Developing talent in HPC
High-Performance Computing is critical for the fight against climate destruction. Modelling extreme weather patterns, optimising manufacturing processes, clean energy: we can’t do any of those things without the convergence of simulation, machine learning and scalable compute. But all areas are suffering from a skills shortfall, so how can we develop the younger generation to make up the workforce of tomorrow?
Many of you will know that before I joined Altair as Chief Scientist for HPC I ran my own company here in the UK. While my company was a lot smaller than the team I belong to today, we still had our part to play in developing careers and building the talent pipeline. Of course we developed some great people and they left, but we also developed some outstanding people who stayed.
Now that I’m part of Altair, I’m pleased that we have a healthy intern programme. We often hire our interns after university, and we have a seemingly never-ending set of self-contained tasks that are perfect for bright people to cut their teeth on. I’ve been really impressed both with the work and the maturity of many of our interns, who have had to enter the working world in a very different way from those of us who grew up long before Covid.
The HPC skills rainbow
Picking the right trainees and matching them to available positions is never easy. A friend of mine who ran a technology start-up asked me once how he was supposed to know whether candidates were going to like being developers when they didn’t know themselves. A fair question, because training junior members of staff is a big drain on senior engineers who are already very busy.
I explained that in my company we shop people around. We give them programming tasks, but we also invite them to sit in on customer calls and take them to trade shows. That way they get a taste of different areas of the business and together we can see where they shine. They can try out R&D, support, and IT as well as sales jobs. The result is happier staff who are more engaged with the business. They have more respect for their colleagues and we all know they are in the right role.
In HPC there is a plethora of jobs out there. Many jobs are multifaceted and so it is not uncommon to find someone who started adulthood as a scientist before they became more IT literate and moved over the HPC administration side. Great HPC professionals need to know a little software engineering, dev ops and, increasingly, data science. On top of this you need a good helping of HPC-specific knowledge around hardware, infrastructure, file-systems and the unique challenges of running each family of applications. HPC spans the public sector, private sector, government, and healthcare with domain knowledge needed at every stage of the technology delivery pipeline from sales to support and system architecture. Fitting good people to the range roles available should be something we can do.
Getting the best graduates
There is always a lot of emphasis on finding the best candidates, but what does that really mean? Top school? Best grades? Historically, those who fit the mould of the archetypal male nerd have done well in technical challenges and been rated highly, perhaps higher than those with similar technical ability but better social skills. Now that many of us work remotely, this balance needs to readdressed. Only those with the skills to negotiate today’s trickier remote social relationships will excel as effective members of a team.
Many of the best people I’ve hired have not been to university, or they have but chose the wrong subject and did not graduate with the best grades. Instead I’ve hired them for key technical skills, real work experience and an aptitude for common sense. We need to make sure that non-traditional routes into the industry remain open if we are at all committed to diversity. The halls of computer science in universities are better than they used to be, but they still represent a sliver of society and we are losing out on what the wider population has to offer.
Work experience
Work experience is an often-overlooked part of the CV, but it says so much about a candidate. Glowing CVs may come with a few internships, but many applicants have never had a normal job or they leave it off their CV, thinking it to be irrelevant. Well, I want to see your paper round, I want to know if you’ve pulled a few pints, waited on tables, pushed trollies in a hospital. I want to know if you can handle conversations with the general public.
The adult world of work is different from school in a very important way: at school nearly complete is a top grade, but in life nearly complete is often a failed task. The common sense to finish a job to an acceptable level is very different from the skill needed to demonstrate academic potential, and yet it is the latter we tend to test in job interviews. So if you put yourself through university as a children’s entertainer, then put that at the top of your CV and I will interview you first.
