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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.""
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.
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
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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.
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.
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
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.