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No Shortage Of Programmers?
Robber Baron writes "While searching with Copernic for the old Indian-head test pattern, I chanced upon this article (funny how search engines work, isn't it?). It seems (surprise, suprise) that this whole IT labour shortage crisis was a myth generated by large IT companies to justify importing boatloads of foreign IT workers willing to work for low wages in substandard conditions. Anyone have any experience with this?"
I already took the one from the article, sorry.Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage
Note that by searching with it shortage+workers, you'll get:
3 Is There REALLY an IT Worker Shortage in the US? by Cliff on Saturday October 14, @06:20AM EST 535
3 H1B Tech Visa Workers Being Deported From U.S. by Hemos on Monday September 18, @09:52PM EST 1246
2 Management To Blame For IT Worker Shortage? by CmdrTaco on Thursday September 28, @02:15PM EST 396
2 The IT Labor Shortage by Hemos on Wednesday March 22, @03:22PM EST 531
2 H-1B Tech Workers May Be Severely Underpaid by Roblimo on Tuesday August 03, @06:23AM EST 310
2 Worker shortages: short-term and long-term by sengan on Sunday October 25, @09:19AM EST 191
2 Is There a Tech Labor Shortage? by CmdrTaco on Monday March 23, @08:04AM EST 48
2 Tech Labor Shortage Myth? by CmdrTaco on Thursday February 26, @05:13AM EST 31
(ad nauseum)
Cheers,
--fred
Nokia's profits are down for the first time in several years: they're sacking people which was unheard of a couple of years back.
Ericsson's making huge losses: thousands of people lost their jobs.
Compaq's profits fell 81% in the last quarter: thousands of jobs will be lost by the end of the year.
And so on. In fact the future is starting to look so gloomy that my IT worker friends have one by one started preparing for unemployment by insuring their mortgage and joining unemployment funds at which they scoffed just a few years ago.
Way to prove his point.
Without understanding the implementation (the OS) of the API, you'll never be able to optimize a program. There's no minimal cost for a task when you can't describe the cost of the OS functions. It's a challenge to choose between even two ways of doing the same thing. Yes, there's a lot more than two ways to open a file.
Debugging is a challenge when you're assuming the API is a black box that always works. Operating systems tend to have more bugs than other programs- they're more massive than other programs, for one.
And have you ever tried programming for an API that was incompletely specified? Totally missing many functions and lacking or having wrong documentation for many others? I'm not saying that MS would do this and drag it out for several years until a lot of people wrote large books about what was missing from the API specification, of course.
Getting bachelors does not neccessarily equal a job even if you were. You are talking about "skills shortage", not "people-who-has-degree shortage".
I was employed by my school and was working there in summers full time where I had the chance to meet people who are now good friends of mine. People that were finishing their thesis and even getting their masters degree. How I got to know them was through helping them out with things when they were lost, and they asked me for alot of advice.
What scared me was that, well I don't consider myself a very skilled person but I do know quite some things since I usually want to learn other things in addition to what taught in school, but some of these people hardly even knew things as the difference between a file and a folder!
They are now out there with a masters degree (how they managed I really don't know) looking for jobs, while I have two jobs and companies ask ME to come work for them...
Where I work, there IS shortage of people in the IT-field (but not those who are called project managers and whatever and doesn't really have anything to do with IT technically).
There are tons of designers & the like, it's the dirty unglamorous complciated stuff that is in short supply.
Well things are starting to get very messy over here in the Irish Tech sector too. I just lost my job as a developer and it really looks like I have little to no prospect of getting a new one (at least not in Ireland). There are now hordes of people out there with the same skills as mine who have also lost their job due to the downturn.
Of course its not as if theres no jobs out there its just that my 1 year of commercial programming experience is not exactly useful to a company looking for someone with 5 years C++ experience and an in-depth knowledge of just about every telecoms protocol there is. There will always be a demand for very highly skilled programmers which usually means higly experienced too.
The simple fact of the matter about bringing people from abroad to work cheaper is that if people are going to better off coming from abroad to work they will do it.
I have seen quite a few more Russian, East European and Indian/Pakistani programmers in Ireland over the last year. Most of these people are now earning way more than they could at home and are in most cases far better educated than your average programmer (lots of Masters and Doctorates people). An interesting point was made to me about East-European programmers that they know far more about the theory of computing and operating systems as they didn't have access to the latest and greatest technologies during the cold war or even computers in most cases. So they studied the theory more and have a highly developed knowledge far beyond the average programmer. I believe something similar probably applies to many of the Indian/Asian programmers.
To put it in perspective I did see a newspaper story about how many of the Irish Technology companies setting up offices in Silicon Valley and the US in general, were shocked by the fact that many of the programmers and people they needed were asking for an average salary higher than the CEO'! Its just the wealth affect really.
American Multinationals piled into Ireland in the 90's because of nice tax regime (for them anyway) and educated, cheap workforce relative to the US. Now they're starting to look more closely at Eastern Europe I suspect as Ireland while still cheaper to hire people than the US is much more expensive than it was.
To sum up one thing I heard years ago in regard to "foreigners" taking "our" jobs was that at the end of the of the day its all down to who will work and who won't. If you're not making the kind of money you want to then do something about it because you'll be damned sure no company will pay you more just because you think they should.
Anyway back to the job-hunt...
No growth can continue forever! It's an impossibility! If you think a company can grow 200 % per year the next 150 years you need to snap out of it.
Stock markets are based on the notion of continuous growth all the time, and that isn't feasible. So, is it a wonder the companies are having trouble from time to time..?
Upper management always requests that I train these new recruits (frequently H-1B's). I absolutely refuse to train people at work, even if it means not being viewed as a "team player". I was hired as a programmer and my job description doesn't list teaching. I am very strict about this and am imply upper management, that I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE to train personnel. There must supply me with adequately trained personnel. This goes hand-in-hand with my other position. If they want to accomplish the project as cheaply as possible, then hire the best programmers available regardless of cost. The cost is easily offset by the increased productivity. But no one in upper management ever seems to grasp this concept, so they continue to supply me with relatively uneducated H-1Bs (who have read the book, but can't diagnose problems) in a misguided attempt to save money.
If the original coder was any good, any decent coder could have picked up where he left off. But I suspect that is why you had trouble with his replacements.
1. The article says that math is not needed for programming, (6.3.2) which is not true. Complexity Theory, Algorithms, Data Structures, etc. All of these require math. If you want to make java applets you might not need math, but we are talking about programming here. 2. Several times (at least 3) the author mentions..."Microsoft founder Bill Gates does not even have a Bachelor's degree, let alone a Master's. The same is true for Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Apple/Pixar founder Steve Jobs, and countless others." I think the author is forgetting that bill gates and Steve Jobs ETC...(A) Are exceptions to the rule in any industry (B) started their companies years ago.
My name is Anesh Anatakrisna and I am a programmer for a large DB firm in the Silicon Valley. I am really grateful to my employer (and to Ganesh my supporting god) who allows me to work only 14 hours a day and 6 days a week in my cubicle. This is really easy job. I have a week of vacation for Christmas when the company close to celebrate the christian holiday where I can go back to Deli to meet my wife who couldn't come here due to visa costs and immigration restriction. I can also visit my friends and family which I can only see during that time. Christmas is not a good time to fly because the planes are crowded and the air fair is really expensive. It's hard to save money to pay for the rent in the bay area. I live with 6 roommates in a 2 bed-room appartment, near Fremont in the East bay so I can really save more money. They are all co-workers so we can still work at night and when we commute together. When I go back to my wife, I will make another baby and hopefully we can have our 5th child next year. I won't be there when the baby is born but will see them next christmas.The money I make here is not very high compared to my american co-workers but it is a lot compared to my native country Indian fellows. Over there, when I come back I can live like a prince and my family will be very happy. My management is also from India but unlike me they have visa to stay longer in the States so I guess that is why they are managers with big houses. They understand the culture of their employes and that is important for upper management to know that they can build a team of hard workers like me. So they deserve a reward. My boss is nice to me and ask me if I know hard workers like me from where I come from because they want to hire more people. They like programmers from India. At some point, we won't have to speak English during the weekly meeting. It will be easier for us. It's good that we can put comments in the code using unicode too. I like California because there are a lot of Indian restaurants and a lot of people from my country. I went to Colorado to help a customer and I didn't find any indian food. It is too cold for us there. My fellow workers are nice and I will feel sorry when I live them to go back to retire in India with the money I made here working hard in the States. But I know that is what I came here for: the money, only the money. Anesh Anatakrisna.
H1's CAN switch jobs. Granted, it's not as easy, as they have to have the next one lined up before they quit, but it can happen and has happened in my company.
The reasons why it is more difficult for these employees to switch are firstly, an extremely short "grace period" where the Visa remains in effect without employment. I believe this is currently 10 days. There are discussion about extending this to 6 months with all the recent layoffs. The second reason, completely contrary to the author of that calamity, is that there just aren't enough companies that are willing to sponsor the Visa. If the state of things were as the author said, 10 day's would be plenty.
As for the quantity of the visa's issued, shrinking that number will only cause the problem to get worse. The reason is that when the waiting period is up around 8 months, traditionally, everyone who hires H1's switches to B1's. This is a business-to-business visa that can be executed at the drop of a hat. When the queue lets up, these are then converted into H1's. The problem here is that the employee cannot be paid anything locally except for expenses. Any compenstation has to come from the company abroad, which in many cases does not exist, resulting in being paid under the table.
In his conclusions about what should be done, it's made quite clear this is a "keep the jobs here" argument, urging the reclosing of the H1 quantaties.
Dr. Norman Matloff, the author, rants in the same article about age discrimination. Judging from his photo and his "bio" here's my take on him. He used to work in Silicon Valley, they cut him because he couldn't keep up, he couldn't find another job, because he sucked, so he washed up on the shores of academia which fosters washed up chumps like himself, giving them a forum for ranting.
When a divison gets cut or a major project cancelled, EVERYBODY gets the ax.
... During 1999 - there WAS a shortage in certain areas, no question.
Amen. Deep job cuts like these mean good people are laid off.
Even worse is the companies KNOW this and can hand pick the person that fits every single one of their requirements where before if a person fit 80% - it was a catch.
Well, I agree with you about the 80% figure and I'll add that if employers are that picky during times when employees are supposedly scarce, they must pretty much want a perfect match now.
I'm also in the RTP area and have been all my life. I've somehow weathered the last 3 recessions. I'm a good engineer and a fair programmer and I'm damned lucky. When there are cuts this deep, sometimes luck is all that's between you and unemployment. My number has come up before twice. In 1986, ITT laid me off. The year before I had gotten a promotion and a 20% pay increase! A year later, I was laid off from RCA after General Electric bought them. All GE wanted was NBC. They quicky sold the consumer electronics divisions. I remember these experiences vividly. I developed a grey streak in my hair during the ITT layoff. That was a shock. I understand how people feel who have been let go in the last year. It can be absolutely devastating, particularly when that job is how many engineers and technical people define themselves. I've read quite a few posts from people who think their skills are so great that they will be spared this life changing trauma. They go on to say that if they are laid off, they will quickly find work. Well, as my old karate instructor used to tell arrogant students who thought their fighting skils were better that he thought, "I hope it all works out for you." That's what I say to the young whipper snappers who think they are safe. I hope it all works out for you because what I've experienced, I wouldn't wish on anyone.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
What about blacks, women, or Mexicans? Any enlightening thoughts on any of those groups?
I'm in the midst of a OO project. About two years ago many of our senior devoplers left. Many of those have sayed have blaned failures on the project on OO, and not on themselves.
My observation, having to maintin code of several people who left: The more junior the programer the better the code. That isn't to say the junior programers were better programers, just that their code is more maintainable, and more efficant. the Senior programers said "I've been programing for 15 years", and dived right in. The junior programers said "I don't know how to do this", so they started talk to the experts (generally the expirenced senior engineeres above) and planed their system to work right. Today I have to fix bugs the both programers wrote. The junior programers made more mistakes and caused mroe bugs, but they can be fixed. I have spent weeks trying to figgure out why a one line change broke a senior engineers code, and finally gave up - the odds that anouther customer would encounter that bug were low enough compared to the 10 other bugs I could have fixed in the mean time that management let me do so.
Its been said that if you see a bus about to run over Paul then you better knock him out of the way, since you are replaceable, Paul isn't. (Fortunatly Paul is one of the few who admit failures in OO are his fault, not the fault of OO, and he is slowly fixing things to be maintanable.
OO is a new paridime. It is better then straight C when done right, but you can write bad spaghatti code with any toolset. Thus we have unmaintaneble code with a class diagram (the wrong modle to base a class diagram, but there is a class diagram) Do it right and you have reusable code that isn't significantly slower then asm. (An a good profiler will tell you where to drop to inline asm for speed)
Note the copyright dates on the document (C) 1998 through 2001.
Funny that it took Slashdotters this long to stumble across it. Maybe that's because it's so full of crap that nobody is paying attention to it.
This is certainly not news (for nerds, or anyone).
I think I was thinking ``Dr. Pangloss'' in my head when I wrote that, the character from Voltaire's _Candide_ whose irrational optimism in stark contrast to Matloff's pessimism. ;)
As someone who spends a lot of time hiring (yes, I'm a manager) I really have to disagree. The problem isn't finding "programmers" i.e. people who write classes all day, and regurgitate the algorithms they memorized in college, but finding what I like to call "Developers;" that is, people who think, who see a big picture. My staff is compromised entirely of thinkers, and it's a small team. We have a hire rate of around 25% of interviewees, and that's generous.
Nothing against polytechnical schools, but universities seem to produce "thinkers" not just "doers" It's all well and good to be able to write code when you're given explicit direction, pseudo-code, etc, but a real "Developer" just needs a "goal" There is definitely a shortage of highly motivated, problem solvers, not a shortage of code monkeys.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
I agree with pretty much everything Parity says above - I'm just intrigued by the wording of the above sentence. Why do you make a distinction between contractors and "full-timers"?
Now I have encountered people before (usually HR types) who refer exclusively to permanent staff as "full-time" (for example, when I ask if they're willing to hire me as a contractor: "No, we're only looking for a full-time person")) but I've discovered it's pretty much a waste of time asking them to clarify their terminology.
I mean, at least in my experience, contractors work at least the same number of hours a week as "permanent" (another dicey term, but anyway) employees and usually more (hell, they're getting paid per hour ;). And if you use the term "full-time" to refer to "permanent" employees,
how do you refer
to permanent employees who work part-time?
Part-time full-timers? *grin*
Oh well, just a minor rant against illogical use of language. Feel free to ignore.
Pete.
PS. Tune in next week for the episode 217.6 of "Pete's Miscellaneous Language Rants", when we'll try to work out why US-ians insist on saying "I could care less" when they really mean "I couldn't care less." ;-)
If you've got a house, family, or both, it's easy to glibly say that- it's another thing to DO it. This is not to say that I wouldn't do it at the drop of a hat, if the need arose, but I'm not going to bolt from where I live just yet. Jobs aren't as plentiful as they once were, but they're still available in my area.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Some people DO belong here on the old H-1 visa scheme and some do belong here under the H-1B. So many of the ones I've seen could have been filled by local people it's not funny.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
...richie - It is a good day to code.
When a new IT related position opens up in our organization we don't have a shortage of applicants. But very rarely do we get an applicant that impresses me. In fact, some of the applicants barely reach what I'd consider to be competent.
For the last 5-7 years parents and guidance counsellors have been telling their kids, "go into the computers, it's the 'wave of the future'!" And this whole IT shortage thing making the headlines over the last couple of years has made a lot of students enter computer science and IT related programs in school. (I ought to know, I work for one.) Unfortunately, just because these people get a degree, doesn't mean they're particularly good or even competent. (Yes, the occasional incompetent student manages to get a degree. It happens.) As a result, we now have tons and tons of students in or graduating from IT and computer science. So it may seem like there's no shortage, but really try interviewing a random selection of this pool and you'll see that the shortage is in the truly skilled.
Jason.
That's "toeing" the line, not towing.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I wasn't correcting the spelling. Towing is a perfectly valid word and it was spelled correctly. It just wasn't the correct word for that phrase. Nowadays a lot of people use phrases without a clear understanding of what they mean or how they came to be. The idea of toeing the line or toeing the mark is literally to stand exactly where you are supposed to (with some authority making that decision), and the general meaning is doing exactly that which those in charge expect of one.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Several recent studies demonstrating dramatic increases in the number of programmers coming to the United States from other countries have ignited controversy that mirrors the current national debate over immigration.
/. story (this as well as others) are old stories that are all to familiar to scientists (especially physicists). By the mid-90's, H1-B eventually became a tool to be used by the booming internet/computer industry. One can debate the merits or demerits of this program, but one should not forget to study the past.
Critics are blaming this influx of immigrant programmers for lowered wages, declining working conditions, and an overall decrease in job opportunities for American programmers, particularly women and minorities. They have called for drastic changes to immigration laws as well as stepped-up enforcement of existing laws. Programmers who have immigrated to the U.S., among others, strenuously object to these conclusions, citing the value of immigration to the U.S. economy and to the development of the internet.
The above two paragraphs were taken from this article published in 1995. I have substituted programmers for scientists and engineers, and the words the internet for science.
In the early 1990's, the debate over H1-B was one that concerned science and engineering. At this time the Myth was that there was/would be a shortage of scientists and engineers, while in reality there was a glut/lack of jobs. H1-B was to help fill this shortage, much to the demise of U.S. born scientists. To counter the Myth, the Young Scientist Network (YSN) was established, and a certain level of activism was carried out by several young scientists.
The argument raised in this
Yes, I've had both types of managers, but what you are largely talking about is people skills.
:-)
Exactly. People skills. Hence, skilled labor.
But most of this stuff you should have learned in kindergarten.
Partially true. Certain basics you should've learned in kindergarten, but I'm continually amazed at how many adults haven't mastered basic manners. Plus, there's a lot more than kindergarten skills that go into good managers. Motivating people, communicating complex concepts in ways that people can understand, etc.
once a manager has mastered the soft issues, he's pretty much done
But that's the thing - he really isn't done. Like any other skills, effective people skills require that you keep using those skills to keep them in shape. It's kinda like programming - once you've mastered the basic concepts of programming, you could say that you're "pretty much done". But the specific skills - say language X - you need to keep current on or you're not going to be effective. Similarly, managers must keep current on (and the best continually *improve* on) their skills - being able to motivate their team, communicate effectively between their workers and higher management (and maybe customers), and keep the group working smoothly. These may very well be "soft" skills, but they are skills in every sense of the word.
I've had interviews like this, and in both cases got job offers. In neither case did I take the job, basically just because I also got better offers. However, I've thought about what I'd do if I again encountered that sort of situation.
I would answer your questions politely. I'm smart, I'm good at thinking on my feet, and I have a lot of math under my belt, so I'd do pretty well. Then I would emphatically turn down the job offer. My answer to your boss would be that life is too short to work with a immature jerk like you.
It doesn't make economic sense to ask if there is a "shortage" of something in a free market. If you think you see a shortage, it's because you aren't paying enough.
If you want 10 programmers, and are willing to pay $50K/year/programmer, there is a shortage. If you are willing to pay $200K/year/programmer, there is a surplus.
This is also short-sighted. I'm surprised an automoblie nut would come up with this sort of rhetoric, because it's simlar to the kind of protectionist arguments rightists usually have the sense to see through. Look at it this way, people will have to get from (a) to (b) some way or other. So if everyone starts using public transport, the auto industry jobs will be replaced by an equal number of jobs in mass transit. If given the change, the mass transit system employs less people, then it's probably a more efficient industry. And a more efficient transit system will ultimately mean more money in everyohnes pocket which will mean, gues what ? More jobs.
You should have learned addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in grade school.
When people speak of math skills for engineering careers, they are usually referring to calculus at least.
Odd that, all the programmers in the shop where I work are somewhere to the left of Bill Clinton. Not that that's particularly hard....
Finding God in a Dog
That is not only true for software development, but every other industry there is. It's the basics of economics to have people flood where the money is, even if they don't belong there.
The sad part about it is that people that actually belong get overlooked in a sea of unqualified wannabes. My school has a huge chunk of people in the computer science department that don't belong there. As a result, the CS professors have been lowering their standards to keep enrollment up. Sad. Some students come to me and complain, "I just have so much trouble programming in C. I hate it." Absurd.
IMO, it seems that to differentiate yourself on an academic level, a bachelor degree is not enough because of the very reason you speak of. That is why now in my junior year, I have already started very seriously looking at different graduate schools in my state. What better to say to other people that you belong in your industry than to spend 6-7 years in school learning more about it.
There are two seperate concerns here
1 The Myth of Shortage : Considering the current layoff situations all over the tech industry, it can be argued that the shortage was a myth just like the myth of making money in Dot-Com. Unfortunately the first myth was fueled by the second myth.
2 Are H1 workers being paid equally It is also true to some extent that Organizations do indeed try to negotiate a lower wages for an H1 employee. But let me be very very clear that this problem is more due to legal problems of an H1 worker imposed by the Goverment which gives little or no room for a H1 employee to bargain for anything more.
a) To change a simple job from one organization to another is a process which used to take 4 months before. Thanks to a new regulation earlier this year, an employee can start working on the new job as soon as he/she gets a confirmation number of receipt of the application by the INS (instead of waiting for the complete process which takes 4 months now). However this process has to be completed before an employee leave the first company. If an employee is fired/layed off, he goes out of status and has to leave the country immediately (legally speaking)... If he does leave he can return only after the complete 4 month process, or he has to take the risk of being found as an un-authorized alien and continue living here waiting for the reciept to return from INS. (INS has been a little leniant here lately for which many people are greatfull )
b) However, if the employee starts working, and the application is rejected after 4 months, the employee is out of status and has to leave the country immediately...
c) When companies apply for H1 and GreenCard they regularly ask the employee to sign contracts to force the employee to work for the organization for a period of time untill they can recover their lawyer fees. Unfortunately none of those contract mention that if that employee is kicked out of the company against his will, he would have a huge financial losses if he had to leave the country to avoid being out of status.
And these are only few of the problems a H1 employee face. How do you think you would react to the same situation ?
Personally I believe that just like any other open market, the job market should be wide open so that the myth can die for once and for all. Once there are lesser restrictions on H1 empolyees, the cost of these employees will go up and it would bring in only those people who are really required in the industry.
Most of the Myth is introduced in this industry my "body shoppers" who are middleman between companies and employees. Take away the reason why they exist... and let the market decide the course of action.
This is clearly due to stupid accounting practices.
--
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
that most American managers are not competent enough to manage a geographically widely dispersed work force.
1) The communication infrastructure is available, (this I know from using it.)
2) The server-side processing power is available. (this I know from using it.)
3) The client-side processing power is available (this I know from using it.)
4) The foreign workers are available, out there, (this I know personally.)
5) Fund transfers can be made account-to-account anywhere on the planet, (this I know, I work in banking systems.)
6) Local and federal taxes are taken care of by subcontractors. The only responsibility of the contractor is to report to the local and federal governments the gross amount paid to the subcontractor, (this I know from working in payroll systems.)
7) Most governments would love to have sources of hard-currency apart from material goods exports. Leveraging of their services instead of just their goods would constitute a very attractive foreign revenue stream, (this I know from having worked on the GST system in Canada and from living there.)
But most managers here in the 'States and elsewhere aren't able to leverage their resources or to communicate effectively enough to make use of what's available.
Hands-on managers are hands-on because they skate on the thin ice of chaos. Micro-managers are hands-on managers who don't even know what they're doing or have sufficient reporting channels to know and trust that their resources are doing what they're supposed to.
That's the real reason that the US has H1-B and other types of visas. The shortage is caused by the business schools who don't equip anyone to deal effectively with anything other than in face-to-face.
Apart from large multi-nationals (of which there are only a few thousand,) most companies are being directed by people without effective communication skills. This costs them locally in wasted effort and acts as a limit to growth or even to serving their clients effectively and efficiently while maximizing the profits that they can derive from their revenue.
The real management lesson of the Linux operating system is not the OS, but the communication and control system that created it from a group of people dispersed world-wide.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
When people speak of math skills for engineering careers, they are usually referring to calculus at least.
... the highest level coursework I took was Differential Equations and/or Complex Calculus -- two different tracks so you be the judge).
The English language is gifted with several hundred thousand unique identifiers called words, some of which are general and some of which are specific.
Math is a general term, referring to everything from gradeschool addition through post-doctoral work on quantum physics and God knows what else (I am not a mathematician
Calculus is a more specific term, referring to derivatives, integrals, and some other more advanced concepts.
If you mean "calculus at least," then say "calculus at least." Do not say "math" and then criticize someone else for your innacurate use of language. The poster whom you so derisively answered was very correct in his sarcasm, that to say programmers don't use math (which by the way includes this amazing field known as "descreet math" and "boolean theory" which are used every day by said programmers) is absurd in the extreme.
On the other hand, to say most programmers don't use Calculus is probably a true statement (I certainly don't), so if that is what is meant, than that is what should be said. Arrogantly redefining the word "math" to some value other than its default meaning and then deride others for not being 31337 enough to understand isn't just pointless, it is downright stupid.
--
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Few people can expect to finish a CS course and get a well paid job... maybe the top 1% do, and those are the ones that the universities/colleges use as 'typical examples' so they can get more students (=more money).
You'll probably be working in a sweatshop for 3 or 4 years for 3/4 the national average wage before being deemed 'experienced' enough to sign up with a few agencies and start building a career (my first job paid £6,500 [10 years ago]. It took another 4 years to get up to £15,000... once I had a bit of experience under my belt I could start asserting myself a bit & I'm now on a healthy £35,000*)
What really bothers me is the adverts you see from colleges which say things like 'I took a web design course with foo college and now I'm earning £100,000!'. If you could get £100,000 doing web design I'd quit my job tomorrow....
Tony
* This might not seem a lot to those in the US but it's quite a lot over here
I've been in situations in which this principle should've been applied. Sometimes people use positions of power like this to squash new ideas and prevent their company from moving forward. They purposely make themselves a bottleneck for the rest of the organization, then prove their 'usefuleness' by putting in 80 hour weeks. It's sick and wrong, and people like that should be fired for the overall health of the organization.
Now, from what you say, it doesn't sound like it's the same situation in your organization. It sounds like you come by your indespensibility honestly, and don't abuse your position. If the manager guy spouted that (often valid) phrase, and that really IS the case, then he is a clueless idiot.
I strive to be indespensible for the continuing value I bring, not because I make myself into the only source of information or help for a particular class of problems. In fact, I dislike being in that position because it usually keeps me from working on new, interesting things. I hope it is the same case with you.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I'm sorry, but, I've worked under good managers and under bad managers, and under the first you feel informed, motivated, like you're contributing to the project. Under a bad manager, you never feel anything but another deadline. Managers need a lot of skills - to be able to talk to the suits (if you have a good manager, you won't feel he -is- one of the suits... he's one of the team), to translate techie-speak to suit-speak to customer-speak and back again without losing anything in the translation; to prioritize sanely (maybe the customer only cares about adding feature X, but programmer is worried about bug Y and wants to spend time on it... factor in importance of the feature, whether the bug has effects that make work on the product hard - low-level bugs affect code above them, messing up things for the programmer trying to add functionality; high-level bugs may not have any effect other than the obvious one.) A manager doesn't have to have a tech background to do these things, but he does have to have an open mind and an ability to ask the right questions, to make decisions quickly, and to not be afraid to change his mind if a decision starts to look wrong.
I'm not sure if you've only had good managers or only had bad managers, but if you'd had some of each, you'd notice that there is definitely skill involved!
Parity Odd
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
There are lots of people contradicting this article, but I have to say, that I'm not a manager, but I still get involved in the interview process, to assess people's technical skills. I give them a little quiz, usually, a coding test of some kind. There are several ways to fail this test:
... she wrote down a linked-list queue straight from a data-structures course, with a couple of small errors but the logic was mostly right. So, hey, if we have to wait for an H1B Visa, we're going to wait for it, because while the point of on-the-job training is well taken (we expect to do that; we wanted ability to program and understanding of networking, things -any- B.S. in compsci -ought- to know, plus a little RL coding experience). Sorry, but no, we are -not- going to teach people on the job the basics of basic coding, and given some of the people I've seen come through (and be handed to me by managers with glowing words only for me to find out they don't even know what code should look like, much less how to do it.) And -that- is my little story and why I believe the above person is not distorting facts. (Also, on that retraining... the above poster hired a -contractor-. You don't train contractors, you train full-timers.)
Say you're rusty in language X; then, not know what pseudo-code is; then not be able to write the algorithm in pseudo code; then not be able to write an even something as simple as "a loop to print the numbers from one to ten."
Say you're not prepared, and ask to do the test as a take home or to come back later. This is not a graduate exam, this is something any 1st year compsci undergraduate should be able to do, and if you can't do it in C (or whatever) I'll let you do it in pseudo-code... you shouldn't need to take it home where I can't see that -you- wrote it!
Write down something really scrambled that does utterly the wrong thing, and blame errors on being more familiar with language Y than with language X. No, sorry, doesn't wash. Syntax errors, yes, fine, whatever, I don't care. Logic errors, no. An algorithm is an algorithm, and none of C/C++/Java/Pascal/or even BASIC are far enough apart to make this a viable excuse. 'If' is 'If' and 'For' is 'For' and either you can think a problem through into code or you can't.
And that is why we hired the fourth person, who when asked to write an addelement() and removeelement() for a FIFO Queue (implementation details not specified... you could use an array of ten ints and error on overflow and that'd be fine)
Parity None
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
My dad is a coder and manager, he has 20+ years of programing experience and an MBA. I'm a system engineer with 5-6 years experience in Windows, Solaris, Linux and Cisco systems. I have no degree but I make 85% to 90% of my father's salary, and I NEVER have a problem finding a job. My dad is a good employee, no social problems, and people generally like him and his work; He gets nervous every 6 months or so about his job. His problem: he's over qualified. His programming skill set is lagging behind the mainstream, but nobody is willing to train him. I can't understand why I was hired 1.5 months ago at my current co. and they already set me to train on Win2K and Active Directory to upgrade my skills, but my dad keeps getting relegated to COBOL maintainance even though he desperately wants to learn Oracle. I agree that this industry still needs to learn the huge value of these people, but it is my opinion that managment in the tech industry is still done by brute force and ignorance.
I'm a computer geek, both my parents are computer geeks, it's genetic - I didn't have a choice.
Spyder
One comment. It's always dangerous to generalize from the sample size of "my friends." None of my friends have been having problems finding jobs. Does that mean the economy is fine?
You do raise an important point.
Activity that is reinforced (i.e., rewarded) tends to increase. If you are seeing an increase in non-desireable behavior, perhaps you should look at the structure of your environment, to see what actions are rewarded, and what actions are penalized.
If expressing ideas is penalized, then you can expect both a) fewer ideas will be expressed and b) more resentment will be present.
If you are penalizing ideas, and yet demanding that they be expressed, then you can expect that much time will be expended to determine what idea it is that is supposed to be expressed.
I don't think that managers are usually aware that they are engaging in these tactics. I certainly hope not. But whether that is the intention or not, they frequently do. With the predictable response.
So new (i.e., youthful) programmers are desired because they haven't yet learned the results of providing freely the requested material (ideas).
I'm not denying that the other suggested motives (job vs. family, etc.) are also happening, but there are other reasons...
This doesn't make it fair, just, decent, or honorable, however. But then it's been quite awhile since I expected that of management. And by the time I learned, I was wise enough not to let them know.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If he's not enough of a self-starter to teach himself at least the basics (not a good sign), then he should consider investing in a training course. He should approach his boss for sponsorship, but if he's turned down, he should go ahead and pay for it himself.
If he doesn't take some proactive action like this, the writing is on the wall for him, and it'll be his own fault.
No, that's not reasonable. Why damage your business (or take the risk of doing so) to solve a problem that doesn't yet exist, and may never exist? Instead, take steps to actually address the underlying risk.
Hire an understudy to act as a backup for the irreplaceable person. If that person has a negative reaction to this, use your management skills (hopefully a bit more sophisticated than those being displayed so far) to explain why this is a good thing for all concerned, and obtain his/her participation.
As part of bringing the new person up to speed, ask that the two of them collaborate on an effort to document the various critical systems.
When this process is complete, then you can fire one or both of them! Bwahahahaha!
[PS: the subject line is a reference to a fun book of that name by Stanley Bing, worth reading if you want some perspective on this kind of stuff.]
The problem in these cases has been that back when these mediocre programmers were younger, they had fewer of those family and other life obligations, and were more motivated to work hard at doing an acceptable job. What seems to happen over time, though, is that they:
-
Don't keep their skills up to date, and find adapting to new technologies and tools very difficult, because this takes time, skill, and devotion.
- Don't have as much time to devote to compensating for the fact that they were never that good in the first place.
- Begin to indulge in various increasingly irrational behaviors to cover up their shortcomings, possibly causing damage to team function and overall morale. Fellow employees don't necessarily want to throw such people to the wolves, so it can take a while until the obvious becomes apparent to higher-ups.
- Expect to be paid more, even though their value to a company decreases over time.
Faced with this, it's little wonder that many managers shy away from older programmers. Since there are more average programmers than otherwise, some version of the above may apply to the bulk of the programmer market.And of course, a big part of the problem is that management is often so incapable of judging programmer performance on an individual basis, that it has little choice but to fall back on simplistic indicators, like age.
There's more to it than that. Sure, this guy wouldn't land a new Oracle job on the strength of nothing but a bit of self-teaching. But part of the point is to continue to develop your skills on an ongoing basis, while you have a job. This might allow the guy to move onto other things with his current employer.
If he does find himself in the position of facing recruiters and hiring managers, the ability to say that he has "familiarity with Oracle" and back that up by being able to pass some of the silly sorts of tests that have been described in other messages here, could make the difference between being hired or not. Maybe he would still have to rely on his COBOL skills to get a job, but someone who knows both COBOL and Oracle is going to be more valuable than someone who knows COBOL alone.
Finally, just because recruiters and hiring managers are often short-sighted morons, doesn't mean you should just sit back and let them shuffle you where they think you belong. Make them understand and believe what you can do, explain to them how you'll add value to their business, demonstrate that you're not stuck in a single outdated skill set, and you'll make an impression on the better managers, which are the ones you want to be working for anyway.
Sitting around whinging about how your company won't train you, on the other hand, will get you nowhere real fast.
Programmers are a dime a dozen. *Good* programmers are rarer than hen's teeth. Part of the problem is that good programmers spend a lot of time cleaning up after less-skilled workers.
There is still a shortage of *good* programmers, and there probably always will be. It's not clear whether this justifies hiring in new people, but frankly, I'm all for hiring people who come from poorer countries, because it funnels money into economies that need it, as people save up and send money home.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
If there isn't time to create solid design documentation, then for any project longer than about 2 days, the project is fucked!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
That's why the design can be re-thought during the development cycles. Methodologies like Extreme Programming describe how this is done. I suggest you read it (even though I don't necessarily suggest adopting it in whole). There's nothing wrong with changing the design. But it does need to be thought out carefully every time it is worked on, and it needs to be a clean, clear, well specified design.
BTW, those "pointy-haired-clients who know nothing about software and have deep pockets that will keep your company in business" will also dump your ass fast, and send in the lawyers, if your software does not do the job and do it right. If they lose money, or even come up short on projections, you can be sure they will come to collect it from you.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There's use for your style, but not on large from-the-ground-up systems that run a business. But they may need you to come in and fix what the system failed to do as a quick fix (before the client goes off to someone else to get a better system).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Try posting in HTML.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's even rarer to find someone that is a designer, and a coder, and willing to start with someone else's design.
Designers tend to be creative people, and creative people for the most part want to build something new from scratch. What this means is you had damned well better keep your original designer. If the original guy leaves, find out why and correct that reason. It might be money in which case you better be paying more now that you learned your lesson. Whatever it is, if people leave for some other job, that means the other job was considered better than the job you now have open by at least the one good person you used to have and it would not be a surprise if a lot more thought so. If you want to make it easier to find good people, then you better make your job more attractive to good people than other managers competing for the same good people. There isn't (and never was) a shortage of people for the really good jobs worth having.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Have you tried hiring a new CEO for your rapidly growing company lately? So far almost all that can be found are total idiots that have a resume of dot.com failures. Then when you do find someone who knows his stuff and didn't have to execute a bankruptcy, and knows how to go to Wall Street to line of your next $350 million of 2nd round financing, they end up wanting half a million a year and 50% of all the stock options the company has. Do these guys think they run the company or something? Just hire some bum off the street.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
- Kaatunut
- Kaatunut
I know a homeless guy who wears one of these! It keeps the aliens from reading your thoughts apparently.
It's true. I write code to designed specifications flawlessly. If you expect me to engineer your software and do you your analysis for you, a monkey is probably not what you need.
Part of the problem is that companies will always be fussy, shortage or no shortage. Their HR departments are usually slow, so the companies that do employ you will usually be those with the better recruitment process in place.
Graduates usually have a tough time because companies are looking for people withe experience, so this leads to that paradox that you need work experience to get work, but where the heck do you get the experience if no one wants to employ graduates.
In the end you wil find something, but you will have to work at it. Usually a good thing is to get registered with some agencies or even check with your university for companies interested in hiring graduates. One thing that you will find has its weight in gold are contacts, as in the end the people you know will help you get the job you want.
Currently in North America finding a computer job is tough for everyone, since companies having been firing people left, right and center and those that haven't re in near hiring freezes.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
- The questions are so obscure as even to elimnate the best 'practical' programmer. They will be best answered by the theoretical programmer, ie the one who has only ever read a book on the subject.
- The questions are usually unanswerable even by the guys already working at the company and these guys are doing a good job.
- Some of the tests aren't actually proof read and thus the answer sheet that the HR guy has no relavence.
- It is the HR guy who checks the answers not another programmer - so there in no real way to make a proper judgement.
- The questions tend to test known facts, as opposed to the ability to learn new skills fast opposed to being a compatible personality for the company's development team.
If you feel that the applicant thinks and tackles problems in the right way, then it is often more important that whether they know skill x. After all what is a perfect match if they can't get beyond the examples in the book?Jumpstart the tartan drive.
If you did both degrees at the same time then you could always forget that you did Biology on your CV, unless that's what you are looking for. The problem you will probably find is that employers will make rash judgements on you suitability for a job based on the degrees you have, so by not putting biology down the employer doesn't get the notion that you are looking for a biology related computer job. While there are a ethics on pretending to do something, I don't think there are any on pretending not do something in a CV. The way I see it is that you have to be able to twist the truth sometimes without lying about it - after all the company you are going to be working for is probably doin that themselves.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Many people are still under the impression that H1B visa holders are sort of stuck, finding it difficult to change employers. This is certainly not the case now, as a FAQ on the new law shows. A highlight:
Q6. Does the law make it easier for an H-1B worker to change employers?
A. Yes it does. Section 105 allows an H-1B worker to change employers as soon as his or her new employer submits a "nonfrivolous" H-1B petition to the INS. Prior law requires that a worker wait until the petition is approved before changing employers.
I don't have the INS letter that Shusterman posted a while ago, but it is clear from that letter that this provision has already been implemented. A company has little incentive to recruit H1B workers -- and deal with the paperwork -- with the intention of underpaying them, since the visa-holders can easily jump to another, better-paying company with little difficulty.
She just turned 21 in December. She's got about two years solid experience doing tech dupport, in two chunks (she took time off to move in with me, then eventually broke up and went back to work), but has spent zero time getting any further degree (for lack of both sufficient time and money).
Until Symantec will encourage her to get that degree, all they're doing is burning her out. Seeing as they can always get cheap, starry-eyed newbies to fill her job, thanks to the law about importing workers, I really don't see this happening any time soon.
Lemon curry?
My ex, a Canadian, works for Symmantec. They shut down their Toronto tech support office, and moved it to Oregon. She went with them, on an H1B visa.
... but she can't, not on what little free time and money she has now.
Now, she's working longer hours, for less real pay (yeah, the US Dollar's better than the Canafian Dollar, but costs are high here, too). Add to that, she's stuck in bufu Oregon, and has no real option to change companies.
She's brilliant, and really should be in school earning a degree in programming
So, yes, from the other side of the story, the "imported" IT staff, it's a reality. This whole "shortage" was a scam, designed to let companies import cheap workers at slave-labor rates, and work them to death, all for the good of the bottom line. Welcome to America.
Lemon curry?
I'm happy that my company survived so I don't have to go looking for a job in the now saturated market.
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During this time, I heard stories from a friend and coworker (a very talented programmer and designer) of how is brother, while still in school in the San Francisco Bay Area was making as much as we were for a part-time job. My friend told me that his brother was quite talented, and of course, there is a big difference in the cost of living between Stanford and Austin, but it was always amazing for me to hear of the salaries that companies, mostly dot-coms, were paying for even inexperienced programmers.
Naturally, because my wife was a recruiter during this time when companies could not find enough talent on their own, I found a new job (that I really love!) I heard plenty of stories from her about programmers would believed that the world was theirs for the asking. "How much are you currently making?" she would ask a candidate. "$50,000, but I want a job for at least $80,000," would be a typical response from someone with less than two years of experience. Another situation would involve a team lead at a large company in (in pink buildings) who was looking for a new job in part because his company would not increase his pay above that of a college new-hire who worked for him.
Now, one of the things that a former employer planned to do was recruit programmers from India, which is quite conceivable since the president of the company is a long-time resident and naturalized U.S. citizen from India. Why would this be something that makes money? I believe because the expectations of domestic job-seekers rose so sharply, many companies were willing to deal with the paperwork, legal work, etc. of hiring H1B programmers.
Maybe the complaint above should be modified to "ego-maniacal, overpriced programmers are the only real shortage."
As a side note, can someone recently from India comment on my neighbor's statement that two of the most popular activities of youth in India are computer programming and chess playing?
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I understood all of this except the part about Rush Limbaugh.
cpeterso
I here that!
I spent a day at BrassRing last year in the middle of the dotcom frenzy. BrassRing is *the* job fair in Silicon Valley for those that don't know.
99% of the of the applicants I spoke to were so underqualified it wasn't funny. They all wanted programming jobs, but none knew the first thing about programming. Several had not even finished their first programming course. Some had a junior college certificate in Java and they were all set to make their deserved millions.
Several were hired by other companies before they hit the end of the row. The collapse of the dotcoms is no mystery to me...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Sorry, i'ts not my falt. I am the produkt of publick educashun.
I tride uzing a spel-chekker, but it kept finding all of TacoBoy's insted...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Myself, I'm a few years shy of 40, been programming for 3 years, and program in Perl, Python, Java, XML, and am beginning to delve into C++. Am I outdated and outmoded? I can't say for certain if I've been discriminated against due to my age, but I certainly felt the weird vibes coming from co-workers and bosses when I have revealed my age.
When I worked at an Internet start-up, I was working mostly with 20 - 28 year olds (closer to the bottom number). I usually put in 10 hour days, 5 d/w. Some other programmers worked like I did, while some others and the CTO typically would work from 10am to 11pm or even 2am. But you know what? Those "long hours" workers spent hours per day in smoking breaks, going to the store, sitting around bullshitting, etc. They'd go to dinner, spend hours out, go to bars, get drunk, then come back to the office and put in a few more hours. So, yes, the time spent at the office and not at home was very long. But productive time spent coding, designing, debugging, getting requirements? Not 80 hours' worth, by any stretch. On occassion, I and others would stay overnight when we were rolling out a new release (or during the crunch before a rollout). I wonder what others' experience is with the validity of these "80 hour weeks"?
Finally I fired him and went back to my original search. I find this sort of story absolutely mind-numbing. Why is it that organizations just don't see the possibility of training or otherwise developing people in the skills they need?
Interesting. I hope that's not something we did, but I don't think so. We have some basic requirements for compentance in c++, OOD, and SQL and that's what we tested for.
Even some of the people we took on did very badly, but showed that they understood what they should have been doing. The tests were mostly to give us something to discuss.
But it became obvious how many people out there that (for example) claim to be a C++ programmer but don't know what the "virtual" keyword does.
Sig is taking a break!
Yes, I've been involved in recuriting programmers for the company I work for and found that there is no shortage of programmers. What there is a shortage of is competent programmers. Only about 5% of the applications we got were actually any good.
About 75% did not have the skills ever to make it to a first interview. It often became apparent during a first interview that they did not have the skills that they claimed.
Og the 10% or so that made it to the 2nd interview we give them a short technical test to test that the actually know c++, object oriented design and SQL which were the three things we needed.
We often had people claiming to be experts in C++ who didn't know what the virtual keyword did, or could not write a simple function to (for example) reverse thr direction of the elements in an array.
We had a simple question for OO analysis and design where we stated very simple problem and asked them to derive a possible object model to represent the system. Before we even looked at the quality of their solution, about half the candidates had no idea how to do this.
Finally we had on more than one occasion people claiming years of sql experience who didn;'t seem aware that database queries could join more than one table.
Frankly, there is a big skills shortage, not a shortage of people.
Sig is taking a break!
I've been a hiring manager at a large high-tech firm, and I can affirm that there WAS a severe shortage of US citizens that were skilled enough to do the kind of work that my company does. We recruited at all the colleges and held job fairs all the time. We saw all kinds of people, US citizens and noncitizens, young and not-so-young, and we found VERY slim pickings among the US citizens. Nearly all those qualified were already fully employed. We prefer to hire US citizens, because there is SO much less paperwork. But we couldn't, because we just couldn't find them. When I started with my company 15 years ago, it was predominantly inhabited by Anglo Saxons, with a few Indians (not native Americans) thrown in. Now, among the programming staff, it's 60-80% Indian/Arab/Chinese. I would say 90%, but some might acuse me of exaggurating.
Like many companies, we've had layoffs, and we did not target the visa holders any more than the citizens. And we certainly have not targeted older workers. I'm very glad about that; I'm rapidly becoming an "older worker". I'm 38, and I'm already one of the most senior (in age) design folks around.
I have seen an issue where some of the "senior" designers, who had spent most of their career working on our proprietary technology, did not make the effort to learn new tricks (learning Java, object oriented design, etc.) and in fact actively resisted any assignment that might have exposed them to new ways of doing business. These behaviors have exposed them to greater likelihood of job loss than those who embrace new technology.
a great deal of H1B workers (like myself) actually came to the US before getting the infamous visa - usually as a student (F1). In other words, a lot of H1B workers like myself, came to the US looking for a degree with no intend to stay, then after 4 years in the country got "americanized" and the same high quality education as americans. By graduation time we get recruited heavily (that may not be the case anymore with the economic downturn) and get offered jobs...
I'm going to be very arrogant here: I'm one of those programmers who can pull his own weight, and several of my coworkers', technologically. And I know several other people who are too. I'm talking about my personal experience here, but I think it goes for the majority of skilled IT personnel
Any of us likes a good salary. I sure don't want to be paid less than any of my coworkers, esp. those with less skills than me. I expect to be paid fairly, yet that is not my main reason do the work that I do. I can already live from what I make.
The secret is that I like my job. I like computers, and I like technology in general. I'm good at programming, because I find it enjoyable, and thus am more motivated. I easily learn new techniques when they interest me, or enable me to create things (software or other). Not because it gets me paid.
If you want to offer me a job, better make sure the job is great, and have guarantees. I've had job offers that promised me 4 times what I make now, and not all of those were from flimsy dotcoms. I don't switch jobs for money, I switch jobs when I'm bored, and then I go looking for an interesting job.
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the pun is mightier than the sword
I would like to point out that the only thing harder to find than an Oracle DBA/Programmer who really knows what s/he is doing is a person with a high IQ and the ability/inclination to learn new things quickly. Ten years in the industry and I can only say that I am disappointed with the caliber of people in the industry. I can not, however, say that foreign workers fill the high IQ/learn-things-quickly prerequisite any better than native workers. In fact, the language barrier can sometimes get in the way. However, they tend to have more incentive to learn, since they will be deported if they fail at their task and get fired.
Opinions change daily as new information arrives. Stay tuned.
Perhaps the real problem is that the programmers who think they're worth huge salaries don't realize some fundamentals of economics? It's quite obvious from how you stated the issue. The programmers in the job market are selling themselves as a product. Fuelled by high hopes, the occasional inflated self-image, etc, they set their price higher than the market will bear. India then becomes the Wal-Mart of programming talent.
Unlike some people, I don't put fault on Wal-Mart or the people who shop there for all the mom & pop stores Wal-Mart has crushed over the years. Every time I read an article like this, I have to think that American programmers might need to lower their standards now and then...just because you can code is not a guarantee of a 6-figure salary.
On another note, I've seen way too many programmers (and this extends into my domain of networks and servers as well) think that they should always be getting a salary that's at or near the top level for their profession. They read some survey results, see "C++ Programmer" or "Network Engineer" listed with outrageous max salaries and skip right over that significantly smaller number labelled "Average".
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
The author states,
"Software employers, large or small, across the nation, concede that they receive huge numbers of resumes but reject most of them without even an interview. One does not have to be a
``techie'' to see the contradiction here. A 2% hiring rate might be unremarkable in other fields, but not in one in which there is supposed to be a ``desperate'' labor shortage. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants."
Let me shed some light on this with my own experiences. A few years ago I was working in Silicon Valley for Excite (now Excite@Home). We spent months trying to find a *qualified* person to work with me on the NewsTracker project. And, yes, we probably rejected 100 applicants without ever interviewing them. The reasons fell into these categories:
a. Lack of experience. (Eventually we had to compromise on this one).
b. Lack of qualifications for serious programming work. There are hordes of people out there who think that just because they know a little bit of HTML or have written a few Perl programs, they qualify as software engineers.
c. Lack of desired background and skills specific to the position. (Eventually we had to compromise on this, too.)
Category (b) was the most common reason for tossing applications. Most of the applicants simply weren't qualified by a long shot for the position.
Sounds about right. The Alpha-geek is afraid of fresh competent blood which might possibly make his work look bad - perhaps hes not working _that_ hard after all, even if it looks hard - and get him fired.
I had an instance of this once. Luckly for me the alpha-geek was introverted majorly, and was passive-aggressive when he took action (which wasnt often). I ended up leaving because for a programmer, doing SA work is just painful sometimes.
I'm going to go ahead and remark on your university programme.
Now, this may be biased since I never attended NMT...
From what I hear, the quality of education at the undergraduate level in the US is quite lacking. Even from the ivy league universities it can still be second rate. The graduate programs are good, but unless you're contributing to the university (undergrads dont contribute), you're nothing.
Here at my school, that being UBC, compilers is an optional part of the undergraduate program. If you dont want to take that track, then you don't have to. There are other tracks which expose you to RDBMS, operating system internals, AI, etc. Probably the 4th year courses might be classified as "graduate level" at some american university.
While I haven't attended an american undergrad program, I have heard from many who are familiar with both the American and Canadian undergraduate systems, that without a doubt you recieve a superior education in Canada at the undergraduate level. Its only when you deal with the top American universities's Graduate programs then you see a difference.
The old american standby: "we have superior education" is mislabled from what I can tell.
And yes, I'm a Canadian, just graduated, and I just got hired by large American firm based in Seattle. I won't say who, but heres a hint, they've had a busy stock week. I didnt inquire to deeply into their hiring practices, but I suspect they couldn't find the calibre of intelligence they were looking for. And in my interview process, I wasnt asked buzz-word related questions, mostly problem solving and simple programming problems (simple == write a C function to delete a singly linked list, describe design patterns)
Are you an american? Holy shit, you don't even know the name of powerful government agencies which oversee such things. You really should go back to school. Even _I_ know that in the USA it is the INS which is responsible for enforcing visa restrictions, although I suspect they probably get help from local law (hired guns).
Also, just a quiz, what exactly is the occasion celebrated on July the 4th?
*sigh*
Uh, sounds like you need a better project manager.
Project managers should not be the ones adding requirements. Architects, marketing and customers are supposed to do that.
Project managers do get a lot of say on the quality of testing, but if they want to mess with it, then they should also take responsability for the quality of the software itself.
Is that H1B worker "the right person"? Will they be able to run through your little obstacle course any better than the local applicants you rejected? I doubt it. They're just cheaper. Suddenly it's not about skills after all, it's about dollars. It's also, IMO, often about hiring people who won't be threats to your own position or prestige.
I'm on an H1B. I earn a boatload of money doing it - more than a lot of the other engineers here. Methinks that your supposition is flawed.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Good for you. Unfortunately, anecdotes are like assholes - everyone has 'em, and they're totally useless as a basis for debate. Would you like to bet on whether your "boatload" is typical or anomalous for those on H1B visas? If the latter, whose supposition would you say is flawed?
Which was my point entirely -- your argument is based entirely on anecdotal evidence. I've worked with a lot of H1B visa holders. None of them are hurting. The ones that excel get paid above and beyond the average for the industry in the area. The ones that are sub-par... get paid the industry average *for that location* because it's the law. So even a sucky programmer will make good money, if they manage to wangle an H1-B.
Where's your evidence that 'they're just cheaper'???
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Same here...I'm a bit different in the sense that I've got Bachelors in both Computer Science and Biology a couple months ago, but it seems as if no one is hiring.
:-)
I've tried several IS/IT firms, and I always get no reply from them. Bioinformatics firms are looking for MS/PhD people, not entry level programmers. I've still got more connections I can try using, but damnit, this is getting depressing.
Anyone have a job or words of advice for a green college kid?
--------------------------
I'm inclined to agree with the poster who said you're a control-freak micro-managing jackass, for the following two reasons:
If you really feel you're such an alpha geek, get back in the trenches instead of being such a REMF (Rear Echelon Mother Fucker, from the military). What you're doing now is very one-sided. There's none of your code out there for them to critique, and you're the guy who decides raises or promotions so they can't afford to piss you off by responding to your criticism as you deserve. It's a power trip, pure and simple, and just reading about it makes my blood pressure rise. I shudder to think how infuriating and frustrating it is for those with the misfortune to work for you.
Secondly, let's consider this:
So how does this justify hiring H1B workers instead of locals? Remember, that was the original topic. Is that H1B worker "the right person"? Will they be able to run through your little obstacle course any better than the local applicants you rejected? I doubt it. They're just cheaper. Suddenly it's not about skills after all, it's about dollars. It's also, IMO, often about hiring people who won't be threats to your own position or prestige. There's a group where I work that hires lots of foreigners, mostly Chinese and Indian/Pakistani. These folks are often underpaid for the work to do, and are afraid to complain much about that or anything else because the bosses have control over their visas. The bosses know that, too, and use the knowledge to act like feudal lords. You'd probably love that, wouldn't you? Upper management sees that payroll is low, so they don't mind, but in the meantime that group continues to put out inferior products because nobody dares to challenge the honchos' bad decisions. It's the high-tech equivalent of union-busting, and it's really quite sickening to watch.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Can you suggest other words that (a) rhyme with "nerds" and "matters" and (b) express the appropriate degree of contempt for Slashdot vermin like yourself? No, didn't think so. Fuck off.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Good for you. Unfortunately, anecdotes are like assholes - everyone has 'em, and they're totally useless as a basis for debate. Would you like to bet on whether your "boatload" is typical or anomalous for those on H1B visas? If the latter, whose supposition would you say is flawed?
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
You really should have read the article that this whole discussion is about, before you asked that. Consider these example quotes:
It's not hard to find more in that vein, if you look. For example:
Admittedly, this is not quite the sort of hard data I myself would like to see. It is, however, far more convincing than the "evidence" you have offered for the opposing point of view. Where the hell is your proof? I guess it's possible that you and your "boatloads" represent the luckiest percentile or two of H1B workers. It's also possible that what seems like "boatloads" to you would be mere flotsam to others. Either way, I see no reason to accept your word over that of the other sources I've cited, and I see no reason why any other rational person would do so.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
For the first, the task is to design an interface for a C function that returns a null-terminated character string. The thing is that the length of the string is random and the caller has no apriori info about the string. Also the function is provided as part of a library so you can make NO assumptions of the environment the caller is in (for instance what memory manager it uses). This is a great question to test a variety of things like interface design skills, nitty-gritty knowledge of how memory-managers work, all the way upto callback functions. I never fail people on the test just because they don't get the ultimate answer I want. More important to me is how they proceed to try to answer the question. Of course at times there are people who are really bad, but I normally phone screen to avoid such folks.
My second question is a little different. I quiz them a little about the internet and the HTTP protocol and ask the candidate to tell me how webserver implementations would be different if HTTP was a state-ful protocol.
Finally I ask the candidate their favourite field of computer science and ask a question in that.
In general when I interview I look for people with good systems skills. Database internals experience is a plus .. but the market was so tough last year my gosh. I must have interviewed about 20 people to staff 3 positions.
Oh btw .. _I_ am a H1-B worker ...
The H1-B racket is still going, though... I saw on the Maclaughlin Group (sp?) Friday night something about Bushy considering amnesty-by-another-name for foreigners working without permits, 'cause the economy's come to depend on them? (You guys never really did finish with slave-type labour, didya?)
I currently work for a dot.com, and we just contracted with an Indian firm to do much of our development (which kind of puts me in the hot seat, as I am one of the few remaining software developers there). And I have to say I have NEVER heard more Indian jokes in my life than in the last few weeks. It's depressing. And infuriating. Theoretically well-educated people engaging in little more than racism, and from major executives.
After meeting with their project manager and discussing a new product, I have come to the conclusion that they are not much different (in technical ability) than any given pool of domestic developers, as I expected. They are not uber-coders. They do have a very "willing to do it your way" attitude, but that is normal since they are working for us. And we're only paying them $10.00 / hour.
THAT's the big difference. I don't know what sort of back-alley business deals my bosses cut to get this rate, but whatever, the fact that you could find a firm anywhere willing to do this much for this little, is impressive from a business standpoint.
Now, I'm only a single datapoint, but I'd say that the article was completely accurate, from my limited experience. I also agree with sections 10-12, I do think this sort of thing that my company is engaging in, will hurt in the long run (if we survive).
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
I'm about to enter junior year of undergrad, computer engineering and CS major. It'll ake me 4.5yrs total, and I'm going to go for 5 to take some grad-level courses. Then an MBA, and likely that's it.
So I keep reading about the downturn of the economy, tech slumps, layoffs, etc and it has me wondering. I know my education is good, since I work hard and my school is focused, while I see friends at UCs failing classes and not really learning anything and lacking any incentive. So I'll have a good background to go into what, an overpopulated workforce in a failing economy?
Personally my interests are in processor architecture, though what I go into depends on my job offers. So, what are my chances?
-----------------------------------------
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Second, you gotta get the hell outta Texas and visit America once in a while.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
From seeing the different opinions reflected here, I'm no longer sure what to think. I am a student at a major American public university, going for a BS in Comp Sci (and possibly a Math minor, for algorithms and to augment my moderate math skills). What's the bottom line for my employment opportunities when I get out? I mean, Comp Sci for the beauty of code is one thing, but I need to be able to support myself and a family.
and i was most of the time responsible for the hiring.
Programming like most *real* IT jobs requires a
solid education. There may be exceptions, but they are execptions. Highly educated and trained people
in any "new" area have allways been scarce.
But IT companies get swamped by applications from people who read two or three books an wrote a VBA script. Companies, under the pressure to grow and to satisfy the demand, which hire those goons will go under.
So they, especially big companies, try to get those scarce ressources form all over the world.
But this is a short term strategy:
of "freaks" who truly understand what they are doing seems to be as low as during my highschool days (mid 1980's).
So i think green cards or H1B visas will not solve these problems.
CU, Martin
You may find this amusing. It's usenet article looking for new programmers. Note that they have specifically ruled out anyone over 28 years old, or with more than 3 years of experience.
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Opensource development is a great way to break out of the paradox. Your contributions can always be evaluated by a potential employer, reducing their risk (in the same way that requiring professional experience reduces risk).
What you dont want, as an employer, is a person graduated with a CS major who still doesn't know how to code/design software/solve problems.
- Some universities are pushing their students throug CS in a NT-only environment. I would never hire a developer fresh out of such an education.
IT is chock full of people whose claimed expertise is in some vague conglomeration of "project management and business strategy", but when faced with need for hard answers to real problems, they're clueless.
Recessions are a good way to trim some of this "fat". Unfortunately good people sometimes get burned, too.
Never ever let go of your curiosity!
Been there, done that.
Currently I freelance. Which means I'm in a perpetual state of looking for a new job. So far, I have been rejected *three times* for a consulting gig in the last seven years by managers who basically said "we can't hire you, because the skill set you would provide us is so well suited to our needs and the price you would provide us is so good that we would become overly dependant on you." It didn't matter to them that as part of the contract, I would document my work so that another programmer could pick up where I left off--in fact, my offer to document the work was apparently part of the problem.
I can sort of understand the point of not being at a single person's mercy. But it strikes me as rather brain-dead.
Older workers (I'm hitting the big 4-oh this year) have negatives beyond age. We often have wives and families, which mean we're unwilling to work 6-80 hour weeks and on weekends.
Which is to me amazingly silly, given that after about 50 hours, most people are unable to concentrate well enough on their work that you may as well send them home.
I remember one shop I did some work for where the programmers "worked" for 60-80 weeks. Management was rather flexable as to how they "worked", understanding that sometimes productivity is helped when a programmer takes a couple of minutes from his work to allow a problem to perculate. Most of the programmers were 20-something.
Well, having spent a month with them, I discovered they hardly did any work at all! The programming "pit" (the area where the programmers worked) was basically one large social club; perhaps they worked an average of 20 hours a week if that--most of the time spent on the computers were spent surfing various "fantasy football" web sites and making bets. Turns out that even a large chunk of the time they spent "working" was done developing an in-house betting system that would allow them to play fantasy football against each other!
*sigh*
When I was 25, perhaps I would have enjoyed spending 60 hours a week there. But today, I'd rather go home to my wife than hang out and play fantasy football with a bunch of fellow geeks. And I honestly don't care if management is too stupid to realize that they're not as "hard working" as they appear.
You may be an excellent programmer, godlike sysadmin, and masterful designer. However, if you come across to your future employers as one who likes to 'toot his own horn', as you have put it, it may be a while before you get hired. I just had the lovely experience this afternoon of dealing with just such a type. He had been in IT for about 15 years, has worked with everything from vsam to lisp to assembler to c++ to oracle, and doesn't mind telling you in great detail just how great he is at everything he has every done. One beautiful quote was '... and then the company hired a team of lawyers to protect me so I could sniff propriety information off the networks'. Hmmm.....
I'm just glad it was a random encounter and I don't have to work with him on a regular basis - skilled or not he would drive anyone up the wall.
If after decades of colonialism, imperialism, and corporate exploitation, the only choices they have are sweatshop vs. "sitting in a hut out in the desert somewhere", that's a very strong clue that the system is in need of radical change.
It's very difficult to "lift yourself" when most of the value you produce is funneled to parasitic investors in a far-off country.
Supply and demand only produces efficient solutions when parties meet with equal power. Citizens of naitons that spent most of the 19th and 20th centuries being fucked over by rich Western nations do not have equal power with mega-corps from those nations.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Globalizing corporate rule does not "redistribute" wealth to poor nations. It lets rich Western investors redistribute wealth produced by poor "third world" workers into the investors own pockets.
It is not progress for poor people living on table scraps from the tables of the rich when the rich get richer and leave more scraps.
If you want to use trade to truly increase the flow of wealth to these nations, you have to do so in a "fair trade" manner.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Female Prison Rape in NY
Like one of the other people who replied to you post, a buisness IS composed of people. This is really not the entire point though. The whole economy (and subsequently people's existance) is a complex interaction between consumers(people),employees(people), and employers(people). So in the situation you acclaim as ideal, you will be posting tomorrow about either that "these damn corperations are charging too damn much for their product", or that they have move out of this country. I really do not apologize for buisness, I really do not even like the way that America is corperate centered, but that is the way it is. I really do not have any anwsers on how to create even a good economy (for all people), greater people than I have spent their entire lives on this and have failed.
I'm just about to start my course (UK)... they told me there was a big shortage of engineers. There better be some good jobs for me when i get out 'cause i'm sure-as-hell not going to work at bu*ger king. lol
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
but change to what???
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Oh shit. :(
No-one will hire me for any job involving customer-interaction:
good afternoon sir, how may i help you?
(hello sir, do you realise your costing me my lunch break?)
- well i want to buy a computer.
ok, so what will you mostly be using the computer for?
- well i need it for work, and my kids will want the internet.
Ok, and what would you describe yourself as: a rich arab, a stupid manager with too much money and VAT-back, or poor scum?
-EXCUSE ME?!?
oh and will your kids be mostly browsing the porn sites or hacking?
And i'm not dumb enough to work in bugger-king. I refuse to do manual labour (i _will_ break both my legs if it will get me on disabled benifits).
What does that leave me?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Are you replying to my comment? If so, please re-read what I said as you have appeared to have
mis-interpreted what I said, or a reading something into it which does not exist.
I was not trying to prove anything, and I did not state any beliefs.
What I did say is that the report is using the salary to prove two different points, and is
creating a contradiction.
I am not passing any judgement on the truth either of the 'facts'. It may be true that they
are all below average - I don't care. I have no personal involvement in this issue - I don't live
in the US, and have no desire to.
I am critizing the his analysis and conclusions. Maybe he should have produced more information to
show why there isn't a contradiction.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
I read through the article, and to me, there were many statements which contradicted
themselves, but, aren't that obvious as they are well spread out, and the article
is long, with alot of points.
It appears that the article is a politically biased article trying it's best to
appear to be objective.
For exapmle, towards the end of the FAQ section, we come across -
"Question: The industry lobbyists claim that the H-1Bs tend to be
``the best and the brightest'' from around the world. Is this true?
Certainly not. We should definitely facilitate the immigration
of the outstanding talents throughout the world, but only a small
proportion of the H-1Bs fall into this category. 75% of the H-1Bs
earn less than $65,000, far below the salaries of top talent in
this field, which exceed $100,000. "
This is trying to imply that the average H-1B is not the top talent, and is
most likely only average or below. This may, not may not be true, I am
not discussing the merit of this point, but I want to focus just on what
the report is saying.
But, those with not so short memories will remember right at the top of the
FAQ section, Matloff said -
"The industry lobbyists form a lone voice on this issue. There is
a broad consensus that the H-1Bs are indeed exploited in terms of
wages and working conditions."
and
"... study at UCLA, which found that the immigrant engineers
were paid 33% less than comparable Americans "
and
"Thus it is indisputable, from basic economic principles, that on
average they are making less money than they would if they had their
freedom."
So, Matloff, along with all of the studies mentioned, say that these
workers are getting far less than they should due to the exploitation of
restrictions in the system.
Hany on, how can you say that they are getting far less than they are
worth, and then later on, say that
"far below the salaries of top talent in this field" ???
Let me state this one more time. Matloff says -
- they are underpaid for their skills
- if we use at their salaries as an
indicator, they are not very good.
This is a direct contradiction. You can't have it both ways. Either
they are underpaid and worth more, or they are paid what they are
worth and are not the top in their field.
I found many other instances like this through out the report. This
guy has a point he wants to prove so much, that he even switches
sides in his arguments.
I wonder if he even realises what he has done?
If you are going to respond to my post, please note, I am not taking
sides on this debate. I am just trying to point out flaws in the
report.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
that they were going to the Phillipines for a major hiring of several programmers.
http://www.icalledit.com - Predicting the future, one post at a time
Ok, so it's pretty obvious, there are not enough high skilled tech workers to do the specific job many companies want. But no one has ever mentioned, "Well, this job was critical, so was have a junior position where we put some guy who has good logic skills and works well with others. We expect for him to learn the skills, and he can assist the skilled worker."
No, you don't see that. So, now after years of not training people, the lack of skilled tech workers is coming back to bite them on the ass. And STILL they don't have any trainee positions.
As to the quizmiesters. Stop looking for the applicant with all the answers. When I stop working on a language I start to forget how to do things. Do I work well with you? Do you like my examples of previously written code? Am I a slacker? What else do you need?
Just graduated, horrific sense of timing.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
eh? how many 35+ year old professionals do you know? How many of them have skills that apply today? It takes more than a good suit, a snappy smile, and a mathematics degree to make it in this world today. Gasp--you actually need to know something and be willing to work. Students leaving my university are snapped up quick: not every CS degree involves writing a C compiler, Linux device drivers, cleanroom style coding, and database building. it's a hard curriculum, and people leave it destined for greatness it seems. an informal comparison I did one night showed many of the classes required for the degree at my college were master's level courses at other universities. master's students from other schools are often tutored at my school. By the undergraduates. of course, not having a single professor who's native language is English encourages an atmosphere of "do-it-yourself", that combined with the focus on Linux development pretty much guarantees that only the hardcore shall survive. :-D I've never been so proud of being average.
A good friend of mine, near and dear to my heart, has been in the industry for more than twenty years. But he was trained in Lisp programming; AI and computer linguistics. The demand in that particular field is non-existant. Instead of marketing himself as that, he markets himself as a UNIX/Linux sysadmin with 20+ years of experience. Which, while not unheard of, is certainly more useful in this day and age than LISP programmer or 4 year experienced Linux programmer. He has not been without a job for any significant amount of time, and always manages to bargain to get extra time off due to an illness.
There's no such thing as age discrimination. There's discrimination against stale skills. There's discrimination against outdated, outmoded technology. I'm not hiring a former VMS expert unless he can use my system (which isn't VMS). I'm not hiring a LISP programmer if my code is Python/Perl/C++.
The one thing the world is not tolerant of, in the information age, is experience for the sake of loyalty and not learning. we aren't building systems on an assembly line. Cisco certified network administrators who don't know bash are useless as sysadmins. I know one, and he knows that basic Linux skills are the mana from heaven as far as employers are concerned. then again I have another friend who insists that an EE degree in addition to your CS degree is yoru golden passport to any job you want at whatever salary you demand. Probably true, in some circles. but this is not an industry where loyalty is rewarded.
Daniel
As far as I can see, IT companies are screaming out (with cheque books foremost) for skilled IT workers. Getting a programming job or a Unix/Linux sysadmin is easier than falling off a log.
The IT industry is still growing very fast, and companies that have nothing to do with IT are hiring a sysadmin or programmer just to write them a website, or do a computer program of their products, or whatever.
The FAQ mentions a 2% hiring rate. That sounds about right. Though, I don't actually do the hiring mechanism (HR does that) I've interviewed scores of people and read many times as many resumes. Yes, there is a shortage. I once received a stack of resumes from HR that was 5 inches thick. Only 4 of the resumes were worth looking at, we interviewed 2. We offered to 1. Guess what: He was Indian.
Representative of the resumes we received was one person who had worked administratively for 10 years, took 2 classes on VB (Count 'em, yes, TWO) and had as the objective to become a professional programmer.
My experience may be statistically insignificant, but it jibes with the hype.
Be careful what you wish for...
Where your treasure is there is your heart also...
The first stage has been to put back end processing and programming to cheaper labour countries, the next stage is to include more customer focused people in the cheaper labour countries so more decision making can be done there. Hopefully returning H1-B people have more than 'just' programming experience but more Product Management, Buisness Awareness and Customer Facing skills.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
Quote: ...yes, the typical programmer is far to the political Right...
Reply: Odd that, all the programmers in the shop where I work are somewhere to the left of Bill Clinton.
I suggest that you are both right... er, correct. Programmers are thinking beings, and modify their viewpoints as new information and ideas are absorbed and analyzed.
First comes The Wheel of conservatism, liberalism, and totalitarianism. The programmer may spend a single cycle on the Wheel or many, and the ride may be uneven. But ride it he must.
The next stage is a move away from the wheel, a move incomprehensible to those still traveling on the wheel. This departure may take the form of libertarianism or some other similar enlightenment. The programmer will probably find this stage much more comfortable than the Wheel, and may tarry long here.
The final stage is, of course, The Void.
A dingo ate my sig...
I can only second this. We were also looking for some good php/sql coders, but its incredible hard to find !
;)
.. it comes to check the folks with the highest potential, and train them. When you see the quality of the so called "business schools" where they teach programming here, you would fall from your chair .. :)
I got also numerous offers from folks that did know how to write "select * from foobar" and think they are sql experts.. (the funny thing is that those ppl did demand the highest salarys
But in the end
Most of those business schools teach about 1 topic per week here, thats 1 week db admin, 1 week java, 1 week php, and so on. total bullshit.
Look, from Project Censored, the group that reports on stories downplayed by big-business-owned media:
h tm l
http://www.projectcensored.org/c2001stories/10.
"Old man yells at systemd"
this article has been posted at least 3 times in the past here on slashdot
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
As one of my friends in the aerospace industry puts it, "Any manger will tell you that of course there's a shortage of engineers - especially really brilliant ones who will work 60 hours a week for $20K a year."
You give MBA's too much credit. Several years ago I worked at a company that went through this exact situation. Older, experienced engineers were forced out the door to reduce department budgets by MBAs who had no understanding of the technical contributions of those guys. Many of them were ultimately rehired as consultants at 3X their hourly rates. But the MBA's didn't care, because the consulting fees were paid from a different pot of money, not their departmental budgets. They could cut their salary budgets, still get the work done, and look good to their own bosses, even though it cost the company far more money in the long run.
...appears here:
u are/art/testpattern.jpg
http://www.vpl.vancouver.bc.ca/branches/LibrarySq
---
The Big News Page
This was basically all about harvesting the real estate value generated by the demand from the baby boomers before the females of that generation finally gave up on having kids. There were quite substantial interests who wanted to mobilize the barbarian hoards against the Microsoft Empire while, unnoticed back on the East Coast, AOL/Time/Warner/CNN/Netscape/Amazon/etc. absorbed more and more key assets -- however that attack failed and the war was funded (as usual) by lemmings anyway, so who cared?
The main thing is the wealth transfer to Wall Street and its favored investors needed to occur before the GI generation died leaving all that real estate value to mid to late boomer males who, unlike those born before 1950 such as Clinton, Gore, etc. did not get to be "Shockwave Riders" in the sense their parents and elder siblings did and who, unlike females in their cohort, weren't in a position to get a boost from the unprecedented youthful sexual power accorded to females during those critical years as a result of sexual liberation, women's liberation, birth control and abortion. As a consequence, many GI's really will Die Broke even if they didn't intend it. At least they can take solace in all those WW II blockbusters being put out by Hollywood lately -- not quite as analgesic as heroin, though.
A side benefit of having this sort of pathological tsunami pass through an industry and wreak havoc, is that in its wake there are lots of bargains -- and that is good news for the guys who rode the ponzi schemes to wealth. They are now in a position to broker control the genuine threat to the status quo represented by the Internet. Here again, however, was ancillary to the primary target:
The largest intergenerational wealth transfer in human history.
Seastead this.
Well,
if the new part of the program is 1000 times faster, then the original part was bad desigend or bad coded.
Its very unlikely that switching from C++ to C or to assembler is more than 2 times faster if you do not change the whole allgorithm.
The fact that a virtual function call is more expensive than a non virtual call is very overrated.
What is the alternative to a virtual call?
A switch or if statement ot find the correct portion of code to execute where a virtual call would be sufficient.
That if or switch statement is unlikely faster than the virtual function call.
In fact if you KNOW about how to design, its easy to write C++ code which is FASTER than similar C code, as you would need to design/code/compile/test C code with better quality which you get for free from the C++ compiler.
BTW: I once rewrote an assembler program which was used to draw lines on an MAC screen, in C (Think C, which had C++ extensions, but I just made a plain C routine). My C routine was over 10 times faster. Why? The assembler routine accessed memory byte wise. Depending on how the line was orientated (the number of bits to switch) I used 1 byte, 2 byte or 4 byte words for line drawing.
By that I had optimized memory access, which basicly saved the time.
The algorithm was only a showcase. I liked to reimplement it in assembler after that, but that had likely given only 25% additional speed as the generated machine code from the C routine looked quite nice and well optimized by the compiler.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Meanwhile, I can hire foreign graduate students who've finished their masters degree under the Practical Training provision of their student visa for less than $15/hr. And these are people who typically worked for years in the field in their home countries before coming to the US for their masters.
-a.e.mossberg
At our company, we just went through a round of layoffs that our investors required (we had to reduce "burn rate"). Those folks you mention (like our worthless "product manager" kept their jobs. Three developers were cut. Of course, those guys were fairly worthless, but still. It CAN happen.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
You programmers make me laugh. There's a shortage of GOOD EVERYTHING! Good engineers for example, are DAMN hard to find. Sure we all want to work with the best, but lets face it, sometimes an AVERAGE employee will do just fine. It sounds like people have unreasonable expectations.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
I am finding that many corporate bosses don't really want to hire competent people.
Competent people get the job done with half the resources and with half the people making a boss's empire that much smaller.
Many bosses in bureaucracies (especially government ones) are rated because of the size of their budget and staff. Having a bunch of time fillers needing off-the-shelf GUI's running on Windows means the the empire is very big.
Having one or two geeks who don't fit into the corporate mold makes the boss look bad. Linux scares them because it gets the job done without need for a bigger budget and more toys.
As an AC pointed out, this has been discussed several times before. It might be an interesting point for discussion, but I can't imagine it getting to far before people starting flaming each other.
cheers!
there is no thing
what else could you want?
For what little it's worth, when I was working on Wall St., one of the guys I met had a "part time" job finding Indian developers to come over to the US and work as consultants for him. He sponsored the visas, found them a place to live (never found out what sort) and paid them $20K or so a year, pocketing the rest. They were happy, and with the two or so million a year he was clearing, he was even happier.
It's not quite indentured servitude, but it isn't that far, either.
Easy does it!
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
As someone who has actually pored through the resumes in question in previous jobs, let me throw in my two bits:
1) Somewhere between 20-35% of the resumes had no experience even vaguely related to the position at hand. Say we're looking for a C developer, we would get resumes from people who want to design web sites or be an administrative assistant. (Really!)
2) 10-20% of the resumes failed the "If you can't form complete English sentences on your Resume, you obviously can't even write email" test. If you can't write well enough to get one or two pages of the most important document in your career right (and don't have the brains to have someone else review it for you), we didn't want to hire you.
3) About half of the remaining resumes were rejected because technicians, fresh-outs, etc. were applying for positions with 2+ years of development experience. (We had positions periodically for fresh-outs, but then we'd be rejecting the resumes for Sr. guys.)
4) We're down to about 10-20% of the resumes at this point, and those guys got a phone call. We'd ask them some dirt simple C questions like "What does "static" mean?" We'd ask them what they thought about software engineering and software process. About half failed here, but if you have a really strong resume you probably got a face-to-face interview anyway.
Of those that got a face-to-face interview, about half had obviously exaggerated on their resume to the point that they weren't trustworthy candidates. They couldn't answer trivial questions about C while claiming 5 years of development in the language. I can't recommend hiring someone who lies on their resume.
Of the remaining candidates, many got an offer. But in the end, it was well under 5% of the resumes reviewed. And I think that's totally appropriate.
The article quotes that the most productive developers are ten times as productive as the least productive developers. The correct figure, if I remember correctly, is that the most productive developers are ten times as productive as the AVERAGE developer, and the average developer is ten times as productive as the worst.
That means there's a 100:1 ratio between the most productive developer and the least.
Some of this productivity difference is attributable to experience. Again, IIRC, the difference between developers with similar amounts of experience is about 10:1 again. This implies that a bottom 1% programmer with a great deal of experience is about as good as a top fresh-out-of-college programmer.
But I don't think you ever get bottom 1% programmers with a great deal of experience. No one would keep them around in their organization very long, and they would never get the experience. They go off into other careers both in and out of IT.
And contrary to the article, the top developers get paid a lot more than 10% more than the average developers. The thing is, the only ones that keep advancing in their careers, and get the 6 figure salaries, are the top developers. I'd hazard to guess that of the 19% of the developers that are still in the industry 20 years after graduation (from the article), almost all are from the top 25%.
Those people who are only average developers don't produce enough to justify the salary of a Sr. developer even with the benefits of 20 years of experience. (And the productivity of an average developer does not significantly increase after 10 years in the industry, in my experience.)
In my experience, however, everyone expects to continue getting promotions (and significant raises) throughout their career. But if you can't produce in the development business, you won't get that promotion. And then you have to decide, once you're getting paid the most your productivity will justify, if you're happy with that, or if you want to change careers.
And I think most people will get out of the business before they are "stuck" at a relatively low level on the corporate ladder for their entire career.
Meritocracies are really rough if you're not on top.
As a child of immigrants, I believe what you have said is very true and you make a lot of excellent points.
Rangers Lead the Way!
TSA (title says all)
Rangers Lead the Way!
I read all the threads in this topic and finally found someone who has the balls to say...
When people ask me if they should get 'into computers' (because they heard it pays well) I tell them this:
"If you don't love it, don't bother. If your in it for the money, you'll never be any good at it. In order to be a good engineer of any kind it has to be in your blood. If you're doing it for the money you'll never be any good at it. If you are a natural, you don't do it for the money; the money just follows."
The above should be posted in every "college guide" book published in the world.
-redking
Rangers Lead the Way!
What it really comes down to is:
1. Pay NON-American's instead of Americans in America. = H1-B
2. Pay NON-American's instead of American's, Worldwide. = Competant Long Distance Managers
The best people will get hired no matter what, so:
Would you rather have that employee's salary spent within U.S. borders?
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
I agree with you on the issue of confusing people with nonsense programming questions. That seems to be a common practice at university course tests, even though it makes no sense. I took the second level C++ course my first semester freshman year in college, and found it to be relatively easy. Just straight forward object oriented programming, not even getting into STL or templates. Judging from talking to many people in the class and knowing how long it took people to get the assignments done, I know I was in the top 5 programmers in a class of around 150. I'd had about three years of C++ experience, mostly self taught by programming and from books, along with high school AP Computer Science thrown in there (got a 5 on the AB test). The point being I considered myself to be a good C++ programmer. But some of the questions on tests had questions that demonstrated some of the more archane C/C++ language "features". I wasn't able to be 100% sure that I answered them right. I have no idea how people who were new to programming and C++ were supposed to know these things. You certainly wouldn't get a good grade if you wrote code like that on an assignment, yet it was on the test questions.
Is arguing always a bad thing? We have about 10 programmers at our company, and the only two that ever argue with me on issues are the ones that are on the same skill level as me. Everyone else just agrees with everything. While there's not always a right and a wrong way to do something, I think it's important to be in agreement with other good programmers about things. Either we just have a different opinion about something that could be done multiple ways, or one of us is wrong. If the other programmer has a different opinion then me, it should be resolved. I want to know why he feels a certain way about something. Eventually we will have to decide how to do something, and everyone should understand why the decision was made. I can't work in an environment where something is done poorly because "that's the way it's always been done" or "that's just the way things are".
Actually, the only people we hired are the only people that made it as far as discussing salaries. If someone is good enough, salary usually isn't an issue. As for money/ego, I'll grant you the second part of that, I have a good sized ego. That aside, I've been writing software for 22 years. I still write software. I'm the architect and I wrote a fair portion (more than 25%) of our last product. I get paid more, but I do more than just write the software. I also manage the programmers. It really is two jobs, and I've worked the hours to prove it.
If you think management is unskilled work, try it some day. Managing developers is certainly more difficult than I ever thought it would be. Maybe your managers aren't very good at their job. It's easy to sit back and tell everyone "Do this, do that, blah blah blah." That's just management in title. When you've managed, and been on the hiring side of the coin, you come back and tell me that this is BS. In the meantime, I suggest you keep your comments to topics you actually have some knowledge of.
It's not as if managers don't get watched too. I have to report to upper management, and the ultimate responsibility of the success or failure of the product lays with me. That's a hell of a lot of responsibility, especially in a small company where in my case, my success or failure meant the success or failure of the company as a whole, the jobs of 15 people, and my bosses home, were all on the line. (My boss financed the project with his home, in a last ditch effort to save the company, which fortunately succeeded).
I agree, there are plenty of bad managers out there, and I've had my share of them. I've also had some damn good managers, most of which, had been developers before. Maybe it's just the case that developers make better managers for developers. There are certainly managerial skills that you don't learn in programming, and some of those are hard to learn.
Management, in many ways, means you're on "the other side," which can be a difficult role to play. I'm part of the team, but at the same time, my loyalty is to the company, and no individual in my team. If someone is screwing up, I'm responsible for making sure they stop screwing up, and if need be, let them go. I'm not a very confrontational person, and that's something I've had to work on, as a manager.
What it comes down to, I think, is that management IS a skilled job. Different than programming, but still a skilled job. The skills take work to develop. They don't come naturally to everyone. Programming is no different. You have good and bad programmers. For some, it comes naturally. To say management is unskilled though, is a very naive thing to say.
As a manager of developers, I can tell you that there absolutely IS an shortage of IT people. At least a shortage of good ones. I mean, I get tons of resumes from people who don't know anything about software development, but they're not useful to me. I have had 4 developers in my group. 3 of them are here on H1B work visas. I didn't hire them because they were foreigners. I hired them because they were the best I could find.
I have one other person that I'm probably going to hire in the next few weeks. He's was born and raised American.
I've interviewed at least a 50 developers over the past year. I'd say that 80-90% of them have been foreigners looking to get work visas. So, if you ask me, it looks like there's a serious shortage of IT workers in this country, or at least in my area, which is a high-tech center (the Dulles Corridor of Northern Virginia).
Exactly. If I can startup towerofbabel.com and grow it to a size of 200 translators in 40 different languages all over the planet (not to mention the contributors) from a room in my parents house, why can't anyone else? People skills perhaps? Being able to know that "please" and "thank you" really are magic words? I guess I'll never understand why companies fly people all over the world just for face to face meetings. Gee, aren't those really expensive? Haven't these companies heard of the Internet or email? Don't they know how to read a resume and tell if someone is trustworthy or not? Was I the only person who hitchhiked and traveled the world after college rather than mindlessly following the suspicious paranoia of the television-watching middle class?
My name is Carlos Montoya. You share files of my music. Prepare to die.
It's not going to be easy. Breaking into a job market is always hard, and particularly now.
I'd actually recommend pushing harder on the biology side; Novartis, etc. are on the rise, while silicon is still falling, and pits you against tougher competitors who were just laid off. The computing boom is over.
He was just trying to make an impression by saying shocking things, at your expense. I hope all the real employers see this guy for what he is.
To some extent, he's right about your leverage (though if you're working for moderate pay, it seems to be cancelled out by your generosity or sense of fairness) - but even if you became unreasonably demanding, the proper action would be to hire alternatives, not replacements (at least at first).
Amen! I'm only 24 and even I have realize that. I kringe at my co-workers who kibtz all day long and then complain about deadlines.
-no broken link
No wonder you have troubles finding good people. You are looking for the kind of people who feel they need to memorize the kind of minutia they ask on certification tests. Then it seems that these are the only people you interview, failing to see if they can do actual tasks.
The main SQL question I ask follows: You have two tables: table A and table B. Table A has three columns: customer_id, item_id, quantity. Table B has two columns: item_id and price. Item_id in table A is foreign keyed to table B. Table A holds orders by a customer for a certain number of a particular item. Table B holds the price in dollars of each item. What is the total amount in dollars of all the orders belonging to customer "3".
I leave details out on purpose (like that the foreign key is to the first column in table B, which is a primary key) to see how well the applicant can understand the problem. They can have paper or whatever.
The majority of candidates that do get the answer (yes a lot don't, including one who claimed to be a certified oracle programmer (by Oracle)) will say the anser is "select price*quantity from A,B where a.item_id=b.item_id and customer_id = 3" which is wrong, but even then I don't consider the error enough to say they have out and out failed the interview.
The interview is made up of lots of questions that have degrees of correctness and a perfect score isn't required. In fact a B- total will likely get you hired.
-no broken link
Ugh. If you call $65,000/yr next to nothing, then your post makes sense. That's almost twice the national average.
-no broken link
You can use this to your advantage. If you're one of those "older" programmers, actively look for projects where you could effectively apply a new technology skillset, then learn the skills yourself and lay out a design to your manager. They love that proactive shit, and you get to put the skill on your resume and say you have experience in it to boot.
____________________
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I agree with you on this:
I can not, however, say that foreign workers fill the high IQ/learn-things-quickly
prerequisite any better than native workers. In fact, the language barrier can sometimes get in the way.
While as individuals that is true, but taken as a group they broaden the pool of people from which to choose. So your chances of finding that person you need is better.
That said, I agree with substantially large portions of the article, and I believe that if the economic worth of an activity is high enough, than the prevailing wage for that activity will rise enough to motivate (American) workers to become skilled at that activity.
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
We (the company I work for) write parallel processing applications. We had a skills shortage, but managed to get around it by training people with good experience in technologies similar in nature.
I wasn't born with parallel processing app dev skills. Neither were any of my foreign co-workers. They were trained on the subject, and the criteria for hire is/was an ability to absorb new concepts with minimum effort. So a hi IQ gets you the job.
I suspect in your case that you didn't pay the prevailing rate for the position (perhaps bad information?) and/or you were not geared to recruit people with the real prerequisite: The ability to comprehend what was necessary to make the software work.
Unfortunately, the people making hiring decisions do not do so optimally. That is just a matter of human nature. I think that that your specific requirements drew you into a sort of no-win situation, in that you could not keep/advance your career without a guaranteed success, and in response to that you targeted your audience too restictively, which effectively precluded success.
The next time you look at finding a person to fill a position, look at what is really required outside of the core technologies. Those who fulfill these requirments are the people you need to interview for. Which is the unspoken point of this article: We have created an atificial limit on applicants and suffered, but now that the price has dipped somewhat, with lowered expectations we have a surplus.
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
I also work for a large company in RTP that recently had layoffs (Cisco). You're right, projects and departments are usually cut and the people in them are let go regardless of their skill level.
In my experience, larger companies normally work like that. Smaller companies (300 employees or less) tend to look at people and decide if the can live without them. Larger companies look at a department and it's contribution to the bottom line. If you're in the wrong group everybody is toast regardless of their skill set.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
You might as well say "Journalism does not use words."
--
PaxTech
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
If you are into web stuff (Java, PHP, MySQL, ASP) you could find a non-profit and do about 4-8 hrs a week pro-bono. Then your resume can direct a prospective hire to the web see to see where you have strutted your stuff. Gives you a chance to learn if there is already a team in place.
and i'm not short.
The whole POINT of the H1-B system is to INTERERE with supply and demand. It works to artificially keep the supply low by limiting the number of foreign workers who may come here and work. The H1-B system is entirely skewed in the programmer's favor because it protects them from foreign competition. If you want supply and demand to actually set the wages, eleminate H1-B visas entirely and allow as many foreign programmers to come in as want.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Perhaps this is a sign that the "industry standard" rate is too high. Maybe American programmers should be willing to work for a bit less.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Do you have to keep posting the same person's
rant against H1-B programmers over and over again? I haven't seen anything different in what Matloff has written from 2 years ago in this write up. Just because the economy is turning south, Matloff words seem to ring a resonant chord with quite a few people here.
I have been around softwareville for a while on a H1B. I don't have a job now and have been told explicitly by some recruting companies that it's going to be tough since there are a lot of local guys who are unemployed. The H1B legislation in force stipulates that American citizens have to given preference - Despite Norman Matloff and the likes's ,stubborn refusal to believe this, most companies do follow this rule.
All the hard core programming/developer jobs are still done by American programmers. Most H1Bs are engaged in maintenance jobs. In the last two years a couple of development centers of American companies have been opened in India. But It's nothing compared with the development centers in Ireland or elsewhere in Europe. it's stange no one complains about development centers in Ireland, Germany and Britain. In fact these days there are lot of Russian programmers in any big American company - looks like you can tolerate even your former enemies. Am I seeing a pattern here ?
There is lot of anecdotal evidence floating around about Indian programmers who get very low pay compared with their American counterparts. Well in my opinion it's due to the stupid Visa rules. Most companies don't want to deal with Visa procedures and the lawyer overheads; so they hire contractors from recruiting agencies who get a cut - there are often 2 or more sub-contractors involved , which ensures that by the time the moolah reaches the programmer's pocket, it is far less than what the company pays to the recruting agency. During the height of the software boom , the Big Six consulting companies would charge anywhere between $250-$350 per hour for the programmers they subcontracted from an indian recruting company , which would get typically $50-$70 (from the Big Six )- you can imagine how much the programmer gets in such cases.
In most engineering environments there are plenty of older American sw engineers around, with highly specialised skills. Software Technologies that have become commoditised simply cannot ensure high salaries to lot of older programmers. There is no big conspiracy here.A lot of software technologies are one day going to be commoditised. It's a complex combination of economic and technical factors. Matloff pisses me off with his over simplification.
As broadband becomes a reality and colloborative development tools become more sophisticated, you will undoubtedly see a lot of companies re-locating jobs to wherever it makes business sense. The greatest threat is not H1B - you are gonna' get sided by technology.
Till date, I have never seen any hard numbers on the number of Ameircan programmers thrown out of their job due to the H1B program.
or maybe just in your neck of the woods
for the first time in my life i cant find a (programming) job
Good people are always in short supply. Are there H1B types that are bettern than the average American developer - of course there are! However, that isn't the full story.
Firstly, the major reason that companies want to use H1B types is not for the good developers, but for the cheaper developers. I read somewhere that two thirds of the H1B applications are from 3 companies (e.g. Tata in India with a presence stateside). That's a form of oligopoly there. Their clients are not the smaller companies or startup shops that want good skills. Their clients are the Fortune 1000 that want lots of average developers at below average costs.
These developers get paid half of American developers sometimes and few benefits besides. The middleman charges only 2/3 of what it would cost the Fortune 1000 company to pay an American resident (citizen or permanent resident) and usually the middleman's contract with the import employee is that he cannot quit and cannot work for any other company in the United States for some period of time after completion of the contract.
This situation is the single situation IMHO that will create the high tech union if any. Help these H1Bs get their rights (including freedom to switch jobs and equitable salaries) etc and you will see the demand for additional H1Bs go down as well as less American residents losing their jobs.
You won't know you haven't spent enough on defense until you lose a war - Thatcher
get their real life coding experience in Elbonia? Employers seem to think -- why? -- that they come to the job with years of U.S. business experience.
Is it the B.S. CompSci + RL experience that you all are looking for, or is it cheap programmers?
As for training full-timers, it's my experience and that of a lot of the posters here as well that training isn't in the cards for them either, which leads to the question: who the hell is getting trained??
In a more useful vein, I recall about eight years ago or so, a group of companies decided to alleviate the coder shortage in a new way. They hired... classical musicians. And trained them in basic coding (C++, COBOL, whatever). And guess what? They proved to be excellent coders. Good memory and the ability to think in patterns (I was a sketch artist once, for instance) let them adapt easily. Such a program would never fly today due to the arrogance and bullheaded stupidity of IT people, management and programmers alike.
Teaching pseudocode takes an hour. Teaching C takes a week of pretty damned easy lessons. If you start with people who can think, and believe it or not, most can, you can make an adequate coder in a month. A good one in a few months, and excellent one in a year.
Programming is blocked by barriers to entry that are getting sillier all the time. Mathematics is the least silly, but frankly, what the hell do most coders use differential calc for? Why is it required? Object based code is machine friendly, but is a bear for a human to think in.
The social blocks are the geek clubbiness and arrogance of IT itself. School snobbery. Class affectations. Disdain for age, no matter how it's cloaked in the excuse that the programmer is not "currrent" -- of course they are not "current", if by "current" you mean they graduated in your class. Guess what? Programming ain't changed all that much, and won't in the future either. Another huge, HUGE block to entering IT is the adamant self-interest motivated refusal of the industry to train people. I find it hard to think of examples of other lines of business that won't hire people unless they are sprung full-grown from their father's brow. It's impossible. Workers should be grown into jobs. But the circular non-logic driving the industry of we-don't-train-we-want-experience will grind it slowly into the mud.
Question: The industry dismisses concerns about older programmers by claiming that those programmers' experience is in COBOL, a language popular in the 1960s and 1970s but radically different from the languages used today. Is this true?
Virtually none of the older programmers I talk to around the nation who have trouble finding programming work are COBOL people. Their experience is in the C programming language. Java and C++, two of the hottest languages today, are extensions of the C language.
The industry lobbyists then claim that the C language is not enough, asserting that Java and C++, with their ``object-oriented programming'' (OOP) philosophy, represent an ``abrupt change in the paradigms of programming.'' This is simply false. Those of us ``dinosaurs'' who have been programming since way back in the days of punched cards have heard claims of ``abrupt paradigm changes'' many times as programming languages have evolved over the years. The claims have always simply been hype. Programming is programming is programming, and it has always been a straightforward matter to quickly become productive in a new language.
Question: Since the issue of specific programming skills issue is central, is the solution to increase government or private training programs?
No, this is absolutely the wrong ``solution,'' for these reasons:
Any competent programmer can pick up a new software skill on his/her own, on the job, without formal instruction.
The training programs are for technicians, not programmers, and thus are not achieving their stated purpose of reducing the industry's usage of H-1Bs. This is not a ``career path'' issue. Technicians do not later become programmers. The two jobs are unrelated, just a computer technician at a magazine would not become a writer, a lighting technician in a theater would not become an actor, etc.
Even if retraining programs were to focus on programmers instead of technicians, they would be useless. Employers are not willing to hire a veteran programmer who has taken a course in a new software skill. They want actual work experience.
My Opinion:
I am currently working on a military contract and I am currently in C-- hell! This is the second time in my career when I have worked on a project that was a 'first OOP effort'. Both times I have seen large amounts of unbelievably bloated and convoluted code produced by programmers who didn't get the OOP paradigm. If you think I'm kidding hear this: We're building a surface ship combat system. There are more than 7,000 classes defined for this project and NO object named "ship", or "weapon", or "sensor"...
I don't mean to be pessimistic but, frankly, many of the people I'm working with will never make the paridigm shift to OOP. Some of them don't want to try. But many of them are so ingrained in structured techniques that even after 2 years of training and working on this project they still don't get it.
--Richard
Correct link
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
There are boatloads of people working in the IT field with job titles such as "Product Manager", "Product Planner" or anything that has to do with marketing. These jobs are especially numerous in the dot com sector. These people rake in lots of dough and perform jobs that require less than high school diploma. These are people that are reported being getting laid off everyday on fuckedcompany.com, not programmers. We still need real programmers.
xxx straight edge xxx
Hello
This subject has been debated endlessly on USENET, in the letters column of business and computer magazines, and so many other places that I'm surprised to see it mentioned on Slashdot.
In the early '90's, I was working at a software company that was growing and had openings for programmers, and inbetween interviews, the founder turned to me and said "American programmers are too expensive, so I'm only going to hire foreigners from now on" (or words to that effect, this was almost a decade ago). After that, I personally started calling the corner or the building where all the development staff were located "Little Europe" because I heard more Russian and Bulgarian than English spoken around me. And I don't think any one of them worked less than 80-90 hours a week.
What companies are bemoaning is a lack of cheap-yet-highly-skilled labor. They wish to produce complex products, but do not wish to pay for the skill and experience required to create them.
Want to see the shortage of programmers disappear overnight? Increase H-1B fees so it costs more for a temporary foreign worker than a domestic one, and make sponsorship non-exclusive, so that the person brought in can take a job elsewhere in 90 days. If there really was a shortage of domestic programmers, then companies would be willing to pay that premium, and they'd have to pay those workers a decent salary to keep them from going to an employer that doesn't view their H-1B's as indentured servants.
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
Dexter is a good dog.
In the UK, the IT job market seems to be pretty dire, but it's been recently publicised that a lot of companies are making their contract IT staff unemployed in favour of programmers from India, who are obviously going to be a lot cheaper.
All I can seem to get at the moment are odd jobs for a few weeks at a time, and as far as my home area is concerned, there's just no IT work whatsoever.
There isn't a skill shortage at all. It's just that UK employees are considered as too expensive for UK businesses. (I know it's not the US, but let's be honest, most UK offices are just regional satellites of US companies)
M.
of course, if you substitute "deutch" for "english", you get a series of blank pages thar are slightly more informative.
---
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
so, um, who's been moderating on crack? How is this troll?
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Plenty of companies in many cities (not just here in SF) are currently firing key personnel and replacing them with sales and marketing people because they believe that that's going to save their company; these companies have too much technology and not enough sales. In a few short months, these same companies are going to realize that there's noone to support the technology that they're selling.
I believe that this will cause a large hiring blitz soon.
C'mon, that's called "Brooks's Law", and was written more than 25 years ago in Frederick Brooks's book "The Mythical Man-Month". It's a classic that still is a "must read", and your comment shows you have not done so. Do yourself a big favour: Read it.
From Fatbrain:
The added chapters contain a crisp condensation of all the propositions asserted in the original book, including Brooks central argument in The Mythical Man-Month:
Yup, that was evident when I went to your website and I only got this:
I suggest that you are both right... er, correct. Programmers are thinking beings, and modify their viewpoints as new information and ideas are absorbed and analyzed.
They also tend to have a lot of holes in their historical/sociological knowledge and are swayed easily by single sources and unverified facts.
--
Somebody mod Spyder's post up!
This is exactly what I have seen while working in the tech industry for the last 4 years. The number one unwritten hiring requirement that I have seen, either while interviewing or being interviewed, has been this:
find someone with the right experience and skills, but NEVER hire anyone with enough experience and skills to question stupid management decisions.
This pervasive mentality relegates people to maybe a 10 year lifespan within the industry, if you play your cards right. Beyond that, you are more of a threat than a benefit to most organizations. I have seen VERY qualified people turned down simply because they were not "fresh" enough, or because they did not spend every waking hour learning the "next new newest thing" at their last job. Most times, the reasons for management needing the next "new newest thing" is because management made poorly conceived business decisions that were badly considered, and then think that if they throw the latest technology at the problem, then any solution from it will dig them out of the hole that they created for themselves. Most hiring requirements are handed down based on this model, even if the tech staff are the ones who define the requirements.
This creates a culture of enforced idiocy through inexperience. So long as the candidate can concentrate only on FOO skillset, and has had a year or two playing with FOO toys on someone else's check, then they are hirable. Anyone who has more than that skill, or isn't willing to atrophy themselves to become a one trick FOO pony is out of the running. After a few years, the people hired to do FOO are in a nasty mess...looking over their shoulders, wondering if they get the axe if they will ever find another job again, because they are now "not fresh".
Moreover, even if these people DID go after FOO skill, and then the latest BAR skill, they become skilled to a point where managers won't want to touch them, either because someone that experienced will push back when management makes another "business logic" gaffe, or because their skills are too "generalized" now. That person, with years of experience with FOO and BAR and SNA and FU will probably not be able to respond as quickly to highly specialized questions like "if we use this subset of the fifth element of the structural call for FOO, explain how that would work in the OSI model, from beginning to end of the process within, oh, this model"(said model being what their own FOO specialists had difficulty with last week).
The person who has been a FOO monkey for the last year will stick the question first try...the person with years of experience will sit back and have to sift through their knowledge to possibly come up with an answer, but the experienced one just blew the interview because they didn't respond quickly enough, or couldn't come up with exactly the answer the interviewer was looking for. Likely, the business doesn't need a FOO expert at all, but management decided to "move the business in a new direction" and preferred the instant gratification of hiring an atrophied specialist who will have the unfortunate effect of tying the business down to a single model for fulfilling their end goals. Someone more experienced would question such things, and would also provide a more flexible model, but that would be at the expense of upper management having the appearance of "being questioned" in their decisions and "shown up". What a shame.
mrgoat
'Hail Eris, baby, hail Eris...pfffffffttt.' *cough* 'Yeah.'
Yeah, you read right, although it isn't quite as bad as an H1-B. The main reason we have the "Greencard"[sic] is because all the German programmers split to the US and UK to make better money for generally the same work. Of course, they usually come back home after a couple years because they miss a number of benefits and protections (like workers' protections, health insurance, 30 days' holiday instead of 10 [and usually none the first year in the US], good beer and a sensible government system not yet owned by corporations, to name a few).
Germany also put other restrictions on the Greencard, including proof of abilities and a minimum salary of DM 100,000 (around US$ 45,000 right now). They also don't give employers the rights of some god; the visa-holder here is not some sort of indentured servant. That's sociual democracy for ya.
Another more important difference here in the Reich is that the population is not sustainable. People are having a lot fewer babies and having them later. There simply ain't enough people, and this is a growing problem in most European countries.
I'm a Yank, but live here for a lot of reasons I won't go into. Paid my dues, did my time (USN, DOL, FERC), paid my taxes and Social Insecurity.
By the way: unlike private industry, the government believes in a training budget!
The US gov't provides little training outside the military, unless you lie on your application for a job and get it anyway. It used to be that you had to take a civil service exam and actually prove you knew basic things. Trying to get a simple GS-3 secretarial job? You needed to take a typing test. Not anymore, and not for some time. It's "discrimination". Really. If someone can bullshit his way through an interview and get the job being totally incompetent, the US generally can't fire him/her (also "discrimination": that's where the training comes in. I wish I was joking. Dad was a federal judge and dealt with this.
Oh yeah, I'm working for a YooEss company (but no visa through them, I'm permanent here on my own). The pay could be better, but we're "entitled" to training. We can only fly steerage (a.k.a. "ecomony") though; even managers don't get business class. Ppfththt.
woof.
Last year I had 41 paid days off, not including sick days.
Experienced hiring managers learn to be able to pick people who can make the grade (or more accurately, a large proportion of those who can't) just by reading the resume. They don't need to pull them in for an interview to find out they won't make it, because they'll know.
I even tested this once by accepting all candidates in a run for an interview, even though my judgement on the resumes was that they wouldn't be up to scratch. They could tick every box, but every resume either had something or lacked something that led me to believe they wouldn't make it.
Not one of them made it.
When I'm being more selective about who I interview, about one in three makes it.
So not being called in for an interview doesn't mean there's no shortage of competent people - it may simply mean the person's resume gives them away out of the gate.
And these don't exist in the U.S.? Where have you been? It's called the HOV lane, and yes, there are cities that have roads for buses only. The greenie-weenies are already getting a foothold here, don't you fret.
Yeah, maybe doctors and lawyers should be willing to work for less, too. They get paid too much, IMHO. What a ridiculous notion...it's law of supply and demand. If programmers are in short supply, then they should be paid accordingly. The H1-B system is completely artificial and skewed in the company's favor. If there was a true shortage, then companies should lobby for giving out citizenship to those that are needed - not some short-term indentured servitude.
I would subscribe that in the end, it costs just as much time and money to keep your skills on the bleeding edge over a long career of programming as it does for doctors and lawyers. Okay, maybe not as much, but even so, who's to say that some industry's standard rate is too high?
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT. Things may be worse in SV, I can't speak for that, but I live in Denver, and things ain't so pretty here, either. TONS of layoffs. One headhunter a friend talked to is obviously feeling a bit high and mighty: she said, "A year ago, I posted a Java position, I got almost no responses, so I had to throw money at people, 120K was not uncommon. Now, I post a job position, and get 500 resumes!" So, people that had to do a little dance before are now able to pick and choose...and being assholes about it, too...if I lose my current job, and end up at one of these places, when the market takes an upturn, I'd turn the tables on them as soon as possible, and nearly anyone else would, too. I imagine some come-uppances will be in order a few months/years down the road....
Same with the East Coast (PA, NJ, D.C. area), from what I hear. Almost no one is willing to pay relo fees right now, because they can find local talent almost anywhere they are. A friend of mine who wanted to relocate to the northeast (Maine/Vermont, etc) said one headhunter told him that "if you're not from this area, there is no reason to even send your resume."
I've also noticed that an awful lot of local postings specifically say they WILL NOT accept H1-B's at this time. Which is a good thing, IMHO. At least local workers aren't totally screwed at finding a job if they lose their current one. If we didn't have so many glutting the market in the first place, it might not be so hard finding a job right now, though.
All I can say to this is: "yep". It's been tried. And it would have been similar to auto industry if it worked. But it has not. I was at a client that tried to outsource nearly the entire project to Pakistan. What a complete and utter trainwreck...yeah, the rates are cheap, but when you end up with a product that doesn't do what you want, and doesn't even do what you don't want right, what's the point? That's where I came in. I was a local contractor. Myself and others got the project back on track in the short term by doing what the project was supposed to do. Initially, I was only supposed to be there for a 2-3 months, but it ended up being six. In the meantime, they hired all-American team (though some were foreign-born, they had green card or citizenship) and started down the right path. Just ask them how well it went. And don't think they didn't try to do the things to head off problems. Every time H1-B cap-raising comes up, this spectre is always raised by companies or those representing companies. It's bullshit, don't believe it for a second...if they could do this, they already would have.
I strongly disagree with your disagreement. I am still relatively young, but I think a lot of older programmers are simply cut out of the picture for ageism, and for no other reason. If you want to pay younger programmers higher wages while rejecting resumes from older programmers, that's your choice, but don't pretend it's based on any facts. It's just your prejudice...but don't feel bad, you're not alone in your ageism, apparently.
I also think that someone who is good at problem-solving in general, and has had experience overall in programming (many different languages) can pick up any new acronym the industry is currently hyping. Really. Think about it - HR won't pass a resume on because someone knows Java/C/Pascal, but oops, they don't have XML on there. Wow, that's hard stuff there. Or, oops, they have Java but not EJB on there. Oooh, rocket science. You can't tell me that, beyond OO, things have changed THAT much. And even OO is not too difficult to grasp the basic concepts, if one is given half the chance.
Oh, then there's Yourdon who cites some studies about programmers and the productivity they have: the ONLY correlation between productivity and anything they could measure was the number of languages a programmer knew: the more, the better.
An older programmer is likely to have used more languages over the course of his career, no?
Erm. And that is exactly my point. We SHOULD allow as many QUALIFIED people become citizens, and let the market decide. Because they will have more leverage (and would be more likely to spend more here, since they know they can stay), I would imagine the situation would be better overall. Not necessarily for the companies in the SHORT run, but overall, I would think everyone would benefit. Foreign workers would certainly not be getting raped financially. And companies would be less likely to ask ridiculous hours and weekends from its employees, because no one has a stay in the country that is hinging on staying the company's good favor.
My point about the doctors and lawyers was that someone was arbitrarily saying that programmers are overpaid. I can select any profession and say that I think they are overpaid. That doesn't necessarily mean there should be a gov't program to artificially depress those salaries.
Geez. Couldn't said it better myself. This is just a "me too" post saying that I couldn't agree more. Mod this mother up!!!!
My advice: get another job as soon as is humanly possible. That project is DOOMED. You don't want to be involed with any code like that. It will make your brain hurt looking at some of the terrible code.
Project/specwise: trying to communicate across time zones and whatnot is hard enough w/o the cultural differences. This has nothing to do with racism. This has to do with other factors besides that. Any white programmers working for $10 hour would be churning out a real cluster-fuck, as well....and there is simply no way that won't happen in your case. I guarantee it. I've seen it, and in the case I saw, the client made all kinds of efforts to head off these kinds of problems, and THEY STILL HAPPENED. And it was a relatively small project. And those programmers were getting $20 an hour...I can't imagine what will happen for $10. It was the biggest chunk of shite code I've ever seen, even though initial design was really good (done by people at company, not offshore). Guess what happened? The client hired me and another contractor to work on fixing it while they got rid of offshore team, and hired perms that were competent AND PAID WELL.
In the end, it was not at all impressive from a business standpoint. If you are still there in a year, I think you will probably agree with me. It was an idiotic business decision, and I know for a fact that the client regretted ever doing it in the first place. It probably cost them tons of $$$ to turn it around, and probably even much more immeasurable $$$ because time-to-market was thrown way off track.
There are people who are good software engineers. There are people who aren't. The issue with the industry in general is that there's too bloody many of the latter, usually because "there's good money in IT". I know a lot of VERY good software engineers. It's in their blood, it's what they DO, it's what God put them on this planet for. And they spend their entire lives fixing the crap that the others cause.
/.? Because I'm waiting for a compile to finish, because the makefile is so badly written it might as well not dependency check, but I'm not allowed to fix it because it's "complicated"
/believe/ in what they're doing, in gaining justice or representing their clients and so on, but they're drowned out by hordes of people who are there because it's either be a lawyer or watch Oprah and being a lawyer buys bigger BMWs.
/stop/ writing or drawing or talking. The others regard it as a chore to do anything like thinking.
Here I am, I'm a damn good software engineer. Why am I posting to
It might well be complicated to people who don't do this stuff in their sleep, that's not a reason to not let the rest of us work.
All around me I see people who don't really want to do this. They're here for the money. They're talking about football, or beer or just about anything rather than getting on with being a software engineer. Because being a software engineer is what they put in the box on the credit card application forms and that's all.
They don't really want to do it, so they don't do it well. It's just a job. I bet there are people at MacDonalds that actually WANT to work in the fast food industry and it must drive them nuts that most of the people around them only smile at the customers because if they don't they get fired.
There must be lawyers who really
Most of the people in the IT industry are doing the bare minimum to get by without being fired, and that, unfortunately, includes the interviewers...
I ask an interview question I admit to stealing from someone else: "We're going to write a computer simulation of Monopoly. Talk me through the sorts of classes you'd build."
There's no correct answer. But going "huh?" or aimlessly flailing gets you a fail. {Actually this was flummuxed once by a chap who was from Eygpt and had never played Monopoly... Since he was the strongest candidate out of the group otherwise he was hired...}
Other results? People destined to be VB programmers (and other low life forms) start talking about arrays of names of squares.
Proper OO developers start saying things like "there's a board, it's got squares... some of them are ownable and they charge rent, some of the ownables can be built on.. squares are an abstract base they have a successor to move to, ownable extends square for squares with a price, street extends ownable, station extends ownable.." Then they ask for a bigger sheet of paper.
I'm not that interested in exactly what they do. I'm just interested in the process. The people I want around me get excited when someone asks them to do something vaguely challenging and the trick becomes getting them to
"First of all, it is impossible to look "10 times:" better than someone."
I don't have any trouble believing that is true for you
"I suspect the only real skill you have is speaking english."
Even you don't believe your own bullshit. Everyone has more than one skill. And if you'd like to try my Engineering knowledge out feel free. I gather you're one of those idiots that will try to see if I'm a good engineer by testing my knowledge of your favorite language, but I'd welcome a real engineering question, if you have a friend who might know one.
"I'll take someone who can learn new things over someone who has skillz any day."
And your clearly enough of an idiot that you think these two things are mutually exclusive. I got news for you. The 10% to 20% of the people who belong in this field wouldn't dream of going a day without learning several new things. And this will come as a surprise to you, I can see, but the more new things I learn, the more skilz I have. It's complicated I know, and the correlation is clearly very difficult for you to see, but it is there, I assure you.
And finally, of course, you are clearly one of the people I was talking about or you would have agreed with me. So bugger off now, will you! Probably not. You're too stupid to see how stupid you really are! 8^&
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I estimate that approximately 80% to 90% of the people in Software don't belong here. Why are they here? It's simple. When they went to the local school and told them that they want to learn Software because they heard it pays well, their counselor didn't bat an eyelash!
When people ask me if they should get 'into computers' (because they heard it pays well) I tell them this:
"If you don't love it, don't bother. If your in it for the money, you'll never be any good at it. In order to be a good engineer of any kind it has to be in your blood. If you're doing it for the money you'll never be any good at it. If you are a natural, you don't do it for the money; the money just follows"
Unfortunately, I am responsible enough to do this, but your average 'American Joe' who takes a job as a counselor doesn't see a problem with getting into a career for the money, even if he/she didn't choose their career path for the money. It's the American way. Unfortunately, the result of all this is the current state of Engineering in America today 8^{
The good news? I look 10 times better when compared to 'the average.' Still, every time I hear someone proudly call themselves a 'programmer', I shudder. These people are often performing the Software Engineering function, and they still don't know that programming is only about 20% to 40% of the puzzle. Scary!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Programmers are thinking beings, and modify their viewpoints as new information and ideas are absorbed and analyzed.
First comes The Wheel of conservatism, liberalism, and totalitarianism. The programmer may spend a single cycle on the Wheel or many, and the ride may be uneven. But ride it he must.
The next stage is a move away from the wheel, a move incomprehensible to those still traveling on the wheel. This departure may take the form of libertarianism or some other similar enlightenment. The programmer will probably find this stage much more comfortable than the Wheel, and may tarry long here.
Woah, what drug were you on when you wrote that? The "wheel" you describe, or the standard left/right political spectrum, never was a valid classification system and was replaced decades ago by the nolan chart. (Note that this has little to do with charting one's preference for a democratic/republic/dictatorship system of government.)
The final stage is, of course, The Void.
Oh, I see. You were trying to be funny.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I'll be blunt. If you interview with me, you will get a set of (usually four or five) very obscure questions. They usually come from obscure mathematics (one of my favorites comes from fractional graph theory), though none of them require any more math than a typical programmer has to understand. They've been printed up (everyone gets exactly the same questions), and I hand them to you one at a time.
If you give up or get frustrated at me asking the questions, you fail. I've never had the opportunity to pick and choose my problems when I'm working.
On the other hand, I want to see how they respond to the questions. I ask them to talk aloud, to explain how they think through problems that they've (likely) never seen before. If they need a reference to look things up, I provide it. I want to see how far along paths they go, whether they try two or three different solutions at the same time, and what tools they apply to solving the problem. I want to see whether they stop at the first answer that 'looks right', or whether they're willing to go deeper. I want to see whether they can question their initial assumptions.
Good luck if you hit another 'alpha programmer' like me.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
In my book, the answers from best to worst are:
Only the last two of those is a failure.
In this field, no one can or will know everything. Period. It's really important to me to know how people will respond to situations that they're not familiar with.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
That's an interesting concept.
Could elaborate a bit?
This Norman Matloff fellow is not interested in programmers. Put his name into Google and find an array of anti-immigration articles and sites. It seems that this person is just a hard core protectionist worried about them dang forners takin' jobs from honest 'muricans.
Yes, I agree that a complete 'open borders' policy won't work - you need an element of difficulty in entry to ensure that you deny entry to those least able to contribute to your society.
You're also correct that wages are low in those sectors where unskilled foreigners undercut natives - but are you aware of what would happen if they disappeared? The rising cost of their wages, plus the knock-on effect to the cost of all other services would send inflation through the roof - I don't see Mr. Greenspan being too happy about that. Cheap foreign labour is one of those dirty little things that people love to take shots at, but the simple fact is that most industrialised countries rely on it economically.
All that aside, the point I was trying to make in my post was mainly one that my company can't get people with my skillset from US citizens - and despite some serious efforts to encourage engineers to develop in that manner, have been fairly unsuccesful. Not because the job doesn't pay well (my field/experience is $80-100k+) but because it's hard, and business/finance/law are easier (though more tedious) and pay better. Now while you argue that if there was no foreign labour engineer wages would rise, people simply won't pay for engineering services the same way they do for bankers and lawyers. It comes back to people willing to pay the going rate - and in these cases they simply aren't.
Your last point "sunk cost of having lived here up til now" I don't think holds up. While you've probably paid more for your education (mine was 'free', thanks to the taxpaying of my parents etc), what you should remember, that most people here take for granted, is *that you were born an American (and probably middle class) and that gives you massive advantages and opportunities most people in the world will never see*. An American co-worker of mine brings this up all the time - Americans wasting the opportunities afforded them by chance of birth, while some foreigners will sweat blood to get those opportunities, and the best response the US can come up with is to deny entry to the foreigners rather than improve their own attitude.
My final point about racism is one I'm not sure about myself. There certainly is an element of it, since I seem to be an 'acceptable foreigner' due to my skin colour, first language English, and being from a nation with the closest cultural ties to the US outside North American continent (ouch, that's a putdown for any culture!) - while Indians of equal caliber are often the butt of jokes from people that find me acceptable. If all H1Bs were like me, do you think there'd be the same problem?
And a final point - if these people really are talented and want to work here, aren't you better off with them doing it in the US at a comparable salary, rather than staying at home and charging 10% the going US rate for work contracted out to them?
While I know the article is aimed at programming jobs, people need to be aware that not all H1B workers are in programming - some are in other fields too. I'm an H1B from the UK employed in engineering - consultancy in design and simulation of systems involving wave propagation (waveguides for example). It's a small company, I get along well with everyone, like the work and they treat me well, and pay above the minimum required for an H1B (yes, there is a minimum that's a decent amount, which isn't mentioned in this topic often).
So why didn't my company get in a US worker to do the job I do? Simple - there isn't anyone with the skills required available. How do I know this? Because I work with all the people in the US that have this skill set (other companies) and they aren't available - and there's not a lot of them either.
My company has worked closely with several US universities over the last few years, supporting at minimal costs research groups and teaching courses, in an attempt to foster skill sets in the next generation of engineers in our field. What happens? The US students don't carry on in engineering, because it's too hard. They can make more money with less effort in business and law. The people that do run with the ball are either the 'very focussed' or the foreign students (either here or in their native countries).
And don't slam the H1B people for lowering your salary - that's a government restriction and with a loosening of those the bargaining power increases, and so do your wages. I find it amusing that in the land of the free market, people are advocating restricting trade (the selling of skills). Things need to be more free, not more regulated. I pay a lot of tax, a lot of social security I'll likely never see and contribute to the bottom line of my company in a big way.
Also, while there will always be stories about the crap foreign worker who couldn't do what he claimed, remember that most H1Bs are talented people in their field with the 'get up and go' to move halfway around the world. You're likely getting the benefits of someone who's in the top few % of ability in their own country, and has been educated at zero cost to you (talk about a bargain!). I suppose that's quite something to compete with, so maybe you'd just better keep them out so you don't have to.
This whole topic smacks to me of the racism I saw at home when the economy took a downturn - 'damn foreigners coming in here and stealing our jobs', when these were the people doing the jobs natives wouldn't do (clean toilets, sweep streets) or providing services everyone else wants (24 hour shops), working damn hard for not much money. While there are genuine concerns about abuses of the system (abusive companies need to be the target, not H1Bs) - don't let man's 'baser insticts' and fear rule attitudes.
While you may deny there is racism in any way here, look at some of the phrasing of sentences talking about Indians and eastern Europeans. 'These damn Indians taking a job from an honest hard-working American!'. Try replacing Indian with 'Jew' or 'Black' and see how it sounds. And I doubt you realise how often otherwise liberal people say this sort of thing - I've been in groups of educated Americans as they bitch about foreign workers and how they're just leeches etc - I pipe up with 'damn foreigners throw them all out of our country' and they agree. Only a few realise the irony that I'm a foreigner too. Why? Because I'm white and English is my first language.
... cheap labor.
I am a senior programmer/analyst who was displaced by H1-B visa holder. And it was simply done because of money - I spent four years with the company and earned numerous awards, and even letters of glowing accomodation from the CEO of a Fortune 20 company. I have found new work, but it's been at cost to what I could normally make in a free market, as opposed to one that is artificially restricted - sure H1-B visa holders can change jobs, but for many, that would start the clock over on the time for green card - so they toil like Joseph worked to gain a wife in the old testament, waiting for their 5 or 6 or 7 years, or whatever the mark is now. Others in my same predicament have opted for early retirement (if they could afford it - I sure couldn't ;(), and others are working as lifeguards and waiters while they scour the job market for a position that will most likely only pay 60-80% of what they were earning.
The new model is to "offshore" the coding support and development - 50% of the programmers are in India, and 50% are comprised mostly of H1-B Visa holders. It's not about quality - it's about cost. Nobody cares about quality until an application system has been down for three days straight, or some nasty lawsuit is filed by a disgruntled and angry customer. The visa holder is hardly qualified - in fact, in many instances he/she is handed a manual on the plane ride over to the U.S.. Some newcomers are very bright and catch on quickly and become competent programmers. But in many cases, it simply isn't so and even the brightest imports are not a substitute for a skilled programmer that has 10+ years working on a particular platform. There are things that take me minutes to figure out that will take that person days ... it is not bragging, it's just things become second-nature to you after you've been seasoned by enough firewalks.
I realize most of my career experience has been in the realm of mainframe computing - I've worked on old Burroughs mainframes, VAX, PDP, and most all of the large IBM mainframe series - I can look back to a day when my manager was just like me, only more experienced. We would get together at lunchtime, sandwich in the mouth, and scribble out solutions to development problems, and brainstorm on satisfying customer demand. Nowdays, my manager is more likely to be some MBA type or worst, Sociology major that has no clue of large systems or the craft of programming and/or systems development. All that matters is cost. It really drove it home in my last contract when I would stroll in to work after a couple of days vacation, then see a problem that hadn't been solved for 2-3 days - I would nail it in less than a few hours. Am I a genius? No. I just knew where to look, and could ask the right questions. Maybe this is more exaggerated because most of my professional experience, like I stated, has been working on esoteric mainframes. But I am guessing it's not dramatically different that someone that read a book on Perl and cranked out a few home-brewed scripts vs. someone who's been developing and supporting enterprise level Perl code for 5+ years.
And the kicker is that we won't realize the grevious errors of this strategy until 5-10 years from now. Then, all of the system "experts" that were retained to guide and coach the newcomers will be gone - retired. And the raw youth that they trained will migrate on to the next "bodyshop" that pays a little more than the paltry wages they received before they got their green card.
It used to be that when we were faced with a shortage of talented programming professionals in the past, firms would actively recruit from the operational side - sure, not all those who toiled as computer operators or customer service reps and wanted to be a programmer possessed the necessary skill. But they were tested, the best then enrolled into a rigirous training program that prepared them for a new career. It was a win-win scenario for the company and the individuals who bootstrapped themselves into a better position. Those days are gone - now, American programmers are discarded and foreign H1-B visa holders are imported and/or the work is sent overseas. What message does that send to the youth of U.S.A.? I'm sure some wiseenheimer will retort that there are still individuals that rise above these obstacles and environmental challenges and succeed in spite. To which I respond - telling me that just because 0.5% of the population can do it, so can the other 99.5% is bunk. This shouldn't be about Darwinism, it should be about investing in our youth.
Listening to a local talk radio show, where the host was an auto mechanic - he described his surprise at encountering all of the "computer types" that seemed to have jobs that pay not much more than a "general help" position - it baffled him that the salary of educated professionals paled in comparison to the mechanics in his shop. I guess our lot is to be the same as the predicament of teachers today ...
AZspot
Consider yourself lucky not to work there...
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Canadian living in USA after failed bid at a .com looking for work. I had it good i.e.had them pay for my move down plus about 50k bonus (one time) for the move, rent for the first year, and cashed in my stock options at a profit.) Also got green cards out of the deal. Dunno wtf people are complaining about.
By no means was my experience "substandard" in any way.
Compared to where I and many other's came from, the USA paid really well - compared to where I came from and where others came from, the $ they earn in the states will be a definite improvement on their lifestyle in the old country.
Fine, perhaps they aren't being paid the average salary, but when you calculate moving, the green cards (i.e. pay lawyers, lots of lawyers), the rent, the bonuses, etc...) and they get substancially more $ than they would have back home.
The States isn't awesome in every way, it just has lower taxes and a higher standard of living than the majority of countries in the world.
Too bad the media doesn't cover any foreign news with the exception of when the us is bombing iraq..
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I personally know 3 H1-B programmers who were laid off by their first employer and had to scramble around and find a job quickly or be deported. They complained to me about being "indentured servants" but I didn't understand at the time. You can figure out that they didn't bargain too hard when applying for their next job, either.
Those few people we really need to bring in should be given green cards or have similar workers rights. It's a matter of respect for them and for our own workers.
You are also missing his main point. The difference between domestic and H1-B workers is price, not quality.
There is no advantage to having American companies get the business: When they are just wrappers around foreign countries. When foreign workers get the professional experience and skills. When the money is repatriated overseas. When these skilled people are eventually sent back home. When skilled American programmers are unemployed.
Perhaps the worst documented effect of the excess of H1-B visas is that the lowered income of software engineers is discouraging college students from majoring in Tech fields, slowing us down in the long run.
In a free-market economy, there is no such thing as a shortage, just a rise in prices. Bringing in cheap imports just discourages domestic production, whether it be of steel or knowledge workers.
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I18N == Intergalacticization
I've already seen want-ads requiring experience in C# programming -- no other knowledge will substitute! Managers do not know how to recruit and keep software engineers, so they punt and try to hire cheap workers with the exact precise experience in the exact job they are hiring for.
The root problem is probably that managers don't have enough experience in software development themselves.
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I18N == Intergalacticization
In a free-market economy, there is no such thing as a shortage, just a rise in prices. Bringing in cheap imports just discourages domestic production, whether it be of steel or software engineers.
--
I18N == Intergalacticization
2. We can't find any skilled coders.
Hello? Does anyone else see the correlation here? Skill is the product of talent and experience. Talent comes from God Almighty in precious little doses, but experience comes with age.
The skilled coder you can't find is probably one of the ones you dumped because his salary was just a little too high. Now you'll pay double his salary in recruitment costs and receive nothing productive in return.
You would think even an MBA could understand this.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
They never show the real "IT" people on the TV commercials. Yeah, I'd like to see them show a Real Programmer's cubicle. With loads of old drives, disks, PCI/ISA/EISA/VLB cards, prototype boards, cables piled all over his desk amidst the empty soda and slurpee cups; stacks of now useless code printouts filling most of his desk; with several sheets of scribbled notes shoved under his keyboard; the Belldandy wallpaper on his desktop; the safari shorts, 3-5 year old tennis shoes and black T-shirt that's frazzled around the neck and sleeves and should've been thrown away 2 years ago; the sci-fi and anime related posters all over the wall, while he wears headphones listening to a real audio stream of Rush Limbaugh; yes, the typical programmer is far to the political Right despite the popular "counterculture" image of tech people on TV. Note, though that this is not "wrong" nor counts against the programmer; a few programming charts (esp. the 'C' order of operations precedence list); the various goodies (pens, Linux bumper stickers, yo-yos) from many Comdex's past. The bad-burn CDs and line printer stuff pinned up as some kind of obscure nouveau art. The "ACHTUNG! Alles Lookenpepers" sign lifted from the jargon file near the cubicle's entrance; And a 'combat' cartridge from the Atari 2600 mounted on the cubicle wall to honor the profession's past; and of course several running computers with at least two monitors switched by switchboxes with flakey contacts so the video jitters on the red gun unti you wiggle the knob; At least one monitor with Slashdot displayed in any browser except IE. THESE are the Real Programmers who have been around long enough to remember entire teamd of long since fired "IT staff". He may be kinda wierd, but he can do the magic over and over and over and will be with the company forever until he can retire at 40.
This information is somewhat old, in that it's been available for quite some time and I think I first heard about it on slashdot quite some time ago. In fact I used it, reference to it, in a communication to the EU regarding research on whether or not software should be patentable.
I'm seeing more and more things, articles, computers, etc.. become recycled and this suggest or provides evidence that the industry has reached the rim of it's holder and is now overflowing, becomming wasteful.
Even the subject matter of the article has become somewhat outdated, given the number of layoffs and tech market stock fall.
If there is anything to be seen in that article, it's an example of recognizing deception in the computer industry, only it touches some surface level possibilities, it doesn't go deeper.
The point is, maybe there is a public awarness growing that doesn't need to be spoken. Awareness that the computer industry is filled with far more hype and misinformation than otherwise. And this awareness is a turnoff. Such a turnoff that the consumer know it's a pointless exercize in futility to try and tell the industry this.
3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!
One thing I've found with the incoming workers is that there is a great skill disparity. While I see many boatloads of them arriving and jumping into cubicles, they go through loads of training to get anywhere near being productive; that's a cost in the time of a regular engineer(s) being away from their own projects and the time that the new hire is not producing. Another I see is that I myself am asked to travel to international offices to take care of things that my international peers do not have the expertise to take care of; travel is not cheap. They certainly are cheaper labor in the short term, but there are other costs besides salary to look at that will make them seem not quite so cheap as you first thought.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
My experience (and friends experience) thus far is this: follow-up, follow-up, follow-up. The larger the company, the slower the HR people are. If you send your resume, call them to make sure they got it. If they got your resume, go in and see if they've read it. If they've read your resume beat them over the head till they hire you. Seriously.. you might end up irritating 15% of these people but the other 85% will remember your initiative and more importantly your name and face. When sorting through 100 resumes yours will stick out and hopefully they'll call you instead of the other guy. Also, when a company says "4 years exp." they are often wishfully thinking too. If you have two years exp, give it a whirl anyway. Almost every person I have known who has gotten a job has had less exp than the employer was looking for. good luck..
I don't really buy the argument that having many, many applications means that there is no shortage.
Think of the music recording industry: There are thousands of local bands with a lot of experience and most of them are turned down by the record companies. They still put out CDs by somebody who is already a star.
There might be a few who deserve a chance, but I'm glad they spare me all those who could be "trained".
"The basic flaw with Matloff's argument is that he assumes that if foreigners don't come to the US on H1B visas, the jobs will go to US residents. That's wrong. What happens in real life is that if the foreign programmers and professionals can't come here, the jobs simply go to where the people are. Most large companies already have development labs set up all around the world and can shift resources overseas at a moment's notice and without any increase in cost. In fact, that's already what happens when potential foreign hires can't come to the US: they simply work overseas until their visas come through. "
Some of the flaws with foreign outsourcing.
1. In the time you have developed a project definition of sufficient detail for outsourcing, you could have completed the project using competent staff..
2. In the states, I stand behind my products I produce. Yes, I can be sued, in a U.S. court, if I fail to perform. Just try to get the same accountability in a foreign Jurisdictions. Same goes for NDA's, non-competes, etc. Will the foreign courts enforce it or render fair judgments? or will it based on who you know, or paid off?
3. Time to watch you IP fly out the door, and wind up in the hands of foreign competitor.
4. Lack of modern infrastructure. In the US you can ship packages and it will arrive at it destination 99.99% of the time. Good luck with 2nd/3rd world countries and the various customs problems you will encounter.
5. Protected utility monopolies can and will charge and arm and leg for even simple items. phone lines, long distance, T1 line (ouch).
6. Are the utilities reliable. Is the power up 24x7, are the phones reliable, (or do they yield busy signals 10 hours a day)?
7. Time lag issues, Management problems, Language issues.
8. Loss of insight. when a local worker often observes the issues/problems first hand, then proposes sensible solutions that can be accomplished in a realistic time frame. Very rarely is the client able to accurately describe what they really need or desire. I.E. Loss of fit, finish and function.
9. Over specificity. In order to lock down a cost of a foreign, one has a tendency too over specify the design, often locking themselves into a useless product design or solution.
10. Lack of experience in approaching problems in a modern fashion. Difference cost basis applies here, in 3rd world, labor is cheap, in the US labor is expensive(tech support, sales, etc). What type of solution will you finally get?
Any combination of the above items can conspire too ruin any foreign outsourcing relationship.
In summary, foreign IT outsourcing has been tried and tried again. Most fail or yield little long term success.
Older workers (I'm hitting the big 4-oh this year) have negatives beyond age. We often have wives and families, which mean we're unwilling to work 6-80 hour weeks and on weekends. Wives also come with children in many cases -- leading "mature" workers to want benefits like insurance and pension plans.
A couple of decades ago, having a family was a *plus* when applying for a job; it proved stability and responsibility. Today, when the average tech job lasts for a year or two (if that!), employers are more interested in cost-cutting and reducing benefit loads. Which may explain why so much software today just simply sucks...
The same force that drove manufacturing jobs -- cheap labor -- overseas will now begin to eat away at the U.S. tech industry. Someone working in Mexico or India requires a lower salaray and fewer benefits than the equivalent U.S. worker. In a world driven entirly by the collection of wealth, does it surprise anyone that tech company have foreign development shops or employ H1B indentured servants?
--
Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos
All about me
What if you are married and have children and they would like to work, too?
What if you'd *gasp* actually like to LIVE in the USA? (Remember, Chretien said *hiff yew doan like dem tax dat hi put on hevvryone den you can go to da Hyewnited States!*)
What if you'd like to work somewhere more than 11 months?
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
So, all the American Indian programmers have spoken, and have such strong words about the situation.
What about the rest of you people whose parents or grandparents immigrated here... What do you guys, the transplanted ones, think about the whole situation? If it wasn't for the fact that someone in your family tree thought that they could get a better life, and moved here to the States, and coincidentally, happened to have met someone, and a few generations afterwards, hey, here you are, where would you be?
Bloody xenophones. Bah.
-b0fh
I'm kind of surprised the article did not recommend that software companies restructure the way they go about handling software projects.
I would imagine some of these hiring problems that I read about here in Slashdot and have seen first-hand would be diminished if, as an industry, we worked more like a surgical team and less like an assembly factory (yes, a The Mythical Man-Month reference).
With such an approach, job qualifications change, making it easier for people to learn appropriate skills on the job while reducing the risk of screwing up a project.
And so it goes.
Um, Intel just closed the Costa Rica facility, laying off all workers.
It sounds to me like you were a victim of a programmer Ensuring Job Security.
if there are no other quality programmers, the in-house guy has a lock on the job...
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
There's certainly no shortage of programmer now. Yes a lot of H1-B visa people are being hired. No one has the motivation that they do. Take the Indian H1-B workers (please). In their high school they're taught every "money making" in demand program out there. American companies open up corporations in India which the only responsibility is to recruit. They come over here, making 40k a year. The average salary over there is a fraction of that. Additionally they're the hope of their town or village. Since they're the creme of the crop, they have a chip on their shoulders. In my experience their impression of American programmers aren't very high. They're a tight nit group and always network. Meanwhile, the company owns their visa, so they don't run to another job for a few dollars more, which is a rampant attribute of american programmers. So by default they're much more difficult to recruit and retain.
But then again this is how it used to be.
Right now there's so many out of work american programmers that any stable company should have their pick of all-stars. Unfortunately the layoffs and the hiring freeze has had a huge impact on H1B Visas... Most of them are being forced to go home and of course its a great shame to them. Most of the computer jobs that exist there were either at american companies, or companies that got their money from american companies that hired them for jobs. Its tougher for them than it is for us. Additionally those all-star all-americans are having enough trouble finding work, but they'll be picked before the H1-B visas. I don't think we can blame the countries that send them, and mostly its the individual that's trying for a better life, and only a small amount of blame exists on the opportunist companies, the real blame is that the stigma surrounding being a "nerd" has, for so many years preceding the boom, made the numbers of technical people drop by so much that they couldn't ramp up to produce the workers. But boom times are over and equillibrium is beginning to take place.
Same with us. We just ran a 2 month search for a programmer (large financial firm, NYC). The pay offered was great - $125/hour - so we got hundreds of applicants.
We ran 3 questions on each technical area we required - sybase, ASP, UNIX and Perl. Only 3 passed. All were H1B's.
I learnt from the experience that recruiters are morons: the majority of applicants they sent in had no fucking clue how to program. I also learnt that managers hate american programmers because they argue too much - they argued with the questions, and they argued with the interviewer. And so they didn't get the job.
I've seen many examples of contract houses exploiting the individuals in the process for their green card. Apparently, these people are more or less locked in with your employer when you start the process. If you change employers you go through a lot of hassle and have to start over. Maybe it's more complex than that, but it seems that these people are not as free to look elsewhere for a job like your average citizen who get's shafted by their employer.
As a manager at a large firm several years ago I had trouble hiring the right talent because the company was not willing to pay the premium that it cost.
Recently I was replaced by a cheaper contractor imported from India.
Does this hurt workers already in the USA? Of course it does.
This is real life. Let's stop towing the "company" line that there is a programmer shortage. There never has been. There has only been a shortage of cheap programmers.
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~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Your mileage may vary. 60 Minutes had an expose where they analyzed HP's hiring practices with regards to H1B visas. They found (somehow someone leaked a salary document to 60 Minutes) that HP was hiring a lot of Indian programmers at a "standard" salary of about $26,500 which is a lot lower than the salary that other programmers who are American citizens were being paid.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
I gotta say that it truly does suck for full-timers. But, I can assure you, those of us who are contractors (even in the RTP area) are having no such trouble. In fact, I just got a pay raise in the past few months.
Aren't those comparisons are usually drawn from standardized test results (SATs, GREs, etc.)? If so, we're talking about basic logic/algebra/geo/trig, not diff eqs and other college level topics. Talent in the former is certainly a good indicator of programming potential.
Evidently you did not read the article. The author claims that employers are not interviewing the vast majority of their applicants, and that if there really was shortage, they woul dat least be interviewing them. I agree that the article is extremely long but it is worth the read ;)
Sig: Tell all your friends NOT to download the Advanced Ebook Processor:
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
With the severe downturn in the economy, a lot of companies are moving out of the Silicon Valley area for cheaper locations. Utah, Texas, Illinois are amongst the top places trying to attract those big ones. Chicago recently succeeded in lobbying Boeing to move their HQ. So, what all this has to do with H1B? I can see the new trend here where companies trying to save on their $$$ and moving their development offshore to those exactly cheaper places.
The article's author mention that this would be an infeasible solution. Linux, Apache, Tomcat, Mozilla (just to name a few of the most popular projects which have been pooling resources globally) have now been doing it for years.
I think he is an idiot.
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... as after all, he is also on H1B working for his employer ...
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A few years back, there must have been a shortage of people with the qualifications to sew a big red tick on the side of running shoes. I think we should all re-train... :((
"Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another" - Doctor Who
My company is constantly bringing in new H1-B programmers from Eastern Europe and Russia. I could not help but take note that these programmers (actually coders, they can't seem to program worth a damn) actually have 3 year contracts. My question then is what happens if someone is to be laid off in this time of slowdown? Well, I have no contract as very few REAL American workers that are permanent employees do. I think one of the things we should do is to start sending these H1-B folks back where they came from seeing that we don't need them anymore. Sorry if I sound a bit rough, but this infuriates me to no end. I think we should start petitioning our CongressMen(Women).
We the citizens of this country should very much desire that there be a shortage of workers in ALL occupations (with the execption of health care workers, whom we should import at a very high rate). We WANT high wages--that's a good thing for us citizens. Yes, it is "bad for business", but this country is not run for the benefit of business--it is run for the benefit of its citizens, the owners of this country...
BSCS in May 01
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
I've never been much of a conspiracy-monger.
Some of the earlier posters are fairly accurate in saying the majority of surplus labor is in the MBA/dot-snot Dead Pool, but I really think the big issue among "real" IT people is skillset matching with current market needs.
We all know that saying "programmer" these days is akin to "phyician"- what kind? C++? Obstetrician? XML? Proctologist?
The best advice I can give young students is watch the new trends, and tailor your senior year coursework to them.
All your belongings are base to us.
Could this also be because people on student (F-1, J-1) visas can't legally work in the country (with certain exceptions), making you one of the only viable candidates for most positions?
Another proud carrier of the $rtbl flag
Another intersting point is the academic overuse of NT. This creates certain opportunities for people who have a broader view. If I were starting in IT today, I would market myself as the Anti-Bill: "Hire me, and I'll help you deploy open source alternatives to costly M$ products. If you're tired of M$ licensing and security/stability issues, I have the answer."
The key is to get experience, no matter what it takes. Do open source for free if necessary, but you have to do something other than wave a diploma as if it were a flag of entitlement.
I often wonder why so many students wait until graduation to learn about the need for experience. Having a co-op job is not nearly enough to qualify as the kind of experience that employers want.
The education industry markets itself as the sure-fire path to success in IT. In reality, degrees and certs represent only a fraction of what it takes to launch a career. Paraphrasing the sugar-cereal industry: "A degree is part of a well-balanced resume." Consider our hero, Linus Torvalds. If he blew off his senior year and hit the job market with no degree or certification, would he have a successful career? Sure, it certainly worked for Bill Gates. Could the average person combine open source plus a degree and be successful? Absolutely. Could they skip the degree/certification and still be successful? Maybe, it depends on circumstances. Could they skip the experience and rely on the degree to land job #1? Possible, but unlikely.
Of all the things employers want, the degree requirement is usually spelled out in black and white, while the definition of experience is a little fuzzy. Ironically, the degree is usually negotiable and the experience is not. CS students should know this before graduation, but I guess no one is telling them.
Our own cost structure is an issue. If out of a team of 7 programmers I have 3 that are at the top level and one that I will either have to promote in 6 months or he will get a better paying job somewhere else, then my other 3 programmers have to be juniors just so I don't break my budget.
The other reason for keeping these juniors is that every programming job does not require a rocket scientist, and project managers will start bitching when they have to use a $150/hr programmer for something simple enough for a $15/hr intern.
Hell, we even considered using a coding sweat shop in India! We had three different organizations in India trying to sell us into using one of their virtual programming teams. We could take advantage of the strength of the dollar to get top notch programming at a great saving. Cooler still, we could use the 12-hr time difference to our advantage. I could assign them work at 5 PM EST knowing that when I came back to the office the next day at 7 AM they would have spent 12 hrs dealing with it.
Pedro
Pedro
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The Insomniac Coder
I myself am a very quick programmer, but I agree with your points. When interviewers pull the "snap quiz" on me, I politely decline to play the game, and ask them if there's anything else left to talk about. If not, I walk.
If the real job situation is that cut and dried, they don't need me, they can get anyone with a CS degree, and save themselves a lot of money. I'm there to know which questions need to be asked, not to answer the ones you already thought of.
When I interview job candidates, I usually frame it as "Here's the situation, how do you think you can contribute?" The micro-tactical stuff has a short shelf life, and you'll find out very quickly if they're faking it.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
I was hired from the UK in 1999 by a large company in Belgium because they were suffering from a skills shortage.
There is no way anyone could claim that this is the cheap way of hiring someone, by the time the company had paid the recruitment fee, the relocation costs (including a specalist company to help me move over, find somewhere to live and settle in), the consultant costs for determining how to best pay us when dealing with the (fairly) complex Belgium tax laws for forigen specalists, etc etc...
What's being missed here is that some countries (such as the USA which the article is directed around) have a high technology base, and not enough people with the required knowledge, and other countries (such as India) have a lot of trained, skilled workers in IT, but do not yet rely as much on the technology so that they are surplus to requirements. The whole process is basically supply-and-demand. IT Staff are a resource like any other to be "traded" by countries. the USA just has a trade deficit in this particular area of business, and India has a trade surplus.
-- Pete.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
Trivia is garbage because anyone can look that stuff up (that's what really irks me about the various certification tests -- they don't test your ability to reason things, just to puke up the stock answer).
Yeah, right.
I am also a manager, and when I received the directive from management to bring in another PL/SQL contract programmer to help out on our project, I wanted to scream. This caused two problems:
We were also hampered by the fact that our $#@! company has an exclusive contract with one of the body shops. What this means is that they would push their own people first no matter how incompetent, before they brought in anyone else from other body shops.
Exactly my experience. There are many PL/SQL folks out there -- both H1B and American citizens. 99% of them were weak in either coding skills or couldn't speak/understand English (another requirement). We had one guy who could correctly pass the hardest phone interview question (What is the maximum size of a VARCAR2 variable in PL/SQL?), but when we brought him in and asked him to write a simple select statement, he got as far as "select * from" and then he stopped, because he'd reached the end of his skills.From the article, the author gives this advice to developers:
I couldn't agree more. Since most companies are no longer willing to train lesser-competent folks and age them into the positions needed (thus indirectly lowering turnover, duh), then it is up to us to train ourselves, then leave when we can get a better/different job. Someone I used to work for told me that I needed to switch jobs every 3 years, because I'd fall behind in the pay raise schedule. He figured about a 20% pay rate increase was acceptable. With HR mandating 3-6% merit increases (maybe <g>), one will fall behind after three years. I also read in one of the trade rags that the average lifespan of an IT worker ranged from 2.5 to 5 years, which matches my experience. That is a LOT of turnover, which companies pay for by the knowledge/skill loss and the cost to replace.
Never mind that the knowledge and experience is lost forever. We keep making the same mistakes over and over again because we keep forgetting things we did in the past. "If we implement this function at the end of the accounting batch run without notifying Ms. Somebody in accounting exactly 4 days prior and Mr. Whomever on the web team exactly 2 weeks prior, but not via email--only in person, then the process will need to be reset manually," et cetera. Well, Coder Bob figured that out by being burned once, and now he left to another company to do KDE extensions; no one knows what he did in that area, just that he coded report statements.
If companies would treat their workers better (by actually acting like "Employees are [their] most valuable asset") then we will see a decrease of H1Bs, of any skilled talent shortage and of this constant ri-goddamn-diculous job hopping.
Until then, let them whine while we job-hop, learning what we can and taking our knowledge and experience with us to the next gig.
Yeah, right.
In case you missed it - my post said RTP (research Triangle Park in NC) other posts have also mentioned differnet places - the job market for information tech/computer workers SUCKS right now pretty much all around. SV probably got hit first and the sheer qty of folks is staggering, but its just as bad percentage wise all around it seems.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Leave aside minor irritations like poor literacy, bad infrastructure and unreliable electricity (no, wait, strike that last one off...), Guyana wants IT jobs.
Look at Costa Rica - where else outside USA and Ireland did Intel set up a chip plant?!
Compete globally or lose. This is not an endorsement of WTO or G8.
Backward%20compatibility%20is%20over-rated
OO development accomplishes three things:
- It makes the program bigger
- It makes the program run slower
- It makes the program modules more portable, so less programming labor is needed overall
Often OO is simply the wrong way to do things, just as spaghetti code is sometimes far and away the most efficient way to implement an algorithm. When OO doesn't get in the way it's beautiful, but it's easy to lose track of the performance drag all that double-dereferencing causes.Your older programmer probably started out with a language with weak or no typing (can you say FORTRAN?) on machines where every cycle and every word was a precious resource. He knows that an application of skill to the problem can reduce waste and improve performance, and he's used to doing that. Asking him to willfully waste resources so that the next guy can waste some more by reusing his not-so-optimal code is like asking someone who has known starvation to throw away food.
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I've studied engineering and I've been a programmer for 15 years. Today I couldn't solve a second-order differential equation to save my life. And I'd need a couple of hours with my old textbooks before I even tried to do an integral.
OTOH programming does use some math skills which aren't generally taught to either engineers OR programmers. If I hadn't been given a copy of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming I'd still be in the dark as to some of the mysteries of floating point math. Finite math is very different from the variety usually used by engineers and physicists, and few people understand why it sometimes betrays them.
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You don't know what is possible. I am in the middle of a project where I am basically hacking an embedded controller whose firmware was written (very elegantly, in a certain sense) in C++. But it isn't fast enough. I talked the engineer into giving me a backdoor so I could run some assembly language. That .asm
code is now up to 12,000 lines and is performing
over 1,000 times faster than the normal development
environment coded in C++. Even the guys who
built the box can't believe what I made it do.
As I learned in the casino, if you keep eating
away at your position a few percent at a time
you eventually face a real loss.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
One day one of my coworkers was doing a service job and discussing the computer system I'd designed with an employee of the customer. The employee had just finished taking a management course and asked my coworker if there was any backup for me. To which he replied, no, our guy's pretty unique.
The customer employee then demonstrated his grasp of management principles by saying that he'd just been taught that if you have anyone like me on the payroll, you should fire them at once! Sure it will hurt for awhile, but eventually you'll recover and you won't be at their mercy.
So that's what it's about, boys and girls: POWER. We do stuff they don't understand and it scares the shit out of them. The only way they can feel secure is to be sure we can be instantly replaced. Fifteen years of loyalty? Meaningless. Skill and experience? Meaningless. Modern management teaches that the most important thing is staying in control.
Fortunately, my current employer is as out-of-date as I am, and doesn't feel that way. Which is another reason I hang around even though the pay isn't so great.
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Exactly. Like I said, it's about power.
And the answer to your question is "enlightened self-interest." I have demanded, and gotten, certain concessions as a result of my influence, but I'm smart enough to know what the company can afford and will put up with. They've worked with me long enough to know that I am a reasonable person. In short, they treat me like a human being and I return the favor.
I suppose they just assume everyone is out to grab as much as they can, which is just natural, considering they are the 'mind' of the corporations which are agents of greed.
Exactly. It's about power. It's not about satisfying the customers, it's not about building something we can be proud of, it's not about being the leaders in our sector, it's not about being efficient or beating the competition, it's about being in control. It's about responding to a human situation with the knee-jerk response of a machine that isn't capable of understanding pride, craftsmanship, or loyalty.
Fortunately, the feeling is mutual. I wouldn't want to work for someone who would act that way anyway. For that matter, I suspect a lot of people who share my skills feel that way. Maybe that's why some of the managers who have posted here have such trouble finding people who know what they are doing.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
... are the foriegners, the H1-B visas. They will make more money here than they will in their home country, and if H1-B visas are restricted, potential employers will move those jobs to their home countries in order to exploit the lower average wages.
I see here a lot of arguments both for and against higher visa quotas. I also see a lot of arguments about managers not being able to find qualified candidates, and so many candidates who can't get an interview.. blah blah blah.
This argument is far too complex for slashdot. Here's my take without much explanation anyway-
I work tech support in a small company in Tampa. Like another poster here, I am unfireable because I am the only person in the company with my skills - mostly problem solving, as tech support is supposed to be but is often relegated to the 'too stupid to code' basket. While this is way too often true, some of them are are probably better at their jobs than many programmers are. I went to school to learn the programming languages I know but what they can never teach is the ability to tell some 60 year old machinist who hasn't seen a computer since college in the 60's exactly why his printer won't work - from a desk 6000 miles away. That takes extreme problem solving skills, strong intuition, and the ability to communicate abstract concepts and technical details to someone who's VCR they bought in 1987 still blinks 12:00. I probably make a wage in the top 1% of what's paid to people in similar positions in this area, but still less than $30,000. I'm so tired of not getting interviews for IT positions that will pay me enough to live on that I've stopped looking.
In summation, managers have no idea where to look here in the US for those who just want a foot in the damn door. Yes I'm angry about this, the last interview I had a shot at hired some guy from Spain or some such place. When the jobs here go overseas, those who can do those jobs will either have to follow them or learn to flip burgers. What a mess.
You are all fartheads.
I know that companies want young programmers who see nothing wrong with devoting their lives to the company, but there are a lot out there who value experience- knowing that people with a few decades under their belts don't need to stay until 3 in the morning every night. This is just what I've observed about one programmer, but there are a lot of others like him out there.
"You know, the golf course is the only place he isn't handicapped."
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
"You know, the golf course is the only place he isn't handicapped."
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Then are you saying that IT shops are pushing Congress to expand the workforce with foreign workers not because of some dastardly plot to lower wages of American workers but because they have artificially limited the employment pool to younger, "more easily trained" workers? Or do you think it's a combination of both?
I put "more easily trained" in quotes because I don't want to blithely make the assumption that older workers are harder to train.
Dancin Santa
As much as the conspiracy theorists have been harping on the issue, they haven't been correct until just recently. IT professionals have for quite a while been able to quit their job and pick up a new one in the blink of an eye. There just weren't enough people to fill all the positions that were available.
Now, however, the economy has gone into a recession and thousands of IT professionals have been "freed" into the job market. The high demand for workers that we heard a couple years back is clearly not there anymore.
Could it be that it wasn't a nefarious plot to screw American workers?
Dancin Santa
I decided last year to leave my former employer and start a consulting firm. Enough said.
It's not so bogus. Companys are wanting to save a few $K and wait 3 months for the work visa so the new hire could start (while VC money is fly in all directions)?
Sure, they are a tonne of software sweat shops in the US, and they all took advantage of overseas engineers at low prices. But this doesn't account for the bulk of the overseas engineers. Sure, people on work visas generally earn $10K less, but this is normally to offset the costs/hassles of getting a visa (and applying for a greencard).
Some jobs just require more than two weekends of ColdFusion twiddling....
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M0571y H@rml355.
Hmm, let me see here! 1. A Country full of highly skilled and experienced programmers. 2. IT Schools pumping out masses of new programmers into the work force like a cigarette factory. 3. A flood of H-1B programmers pouring into the US willing to work for much lower wages. No real IT shortage. The only people I see making a decent living are IT recruiters for H1-B applicants, Instructors for overpriced IT Schools, Project managers, and of course Mega Corps getting dirt cheap labor. Now the Gov/Corps are wondering why there are so many Peer-Sharing, Virus, and cracking application infiltrating the profit taking world. Too many pissed off and bored programmers! Maybe if Shawn Fanning would have had a Real job waiting for him, Napter would maybe have never existed. Just a thought.
Two Towers-Two Worlds.One seeks triumphs and freedom for man.The other deems man unworthy and wrecks them.
I remember an interview I went on, for a Perl job. I passed the first interview with flying colors; talked about my programming philosophy with a programmer, got along great, got a second interview. Passed the second interview with a hiring manager. Then, was asked into a back room by the alpha geek of the organization, who hit me blindside with three bizarre perl questions (debugging problems? I don't know what else to call them). Each was totally bizarre, not even remotely connected to normal practice, and was the sort of thing you'd write a little driver program to check out anyway if you came up against it. For example, one had something to do with an arcane scoping issue, with a variable of the same name changing scope like, three times. Flabbergasted and freaked out, I failed his three "tests", and he smugly smiled at me and showed me out.
The only thing this proved was that the guy was a complete jackass. I mean, for example, who uses the same variable name in three different scopes that way? You'd have to be retarded. The questions were nonsensical. If he'd given me something normal to work on, I'd have been fine, and I'd have hired. For the record, I ended up working somewhere else, and built an application used throughout the organization among many other things, improving many of their internal systems and in general making myself very useful (not meaning to bang my own drum).
I guess my point is, if you subconsciously want to prove someone incompetent, you won't find it too hard to completely frustrate and annoy them, and "disqualify" them from consideration. A better approach is to try and see what they come up with in response to a real problem, without trying to catch them with brain teasers and such. I'm not saying that's what you did, mind you, but I've got experience with it and believe me, it isn't much fun to be on the receiving end. Especially when, if you're like most tech types, interviews freak you out anyway.
crazyphilman@programmer.net
crazyphilman@programmer.net
Sort of fat, good looking in a disheveled sort of way.
> [European nationals in the US] usually come back
...health insurance
...30 days' holiday instead of 10 [and usually
...good beer
...and a sensible government system not yet
> home after a couple years because they
> miss a number of benefits and protections (like
> workers' protections
What protections? They sit on their ass in front of a computer screen all day, then probably go home and do it again all night surfing. Internet is much cheaper here, too.
>
Umm, any job worth its salt, which includes programming, has very good insurance, thanks, and a medical system second to none. If Ringworld-style autodocs are invented, I wouldn't bet on Europe too much to develop it.
>
> none the first year in the US]
Ok, you've won on this issue. It's conscious tradeoff between leisure time and productivity. Ironically, and perhaps undeservedly, Europe (and other heavily socialized areas) benefit from the faster technological growth of the more productive nations, so the US is like a prostitute in that sense, giving up their stuff to people who don't appreciate the lifestyle that gives it up. (I hereby copyright that clever thought.)
>
Granted again. German beer gardens, complete with sausages and mustard, r00l. England's warm beer can take a hike tho.
>
> owned by corporations, to name a few).
Well, they're owned instead by power-hungry folks pontificating childlike platitudes to uneducated masses of morons in fields they don't understand, causing slower technological growth, far worse recessions, backbreaking taxes on the relatively few people who do work hard (all the while being defined as evil by those very same government officials they help keep the economy afloat for).
You do, however, have much better pr0n.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
> It is not progress for poor people living on
> table scraps from the tables of the rich when
> the rich get richer and leave more scraps.
Actually, that is EXACTLY how all poor countries claw their way out of 3rd world status. That is how 1st world countries themselved did it via the industrial revolution, which in turn was just an accelerated time period of productivity increase.
It's all supply and demand, and all these people in "sweat shops" in "poor countries" are all there by choice, which is to say, it's a lot better than sitting in a hut out in the desert somewhere. Their choice, they lift themselves. Get out of the way. They don't need your "help".
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Exactly. It's not proper to single out one type of worker to dilute the supply of that type of worker while not letting in other workers because they are larger voting blocks.
If you're going to be honest (and politicians aren't) then you open the borders to any worker, not just some.
Of course, overseas software houses, especially India, are exploding. Supply and demand, it's cheaper over there, go over there.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
I recently graduated also, with a BS in Computer Science. I'd say there is definately no shortage of programmers. I've yet to even get an interview, let alone a job. Almost all the want ads I find say I need at least 5 years experience.
These people rake in lots of dough and perform jobs that require less than high school diploma.
Hey, watch it buddy! Real jobs don't require a H.S. diploma either. Somehow I've managed to hold down a programming position at a major investment bank without one.
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Just because a few of us can read write and do a little math, doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe
Here in Denmark, for ages now, production companies has placed their "assembly crews" in countries like Poland and the baltic contries. Because of the lowered cost in doing so, this has been the default for alot of european companies. Outsource the simple bulk assembly to contries with lower average pay.
But lately the trend is breaking (keep in mind this is a completly natural thing, and european companies has used the cheap eastern market of workers since the sixties), why? Quality..
Tests by some firms, has proven that in their cases. It actually is better buisniss to hire a educated guy from Denmark, because the they calculated that they would get 18% less RMA (defect goods returned from customers). That with the uneducated polak, which actually meaned that the firm moved production to denmark. And are sreaming out to the industry that this was a profitable move, i guess that this story could be applied to the story above to. Because whos producing more bugs? The professional BS. CS from NYU or the little indian dude who just tought him self to code?
I don't know if there is a shortage of programmers, but there is most certainly a shortage of programmers that can write large-scale programs.
I work as a consultant. Most companes I visit employ mediocre staff that has trouble creating anything larger than few thousand lines of code without the program falling apart because of quality problems.
You are right to the degree that smaller companies that don't have overseas facilities will indeed not be able to outsource successfully either. But that doesn't keep the jobs from going to other countries either. Such companies will simply be outcompeted by small European, Asian, and non-US American companies that can hire the labor they need, again, either within their own countries or by letting skilled workers from third countries work there as guest workers.
There is also international competition. If the US cost for producing software becomes too high, the software will get produced elsewhere.
If they could shift the work to India, they would. It's much cheaper than hiring H1-B workers.
They can and they do. To many companies, bringing their skilled knowledge workers to the US is more of a perk to attract people than a question of cost, the kind of perk that companies give when there is a labor shortage. Most of the companies I have worked for would have been just as happy to hire me at a European or Asian location.
Those few people we really need to bring in should be given green cards or have similar workers rights. It's a matter of respect for them and for our own workers.
I fully agree that the H1B regulations have serious problems and should get fixed. Limiting the numbers, however, would not be in the best interest of the US (although it would be a lot fairer to Europe, China, and India, who paid for the education of these workers).
Welcome to the new globalized economy and information infrastructure. Knowledge workers produce a product whose movement can't be controlled and that can be instantly shipped anywhere. And the basic tools, PCs, are available anywhere in the world.
Beyond that, Matloff's claims about shortages, wages, "indentured servitude", and working conditions simply don't agree with what I have seen in real life. But it isn't even worth disproving his factual claims point-by-point when his basic reasoning is so faulty.
Having foreign programmers and professionals come to the US has been a spectacularly good deal for the US, and it has been devastating to the high tech industries in foreign countries. Developing countries have been particularly hard hit by this.
On the other hand, I think that the author's claim that employers use narrow job requirements to artificially inflate the labor shortage has more to do with paranoia than fact.
During the dawn of the business pc, I was a dBase 'programmer'. About two or three years into it, FoxPro (a dBase clone) was becoming the PC database of choice. I had long and fruitless arguments with recruiters who refused to submit me for FoxPro jobs. One recruiter listened patiently as I explained that FoxPro and dBase differed only slightly, listing the handful of differences between them (I'd done my homework) explaining why none of them posed a problem, and why with 2+ years of dBase under my belt I was more qualified than any FoxPro person (It hadn't even been around for a year yet.) When I finally ran out of steam the recruiter said, "You're right, and I believe you are the best person for the job. But unless they see the word 'FoxPro' on your resume, they're not even going to talk to you." It wasn't that these companies were trying to exclude qualified applicants. The problem was that they were trying to hire people for a field they knew nothing about, and the word 'FoxPro' was all they had to go on.
And that's The Real Problem. Qualified applicants are out there. It's just a matter of finding a way of sifting through all the self-proclaimed Gurus to find them. And jobs are out there for qualified programmers. It's just a matter of convincing the HR people that you deserve a second glance.
Of course the people doing the hiring have become more sophisticated over the years, but unfortunately, so have the canditates. I've been fooled myself. I was totally in awe of a newly hired programmer who talked quite intelligently about things like the advantages of using COM architecture in distributed, multi-tiered applications, that is until I found out that he had no idea what a COM interface was, much less how to build one.
And that, too, is The Real Problem. Some people are great programmers. Other people are great at using high-tech buzz words. Only a lucky few are great at both. Unfortunately, it's usually the second group who get hired first, while the first group goes begging.
Or maybe it's just me.
I'll take one example. We had a data warehouse (mostly a big Oracle PL/SQL application). The engineer who designed and implemented the original code left the company, and I was tasked with hiring his replacement since there were some pretty substantial architectural changes we needed to make.
Now, there are a lot of database people out there. A lot. I looked at more resumes than I can count. My ear was sore from phone interviews. Thing was, just about everyone I talked to fell into one of two categories:
I looked and looked. The executive staff got really antsy and started leaning on me to do what the article suggests, just hire someone to get the work going, even if they weren't perfect for the job. I resisted for a while but finally caved in.
The contractor we brought in -- one of the better ones I'd interviewed, though I hadn't liked him well enough to want to hire him -- did a decent job of talking to the right people, gathering requirements, and getting himself acquainted with the layout of the code. But then he started to submit his own code, and man, what a disaster. I wasted weeks correcting his mistakes. Finally I fired him and went back to my original search.
The specifics of the story here aren't important. The point is that it doesn't take many times being burned by the "hire any bum off the street, just fill this technical position" attitude before you develop a very healthy caution about hiring the wrong person. I've seen it happen at other companies and I think it's a universal truth: hiring the wrong person for a job can leave you in a much worse position than hiring nobody at all. Not least because you think you have the position filled, so you stop looking for a while.
Experienced managers know this, so they put themselves through the "there's nobody out there!" routine when the job market is tight. It sucks massively, but it sucks less than the alternative.
(How did the story end? We found an H1-B person who fit the bill perfectly. Then the government took so long to process his paperwork -- months -- that by the time it came through, he'd gotten cold feet. Ugh! Happily by that time I'd moved to a different group.)
Not true. I live in a relatively small town -- Olympia, WA; far enough away from Seattle and Portland that there's not been a lot of overlap in bedroom commutes or "escaping-from-the-ratrace" programmers. What you're seeing here is that there are a FEW programming jobs, but the majority of them are maintenance ... someone to keep the servers going, or clean up after they let go the development team on Government projects. It may be different in the midwest or Texas area, but it seems like most places on the West coast are in a profound slump.
No, the ones who are making the money in India or China are not generally the workers. They are again corporations, and often times they are not even Indian or Chinese corporations. The programmers often do fairly well in the bargain, mind you, but that isn't wealth that really makes that much difference - to become proficient enough to be a programmer brought over on an H1-B, you have to be wealthy enough to afford to go to University, a luxury that many hundreds of millions of Indians or Chinese simply do not have. This becomes a shell game after a while. A company in the United States basically sets up a shell company in India or China, staffed with native managers, developers and support staff. The employees make a modest wage, better perhaps than what's out there, but typically a couple of orders of magnitude less in percentage terms than the money they end up generating for their parent company. The real people people that end up making money are the shareholders that have invested in the parent company, and even there only a very small number of the total. If two or three people together own 90+% stock in a large conglomerate and the remaining 10% is distributed among employees and investors, then it becomes real obvious that the money is not only not going to the workers in the displaced country, but is in fact not going to the workers in the displaced company either -- it is only going to the stratos dwellers. Oh, by the way, to put that into perspective, if your net worth (which for purposes of calculation I assume to be about $100,000) is made into a one pixel-wide dot (smaller than this "." period), then the net-worth of someone making $50 billion dollars is a circle about the size of a house.
Here's another little point that I think many people forget. A person on a green card is not receiving stock options, in general. Granted, in this day and age, that means less than it used to, but not only does an H1-B cost less, they also don't nibble away at the true wealth generator for most owners and senior management (who are often the same) -- the percentage of ownership in the company. This is kind of a sleeping issue now, since most people look at the stock market and see their shares hovering only slightly above 0. However, by jettisoning employees, many of whom effectively lost their options before they could exercise them, and taking on foreign applicants, a company basically is able to reduce not only the immediate cost to the company of the employees salaries but also the long term costs associated with the dilution of stock.
Actually, most apps don't use math, beyond fairly simple algebra. If you're doing graphics, figure some trigonometry and linear algebra. I think I did use Runge-Katta once for a pretty hairy bit of game physics. Compression schemes and encryption algorithms obviously require a certain amount of mathematics. You can create complex system models in programming without ever actually realizing that you're doing graph theory work. The underpinnings of all programming is ultimately linguistic -- the manipulation of symbols. This is where it shares its' similarity to math, but in point of fact biology probably uses more math on a day to day basis than programming does.
Whoever wrote the article didn't take into account the skills of the people that were seeking jobs. Perhaps 98% of the people were high school graduates or just people who decided they had some knowledge and would seek a job in the IT industry.
On the other hand, the 2% that did get hired, were most likely the ones with REAL qualifications. I have heard many stories of dot.coms going bust cause the people they employed were substandard.
I cite Netscape as one example. The code they wrote was unusable, absolutly no order to the code. When it was released it had to be completly re-written for the mozilla project (plug).
My point is that people might be able to change the oil in the car, but that doesn't get them a job as a mechanic
I read this before. He makes a convincing argument that the computer industry doesn't have a shortage of workers, it just has a shortage of workers who will work for almost nothing.
my example of PERL & DBI was just that ... an example ... not a comprehensive or inclusive list. Certainly, I could have, and I guess in this case, should have said JDBC.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
At some level they are, but more often than not, I've run into many are weak in one of two ways. First, some can't handle new languages, or languages that are different from what they were originally trained on. Similar to that line, they are unable to grasp newer or changing technologies.
For example, I've seen alot of people who claim to be Windows programers, who don't have a clue about COM &/or DCOM. I've seen alot of web developers who can't make heads of tail with of Perl ... let alone the DBI.
Second, I've seen many programmers who are either ignorant of the "life-cycle" concept ... or just aren't willing to edure some of the hardships of maintenance phases (though I should temper that with I've seen alot of older programmers making a good living doing maintenance coding).
Likewise similar to this concept, I see alot of programmers who aren't familiar or have forgotten good design methologies. Not that they should be walking textbooks for Martin, DeMarco or Constantine ... but how often have all of us had to clean-up some spagetti because thing weren't really thought through.
Like I said, these are just some observations. Your mileage may vary.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
I read the article over a year ago. Well before the tech crash. Its points are valid about skill specific searches and not retraining their own people... Smid
In college (I'm still a senior in college) I see students who do very well at the CS courses, however when put into a real environment, freeze. Working in anything IS/IT requires more than is taught in school, and frequently people enter the field assuming just becuase they receive a degree, then they are fully qualified.
That's my rant...
just wait until the current whitehouse passes those non-resident-workers immigration laws that the pro-globalization-business lobby's trying to get through... you'll dozens of american programmers on streets, begging. just like CmdrTaco in this alternate universe.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
FreeBSD for the impatient.
When OO doesn't get in the way it's beautiful, but it's easy to lose track of the performance drag all that double-dereferencing causes. in 80% of the code, performance dos not matter (80-20 rule, if you like 90-10 or 70-30 better, so be it) you run thru it once so why go out of you're way to make it fast? easy read/change/maintain is more importent (sp?) OO gives you that and if you need spaghetti code for speed put it in an Object it will not run any slower if you do so.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot.
He looks at the hiring pattern of firms like Microsoft to determine demand for programmers. It doesn't take a genius to realize that the vast demand for software programmers does not take place in leading-edge companies like Microsoft and Oracle, but in more "backwater" firms who need programmers to support their own systems. If Microsoft could supply the vast majority of software programming needed, the software industry would NOT be a growth industry. It could be serviced by perhaps 10,000 workers.
Realistically, Microsoft can afford to be intensely critical of the people it hires. So can other leading edge firms that are excellent to work at. I highly doubt that it is more profitable for them to attract foreigners to work at "lower wages" AND spend billions lobbying Congress through industry associations an it is just to pay the going American wage rate.
This study is also chocked-full of questionable concluons about the macro-economics of internatonal labour markets. Such as his argument that true labour mobility would hurt the real income of Americans, but that's another story....
Read my post again, please. I do not condone ageism; far from it. However, the original article was doing exactly the opposite (claiming ability purely based on age) and that's just as bad.
I disagreed with the claim that "programming is programming is programming", and the implication that because you could program with one tool or technique, you could automatically program with another. That is simply untrue. Certainly someone familiar with general programming principles will learn new tools and techniques faster, and perhaps better, but that isn't what he wrote; actually, what he wrote was almost the complete opposite.
In fact, all the evidence suggests that a previous background in procedural programming actually hampers learning how to program effectively in an OO environment. Those with no previous background tend to learn OO faster.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'll assume that's not a troll, but a genuine claim.
The answer is no, it's not so. To give an obvious example, if you're writing a word processor, it will probably spend 95% of its clock cycles idling while it waits for user input. As long as it's fast enough to respond quickly when the user types a letter or clicks the "print" button, it's, well, fast enough. The user is not going to be impressed by the amazing speed at which your application idles. However, they are going to be very unimpressed if you didn't fix that really annoying bug instead.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Fair enough, but that's nothing to do with the difference between a procedural or an OO approach.
If the profiler says you need to go faster, you consider rewriting the critical parts of your code base more tightly, using a lower level language. That's what you've done here. Your 1000-fold performance increase is down to programming at assembly level instead of C++ level. The fact that it's, presumably, procedural and not OO in style has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Would it have gone 1000 times faster if you'd written it in C? If not, then it's not the OO vs procedural approach that's making the difference. If it would, your C++ design was broken.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
OK, would you people please stop trying to put words into my mouth, now? Let's look at a few facts about what I have and haven't said.
I do not condone ageism in IT. I do not claim that it does not exist; quite the contrary, actually. My own father is a prime example of someone who suffers from it.
I do not think OO is the be-all and end-all. I have never said it is. In fact, I have argued the opposite, using much the same sorts of examples as you have, for some time.
Now, as far as older programmers go... There are, in my experience, two types of older programmer.
I have no problem with the first people. I enjoy working with them, or for them. I do have a problem with the second group of people, who sadly are far more common in my experience. They coast along, creating mess that the rest of us have to clear up, and getting paid twice as much as us for the privilege. I spend a lot of time keeping up to date, so that I can produce the results I do at work. I find the fact that most places would pay someone older more money to do a worse job insulting.
It also goes without saying that this second group of people aren't doing themselves any favours by crying "ageism" while ignoring the objective merits they (don't) have. In the process, they screw the minority of older programmers who do have genuine benefits to offer, as they get tarred with the same brush.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I just found the following, partway down the report, discussing the issue of older programmers whose skills have atrophied.
I strongly disagree with this. In fact, I think older programmers claiming that things don't change and therefore they don't need to keep learning is exactly why a lot of them find it harder to get work. They think they know it all, just because they're older. A few of them do, and they're priceless. Most of them don't.
I have worked with several older and more senior programmers, who had a lot of C experience, but now program C++ or Java. Those who can actually do OO well are few and far between, particularly the "C++ programmer", who are really writing C with a few classes around.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
How much were you advertising and offering them?
The office where I work offers the "going rate". Unfortunately, the "average programmer" expects the "going rate", and the average programmer ain't that good. If you want people who can really pull their weight -- certainly if you want the hackers who are ten times more productive than "just the next guy", and pull his weight too -- you obviously have to pay for it. I accepted the "going rate" when I started, as it was my first job and I wanted a foot in the door. My salary has since increased by more than 50% in less than two years, and I expect it will continue to increase quickly for a year or so yet. If it didn't/doesn't, I know of plenty of places who would now offer what I'm looking for to someone with a demonstrated ability to get things done.
Sadly, we don't live in a meritocracy. The guys who does ten times as much useful work (and a few do do that) aren't likely to get paid ten times as much. But you can bet they're going to get paid several times as much, and if you're not offering that, you're not going to get them.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I suppose it could just be all in the heads of those doing the hiring, but at least in my experience companies treat their programmers (or other IT folks) like they are worth their weight in gold. Mind you, these are the very same companies that treat their _other_ employees (managers, admin/secretaries, marketing) like they are entirely disposable.
Perhaps it's more that there's a shortage of _good_ IT personel?
Lots of talk about the H1-B, but let's not forget our trusty TN-1, the "gift" from NAFTA. Any Canadian sweating their way through an H1-B is probably barking up the wrong tree. Unfortunately U.S. employers' legal beagles are so used to working with H1-Bs that they aren't familiar with the trusty TN-1*. Why wait months when 20 minutes at the border will do ya?
I've always liked this quote from Grasmick's site: "If you're Canadian and have an H-1, you're probably on the wrong visa."
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* Yes, I've been through this and fought it. I had to educate the U.S. lawyers, but they finally saw the light. In the end, though, I got fed up with trying to educate both the employer and his legal team and decided to spend my time elsewhere. Any employer (and their legal team) too thick-skulled to understand simple details like the difference between an H-1B and a TN-1 are probably not the kind of people you want to work for.
Slashdot: Everything in Moderation, including Moderation itself.
They're importing all these underqualified Indians to work here at premium prices. People who don't know anything other than how to work Oracle get hundreds of thousands of dollars salary! Funny thing is, I'm an Indian too. I was born in the USA though...
This is what bothers me about most socialists--they're only for the working class on a local level, not on a global level.
What, exactly, is your problem with a private redistribution of wealth from rich westerners to poor third-worlders? Is it simply that you aren't on the receiving end, like you usually are in socialism?
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
It's not supposed to be about tricking foreign workers, it's about tricking government into loosening protectionist restrictions on foreign workers so people like you who have lower salary expectations than US citizens will drive down salaries.
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You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
"I've seen alot of web developers who can't make heads of tail with of Perl ... let alone the DBI. "
You might have a point with COM but claiming that Perl is synonymous with web development is just ridiculous.
If our company is using Java or even StorySever (TCL) to do web development why in the world would I care about our developers not knowing Perl?
>It seems (surprise, suprise) that this whole >IT labour shortage crisis was a myth >generated by large IT companies to justify >importing boatloads of foreign IT workers >willing to work for low wages in >substandard conditions. Anyone have any >experience with this?" Uh..Yes, that's right, the IT 'shortage' is a myth.. it is fake. It is an excuse to keep salaries lower than they otherwise would be (ever wonder why IT workers make less than doctors, MBAs, lawyers... if there was such a shortage?). The IT shortage was an excuse to pass laws to get cheap programmers (usually from India, China) to replace Americans via laws passed by the senate/house which were bought and paid for big tech firm lobbyist money. THere is now tons written on this Check out: www.programmersguild.org/american.htm www.zazona.com and usenet: alt.computer.consultants..
This country destroyed the steel industry becasue cheap imports was more important. All we ask is a level playing field in order to compete. Can you compete against an 80% reduction of your pay.. Wake up..or maybe you should be layed off and replaced by someone overseas makin $10.00 per hr.
Your professional career is being undermined by our own government and rich corporate lobbyists.
H-1B, one of many worker replacement visa bills, allows American companies to hire foreign temps to replace YOU. As if that wasn't bad enough, 195,000 more of these "temps" are allowed into our country every year. More than 671,000 H-1B workers will be employed in the United States in the year 2001. H-1B is used to import foreign indentured workers here to take white collar jobs that American employers claim can't be filled in the "tight American labor market". H-1B isn't the only way corporations are subverting the American way of life. H-2A and H-2B visas are being used to bring in blue collar and agricultural workers and J-1 visas are now being used by educational and governmental institutions to bring in foreign workers. TN (NAFTA) visas are used to bring in Canadian and Mexican citizens to work in the United States. To make matters worse, President Bush now wants to give millions of H-2B worker visas to allow Mexicans to work take American jobs.
H-1B was bought and paid for by Corporate America. They "donated" to our politicians' campaign funds and now they are reaping the benefits of H-1B because they have the best government money can buy. They now are pushing the Trade Promotion Authority that is a new name for Fast Track. These agreements will allow corporations to import cheap labor whenever and wherever they want.
Listed below are some of the jobs that H-1B visas are being issued for: ..................
Accountants and Administrators
Executives, Managers, Administrators
Software programmers and computer scientists
All engineers and Technicians
Research Associates and Scientists
Lawyers and Tax Analysts
School Teachers and college professors Postdocs and Fellows
Sports Instructors and Physiologists
Doctors, Nurses, Med-Techs, Therapists, Pharmacists
Surgical and Dental Assistants
Fashion models, Secretaries, Clerks
Architects, Musicians, and Artists
Youth Counselors, Day Care, and Cashiers
Truck Drivers
The List Goes ON and ON and ON and ON
Get the Facts on H-1B
www.ZaZona.com