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Researchers Say the Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist
Beeftopia sends this excerpt from an article at BusinessWeek:
"There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense," says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. "They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV." ... The real issue, say Salzman and others, is the industry’s desire for lower-wage, more-exploitable guest workers, not a lack of available American staff. "It seems pretty clear that the industry just wants lower-cost labor," Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in an e-mail. A 2011 review (PDF) by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the H-1B visa program, which is what industry groups are lobbying to expand, had "fragmented and restricted" oversight that weakened its ostensible labor standards. "Many in the tech industry are using it for cheaper, indentured labor," says Rochester Institute of Technology public policy associate professor Ron Hira, an EPI research associate and co-author of the book Outsourcing America.
All of the tech industries behavior point to a desire to keep wages lower than what they would pay in an open market. Whether it's expanding H1B's or agreeing not to poach the goal is the same not driving up the cost of talent. Thus we have a "shortage" of tech workers so we must import more rathe than we have an abundant supply at higher wages so lets hire them. I am not surprise at the GAO report. What needs to be done is make H1B visas portable so after say 6 month to a year the holder was free to switch jobs. That would end abuses quickly and all of a sudden the "shortage" would disappear when it becomes more costly to get and keep an H1B then hire a local.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
"Many in the tech industry are using it for cheaper, indentured labor..."
Gee, you think?
Seriously, as a working engineer, the fact that this hasn't been emphasised this has annoyed me for years. There is no shortage of bright, hard working engineering talent in the US, and the our schools are (and have been for years) capable of turning out as many well-educated engineering graduates as the industry requires. It's just that they want to make enough money to live a good life (and pay back the cost of their education). Graduates from the Farkistan Institue of Technology are *so* much cheaper. And they don't ask for raises or threaten to change jobs...because they would get sent home.
Do you seriously believe that a foreign H1B with an MS, working for $35k is equivalent to a US graduate?
How many number of interviews do companies go through to hire someone?
Last I heard, Facebook goes through ~100 people to fill 1 spot. My company goes through about 20 or so before finding a candidate worthy of a face-to-face interview... Most flunk on basic questions like "describe any sorting mechanism" (someone hands you 1000 sheets of paper, each with a page number out of order, walk me through the process you will use to sort them).
The problem isn't that there's a shortage of "tech workers", there isn't.
It's that most "tech" workers suck. If you want to hire someone who actually knows their stuff, you gotta pick them right out of school, and make sure they're actually "techy" kind (those that actually do their own homeworks because they find them interesting). Now, *those* tech workers are like 1% of "all tech workers", and yes, there's a shortage of those---but not something the h1b can fix.
This is exactly the same issue that migrant laborers are stuck with. The claim is made that Americans will not do field labor. The food industry uses that excuse and pushes to not crack down on undocumented workers. But if we shut down undoucmented workers field labor would receive far higher wages and then those jobs might be much more attractive for American workers. And it extends into other areas as well. The guy that labors in construction has his wages controlled by the availability of labor. So if the farm workers were paid more people who labor or work as store clerks may also receive higher wages or decide to work in the fields. And this conspiracy actually has official support. For example convicts on work programs are often assigned to work as field labor at very low pay rates with the lions share of their pay going back to the prison. Or the prison may have its own farm with the food being consumed by the convicts which also holds down the demand for field labor. And to the right wing nuts this situation is a great example of why supply and demand is not meaningful in economics. It demonstrates that supply as well as demand can be controlled by forces other than exchange for goods and services.
This sort of phenomenon is a natural effect of globalization. A century ago, the world contained wealthy advanced nations, developing nations, and lots of "backward" nations which lacked modern industries and hence had a relatively low standard of living. However, this was somewhat compensated for by a low cost of living. Someone might only earn a dollar or two a day, but food was cheap and life was OK.
Enter globalization: the inevitable outcome of free-market, free-trade economics plus cheap ubiquitous transport. Within a few decades, the world became one single marketplace and - as we in the wealthier nations have seen to our cost - jobs began "finding their own level", that is being exported to the cheapest countries.
Not satisfied with that, bosses and shareholders wanted to bring in cheap labour to do those relatively few jobs that couldn't be done "at long range". Obvious examples are construction, health care, personal service of all kinds, and to some extent expensive specialities like law. (Not many lawyers in India have US bar qualifications, and even if they had they couldn't very well show up in a US court).
After the first irrational exuberance for outsourcing skilled jobs (like IT) to cheaper countries, even the most thick-headed of PHBs are now coming to recognize that outsourcing of this kind doesn't usually work too well. No matter how good the workers are, the communication problems (and often cultural discrepancies) are just too great. Hence the increasing eagerness to import cheap (but well qualified and skilled) labour to do those jobs under direct (not to say oppressively close) supervision.
Unfortunately, citizens of nations like the USA get it coming and going: the government taxes them heavily in order to provide services in a "first world" manner, while allowing business to export jobs to "third world" nations (or bring their workers to the USA to work there). This is a classic "wealth pump" which systematically sucks up wealth and transfers it to the rich.
Ironically, globalization looks set to be pretty much complete and settled in, just in time for the cheap oil that made it possible to run out. Then we'll all have to face the expense and disruption of reverting to relative economic independence within our own countries.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Oh there's a shortage. There's a shortage of STEM jobs with ADEQUATE SALARIES. When Zuckerberg and others are up there on Capital Hill begging for more H1B visas, what they're saying is "There is a shortage of STEM workers." But what they MEAN is "There is a shortage of STEM workers willing to work for slave wages."
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I think the "tech worker shortage" is really just a shortage of people who have no idea how to run a technical company.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In more detail, let me modify one of your key sentences: "what's good for the corrupt oligarchs may not be the same as what's good for the country." Fixed that for you.
Impoverishing US workers will not "juice the success of domestic tech companies which, in the long run, may actually be better for the U.S. as a whole". One that happens it will be hard as hell to bootstrap back to an overall high standard of living in the US. Just how stupid are you to even think that?
And then there is the issue that tech workers are just the latest group to be thrown under the bus in the name of short term greed.
Here's an example of how it's done. At one point construction and industrial jobs like meat packing were all unionized. Then the unions were broken and the jobs were filled by immigrant labor. That's why there are now large numbers of Spanish speaking non-documented workers in the Midwest, for example. It's not that native US workers are not good workers, it's that the employers don't want them because they want semi-slaves. They want workers who will put up with anything, including having their wages stolen or being maimed on the job and not being able to do anything about it.
For tech workers the plan is slightly more complex. First, offshore as many jobs as possible. Second, import as many non-citizen workers as possible. Third, flood the market with a bunch of severely under-trained "coders", like Zuckerberg and his co-conspirators are attempting with code.org. Having a vast army of unemployed makes anyone with a job completely fearful and willing to settle for crumbs.
So the US middle class is destroyed? Do you think that any of the rich care? Remember what Romney said during the election. He thinks that half of Americans are scum. As far as he and his ilk are concerned, if you don't do well it's all your fault. The reality is that he and his type profit from eliminating jobs in the US. They do well by making the rest of us do poorly, and they then have the gall to blame us for not being good enough.
I guess you think that you're immune, or perhaps you want to be a serf. You sure don't seem like someone who want to work and prosper in their own country. What's wrong with you?
Why is Snark Required?
When will we finally get to a ruling class no longer pining for the pre-civil war days?
A friend who teaches economics was posting about this the other day. Her contention is that for all of history until the 1800's, it was fairly easy to just leave and go find some subsistence environment, so if you wanted workers you had to enslave them and force them to work for you. Now that it's not generally possible for most people to find environments for subsistence lifestyles, there's no longer any need to enslave people. They have to find jobs to survive. At that crossover, work stopped being something the lowest class of society did under force, and became something that was considered a privilege.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
There's one silver lining in all this bitching about needing more H-1 visas. The tech companies that can't find enough cheap labor in the US are still looking for labor in the US. They could find all the cheap labor they want as long as they're willing to outsource the jobs to India - but they've already tried that, and it doesn't work.
As one of the few remaining onshore resources in an outsourced company, I can attest to the horrible inefficiencies that outsourcing brings to a tech project. Sure, it's cheaper. Perhaps even by enough to account for all the extra process to manage the outsourced workers. But what isn't said in there is that nothing actually gets done. Our outsourced systems are gradually falling into unsupportability by a thousand bits of bad code put in by cheap offshore resources that don't have adequate guidance to get up to speed without doing damage - and aren't kept on the project long enough to ever finally do some productive work once they get up to speed.
The big guys either know this intuitively, or have tried outsourcing and know it from painful experience. Either way, asking for H-1 visas amounts to an admission that outsourcing tech jobs doesn't work. Now we just need the political will to tell them that paying crap wages isn't an option either.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...