Slashdot Mirror
No Shortage In Tech Workers, Advocacy Groups Say
sabri writes To have a labor shortage or not to have, that's the question. According to the San Jose Mercury News: Last month, three tech advocacy groups launched a labor boycott against Infosys, IBM and the global staffing and consulting company ManpowerGroup, citing a "pattern of excluding U.S. workers from job openings on U.S soil." They say Manpower, for example, last year posted U.S. job openings in India but not in the United States." "It's getting pretty frustrating when you can't compete on salary for a skilled job," said Rich Hajinlian, a veteran computer programmer from the Boston area. "You hear references all the time that these big companies ... can't find skilled workers. I am a skilled worker."
there certainly is a shortage of tech workers in the US willing to work for 19,000/year
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Our company bought several million dollars of IBM products and services a couple of years ago. No sign that any skilled tech went into either the development or support of that stuff. Their salesmen did a good job of blowing smoke into our VP's face though.
What about the large number of job descriptions that are written up that essentially no single individual could fill? You know what I mean, postings that have 15 required disparate skills, with 5+ years experience in each?
Then these companies use the lack of qualified applicants as an excuse to go shopping overseas. Let's face it, the number of companies pulling this kind of stunt FAR outweigh the number of "think they're super-awesome and really aren't" employees.
I've got no problem with immigrants that are "taking american jobs" if they are more skilled. I do however, have a problem if they are being paid substantially less than me. If they are that good they should be paid at least as much if not more than their american counter parts.
That would solve the "shortage" really quick.
The US is awash in certain kinds of skilled tech workers: Java programmers, web programmers, iOS app programmers, and more. It's not hard to find them, nor is there any kind of shortage.
But for more complex work, the best qualified workers are from overseas. Go look in any US comp-sci graduate program, and try to find the Americans. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Back? How many did you find? 10%? 20% And from my experience interviewing them, they are often not the cream of the crop. Don't get me wrong, there are some really top notch American students coming out of graduate programs, but that's the exception, not the rule. If you want a deep understanding of theory, rather than another Java coder, it's hard to find that in the US. Not impossible. Just hard.
OK, so let's go with what you said about the dearth of Americans in comp-sci grad programs is true and that certain high-level skills are found only in people in those programs. How many people are we talking about in all the good schools grad programs? a few thousand? And how many jobs are there that REQUIRE the skills found only in the grad school programs? a few thousand, maybe?
However, there are about 600,000 H1B workers in the USA. How many of these do you believe have the skills only found in comp-sci grad programs, or more to the point, how many of those don't have and don't need grad school comp-sci skills?
My point is that while what you said is true, it has nothing to do with what the complaint is.
The H1B program is designed to obtain the kinds of people you were talking about, but the program is in fact being used to hire an enormous numbers of very ordinary people whose main feature is they work for less money.