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.)

Re:Overworked?

[StarvingSE]

I have many friends, myself included, who are working and programming in the IT industry, and no one every puts in "all nighters" for work. Yes, we did in college in order to get those huge programming assignments done, but those were fun. Your group together in the lab hacking away, eating pizza and BSing never seemed like work to me. But I enjoy my work and I enjoy programming. I can see how this wouldn't be fun to someone who is just doing a computer science degree because they heard "you can earn a lot of money in that industry."

I program at work, and then when I go home I work on open source or some "on the side" programming jobs that I occassionally take. I do this because it is my hobby and career, and it is enjoyable to me. I don't do it everyday, and I do go out with my friends and party on the weekends.

This professor is either lying to you or doesn't really like the industry and has a negative attitude towards it. You need to make up your own mind. If you don't enjoy the work, you will be miserable because it is difficult. If you enjoy it, it can be very rewarding for you.

Ha ha

[tkrotchko]

...and Microsoft will do anything to solve this "crisis" except spend money on it.

That's the government's job! (i.e. yours and mine) ...and meanwhile keep those cheap programmers coming from overseas, otherwise, where will the next version of Windows come from?

Re:Ha ha

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

What does that have to do with Microsoft? And how is that contributing to the problem Bill is whining about? I seem to remember a lawsuit a few years back attacking Microsoft over calling people who weren't engineers engineers. I seem to remember people being encouraged to not finish their CS degree so MS didn't have to pay them as much in the long run. I seem to remember twenty years of vicious market monopoly abuse. Two or three years of giving a little bit back doesn't make up for being a robber baron for twenty. In fact, I don't know if a hundred will, the way the foundation manages itself.

Re:Ha ha

[tkrotchko]

It's a great foundation, and I think they're terrific. However, while Bill Gates is a big shareholder of Microsoft, and he is the owner of the Foundation, they don't appear to be related at all. That is, Microsoft's will is not expressed via the Foundation, which is a good thing. They're more concerned with at-risk children, and the welfare of the planet, which doesn't necessary align with Microsoft's business plan.

But, I went to the link, and it doesn't mention anything about training U.S. programmers to help the crisis. In fact, if you look here at this link, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/UnitedStates/ you'll see the only thing they're trying to do is make sure U.S. students graduate from high school:

    "Significantly increasing the number of students who graduate from high school with the skills needed to succeed in college and work"

Which I find is terrific. I love that Bill and Melinda have really stepped up and helped.

However, I'm asking what Microsoft (not Bill Gates) is doing to help the situation. I would be interesting to see if they're spending more on H1-B lobbying, or actually spending money in the areas that I mentioned (or indeed any sort of Computer Science/Programmer training and encouragement). Do you know where we might find out how much is spent in those areas?

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.

Re:That depends upon you and the job.

[TheGeneration]

*sigh*

If anything is going to cause America to fall behind in the tech sector it's the CEO's and other top execs at major companies that won't let the rest of us practice our ART the way we see fit to do so.

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.

Re:When salaries go up, the shortage is real

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly he wants the work to be done as inexpensively as possible. Any well run business should want the same thing as those that allow salaries to grow out of control are doomed in the long run.

Among the many many mistakes made by the US auto industry was the thinking that since labor was such a small percentage of what it cost to make their product they didn't need to control it. Before long a guy running a screw gun was making $22/hour to screw in a tenth as many screws as a robot in Japan with a capitalized cost of $0.001/hour. Then our US screw gun operator himself was replaced by a robot but he couldn't fired because the collective bargaining agreement prevented it, so he sat in the break room and made $22/hour to play hearts with all the other guys who used to do robot jobs.

As much as people like you want to bleat about how much you need to make to live like a human being the reality is that there are thousands of people right now making rafts out of the empty chemical barrels we sent them our waste in, preparing to cross miles and miles of ocean, so they can crawl through a drain pipe, just for the privlege of doing twice as much as you do for half the pay and far less than half the complaining. So sit here and bellyache about how Microsoft won't pay this or that and that isn't enough money. Someone will be along shortly to make you irrelevant anyway. People like you laughed when all the manufacturing jobs were outsourced, now we see that an engineer and a programmer and even a doctor, can be replaced by a cheaper version just like the screw gun guy.

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

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[0123456]

"Um, he majored in economics. At Harvard."

So it's no wonder he doesn't understand that 'if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys'.

I'm constantly amazed at how little 'economists' know about economics, and how poorly their predictions turn out.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[JesseMcDonald]

H-1B visas artificially increase the labor supply while decreasing wage growth.

Rather, the requirement for H-1B visas artificially restricts the labor supply, raising wages (but reducing wealth), whereas an increased supply of visas allows the labor supply and wages to grow toward their natural levels.

Re:Economics lesson for Billy

[homer_s]

H-1B visas artificially increase the labor supply

How is that artificial? Are these people produced artificially by some machine in a factory?
The only artificial thing in this scenario is national borders and the different artificial economic policies set within each of those borders.

Work not getting done for some reason?

[192939495969798999]

I have no idea why there would be such a need for more workers, it's almost as if all the employed engineers are busy doing something else at work, like going to some website and posting comments or something... nah, that can't be it!

Government Interference

[Inmatarian]

The problem, as I see it, isn't that the government has been doing to little, but rather, doing too much. In classic economics, when there aren't enough workers to fill the roles, salaries and working conditions increase for the valued few. People see how well they're treated and desire these jobs, and go to college to learn how to do it.

In the current state, the government fills far too many of those jobs with foreign born workers, offering them no chance to become American citizens and forcing them to work for a fifth of what American workers cost. These foreigners are abused with long hours, and then sent back to where ever they came from either when they show discontent, or what citizenship is in their sights.

The solution is to make efforts to make these foreign workers into American workers, so they can compete the same way we do. Until that happens, the wage gap will continue to be wide, and the abuses will continue.

What if there were no immigration quotas?

[davidwr]

Here's a thought:

What if there were no immigration quotas?

What if we let anyone and everyone except criminals, terrorists, and those incapable of working come in by just paying port fees, putting down a deposit for a return airplane or bus ticket, and showing they either had a job offer or had a month's worth of living expenses available? Give them all work-authorization cards.

In the first few years there would be a lot of wage-adjustments as certain markets like high-tech, manual-labor, and low-wage retail got flooded but in the long run I think it would be good for the overall economy. Instead of high-tech jobs going to India dragging down American wages, high-tech jobs would remain here at depressed wages but the American economy would benefit from the local employment. It would also give the few Americans who are truly lazy or underperforming a kick in the proverbial kiester if they want to stay employed.

So what if I and my fellow technocrats see wages drop to below $35,000 for starting college grads and proportionately lower for experienced programmers? If it means a more robust American economy and better cultural exchanges with the larger immigrant populations then I'm all for it.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[Maxo-Texas]

If it really did work this way, a college degree would also drop in price from $50,000 for four years to $12,000 for four years. Your cars would drop from $25,000 to $19,000. Your DVD's would drop from $22 to $19.

In that kind of environment, I'd be happy to take a pay cut. The problem is corporations are making a lot of money (record profits for Exxon, a multi BILLION dollar cash chest that Microsoft can't even find ways to spend) and getting artificial laws passed to restrain trade (TV shows months behind in Australia, DVD's for $2.49 in China but $19.99 here that are illegal to re-import, etc.).

With America's relative safety and fair legal system, people with money from all over the world are bidding up our property so we are having more trouble affording to live here. (Galveston- the average house is now 500,000 dollars- their schools are closing because no one with kids can afford to live their and all the real residents of Galveston are being forced to move to the mainland, Any ski area- same problem. Any pretty area- same problem).

The question is how many hours do you have to work to get housing and a hamburger. It's been increasing for the last 9 or 10 years.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[scharkalvin]

Do that and watch the number of mortgage forecloses go up a few thousand percent as many white collar workers can no longer afford their homes. The housing market will die out putting builders out of work as a 10 year backlog of unsold homes hits the market with no takers. Auto workers will go out of work as the market for luxury cars and suv's dries up (but think of how this will help global warming!). Maybe in a few years things will level out, but the president that presides of this disaster will go down in history right next to Herbert Hoover.

Re:What if there were no immigration quotas?

[glider0524]

Globalization suppresses normal diversification in a given country's economy. Anything that can sub-contracted out to a foreign land just disappears from this country's employment profile and those left have to cluster in to a shortening list of professions left. The jobs that are left here become either less skilled, or in management. There can be only so many managerial staff in the economy, we probably have too many as it is. The country has already lost the vast majority of its manufacturing industry; what's in store for us? Will we eventually end up a nation of nothing but fast-food burger flippers and managers for workers in other countries?

We may possibly get an overall monetary benefit as a country from offshoring, but you have to ask, who is getting that benefit?

1. Today: We produce X locally, paying a worker named 'Joe' $20 per widget object X, the employer sells X for $100, (ignoring other static production/distribution costs) the employer keeps, say, $80 of profit for every X object sold. Joe gets to feed his family off a living wage---he's not ripping anyone off or being lazy. He makes his $20/day.
2. Tomorrow: We hire someone offshore and pay them $4 per X built. The employer is not going to pass quite all the savings off to the consumer because competitive pressures aren't forcing him to. He sells each X for $90 now, raking in $86 in profit now. Now, someone in a third world country has $4 for their effort and can buy a flush toilet, the business owner/stockholders of the Widgets, Inc. company have $6 extra of profit in their pocket, the consumer saved 10% ($10) on the cost of the product. Woo-hoo! Everybody wins. Except.. Joe unfortunately now has to find another job not paying as much, possibly something unskilled like being a waiter. He makes a lot less than what he did before, now he only makes $10/day. Rinse and repeat times 10 million Joes. He took a 50% pay cut to subsidize a bunch of other people in society and across the world.

The overall net shift of wealth in America due to offshoring:

• A) Money previously being earned in wages is taken from employee workers.

Some part of it gets transferred to each of:

• B) Business owners/stockholders
• C) Consumers of the product being made
• D) Third world countries

Possibly the country as a whole might be getting a net benefit. Not have to pay money for higher wages to Americans can be seen as "net benefit" since we aren't paying our own workers more money. Maybe that is seen as a "wasteful" cost. My main beef here anyway is that any net benefit gained mainly goes to the rich. The class of "the rich" in America are mostly made up by groups (B) and (C). Jobless people and waiters (the 'recycled') are not often a part of buying consumers getting a benefit in group (C). So, it's really a net loss in economic wealth for a large group of (A) people. Like other economic theory proposed by Conservatives and Libertarians (e.g. trickle down economics), it's mostly an excluse to justify a massive shift of middle-class wealth to the hands of a few.

Of course job recycling is nothing new in the economy. A decline of something like horse buggy whip production has traditionally always been replaced by something like automobile production. I would have disagreed 100 years ago with attempting to halt technological progress, as I absolutely do now. I'm not a Luddite trying to stop technological progress, it's the lifeblood of economic growth. But the difference now from 100 years ago is that by removing a high-tech job now from the American workforce, we AREN'T replacing it with a higher paying job in a newer technological field. All other previous economic cycles had somewhere higher to grow to. The off-shoring process now replaces skilled jobs in America with lower paying and/or less skilled jobs chiefly characterized by the fact that they simply cannot be easily off-shored (being a barber, a waiter, etc).

As long as you treat employees like crap

[Marxist Hacker 42]

You will only have crap employees. Maybe it's time to start actually being competitive in hiring and lifestyle as well as being competitive in the marketplace; after all, full time employees in Europe and Japan enjoy the ability to buy a home, settle down in one place, and raise a family.

Either that or it's time for the United States to realize that economics is a form of warfare for rich countries- and get serious about winning economic wars with our peers instead of wasting money losing military wars with our inferiors. If so, we'll need to realize that the international corporation is effectively a double agent traitor or the arms dealer who sells to both sides- and treat those businesses accordingly.

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.

Re:Don't even go there, Bill

[kconfig]

You are absolutely right. If you do even a cursory search for IT abuse/lack of respect, what sane person would want to enter this field? Even CIO magazine has numerous articles on getting buy-in/respect/etc from other peers. Hell, if an executive has to fight to earn respect at the top, what can a line manager or grunt expect. IT itself is a crazy field - while you can earn a decent living, putting up with the constant changes, lack of true respect from business peers, and too many that use technology but don't even have a basic understanding of it is a maddening career choice. Or, maybe I'm just crazy and burnt out after 15 years in the field

Re:Don't even go there, Bill

[tom's a-cold]

Maybe the real reason that IT is "suffering" is that companies often don't treat their IT employees like real employees.

In other words, they treat them like their other employees. The whole H1-B program is a scam to depress the salaries of American software people. I've done a lot of work in Silicon Valley and it's become increasingly clear to me that it's not about a skills shortage, it's about being able to pay a guy from (let's use a common example) India a lot less than an equivalently-skilled American would demand, and have that guy unable to leave your company without facing deoprtation, and yet have no job security. A win-win for an unscrupulous employer. No inconvenient unfair dismissal suits. No saying "screw you, I'm going to work for the competition." It's indentured servitude, plus a little "cut chicken to scare monkey."

As for skills, H1B people have a bell curve too. I have met a few great designers/coders, and a lot of schmucks who in a previous stage of IT evolution would have been COBOL drones. Everyone works hard, H1B or US citizen, but so what? My job is to clean up the product of hard work when it has been applied to piss-poor IT decisions. The real problems with IT in the US have to do with pig-ignorant short-term-obsessed management who believe contrary to all experience that free lunches exist, spineless IT managers who go along with the knee-jerk "can't afford to think strategically" mind set, consulting firms selling flavor-of-the-month solutions, and the received wisdom that IT people are in some sense interchangeable. If that's true, you're hiring the wrong ones.

It's not the H1-B person's fault. He/she is doing better by coming to the US despite the abuses, and there's the prospect of a green card a few years in the future. But it puts American professionals in a race to the bottom with respect to working conditions, wages and job security. The best thing for the US would be to shut the H1-B program down. The depressed wages provide a disincentive for anyone trying to enter IT in the US, the exploitation makes working conditions worse for everyone, and the H1-B workers who return home take the knowledge with them. If it's about money, then perhaps top executive compensation would be a better place to look for savings. Our foreign competitors don't reward non-performing execs nearly as lavishly, and there's no evidence that you get better work for $50M per year than you do for $30M. And there's a lot more savings to be found there than in putting the squeeze on IT people.

Me, I'm middle-aged and doing well in the business, but I've advised my son, who's more talented than I am, to do something else for a living since this gravy train has long ago moved on. US corporations and their kleptomanagers have already poisoned that well.

Re:Don't even go there, Bill

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

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.

In the nearly ten years since I left college, I've worked for startups, small businesses and large corporations. I wouldn't say "fuck this industry" so much as "fuck you". Out of all of the places I've worked, I've hated corporations the most. They seems to be the most impersonal, have the most ridiculous policies and the most incompetent management.

If you find yourself in an environment that you simply can't stand, then look elsewhere. There are plenty of computer related jobs in many different industries. It is very easy to fall into the trap of being unhappy with your job day after day if the pay is good enough and the work is easy. It's all too easy to ignore or overlook just how negative an impact your daily working environment is actually having on your life. In my case I was chronically sleep deprived, isolated at work (only real programmer at the office) and eventually began turning to substances to cope with just how much I hated going into the office. It was at that point that I finally decided I needed to take a good hard look at how happy I was with my life in general. I came to the realization that my job was negatively impacting just about everything else in my life and decided to resign.

If you're someone who decided to study computer science in college because it sounded interesting, then you may be content with the typical IT staff position. If you consider yourself a hacker, then stay the hell away from those sorts of jobs. The rigorously enforced policies (you must wear this, be at the office at exactly these hours, etc.) and overall mediocrity of those around you will drive you crazy. I've found that I've been much more likely to find happiness working for a smaller, very technical company (typically in the telecommunications industry, but the financial industry can be good too). Working for startups can also be very liberating as many times you find youself in a consulting position, working out of your house and on your own schedule (usually).

I guess my message is to not let one bad employer, or type of employer, get you down. If you take the time to really define what you want your workday to be like, you can probably find a job to match.

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.

Raise Wages and provide training.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr.Gates can afford it. I've never heard of a job an American wont to for decent working conditions and decent pay.

All this nonsense about a "talent shortage" is just that ... non sense. We've heard about a "nurse shortage" for about 80 years now. The fact is, rich hospitals and nursing homes don't want to pay the going rate for labor services. They'd like their own private supply of non-union, foreign 28 year olds (which other businesses wouldn't be allowed to steal).

It's the same with microsoft. They could easily provide training to smart young college graduates or re-train mid-career folks. Sure, it'd take a couple of years to get them productive, but that's cost business has to pay to stay competitive.

Re:Capitalism to the Rescue!

[Archtech]

"Well, the Capitalist answer is that the shortage in qualified applications should cause the average salary within the industry to rise correspondingly".

Unfortunately for everyone but the capitalists, that turns out not to be the case. Please notice the critical obfuscating function performed in the quoted sentence by the word "should". That is, the average salary *should* rise if simplistic Economics 101 formulae about demand and supply held good in the real world. As it happens, they don't. A quick look at US business reveals that there must have been an appalling shortage of ambitious, self-centred, suit-wearing chair-warmers recently - because look where their average salaries have wound up! Someone put a rocket under those suckers, and believe me it wasn't "demand". It was the utter determination of managers (yes, we're talking about managers here) to make as much money as they possibly can while the sun shines. They are aided in this quest by the remarkable fact that everyone's salaries are decided by... well, what do you know - managers!

A couple of years ago, I had an interesting little chat with a director of a UK-based IT recruitment consultancy while we were both waiting for the next conference session to begin. Among other things, he let me know that all the companies he dealt with saw programmers as "very much like bricklayers", and none of them would dream of paying a programmer more than about $40K. When I asked what would happen if they couldn't find any takers, he said airily that his clients would simply defer their software projects until they could hire programmers at "the appropriate rate". In other words, the executives in question would rather eat their own lungs than pay a programmer more than a quarter of what they themselves get.

Quoting economic theory doesn't cut much ice, especially when it is directly contradicted by the observed facts. Unlike real sciences, economics is a big sheaf of educated guesswork, elegant models in search of an application, and clever people talking themselves into important jobs and big salaries. As someone once remarked, there is no economist so distinguished that you can't find another, equally distinguished, to call him a gold-plated liar. And as someone else noted, "if all the economists in the world were laid end to end it would be a very good thing".

IT degree

[Broken scope]

At my college we have the CS majors... and the IT majors. Every year we lose CS majors and IT gains students.

IT majors do 2 programming courses and a no advanced math(no calc). CS majors have a harder dergee program and our college doesn't give a shit about us. They spend time talking about their 100% placement rate with IT major and how all the IT majors are on the management level within 5 years making six figures. Many of the IT majors have their oh so superior "I'll be your boss one day" attitudes which is only reinforced by the attitude of the faculty. It pisses me off to no end because they tout programming skills but if you asked them to do anything more advanced than simple nested for loops and method calls in java they would give you a blank look and go "huh?". Then they make a comment about their golfing skills scoff and walk away. I will plot your downfall you sonofabitch and you won't know what hit you... ahem.. sorry got a little carried away there.

The scary part is with few exception the CS majors look like stereotypical CS majors. Its really scary. Some of us go to the gym or run everyday. The problem is many of us don't and that is the ones people see. The other problem is we have a ton of primadonas. The ones who sit and basically scoff at their classes and claim to be mad hackers. The thing is they are for the most part pretty damned smart. They are to arrogant to do anything or work with other people and they will manage to get their degree and they won't be able to do jack shit in the real world because they refuse to do the mundane programming. They want glamor. These are guys who are about to graduate.

My first semester I got bored and went back and looked at all the mistakes I made registering for classes. One of them was packing my classes into 5 hour work chunks a day or having 2 classes back top back that were way to far away. I spent the next few hours writing some pseudo code. I also asked a friend of mine who is a civil engineering major if he could give me distances between all the building using all the heavily used walking paths on campus. Once I figured it out me and another CS major who was in his third year wrote the actual code up and we took it to the guy who administrates our class scheduling and registration system. He liked it, had another guy on the staff help us adapt it to better work with the database and the front end we employ and we added it. Next semester we saved countless freshman a lot of trouble. We got thanked, credited, were given good experience, I got a recommendation that will help me with any internships I apply for, and hell it was kinda fun to do.

The CS primadonas gave me disdain because I did something so simple that they could do "blindfolded", something that was below their wizardry. IT majors were still pompous arrogant assholes.

It might just be me but since the CS profession lost that bit of glamor it had we have been attracting for the most part the wrong sort of people. We need to make it so its worth the time to get a CS major again instead of making a CS major a miserable experience. That however is just my 0.02$ based on my narrow little slice of hell. Thank god I'm going to a different college next year and starting my game design degree then my masters in CS.

Not Interchangeable

[SirGarlon]

Where are these 100,000 jobs that Mr. Gates claims appear annually? In what branch(es) of "computer science?" Application development? Database administration? Desktop support? R&D? All of these could fall under the umbrella of "computer science," but they require totally different skills and training. Here's something to consider: if a company eliminates 100 engineers from application development and adds 100 network admin jobs (for example), that's 100 unemployed engineers and 100 admin openings competing for qualified applicants. The amount of training required in a "computer science" sub-field makes jumping from one field to another prohibitive for the employee. Especially given that no one wants to go from a senior job in one branch to an entry-level job in another. This creates a lot of inefficiency in the employment market. So it may be not that our schools are inferior; it may be instead the labor market is changing so fast that the labor pool can't keep up.

Large costs, no security, short career, H1B

[Maxo-Texas]

Let's see..

1) Absolutely KILL yourself in college with 35 hours a week of homework for ONE Database class while your friends are spending about 12 hours a week for all homework in all classes.

2) Pay $50,000 over 4 years just like they do.

3) Graduate into a low-status job when it comes to dating (I get a LOT more action from my $500 massage therapy training than I ever did from my CS degree-- MT is a female dominated field- you can't turn around without finding three or four who want to hang out and do tradeoffs and go to conferances- and MT work is like working out 8 hours a day so they tend to be fit and they tend to also be very nice people because they deal with the public a lot-- the pay is crap of course).

4) Start with a reasonably high salary-- but after a few years, it becomes clear you need to leave the field and project lead or manage (that's me these days) if you ever want to make "real" money.

5) Be managed by people who absolutely HATE that they have to have you- they view you as a COST.

6) Never ever be understood by management (either overworked when you are stupid or underworked once you smarten up). They'll replace you in a heartbeat with crappy but cheaper labor. I.e. NO JOB SECURITY. How can you buy a bloody house when you might be unemployeed for 7 months without notice.

7) And then-- at 55-- no more work. I've known so many who were just pushed out of the field. And you need the insurance you see. (Hence also my shift into manager+tech skills).

Corporations spent the 90's and the early 00's repeatedly teaching us that they have no loyalty to us and that they are going to hire people making $10,000 to replace us.

Okay-- WE GET IT. We are leaving the field. Young pups are not entering the field in the first place. And now they complain? Screw them. I hope they have severe problems and end up having to pay $150 an hour for 5 or 6 years to get people to enter the field again.

I've been through two major downturns

[maynard]

First in the very early 1990s, I was laid off and wound up selling boots in an army/navy store for a couple of years while the market recovered. At the time I was in my early twenties, so I consider that a reasonable outcome given my experience level and professional abilities at the time. This last downturn, from 2000 onward, I've survived well enough an remained employed in the field.

And based upon those experiences I say that there's a damn good reason people are avoiding computer science and other technical fields. The job market for this skill-set is far too volatile. I know of many people with excellent skills who can't find work. One programmer friend, who is absolutely top notch, can't find work because he is over fifty; pure age discrimination.

University students aren't unable or unwilling to learn technical skills, instead they're making a good long term bet that training up for a skill in a volatile market might well leave them unable to pay-off the mortgage on a good home, pay for their children's college tuition, or any number of other basic middle class expectations.

I would not recommend this career to anyone who wanted to work in industry. For those who love the science in computer science, then get at Ph.D and conduct research as a faculty member at a university. Get tenure. Otherwise, you'll just get screwed.

Re:There is a shortage of wage slaves

[isaac]

That's the problem. There is a shortage of people willing to work 80 hrs a week for $60K with a relocation to West Gopher Hole, South Dakota.

No, $60k in South Dakota would be fine. The problem is they want to pay $60k in Seattle, where the median home price is >$450k.

-Isaac

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

[gfxguy]

Yes - I've pointed out in another post. The same newspaper has an editorial only less than a week ago that says in 2004 the U.S. produced over 57,000 C.S. graduates. Coupled with his 65,000 H-1B visas, if his 100,000 new jobs a year is accurate, there's a 22k surplus.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

I work at Microsoft.

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

Microsoft doesn't have a problem finding applicants. Microsoft has a problem finding _qualified_ applicants. I've done a bunch of interviews. We interview _way_ more people than we hire. And I don't even want to think about the people that _don't_ make it to me and don't even pass the HR and phone-screening stages of the process.

We want good people no matter where they come from. There is no particular focus on H1-B workers. Given the extra paperwork and overhead involved, and the legal restriction that they get the same pay, etc etc, don't you think we'd rather not deal with the extra hassle?

Re:Au contraire

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Yes - I've pointed out in another post. The same newspaper has an editorial only less than a week ago that says in 2004 the U.S. produced over 57,000 C.S. graduates. Coupled with his 65,000 H-1B visas, if his 100,000 new jobs a year is accurate, there's a 22k surplus.

That's downright funny- guess what we really need is a basic arithmetic requirement for journalists.

Re:Au contraire

[CodeBuster]

I have worked for Microsoft in the past, though only as a summer intern, and although my own experience of the culture at Redmond is somewhat limited I will say that I got the impression that Microsoft is a tough, but fair place to work. The expectations are high and the competition can be intense, but the pay and benefits were very competitive and the work keeps your skills sharp. I will also say that some of the smartest people I have ever met in the workplace worked at Microsoft. The 80 hour mythical work week at Microsoft is mostly bogus too. If you meet your project deadlines and plan your time well then you can be in at eight and out at five most of the time. Of course there is always crunch time, but realistically you will get some of that no matter where you work.

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

[Vicissidude]

Microsoft doesn't have a problem finding applicants. Microsoft has a problem finding _qualified_ applicants. We interview _way_ more people than we hire. And I don't even want to think about the people that _don't_ make it to me and don't even pass the HR and phone-screening stages of the process.

Oh bullshit. You're just being too picky. When HR screens all those candidates, then they already qualify for the position on paper. The interview process is there to insure that the candidate would fit the team. But, all the MS teams do is ask bullshit interview questions. Why are manhole covers round? How do I implement a list?... Those questions don't find good candidates. They find candidates that can bullshit their way through interviews by taking the first answer off the top of their head and running with it. That's the complete opposite of how good code is written and the complete opposite of a good candidate. And, that's probably why MS code is the lump of steaming shit that it is.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

Qualified means "people we make offers to", pretty much by definition. We talk to a lot more people than the number of people we choose to extend offers to. Ergo, we have a problem finding qualified applicants.

The only caveat is that there are probably a set of people out there that would be qualified (i.e. we'd hire them) but they won't talk to us. I don't know how large that set of people is.

What I can tell you is that there are plenty of people who _do_ interview with us who we feel are not qualified to join us... at least at the time of the interview.

I've never paid attention to someone's degree status during an interview. I look at their resume and see what they say they've done. Then I ask them about it. Then I ask them a few other questions. I can't speak for the layers of recruiting that come before me - they may have an unhealthy fixation on university degrees. But I personally do not, and it's also something that never comes up amongst the other interviewers I talk to.

Re:Au contraire

[erc]

Microsoft has a problem finding _qualified_ applicants.

Define "qualified". I've been turned down for jobs because I didn't have experience with a particular version of a software product. I had extensive experience with version X, but not with version Y. "But the differences between version X and version Y are pretty small, especially for what you're doing!" Sorry - that was the artifical bar.

For others it's a particular language - Perl or PHP or C++, for example, instead of focusing on the thought process and problem-solving skillset. The tool itself is much less significant than the business or technical problem to be solved. I'd rather have a rational, logical thinker that knew C that I could get up to speed in a C++ environment (in most cases, C will do the job just fine) than someone who was an expert at C++ but had no rational problem-solving skills. But most hiring managers, especially in HR (where they have no clue as to technical ability anyway) just screen for buzzwords anyway. Stupid, but it is what it is, I suppose. That's why the US (which is Microsoft-centric in the extreme) trails most of the rest of the world in technology.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

You'd be shocked at the number of people that can graduate college that can't answer a question like:

"implement $(randomly selected function in the C string library) on this white board. Use whatever language you like. It doesn't even have to be a real language if you can explain it to me and it's coherent"

You'd be shocked at the number of people that just draw a blank when you say:

"describe how you'd test a coffee maker"

These aren't especially interesting or novel questions. It's a shame you even have to ask them except that you still meet people that CANT ANSWER THEM!

As an aside, based on your knowledge of what makes a good candidate, and what makes a poor interview, what would you suggest asking potential candidates for developers? For testers?

Re:Au contraire

[gfxguy]

All good questions, and ones that Bill Gates should have answered in his commentary.

But since you mentioned Wall Street, you will probably find the other article very interesting, and I don't want to make you search for it. Here's a quote:

On average, American lawyers make 42 percent more than chemical engineers. At elite levels, huge pay gaps also exist. In 2005 the median starting salary for a new Harvard University MBA was $100,000. An MBA is a two-year degree. By contrast, a science or engineering PhD can take five to 10 years, with a few years of "post-doc" lab work. At a Business Roundtable press briefing, one CEO said his company might start this sort of scientist at $90,000. Does anyone wonder why some budding physicists switch to Wall Street?

Re:Au contraire

[networkBoy]

I think you're being beaten up here because while an individual or even a small team at microsoft can write brilliant code, it seems without fail that the whole (vista, xp, whatever) is much less than the sum of its parts. Your management is seen as lacking direction, grasping at eye-candy and restrictive releases (re: DRM). I was going to just chalk you off as a poor shill then I read this:

I'll cut to the chase. I work for Microsoft. But it wasn't always that way. My first Linux distro was TAMU, and I first used kernel .98. My first unix experience was in middle school. I still have the sparcstation 10 i bought in highschool (Before I owned a Car, even). So, I may be a Microsoft sellout, but don't accuse me of making an uninformed decision :) so you're either a brilliant shill, or a good coder trapped at the slow moving mega-sloth. Go to Apple or Google and you will make a difference, stay where you are and I fear that you will not be happy.

I work in the hardware side of the world, and your company's main product gives me fits. I have no malice towards you, but I really wish all the zealots in the Linux/OSS cam would get their heads out of their individual distro's asses and produce a real competitor to your OS/Office suite. I think they are close with Ubuntu, now all we nead is a 100% compatible exchange server mimic and client, along with a powerpoint clone that's not power-bloat and we're all set.
-nB

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

[duffbeer703]

There's a reason why Bill is a multi-billionaire. Even if there isn't a shortage of 100,000 IT workers, if we import more, all of the sudden you have more computer savvy people in the marketplace buying Microsoft products. An extra 60,000 IT workers/year represents alot of sales -- and if those workers are educated using Microsoft Dev tools, they're going to be driving the sales of more Windows, MSDN, SQL Server, etc licenses and buying more support contracts.

Also, more cheap newbie workers trained in the latest stuff keep costs down and provides a powerful incentive for companies to keep upgrading. If I run a company with apps using MFC from the 90's, I can't find those people anymore, so I'll be hiring new people writing stuff in .Net 3.0, etc.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

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?

Hard to day. When i was working in devdiv, most days i got in between 9 and 10, and left around 7. When it was crunch time to get VS.NET (7.0) out the door, for a while there it was team-dinnners every nite, and people would be at work until 8 or 9. Of course, nobody got to work before 9. In redmond, at 7:59am, the main doors to buildings are still locked.

Now that I am on a different campus (in Fargo), the local culture is much different. At 8:30 the parking lot is full and at 6 its empty. Leaving the Redmond main campus at 6pm was suicide because the traffic was so outrageous. You could leave at 5 or at 6:45 and get home at the same time.

- 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?

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

You'd be shocked at the number of people that can graduate college that can't answer a question like: "implement $(randomly selected function in the C string library) on this white board. Use whatever language you like. It doesn't even have to be a real language if you can explain it to me and it's coherent"

As I wrote previously, that is completely opposite to how people write code in the real world. You don't take the first thing off the top of your head and start writing it down, especially without a good IDE. Testing someone on a whiteboard is the equivalent of making someone use Notepad to code. Sure, you should be able to do it, but who the hell actually does?

And unless you recently finished a CS class, then remembering a good implementation of any random C function is not going to be on the top of your head. So, it's all but guaranteed that the MS interviewer will rip apart the answer because it wasn't very good because it came about through a completely bad process. Big surprise.

You'd be shocked at the number of people that just draw a blank when you say: "describe how you'd test a coffee maker"

That's because the first thing they think is, "Wow, what a stupid question." And then, "What? Oh, he's actually serious." Then, "do I really want to work here if that is the best interview question they can come up with?"

Answering bullshit questions like that only tests the candidate's ability to answer bullshit questions. Oh, and it tests the willingness of the candidate to sit there and take stupid, insulting questions without getting up, punching you in the face, and walking out the door. Given Ballmer's temperament, that's probably a good thing for people who work with him, but that's bad for anyone else in the company.

...what would you suggest asking potential candidates for developers? For testers?

Having actually conducted several interviews for senior developers, you need to do two things: see if you like them and see if they can actually do the job. You look over their resume and verify what's listed there. You ask them about their previous positions and one major problem they encountered in each place. I then like to ask relevant questions that have come up recently in my own work. How do you version control a database? How would you deal with multiple submissions of a web page? The questions are high-level, don't require writing on a whiteboard, and are difficult enough to tell whether they're bullshitting their way through an answer or not. If they actually have something decent to say, I like them, and their resume looks good, then I recommend them for the position.

Re:Au contraire

[rrhal]

You'd be shocked at the number of people that just draw a blank when you say:

"describe how you'd test a coffee maker" Given the number of people that take the last cup and don't make another pot in the coffee rooms - I'd say a number of these people already work here.

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

And unless you recently finished a CS class, then remembering a good implementation of any random C function is not going to be on the top of your head. So, it's all but guaranteed that the MS interviewer will rip apart the answer because it wasn't very good because it came about through a completely bad process. Big surprise.

This is not about _remembering_, it's about deriving. If someone knows the question off the top of their head, we try something different. If someone cannot derive an implementation of a string function, they're not an interesting candidate. _Especially_ if they're interviewing for a position with the BCL or other platform/framework type group.

"Ripping apart" answers isn't something we do. Rarely does someone issue a perfect answer on their first try - both in interviews and in the real world. For almost any answer someone gives, there is some possible drawback or "gocha". What is the memory consumption of your routine? How many conditional branch statements would it require? Asking these follow-on questions are what makes it a less-worthless question, and seeing how someone thinks about the implications of their decisions and describes the tradeoffs is what makes it worthwhile.

That's because the first thing they think is, "Wow, what a stupid question." And then, "What? Oh, he's actually serious." Then, "do I really want to work here if that is the best interview question they can come up with?"

That's a fine response to have, but i'd ask you to justify it. Why is it a stupid question? Obviously, i'd ask it as an allegorical question to the problem of how to test software. Fundamentally, a coffee maker is something many people are familiar with, so its something that doesn't require significant introduction.

It's not the "best" question. It is _a_ question. And i'll ask you again - justify why you think it is a poor/irrelevant quesiton?

Having actually conducted several interviews for senior developers, you need to do two things: see if you like them and see if they can actually do the job.

We agree so far. Although i'm not sure about "liking them".

You look over their resume and verify what's listed there.

Done.

You ask them about their previous positions and one major problem they encountered in each place. I then like to ask relevant questions that have come up recently in my own work

I'm with you there. Sometimes, these are college hires. Sometimes, these are people that haven't had previous work experience.

The questions are high-level, don't require writing on a whiteboard, and are difficult enough to tell whether they're bullshitting their way through an answer or not

I find that the opposite is true -- people that are unwilling to delve into the details of an answer.. people that keep things "high level" are bullshit artists. The saying "The devil is in the details" is a saying for a _reason_.

We don't have a perfect hiring philosophy. I'm not sure where your animosity comes from, however.

Re:Au contraire

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

And unless you recently finished a CS class, then remembering a good implementation of any random C function is not going to be on the top of your head. So, it's all but guaranteed that the MS interviewer will rip apart the answer because it wasn't very good because it came about through a completely bad process. Big surprise.

Except that the functions they're being asked to implement are RIDICULOUSLY easy. Anyone who has actually done a fair amount of programming ought to be able to implement functions like strlen, strstr, strcmp, etc in about two minutes, tops. These are not tricky brain teasers - if you write real software you probably call those functions (or equivalent methods in C++ or Java or Python) dozens of times per day. So you know exactly what they do, and you've written functions a hundred times more complicated than that before. It's trivial.

I think the problem is that people go into college, do the bare minimum in their C.S. classes, never play around with programming for fun, and then expect to get a job at Microsoft or Google. Sorry, those companies are not interested in someone who just did the bare minimum in their classes and didn't take the time to actually experiment in their chosen field. All it takes is a little curiousity in the weekends, a little extra effort on some of your class projects, and a couple of summer internships, and by the time you graduate you can be an excellent programmer - if you're still enjoying it by then, companies like Microsoft and Google will be drooling over you.

Microsoft's questions like strlen are not meant to identify good employees. They're meant to weed out the people who haven't even learned the basics yet. And when the vast majority of applicants fall in that category, no wonder Bill Gates feels the way he does.

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:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

This is not about _remembering_, it's about deriving. If someone knows the question off the top of their head, we try something different. If someone cannot derive an implementation of a string function, they're not an interesting candidate.

Oh bullshit. Good development and good code isn't about reinventing the wheel when good algorithms and code already exists. It's about recombining what you know and what you have to produce new functionality that works in the minimal amount of time. Developers don't just go out and create all new code without first looking at what's already there.

No wonder MS is the way it is.

"Ripping apart" answers isn't something we do.

So, you call it "follow-on" while I call it ripping apart - same thing.

Rarely does someone issue a perfect answer on their first try

Certainly in interviews, yes. However, it certainly is possible to come up with good code if you have time to think about the solution and look at previous solutions.

For almost any answer someone gives, there is some possible drawback or "gocha". What is the memory consumption of your routine? How many conditional branch statements would it require? Asking these follow-on questions are what makes it a less-worthless question, and seeing how someone thinks about the implications of their decisions and describes the tradeoffs is what makes it worthwhile.

And that is what I was getting to. Yes, that "gotcha" is the "ripping apart" of someone's logic. You ask them to solve one problem in a completely bullshit manner in a bullshit amount of time under intense pressure from not having a job and needing one. And then, you twist things around and say that the solution doesn't address this other problem which was never mentioned previously.

And no, asking them to solve that second question based on the first doesn't make the first question more meaningful. You're just piling on the shit, requiring more bullshit from the candidate on top of the bullshit they've already produced. And then, there are other gotchas that you pull after, further ripping apart the solution, and further requiring more bullshit. You hold back on the actual requirements of the bullshit problem. You're asking the candidate to do the role of developer, project manager, and business analyst in the middle of an interview when you only first asked for a "simple C function". You make something appear deceptively simple and then ream them for not writing a bulletproof answer the first time.

That's a fine response to have, but i'd ask you to justify it. Why is it a stupid question? Obviously, i'd ask it as an allegorical question to the problem of how to test software.

Well let's see, because "allegorical" or not, it actually has nothing to do with software. If you want to know about software testing, then ask about software testing. My dad could answer this toaster question and he can barely turn on a computer. He could bullshit his way through this answer and actually convince you he'd make a great tester if he wanted.

Although i'm not sure about "liking them".

Wow. That's another huge problem with MS. I can't believe they would actually hire people that don't get along with each other. Ballmer's tantrums seem less and less surprising now.

I find that the opposite is true -- people that are unwilling to delve into the details of an answer.. people that keep things "high level" are bullshit artists. The saying "The devil is in the details" is a saying for a _reason_.

The "details" you can infer from their resume. If they were with a company for any significant amount of time, especially during the last few years during the tech downturn, then you can bet they know their shit. You want to know whether they really worked at that company, at that position, doing what they wrote they did. Your background check will catch those first two items.

Re:Au contraire

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Or perhaps just having a CS degree doesn't actually make you qualified for every one of those 100,000 jobs?

Then almost none of the H-1bs should be qualified- most of them only have a 4 year CS degree from IIT anyway. Why complain about the lack of CS degree holders if the 100,000 jobs aren't for CS degree holders? I myself would rather they be SE holders- but let's face facts, maybe only 10,000 of those 100,000 jobs will really require an SE degree. The majority will require *maybe* a weekend's study in a single set of skills.

Re:Au contraire

[HiThere]

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?

I'm just going to speak to a part of this. If you look around you, programming is a field where one invests a lot of up-front time and effort before getting much in the way of rewards. The low-haning fruit has been harvested, AND IT DOESN'T NEED TO BE DONE AGAIN! So. If you have such an industry, and you go through boom-and-bust cycles (as we do), then people are going to be VERY skittish about making the kind of commitment that you want them to give. YOU (the company) aren't making they commitment, so asking it of them can only be seen as a power-play.

When I first started working, I was a firm believer in honesty, etc. As time went on, I observed that politics was more important than ability to do the official job. I ended up quite cynical about companies. Managers that have been delegated power to do their job instead use it for personal advancement at the expense of the staff, and appear to feel that it's their right. There are exceptions, but the exceptions aren't as personally successful (as measured in terms of the number of promotions).

This, I feel, is that nature of human politics. It's wrong to centralize power to accomplish some good end, because once centralized the power will be abused, and the good end will not be accomplished in any final way, because that would eliminate the need for the centralization of the power, which isn't to the benefit of those controlling the power.

OTOH, human society requires reliable structures in order to operate properly. 'Tis a difficult puzzle. I don't know of a decent answer. History provides MANY examples of indecent answers, but none of good ones. If you did have a decent answer, the problem would then arise of "how does one get from here to there?" This is made difficult if one imposes the condition "And don't make things a lot worse in the process!"

Re:Au contraire

[bmajik]

I didn't get the first set of positions I interviewed for :)

I'd guess that was 50% me being a "normal" coder instead of a "legendary" one.. and the other 50% was my attitude.

One of the questions the HR lady asked me was

"so, how are you as a C programmer.. on a scale of 1-10?"
"9"
"Ok, what would make you a 10?"
"I donno.. i could have the lang spec memorized or something... i haven't written a C compiler yet"

Yeah. She knew that I'd be interviewing with people writing C compilers, but I was too arrogant to connect the dots. Maybe every snotty kid who's used to being "the computer guy" and who doesn't have to try very hard in school runs into reality.. I certainly did :)

The interviews didn't go very well. My up-until-then-invincible-ego thoroughly crushed, I was given a second set of interviews for a different type of position and that went much better.

Re:Au contraire

[jadavis]

what we really need is a basic arithmetic requirement for journalists.

And economics. There aren't "100,000 jobs" that "need to be filled". The job market is controlled by supply and demand, pure and simple. If you make a better offer (money, environment, hours) you will attract the people you need. If you can't make a better offer, well, gee, looks like you didn't "need" that employee after all!

I am not in any way saying that it's a good or a bad policy to encourage foreign labor and/or immigration, that's a much more complex question. I'm just saying that anytime people use terms like "shortage" or "surplus" in a market economy they are trying to get the government to give them a better deal by intervening in the marketplace. Shortages and surpluses are what happen when you do not have a free market economy.

I personally have a shortage of jet airplanes. I've got $50, and I've have been looking all over for a jet airplane, and I can't find one. We have a national crisis!

Re:Au contraire

[Vicissidude]

All the questions asked... test one of the following a) critical thinking b) creative thinking c) solid CS foundations. If you can't manage one or more of the above, why would you consider yourself qualified?

No, they only test the ability to think on your feet in a high stress situation that is the exact opposite of the way code is actually written in reality.

I don't understand why some people think they can go be ``coding monkeys'' without care or thought... You mean you can't tell the guy how to implement a list? Or how strcpy works? Or how to implement a tree? Wtf? If you fail to show your knowledge through these basic things, why should the interviewer trust your skill set? Because you said so on your resume? Give me a break...

Yeah, I can tell you how to do any of that shit. The problem comes when you ask for details and want me to show you specifics. Telling someone how to implement a list or a tree is different from writing it on a whiteboard, from the top of your head, without any hints, in less than 10 minutes, with your future job on the line, getting the syntax straight, and not making any major mistakes. As I mentioned, that is the exact opposite of the way code is actually written in reality. And it doesn't tell you anything about the candidate other than their ability to think fast. The ability to think fast does not necessarily indicate a good developer.

How many software engineers actually implement any of that shit on a regular basis? Not many. If you do, you should be fired for wasting time and resources. I haven't implemented a list in years since I left college and became a productive developer, so excuse me if I think your reasoning is lousy. My skill set is not untrustworthy if I can't think fast, remember my college days, and write a complete list implementation without errors under those bullshit conditions.

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.

H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[queenb**ch]

What do we need to do in order to produce more IT professionals? Take a look at the list below for a few idea.

Here's my solution:

1) Poll all current welfare and permanent disability recipients. See how many are interested and capable of learning to perform IT work.
2) Instead of continuing to pump money into a system that only perpetuates poverty, educate the people who are both interested and capable. Get them a CNA or MCSE and help them get their first job. After the first paycheck, government assistance ends since at that point you should be a) getting paid and b) have health coverage.
3) Increase funding for science and math teachers from elementary school to high school. We can use the money that we're saving from the public assistance programs to fund this.
4) Increase funding for music and art. While most people don't realize this, there is a strong connection between math and music as well as science and art in the human brain. Researchers are still trying to work out exactly what it is, but studies show that there is definitely a link for most people.
5) Raise instead of lower the requirements in order to graduate high school. One of my friends has a daughter who just started high school this year. The only math requirements for her to graduate are two semesters of math. What this means is that they're only required to take and pass Pre-Algebra I & II. Since most everyone on here are IT pros of some kind, I'm sure you're aware that this doesn't cut it for college. Algebra I & II, Geometry, and Trig should be the minimum requirements, IMHO.
6) As a corollary to #5, we need to raise the requirements for science as well. Her school district only requires two semesters of science. What this really means is that you take a semester of earth science and you take health class. IMHO, you should take Biology I & II, Chemestry I & II, Anatomy & Physiology, and Physics.
7) They do require 8 semesters of English, however, I can tell you that what passes for papers in many of these classes is laughable. I have a friend who teaches freshman & sophomore composition at a local university. The level of literacy among these kids is...horrific. I've helped her grade papers and seen things like an entire 3 page paper that was a single run on sentence. These kids do not know the difference between things like "to", "too", and "two". I cannot count the number of times I've seen someone write something like "I'm going two the store." "There", "their", and "they're" is another one that they don't seem to be aware of. Then there are the kids that write papers like they send IM and text messages, "UR 4 real?"
8) Ditch "no child left behind" philosophy. This blatantly ignores the fact that some of the kids *need* to be left behind. If they cannot keep pace in a regular classroom, they need to be sent to remedial classes until they are on a par with their peers. Keeping them in the regular classrooms has a negative effect on the kids who do their work and keep up. All this has done is resulted in a dumbing down of the entire curriculum. Here in Dallas, the school district recently published an article proclaiming their pride in the fact that only 25% of the graduates last year were functionally illiterate. They're proud of this figure because it's down from 33% last year. That means 1 in 4 high school graduates cannot read and write well enough to fill out a job application at Wal-mart. They cannot add and subtract well enough to make change for a dollar. That is absolutely shameful and how anyone in their right mind can take pride in that is beyond me.

2 cents,

QueenB.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[drinkypoo]

3) Increase funding for science and math teachers from elementary school to high school. We can use the money that we're saving from the public assistance programs to fund this.

There are two problems with the teaching of math and science in school today.

One is that most teachers understand neither. They learned to do math the same way we are teaching it - by rote. This leaves them with no actual understanding of math, just a larger arsenal of mathematical tools to apply to problems. It's not really mathematics, it's computation. They didn't learn to actually perform scientific experiments, although they can explain every step of the scientific method to you and grade your essay without a cheat sheet. So what they are teaching is really not math and science, but the appreciation of math and science.

The other is that even the teachers who do know something are hog-tied by the regulations. The instructor must follow the curriculum and must make sure all students pass standardized testing. When a child doesn't want to learn, the instructor is blamed and has to put their effort into the problem - I'm not implying that such students should simply be ignored and left to fall by the wayside, but it's horribly unfair to support these children at the expense of others.

Actually, if you want to talk about money, THAT is an issue that should be raised. I know this is a confrontational belief, but I think we need to stop spending so much money supporting "special needs" students. We spend multiples of the money spent on the average student on students who simply will never come up to the level of children we are therefore neglecting. I think that this is simply wrong. Today we have the technology to detect many developmental disabilities before birth and a parent has the choice to have the child or not. Thus, I feel it is wrong to force others to shoulder the load. If you want to have that child, and be responsible for it, that is fine with me. Your beliefs or your heart may require it. But to then expect me to shoulder the burden is quite frankly unconscionable. And to penalize other people's children, well, that's downright mean and quite selfish.

The sad truth however is that the educational system is not about educating children to the best of our ability. It's about producing good little drones that will go and do as they are told. Unfortunately, this trend's ever-increasing prevalence has produced a nation of sheep who, for the most part, are utterly incapable of putting their brain to the purposes for which it was intended.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Atanamis]

The other is that even the teachers who do know something are hog-tied by the regulations. The instructor must follow the curriculum and must make sure all students pass standardized testing.

My mother in law is a Biology teacher with a background in Microbiology and Genetics. She has been asked to leave both private and public schools for the crime of failing honors students who don't learn the material. I've never sat in her class, but the criticism has never been that she is a poor teacher. Rather, it is that she will not lower her standards enough. She will allow any student to retake any test, with the provision that the new grade completely replaces the old. You can retake test one 5 times, until you have it completely memorized. Still, students fail.

Is the proposed solution to provide additional tutoring (she stays late after school every day willing to tutor kids who need it)? Is it encouraging only people willing to do their homework to take honors classes? No, the proposed solution is to reduce standards on the top level classes so kids with dreams of becoming a doctor do not feel discouraged. When parents and administrators value grades above learning, everyone loses. My mother in law will be looking for a new job at a school that will not expect her to pass people who are not willing to learn the material.

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[Lord Ender]

5) Raise instead of lower the requirements in order to graduate high school. One of my friends has a daughter who just started high school this year. The only math requirements for her to graduate are two semesters of math. What this means is that they're only required to take and pass Pre-Algebra I & II. Since most everyone on here are IT pros of some kind, I'm sure you're aware that this doesn't cut it for college. Algebra I & II, Geometry, and Trig should be the minimum requirements, IMHO.

There is no courses called "pre-algebra II" or "trig." High school math for college-bound kids in the US usually goes like this:
grade 9: Geometry+Trigonometry
grade 10: Algebra II
grade 11: Pre-calc
grade 12: Calc
College-bound kids typically had Algebra I in middle school.

Mediocre students (some of whom go to real college, some to community college, some to career training) are usually a year behind, so their high school math is:
grade 9: Algebra I
grade 10: Geometry+Trig
grade 11: Algebra II
grade 12: Pre-calc

The rest, I believe, take some sort of "remedial math for monkeys" courses over and over until they pass with the minimum requirements to graduate.

So, your idea of what is in the HS curriculum is wrong. Don't worry. Most students get geometry and trig on the first or second year of HS.

Of course, if you ask me, this is all a crap curriculum from a earlier age. Today, kids should be learning set theory, probability, discrete math, statistics, logic, and personal finance. Forget calc and advanced algebra! The (very small) number of people who can use that will get it in college. Stats and logic are useful to EVERYONE, and should be taught to everyone!

Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution

[ghoul]

In India to graduate high school you have to take 2 national level standardised exams - One after class 10 and one after class 12. Till Class 10 you have 10 subjects the whole year- English, Hindi, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Math, History, Geography, Civics, Economics and a third language (my school had the choice of Sanskrit and French - I took Sanskrit) as well as compulsory Music, Art, Yoga and Physical Ed classes (mostly playing soccer, basketball or tennis recreationally no organized sports). After giving the exams in these subjects depending on how well you scored you will get to choose Science (Engineering track), Science(Medical track), Economics track or Arts track . In each of these tracks you will have English and Math(including Calculus except in Arts where there is no Math) and 3 more subjects. People survive this while at the same time preparing for college entrance exams as college entrance is not based on High school scores (for professional colleges). Sure Indian kids suck at sports and have low social skills as they dont have time for organized sports or dating but they sure are much more prepared for college level acaemics. Its these kids against whom American kids have to start to compete so its time to toughen up the US curriculum and fail kids without mercy if they cant keep up. The most ridiculous thing I have heard is passing a kid who obviously hasnt learnt the material so as to not hurt their self esteem. WTF. If a kid cant be bothered to learn enough to pass the minimum requirements his/her self esteem needs to be hurt - in fact the self esteem needs to be taken out to the woods and shot. Respect and self respect are earned not a right.
If the curriculum isnt toughened up the Indian kids will take the jobs - either here or in India through outsourcing. No amount of racist immigration policies can stop that.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Anonymous Coward]

everything to do with ID'ing yourself as in the x-th percentile of intelligence

Unfortunately this is not true. I'm in the 99.9th percentile as far as intelligence (at least according to the Triple Nine Society) but I only have a Bachelor's degree and a not-very-good GPA, which is enough to keep me from going to a good graduate school. Why is my GPA so low? Because schools don't measure intelligence.

When I was in elementary school I began to realize that there is a "sweet spot" for intelligence in school. Since then I've seen more and more evidence of it. As a student's intelligence approaches the sweet spot from below, the student gets higher and higher grades. But if intelligence continues to increase past that, grades begin to go back down. (Of course there are other factors besides intelligence that can cause low grades, but the main idea is valid.) This is why "gifted" programs work -- "gifted" students actually get better grades in harder courses because the standard courses bore them to death. But even "gifted" programs have a "sweet spot" beyond which your intelligence starts to work against you. (I put "gifted" in quotes because it presupposes someone doing the gifting.)

After ten years I am considering leaving the computer field. In the jobs I've held so far, I've brought knowledge from my education and from books only to be disallowed from using it because the boss doesn't know how to use it, has no way of verifying that I'm using it correctly, and is terrified of having to find another employee who knows it too. And yet, I don't know any other way to get the job done, so I end up using the knowledge I have anyway. This makes me "disobedient." When the books and the evidence show that I am right, this makes my situation even worse. No boss likes to be proved wrong.

My mother is a math teacher. Her students always complain to her, "Why do we have to learn this stuff? We'll never have to use it!" Sadly, I find myself siding with the students: if you go to the trouble to learn, say, differential equations, you won't be able to use them because you won't be able to find a boss who understands them enough to allow you to use them.

Intelligence is an asset when you use it against the natural world. But it seems to be an enormous liability in society. So don't go thinking that employers want intelligence. They don't. They want obedience. And that is what schools really measure: people whose intelligence is below the "sweet spot" can't understand orders well enough to obey them, but people whose intelligence is above that point understand their orders too well and tend to question them, and that isn't wanted either.

That is why employers are in a quandary with engineering. Engineering demands intelligence and intelligence doesn't work well with obedience. Some of this is due to American culture, too, where, in spite of the school system, people are raised with the ideas of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which is why many employers prefer to outsource to cultures where obedience to authority is a more important and accepted part of life.

How to keep America (Non) Competitive...

[wtansill]

From TFA:

Today we know that these elements are outweighed by a single critical factor: innovation.

This from Microsoft -- one of the best-known companies in the field for fostering innovation. Stacker? Netscape? CSS? ODF vs. OOXML? Hmmm...

Two steps are critical. First, we must demand strong schools so that young Americans enter the workforce with the math, science and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in the knowledge economy. We must also make it easier for foreign-born scientists and engineers to work for U.S. companies.

Mr. Bill of course does not realize that the first thing he mentions, better education, is largely negated by the second -- more "foreighn-born scientists and engineers". So -- I should go to school for many years, and rack up sizable amounts of debt to pursue a job that will be outsourced to India, or that will be given to the holder of an H1-B visa rather than me, as the visa holder can be had more cheaply... Yes -- this makes perfect economic sense to me.

American competitiveness also requires immigration reforms that reflect the importance of highly skilled foreign-born employees. Demand for specialized technical skills has long exceeded the supply of native-born workers with advanced degrees, and scientists and engineers from other countries fill this gap.

Of course demand exceeds supply. Because companies do not want to pay the wages commensurate with the educational and experience levels of US-born applicants. "Our American workers cost too much. Let's rework the immigration laws so that we can hire some cheaper labor from foreign countries!"

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.

So please, congresspeople, raise the visa limit so we can get more people that we can abuse with low pay and long hours!

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.

OK -- I don't get this. This hurts Microsoft .... how, exactly? If the visa holder can't change jobs, that means that MS "owns" them, so I do not uinderstand the complaint.

Last year, reform on this issue stalled as Congress struggled to address border security and undocumented immigration. As lawmakers grapple with those important issues once again, I urge them to support changes to the H-1B visa program that allow American businesses to hire foreign-born scientists and engineers when they can't find the homegrown talent they need.

Thus virtually guaranteeing that there will be no home-grown applicants since it will not be economically viable for them to study for any job that can be outsourced on Bill G's whim.

Sorry, but it sounds like more of the same corprate blather to me.

Solution in my opinion.

[955301]

Industrialize software development. It's still a science right now and not an engineering practice.

We're the only industry where the person who designs the product also works on creating it. This is a collosal mistake for the exact reason this article points out - there are not enough skilled hands to squander on the unskilled aspects of development.

The architect should never create class diagrams. The developer should never change the architecture. The Programmer should *never* change a method signature or add a new method or class.

Then the architects can be masters, the developers bachelors, and the programmers high school graduates.

*That*, my friends will cause an explosion in the quality of software development. If the developer has to design to the method level and get it right, reuse will become the way of life, not just a novelty. Typing can be learned in high school, as can method level programming.

If programmers are simply tackling a string of homework assignments from their point of view of simplicity (here's a problem method, fill it in) they can be more like carpenters and less like jacks of all trades.

Re:Solution in my opinion.

[Yogs]

You clearly don't do this for a living. There all always trade-offs, corner cases, performance considerations, and other things that can be important to the architecture of the system, and are impossible to get right without being familiar with the details. Once you are there looking at the details, it almost always takes less time to do it yourself than it takes to explain it in sufficient detail, even to someone on your level. We don't need more low skill level developers, we need more high skill level developers.

Traditionally, architects write code that's used by a lot of other code, or whose side state-full behavior is important to a lot of other code. People with lesser titles do work that doesn't impact the system as widely. But, at the end of the day it's all code, and programming, development, and architecting are less descriptive of different kinds of work than they are of the esteem that work is held in. You clearly esteem education, which is fine, but I'll tell you it correlates only marginally with the ability to actually design a good system.

People complain about software all the time, and fantasize about silver bullets, but the reason software sucks is that its design is way, way more complex than anything that's industrialized. The ability to code in such a way that promotes reuse is one of the most important attributes a developer can have. Still, reuse can only reduce a problem so much, and in the end software is complex is because you, the business, ask us for complexity. Cookie cutter solutions don't satisfy... see the failure of every touted 4GL. Software in particular will stay complicated as the cost of change in software is lower than anything where you have a lot of physical product to scrap. That's also why people will complain about software more than anything else, because in the end it's as much a problem of getting people to agree as it is to build a product.

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..

H1B Upsides and Downsides

[nomad63]

Yes it is a thorny issue. H1B has its upsides and down as any other matter. I, for one, was the holder of those highly coveted 65,000 H1B visas at one time in the past. If I do not have single dime in the dot com boom time in the silicon valley to my name right now, I owe it to that H1B> I came here from Canada, without knowing much, or heck, nothing, about what H1B entails. I was placed in Atlanta GA, at the time where all those people in Silicon Valley, who were making obscene amounts of money on IPOs, were farming their low level, day-to-day operations to where I worked. I was stuck with this company, Syntel, one of the biggest abusers of H1B visa, because the owner/CEO (they are publicly traded) was indian and had a large pool of available candidates. I met with some of these people. Some were sharp and US should be happy to have them in the workforce here but some others I have met were really the bottom of barrel.

US does not have a good system to justify these people. Most "engineers" these H1B abusing companies bring in, are/were brought in to, first learn than contribute to the projects they were supposed to be assisting from the get go. And nobody was saying anything. Mainly because, they needed to fill the desks with warm bodies. In my opinion, lots of these highly coveted H1B positions did not do any good to US economy but was a boon to the abusers of these visa holders, such as Syntel, Tata etc. They were able to fill up their coffers without much effort.

H1B to permanent residency was a good promise as long as it floated. But in my case, less than 3 months before my, so-called, labor certification got approved by the dept. of labor, I got canned by the second company who held my visa and I found myself, facing deportation. Fortunately, I had a girlfriend at the time, wife now, who is a US citizen and we had to take our marriage plans way in advance. So, if these people are really useful and contributing in the positions they hold, I think US should do something to speed up this process and should not hold them tied to the employers. Otherwise, DOL, should have a possibility to can the visas of some and send them back. And before the approval of H1B visas, I think something as substantial as a degree from an accredited foreign college should be a requirement to prevent the abuser companies, bringing in the riff-raff as experts.

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!

Bill Gates Wants IT Salaries Lower

[ProteusQ]

That's the alternate headline. It's basic economics that if there's a labor shortage, wages go up. But Bill wants to stay a billionaire, so he'd rather pull an Al Gore and create hysteria rather than acknowledge certain facts. Double IT salaries, or even just double benefits, and its doubtful that the shortage will continue.

nice idealisim.. reality sinks in

[way2trivial]

the basic problem with your points are the assumption that we MUST churn out more IT, to the detriment of all other employment fields.

1- and if the answer is none?
2- how many people recieved health insurance with the first paycheck? often there is a 30-90-180days before health insurance starts.
3- there is no savings at point of beginning.... it is YEARS down the line if it works. Investment cannot come from savings which follow years later.
4- perhaps the correlation is not, the existance of music and art makes people math smart, but rather, math smart people are also people who appreciate music and art.
this is akin to saying, people who know how to swim are wet.. so throw a non-swimmer in a pool and they will/can swim..
5- how the hell do you do that with the NCLB? seriously, one of the reason some other countries do so very well on standardized testing, is that they DROP underperforming students from educational programs, leaving the mid to reasonably behind for testing and highschool.. they leave children out.... some kids are that stupid.
6- physics? to graduate from highschool everyone should have a semester of chem II and physics? it's not practical.. not everyone needs these classes.
7- here I'll agree with you. The most important argument and flaw in the system I see.
8- here I'll agree with you almost wholeheartedly.. it's not a philosphy, it's an unfunded federal mandate.. a major distinction. To keep getting the federal dollars for school systems, schools must get 100% of their kids in line, and to do so- they get no additional money where needed- they just lose funding &control in some cases, of their own educational program.. The result has not been dumbing down of an entire curriculum, it's been the refocusing of the entire curriculum to being 'program the kids to pass the standardized test'

First step is, balancing the need of more IT professionals vs. other professions.

I think you'd do a lot better training welfare recipients/disabled types in medical technician training.
IT training requires a lot more mental capacity & attitude than some people have.
blood draw tech, orderlies, nurses assistants, dental assistants, etc.. a slot where life saving is not key...

Age discrimination

[SirGarlon]

Now, try and find an employer willing to hire me for an entry level position!

You're absolutely right, age discrimination is rampant and a huge problem for the workers.

If there were really a huge labor shortage, employers wouldn't be able to afford to discriminate against people like you.

CS is a great degree, if you like being spat on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother with obtaining a CS degree anyway? All it does it put you squarely with the pack of starving dogs trying to scarf up scraps of work in companies that arn't going to Beijing or New Delhi. Yes, you might get lucky and get the senior sysadmin job because of the MCSE/RHCE/CCIE, but the second management finds someone cheaper, expect to find your stuff boxed at your desk the next morning.

The CS degree has only one use, and that is a prerequisite to law school. Being even a top IT guy in a business just makes you a master sargent, while you are forever under the command of the "butter bars" (second lieutenants) -- the law department guys. They say jump, you better jump, or your job goes poof because you were not SOX compliant. The two years spent in law school are the difference between being nobility where people listen when you speak (as well as having a real job, real money, and a car/SUV people don't snigger at behind your back) versus being the guy working 60-100 hours a week, forced to drive a jalopy, and waiting on the people fresh out of law school hand and foot.

You want a SO, a decent car, a house where you are not living in a neighborhood with gunshots going off nightly, and a chance at people of the opposite sex? Take law school. You want 100 hour a week, no respect, with co-workers urinating on you, blaming you for any computer problems, then firing you for someone cheaper when they get the chance? Graduate CS. Yes, the two years of law school and the bar exam are a pain, but being able to afford a nice car while your classmates who graduated CS and are working four times as long as you do, still driving ten year old Metros, makes it worth it in the end.

Hire women, blacks, people from state Universities

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Additionally, managers in silicon valley have a track record of strong bias in favor of graduates from a single-digit list of colleges, and of Caucasian, Oriental, or Indian descent males.

(The university business is particularly blecherous since the actual pioneers of the information age were almost entirely NOT ivy-leaguers, and had more than a sprinkling of non wasp-males among their number.)

If you include women, blacks, American Indians, Hispanic-descent citizens, various "halfbreeds", and graduates of other fine universities (especially state universities) - rather than reserving them to support (or janitorial) positions, there is no shortage whatsoever.

But there's another part of this: You have to PAY them on the basis of performance, respect their opinions, and avoid filing the serial numbers off their ideas and crediting them to the stars from that tiny pool of ivy-league whites and orientals. If you hire them and then systematically abuse them and pay them 2/3 of what you pay the in crowd, they'll burn out and drop out.

(I watched this happen to an exceptional talent. Woman. Part Amerind. State universities. IQ so high a psych professor had to roll a special test to estimate it. Four degrees, one advanced and from a top U, in diverse subjects (computer science among them). Sharp as a tack and total grasp of the subtleties of software engineering. Yet administrators systematically ignored or rejected her ideas or credited her colleagues for them when they were finally accepted. Last straw was in a windows application development shop when she found out the clueless-about-Windows-programs unix people she was teaching were paid more than half again what she got. She left the field.)

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Maxo-Texas]

Something else occured to me during lunch. I was caught a bit flat footed by your "yes man to the boss" comment but I'm a yes man to *everyone*.

Every person I have a relationship with, I get one no for every nine yes's.

A co-worker offers to do the project but they want to use a methodology I don't think is best... I let them do it they way they want to- they are doing the work.

A girlfriend offers to help me with something but is going to do it in a way I don't think is best... same thing.

I only say "no" if it is critical.

But how do you decide if it is critical? Humans left to our own judgement would promote everything to critical.

By making a hard budget that I have to say "yes" most the time, it forces me to save my "no"s with two effects.
1) People like me since I'm not arguing with them and saying their opinion, approach, etc. was as good as mine.
2) When I DO say no, they tend to pay attention since I do it so rarely. Since I respected their opinion so many times, they tend to respect mine.

You are not respected for being right until after you are dead. If you are brilliant and driven- go for it. But if you want a happy life with real respect and appreciation today, then you need to let other people be right (even if you know they are not) on a lot of non-critical stuff.

Time to call this practice what it really is

[Whuffo]

The problem is NOT that Microsoft (or other tech companies) can't find qualified applicants. Their "problem" is more specific than that - what they can't find are qualified applicants that are under 40 and will work long shifts for hamburger-flipper wages - and no overtime.

There's plenty of unemployed people right here in the US that are fully qualified to fill these positions. If these corporations would simply pay market rates - and stop the discrimination and abuse - they'd be able to fill every empty seat with experienced employees.

On a level playing field, this is what they'd have to do. Treat the employees right or they'll go work for someone else. But these corporations don't want to play by the rules. Forget those nasty federal and state laws about discrimination and fair labor standards; they'll just pay off some politicians to create a special category of employees and call it H1B. Very handy; now they can import foreigners and use them essentially as slave labor. Yes, slave labor. If you can't quit or change jobs what would YOU call it?

Why am I not surprised that they want to expand this practice? The constant crying about "We need to be competitive" should be a warning sign.

I've got a better idea: these corporations should bring themselves into FULL compliance with all federal and state labor laws and pay their employees according to the prevailing market rate. And if they can't do this and remain competitive, their business plan isn't workable and they should either fix the problems or shut down.

Let's see now; Microsoft has a long history of legal problems because of the way they treat their employees. Now they need to increase the number of imported indentured servants to remain competitive. Nothing new here; same old story.

Why do we allow this to continue?

opposite water?

[Bastard of Subhumani]

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.

Imagine a situation where the demand for programmers is incredibly high. Salaries could get bidded up to the point where anyone who knows which side of the keyboard to sit is well into 6 figures. And by anyone I mean anyone; lawyers, pole-dancers, used-car salesmen.

Be thankful that it could never happen. Because if it did we'd still be fixing the mess they made seven years, one month and, ummmm, 26 days later.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[Vomibra]

General Education requirements at my college are pathetic; most of them can be skipped by taking AP tests in high school. A quick summary:

• Two writing classes
• One oral communication class
• Three classes total in mathematics and the natural sciences (this includes remedial mathematics and introductory sciences)
• One literature class
• One non-literature humanities (philosophy, music, foreign languages, etc)
• Two social studies classes (economics, history, psychology, sociology)

These are pretty basic requirements to function as a useful member of society; your crack at "Shakespeare appreciation" shows that you didn't really understand the purpose of literature courses--to teach reading comprehension.

Re:How about the 17-year education lag?

[AK Marc]

In the jobs I've held so far, I've brought knowledge from my education and from books only to be disallowed from using it because the boss doesn't know how to use it, has no way of verifying that I'm using it correctly, and is terrified of having to find another employee who knows it too. And yet, I don't know any other way to get the job done, so I end up using the knowledge I have anyway. This makes me "disobedient." When the books and the evidence show that I am right, this makes my situation even worse. No boss likes to be proved wrong.

I have never had my IQ officially tested, but I would estimate it to be in the range of yours. One thing I have learned is that the only way to get along at a job is to not always be right. Even if you were always right, other people do not understand that to be possible. They make mistakes (and try to hide them). If you never get caught in a mistake, that proves that you are better at hiding them. That means, the smarter you are, the less reliable others hold you to be.

My boss asked me questions about watts to BTUs. I answered, and made a chart of it also converting to tons (because the AC was in tons, half the equipment was in Watts, and half was in BTUs). I had the answer and spreadsheet to him in under 5 minutes. He spend the next 2 hours calling multiple people to check my work. I have made frequency calculations and such that are very complicated in his presence, which he then contacts the vendors to verify the conversion factors. Am I annoyed? I was at first. However, realizing that many people answer questions they do not know the answer to as if they were an expert, I do not blame him. It is not now, nor ever was personal. It's because he's a manager, and he has been fed bad info before by others. It's his ass on the line if I give him bad info, so he'll check it until he's confident with me or the information he requested. However, after taunting me when I answered "I don't know" a few times, he's realized that I will give the accurate answer, even if the only accurate answer I am capable of is "I don't know."

It isn't personal when people think you are a moron. Look around you, everyone else is, so they would be a moron to presume that you weren't. You have to be personalble. You have to accept that you will have to prove yourself repeatedly. Don't ever be condescending. No one is ever open to an idea after they become defensive. I had a boss that didn't like me. He never listened to me. I made a really nice report "proving" that there was a simple way to save about $5,000,000 per year in communications cost. He never gave it a serious look, but I gave it to him in a bright folder. He'd have to take it out every once in a while to show me he was considering it. He'd look pretty damned stupid if I were to show it to his boss and his boss liked it (of course, that'd get me fired). So it was in his office for 6 months with him having to look at the bright folder every once in a while. But that's an example of one of the things you have to do to win them over. Don't preach. Don't lecture. Give them options and let them decide. Even if the choice is wrong, don't fight it. They are the boss. They will always win.

Re:A skill is a skill

[Vicissidude]

The point is to test your ability to think on your feet.

No, the point is to get a good candidate for the job. The ability to think fast does not necessarily indicate a good developer.

If you can code it off the cuff in the allowed time, you've exhibited a basic level of competence.

And you've just pissed off the 20 year veteran asking him to prove that he knows what he's been doing for the last 20 years. Even if you ask a harder question, it's still insulting and tells you nothing other than his ability to think fast.

The resume is enough to exhibit a basic level of competence unless you're hiring straight out of college. You want to know whether they really worked at their previous company, at that position, doing what they wrote they did. A background check will catch those first two items. Less insulting and more useful questions can determine the third.

And BTW, I've heard your argument a hundred times.

Well, aren't you special...