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Tech Sector Slow To Hire
Iftekhar25 writes "The NY Times is running an article about soaring unemployment rates for IT in the US (6 percent) despite a tech sector that is thirsting for engineering talent. Quoting: 'The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost. That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.'"
IT is not engineering. The two fields are not analogous
My sincerest wishes to those unemployed, but 6 percent considered soaring?
Sure, it's not great but it's perhaps not as terrible a crisis as newspapers would like to make out; considering how every section of the economy is impacted right now I would read too much into it.
not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms,
Complete bullshit.
and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost
This is 100% true.
And don't forget this reason I am adding:
Too few people willing to work heroic hours for non-heroic pay.
Oh no, there are not enough highly skilled engineers available to depress wages even further. The CEO will starve if he can't drop the payroll enough.
Nullius in verba
...then complain about a lack of "qualified" candidates.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Especially since the national average is over 9% currently. Seems to me a more accurate story would be "Tech sector hasn't recovered to previous levels, but has much lower unemployment than many other areas."
The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost. That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.'"
Then train them or make it a legal requirement to hire & train them. It's one thing to complain about regular people having to settle with less, why can't a business be made to do the same?
Reads like an justification for offshoring if you'd ask me.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Stupid H1Bs! Stealing our jerbs!
But seriously ... H1B suffers from serious abuses. There are a lot of well-qualified americans ready to take those jobs, but companies don't want to pay what it would cost to hire those americans. It definitely does NOT do what it claims.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Where are the qualified candidates!
They're already employed and fairly happy. If you want to get them to uproot and move to your company, your HR department is going to have to offer more than the standard "kinda above average" salary and "competitive" benefits.
What does the job posting look like? Is how it's worded attracting the wrong candidates?
When I was job hunting, I could always tell the "dog" jobs because they said nothing interesting about compensation besides (sometimes) "competitive pay and benefits".
I see that a lot. There needs to be a differentiation between "experience" and "drawing a paycheck".
If you get hired by a company to drop workstation images onto workstation hardware ... and you do it for 10 years ... do you have 10 years of experience working with those OS's?
No. You have 1 week experience ... repeated 520 times (not counting vacations).
You have 10 years of drawing a paycheck.
That's why I prefer to test candidates myself.
Software development is more about problem solving and communication skills than actually writing code. These abilities don't atrophy nearly so fast. A solid developer can pick up whatever technologies are needed for jumping into an existing problem space with little effort and apply their problem solving skills.
Had a friend who had a long stint of unemployment. A large part of the problem was companies that use recruiters, and have morons write the job requirements. There were so many jobs that when you filtered through the bullshit, he probably could do. However he'd have to lie about his qualifications to get them, and he won't do that. Shit like "Must have 7 years experience in Ruby, Java, Perl, PHP, and MySQL." Ok so they are looking for a web app and they don't know what they want it in. Fine, he can do that, he's a real programmer in that he can learn new languages. He also has done all those. However he can't truthfully say 7 years of Ruby experience. He's got 15 years of Perl experience, but only 1 of Ruby. Doesn't mean he's bad at Ruby, just that he didn't see the need to use it till recently. However he gets filtered since he doesn't "meet the requirements" and instead they get the liar types who don't know what they are talking about.
That was actually something that the people at the job he did get commented on. He had very little Ruby experience, but generates code faster and of much higher quality than the "Ruby people." They were amazed and he had to explain that he'd done all this before, the specific language isn't really relevant.
So if you want good candidates, make sure the description is written by someone who knows what the fuck they are talking about, and that what it asks for is reasonable. Reason is a good candidate is probably also someone who's honest and thus won't lie on the app just to get in the door. Figure out what you actually need, and put down also what you'd like as optional and go with that.
No "10 years of experience with every single web related language," kind of shit. Instead something like "Someone with 5+ years of software development experience, at least some of it with web programming. Experience in one or more of the following a plus: Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc." Something that tells people what the job actually is, and gives them an idea what you want.
the devil you know (and have experience with that might save you from a layoff) is better than the devil you don't. Either way, your solution is correct - a risk premium in salary or benefits are in order.
Or, if they're coasties, their house is (financially) underwater and to switch jobs they'd have to move and declare bankruptcy. I've heard this is an issue, folks whom rent can move, and are making bank, folks with houses can't move and are stuck. Even worse for security clearance type jobs where bankruptcy equals no clearance.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
All we have to do is get rid of the H1B bastards and BOOM instant high tech employment.
I love how Slashdot is dominated by liberal sentiments until it comes to our jobs, then it's 100% anti-immigration, dominated with rhetoric that sounds like theminute men. It's sad that you were modded insightful instead of troll.
:) That's my happy dream.
What we actually need is more immigration, and more emigration, so we can all get to know each other and realize that we're all human brothers and sisters and won't want to kill each other for reading one book or another, and can be happy when someone else gets a job instead of calling them bastards.
Qxe4
H1Bs are not offshore outsourcing, they are importing skilled workers. If you fire them all, you'll replace them with people who live and work in another country and you won't get any benefit from them paying taxes to the same government as you.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The rules are here. They're (very) restrictive. I'm not saying they work 100% right. But it's not a free for all to hire cheap labor either... at all.
That's cute that you think companies follow the rules like that...
I DO know the rules, and I have also seen first hand how the companies that abuse them are evading them. The most common strategy is to list an impossible requirement, and then miraculously find that the foreigner they want to hire happens to have that on his resume. Miracle of miracles, the job is filled. Meanwhile, to get an american to do the job would have cost 2-3x the 'prevailing wage', so they have a huge financial win.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Let companies keep more of what they earn and they'll feel more comfortable hiring people, it's that simple.
Ummm, it's not that simple. In general, corporate earnings have been improving since Q1 2010 (when the "official" recession ended). Targeted business tax cuts were instituted in 2009 as part of the stimulus package. There are still not robust increases in hiring. If you look at financial reports for companies that are having increases in earnings you find that these corporations are either (a) hoarding cash, (b) using extra cash for acquisitions, or (c) instituting share buyback programs. None of these things "hire workers". In fact, choice (b) often depresses employment, as redundancies are eliminated in the merged entities. Nor is there any indication that lowering the tax rates further at this point would encourage corporations to hire more workers, either theoretically or empirically.
Do you actually observe the economy and research these things, or do you just get your talking points from Glenn Beck?
That is all.
Unless someone is cheating (and there are some contracting companies that cheat badly), an H1B is no cheaper than a citizen to employ. The wages are typically slighly lower, offset by legal costs of dealing with the immigration paperwork. Legally, you have to pay an H1B market rate (and all H1B salaries are public, so it's easy to check), and since an H1B worker can change jobs, he'll leave like anyone else if you try to get too cheap (like anyone else, that can be hard right now).
Companies that don't want to pay what it would cost to hire Americans offshore the jobs, they don't muck around with H1Bs.
I can compete with H1Bs, they have the same basic costs of living I do, but there's no way to compete with the cost of living in a developing nation.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
My employer is hiring, both full-time and contractor. My previous employer was hiring as well. In neither case could we get qualified candidates.
Thats because HR is requiring 10 years of experience with winders 2008 server, so by definition the only resumes that make it thru the HR filtration plant are liars / con men / inside-referrals.
Whenever I see someone say that "they can't get qualified people" it's always for these reasons:
Unreasonable qualifications as the parent stated or incompetent HR. And it's not just tech skills, it's also for subjective reasons too; such as, "they wouldn't fit in" or some nonsense.
Here's an example that I over heard fixing a friend's computer who lives with an HR person that works at home. They were on a conference call and it was on speaker phone. One of the HR people came on to talk about a candidate. The candidate by her own admission had an impressive resume - all the skills, education and experience required by the job. Anyway, this person commented that when the candidate came in the room "he sucked the air out of the room" and he wouldn't be good for the company.
Now, was it brought up that the guy could have been a bit nervous because he was unemployed for several months? Nope. He was passed over because the HR person didn't think she was allowed to have enough air.
You want qualified candidates? Bypass HR.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Sure, there are companies out there doing it right or at least trying, but there are many who are looking to
1. Replace experienced workers with inexperienced ones at half to 2/3rds salary.
2.Hire architects to design and document complex systems and then hire the equivalent of janitors to do maintenance and upgrade work. Eventually the center cannot hold and you end up with a complex nest of band aids and workarounds worthy only of submission to TDWTF.
3.Replace creative thinking, problem solving and innovation with documentation of procedure whereby routine tasks are accomplished by following rote procedures and recipes that a trained monkey can follow, but which don't really address all the real world failure points in the process or how to even detect them much less correct them. Worse yet, since policy is to follow the procedure, updating said procedure is usually next to impossible to get approved.
Most of this comes from a fundamental mistrust and misunderstanding of the value and role of IT within an organization. IT as a whole is viewed as a sausage grinder into which many companies pour their most critical business problems and hope that what comes out is a solution everyone can stomach. IT doesn't fix business problems, it fixes Information and automation problems. If you make poor decisions and ask IT to implement them, and the whole thing goes up in flames it doesn't mean IT failed you and many companies don't seem to grasp that.
whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.
Huh, that doesn't seem to jive with my experience. Of course, I stayed away from the framework of the week and learned C in college. Oh look, it's still relevant.
That only works for so long, at least if we're talking about software development. Once you're a "senior developer"-level person, it stops working. You have entry level skills in your new area, but you have senior-level work experience that requires senior-level pay. Companies prefer not to hire such candidates. They assume that the candidate will produce sub-standard output if they pay at a senior rate. Or if they low-ball the rate, the candidate will jump ship as soon as they find a job in their 'core area'.
Unfortunately, not too many development companies have figured out that once you have legitimately reached a 'senior' position, picking up the new language is pretty damn trivial. Each language is solving the same problem over again, with a slightly different solution. Once you have the basic programming concepts down, it really doesn't matter what the API is called.
I have to agree here. I was forced to go the H1B route at my last job to hire an entry level applications engineer. Believe it or not, I couldn't find a single qualified US citizen or resident alien, and we did not have a mystery requirement. It was a solid technical person, engineer, that anyone with a EE or even a physics degree could have done. Just no early career people to fill the role (it was a junior applications engineer role).
It probably cost us the better part of $200K by the time we were done to hire someone from China, after legal and all the fees. The pay was good for the area as well, $80K target, and I would have easily gone to $100K for someone with a couple years experience or a PhD.
Of course, it wasn't IT, and I will probably get my karma dinged by this, but the US is just not turning out home grown talent in mathematics, engineering, physics and chemistry to fill these opportunities. Go to an engineering or science program at mid level to elite university, and not many citizens are in the programs.
Very sad
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
Let me get this straight....you wanted a PhD for an entry-level applications engineer job, and were surprised you had trouble finding candidates?
Methinks your expectations are a tad out-of-whack.
No. You obviously don't get it. The free market is "magical," as Ronald Reagan once said. The free market takes care of everybody's needs.
No big government is needed, because we can trust big business to take care of us. Don't worry about the minimum wage, because the free market will provide what you need.
What? You're not cutting it? It's your fault, you should be succeeding. If you're not, there is something wrong with you.
Trust in the Free Market! Big Business is your Friend!
From his comment, we wanted anyone with a EE degree, but would have been willing to pay an extra $20k if needed to hire someone with a PhD, rather then the normal rejecting of that candidate for being overqualified/too expensive.
From my own experience, we ran an internship program a couple of summers ago, and really would have preferred to hire citizens/green card holders, as the legal costs are quite high relative in the total salary cost of an intership. We got exactly 0 applications from citizens and green card holders, and so had to pay the extra if we wanted to have the internship program at all (of course, that's not directly H1Bs, but we then sponsored the people we kept permanently).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The error in expectations is the belief that a PhD would apply for an entry-level position.
Learn to write better job postings, or find out why HR threw all of the applications in the trash. Remember- it's not only the candidate's job to fill the position.
It doesn't work that way. You're obligated to look for non-H1Bs first, and to pay your H1Bs at least market rate - you're not obligated to hire an American "at any price." What kind of sense would that make?
In any case, H1B holders often become green card holders and then citizens eventually, which is a fine outcome (an American citizen has the job at that point) and far better than the jobs going to other countries.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I don't have to acquire enough wealth to retire in California (where I'm working now) - what's your point? I hear it's pretty cheap to retire in the Bahamas.
An H1B can change jobs like anyone else, so the market keeps the cost of employement basically level (H1Bs take home a bit less because some of that money goes to lawyers) at most companies.
However, some contracting companies exists solely to exploit workers in there first jobs, and some of those focus on bringing over H1Bs and lying to them about their ability to change jobs to try to keep them captive at very low pay. The government does chase after such illegal behavior, but neither the current nor previous president has had "crack down on illegal immigration practices" anywhere on their to-do list, so they get away with that crap for longer than they should.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
[Citation Needed]
The U6 is rarely mentioned by the media regardless of the President's political party.
Believe it or not, I couldn't find a single qualified US citizen or resident alien, and we did not have a mystery requirement.
I don't believe it. Either you're not looking/advertising in the right places, or you've got some requirement, stigma, or location that's utterly unappetizing to US citizens.
Go to an engineering or science program at mid level to elite university, and not many citizens are in the programs.
My PhD program is 80% or more US citizens. It's one of the top five research universities in the US. We're research upstairs, and engineering downstairs. I can't imagine that my university exists in some crazy, alternate universe from all the rest.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
As it happens, we were focused on interns from graduate programs in Silly Valley, and focused on second-tier schools (Google and MS and the like were so aggressive with the top tier schools it simply wasn't worth our effort there). The percentage of citizens in those graduate programs is pretty small to begin with, but still I was surprised.
Not to flame, but why is it that you were focused on second-tier graduate schools in silicon valley, yet when you were unable to fill the position from this (limited) pool, the next step was to go to an H1B? From that account it sounds like the company did exactly what everyone thinks they are doing - looked at an arbitrary extremely narrow set of potential applicants, and when that didn't pan out (surprise surprise) went straight to finding an international worker. Wouldn't it have made more sense to possibly expand your search criteria to maybe include people from outside a relatively small portion of Northern California rather than jump straight to spending the money on an H1B?
I'm also trying to figure out what second-tier programs there are in Silicon Valley (or the immediate area) that have the potential to turn out PhDs, but I'm not really coming up with much...
That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.
The only skills that depreciate that quickly are ones that any competent programmer can pick up very quickly and with very little effort. The important skills are the ones that take years to acquire, and those don't go out of date just because Magic Web Framework 3.0 gets released.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Yes, but the additional expenses ("legal fees and red tape") for hiring 25 H1B workers is no more than for hiring 1.
Yes, the H1B is being abused something awful. But that's just par for the course for American business: abuse workers no matter if they're Americans or not.
And anyone who tells you that companies are holding off on hiring "because they're so unsure about Health Care Reform/Taxes/or name your Obama Administration policy" they are lying to you. They are holding off on hiring because they're having so much success making their current employees work a lot harder, for longer hours and for lower wages and benefits. When Germany would be shortening hours so that more people can stay employed (which allows them to stay in their homes, feed their families, keep the economy working), America just makes laying off employees more attractive to companies.
American business loves it when there's fear in the employment market. In fact, Ben Bernake some years ago, when he was talking about rising unemployment due to monetary policy, said that it's a good thing to make sure "workers don't get too comfortable".
This is why the US is now a second-rate nation on the decline. Because our society values corporate profits above the labor of citizens. And any first year economics student can tell you, Labor precedes Capital, not the other way around. If you think it's bad here now, just wait 12-15 years. Adult literacy is declining, so we're going to be having even more low-information voters. We're going to think these were the good old days.
You are welcome on my lawn.