How to Keep America Competitive

pkbarbiedoll writes to tell us that in a recent Washington Post article, Bill Gates takes another look at the current state of affairs in computer science and education. According to Gates: "This issue has reached a crisis point. Computer science employment is growing by nearly 100,000 jobs annually. But at the same time studies show that there is a dramatic decline in the number of students graduating with computer science degrees. The United States provides 65,000 temporary H-1B visas each year to make up this shortfall — not nearly enough to fill open technical positions. Permanent residency regulations compound this problem. Temporary employees wait five years or longer for a green card. During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth."

Comments

Overworked?

[wframe9109]

I went to college under the impression that I would graduate with a degree in Computer Science.

In the third lecture of the intro course, the teacher discussed spending all night coding for labs and so forth, and mentioned that it would prepare us for real life.

After a quick google session, I never went to the class again.

I'm sure there are places where you aren't forced to stay late or bring your work home with you... But the trend of overworking in real life occupations CS degrees can lead to is very damaging to interest in this degree.

If I wanted to concentrate on a job over things like family and a social life, I would go to med school.

Re:Overworked?

[koreth]

Your professor misled you. Yeah, sure, sometimes I'm up past midnight pounding out code.

But then the next day I get to sleep in until noon if I want.

"How late you stay up working" is only half the picture -- there's the unspoken assumption that you arrive in the office at the same time as everyone else, which is absolutely not necessarily the case. Every single programming job I've had (I've been in the industry for close to 20 years, worked at a couple big companies and a bunch of small ones) has had flexible schedules and sane comp time policies. And this is including a couple dot-com-boom startups. Now, maybe it's different if you're at a non-tech company, but the point is there are tons of jobs out there that don't require you to spend every waking hour working.

You can burn yourself out at any job. Burnout is 90% about you and only 10% about your employer, in my experience. And the trend toward longer hours is an American disease, not a CS one; you'll probably run into it no matter what industry you enter. (That's assuming you're in the US, which of course I don't actually know, so bad me if you're not.)

That depends upon you and the job.

[khasim]

Some people prefer to work really late in "deep hack mode".

Others prefer 8-5 job and forget about the work when you leave.

It all depends upon your personality and the requirements of the job. And IF WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS IS CORRECT finding a job more in line with your personality should be easy.

If what the article says is correct.

Hmm

[Erwos]

Seems to me that the appropriate way of handling this issue would be for the US to encourage more students to take up CS as their degree, and do more to encourage smart, well-educated professionals to immigrate here - permanently. Temporary visas and the like seem to be band-aids rather than real solutions.

I don't care where they're from - this country can only do better to have more educated folks living in it.

When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[Animats]

There's no shortage. Salaries are too low.

As the IEEE points out, relative engineering salaries have been declining since the 1970s.

What Gates is whining about is that there aren't enough people willing to learn the ins and outs of Microsoft's software and work around its problems in the field. What he wants are cheap janitors to clean up the Mess from Redmond.

Economics lesson for Billy

[zerofoo]

Gates must have dropped out before taking Econ 101.

A labor shortfall in a free market ALWAYS results in higher wages which ends up drawing more people into the field. Once an employment saturation point is achieved, salaries decline and employment levels off.

H-1B visas artificially increase the labor supply while decreasing wage growth. This attempt to "makeup the shortfall" will only further depress CS enrollments. Why on earth would a prospective student go into CS if the money is not there, and labor is being imported to further drive down wages?

Gates is not a stupid man - he knows these economic rules, and lowering wages is the only reason to push for more H-1B visas.

-ted

Don't even go there, Bill

[MikeRT]

There was an article posted outside of a professor's door when I was in college a year and a half ago talking about Microsoft's problem with treating even its IT contractors right. Maybe the real reason that IT is "suffering" is that companies often don't treat their IT employees like real employees. My fiance's dad, for example, has been proven to be a strategic asset to his company, but when he had to switch jobs because the client's manager found out that he made more money than she did, his boss basically said "ain't my duty to lift a finger to find you work" until it became a possibility that a competitor might pick him up. Given his reputation, that's actually possible. Hell, the abuses that IT workers ranging from sysadmins to software engineers face at the hands of corporate bureaucrats is legendary, and many young people are turned off/scared of that! Who wants to get paid a modest salary for that, especially women? My fiance can't take the abuse from the corporate types over her which is part of the reason why she fully intends to say "fuck this industry" and become a stay at home mother coding in her spare time for fun and to teach her kids if they're interested.

And the thing is that people like Bill Gates don't even care that they are adding to this by calling for the dilution of wages even more, at the same time that many "good liberals" like Gates support high taxes, high regulations and other things that cut into the competitiveness of the average worker compared to foreign workers and reduce the wages of the domestic workers. Yes, I know I'm cynical.

This is news?

[J.R. Random]

A super rich capitalist wants to increase his profits by importing more cheap labor.

It will be news when a super rich capitalist says, "Sure, it costs a little more to hire American citizens, but I do that because I don't want to see this continued race to the bottom, with the level of economic inequality in this country soon to exceed that of Brazil."

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[drinkypoo]

I mean, it's great to learn all that extra stuff, get new "perspectives", be "well-rounded", etc. I won't deny that at all. But isn't it more important that you be able to live independently first, in a job commensurate with your abilities?

What you're talking about is a program that would produce mindless drones. We expose people to a multitude of content in school so that they are aware of things beyond the end of their nose.

Oh, come on, Bill, you may have Aspergers, but...

[Baldrson]

There is no shortage of US engineers -- there is only a shortage of young engineers -- and of managers who see the difference between a line of code and productivity. Not one of the guys over 40 I know is making as much now as he was BEFORE 1996 and most of them have been unemployed most of the time since the year 2000 -- this during a time when real estate costs have skyrocketed along with H-1b imports.

This includes guys who were college buddies of Ray Ozzie and helped him with his CS homework. Yeah, I went to the University of Illinois and worked on the PLATO project as a system programmer.

And don't give me garbage about "keeping up on your skills" when the guys I've most closely worked with -- these obsolete aging engineers who "don't keep up on their skills" -- were doing 50K line Javascript web applications back in 1997 and couldn't get the mind-share among the "luminaries" who were all agog about Java -- and do we even need to talk about VB?

There has been a demographic collapse among young engineers because the prior generation of engineers couldn't afford to have children even if they could find a wife in one of the male saturated ghettos created by guys like you. The few young men sired by engineers are all-too-aware of what you've done to their fathers and they'll be better off going into real estate or moving out to a little plot of land in the country living an eco-friendly subsistence lifestyle.

You see they know they are from a culture that respects women's sovereignty to the point that arranged marriages are out of the question -- unlike the hoards you idiots are importing.

Well, sorry, you're obviously not idiots. You're probably suffering from a mild form of Aspergers to be so unaware of these profound social problems afflicting your subjects -- sort of like a "nobility" that just can't understand why their subjects don't eat cake and then try to guillotine them. My nephew has a fairly severe form of Aspergers but he can get along a lot better now that he is self-aware about it and the limitations it places on his judgement about human social relations. Sometimes reality makes one sound like a satirist but there is truth to what I'm saying here.

What's the problem again?

[TheLink]

I'm not in the US, nor a US citizen, but I thought the US companies wanted to send those jobs overseas anyway? Why should smart US students waste X years doing CS, graduate and then have their jobs outsourced or have to compete for jobs treated as "cheap labour" by companies (after all what's the H1-B thing really about)?

If the companies keep changing their minds, well too bad for them.

Meanwhile, it's supply and demand. Not enough applicants? Start offering higher salaries and better working conditions then - too bad you'd probably have to wait a while - try thinking longer term next time.

Otherwise I think they just want more silly people to rush into CS just to increase supply and keep prices down.

The real crisis is the shortage of people with competence and integrity, rather than a shortage of people who do Computer Science.

Au contraire

[bill_mcgonigle]

And IF WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS IS CORRECT finding a job more in line with your personality should be easy.

I read it differently. Bill Gates wants more H1-B workers which he can, unofficially, work at those kind of hours. That creates a watermark in the marketplace, against which non-H1B workers need to compete for jobs. I bet if Microsoft improved working conditions and company policies (both stemming from the same dysfunctional root, most likely) they'd have plenty of folks beating a path to their door.

Folks I've known who figured Microsoft would be the right place to work straight out of college have all "gotten the hell out" after a year or two. And it's not all about the hours - Apple has a much lower turnover rate and a lower percentage of H1-B's despite inhuman hour requirements.

Part of it is cultural - the 80-hour salaried job at Microsoft might be nirvana to a particular H1-B workers, but unacceptable to a well-educated American. Not to mention a Frenchman.

Re:Au contraire

[bill_mcgonigle]

I know very few 80hr/week employees. As in, i can't think of any right now.

OK, great, what's a good average number for a leaf node employee with a product behind schedule?

Microsoft has a problem finding _qualified_ applicants...don't you think we'd rather not deal with the extra hassle?

So one of three things has to be true:

• There aren't any qualified potential US applicants
• Qualified potential US applicants by and large don't want to work at Microsoft
• Microsoft isn't paying enough to attract qualified US applicants

That last one is really redundant with the second, just being the economic facet of the second case. If the first one were true Microsoft would be the only successful software company in the US. It's not, leaving basically the second option by process of elimination. So, that's where the company should focus its efforts. H1-B is probably easier/cheaper in the long run, even if it makes your life difficult, but whatever you can do to improve the attractiveness of Microsoft is going to be best for everybody. Given that you're here on Slashdot, I'd say you're probably a good candidate to be a force for betterment.

Re:Au contraire

[erc]

That's an odd statement. How would you justify it?

Which part - the Microsoft-centric, or the trailing in technology?

Microsoft doesn't necessarily have the latest, greatest, or best in technology, despite repeated attempts to self-aggrandize at the expense of Linux and other operating systems. It can be argued (and rather successfully) that Windows isn't the best choice for many server installations, and even for a significant portion of desktops - because of stability issues, draconian DRM and licensing issues designed to fatten Microsoft's and partners bottom lines at the expense of consumers, the desire to own the computer market completely instead of acknowledging that there are other operating systems around (some better than Windows) and the fact that Windows is the #1 target of malicious attacks (whether or not this is due to the popularity of Windows or that Windows has more security issues per K lines of code than many other operating systems is a matter of debate), which Microsoft could be more forthcoming about and more agile to respond.

As for the US trailing many other countries in the world, one simply needs to look at where we get most of our technology - from overseas, particularly Japan. Where is most software innovation going on? Europe, mostly - and mostly in areas other than Windows. Windows is inherently handicapped, in part because you simply can't get rid of the GUI, and this encourages a generation of point-and-click administrators and people who call themselves programmers who have little knowledge of what goes on underneath the covers (a position that Microsoft encourages, partly because their code isn't open and partly because Microsoft seeks to protect what they regard as their trade secrets), where Linux and the BSD variants encourage just the opposite. I can get FreeBSD to run in 64MB or less of RAM and in far less than 200 MB of disk space and have a fully-functional server, out-of-the-box - I don't think you can say the same of Windows, especially Windows XP and Vista.

Another indication - the US trails a lot of other nations in the number of high-speed internet connections per capita. South Korea has 100 MB to the door for most people in the larger cities, and it's cheaper to boot - while we suffer with less than 10 MB connections at twice the cost. It's not about national pride, it's not about innovation, it's about making as much money as possible, even at the expense of consumers - and that has become the defining characteristic of Microsoft, sadly enough.

Re:Au contraire

[yakovlev]

- Qualified potential US applicants by and large don't want to work at Microsoft
- Microsoft isn't paying enough to attract qualified US applicants

Yeah, one or both is likely. MS isn't the darling of the tech world it once was; you're no longer a millionaire after 7 years. The compensation structure has chnaged a few times since 2000 when people were leaving MS in droves to do startups. Many people think we made some poor hiring decisions around that time frame (after all, _I_ was hired, and my main motivation for interviewing was to get a free trip to Seattle and to mouth-off about how awesome linux was to a bunch of MSFT people :)

MSFT doesn't aim to be the pay-leader, so people purely motivated by that will probably look elsewhere.

That said, I think many tech companies have open positions and describe having difficulty filling them. Does the entire sector, as a whole, not pay enough? Are there people out there that are not working for anyone, rather than work for what they deem to be too little? Said another way, if you see that across the board, tech companies have open heads, it's hard to suggest that it is purely a Microsoft problem related to salary or other undesirability. Doesn't Google have difficulty hiring people? Apple?

Yes, if a given industry is having trouble finding qualified applicants, then it isn't paying enough for qualified labor. The obvious way to show this is that if CS graduates were paid a million dollars per year starting out, people would be leaving other careers in droves to pursue a career in computer science. This is freshman economics at work. Now, clearly technology companies can't afford that kind of pay, but that just means that employers have trouble finding qualified applicants at a price they're willing to pay. Freshman economics says "tough noogies, you can't have more at the current price than the quantity supplied at the current price." That's how free markets work. The H1-B program is about changing the rules by finding an additional supplier of labor who is willing to produce more at the current price. The overall result of adding this new supplier will be to drive prices down and quantities up, at the expense of existing workers. Moving jobs overseas does the same thing economically as raising the H1-B cap, however the H1-B changes may come more slowly.

Now, is free trade in the labor market good for the global economy? Most economic models say yes. Is it good for the US economy? The answer is less clear, though the answer leans towards it being good for the US economy. Is it good for technology workers? Probably not, as with new competition they will have to accept lower wages.

So, don't think for a minute that there is a "labor shortage" in IT. The so-called labor shortage is just a result of normal supply and demand. Expanding the H1-B program should be viewed as what it is, and attempt to apply free trade to the IT labor market, with the result being new low-cost overseas competition for US technology jobs. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on your perspective, but adding H1-B workers is going to have a serious effect on US IT workers.

Re:blameusa

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Mabye if we realized that international corporations owe no loyalty to any country, not even the one that they are headquartered in, there'd be no reason for such a tag because America isn't the problem. The problem is that economics is profoundly nationalistic and a form of warfare- and we've got a bunch of people selling weapons to both sides.

It's been 20 years and CS still gets no respect.

[LuisAnaya]

Let's see... who in their right mind would go for a career that:

• The amount of money you get does not equal the amount of time spent unlike other careers
• You age sooner than a super model, you're considered "over the hill" after the age of 40 if you're still doing technical work.
• You seldom get paid to keep yourself current, some companies do, others do not. Most of the time, you are stuck with a technology segment while the world around you changes every 5 years. It was a hard time for me to move from Mainframe programming to UNIX/C, and it is going to be another hard time for me if I ever decide to move to Web/AJAX/Java development.
• Your job is in jeopardy to be outsourced or being forced adjusted for cheaper labor.
• ... and you can't take overtime because you're considered "a manager".

Really, who wants to deal with this crap? I'm sorry, but until conditions do not improve, it's going to be a tough sale to college students to go for CS's. People asks me about it and this is what I say: It is lot's of fun if you like it but at the end, you're better of going to business, med or become a lawyer if you want to get the moolah". Personally, I moved from software development to technical pre-sales and I could not be happier. I sometimes wondered if I should've gone for an MBA rather than my MS in CS. Oh well..

Being Underpaid Due to Government Intervention

[reporter]

A shortage of labor is a normal part of a free market. So is a surplus. Shortages and surpluses are powerful economic forces that correct the underpricing and overpricing, respectively, of labor.

There is no need for the government to intervene by importing desperate labor from either India via the H-1B visa or Mexico via an open-border policy. The free market, by itself and without government intervention, will fix the shortage or surplus. Wages rise, and the shortage disappears. Wages fall, and layoffs occur -- thus fixing the surplus.

Washington does not intervene to fix the labor surplus (which is leading to massive layoffs) in Detroit. Why should Washington intervene to fix a labor shortage?

If Microsoft paid the market wage for computer programmers, then plenty of programmers with the "right" skills would apply for Microsoft jobs. The problem is that Microsoft refuses to pay the market wage. The market wage is not what Microsoft management considers to be the right wage. The market wage (and the market working conditions) is the wage (and quality of working conditions) at which the supply of labor meets the demand for that labor. The market wage is the intersection point of the labor-demand curve and the labor-supply curve.

The bottom line is that Microsoft (and many other American companies) refuse to pay the market wage. So, they want government to intervene in the free market so that Microsoft can pay below-market-wage salaries.

Well DUH!

[Anon-Admin]

If they want to know why, all they have to do is look at the career possibilities.

#1) Unneeded: IT is seen (By the C-Level executives) as expensive, overpriced, overstaffed, and overhead. It is one of the first departments to get hit with layoffs when times get tough.

#2) No promotion/raise: The only way I have gotten a promotion or a raise is to change jobs. 5 years of working for a company, working to better the systems and protect the company assets. When the Manager moved up (to the GM spot) I put in for the position. I am told that I am not qualified. Strange, you would think that 10 years management experience, PM classes and 2 years towards a MBA would qualify me.

#3) Respect: When problems occur, IT is the first to get blamed Do I even need to explain this one?

#4) Cost Cutting: IT is the only field I have ever worked where you can and do get asked to take a pay cut while doubling your work load.

#5) Knowledge and training == 0: This is one of the few fields where people are paid for what they know, only to have the critical decisions made without their input. How many of us have been overridden by a C-Level Exec? Ex: "I have decided that we will be a MS Windows shop from now on. I need you to replace those 8 old HP9000 oracle servers with this new quad processor Windows server." --- Real example!

#6) Education: Most realize that after 4 years in college, they enter the workforce 7 years behind the curve. Experience is everything!