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IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth
buzzardsbay writes "For the past few years, we've heard a number of analysts and high-profile IT industry executives, Bill Gates and Craig Barrett among them, promoting the idea that there's an ever-present shortage of skilled IT workers to fill the industry's demand. But now there's growing evidence suggesting the "shortage" is simply a self-serving myth. "It seems like every three years you've got one group or another saying, the world is going to come to an end there is going to be a shortage and so on," says Vivek Wadhwa, a professor for Duke University's Master of Engineering Management Program and a former technology CEO himself. "This whole concept of shortages is bogus, it shows a lack of understanding of the labor pool in the USA.""
Raise your wages, the workers will come.
The market will fix the problem. No need for special legislation or guest workers.
I can't speak for the US, but I can state that in South Africa we have a fair number of IT workers, a handful of which are actually worth anything, but on the whole not a shortage. The area of the market that DOES have a shortage, however, and a really massive one at that, is the Tester and Test Analyst side. We are struggling to get even halfway decent people.
And even with this shortage, the IT academies and schools out there are churning out MCSE's by the truckfull - rather than getting useful skills, they are giving some poor schmuck a certification that means really little in the real world, and which doesn't really have a descent career path anymore..
Testers, on the other hand, have a great job, good money, and a really flexible career. They also develop a lot of really useful business skills to augment their technical skills, and have no problems finding work.
There is a shortage of *cheap* IT labor...
No it doesn't. As the summary says, it's self serving. When you can bring in another 100k H1B's, it serves quite well.
I can't stand those ComputerTraining.com ads on the radio that reinforce this myth. Find me one person that has a starting salary of 70k from their program.
I think that it is easy to find people that know some Windows, but that they are not very useful in more qualified areas. I don't know why, but they seem to depend on a manual to do anything, if there is no manual, they are lost.
So, yes it's a myth that there are not enough people to fill IT positions, there are lots of code monkeys willing to pound keys for their banana but what are the skilled IT people that these larger companies are looking for out of the box and where will we find them right now?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Over the course of last year I needed to hire 10 experienced J2EE developers. I literally interviewed hundreds, but was only able to find 6 suitable candidates. While it is true that there isn't a shortage of applicants, there is most certainly a shortage of people who can actually perform the advertised job.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
And I will second that, I am sure in other parts of the country, skilled IT are a dime a dozen. But where I am at (Midwest) actual skilled IT people are hard to find. Sure you can find the guy/girl who was promoted to IT from accounting back in the 90s but that doesn't make them a skilled pro. Show me a cross reference of IT folks who actually know what they are doing, have a passion for it, and I bet that subset is really small. I have no need for joe basement dweller who runs his guild website and knows how to install a video card. I also dont have any need for dilbert principle folks who are in waaaay over their heads and cannot configure a server without serious handholding or an in depth checklist.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
who are willing to work for $20 an hour with a masters degree.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You know where there's a real shortage of technical people? Technicians in the industrial electromechanical field. Well, there are many such technicians, but I mean good ones. People who understand industrial control, who can diagnose and repair problems in a system composed of software, electronic, electrical, and mechanical components. This field requires extensive experience in all four areas, and people who can do a good job in this area are scarce to find, and hiring them is very expensive.
Yeah and wonder why they keep asking for more women to join the IT field etc, even though it is _obvious_ that most women just aren't as interested in the IT fields as they are in other fields.
More supply = lower cost to these rich companies.
Mostly to lower wages, increase profits and cut expenses. If you keep on feeding the myth of a shortage and getting cheap labor influxes its hard to give up on the myth when it can make you so much more money. I mean really, everything labor related is is labor expenses - thats what it boils down to. Its not that there aren't enough people working in the field, its just that the field wants to lower its costs with cheaper labor.
Its the ongoing commoditization of not just the products but the people that maintain them. They've already commoditized the manufacturing and they're desperately trying to do the same to the engineering, infrastructure and support sides.
Put a price on it and compete on price alone. The holy grail of Capitalist pigs the angst of the modern day IT worker.
industry is always crying about shortages but never bothers teaching people those skills
if they really needed people, they'd just pay more
after all, it is a labour market
H1B supposed to be when no qualified person can be found here BUT qualified is not defined: 1. Find IT person in overseas country of your choice 2. Write requirements to fit only that person 3. Advertise job, reject all domestic applicants. Ex. Job requires 5 years Unix experience , you have 4.5 4. Bring in person, pay 60% of going rate 5. Never forget your campaign contribution. 6. = profit = re-election
Tell that to my open positions and total lack of applicants. The local talent pool is drained of anybody *worth* hiring in the first place.
----
It is often easer to gain forgiveness than permission
The IT labor "shortage" is a profit issue.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
1) resize your browser window to 200 pixels wide. ...
1a) For a more authentic experience, open any PCMagazine.com article in a second window and maximize it in the background
2) Instead of scrolling line-by-line, page down. Say "next" out loud each time you do so.
3) Enjoy your simulated "online magazine" article experience
4)
5) Profit...for someone
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
There are two very obvious sides to this argument:
1. We want more supply of labor to bring the price down.
2. We want less supply of labor to bring the price up.
Both positions are entirely self-serving. There's no surprise.
FWIW: Our company is looking for someone to be a Unix/Linux sysadmin in the Sacramento area. We pay well. We can't find anyone.
When they talk about an "IT labor shortage", they are talking about how many people are willing to work for low wages and yet have a large pool of skills, talent and education.
There are plenty of people who have the skill sets they need, they just don't want to pay the kind of wages it takes to get them and keep them.
I am not talking about kids just out of college expecting a high paying job. I am talking about companies that want people with 10+ years worth of experience and want to pay them like a kid out of college.
It has been true for a very long time that the only way you can get a real pay increase in IT it to move somewhere else. Until companies start looking at their employees as a resource and not an expense and pay them accordingly, the situation will not improve.
All these cries to let them import labor is to allow them to rent temporary employees who can be deported at the first sign of "getting uppity" for demanding a living wage.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
This encourages more students to train in IT. Supply goes up, price comes down.
I know it is real here. We have had to increase our recruiting trips to every major University within 5 hours of us, and forget about finding experienced devs.
What Bill Gates and others want is a glut of workers in the market, this makes it more competitive and means wages are lower.
We use some H1B's (and try to get them green cards).
We pay a "decent" salary-- my buds at HP earn roughly 10% more-- those in the oil field earn about 20% more (but have a history of frequent layoffs). We have solid benefits that exceed those of the oil field and HP.
The reality is- we are about to lose positions because we cannot even get under-qualified people to apply for them. Now part of it is that we require people with at least a couple other jobs experience under their belt. Part of it is that being a big corp, our bureaucracy is pretty harsh. I have a friend who was sucked into Schluberje (sp) recently and there you literally have to take a driving class (as a frikkin programmer???) as part of your job duties. Bureaucracy gone mad. I'm sure many of you have seen office space--- we are 3x office space. It really takes a special person to fit in a large corporation. Jobs that would take 2 hours at a small company (and be very satisfying) may take three months. I even know of one project that was finished a year ago and it is still stuck waiting to be prioritized for release.
Sarbanes Oxley takes all the joy out of being a programmer. It just sucks the life out of it. Coders like to code 32 hours a week-- not 32 hours per quarter. You can't even maintain your coding skills at those levels.
I think the IT Worker crunch IS coming- and it is going to be wicked nasty starting in about 2012.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
...if /. were only available at night?
it shows a lack of understanding of the labor pool in the USA This does not show a lack of understanding. It shows that they are like all those employing illegal aliens; well aware of what the pool is doing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
and let the job market correct itself? We have these same issues in my field. If people were payed what they are worth we wouldn't have to import workers. I see these claims of shortages of workers in any field as simply industry's (quite successful) attempts to suppress wages for a long time to come, rather than be forced to pay the wage that the current supply-demand for that skill set dictates. Once society sees the adjusted pay grades, incoming students will adjust the supply accordingly. You don't honestly think everyone is getting a business degree because they perceive that those are the jobs most in demand. No, everyone does business degrees because the work-pay ratio is seen as being much better in that field than others. Imagine the responses of CEO's and CFO's if we showed that there was a shortage of skilled executives. Actually given the current state of affairs in some industries it seems there is certainly a shortage of skilled CEO's and CFO's. Now rather than pay the existing LARGE salaries and incentive packages, why don't we just import some Cheif Officers from outside the US.
They responded by dropping computer science enrollments to a ten year low in 2007 - half of the 2000 peak. They know you must love computers and not the money. And that may not even be enough to keep a job in the US.
Sure there may not be a shortage of IT resumes on monster... But there sure is a shortage of people who can back up their resumes with actual demonstrated work/skill.
We are offering market wage, and we are hiring entry level people, maybe 1 in 30 of the people we interview actually demonstrates the minimum of critical thinking and problem solving skills needed to be a decent software developer. Our interviews are not concentrated on any one platform, we have stuff in foxpro, java, python, php, c++ and c#... So our interviews are focused on critical thinking and problem solving. We have a couple basic problem solving questions and 2 algorithm questions which we routinely ask.. This is stuff I learned in high school, or my 2nd year algorithms class in college. People who are professing CS degrees and 0-5 years experience are routinely getting these questions wrong.
Even the few people we have hired over the last 3-6 months have been disappointing in their ability to a) learn new languages, b) learn and follow best practices, c) demonstrate real troubleshooting/bug fixing skills. C is probably my biggest pet peeve, as a manager I don't know how many times in the last 6 months I've had to go to a programmers system when they say "I'm getting this error and I don't know what it means" and the error message very clearly lays out the problem, the line it is occurring on, etc...
Either CS degrees are seriously lacking in rigor since I participated ~ 8 years ago, or they are just rubber stamping people that shouldn't be passing the classes.
I am a "highly experienced J2EE person" and as a contractor I sit for interviews once a year or so.
I am not disagreeing w/your experience, simply because I wasn't there.
My point is most hiring managers don't know how to interview and frequently don't even know what skills are relevant.
My interviews routinely turn into some sort of geek dick size war (and the candidate must be polite) or a beauty pagent (where did you go to university, my professors are more glamorous than yours) or some other stupid diversion rather than the job at hand.
My least favorite is: are you kewl enough to work in our clubhouse? It's just a job, I get all the love I want at home.
It doesn't help that most jobs are using API's they barely understand. So when someone asks me an obscure question about XML bindings or hibernate, they frequently don't recognize the answer.
Anyway, I'm a little tired of hearing about "the shortage" when in fact there is none. The "shortage" (IMO) is manufactured.
I work for a information-based organization in Washington State. We offer excellent pay and sweet-arse benefits IMO. But there are just not enough qualified applicants for the IT positions we have open. We will get lots of resumes, but they seem to fall into one of two categories:
-I have an MCSE and 6 month actual work experience
-I have a doctorate in computer science but can't manage a network at all (seriously, we had one guy who could not define what DNS was)
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I think the key word has always been talented. As in a shortage of talented IT people.
I had not read through all of these today but having survived 5+ years now of business only hiring temps and "independent contractors", I have a fair amount of knowledge in the area. Because of this "outsourcing" that many of us went through, our jobs were cut by moves in business to cut IT costs and improve profits for the shareholders, et al. This really is nothing more than devaluating the duties and tasks that we do to that of a high schooler working at a local Mickey-D's.
The real "shortage" comes about because business is NOT able to find someone willing to come in and be an all-purpose IT person, network guru, server admin., etc. and accept pay to the tune of $11 per hour. Thats the real shortage issue. So they will further outsource the jobs and bring in foreigners on H1B's to do those jobs at substantially reduced rates. IBM and a handful of other international companies are notorious for this.
Really what it will come down to is let these large companies hire the kids for $11. You really do get what you paid for. Eventually when things begin to collapse for many of these companies, they will be force to bring in people with knowledge and experience, and best of all; pay them what they're worth.
Remember that: "What goes around; comes around"
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
We have plenty of IT people available to us, the problem is finding those who know their stuff over those who think they know their stuff.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I think that there is a bit of a distorted perception that there is always a shortage of IT labor, because no matter where you work, no matter how many people are in your staff, you'll believe that your department is understaffed and overworked. Have you ever heard an IT staff say "we have just the right amount of people for just the right amount of work?"
It's just corporate BS to hire cheaper overseas labour.
There, fixed that for ya.
Even the original writeup used the term "self-serving." It's not a misunderstanding of who is available, it's a direct consequence of the idea that, even with air travel expenses and shepherding, getting some third-world contractor to do the coding will save money. Whether this idea is actually defensible on cost-vs-quality terms is debatable, but the idea remains important, in management's view.
Think in four quadrants. The quadrant representing status-quo is high-cost/high-quality of domestic staff. If quality targets can be a bit lax, domestic staff would get restless and churn, while imported staff wins on cost. If the skills of the imported staff are actually above average, they win again. Two winning quadrants, one status-quo, and one quadrant with staff churn. I'm sure I could phrase it better but it sounds like a "slam dunk" in manager-ese.
[
Many times in a 30 year IT career, I have seen Human Resources people who are clueless about technology writing ads that have qualifications that nobody could meet. Examples: 5 months after the introduction of the JDK 1.0, there were ads asking for 3-5 years of Java experience. There are ads currently out there asking for 3-5 years of ActionScript 3 (introduced I think June of 2006). Requiring a bachelors degree for an entry level help desk position doesn't add up to a healthy pool of qualified applicants either.
Job ads often have a huge list of "requirements" as well, and an applicant missing even one of them might well be screened out. An example of this? Seasoned web developers might not bother listing FTP on their resume. In their view, requiring a web developer to have FTP experience is like requiring a carpenter to know how to use a saw. But that failure to list FTP on the resume might well mean the application is automatically trashed. I have seen HR screen out applicants for a web developer position because they neglected to list HTTP, DHTML, and Photoshop on their resume. And don't get me started about HR's lack of understanding of the difference between a web developer and a web designer.
If HR departments are the source of some of the statistical and anecdotal evidence being trotted forth in support of the existence of this "shortage", I am not surprised the picture looks grim.
where will we find them right now
There's yer problem, right there, guv.
The problem is that the IT industry, like many industries, expects to find a pool of skilled and experienced available staff, at the drop of a hat, without the company putting in any effort themselves.
The solution is apprenticeships - a variant on "I wouldn't start from here", I admit, but the only workable solution nonetheless. Start the recruitment process two years in advance, and train up the monkeys to become experts. Another benefit is that apprenticeships, unlike university degrees, have no fixed syllabus and can quickly flex to meet new skill demand trends.
The problem with apprenticeships is that various governments have regulations against locking-in staff for long periods. Companies who invest in apprenticeships see their newly-trained staff bugger off to a better-paying competitor, who can afford to pay more since they haven't invested in apprenticeships, the moment they qualify. Governments need to relax regulations on locking-in apprentices to their sponsoring employer. Governments also need to give companies better ability to fire apprentices who fail to meet expected grades on time.
Cheap, experienced, immediately available - pick any two.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
In HP's IT they require you to weekly track
your hours. Woe to the manager who's direct reports
don't fill in their hours.
IT new hires ask in staff meetings "does anyone code here?"
because all they do is project management.
If you try to read all the corporate emails that
are sent into your mail box, you'd spend 20% of your
day doing it. Don't forget all the time you have to spend
doing all your yearly corporate certifications and
procedures on lame-ass web systems that make the process
10x longer than it should take.
HP and other large corporations resemble the Soviet
Union at the end of the cold war: Big, threatening,
and on the verge of collapse due to their bureaucracy.
In fact, that's probably as it should be.
The real problem might be that companies can't easily figure out who is worth nothing and who is worth 4x the average salary.
But who the hell would want to do that for a job? Honestly....
I found out our testers are payed on a par with or more than software developers the other day. At first I was a little angry, because I get angry whenever anyone is paid more than software developers because "we make your fscking products!".
Then I thought "What would it take to get me into that job?" and I realised they were welcome to the money.
I left ICT because I finally got sick and tired of 50 hour work weeks, crappy vacation time, the endless stress, the petty competitions, and basically having no life, and retirement consisted of whatever I could squirrel away in a 401k, which isn't much when you live in San Francisco, and then have a baby and then have a mortgage, etc...
So, I got some degrees and now I'm in academia and have a much more active art practice. I get most of the summer off, and life is pretty good. I left the USA, and instantly doubled my vacation time. during the school year I work 50 - 60 hours a week, like I did before, but now I get summers off, and 2 weeks at Xmas and 5 weeks vacation. There is stress, but it's not like a certain micromanaging CEO of a certain Huge Company is standing on my desk screaming at me and my colleagues for blowing a deadline.
So, if there is a problem with retention of quality people in ICT, from my experience, it likely has to do more with the crap working conditions and dismal futures of so much of the average ICT employee. Note: AVERAGE employee. The stars will always excel, but if you're not a high flying Type A aneurysm waiting to happen, and you just want a job at something that doesn't hurt, being an average ICT worker isn't always such a great deal.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
http://www.fispace.org/home/2004/01/_when_i_woke_up.html
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
When I graduated in the 80's, where they announced an EE shortage. About 10 yrs later I read in EEtimes that the basis was flawed, and in fact there was no shortage. QED... Companies pool together in waves of announcements. First they hire illegals, then create a fake housing market, then have mass layoffs, then tell congress to oust illegals. Then they outsource. They don't want to do it alone. If FedEx fills US buildings with Indian IT labor, they make sure they are in parity with other local businesses such as Microsoft, Harrahs, you name it. We need an EE union. Lets start one, slashdotters! I was anti union for 100 years, but if you look hard at unions, sometimes they are better than watching your country go down the tube. Look at England, now they are just a bunch of pomp. The Auto unions kept manufacturing in the US. They suck a lot, but they gave workers a voice. They prevented outsourcing while promising a profit and wage caps. I work at a company that makes programmers wear safety glasses! A union would kill that nonesense, but a worker cannot! They kill our productivity, then outsource our nonproductive asses to India! Don't be a bunch of chicken IT babies. Lets start a union now! Why doesn't Leahy (pres IEEE) promote UNIONS. Lawyers have them, doctors have them, dentists have them. EE union now! -jim
I think many of us are defining the commodity of which there is a shortage wrong: It's IT workers, with the skills in demand, willing to take what the boss thinks the work is worth. One may go on and on about how their l33t skillz is worth X amount of dollars, but if they don't result in X + Y revenue for the guy cutting the check, then you cost too much.
You are totally blocking my view of the wall. - Dogbert
Having a recent grad that is willing to learn is a good thing, but having a recent grad with the ability to learn is necessary.
I think the problem in today's market is the "bright" part of that statement. You can find someone that is young and inexperienced anywhere, but there is a shortage of what some would refer to as talent.
As others have said, the argument really boils down to skilled IT staff, what employers are willing to pay and what these skilled IT workers are willing to accept.
If you can buy cheaper skilled IT workers from abroad, it makes the employers happy but will ultimately lower the value of these roles making them less attractive to new workers. Rather than being self-serving, it's a short term strategy that ultimately is self-defeating. As a responsible employer that realizes they're only one small cog in the national machinery, they need to realize what this impact will have.
We also have a lack of skilled IT workers coming out of the universities, largely because universities in the Western countries are focussed on number of students and number of degrees awarded. They are driven by income and results, not by the quality of their teaching. Again, this is self-defeating as we, the nation, now pay more for tuition that adds less value to ourselves. So we're spending more and gaining less. Nationally, this is a slippery slope that leads only downhill.
Personally, what we are prepared to accept as a wage is the final part of the problem. Our acceptable wage is largely driven by our expectations of what we want and our living costs. As living costs rise, we expect our income to keep pace. If we're also led to believe that we're chasing an American dream of a white picket fence, wife, 2.4 kids, dog and a pickup then we expect a little more money. After all, isn't that why we're working in this country. Didn't you sell that idea to us? If we can't achieve that dream, we'll go somewhere else.
As a professor and former technology CEO, I'd question whether Vivek Wadwha understands the labor pool in the USA. It's a complex arrangement of personal and corporate expectations mixed in with some realities, aspirations and a need for us to exist in the real world. If you want us to live near you in Silicon Valley, you need to make sure we can live nearby. Wisconsin salaries don't work in California.
I'm a 38 year old freelance computer consultant with no degree, no longer living in the country I was born in and started work in. My skills were honed from experience and were all gained outside of any classroom. I have struggled to find skilled IT workers, struggled to find work myself and been on both sides of the fence arguing for IT staff to be paid more and also trying to keep costs down. There is no soundbite that can solve this problem.
I see H1Bs helping to solve the lack of teaching within universities and its disassociation from industry but this has to be a short-term fix or the country will suffer. Devaluing IT jobs, will only bring fewer CS students so you really need to turn this around by championing more technology universities that focus on quality, not income or results. If anything only 75% of students should pass each year, if you get more you need to make it harder. Life is hard, we pass and we fail in every aspect of our lives. Death is the ultimate failing grade.
Don't bring in H1Bs without fixing the real problem.
Pick any two.
The games industry has a dearth of programmers. Good talent in general (artists, producers, and so on) is needed, but programmers are very high in demand and wages have skyrocketed. In the last 12 years, salaries have more than doubled (about 2 1/2 times). Still, we have had job postings on Monster, Dice, Gamasutra, local papers, web sites, and so on and we can't get good people. By good, we mean people who have worked on 1-2 games before and have more than 3 years experience and can answer simple questions like "what is a pointer in C++". This isn't a stringent requirement. We now have internal contests to obtain more resumes and we offer prizes if you can recommend someone and bring in his/her resume. Things are very tight. Wages are good and the hours are only slightly more than 40 per week depending on your area of expertise.
Speaking to other people on the train to work here in Vancouver, BC is enlightening. They need engineers for the mining industry here which is strong and becoming stronger (programmers, chemical engineers, civil, electrical, etc) . People won't even apply for these jobs paying 100k+ per year even though these are decent jobs with no ancillary requirements like travel, working in the cold (there is snow here in BC), or anything like that.
Jobs are plentiful here but even average talent is rare.
Picky picky picky.
Actually, we find it much easier to hire J2EE programmers, since the framework is designed to accomodate those with, ahem, ordinary skills. Make so mistake, a very good J2EE programmer is better than a mediocre one, and there are lots of bad ones, but with J2EE you can do just fine, especially in a large organization with checks and balances and a decent support infrastructure.
It's the system administrators, "analyst/architects" (for lack of a better term), and people who need to patch up "out of band" legacy and proprietary bloatware that are hard to find. (Although anyone in our organization who dares call themselves "architect" gets slapped down to "gut level coder" for a few weeks as punishment.)
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
The article is the usual drivel from people who evidently aren't involved in IT hiring.
They are right that there is no shortage of people who consider themselves IT workers. There is also no shortage of people graduating with IT-related degrees either.
There is, however, a big shortage of IT workers that I would even remotely consider hiring. And at the top of the list of deficiencies are the fundamentals: math, writing, presentation, team work, critical thinking, and reading comprehension.
Maybe we just need a strict certification program. My guess is that 80-90% of IT workers today would fail. Then the shortage of skilled IT workers would be pretty obvious to everybody.
Your sig is missing any utilization of what I will call writing's fifth symbol.
I'm sure there will be a lot of comments on H1Bs and how those are nothing but a form of indentured servitude. I thought I'll throw in my two cents here.
..... so a country that's really small like Luxembourg has the same number of green-cards allocated to it as India or China. The unused numbers do not get transferred to other countries (use it or lose it)...you can see the problem right away -> a huge waiting time (a few years) for ppl from India and China. And this is the kicker -> if you change jobs, that entire green-card application starts from scratch (unless you are in the very last stage; if you are at the very last stage, you already have your work permit..so that's a moot point).
... if they approve my employer's petition, I get my green card right away. Now, I'm not suggesting any solutions or making any moral/ethical arguments in my posting (I know this is Slashdot, but still) .... just trying to educate folks who are not well versed in immigration laws. One suggestion I would make is a complete ban on H1B applications from body-shops and contract agencies...these agencies are outright scammers.
DISCLAIMER: I'm currently on H1B. I do NOT work in the software field. I have a Masters and PhD from an Ivy-league university and work in the circuit design field.
One of the biggest gripes about H1B is that because it does not allow ppl to move on to other companies, you are basically held hostage by the company that sponsors your H1B. In reality, H1B visas can be transferred to another company as long as you are working in the same field and its a similar kind of job. This transfer is NOT subject to the annual limit/cap of 65000 (or whatever).
So, is it true that H1B-holders will continue working for the same company that sponsored their visa and is continuing to screw them over, when they can transfer that visa to some other company that's offering them better pay and benefits? If you are from India or China, the answer to that question is most likely a resounding YES. So you ask why? The answer is -- the green-card application process.
The State Dept has a maximum number of green-cards (for each country) that it hands out every year. That number does not depend on the size of the country
My green card application is under the EB-1 (Outstanding researcher/professor) category which does not have a queue
Add to this the fact that the definition of IT work keeps changing. Large corporations don't need as many IT people on staff anymore because of the advances in systems. As an example, only the biggest of mainframe shops would still have a "computer operator" position. In smaller companies, the "IT staff" is responsible for many more aspects of the environment than a lone software developer out of hundreds in a big-company setting. Finally, with offshoring of totally tech-focused jobs, there's more of a push to turn us into project managers. (I'm resisting this one as long as I can -- I have nothing to offer in the way of expertise here and it's not something you can just learn. People are too difficult to control.)
I say we should give the market a few more years to settle out. There are still people hanging on from the dotcom craze. Our company just did a big round of IT hiring to correct for a massive growth spurt. It's true what they say -- the truly good people are employed already. If they're not, you have a very short window in which to reach them. The interesting cases come when you see people who have been out of work for months. Some are truly great and have just had a run of bad luck. Others just don't belong in the field and haven't given up yet.
A lot of people resist this idea, but I think a lot of the shortage/surplus findings would be fixed by making IT a profession. Set a barrier to entry, have a formal training program so you can advance predictably, and form a governing body to promote quality and lobby for our interests. This would prevent a lot of those fly-by-night certification schools from giving people false levels of confidence in their abilities. Most IT workers think this is a "union" mentality and therefore evil. But consider this...the AMA lobbies for the interest of its member doctors. Look at malpractice insurance. Same goes for the bar asssociation.
There is only an unwillingness to pay enough money to hire the people with the skill set you want.
Deleted
Back when Java had only been out for seven years.
There is no shortage, just a lack of skills reinvestment by the hiring managers.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Many companies seem to be averse to hiring lower level positions. They don't want to hire anyone who is junior and train them, they expect that they should be able to hire people fully qualified for whatever it is they want, even if that thing is very esoteric and requires lots of specialised knowledge.
Well, sorry, but that just isn't realistic. Experience has to come from somewhere and this idea that "somewhere" is always going to be "somewhere else" just isn't realistic. I think maybe these companies need to say "Ok well we can't get enough people who are ideally qualified, so let's back off the requirements and hire some people we can train."
You don't even necessarily need things like apprenticeships or anything, just hire some lower level job. Ok so you are doing Java development and you need some people who are good at J2EE. You want some real experts so you try to hire vets with 10 years experience and some major projects to their name. Ok but you find you can only get 2 people for that, and you need more. Well then maybe back off and hire some mid level people, and then if you still don't have enough back off and hire some entry level people.
Ok so it isn't the highly trained dream team you wanted but at least you now have the people. Now you start training them, you let the veterans lead the team and the newer people learn. In time, you have a highly skilled team, and you probably ended up getting it for less money (and perhaps more loyalty).
Too many companies seem to think that experienced employees should just pop up out of the ground. No, sorry, not how it works. If you want someone with 10 years experience, well that means the only way they can have it is actually having been in the workforce for 10 years somewhere. There is just going to be a limited number of those.
Watch and learn
I'm also busy building a virtual test lab. It's the forst in the Southern Hemisphere, and one of the first in the world, so I expected to be pretty much on my own getting it up and running. What I didn't expect is that Microsoft seems to have no clue how to license software to us.
By IT skills, there is a lot of talk about being competent in multiple languages, understanding of sox and licencing issues etc. So academic skills. I have to ask - why did you let your IT system get into such an un-manageable mess (nickle and diming the upgrade process I would imagine)
When I scanned the responses here I did not see much mention of being willing to attend in the middle of the night whenever some system needs bottle feeding, or being led out as a human sacrifice whenever a sales guy needs to 'get tough on outages'. What family person needs that ?
Many IT roles require judgement, high skill levels, disciplin, and dedication (to the job, not to loved ones) that should be rewarded with high pay. Otherwise the people with those qualities will simply find more productive, less invasive work.
You get the people you deserve...
Nullius in verba
We recently had just a Helpdesk position open up. We decided to have all applicants take an aptitude test when they wanted to submit there resume. Although this most likely turned off a lot of people because they would have to actually come in and be tested, it yielded some more amusing results. Most the applicants claimed to have some sort of degree in computer science and an array of certs. Things that I have learned from these tests: a. CCNEs are taught that a Switch is a device that turns a computer on and off b. A subnet mask is a long ip address c. The maximum decimal value of a byte is .001
d. DHCP is used to assign telephone numbers
e. The internet is powered by magic.
Also there seemed to be an abundance of middle aged men who live at home with there mothers and thought it was necessary to bring it up in an interview.
The guy we ended up hiring had no IT experience, answered all the questions right and had an intelligence level greater then a coffee pot. He was the only one we called for a second interview out of maybe 60 :/
There's absolutely no shortage of I.T. labor.
There's a huge shortage of skilled I.T. labor. Big difference!
If I needed a bunch of whipping slaves to answer phones, no problem. If I need someone who can actually compile an app, or debug a SOAP transaction, or provision and deploy a new server top-to-bottom, that's where things get tricky. Everyone and their mother has a résumé ten miles long, with a supposed skillset covering every language and api ever hatched in the last 30 years. 99% of them are obviously full of shit, but how do you pick out the few good apples ? Interviews only work if you're both tech-smart and people-smart, otherwise you can get taken for a ride by a good liar (of which there are tons).
It's a difficult hiring situation, so in our case we cull it down to what we feel are the least worst of the pack, give them one little contract as a test, and hope for the best. In most cases we end up redoing the work ourselves because the potential hire was a complete imbecile, but the more desperate we get, the more we try to adapt our workflow to safely incorporate n00bs.
If we were a large company, we could afford to hire a bunch of morons and train them into compliance like the big boys, but we're small and we just don't have the resources to do that sort of thing. We have to pick out the best candidate we can find and hope they figure things out quickly enough to keep up.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
"It seems like every three years you've got one group or another saying, the world is going to get even hotter, Antarctica is gonna melt and so on," says Vivek Wadhwa, a professor for Duke University's Master of Meteorology Management Program and a former Carbon-Credit CEO himself. "This whole concept of global warming is bogus, it shows a lack of understanding of the dynamic nature of our overall climate system."
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
An ancillary of unemployment is a pool of unused labor. This enables companies to suppress wages while choosing the best candidates. Any tendency in the market that destroys this unemployment gap is extremely problematic to companies like Microsoft. Why?
One has to consider that the budget of a large corporation such as Microsoft is largely constituted in payroll. Even a temporary market condition such as what we saw in the late 1990s with no labor surplus causes wages to shoot up. Reducing wages, once a labor surplus returns to the market, is of course a tall order, and hence layoffs, dead-wood, and so on.
Thus, the ideal market condition for all large companies is to ensure that unemployment is a permanent fixture of the market. In this sense economists talk about 5% unemployment being "normal", and of course while the method of counting unemployment is dubious ethically, it generally serves the appropriate purposes economically.
All this leads to the driving need to bring in additional labor, and continually expand the unemployment sector. The great thing about H1-B is that they represent, for all intents and purpose (for this limited period in history, any way) a virtually unlimited supply of labor. Thus, Microsoft and many other corporations will do everything they possibly can to get as many workers from H1-B as possible, and then some.
Lets be forced into serfdom.
Who are you? Billy Gates? Ballmer? The Joker? The Penguin?
I have news for you: people who receive training are more likely to stay with you (good companies will have no qualms to offer training because they know it is a retention tool, specially if training is immediately relevant to the position).
The problem is companies that give you training only because they get some deal for free with a provider, that gives you "free" training in topics tat are not relevant to your project, and the training only happens once in a blue moon when the company gets a "a good" training deal.
Companies that don't have properly funded training programs will gain no sympathy with high skilled workers.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You telling us what you are going to do next will not protect in any way your salary or earnings.
The market will decide, irrespectively of you telling us or not.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I think there really is a shortage. The USCIS recieved about 135000 applications for the H1B quota this year on the first day alone.
Let's face it. The real issue here is that the entry level position has gone away. I went out to monster and did a quick search for IT/Computer Software jobs with less than 1 year of experience in the RTP, NC, one of the biggest tech areas in the US and I got 6 results. 6!! Companies want to hire people with 3-5 years of experience essentially expecting some other company to pay for the training but are unwilling to create entry level positions and provide on the job training to develop the sort of person they want to hire themselves. With the myriad of technologies in IT these days there are only a finite number of technologies that one can learn to any sort of depth. It's unrealistic to expect people to be 100% productive their first day of work. Companies cannot and should not expect to hire talent that they are not willing to develop themselves.
Speaking for myself I have an engineering degree, 10+ years experience as a number crunching engineer/consultant and manager, two masters degrees including one in finance. Still, I would have a very hard time getting interviews in finance because my background is not a traditional one. When I looked for such positions I'd either be told I was too inexperienced or overqualified every time. Astonishing but true. Now I just run my own business and don't care. Personally I blame HR departments most of which I find to be remarkably incompetent, but perhaps that's just me being bitter...
The solution is apprenticeships
In real engineering it is called an EIT, or "Engineer in Training". It works. Eventually EITs become PEs (project engineers) and help train the next generation. I have argued often for such a program in this forum.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'm the only person in my workplace who likes UNIX and is not afraid of it, so bringing UNIX in is a no-go until we get at least one more guy on who is not afraid if it.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
If we could do a "Terminator" and go back over the last 4 decades and just shoot the people responsible for:
Kevin Smith on Prince
...if the internet's a series of tubes, and plumbers already have a union, does that mean IT workers are unregistered members?
/. posts as dues!
With the current trend in IP pretending that data==money, we could claim
Who's with me? Let's implement a proven solution!
fortune -s -o
But your major point is still valid: there's a difference between certified and skilled. Quantity is no substitute for quality.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Perhaps the problem is that you are advertising the job as a .NET job instead of a job of developing an application that does X? Talented developers aren't so much concerned about the technology as much as they are about what they are developing. It's okay to mention that the existing code base is developed in .NET, but any talk about specific technologies should end there.
Part of the "market" is my ability to tell the market (and their Libertarian campfollowers) what they can do with themselves.
What the "market forces" are doing is driving out the good workers and leaving the drones. (Gresham's law works for IT as well.)
Any time something bad happens to employees the Capitalist theologians declare that is is the "Markets Will" and ignore any of their own fault in helping screw over their fellow man.
The best solution to a situation like what is happening with IT is to get out of the building and watch it burn from a safe distance.
I plan on doing just that.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
The article doesn't address the real question, which is, was there at some point, say in 1995, a shortage. If so, did the increase in overseas quotas, or other measures, alleviate this shortage? If so, that would show that it is difficult to predict when there might be a shortage; and that certain solutions address this shortage.
Of course, the questions above have to be addressed with rigor. What are the conditions for tech booms? Can we attribute the relieving of a shortage reliably to immigration, or other factors, such as increased interest in tech during a boom?
The article has no rigor. It poses the wrong questions in order to make a dramatic statement.
The problem we have here is necessarily skill or technical abilities, but ones ability to take initiative and further enhance their career. I have people who come in here and are brilliant in a certain technology, far better than me, and cannot socially function in a work environment. Furthermore, these people could care less.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not in love my employer, but I was assigned a certain set of responsibilities. It is my duty to fulfill these said duties, not complain and whine about it or do it half-assed.
Personally, I would hire someone that has the ambition, motivation, and initiative to word hard and gain more experience over someone who has more technical abilities who could care less. Just my two cents.
Off the cuff estimate, roughly 90% of the best and brightest IT minds I personally know and including myself, the ones that git-er-done, have given up on long days, fixed pay, lousy conditions, incompetent management, threat of outsourcing, and mental cruelty. A lot of your "skilled" people bail out. We're smart, so we take jobs in lower paying, but more secure and laid back not-for-profits, or find a new second career. We've been in the industry for 10-20 years and want to do things like have families, and see our friends once in a while. I was personally told repeatedly by my management that they could hire 2 college grads or 4 foreign workers for the price of me and if I didn't like 80hr weeks I was welcome to leave. So I did.
Reading all these comments...there seems to be a common theme that "There is no shortage of IT workers, just a shortage of good ones."
Why is that? I'm really asking because I don't know. Why are the majority of practicioners of our profession bad? This doesn't happen with other professions does it? (doctor, lawyer, etc.)
I have a couple of theories:
1) Working in IT requires constant learning and keeping up on the latest technologies. People who already work 60 hours a week and have families just don't have time to keep their skills current. They trust their companies to keep them trained, and the companies let them down.
2) There is no consistent college preparation and certification like there is for every other professional field. I'm a software developer who has a Computer Science degree, but most other developers have MIS degrees, Math degrees, Engineering degrees, no degree, etc. Lots of people who are clever "coders" are actually poor overall software developers.
Anyone have other clues?
Just one example of missing IT people, naturally others domains will expose similar pathologies Who knows how to program a multicores processor effectively? Maybe many will say : me , haha But effectively means you know to extract more than 10% of peak flops on real codes , or peak integers :-)
Did you pass the test?
Did you use a tool to measure, Oh by the way you don't know such tool , back luck , sure you miss the test
Probably you are so good you think you don't need such tool, oh YES I see
Then now the industry is in trouble because 8 cores will be there next year, and there are
cell processor, CUDA and FPGA and many exotic things that very few know how to exploit seriously, even the real experts
Meanwhile the potential is enormous, some will do fundamental breakthroughs, but many will have trouble to stay in competition
And you think the industry has no problem?
There are plenty IT people, some are old and most are incapable to sustain the Moore Law of complexity of their environment
some are young and don't care too much about technologies and details and have difficulties to apprehend this complexity with
inadequate training they received in their expensive high scholl
But many claim they have the magic intelligent tool that will save the industry, probably one day a monkey with right tool wil lbe a good IT expert :-)
How many developers use a memory leak checker?
How many use state of the art tools to analyze their production?
But this is not a problem since poor quality means you will sell expensive support :-)
Support done by people that have quasi no clue on the products they support
All the industry works like that, exceptions are rare, normal since definition of what is an exception :-)
Everybody is trained to accept very poor quality software products where people waste a huge proportion of their day
to adapt to the software they use that some name "tools" , simply ridiculous
Then how many IT experts the planet require?
And many do we have?
No choice we are obliged to put the recruiting bar very low since years, and naturally the recruited incompetent elements
jump in managment position where it's easier to hide and take the bad decisions on political reasons and not on rationals,
then no hope to get out of this mess :-) OOPS
But this is a LOT fun :-)
of the best people.
When you bring lots of good people into an area, you don't take jobs away from the less skillful, you create new jobs.
The problem with the H1B program is that it is structured, not just to bring in already abundant entry level labor, but to prime offshoring efforts by kicking that labor out of the country once it's obtained enough experience to be really useful. At the very least, we should not have a guest worker program for highly skilled workers, but one that clears the way for permanent residency and citizenship.
Even better, we should scrap the whole thing and fund a massive postgraduate fellowship program in a variety of technology areas, each fellowship accompanied with a handsome stipend and an invitation at the end to become a permanent resident. Of course, some knuckleheads would say it's unfair to tax Americans to pay for fellowships they can't apply for, which completely misses the point. I'm not talking about people of the caliber that are going to have trouble finding a job. I'm talking about people whose presence will create wealth and jobs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Governments need to relax regulations on locking-in apprentices to their sponsoring employer.
There is a market solution that doesn't involve short-term contract slavery: employers could compete to retain their valued and newly-trained staff.
Some organizations already do this, and succeed in keeping people for a long time. Others seem to never want what they already have: The new guy with the shiny resumé can command more than the solid employee they *know* has reported to work for two years for $10,000 less. So they talk about salary freezes, while they're hiring people for more -- and that's to say nothing of what they're paying the guys in marketing....
Of course, the market seems to let some of both kinds of organizations survive, so maybe the second type is on to something.
Tweet, tweet.
I thought this was just a ploy so that they can hire H1-B workers for cheap, or PR to justify outsourcing these jobs?
If you're someone like Google and you have stricter standards, I could easily see a shortage of good programmers.
They don't really have this problem -- or at least, they seem to mitigate it successfully by providing superior compensation and a great work environment. And they still turn some great people away.
Tweet, tweet.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am a software developer involved in interviewing for other software developers in Phoenix, AZ.
It seems there really is a shortage of skilled software developers.
There are plenty of people that call themselves developers and respond to adverts for skilled devleopers, but there really is a big shortage of people that actually have the actual skills and ability to write good, reliable and well-structured software.
Well, since I don't expect a candidate to know all of the technologies we use I focus on 2 things. Aptitude and personality. For aptitude we ask questions/problems and work through them together. If you consider that a dick size war so be it. Our team is fairly small so personality is a big deal. If you're a dick, I don't care how talented you are. I don't want to have to deal with you every day so I won't hire you.
LOL, I'm the architect on my team. But since the team is so small, I'm also a 'gut level coder.' Where would that leave me?
Then why worship at the altar of MCSE? This has been going on for years, and you here MCSEs bitching about it. "They hired me to administer the Windows network, but now we've got this Cisco router, what do I do?????"
If you want a guy with a lot experience on a lot of wide-ranging systems, you're not going to find him from the pool of a kazillion kids being pumped out of technical courses with an MCSE.
Of course, you're never going to find the guy that knows everything. Some of the jobs I've applied for I just shake my head, because they ask for expertise in everything from AS/400 through GIS to Novell and a basic PC LAN. I'm not joking, one of the jobs had that as the requirements. They have such strange and esoteric systems that they either can't find the guy to run it or they have to pay huge money to get someone in who even has a passing knowledge of all the systems.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Bingo. I believe that any decent programmer who already knows how to approach a given task can quickly adapt themselves to whatever language or SDK they need to accomplish it.
There's way too many programmers. Not enough good ones. Nuff said.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Economically speaking, there cannot be a shortage without some sort of cap on what people can pay. Not being happy with the prices in a free market is not a shortage. Supply and demand are always in equilibrium unless the government intervenes. I suggest companies stop whining and either open up their wallets or learn to do without!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Many managers sincerely believe that their job is to get the work done for the minimum cost. Most of them don't understand that some people really do produce more or better results. And they don't understand the cost structure of software. So they hire the cheapest people, without regard to qualification, ability, or talent, and whine about the "shortage" of even-cheaper people. That could be seen as pointy-haired stupidity. Or, it could be a smart move by that manager.
A battalion of fresh-out programmers who have no intention of mastering the subject can crank out lots of code in a hurry. Most of it won't work, and so will require lots of testing and rewriting. All that testing and rewriting increases the number of man-hours in the project, which can be used to justify more warm bodies, and more budget, which can in turn be used to justify a higher salary/bonus for the manager. The constant hiring and turnover assures that no one ever develops the expertise to actually get the system working. And the unrealistic ceiling on compensation assures that highly competent and experienced people cannot be hired. So the project never ends, but the manager gets promoted.
A squad of seasoned professional developers, with higher degrees and/or decades of experience, can develop the same system in a fraction of the time. Most of their stuff will work with very little testing and debugging required. So their manager cannot easily justify increasing the number of people, and his successful project looks like a smaller project. After all, it only took ten people time one year, so it can't be a huge thing, can it? That manager then has to come up with other reasons, besides the number employees, to justify his salary/bonus increase. And, he has to find another project for next year.
So the cheapest-people (and lots of them) strategy doesn't work for the company, but it works really well for the manager. At least in the short run, which is all they seem to care about any more.
You lack of history education is what makes this an issue.
Those that do not learn from the past are bound to repeat it.
It was slave labor that was imported in.
Then it was indentured servants that were imported in.
Then is was sharecropping that was imported in.
The it was child labor that was imported in.
Then people formed unions and it stopped.
Then the unions rotted from within and rather then working with the employer became advasaries.
Then the unions grew weak and self-interested and lost power in the private sector.
Then the unions latched on to their last safe haven, government jobs.
Then the unions fought tooth an nail to bloat government to increase as many union jobs as possible to keep the money via union dues coming in. A frantic grasp as a glory long lost.
Then the businesses started importing H1B via staffers.
Then the unions complained and the government mandated that H1B's get market rate pay.
Then the H1Bs started working 80 hours a week but only reporting 40.
Then the unions complained and investigations were launched.
Then the companies sent the servers, the jobs, and the work over seas where the H1Bs aren't needed.
There has never been a golden age for US workers except when unions were strong and HONEST. Now the unions are in general a bunch of whiners that you can't even fire when they screw up. They don't, unless some is dead or in jail, accept responsibility for their own and have failed in their mission. The unions should never have stopped once they gain power in the US. They should have been fighting tooth an nail for a global minimum wage and global standards for living wages. Then there would have been no incentive to "go get cheap labor."
Outsource isn't a problem. Exporting jobs isn't a problem. Taking advantage of people, anywhere on Earth or beyond (future proofing this post) is the problem.
Solution: Global minimum wage as Earth struggles to approach parity in the job market. So long as there is a third world so to speak. The market will adjust and we will feel the pain as much of the 3rd world rises to take their "share". We had a good run but were blind to our own inflated sense of value. IT will go the way of TV repair men as technology advances.
We in IT are dealing with what autoworkers have struggled with for decades. Why did they last decades where modern IT only lasted 20 years till we hit this point? They have a union, we didn't.
We devalued our own industry and sabatoged our own success. Remember the excess during the bubble? Yeah businesses do. Remember the job hopping? Yep businesses do. Remember the network admins with the 3 flat screen monitors do track 1 exchange server and had a TCPDUMP on another "because it looked cool and made them look busy?", businesses do.
The hard fact is labor is cheaper then we would like and we are drifting ever lower and the rest of the world is rising and perhaps not in the lifetime of anyone reading this but perhaps a generation or two down the road we'll hit parity and business will have no where else to turn to for cheap labor... then again.. that might be the time the cycle starts again...
my 2 cents. enjoy, hate, flame etc...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Truthfully, as "bogus" as most of these certs. are, I spent my own personal money to go take the A+ certification exam. I didn't waste a dime on "study materials" in advance. I knew that having had years of experience as a service tech., plus my own learning experiences with my computers at home, I'd be ok. All I did was review the free questions or portions of sample exams offered on several web sites, to get a better "feel" for the types of questions I might be asked. Then I took the test and passed it.
One of my good friends just did likewise, as he was unemployed and looking for any angle he could to improve his chances of getting another job. Did it help in his situation? Hard to say, but shortly after he obtained it and added it to his resume, he did get hired on at a company supporting point-of-sale terminals and software.
As stupid as it might seem for companies to turn away experienced people simply for not having the A+, it's really a fairly easy test to pass and get out of the way. It wasn't that costly either, compared to most (only 2 parts to it). In addition, it was fairly platform-neutral compared to most (Cisco certs., MSCA/MSCE, etc.). It asks a few DOS/Windows-centric things, but they're basic enough of items that any decent tech. should comprehend them anyway - even if he/she primarily works in a Mac or Unix environment.
L1B visas are unlimited. They allow a foreign company to bring in their own overseas workers to the US ostensibly to work on that firm's projects alone, at rate the company choses to pay them as long as it doesn't violate minimum wage laws. Moreover those workers, often packed 4 or 5 in an apartment are charged their rent and expenses against that below market rate salary. So if they are 'paid' $3000/month for the job used to do for 80K/year, then they are charged back $2000/month in rent and expenses leaving them 12k/year.
Basically you're losing your jobs to people who practically indentured servants. THAT's why there's a shortage. There's a shortage of indentured servants that US companies can pay. They're not paying your rate ergo so a 'gap' is created that filled off the labor rolls by foreign workers.
Feeling threatened? Did some of my complaint apply to you?
There is a game people play called "stump the candidate" where they invent questions (and research the answers) just to spring on people at job interviews. There is no need for contrived BS just to try and intimidate people. I'm not intimidated. If I don't know, I can look it up or figure it out. This "dick size war" proves nothing.
I recently have decided to just say "I don't know" early in the show and get it over with. Amazingly, technology companies (HP, Cray, Cisco, thanks for the memories) are usually better about this than non-technology companies (banks, etc).
As for the clubhouse: I'm paid to be pleasant and professional, which I deliver. I might even like you on a personal level. But I'm nobodies toady, and if work is your entire social circle... Well, you have problems that software will never fix.
Anyway, don't hire me. I'm fine w/that. You probably couldn't afford me anyway.
One of the biggest reasons there is a shortage is a lack of standardization in the industry. Every new application, tool, server, OS, whatever that is released has a significantly different interface and functionality than the previous version. This requires an individual to not only be familiar and have experience in general IT work, but to be specifically trained for the application a company is using.
Microsoft loves releasing new software with a continual learning curve. Problem with this is, no one has time to learn all the ins and outs of this week's new software release. The more people in IT, the more people that can specialize in a particular application. If Microsoft would update their products incrementally, keeping the same basic functionality as the previous version but just fixing the bugs and enhancing things where they are needed IT would be much easier to work in. When there are four active releases of one product (Outlook, Office, IE, Exchange, etc...) it is incredibly difficult to keep track of how each one works. Licensing costs are prohibitive for many businesses, so they many don't upgrade all of their systems to the latest version regularly. This means an IT professional has to be versed in versions of the software that are both current and several years old.
Flooding the market with IT people is the only way Microsoft, and companies like them, can manage to support their business model. As the talent pool shrinks, there are less people willing to learn their new products. As a result, new versions of their software (Vista) don't sell very well. No one is trained to support them, and no one wants to learn.
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Wow! The boss you had who said that illustrates exactly why so much software out there is garbage!
I'd say testing is VERY much a revenue-generating component of a business that sells software! Software inherently contains bugs, because people are not perfect. As my software coding friend used to fondly point out, "If I'm 99% accurate with all the code I write, that means roughly 1 line in every 100 I write needs fixing!"
Back when most software development efforts were 1 man projects, it was a "given" that the person writing the code would also find and fix the bugs in it. But when you develop today's large applications in a team, it makes sense to offload some of that work to another department. You don't need to waste a developer's time going back through their code for days, trying to make sure they've caught as many mistakes as possible. Delegate that out to a testing team, who can flush out the problems (even using automated tools to do repetitious stuff nobody will bother to do manually), and turn in the list of flaws found to the developers, so they're working on more focused problems.
In that perspective, a QA tester really *is* a part of the software development team, and IMHO, should be paid equally well. Both groups are working to accomplish the goal of getting a product released that delivers on what it promises.
Therefore, when employers say that there is a shortage, then they are saying "employees are more scarce than I want them to be", which means "I have to pay more for the quality of employees that I want". As a rule, unless there are unemployed experts out there just waiting to be snatched up at a pittance (as was the case during the dotcom bust), employers will always feel that they have to pay too much for the quality of employee that they want.
There are three things that you can do to improve the situation:
If the employers are making public complaints about this, guess which of the three they want to do.
This is true for most other industries, too. If you increase the amount that nurses and teachers are paid, just watch how quickly the shortage turns into a glut.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
I don't know what they're talking about. The average height in the IT department here is approx 5'10" (guessing by looking around) - 2 slightly below average folks, a few people above 6', and then me in the middle at 5'11". Bah.
TFA in this post reads a lot like TFA in an earlier post about the supposed science and engineering labor shortage. In both cases, we see governmental and educational institutions using a perceived need for more labor in a certain sector as a means for spending programs and college recruiting, while not tailoring their approaches to meet specific market demands.
If it makes you happy, ya'll can debate all day long about whether or not the myth is really a myth or just a function of the fact that only people with 5 to 10 years' experience in the real world aren't wasting the oxygen of the world's self-made uber-programmers. Personally, I would rather think about what this common thread means in broader terms. What do these two articles, taken together, say about macro-scale patterns related to the labor market and, more importantly, American global competitiveness? What does the fact that schools and government incentive programs are not flexible enough to meet specific demands mean in terms of their abilities to promote the pursuit of livelihoods tailored for educated (and more importantly, according to you lot, self-educated) science, engineering, and IT professionals? What, in turn, does this say about the plans of various political candidates (Obama and McCain, chief among them), to deal with globalization through job retraining?
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard Feynman
I don't feel threatened at all. Why would I? I don't attempt to stump the candidate at all. I don't ask any trick questions. My usual questioning takes something I'm currently working on and explore how the candidate would solve the problem. Many times I haven't even come up with a solution yet, so there is no right answer. I just want to see how someone will go about problem solving. If you think that's trying to intimidate, then fine. I don't know how else to evaluate someone without giving some fixed test which would end up being more like a quiz. I also don't care how well someone knows a particular language since I'm of the camp that if you know one, you can learn any other.
I don't expect my colleagues to be my out of work buddies. I'd rather them not be my outside of work friends for the most part. But, I've worked with some real jerks in the past. They were smart guys, but a huge pain to work with, which always led to the projects to suffer.
So then we should expect the wages offered for IT professionals to go up. Right?
Have gnu, will travel.
Here's the post again, without the typos:
I'm not saying for a moment I don't appreciate our testers, I work quite closely with them - generally giving them the heads up on what we're doing so they can get their tests designed ahead of time - I'm just saying I don't find the prospect of doing their work thrilling.
You may be onto something with design of auto test frameworks and the like, but I have a feeling even that could be repetetive. If you have the freedom and expertise to get creative in the security test arena that could be fun, input fuzzing and the like...
Before anybody responded to this flamebait, responsible /. readers should have asked who was writing the article. Who is the person who wrote this article, and what agenda could she possibly have? What I mean is, if working for a magazine funded by the IT community (see: the guys that pay IT wages), what would the result of writing an article that said IT employees "had it good" already and were not valuable commodities?
Here are Ericka Chickowski's last 5 articles:
2008-03-07 10 Ways to Cultivate a Creative IT Environment
2008-03-05 Is There Really an IT Labor Shortage?
2008-03-03 6 Ways to Prepare for Inevitable Cost Cuts
2008-02-29 10 Ways IT Employees are Different from Everyone Else
2008-02-21 Employment Outlook: IT Jobs Stable, Salaries Flat
Anybody else see a theme?
If I was a large corporation, and I believed bad times were ahead (given the state of the economy), the first thing I'd do is try to curb new-hires' salary expectations by getting the propaganda machine to churn out some nonsense like the items above.
The fact is, the software developers are the company. Managers, PMs, Human Resources and CEOs like to think they make the world turn, but without developers, they have nothing to sell.
I don't know about you guys, but if I was confident in my skills as a coder/developer/integrator, her article would make laugh.
The Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
We agree.
I usually ask candidates about their projects, then ask about the decisions they made. I have enough experience that I can usually grok their problem domain rather than place them in mine.
But whatever works for you.
I pretty much don't want to see my coworkers outside of work, although some of them seem rather interesting. I need some space to decompress. I work in silicon valley, our workdays are long enough.
I am a Collage Grad, with a MCSE +I, A+ Cert, Genesys Telecom Certified, can work on on IVRs, can do Webpage desgin, worked in a Help Desk for a large company, and can program, make macros, automate PC processes and work procedures... and have been looking for any type of IT job for at least 7 years (in the California Bay Area) now.. but i have been stuck doing Home Loans and now and working at a bank as a Customer Service Team Lead. I also know a few people in my area in my same situation.. so there is no shortage out there of IT workers.. there IS a shortage of IT jobs.. I say it is the goverment.. how much longer do we have this guy in office again? ;)
Please drop me a contact mail.
Like the Inflation rate (cooked to exclude the most inflationary items).
Like the unemployment rate (cooked by cherry picking only those sectors that support the desired outcome).
I can speak for myself, I looked for work for five years (unsuccessfully) before giving up and retiring completely, and it seems to me that the IT industry is more than 70% foreign contract workers despite the TRUE 18% US jobless rate!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Please drop me a private mail.
Speaking as a fellow EE, there is a fundamental flaw when making these comparisons between manufacturing related jobs (like ours) and service based jobs (like lawyers, doctors, etc.) If we make product X and we use all US labor and we are in competition with product Y from a non-unionized, foreign manufacturer, how do we compete [1]? On the other hand, are you going to talk to a lawyer from the UK to handle a US issue? You can't. You would need to have someone who has passed the bar exam in your state. I doubt you would routinely see a doctor from a different state/country either, unless you lived trivially close to a state/national border. The services are tied to the region where the other workers live. However, consumer products are not tied to a region. These products will be in competition with anyone who can make and ship them globally.
You cite the auto unions in your reply also. Have you looked at the big 3 lately? Do you see how well they are doing right now? I grew up in Detroit. I have seen the ups and downs of the UAW. While the US auto industry was booming, so were the workers in the UAW. That was due in part to the leverage the UAW had over the big 3. Now-a-days, even the big 3 are closing plants in Michigan, because Michigan requires its workers to join unions in unionized shops. Instead, a lot of their manufacturing is either in Mexico (one 'benefit' of NAFTA) or in other "right to work"[2] states. In short, the UAW demanded too much from the US automakers to the point where they are having a hard time competing with foreign automakers.
[1] I guess you could implement some sort of tariff making our products more attractive than foreign competitors, but they would likely do the same to us.
[2] Right to work meaning that you are not required to join the union if the shop you work in has a union.
What exactly were you looking for in IT? I've voluntarily left and gotten new jobs 3 times since 2001. So, either you do something really specialized, are in a shitty area (in which case it says little about the national IT market as a whole), or you were Doing It Wrong.
I could not agree with this more. I used to work in tech support, and almost daily I was educating our customers on technologies that a skilled network administrator should know how to do.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
But *skilled* IT workers is a different matter altogether. It's a pity that whoever hires IT workers can rarely tell the difference.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
I think there is a serious shortage of inexpensive competent honest lawyers. Maybe Congress might want to address that issue. I went to a lawyer, who said he would charge me next to nothing to get a frivolous $500 towing charge dismissed. His idea of next to nothing was $200. Mine was like $20. But he had me come into his office, and pontificate for an hour about the ticket and such. Then, he asked me for $100. After court, he asked for another $100. I asked for a receipt, which he wrote on a PostIt note in unreadable handwritting.
Your post leaves me a little perplexed.
"There are a lot of mediocre or bad programmers out there, most of them with degrees."
How do you know? There are hundreds of thousands of programmers, have you really hired, and fairly evaluated a big enough sample to make that sort of a statement? Also, what are your own credentials? And what, in your opinion, makes them so "mediocre or bad?"
In my experience, self-taught programmers do not understand structured development at all. They tend to be spaghetti coders. They also don't understand the software life cycle process, or other software engineering concepts. They just know how to hack things together. But, that is just my experience.
I would be interested to know what criteria you use to define a "good programmer."
I'm studying CS right now. I love it to pieces, I'm getting top marks - I can't imagine switching degrees. But this all sounds foreboding. Is there going to be any work for me when I'm done or not?
Censorship is the opposite of education. If neo-darwinism were defensible, people would not need to try and censor ID.
Maybe your shell/joke wasn't "korny" enough!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
What is it with these PHBs?
Think about this: there is a difference between saying "there are not enough super-models who want to go out with me" and saying "there are not enough women in the world."
If you want to make a point, please specify: your exact requirements, exactly what pay and terms you offer, and where the job is located.
If you are typical, you are looking for somebody with extensive experience in a dozen different areas, then whining that there are no IT specialists.
I wonder if the persons or organizations responsible for these claims of IT shortages have looked into the logistics of IT.
In other words, it's possible that, due to the size of the U.S. and the distribution of skilled labor, there are surpluses in some areas and shortages in others.
I work for an international telecom company. Our office traditionally has a difficult time filling jobs because of our location in Northeast Ohio. The office has been here for years, but it's not exactly a mecca of technology, and thusly we find ourselves interviewing people from all across the country. Then it becomes an issue when we need to relocate someone from one of the coasts to NE Ohio. Firstly, not many people get excited about the prospects of NEO, and Secondly it's an expensive proposition to pick up someone and their family and move them across the country.
NE Ohio is also lacking "real" companies, while simultaneously being overly-saturated with contracting companies and recruiters. I have no interest in being a contract employee so that severely limits employment prospects.
Conversely, I'm not overly excited about the prospects of staying in NE Ohio for the rest of my career, but I have dozens of considerations that preclude me from just picking up and moving somewhere else. I have my family to consider, a home (to attempt) to sell in a dismal market, the whole prospect of relocation of household, my wife works and loves her job, etc. I would love to be able to move to a "hotbed" of technology, but of course it's not a simple process.
I wonder if the net employment/employee ratio nationwide is a wash? How many of these employers who are claiming shortages would be willing to hire someone like me, purchase my house, pay relocation costs, etc.??
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
I am in Denver, and that is the going pay. Many helpdesk jobs require very considerable skills, but the pay is nothing. I am amazed that anybody would want those jobs.
You can check out my blog at techtoil.org. On the front page I have an article: "Worst job in IT: PC Technician and/or Help-Desk?" Also click on the "Salary Survey" and compare helpdesk jobs to unskilled labor.
Here are a few quick examples, please note the *long* list of requirements relative to the pitiful pay:
* Helpdesk Support |Entry Level
o Bachelor's degree (required) in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems or similar discipline preferred
o 1-3 years technical experience in a desktop support environment
o Strong Windows XP, MS Office, Outlook, Internet Explorer and Adobe Acrobat support experience
o Knowledge of Ghost or similar imaging software and concepts
o Strong competency in supporting PC, Laptop and PDA Hardware and Software
o Experience using Help Desk Software for issue tracking, asset tracking, knowledge base and service level reporting desired
o A+ Certification preferred but not required.
o Microsoft MCDST Certification or equivalent preferred but not required.
* Compensation: $35K to $45K
* Technical Support/Help Desk
o Excel, Powerpoint, Word, Netmeeting, Microsoft Outlook
o Communication Skills, Business Writing Skillls
o SAP, Oracle, Data Modeling, Data Management
o Peoplesoft, MS Access
o DSS/EIS/OLAP Programmer
o Database Design, DB2, EAI, Middleware
o System Integration, Automated Test, System Architect
o PDM, Project Management, Organizational Skills
* Compensation: up to $13.73 per hour DOE, Heath insurance available
However, the "IT field" has such a wide range of meaning that it is pretty useless in the context of employment. Consider this quote from the article:
A few months of study and we have a trained IT worker(!?). However, we don't have a skilled programmer. Yet, this statement is in an article which also talks about skilled programmers. They aren't the same, but the writer doesn't know that.
I agree that people should know the basics, and be able to kick ass with them.
On the other hand, I'm not just hiring a programmer to twiddle bits. If they are going to be professionals, they need to able to write, to speak, to listen, to think, and to understand a broad enough range of topics to apply lessons that come from other specialties. For example:
- psychology - because the software we make is for people
- sociology and anthropology - because we work in groups
- american history - to understand the business and social context in which we work
- world history - to not look like an idiot in front of international partners and clients
- business - for obvious reasons
- accounting - if you ever want to touch a system that handles money
- law - at least enough to understand IP law and our regulatory environment
And I could go on from there. Mathematics, statistics, demography, marketing, advertising, visual design, information design, library science, physics, and experimental methods from some lab science: some knowledge of all of these fields can be helpful to pretty much any working professional programmer. And of course if you're looking to work in a particular field, like bioinformatics, you'll need special training.Basically, what I'm saying is that if you want to be a professional, you need a liberal education (a term much older than the "liberal" stick the American right uses to beat the American left). Sure, you can still get a job, but if coding is all you can do, you'll end up the IT equivalent of a mediocre auto mechanic.
Lets see if we can find some common ground. Do you agree with this statement.
We have made cars in the US a lot longer than we have made steel in the US.
Maybe that's the problem. Your problem.
If I had 10 J2EE positions to fill and there'd be a low in supply I'd hire 2 experienced J2EE developers with basic social skills and 8 kids directly from High School who've done a little web project in the past or have neat World of Warcraft LUA scripting skills for like a tenth of the price.
I'd have the Experts help the n00bs wrap their head around that J2EE behemoth, buy them an entire library on Java, send the whole lot on 2 or 3 trainings over the first year and have them do or help at a handfull of projects (OSS or something) and test developement methodologies. I'd offer each a full-scale Sun Java Certification palette over the next 5 years or so for those who stay in line. Screw University and CompSci - who needs that nowadays? Training on the job is king. You don't think the Linux kernel would be worse if Linus didn't have a degree, do you? Ton Roosendahl (Eternal Blender Lead) doesn't even have a formal training in programming!
I'd give them air to breathe, all the tools the experts say speed up the job and in 18 months I'd have a team that could programm the universe. I'd slowly raise the n00bs into the positions that they are comfortable in, fire the slackers and get new n00bs on board. They'd all be a perfect fit and better than any hodge-podge crew that somebody tacks together from hiring a dozen of the 'best skilled developers'.
If you really have 10 positions for frontline J2EE developers to fill then you're a larger shop that could do this type of thing easyly. That you haven't done it yet goes to show how IT and Softwaredevelopement in general lacks result-oriented thinking and acting these days.
Or maybe you just wanted a team of rockstars that would gladly work for $8 an hour. Like most companies nowadays.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Business works under the assumption that IT workers are interchangable commodities, but nothing could be further from the truth.
What the PHBs don't understand: a person can know windows or linux all day, but it can take a long time to fully understand the particular system at a particular company. This is even more true when it comes to software development: somebody who is fully familiar with your company's code, and company's way of doing things is going to be 10X as productive as another developer who only knows "Java" or whatever.
But when the PHBs can not find the exact skill set they want, they will bitch that there are no IT workers. Those skills sets can be very complicated, btw. Six different skill areas are typical, although I have seen some jobs that ask for over 30 different skills.
As somebody that has just being replaced by people working in India (hello chaps!) I can categorically tell you there are labour shortages in Western countries.
I did the interviews, the people is just not there. As for myself I will take a few months off because I know there will be a job for me once I am rested and have done a few things I have in the back burner.
The situation in the US is not the way you are portraying it. Foreign workers are well paid (by definition, given the kind of visa they need to enter the country) so they are not driving salaries down, and most importantly pay taxes and spend money in the local economy, which benefits without having invested a dime in the education of these individuals.
The people driving salaries down are the ones working remotely and that never set foot in the country they are serving, very often using the infrastructure in that country, which was originally built to benefit the local population. That is what happened to me. I have no problem with this, I will have to take a lower salary most likely, but this is just natural given the savage competition to which we are being confronted (people in India are forced to work insane hours for a quarter of what we earn in the West, but fret no, salaries are going up and it is a matter of 3 or 4 years before they are comparable to Western standards, the turnover rate over there is atrocious, because techie people over there are not stupid: as soon as they get a better skill set they move on. In my experience this is at the very least 40% a year of attrition rate, so you always have a half competent group of people, half of which will leave very soon. Some companies are waking up to this fact, but some others are going ahead like a blinded lemming with suicidal thoughts).
Techies in developed countries should be writing to politicians about why they are allowing people working remotely in machines based locally, offering services locally. If they are affecting the economy in such way, they should be taxed as if they were working locally, people working remotely get all the money but pay no taxes locally, while the other way around is nigh to impossible to set up shop.
Or we should get free access to Indian and Chinese markets in order to compete in a fair basis. But our politicians are too busy wasting billions of dollars killing innocent people instead of investing in the future of our respective countries.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And no, not everybody has to learn to drive (I can tell you this most definitively: I don't ).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... but I am as sure as hell that I would come up with something that orders a list.
That should be a most basic skill: to get things done even if they are not optimal. Optimization can't be done in the short span of a test during a job application, situation in which you don't have access to Google, books, etc.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Job safety is gone. The only difference is that in some localities corporations are forced to pay something when they get rid of you. But that is pretty much all.
If you play your cards correctly (you know, put enough savings aside, I now recommend to have at least one year of salary covered in hard cold cash via your savings) there should be no difference whatsoever between being contracted or being employed (oh no, wait, bein contracted you are not sucked into office politics and you actually get work done)...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...it's a shortage in compensation. The employers don't offer additional compensation then complain when they only get mediocre performing employees. What most companies are willing to pay for entry level IT positions isn't competitive with other highly technical positions and this affects career decisions. Lots of people I know who are competent at programming decided to become engineers or pursue graduate degrees instead of a computer science degree. The pay scale and the perception of age in each field helped them decide which of their interests they wanted to turn into a career. It's really no different than finding a competent K-12 teacher, some people will do it because they love it but lots of talented individuals who are interested look at the compensation and decide on another career option.
Honestly, I thought that I would never see Slashdot post such a story, and I never thought that Rob "Commander Taco" Malda himself would post it. Amazing. Perhaps liberals are capable of change, after all.
For more information on the specious "labor shortage," google on terms such as these:
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
Well, went J2ME instead.
My least favorite is: are you kewl enough to work in our clubhouse? Kewlness is no substitute for ability.
My advice, dont even waste your time. Just let em fall. Sooner or later their employers/customers will go looking for someone who knows his handwork.
Anyway, I'm a little tired of hearing about "the shortage" when in fact there is none. The "shortage" (IMO) is manufactured. Same here (in Germany). Im getting tired of it as well. All those mummys sons who studied CS cause it was the "in" thing to do with the advertised shortage. Doesnt make live easier for those who actually do what they enjoy (well most of the time) and do well.
As far as i can tell its just a stupid trick to lower wages, fake demand to increase supply of labour. People who choose their job based solely on expected salary rarely are a good choice.
In Australia, at any rate, there's no great shortage of people with qualifications in IT. There is however a desperate shortage of people who can actually function in IT jobs.
We've had University-level computer science courses since the seventies or so, like everywhere else I guess. During the dot-com era, loads of institutions started up so-called "information technology" courses, mostly aimed at vocational programmer training. These courses do *not* teach anything about algorithms, because (and I quote an IT lecturer) "they're never going to have to worry about that in the real world". Now fair enough, they probably won't have to worry about algorithmic complexity or do a formal proof of correctness after they leave uni. But these guys aren't learning *anything* about algorithms -- including how to develop or test one.
What most IT graduates have learned how to do is translate algorithms into Java. Someone else has to come up with the algorithms for them and write them up in detailed pseudocode -- and if you've got someone on staff capable of doing that, it's not that much extra effort for them to learn Java syntax. If thirty years of research into learning how to program has told us anything, it's that learning the syntax ain't the hard part. Unless you're learning INTERCAL, in which case all bets are off.
Meanwhile, CS programs that still teach all that stuff are still copping flak because of a general perception among undergrads that it's irrelevant, and that what employers REALLY want is someone who knows the Java libraries backwards. I reckon that's nice and all, but a) that's the sort of think you can pick up from a reference book after you've taken second year Algorithms and Data Structures, and b) what the employers I've spoken to really want from a programmer is someone who, after a reasonable training period, doesn't need to be told how to do everything they have to do.
It is a woman's prerogative to change other people's minds.
In my mind it's not important whether we have a shortage of workers or not. Software engineering isn't like steel mining, where you want lots of workers when there are lots of viable mines available, and then you get rid of them when you've taken all of the metal out of the mine.
Engineers *are* the mine. The more computer science people are in the field, the more opportunities will open up for computer scientists to work in, because there are an infinite number of applications for computers and robots and an infinite amount of money that can be made selling those applications.
An increase in the number of CS grads my dampen wages temporarily, but that only creates more incentive for grads to start their own companies and explore niches that the larger companies ignored up until then. In the long run, the market expands until wages approach a kind of equilibrium.
So, I say, we need as many CS people as we can get, and in the long run we will be way better off.
Also, some people worry about foreign workers coming into the US to work at US companies, but I don't for this reason. Those workers from Taiwan, China, India, Japan, are all coming from countries that have an enourmous demand for software, but which don't have an internal software industry comparable to the united states. What people don't understand is that the H1-b program is part of a long held policy of brain draining the crap out of countries that we compete with, which insures that all the smartest people are working in US companies and paying US income taxes.
As the software market rapidly expands both into new niches and into new physical territories like China, Russia, and India, the US and a small number of European countries still dominate the software market, and still reap all of the profits from billions of customers. The policy of expanding our workforce and brain draining the competition makes sure that we remain on the gravy train and will in the long run benefit US workers, even if there's a temporary depression of salaries in the short term.
Also, it should be noted that computer scientists still get paid quite well (65-90k jobs), although not nearly as much as professionals in fields that are vastly understaffed like medical personnel.
skills. Easy to find applicants, but we've been looking for people for a long time, and have had extreme difficulty finding someone who can even code up simple programs in the course of the interview. We have a programmer interview where the three senior developers (including myself) ask somewhat tricky questions and guide applicants in trying to solve them (using pseudocode). Most applicants seem to be afraid of even attempting to code on the fly, or, even worse, start providing super-high level solutions without figuring out how they will work. We work on simulation software, and that requires a special set of skills, but all we look for in an interview is someone with the relevant background and reasonable programming skills. Most graduates from universities these days have either (a) spent their life doing HTML/CSS/JavaScript, (b) passed their exams by copying off their classmates, (c) got really deep into the specifics of one particular technology while have no general knowledge. I was in a top-10 engineering school until a little while ago, I can assure you that I would not hire 99% of my classmates. Good people are always hard to find. Anywhere in the world. End of story.
I've been teaching mathematics for 20 years now, and ever since starting I've been told that there's a shortage of mathematics teachers. What's most puzzling is that 65% of the teaching time at my school is done by extremely low paid adjuncts . . . the union (surprisingly) is the main advocate of low paid adjuncts as it helps reduce the total cost of instruction, which helped a cadre of union old timers reach outrageous salaries ($170,000/year for 32 weeks of work, benefits (~$20,000) not included). The adjunct rate for an equivalent load is a flat $15,000 (I'm not kidding).
The best part of these numbers is that the public routinely buys the mantra that we need mathematics teachers, and the reason that we have such bad outcomes is that few are qualified to teach mathematics. Oh, did I mention that the adjuncts at my school are required to have advanced degrees in mathematics?
Yes, IT often explains away their incompetence as a result of not enough qualified people. Funny, but I think most of the IT staff at my school are low paid part-timers, with a small cadre of well paid people at the top. I hope you see the similarities.
You'd better believe that it's the truth, there is a huge shortage of "skilled IT workers." Main word being skilled! During my short stint into IT work as a high school student I worked for the most incompotent system administrator ever. By the second month of working for him half of the people that used to come to him with their problems, started coming to me. Except I got the distinct impression that they came to me, not for my knowledge, but for my skill of being able to effectively communicate with them.
So yes, the the 'myth' of a lack of skilled IT workers is true, except the parent would have you believe that IT workers do not need to be skilled in communications, etc.
Coming to you live from another dimension.
http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ideasfromibm/us/humancapital/01282008/images/Adaptable%20Workforce_2008.pdf This is a study done by IBM, and probably biased in some ways, but it does highlight a couple of good key points: -New graduates have different expectations. Reputation of a company isn't sufficient to hire anymore. -Leadership pipeline is quickly dwindling. Companies are not investing enough for next-gen leaders. -Expertise within a company is difficult to locate, and even more difficult to capture (and pass on). I think that overall key is companies will need to begin investing (yes, investing!) more into their hiring process if they want to locate and recruit top candidates. Companies say they've been doing that for years, but I'd sincerely like to see them put their money where their mouths are. Too many are focused on short-term cost savings rather than long-term strategic planning. Think it's bad now? Wait 5-10 years, where there are no graduates to fill those holes ... even the poorly qualified ones.
I can't answer that statement, since I don't know the answer. I am not trying to pick fight. I think we are ultimately on the same side. I personally wouldn't mind having a union as an EE. I would also like everyone to have one. Especially when I hear about CEOs making obscene amounts of money even while the company is doing horribly. Because I know that inevitably, these CEOs will be financially taken care of (ala 'golden parachutes') while the workers are shown the door with a pat on the back. Having a union would just make it hard to compete with those companies which don't. And ultimately, if the company can't compete, there will be no jobs for them since the company will cease to be.
In today's industry, I've seen two ways that management approaches IT staffing (and all the posts on this topic pretty much confirm this):
.com boom (at least as far as 95 from my personal experience). This bad situation has been made worse by the amount of monkeys in the market, which should never have gone into IT in the first place. So in order to find one talented person, you need to interview tons and tons of people, most being a complete waste of interview time.
First, there's a significant amount of manager who think that IT is just monkey work. Where they can take someone out of the street, send them to a training course, and voila, they're a skilled IT staff who's paid in peanuts and monkeys.
Those type of companies of course do push what could be considered a fake 'IT shortage' agenda. I say 'fake' because it's not really difficult to find a monkey, they just really want the cheapest monkey as possible, preferable someone brought in from a developing country on a 'slavery visa', so that they can pay even less peanuts and possibly not even have to offer bananas.
That whole view of course fundamentally flawed. The software industry is in some ways very similar to the building industry. If you want to build a small shack (or a low quality house), a few friends who know a bit of everything (basic plumbing, basic electricity) can do it.
If you want to build a good quality house, you need a competent plumber, a competent electrician, etc...
If you're building a skyscraper, although you do need a lot of grunts (which is one aspect that is different in IT, because since it's mostly intellectual work, there's much less space for grunts), you need quite a few experts in a myriad of fields like large scale plumbing, electricity, elevators, etc. Not only that, but in working on something on this scale, the consequences of any mistakes are drastically amplified, so anyone incompetent will cause immense harm to the project.
So those manager's view on doing IT with monkeys, is quite similar to someone thinking they can go around building large houses and skyscrapers with just a bunch of people with no real skills to do so, which naturally has very predictable results.
Unfortunately those people only have eyes for the bottom line, and proceed doing business with the same mindset as those in the building industry who will use substandard material in their construction and pocket the difference, because as long as they make money, 'who cares' how much harm is caused to others.
Then, there are companies that understand that to do any kind of real IT, you need a reasonably good team. Now, that doesn't mean the whole team has to be talented experts. There just need to be a good mix of experienced and talented ones, and of less experienced ones, but still reasonably talented or at the very least professional and competent.
Talented IT staff has been hard to find for MANY years, even way before the
It's actually quite normal for an industry to be filled up with chaff when there's an industry boom. The main problem is the people who hire and manage IT staff are often clueless about IT (and/or often just plain incompetent). This creates a situation where it's still worthwhile for the monkeys to stick around, because it's still better jobs then shuffling burgers.
So in short, there *do* is a shortage of IT staff, however the main drivers of the 'IT shortage' agenda have the wrong motivation, and have no interest in solving the *REAL* IT shortage, but instead want to drive their own deeply flawed view of how to do IT.
Just look at the job ads. Often a mid-level job requires dozens of different skills - and no two jobs are alike.
For example: what is a sysadmin, what skill do they have? What do they do?
I have been interviewing lately: at one place, the job turned out to be all about database development. At another, the job was all about software configuration management. At another, the job was all about disaster recovery planning. There is never much similarity between the actual job requirements, and the job that is advertised.
And please don't give me that "soft skills" crap. Because that only proves complete ignorance of the screening process. Besides if "communication skills" were really so important, then why do so many jobs go people who do not even speak English natively, or well?
A typical job ad usually lists at least six skills. But since no two jobs are alike, how is it even remotely likely that any particular applicant will have 5 years experience in each of those areas?
There are 3 Billion people in the world making less than $2 a day. This is never discussed by globalism's advocates and international outsourcers. , but simple economics says that the wider we open the door, the faster our lifestyle will fall. And that goes for ALL jobs (eventually). It is just simple "free market" economics. As long as companies are willing to train cheap labor while refusing to train middle class labor, there will always be someone available to work cheaper. Already, China and India are cranking up and will graduate massive numbers of diploma'd scientists and engineers in a few years. How can you compete when other countries are can create graduates at 10% of our cost, when outsourcing companies run IT labor mills that and actually invest in training while our companies stubbornly refuse to invest in Americans? The only thing that is saving our tails right now is the fact that there are limits on how fast the spigot of world labor can enter our country. The only way we can resist global pressures on wages is through thoughtful policy and measured and careful labor immigration policies.
The huge gain in salary we saw in the '90s is still continuing, but it's moved to India. Once they are at some level of equivalence as us, we will begin to see our salaries skyrocket again. There will be emerging competition with China, Russia, etc, but I am skeptical as to how talented the labor pool is out there -- particularly with respect to language.
I've personally pulled the data and done an analysis on IT salaries and exchange rate. On a straight line extrapolation, India salaries will == US salaries in ~7-8 years.
The demand for talented and skilled IT workers that actually know what they're doing (and are willing to do it) is going to do nothing but go up. Outsourcing is a fact and will remain that way, but IT jobs will always remain in demand.
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I just started work at a huge Aerospace place in Iowa. ...
They have the UAW which charges $25/week dues. Cheap!
For grins, I asked to join as an EE and they sounded aok with it...
I may join since I am old and believe in this cause. Young men always let the chips lie as I did, but I love America and don't believe anyone else is letting the chips lie, so fight I will, not for a union, but for a voice, lets call it a viewnion. Not another layer of safety crap, but a programmer voice allowing localsourcing, sabaticals for pions, removing ITnatzis, lounges, flex, you name it. Google for everyone. Not to prohibit progress, but to remove hinderences to excellent programming and magnificent products.
As far as other companies, I have heard that Boeing in Seattle has an EE union?? not sure.
As legend has it, one time at Boeing they had a big project meeting kick off. All in unison, the EE's simultaneously stood up, and left on strike all at once! Awesome.
Thanks for the replys. Rant-out.
Email me anytime. gpscruise@gmailDOTTcom
The shortage is of cheap workers who have the experience that the companies want who are willing to work for what the companies want to pay. Pay them and they will come.
I work for a large Unix (primarily Linux) shop and we've been interviewing people for a year now. We're in NYC so there should be plenty of candidates- and there are. 1 in 10 passes our basic screening test (10 questions and not difficult). We then interview the ones we think are competent in person. It's a tough interview- but you don't need to get everything right- just handle yourself well and show some thought. Hell I'd settle for someone saying "I'd need to read the man page in response ot every question we ask).
Only two candidates have passed, and both of those only barely. We considered them entry level people and were willing to pay them entry level rates ($70k - $80k) but they wanted 6 figures. These are people that would have required significant training to reach a level we consider good.
Maybe we just have high standards but we haven't seen a single serious candidate in the last year. Say what you want but the market is definitely tight- at least for a serious Unix admin.
The one thing that has to stop is people lying about their experience. Do not list "networking experience including BGP" if all you've ever done is type "router bgp blah" and "network blah." If you don't know how OSPF works and can give me a decent explanation, then don't list OSPF. Don't list X years of RedHat experience and RedHat certification if you can't tell me how to find out what version of RedHat a box is running. Don't tell me Linux experience if you're not familiar with basic troubleshooting tools like iostat and vmstat. Don't list Linux if you can't tell me something as simple as how to turn off routing in your distro of choice. Or if you don't know- at least don't suggest stupid things like disabling one of the two interfaces or adding (or removing) a route. It's really annoying to hear such stupid answers.
-sirket
Unfortunately, you're opening up the real and demonstrated possibility of defining skilled as someone who isnt a citizen. This can be done by fitting the criteria to each citizen applicant so that there is always something that will drop them, but not the H1B.
Just put a moratorium on the entire practice by including all foreign assets in taxes. As a failsafe, collect by seizure of any imported(including domestic divisions, complete kit disassembly products) product. End moratorium when citizens need not worry about education(when provided on a basis to citizens that is all but inclusive of them at all levels, and does not suffer for quality).
Make any continued attempts to cheat in this manner punishable by a federal level version of the Business Death Penalty - which means that said business license would be forefit (as well as the permanent disbarment of any firms/people retained by said company) and that all worldwide assets would be ordered frozen and seized.
While it would be nice to use that qualifier, businesses will take that as a green light to cheat out citizens who have said skills.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
We're in a political and business oriented debate started by buzz-word junkies... I mean C-Level's and business staff who believe they understand IT skill well enough to suggest they can find "Qualified".
... as a final note, Indian people may seem more qualified. But in reality, when applying for a job, Indian people come from a society where they are raised from birth to negotiate over even the simplest things like an apple from the market. They know how to posture themselves when negotiating and therefore they succeed better than Americans.
You are in fact right. I've worked for two of the major retail software companies in Norway and in one, they are forced to open offices in Poland and Australia to staff their company and at my current position, since the typical salary is nearly 50% higher for each equivilent position, we can staff with qualified labor with no issue, in Norway. Of course we have Chinese and Indian offices, but that's to handle support and limited specialization for other regions they are more qualified to support.
Pay is everything.
On the other hand, the other big problem is that the typical engineer lacks the ability to negotiate a fair salary for themselves. Therefore, they are keeping the market low since there are too many engineers that are willing to work for far less than they are worth since they are more likely to work somewhere cool and just smile and say thanks for the salary... no matter what it is.
I personally have always applied for jobs where I lacked the educational requirements for the position, however I almost always get the position and I always get paid a healthy salary. Engineers and developers are extremely bright people, but often they lack the confidence to believe they are worth the money they are hoping to make. After all, the guy they're interviewing with has probably spent years learning to control a meeting room, he on the other hand has learned to control a computer and do it quietly.
I'm an unemployed IT personal. Should I move to India so I can get a visa and move back and work?
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
Awhile back the company that I was working for was interviewing for a Linux/Unix admin position. One of the candidates was a recent immigrant from India who had been working in a similar capacity for another large company in town. He mentioned that there had been widespread layoffs in the IT area at his former employer, and that's why he was looking for a job. We asked him what prompted the layoffs, and he said that they had outsourced his entire department to India. How's that for irony?
Obama, Clinton and McCain supported the immigrant bill of 2007 that would have automatically increased HB1 visas 20% every time the cap was met. Here is a reply I wrote to an article about Obama supporting a temporary increase in HB1 Visas: "I'm a software engineer. After I graduated college, it was very, very challenging to find a job, because none of them were entry level. Of course, all of the entry level jobs have been outsourced to foreign countries. Still, I managed to get a job at a start-up, where I worked 12 - 15 hours a day for much less than the typical salary in my region. While I was there, almost HALF the software engineers were foreign, India and Mexico to be specific. They were HB1 contractors with roughly 7 years of experience each. My company would pay the contracting company and the contracting company would pay the hb1 worker roughly 30% of that, it was highway robbery! A HB1 visa increase will just reward companies that outsource entry level work to foreign countries as well as contractors that hire hb1 workers and then take 60%. I'm sorry, but $15 an hour is NOT prevailing wage for a software engineer with 7 years experience, which is what some of these hb1 visa employees were getting paid. You know what though, they were happy with $15 a hour, because that is a lot of money compared to what they would earn in their native countries. So what happens? Wages are kept down while inflation increases and Americans are out of jobs. Fix the HB1 visa program before you increase the cap. Start by auctioning off HB1 visas to the highest bidder instead of just giving them away first come first serve to contracting companies. Don't allow HB1 visa workers rights like in-state tuition or tax breaks. Then, funnel money into creating entry level jobs in the U.S. Force companies to hire entry level citizens and train them, if we have to. The company with the highest number of HB1 visas? Infosys, a contracting company with it's headquarters located in Bangalore, India." I would add creating more accountability for private business to hire American's with a college degree and train them if they don't meet their exact qualifications. Can't find someone with 5 - 7 years in some obscure specialization? Then train them and pay them a competitive wage so that you don't lose them to another company! The "skilled" labor or "superstar" programmer shortage argument is a bad excuse for foreign worker visa increased. The HB1 visa employees I worked with were no smarter than any U.S. citizen with the same amount of experience. They also preferred to be just as "lazy" as most U.S. citizens are stereotyped to be. One used to brag to me about jobs he had where he only did about 5 hours of real work a day, those were the jobs he preferred. Of course, if he was given deadlines that required him to work 15 hours a day he would, because he's at the mercy of his employer who has full control over his worker visa. For every 1 "skilled" or "superstar" programmer you get via an HB1 visa, you'll get 9 that are no smarter or passionate than the average college-educated U.S. programmer and those will flood an already wage-suppressed market. Here are two more notable comments from the same article: "When there is a shortage, you pay more, not less." This makes sense to me. When there is an oil shortage, prices go up like crazy. As of 2001, wages have been flat although productivity has continued to increase and corporate profits rose 20%; I saw a BBC article on this a week ago and would post a link but can't find it currently. "I'm an EMPLOYED IT manager. We can easily train high school people to do a lot of the IT jobs, they don't need BS degrees, a microsoft cert is sufficient. Yet my own company drives down wages routinely by bringing in H1B people rather than trying to compete or train Americans. We routinely offshore development and then lay off our developers." See the article for more comments: http://pradeepc.net/blog/?p=193
Obama, Clinton and McCain supported the immigrant bill of 2007 that would have automatically increased HB1 visas 20% every time the cap was met. Here is a reply I wrote to an article about Obama supporting a temporary increase in HB1 Visas:
"I'm a software engineer. After I graduated college, it was very, very challenging to find a job, because none of them were entry level. Of course, all of the entry level jobs have been outsourced to foreign countries. Still, I managed to get a job at a start-up, where I worked 12 - 15 hours a day for much less than the typical salary in my region. While I was there, almost HALF the software engineers were foreign, India and Mexico to be specific. They were HB1 contractors with roughly 7 years of experience each. My company would pay the contracting company and the contracting company would pay the hb1 worker roughly 30% of that, it was highway robbery!
A HB1 visa increase will just reward companies that outsource entry level work to foreign countries as well as contractors that hire hb1 workers and then take 60%. I'm sorry, but $15 an hour is NOT prevailing wage for a software engineer with 7 years experience, which is what some of these hb1 visa employees were getting paid. You know what though, they were happy with $15 a hour, because that is a lot of money compared to what they would earn in their native countries. So what happens? Wages are kept down while inflation increases and Americans are out of jobs.
Fix the HB1 visa program before you increase the cap. Start by auctioning off HB1 visas to the highest bidder instead of just giving them away first come first serve to contracting companies. Don't allow HB1 visa workers rights like in-state tuition or tax breaks. Then, funnel money into creating entry level jobs in the U.S. Force companies to hire entry level citizens and train them, if we have to.
The company with the highest number of HB1 visas? Infosys, a contracting company with it's headquarters located in Bangalore, India."
I would add creating more accountability for private business to hire American's with a college degree and train them if they don't meet their exact qualifications. Can't find someone with 5 - 7 years in some obscure specialization? Then train them and pay them a competitive wage so that you don't lose them to another company!
The "skilled" labor or "superstar" programmer shortage argument is a bad excuse for foreign worker visa increased. The HB1 visa employees I worked with were no smarter than any U.S. citizen with the same amount of experience. They also preferred to be just as "lazy" as most U.S. citizens are stereotyped to be. One used to brag to me about jobs he had where he only did about 5 hours of real work a day, those were the jobs he preferred. Of course, if he was given deadlines that required him to work 15 hours a day he would, because he's at the mercy of his employer who has full control over his worker visa. For every 1 "skilled" or "superstar" programmer you get via an HB1 visa, you'll get 9 that are no smarter or passionate than the average college-educated U.S. programmer and those will flood an already wage-suppressed market.
Here are two more notable comments from the same article:
"When there is a shortage, you pay more, not less."
This makes sense to me. When there is an oil shortage, prices go up like crazy. As of 2001, wages have been flat although productivity has continued to increase and corporate profits rose 20%; I saw a BBC article on this a week ago and would post a link but can't find it currently.
"I'm an EMPLOYED IT manager. We can easily train high school people to do a lot of the IT jobs, they don't need BS degrees, a microsoft cert is sufficient. Yet my own company drives down wages routinely by bringing in H1B people rather than trying to compete or train Americans. We routinely offshore development and then lay off our developers."
See the article for more comments: http://pradeepc.net/blog/?p=193