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Tech Czar Unimpressed With US IT Workforce
theodp writes, "'The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough,' said Robert Cresanti, Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology. So what does the Poli Sci grad and ex-General Counsel for the ITAA think is the answer? Open the gates to more foreign workers, urged Cresanti, including H-1B holders."
But since he thinks the problem is that "there are not enough engineers with the appropriate skill sets", surely the long-term solution is to adjust your training and education regime so that there are enough such engineers? Hint to start with: degree courses in fields such as Computer Science and Software Engineering should not have teaching Visual Basic.Net and Java as the primary or only focus!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
How about instead of H1-Bs, we fast-track green cards for people with needed skills, or is that not enough like indentured servitude?
Play Command HQ online
The motivation behind this is: GREED! Big American companies want cheap disposable labor. They have no concern with what long-term effect this has on the middle-class, or on the economy, as long as it keeps propping up those bottom lines and rolling in the bonus and back-dated options. If they really wanted the best that the world has to offer, to be brought here and integrated into the US economy on a permanent basis, these would not be H1-B visas. They would have a program for work-towards-citizenship. Everything else is lies and misdirection.
VISAs are essentially an import tariff on employees.
Remember the steel import tariff Bush imposed a year or two back? the steel manufacturers were overjoyed - and rightly so; since imported steel now cost 45% more, they could raise their prices to match, and they made plenty of money out of it.
Who suffered? well, *EVERYONE ELSE*. All the companies who use steel had to pay 45% more. All their products (cars, construction materials for houses, etc) went up in price to compensate for their costs. You and I subsidized the steel industry, by Bush's decree.
Back to VISAs.
If you have demand for a skill-set and a shortfall in supply, wages go up.
Just like steel prices going up, when wages go up, final product prices go up.
So if you restrict the supply of programmers, software prices go up to compensate.
Who benefits? American programmers. They have fatter pay packets (which they notice), but most things they buy will be more expensive (which they won't notice). (Things are more expensive since the part of their cost which covers the price of the software used to make them has gone up).
So who pays? you and I, by Bush's decree.
The "solution" is to import cheap labour to further erode your citizens' desire to spend the time/money/effort getting those advanced technical degrees.
... why, in his opinion, are Americans so much dumber than citizens in other countries?
After all, why rack up so much debt from school when there will be someone else willing to do the same job for less because his school loans (if they exist) are a fraction of your's?
And isn't in the corporation's best interest to get the cheapest labour they can find?
So, the question becomes
I don't think we are. But I do believe that our government is too closely involved with business's desire to get the maximum benefit with the minimum investment. Fuck that. I want to see scholarships for advanced technical studies. Lots of them. Put your money where your mouth is. When 50% of the computer science majors can get out of school and pay off their debt within 5 years, THAT will be sufficient. Only then can he talk about how dumb Americans are.
Such broad statements don't help. I think it is a mixture of the IT industry needing more specific skills AND more people.... I don't believe that blanket H1 increases will solve the problem.
The IT industry should look inward and admit that it has done a piss-poor job of training people (and the employees have been complacent in their training demands). While many companies have training courses, most of these courses cover only general topics. Highly specific and technical knowledge takes more than a two-week course can provide, it takes months, even years to develop. IT companies somehow expect Universities to deliver these people, ready made for work. As long as employee training is considered a cost more than a benefit, the industry will keep saying that they can't find the skilled people. What these companies are saying in reality is that it is not cost effective for them to train their own employees, it is much cheaper to get foreigners trained at much lower cost and then import them. This outlook denies the fact that many employees posses the practical experience to quickly learn new skills if given the opportunity.
So what is the solution? I don't know, but the net effect of allowing more H1's will not be an overall improvement of American skills.
As far as I am concerned anyone should be able to come over here and reap the American dream just like all our ancestors did (except for the natives we forgot to kill).
In addition to the foreigners, you can avail yourself of more Americans by setting your sights lower. I've found that people that have an entrepreneurial spirit, ability to take personal responsibility of job functions, and demonstrate willingness to learn and self-study do very well in IT regardless of official degree. And they cost less.
Summary: US Kids are dumb, lazy, and fat and only interested in video games and lighting their farts on fire. Jobs in the US are leaving the country. Employers are moving their hiring to China, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe. Skilled workers in the US are having a hard time gettings or keeping jobs and the US companies' salary increases aren't even tracking the cost of living increases in the US.
Proposed solution: Bring in more foreign workers to compete for the few jobs that haven't been outsourced or moved overseas?!? Have them bring their extended families with them into the US. WTF! I'm not trying to be protectionist, but... we need to improve education in the US and we need to make sure that there will be good jobs for our kids when they grow up.
I know a lot of US companies now that only hire about 1 person in the US for every 20 they hire. Do you really think it's because they're aren't any qualified workers in the US!?
Could we see a day when our kids will be leaving the US to go to China and India to look for jobs and we'll be complaining about those countries limiting US foreign workers? I believe so...
You're getting as mixed a bag with H1Bs as you are with US IT workers. In IT you can make a salary well over the national average and it's a lot easier to get your foot in the door than it is with medicine or law. I've met some very talented H1Bs and I've had to clean up after some who were complete idiots. The trick isn't so much in the volume of smart people, the trick is in your HR Department's ability to filter out the folks who are only in it for the money.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The outsourcing boom is not working so well.
The number of CS grads is going down.
The US salaries are going up.
What to do, what to do, they've got us by the short hairs again... what did we do before? Ah yes.
Convince Congress that we don't have enough people to do the job, and that those people who live here suck anyway.
Let the H1B's start a-flowin'!
Salaries go down, more American students won't take CS as a degree, then we can ask for more, cheaper slave slabor from abroad! Eternal power-down cycle! Win-win! $$ for us managers!
There are thousands of skilled workers who quit IT because it doesn't pay well enough. I know that I work and study harder, smarter and longer hours than most lawyers, guess who commands the higher salary.
Commodity IT workers are monkeys, any skills shortage is because these monkeys devalue the labor market. I'm not getting out of bed for less than $75,000; don't tell me there's a skills shortage, tell me what is being done to reduce living costs.
Successful developing nations adapt their curricula to produce timely skills, and many are the targets of massive investment and job migration.
Meanwhile, in the face of mass offshoring, we have an increasingly undereducated population whose skills are steadily declining in value.
Visas and offhosring appear attractive short-term solutions because qualified candidates have TOO MUCH education and cost too much.
If the average high school graduate had the needed skills, we'd already have the labor at a reasonable cost.
"Before his confirmation, Cresanti served as Vice President of Public Policy at the Business Software Alliance (BSA). Prior to this, he was Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). Earlier in his career, he served as Staff Director for the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem. He was also Staff Director for the Subcommittee on Financial Services and Technology for the Senate Banking Committee. Mr. Cresanti received his B.A. degree from Austin College and his Juris Doctor degree from Baylor University."
"The Under Secretary is focused on carrying forward President Bush's vision to grow the economy... the Under Secretary's priorities are to: foster an environment conducive to private sector investment in innovation, by identifying ways to facilitate knowledge exchange between scientists and investors, which will boost our country's economic performance"
He's a republican from big business, charged with carrying forth a republican agenda "conductive to private sector investment". And what is a way in which this is accomplished? Lower labor costs. See, most people on Slashdot see America's IT performance as the number/quality of native workers. Cresanti sees it as how attractive each company's stocks are. And in this case, what's good for the goose is not so good for the gander.
Of course, in all fairness, that is a valid perspective, and isolating our market's cost structure from the rest of the world is not sustainable long-term. Thus, this results in a more short term decrease in the American standard of living, and increase in the third world's standard of living-- which no one here likes. There is of course an alternative; 97% of the wealth in the US is controlled by 3% of the population, or something like that. As Mahatma Gandhi said, "The earth has enough to satisfy every man's need, but not any man's greed."
So the bigger picture here is that we are not an island, and our standard of living is also dependent upon the standard of living of the rest of the world. But the earth is very rich in resources, and there certainly exists enough for all to enjoy a reasonable standard of living. The question then becomes, how do you redistribute the ultra-concentrated wealth in such a manner it is to the benefit of all, without the detriments of communism and forced labor, without killing incentive, risk, and drive that led to its creation? I think the happy medium is displayed in many European countries, with a more reasonable redistribution of wealth that encompasses rewarding the people who create it and taking care of the rest of society. Hell, the wealthy should be wealthy. Just perhaps to not such a large degree. How many gold shark minibars does one truly need for their 4th vacation mansion?
The core attitude that is an immediate reaction to stories like this though creates the problem. We immediately think of us, our lifestyle, etc. But we fail to acknowledge the connectedness to others; by hoarding ourselves, either individually or as a nation, we let our neighbors fall into poverty, which comes full circle when they labor for much cheaper wages and are no less human or capable. So I think the true solution is to raise the standard of living in countries we so fear for taking our jobs, for a reasonable redistribution of some of the wealth in the hands of so few, with the intent of providing a livable baseline for all and still room and reason for success and risk taking. And that is very much within our power-- our nation already has the wealth, as evidenced by massive spending in Iraq, and the concentrated wealth at the hands of so few in the population. We simply lack the will to use it to help ourselves and our neighbors. And every time the response is one of selfishness instead of compassion, at any level of society, even for us... the problem perpetuates itself. For if the vast majority of society is committed to any particular economic policy, chances
The solution is to make salaries in IT go up. When that happens, people will become interested in CS and flock to it, just like during the IT boom. Granted, that will attract people who otherwise wouldn't and probably shouldn't go into CS, but that will also attract the truly intelligent who would now rather become a doctor or a lawyer because they get paid so much more. The end result either way is more domestic IT workers.
How do we make IT salaries increase? Simple. Decrease the supply of IT workers in the short-term. That means DECREASING the number of H1-B workers, not increasing them. Fewer workers available means that companies have to bid up the few available workers left. More bidding means higher salaries for IT people.
What does INCREASING the number of H1-B workers mean? That means companies have more people to pick and choose from. That means companies can pay less for their workers because they don't have to bid up. That means US college students become less interested in CS and IT. That's because they see jobs going to foreigners and the few jobs that don't go to foreigners pay poorly. That means we as a nation become more dependent on H1-B labor. That means we don't fix our problem.
(Incidentally, companies want to increase the number of women going into IT for the same reason they want to increase the number of H1-Bs. The economic logic is exactly the same.)
Its funny that you talk about the free market while simultaneously advocating protectionism. In what way are India, China and Mexico less free or more protectionist than the USA? How are they damaging you in the 'unskilled labour market'?
If someone is willing to work for $1/day, then in a free market he will get a lot of customers. That person is not damaging your 'unskilled labour market'. It means that the work he is performing is only worth $1/day. That is the definition of the free market.
You are free to disagree whether it is right or wrong, but don't pretend to understand the free market while condemning free competition and advocating artificial barriers to trade.
People don't make major choices about their broad vocations simply on money. Temperament and aptitude is more important. Now, within those broad vocational parameters, money matters. Someone may become an oncologist, a general practitioner, or a pediatrician based on various trade-offs between pay, workload, etc. But they aren't going to choose between software engineer and doctor - considering the vicissitudes of the labor market, it would be foolish for them to.
People don't make major choices about their broad vocations simply on money.
The hell they don't.
Most of them don't. I went into programming because I enjoyed it. I picked it over other careers that pay more because I don't enjoy them. Generally, the people who pick a career based on money are those who do poorly. Because it is just a job to them, and not something they love to do.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
All this talk about "what employers want" is moot without knowing what they really want. There is no specific research or studies that we can rely on. We know what us techies feel is important, but we don't call the shots. We will spin our wheels here until this is answered.
Now that thats out of the way. My personal observation is that they want instant skills in whatever is popular that month. The easiest way to get that is to comb the world for those skills rather than wait to train existing staff. This is a general trend in the economy, not just IT. I've seen it in the fashion industry thru the experience of relatives: permanent jobs are a thing of the past. Employers want faster staff turnaround to fit current needs (as they see them). The only reason companies don't actually hire more temps is because temps expect more to compensate for the instabality. They just hire in the guise of perm because it is cheaper, but that is not their real plan.
The US must specialize in fast-changing fields because commodity fields go overseas. Churn is now our comparative advantage.
Table-ized A.I.
There is no need for the government to "fix" shortages by importing desperate labor in the form of H-1B workers or illegal aliens. When the government "fixes" a shortage, the government is damaging the normal operation of the free market. The free market works fine without government intervention.
Regrettably, most politicians (and some journals like the "Wall Street Journal") cater to certain segments of the population and outright lie about how economic laws work. For example, many Republicans favor big agri-businesses and claim that the American economy will be irreparably damaged unless Washington allows illegal aliens to pick fruits and vegetables. Many Democrats favor ethnic pressure groups like La Raza and make an identical claim.
Journals like the "Wall Street Journal" use an even sneakier strategy. The Journal repeatedly claims that increasing the American population is wonderful because doing so increases the wealth of the nation via increasing human capital. To a point, this claim is true. Consider an economy of exactly one person. That economy is pathetically poor because one person, regardless of how smart she is, cannot be equally skilled in all areas of work. Here, when I refer to wealth, I am referring to wealth per capita (i.e., GDP per capita), also known as personal wealth. If the 1-person economy grew into a 2-person economy, we can easily imagine that the wealth doubles or triples: one person is tending the vegetable garden while the other person is protecting the grass hut from wild animals.
However, consider an economy with 100 million people. If we doubled the size of this economy, then its wealth does not double. The wealth increases by substantially less than 1 percent. After a certain population size, each doubling of the population brings a rapidly decreasing percentage gain in the wealth.
The game that the WSJ plays is to ignore this concept of diminishing returns. Further, the WSJ deceptively says that doubling the population doubles the total weath (i.e., the total GDP, not the GDP per capita). Though that statement is true, it does nothing for the actual wealth that you experience. What you experience is GDP per capita, not total GDP.
Finally, there is a trade-off between (for example) a 0.1% increase in personal wealth (i.e., GDP per capita) and annoyances (e.g., pollution) created by a doubling of the American population.
By the way, identical comments about diminishing returns apply to global trade. Onces a global free market reaches a certain size, it captures most of the advantages of a large amount of human capital. The USA loses almost nothing by restricting our free trade to only free markets, which includes (at the moment) only Western nations. We should slam our markets shut to non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico. The tiny percentage gain in personal wealth (i.e., the GDP per capita) that we get by including India, China, and Mexico is completely offset by their damaging impact on Americans in the unskilled-labor market. China indirectly erodes the quality of life for Americans in the unskilled-labor market.
Then, along comes the WSJ to deceptively talk about total wealth (i.e., the total GDP) in absolute numbers, say, an increase in total GDP of $15 billion dollars. $15 billion is an eye-popping number. However, divide that number of the number of Americans to get the GDP per capita, and you see only an increase of $50. Is $50 worth destroying the quality of life for Americans in the unskilled-labor market?
"Did you even read the article? There simply ARE NOT ENOUGH SKILLED IT WORKERS IN THE US!"
If the demand for skilled IT workers were higher than the supply, we would expect wages to be up. But adjusted wages are basically flat over something like the last 5 years.
The "problem" is that there is a shortage of supply of IT workers at the prices corporations want to pay.
By bringing in additional H1Bs who will be underpaid (yes, they are and will be), we disrupt the market forces which would otherwise tend to force IT wages up.
Claims that there are not enough skilled U.S. IT workers is just another case of the corporate propaganda and lobbying.
And of *course* foreign governments want more of their workers to have access to U.S. jobs. Why? Because those workers will funnel a significant amont of that money back into the economies of their countries of origin.
Just follow the money.
that's also why they build most of the cars they sell HERE with US workers.. as well as BMW... Americans actually do quality work CHEAPER than in Japan or Germany. Those companies realize that our government are suckers for sloppy management.. and they are eating the good employees up like hotcakes. Most German or Japanese companies can tell you EXACTLY what they want you to do... unfortunately, they leave little room for short term advancement and tend to be to "high-school" for my tastes. American companies can't give you a definite job description ever... they always expect employees to be able to pick up the slack for funding shortages, unexpected up sizing, or downsizing or management mis decisions. American companies are not productive because business owners and managers are always chasing the "big dream" and not running the business they have RIGHT NOW. Productivity at auto makers has gone up 7-9% every year for 10 years, but automakers still loose money? Hint, it's not the workers, even the lazy union ones costing money. Perhaps we need to import MANAGERS under H1B and not techs.
FUD. Yes, there are lots of unqualified monkeys who think they know their stuff even though they truly don't (webmaster last place I worked knew nothing more than static html 4 littered with font tags and tables for layouts).
.NET framework 3 which means several new stacks/technologies to learn (WPF, WCS, WWF, WCS), PowerShell was just released too... It doesn't matter - there is always more to learn than you will ever manage to. There is NO job out there that requires you to learn so much new stuff all the time. You could spend more time to train for the new stuff than you work, and you'd still have more to learn. There's no end to it. And by the time you know the new stuff, more new stuff is released.
But then again, many employers (mine at least) are looking for a dev who is pretty good at the major 3 DBs (enough to port apps, and have 'em work at good performance levels - plus DBA work), know C# and Java (and countless IDEs/compilers and apps for testing/coverage/source control/bug reports/etc), 4 different web/app servers, application architecture, n-tier development, network programming, system programming, scripting in various languages, plus a gazillion unrelated jobs like server/workstation admin, be able to fix network problems, some linux knowledge, and countless such things.
And already knowing all this isn't enough. Even though we just finished learning all kinds of new stuff that came out not long ago (.NET framework 2.0 - the new classes and CLR/language changes, SQL Server 2005, etc), now we have more to learn with Vista coming out (like deploying/administering it),
And preferably, you have to do all this for as close as possible to minimum wage, and without any kind of job security, no flexibility (can't make your own hours, like 4 days of 10 hours instead of 5x8 or such, or work weekend or whatever, no telecommuting - ever), little (if any) bonuses and benefits, and be expected to train your H1B replacement when it finally happens.
There are people who know and do all this, but they cost money. You want me to work 60h weeks (and require almost as much [not paid] to keep up with your requirements i.e. have no life *AT ALL*), while living in an expensive metro area for 50k$/year?
Yeah, no wonder they can't find qualified applicants!
Besides, to have this job done properly, you'd want a good DBA, a couple programmers and an admin - not a "jack of all trades" who knows it all just like they expect me to be, but why pay for 4 experts when they can pay me half of what one costs?
I have no problems finding work, and my work is always up to expectation or better, but I can't ever find a job that pays well, so I'm always looking... What we lack isn't qualified people, it's companies worth working for!
Do we have any hard evidence that having a free market, where Indian or Chinese programmers were favored over American ones -- however 'overpriced' the Americans might be -- helps America? We seem to be taking on premise that a completely free market helps the First World, but I'm not sure why this is. The WSJ crowd never seems to explain exactly the reasoning and evidence for this claim; it's treated as holy writ, beyond all question. And if there's one thing that I really dislike, it's claims that aren't allowed to be questioned.
So what if Americans are "overpriced" compared to workers in areas where basic working conditions aren't guaranteed? That's not a level playing field; it simply guarantees that if Americans want to compete, we have to drop to that level. Why should we allow this? If it doesn't help our economy, why are we implementing economic policies that help China and India, at our workers and our economy's expense?
Simply saying that 'so-and-so doesn't facilitate a free market,' doesn't automatically make it a bad thing. Maybe we don't want a completely free market, if it means we're going to have to compete directly with countries that treat their workers as disposable units. We need to think about the ultimate effects of our economic policies on our citizens, in the long term, and back it up with convincing evidence and research instead of just polemics.
I'm open to both arguments here but convinced of neither; there seem to be a shortage of factual arguments when it comes to foreign and domestic economic policy, and I don't think that helps anything.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
We need to import workers to fill the gaps, not because we're not paying IT workers enough, but because there simply AREN'T enough IT workers available in the first place.
If that were true, wouldn't offered salaries go up to at least dot com bubble levels again?
rd
OK, Mr. Cresanti, so the US is lacking in IT workers with the "appropriate skill sets."
Pray tell, then, what are the appropriate skill sets? What, you don't know? You just know that the IT-industry lobbyist who took you out for a lobster dinner and lap dance last night said we don't have the right kind of people in the US, and we need to allow cheaper workers in. He must know, because he's getting paid so much by the big IT brass, right?
Oh, wait, is the "appropriate skill set" something like eight to ten years of developing a particular part of a particular kind of application in a particular environment using a particular set of tools? Then BS, because you don't learn that in school.
From where I sit, I see thousands of experienced IT people getting laid off every month for the last five years. I don't see any of the employers who are crying labor shortage looking to scoop up even some of these people.
I don't see many employers striving to hire new college grads who lack experience, but have demonstrated ability, for purpose of mentoring them to be the next generation of leaders. (Oh wait, we are doing that with foreign workers, I forgot).
Cry me a river, Mr. Cresanti, but until you have some specifics to back up your argument, at least do us the favor of crying in private.