the rest is CS guys.

It's not resume or education background bias. However, if you're going to pay in the 150k-200k euro range to somebody, you naturally want them to have relevant experience. After ee undergrad, I majored in signal processing and then got a phd in cv. Hiring people in the hopes that they'll become useful is being done but not excessively in a way that it is counter-productive ( eg. we're not hiring number theorists but accept applied maths guys - one new hire (one of our immigrant workers) has a very cool phd thesis on probability and the data he worked with came from CERN experiments - so it's not CV or PR at all - pure math applied on physics experiments... but he's smart and experienced enough that after only 3 months he's already doing substantial contributions )

cv/pr is not a field where you have a 'modest learning curve' if you hire people to do research - you really need at least a few years of research experience for working on state-of-the-art problems... otherwise, you're paying people to develop their research skills at a very high premium. that should be done at a university...

maybe I'm biased - I always consider this H1B problem in terms of research work - not regular stuff where what you need to do is 95% engineering and 5% research.. this is my bias. but it is also a valid example for H1B discussion in contrast to dismissing all H1B immigrant workers as 'cheap labor' for doing engineering tasks with low requirements.

The US is a country spanning a large continent - maybe that is the reason for many of the racist rants I've seen here on this discussion - it doesn't have many neighbouring countries ( and at odds with all of them except maybe Canada? ) and most US citizens don't leave the states to work in other parts of the world. If you have a whole continent for a country it's easier to find a job in a different part of it than moving to a completely different culture. And so this sort of causes people who don't travel much to have a conservative view of 'immigrant' labor. EU is definitely not perfect and has many problems to solve - but at least, in my opinion, opening the borders for quota-free worker exchanges lets people to hire from a richer pool of talent and helps reduce culture clashes and racist viewpoints in the long term. I'm feeling very lucky to get to know many different cultures from all around the world. I wish you could also have a taste of it too...

[mailshanx]

How do i get in touch with you? I have honed my math / ML skills over many years in academic research - we should definitely talk!

[Nursie]

I think there is absolutely a tech hiring culture that discards people who don't have the exact right experience. And it's awful. A good coder with lots of general experience can adapt. An awful, useless hack can sit in a sector and look valuable to a prospective employer while actually being a huge net drain.