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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.
There is a shortage of *cheap* IT labor...
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
MCSEs represent something far worse than that. They represent a severe compartmentalization of skills. After twenty years in the IT profession, I'm pretty much going to be forced to take my MCSE mainly because you just can't get a job. For some reason, management believes that this frivolous piece of paper means that a guy is some sort of uber-tech. Well, I've seen these uber-techs melt when they had to deal with a Bind server, or anything particularly weird or challenging.
The real irony here is the most expertise I've seen out of the Microsoft side of things is the guys that can understand Redmond's insane licensing system.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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."
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 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"
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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?"
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
I can speak of my experience for the western US (but east of california) and say that it can sometimes take months to get a good candidate to apply. There are a lot of mediocre or bad programmers out there, most of them with degrees. I'm very suspicious of the claims in this report; they've looked at graduation rates (worthless, since most of the programmers I work with don't have a degree or have a degree in something other than CS) and they've asked HR about applications and overall satisfaction of the people that were hired. At the large shops I've worked at, there are a lot of mediocre programmers that aren't great, but they're good enough to not get fired. If you're someone like Google and you have stricter standards, I could easily see a shortage of good programmers.
So, to sum up, I see no shortage of programmers, just a shortage of good programmers.
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.
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.
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.
BTW, unlike some of the other posts have suggested, we were offering a highly competitive salary of £60,000 per year (~$120,000).
Bob I'm glad to hear that. As a low-level IT worker who remembers how difficult it was to get a foot in the door, it is painful to see all this complaining about how there are so many jobs that need to be filled, and so many people who need jobs, but most of them do not have the requisite 3-5 years of experience, or will have to learn about a new technology.
I think this is where the hobbyist has the advantage over the person with the cert.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
C is not longer an important language to learn in College. If you want to get a good C programmer, you're looking for somebody of the ages of 38 to 52 years of age. If you're stuck keeping up with legacy systems, that's what you're going to find out.
Now programmers learn Java in fancy IDE's. Never having to learn a pointer or a pointer re-direction. Make sure that you're not maintaining PL/1, COBOL or Assembly... if you have someone decent maintaining that code, make sure that he/she is happy.
You have to keep in mind that a lot of those folks come out of 2 year colleges or with the liberalism in today's universities, many of them spent their time taking macrame or latin literature as part of their CS degree.
My 2 cents...
Vi havas e-poston.
I've taken to writing a statement as to why I don't have any certs and including it with my resume. I've had places turn me down for not having an A+ cert, even though I have 8+ years experience in the industry.
You're right on the other count, too. Throw a bash prompt in front of an MCSE and watch them look at you like your dog does when you tell him a joke.
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.
Comments like this are just plain ignorant. A decent sysadmin (and those are few and far between, the above article notwithstanding) doesn't care what OS a box is running. The actual processes of adminning a system or network are pretty much universal. Whether it's done with a GUI or a command like is just one small detail.
You're using her as bait, Master!
You're right in that they're not trying to cap salaries. H1B is a good program in intent. Unfortunately they left it wide open for abuse and it's being used by many companies (I'll grant not all) as a way to get cheap indentured servants. If a worker under H1B is treated badly by their employer their only option is to go back to their country of origin. The abuses of this program hurt both US born IT workers by driving the market value down and the foreign workers wanting to use this program as they're in a position of which they're easily taken advantage. And now the companies that are abusing the program and probably the company using the program in the spirit it was intended are lobbying Congress to get the cap increased.
I have no problem with the spirit of the H1B Visa program, but with the current manifestation the primary beneficiaries are large companies wanting to keep payroll low.
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.
In paragraph two, you explain your hiring practices. Then in paragraph three, you complain that the candidates you hire suck. Could it be that you're hiring practices are a fault?
From my reading of your hiring practices, the interview questions your using do not correlate to the 3 items for which you're looking.
You're basing your hiring on the following criteria:
Ability to reproduce rote algorithms.
Ability to solve problems on a particular platform. (python, foxpro, php, etc.)
Ability to remember items from high-school and freshman year college.
A number of highly qualified hires I've interviewed would fail your process. The candidates I'm looking for don't waste their time memorizing algorithms, or studying freshman level CS. All of your interview questions could be solved by googling.
Instead, you should be looking for candidates that can explain the pros and cons of different development methodologies, ask intelligent questions when given a development scenario, and explain how they would approach solving a problem. These three items would give you a much better correlation to the 3 skills your looking for.
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.
Programming is hard. In fact, so hard that merely three or four years at university won't make you more than decent at it. The best programmers are the ones who love doing it, who got their C64 at 10 and then spent years learning about computers in their spare time. Understandably that is the kind of programmers your company wants. Programmers who have learnt so much by themselves that it would amount to 10+ years in university for someone new in the field. Programmers that are really good, that are better than average. Does your company pay them a fair salary in comparision to their education and skill? Or does it pay average salaries for very much above average skilled personell? If it is the latter, then it's no wonder that you have trouble recruiting people. So, to sum up, companies that are to cheap to pay decent salaries or to offer training programs for their mediocre programmers have nothing but themselves to blame.
Football Odds
Ok, flame-resistant suit on here, but - what, exactly does that statement say? In other words, why *don't* you have any certs? You say you've been turned down for a job for not having the A+ cert. You and I both know that it's a trivial cert to get, right?
Either the test is trivially simple for you, so you can pick up a quick "A+ certification for dummies" book, skim it on the train over to the testing site (or even walk in with no preparation at all), pass the cert with flying colors, and be out $100 (if you can't get your current employer to cover the cost of the test, which you usually can) and an hour of your life, and not be turned down for a job again for something so trivial.
Or - the test is difficult, it takes some preparation and experience to get through - in which case having one actually *does* say something (much to yours and my surprise) about your knowledge, determination, and commitment.
I was required (strongly asked) to get a couple of Java certifications by my then-employer back in '01. By then I'd been doing Java for a couple of years, so I figured I'd blow through the test with flying colors. Oops - turns out there were quite a few things I didn't know. Turns out that I actually learned some things studying for the test, things that actually turned out to be actually useful.
Contrary to /., taking a test doesn't make you stupider. Passing it doesn't mean you're smart,
but it does mean you're at the very least smarter than somebody who can't even pass the test.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I suppose it's a variation on the tragedy of the commons; each employer's waiting for the other companies to train people so they can poach them away.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
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.
A good tester saves me a lot of embarrassment, and that will save me costumers = revenue
preview button, my computer does't have any preview button
why *don't* you have any certs?
because it can cost you huge amounts of money to get one unless your employer actually agrees to pay for it?
I've looked at certs and paying for them out of my own pocket. But $10k or so for something that will be obsolete in a few years isn't cost effective for me.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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
Of course they are - increased supply means lower prices.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"