How many 4-year olds male or female want to be a scientist or engineer when they grow up? Plenty of boys want to be things like firemen, astronauts, soldiers, pro athletes, etc. who don't eventually enter those fields. I'm a software developer and I never wanted to be a software developer growing up. Then again I was born in the 70s, so it wasn't on a lot of peoples' "radar" career-wise when I was a small child.

Does Belgium tax the perks as well? If so then it's a wash. I know in California they're starting to clue in to the fact that companies are essentially allowing their employes to dodge the income tax by providing "free services" in place of cash. Free food, free transportation, free daycare, free gym membership, free dry-cleaning, etc.

Agreed. I can envision a more credible doomsday scenario, however, where humanity becomes overly dependent on pseudo-AI type automation (think self-driving cars) and that automation breaks in some spectacular way. Probably wouldn't mean the end of the species, but could precipitate a big die-off. Of course that's not what Hawking is talking about.

One reason companies offer all the silly perks (pool table, excessive free food, etc.): it's a way to compensate employees tax-free. I can pay my guys $1000 more apiece but they'll only take home $700. Maybe $1000 worth of "free perks" and creating the perception of a "fun culture" offers better "bang for my buck" in terms of attracting and retaining employees than the extra $700 in take-home pay. Then again, maybe not. But I'm willing to entertain the argument that it does.

I find conclusions like those of the GP laughable at best.

Do you at least agree there's a kernel of truth? Having social skills > not having social skills when it comes to successful interviewing. You don't have to look like "rich frat boy", but, like it or not, it helps if you don't come across as "neckbeard with bad hygiene". The fact that corporate American also has huge problems doesn't change that.

If you get paid and can quit then you're not a slave. Quit with the histrionics. As to what "social skills and teamwork" mean, yes, the ability to accept someone else's authority is a necessary part of working on any team that has the notion of a leader. I will agree, though, that having an extreme aversion to others' authority doesn't necessarily mean you're "antisocial".

i've worked at a startup like this. [...] they want people at the office 16 hours minimum. if you calculate an hourly wage, you're getting around $20/hr.

Gotta ask: why? Are you not capable of getting paid more than $20/hr elsewhere? Or did you just want the extra hours/income? If any employer ever asked me to work more than 50 hr/week for more than 2 weeks in a row I'd probably take my ball and go home.

45 with three kids? No worries! Hope you like pizza fuelled all night gaming marathons and our monthly team trip to Vegas! Oh, you don't? Sorry, you aren't a cultural fit.

Fine by me if that's the criterion they want to use, so long as there are also companies out there refusing to hire young "rockster" devs who crave all-night gaming marathons and monthly team trips to Vegas in favor of 45 year-olds with kids. Honestly, if I applied at the company you describe, I'd be glad if they weeded me out due to "culture fit". It would save me the trouble of being hired then having to quit because of their ridiculous company culture.

#gamergate. AMIRITE?!?!

Exactly. I can attest that the overall thrust of this article is true. The company I work for, as well as past companies, have all taken into account "culture fit" when evaluating candidates. On the other hand, most of the crap in the comments about what people screen for, e.g. weeding out introverts and/or selecting only for rich white frat boys, is not something I've ever experienced or heard about.

Excellent. You sound like someone I wouldn't want to work with. Luckily, so long as you remain un (or self) employed we can both have our way.

Whereas in the 1960s the U.S. was more interested in "Keeping Up With The Kruschevs".

It seems incredible that in the 21st century schools are still teaching children to scratch marks on paper.

Perhaps to the average /. poster it does, but not to most reasonable people.

I get that competition leads to higher salaries. My point is that higher salaries, while it might be a "solution" for a given company's trouble filling positions, isn't an industry-wide solution. If I offer an above-market salary to fill my rec then I'm necessarily taking someone off the market who could be working for some other company. If all other companies increase their compensation equal to the amount I increased mine then I don't gain any advantage and I have approximately as much trouble finding talent as I do today.

What would likely ameliorate the "talent deficit" is that some tech jobs would either cease to exist or move overseas if the compensation level grew too high.

Here's why I'm not convinced that the answer is simply higher salaries. To be sure, some workers who could be doing tech decide to do something else. Maybe they go into academia, finance, IP law, etc. Raising tech salaries across the board, by everyone who employs tech workers, would steal some of these guys back. But would it be enough? You would probably also motivate some young people to go into tech that currently go into other fields. But that's for the future; it doesn't help the present. The fact is that there's a fixed supply of domestic talent at each point along the talent spectrum. You could pay 10x as much and it won't magically increase the amount of available talent. If there is, in fact, not enough talent to "go around", i.e. to fill all the tech positions employers want to fill, then we don't just have a salary problem.

Side note: what's good for the domestic tech worker may not be the same as what's good for the country. That is to say, an influx of highly-skilled foreign tech workers might depress salaries in the short term, but an abundance of cheap tech labor could juice the success of domestic tech companies which, in the long run, may actually be better for the U.S. as a whole.

There's also anecdotal evidence that the U.S. is becoming less attractive to foreign talent and not more. Which, in my opinion, is terrible news.