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?"

Comments

Re:Cause and Effect

[Brian Knotts]

From my experience, esp. old people can't or refuse to learn.

What about blacks, women, or Mexicans? Any enlightening thoughts on any of those groups?

I respectfully disagree.

[Outlyer]

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.

Layoffs and shortage

[rkt]

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.

The only reason there even ARE H1-B visas is ...

[crovira]

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.

Very, very true.

[Parity]

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:

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) ... 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.)

Parity None

--Parity

Re:That's kind of interesting

[tenor]

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.

Re:I've just graduated.

[THEbwana]

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.

Re:Age isn't the only factor...

[w3woody]

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.

Problems with the report

[bungo]

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.

It's true

[SirSlud]

Look, from Project Censored, the group that reports on stories downplayed by big-business-owned media:

http://www.projectcensored.org/c2001stories/10.h tm l

No shortage at $$

[inicom]

In my own hiring, CS students from local community colleges with no experience and little understanding of real world programming scoff at positions offering less than $25/hr.

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.

The article is a myth

[Pedrito]

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).

How to get skills

[xant]

Question: Some older programmers do quite well in the field. So if an older programmer is having trouble finding programming work, isn't it his/her own fault for not keeping up with changes in the technology?

No. Employers are not willing to hire a veteran programmer who has taken a course in a new software skill. Employers insist on actual work experience in that skill.

If an older programmer is lucky enough that the present employer will allow him/her to work on a project which uses a new skill, then he/she can then stay alive in the field. Or, in some instances, if there is a very new programming language X which very few programmers know, a programmer who knows another language Y can try to find another employer who needs Y and is willing to let him/her learn X on the job. But there is only a narrow window of time in which this is possible.

The authors brush over the fact that experienced "older" programmers can and often do suggest projects to their employers that need doing. Someone who actually has design skills and has written code for a project should know what needs to be done better than their management, and therefore, they are in a perfect position to say, "Hey, look at my project, we can add feature X with XML, and we can improve our processes by writing a build system in python..."

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.

____________________

That's kind of interesting

[acacia]

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.

Curious: Where exactly do the H1B's

[Catbeller]

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.

Re:Cause and Effect

[SuiteSisterMary]

Now what Scifi series is this reminding me of? Ah yes, BattleTech.

Our programmers are the pinnacle of five hundred years of selective breeding and intensive training. Five hundred programmers are grown from a genetic sample, then raised together, being constantly tested. Most will die in that testing, or prove unworthy and be demoted to a lower caste.

Programmers who don't work to death by the time they're thirty five are considered solahma, fit only for changing the diapers of young sibkos, and for going on suicide runs, such as fixing Y2K problems.

Re:There really was a shortage of *good* people

[SuiteSisterMary]

There are two (three actually) main schools of interview these days. School one is what I like to call 'I am the Alpha, I am the Omega.' They're not looking for the correct answer, they're looking for their answer. And if you give a correct answer that isn't their answer, you didn't give them the correct answer. School two is the 'I wanted to be a psychiatrist' school, where some managerial idiot starts doing behavioural modeling and response interviewing, which he learned at a two day course, and draws conclusions from it. "Tell me about a time you had to work in a team. Tell me about a time that you had to work under pressure..." School three is the interviewers who don't suck. They're often not looking at what answer you give, so much as how you arrived at that answer. Let me give an example. I learned this trick from my first full time boss, and use it to great effect. The Kobyashi Maru Database

You are the DBA of a database running a client server application. Several people in the office use your application, and all is well. One day, a DBA from a different group is told to install an app for his users onto the DB box. Shortly thereafter, people who use your app start complaining about performance being slow, and data being lost sometimes. What do you do?

And the beauty is that there is no correct answer. No matter what they say, you explain why that doesn't help or won't work. This gives you two benefits: you get to see where their strengths and weaknesses lie, and you get to see how they work things through, under pressure. A little bit of questioning by the applicant eventually reveals that it's the other DBA's new app causing the problem. Now, of course, the eventual answer needs to be 'I punt it off to our supervisors and let them deal with it.' But anybody who says that is obviously, as Scott Adams calls it, "Juan Delegator." Talk to the DBA? He says it's your app's fault. Show him proof? He doesn't believe it. Try to fix the server? You can't touch his stuff. Buy a new box? No money. And so on.

not programmers, just the other IT workers

[10e 999]

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.

Re:not programmers, just the other IT workers

[ConsumedByTV]

What your talking about is people that use computers as an abstract tool. Is that such a bad thing? Would you rather that your skill be something so common that you could be treated like an assembly line worker (no pun) just like most programmers were in "Snow Crash"? I know for a fact that its good to have people that use things as an abstract tool, thats what allows us to have simplifications of everything. Because being a jack of all trades creates a master of none. That being said, I think its good to have end users that are in the tech field, it only helps you look better in the long run anyway.


The Lottery:

Re:not programmers, just the other IT workers

[baptiste]

You're off your rocker! As much as you'd like to believe its all the pseudo technical types being laid off - far from it.

Sure, a few years ago when companies laid folks off, it was usually the slackers and technical marketing types. But no longer!

As an ex-NORTEL employee (by choice long before they cratered) I can tell you I am absolutely blown away by the names I'm seeing come across the local mailing list for laid off NORTEL folks. These people were best in class programmers with excellent skills. The kind of people who got the top level review rating each year that only %5 of employees got. Thats because companies are now shedding entire projects and divisions. Before that used to happen on a small scale and most of the top coders got jobs elsewhere in the company. But in today's environment, theres nowhere else to go in a company laying off 30% of its work force - all open positions are GONE. So what happens? When a divison gets cut or a major project cancelled, EVERYBODY gets the ax.

Now you'd think they'd have jobs just lined up - well, as someone whose been looking for a halfway decent job for 7 months I can assure you its not always that easy, at least not here in RTP Many companies are laying folks off, not hiring. The # of job postings have gone down by at LEAST an order of magnitude. 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.

I've even noticed it in the job postings - an almost arrogant tone that basically says if you can't meet every single requirement (and they list tons) then don't even bother cause they won't even acknowledge they received your info.

During 1999 - there WAS a shortage in certain areas, no question. Totally unqualified people were getting hired because whatever work they could do was better than the job sitting unfilled for months. Now, its brutal and companies that can manage to get an opening approved are taking their time finding the gems - and then are paying them much less than they used to. I know excellent programmers who earned $80K getting offers of $65K

As for the middle maangers - yes they seem like incompetent dorks who serve no purpose, well, I can tell you that while sometimes they are, often they server a very important purpose, at least they did @ NORTEL. If they didn't exist, you'd probably spend more time dealing with customers and requirements, and release schedules which would drive you nuts - I've worn both hats and project managemednt can be a very difficult job, especially when you have to manage a project with hundreds of design teams who all say their feature is the most important (of course) So don't get too high on that pedistal because without project managers, your release would never make it out the door on time and without good technical marketing types, you'd have no customers for your product and no job.

Re:Don't forget the FrontPage / VB script kiddies.

[nomadic]

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.
--

Welcome to America

[Zero__Kelvin]

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!

Cause and Effect

[jeko]

1. Coders get dumped when they turn 35.
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.

Don't forget the FrontPage / VB script kiddies.

[SlushDot]

Sorry, but the web jockeys using FrontPage, etc., are not programmers. I can respect the ones who actually know and edit HTML by hand and bang out cgi scripts in perl. But as for rest using cookie cutter templates? No. Not programmers for a second.

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.

Age isn't the only factor...

[ChaoticCoyote]

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

Re:Objectivity and older programmers

[localroger]

You're thinking like those old programmers again. Most systems today do not need this level of performance. In today's marketplace, and with the complex applications we now develop, factors such as development time and robustness usually figure at least as prominently. Yes, using virtual function calls can reduce your program speed by 5%.

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.

How Management Sees Us

[localroger]

I am the one and only programmer for a distributor, as opposed to manufacturer, in an industry where very few distributors bother to have in-house software development. As such I have, without really trying, become as close to unfireable as you ever get, which is one reason I hang around the place even though they don't pay as well as larger shops.

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.

It certainly is

[localroger]

what's to stop you from, say, extorting more wage? Better work hours? Anything?

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.

So goes the economy

[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

Re:So goes the economy

[slashdot_commentator]

Its the age discrimination that is the key. If the industry was genuinely tight for experienced programmers, they would be more aggressive about hiring 35+ year old professionals, rather than avoiding a large group of people most likely to match the skillset.

Re:There really was a shortage of *good* people

[BPhilman]

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

if the people can't come here, the jobs go there

[janpod66]

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.

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.

There really was a shortage of *good* people

[koreth]

I was a manager during the period in question, and I can tell you, I had a devil of a time filling a couple of positions. Let me take issue with this statement from the article:

If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants.

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:

• Listed all sorts of Oracle skills on their resume, but couldn't correctly answer my SQL skill-testing questions. (Which were nothing especially complex.) This was the vast majority, which surprised me.
• Knew their SQL, but clearly had no design skills to speak of. I'd ask them to design a trivial application and they'd either botch it or claim that they just wrote code, someone else always designed it and gave them a spec.

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.)