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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.""
Bingo. They don't want the guys who want 95-120k a year, they want to guys who'll be happy with 25-35k a year and work 12 hour days.
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."
Shrug. We've all been fresh out of school at some point...A lot of the time I'd rather have a recent grad who's willing to learn than a guy with 10 years experience who thinks he doesn't have to learn anymore.
I seriously get tired of people who expect high-end experts to explode out of the ground whenever they want one. Lot of the time you're going to have to settle for some people who are bright, young, and inexperienced. Mix them up with some more experienced workers, and they'll do okay.
Lot of people say, "I don't want to train someone, knowing that he's going to leave as soon as he gets a better offer." The English translation of that is: "I did this guy a favor by hiring him, and piling crap work on him, and I can't figure out why he'd be so disloyal." Make your company a good place to work, and you won't have such high turnover.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
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.
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.
This is what we are facing in our organization. About 66% of our openings are technical, but our HR director is clueless -- not only in writing effective job descriptions and requirements, but also when it comes to setting compensation packages that attract good candidates. Our business analysts (which are a dime dozen) make as much or more than our application engineers.
It's almost a conspiracy: inability to hire good application engineers, limits our ability to automate business analytic processes, and increases the demand for spread sheet jockeys. Good times.
Why raise wages, when you can convince Congress there is a desperate shortage of labor, so that you can import labor from overseas and bully your workers over wages by tying a work visa to a stick and holding it in front of them?
People need to read the statement for what it is. "There is a labor shortage [at the wage we are willing to pay]."
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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.
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.
Your response bothers me. It's what happens when people put ideology ahead of common sense and facts.
Abusing foreign workers is the POINT of the whole thing. Those who are lucky enough to get an H1-B visa are then owned by their sponsor.
This is not a free market. If it were, we would just throw the doors open and invite any foreign IT worker to "come on down". We set up the rules so they have to have a sponsor or go home.
In general, they are paid less than a US Citizen - and there is not a lot of incentive to give them fair raises. They can't quit and look for a new job unless they can find a new sponsor.
This is a generality. Like most generalities it does not apply to every foreign worker. And it's part of a larger employment situation where IT workers in their twenties are preferred. If you do not yet have a life you don't mind 14 hour days.
And in the mean time, very few have noticed that one of Microsoft's published future plans is to dumb down IT to the point where any idiot can do it with the right software support. This may or may not be a major threat, but once they figure out how to build an operating system that actually works, you had better watch out.
When you are dancing with wolves, never limp