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Is There REALLY an IT Worker Shortage in the US?
dwalker asks: " I found a disturbing manifesto while I was investigating the H-1B situation. Dr. Norman Matloff is a computer science teacher at UC Davis and he makes some radical claims about the tech industry including ,
'Rampant age discrimination...at age 35', H-1B workers as cheap labor and 'Indentured Servants' , and he claims that there is no labor shortage. His testimony was presented to the U.S House Subcommittee on Immigration in 1998 right before the last H-1B visa increase. Plus he has quotes and documentation to back up his claims, everything from personal e-mail to articles in the Washington Post. I'm not in the workforce yet but if this guy is right my CS Degree isn't gonna mean much. I'm curious what the tech community at large thinks of this guy and his claims, especially now after 2 years?"
Well, I'm an H-1B in US, working for a non-profit. I'm paid mostly within 90% of the market rate. Oh yes, I'm from India as well :-) It is always the money that matters in these things. We are paid better here than in India, and employer gets a hard working person for little less. Because of H-1B terms (which are now changing), the employer is surer to keep the employee for a little more time. In my couple of years here, I've seen the following assumptions by employers:
1. More people in a project means more efficiency.
2. More managers also implies more efficiency.
3. More analysts are also better.
4. More meetings are great as well.
Needless to say, I disagree with all these. Very few Americans who are CS degree holders want to
be programming after 5 years on the job. A lot less number of folks from other background who
just had some HTML-ASP course want to actually do coding for more than a year. Everyone wants to be an analyst or coordinator or manager or the idea guy. If they need to code, they are unhappy and thanks to the citizenship, they can easily change jobs - that said, I've really seen employee shortage atleast around DC area. And many American companies' IT departments seldom follow any kind of written standards for software projects - I'm talking about companies with primary business NOT being software development. This makes it very difficult to cope up with a change in work force.
what corporate America needs is experienced work force and some decent HR policies to keep them.
My suggestions:
1. No need to increase the H-1B cap, this just makes it worse.
2. Relax the H-1B restrictions so that changing employers are easier.
Isn't America built upon the principles of competition? This will help keep the pay higher, and will certainly make employers see the light in hiring experienced American employees.
3. After 6 years on H-1B, one needs to take an year out of USA. Lift this restriction.
This will help the employers and employees financially.
4. And for God's sake, before any one starts on an IT project, have a plan before the first line of code is written or the first resource is committed.
About the report of the Professor, it just seems like a political rhetoric, in tune with the rest of the world. I say this because before USA, I had worked in Europe, Middle East and Japan. And India. Similar sons-of-soil preachers are on the rise there too.
It makes sense about a small % of H-1Bs are really really good though. And that the emphasis should be made on general programming talent and learnability.
Candidate A is single and has no problem working 60 hour weeks, while B has a wife and 3 kids and wants to work only 40 hours. How can you expect the company to ignore the fact that A is going to give them more for their money?
The prospective employer cannot whether know Candidate B is married or has kids because these are illegal, discriminitory interview questions. Therefore the employer has no (legal) way to make this "value for their money" comparison.
cpeterso
While I think that you have some good arguments, a quick perusal of the Want Ads brings many of them into question, to wit:
.NET etc.) The fact is that employers are setting up criterea that CANNOT be met.
A programmer who has been out of work and hasn't even bothered as much as to learn Perl or Java does not seem to be a very attractive candidate, simply because they don't seem very motivated or interested in the job.
The problem with this statement is that employers are requiring two years or more experience in the given technology. Saying that I took the time to study J2EE while I was unemployed is NOT going to get me a job. Even more egregious are the insane advertisements "require - 5 years programming experience with C#,
The argument for keeping foreign IT workers out of the US is that that would allow US workers to take those jobs, or at least increase demand and raise wages.
But that is illusory. If the foreign IT workers can't come here, they'll simply work for a subsidiary or contracting firm in Europe or Asia.
Nice theory, but it just doesn't work that way. IT companies who import workers have to pay MUCH higher wages in the US than they do abroad. The incentive to set up low wage programming shops has been IMMENSE for many years. There are in fact such shops, most notably in India. The problem is that there are tremendous communications difficulties that make development of a team impossible, and team building is perhaps the most critical element determining the success or failure of a programming project.
The real reason to object to the mass importation of H1B IT workers is that it is ruining the education system in this country, distorting the employment marketplace, and destroying the attractiveness of technical careers in the minds of the youth in this country. Who wants to become a computer programmer when you are going to be working in a group of expatriats? What is the potential for long term career advancement when you are in that sort of atmosphere? In reality is it any different than saying that you want to become a farm worker and compete with illegal immigrants in their labor market?
NO, it is not. The fact of the matter is that by importing large number of H1B workers into the US, we are surpressing the natural rise in wages that would occur in the presence of a real labor shortage. This rise in wages WOULD encourage companies to invest in training, spur US colleges and universities to expand their programs in the fields of interest and otherwise. What is happening instead is that Colleges and Universities OUTSIDE the US are expanding their IT programs in order to fill the needs of their students who wish to immigrate to the US.
It is my own opinion that the H1B program is the worst public policy imaginable, and policy makers in the US will rue the day this was passed.
Personally, I've noticed a trend over the last few years; as I've applied for jobs for which I'm truly well-qualified (i.e. many years of relevant and up-to-date experience in exactly the pertinent areas) I've found that not only do I not get the job, my cover letter/resume submission isn't even ack'd.
I find this puzzling, given how often this submission is done electronically, making the process of ack'ing it trivial. I would have expected that as more and more of this interaction takes place online, that we'd see increased responsiveness from employers, not less. And in the case of a handful of positions that I applied for this year, I'm outright baffled: they listed X buzzwords, I have 90% of them in theory and practice and a bunch of related stuff that they didn't bother to list. (I make a continuous effort to keep my skills current, and while, for example, I haven't tackled PHP yet, I do speak perl and Java, run Linux and BSD, speak fluent sendmail and DNS and Apache, etc.)
So why didn't I even get called for an interview?
Could it be because I'm in my 40's, because I expect to be well-paid for what I bring to the table, and don't expect to work 80 hours/week because my employers are too cheap to hire two people to do two peoples' work?
I don't know. The lack of interaction with potential employers means that I'm speculating and trying to correlate anecdotal evidence with experience. But I find the trend disturbing, not only because of how it impacts me, but because of what it means for those who are entering the workforce twenty years behind me.
I'm concerned that employers who avoid people like me -- because we're (relatively) expensive and won't work ourselves to death -- will try to take advantage of younger workers, and that they will succeed. Again, the evidence is mostly anecdotal, but I'll bet that at least half the people reading this worked more than 60 hours this week and were not fairly compensated for it. I'll further bet that a quarter worked more than 80 while being paid a salary commensurate with 40.
Of course, there's no way for me to know if I'm right about that or not; maybe I'm way off base here. (shrug) But my advice is not to buy into the PHB-propagated myth that you are somehow obligated to do this for the company you work for. You're not. And if you do, you may find that twenty years down the road, you'll discover that all the sacrifices you made, all the things you gave up, were never appreciated or paid for -- but that the people above you, the ones who have profited handsomely from everything you gave up, have taken their money and gone somewhere else to repeat the cycle.
Exactly. I recently had a phone conversation with an HR drone. She was trying to talk me into one of their positions. I told her how much money I wanted. It was about $20k more than they were listing the position. She told me that she thought I was being unrealistic. I told her "that's why that position is still open" and hung up.
Another job I know of was listed for at least 6 months, 3 of those after the "application deadline". I know of two well-qualified people that applied for it. So why didn't it get filled? The company wouldn't make a decision and eventually decided not to fill the position due to a money crunch.
In my opinion, that's the labor shortage in a nutshell. Every open position I see has a story behind why it's still open. It isn't because there aren't people out there looking for work. It's because the job is underpaid, they aren't really hiring, nobody can make a decision about hiring, etc. I've seen plenty of jobs listed where it's obvious that the someone priced the position using 1997's salary chart.