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Obama Administration Claims There Are 545,000 IT Job Openings
dcblogs writes The White House has established a $100 million program that endorses fast-track, boot camp IT training efforts and other four-year degree alternatives. But this plan is drawing criticism because of the underlying message it sends in the H-1B battle. The federal program, called TechHire, will get its money from H-1B visa fees, and the major users of this visa are IT services firms that outsource jobs. Another source of controversy will be the White House's assertion that there are 545,000 unfilled IT jobs. It has not explained how it arrived at this number, but the estimate will likely be used as a talking point by lawmakers seeking to raise the H-1B cap.
people in the tech sector would not be looking for jobs for months at a time. Id love to see the breakdown on where they came up with this number.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
That number is EASY to figure out. Just look at all the revolving door jobs the IT industry has created the past few years. The largest companies don't want to high full time anymore, so they just go through temp agencies (*COUGH*MICROSOFT*COUGH*). So, once the temp hits a certain date, they're terminated and replaced by another temp (and the original temp is invited back after a certain period of time). So, with this, we just look at the cycle of temps going in/out of the tech industry. These are the "openings", which are just being filled by the same cycle of people.
all paying $13.25/hour...
I always hear about how much poverty there is in the African-American community, due to rampant unemployment.
Well, this sounds like a perfect opportunity for these people to become employed.
Why don't we see them getting some training, or even learning these skills on their own? These days, even the most run-down, underfunded inner-city libraries have computers with Internet connectivity, along with books about programming.
Why aren't these unemployed people filling these jobs?
Just most are in other countries, or they are fake openings purposefully designed not to be filled to justify bringing in H1Bs.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
and a workforce that will stay put and work like a drone. Been saying it for years, but it was summed up nicely in the article.
"Just look at all the cases, including the recent Southern California Edison incident, in which Americans are laid off and forced to train their foreign-worker replacements; Clearly, it's the foreign workers who need the training, not the Americans," said Matloff. "The fact is that employers don't want to hire Americans; they want cheap, immobile labor."
Well, FTFA, they suggest a more realistic number might be in the 60,000s. Anyone who has been in the job market knows that for every unfilled IT job position, there are at least 10 contracting and headhunter firms like Dice vying to fill that job req for their "special client". So it's perfectly reasonable that we could see 10x as many job postings as actual positions available.
And even then, they say that with the inflated numbers, 17% of the IT workforce is unfulfilled. Which actually sounds about right since roughly about a fifth of all of my engineering teams in recent memory have been open job reqs to replace people who just left.
Anyway, contracting and headhunter firms are a big cottage industry grown up around IT nowadays, we're gonna have to hire more developers to make sense of all of this IT hiring data. Like the banks making more money by loaning each other money, we could make the IT job market even bigger by trying to optimize the IT job market! You should use Dice to help you sort through it all!
Dice! (am I doing it right?)
its 500,000 jobs that each last about 4 hrs, half a day of work. string enough together and you have a job.
2017 cannot come fast enough. The current administration in the white house does not even know what party it represents, what it stands for.
This is lunacy. There are not 545,000 IT job openings in this country. Look at dice.com, indeed, monster, etc. TRY TO GET A JOB.
I bet there are less than 100,000 real positions available.
This is just a red herring to let them open up the H1-B faucet and drive wages down. This would have been unsurprising coming from the republicans, but from the obama administration? Just more incompetence. Disappointing, but not unexpected.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Are Full of Shit.
EOT
Good Presidents borrow, great Presidents steal?
He's a lying socialist, who puts the interests of indolent immigrants above the rights American citizens and the rule of law. But I knew that already. Let's take an honest slashdot pol. How many of you a$$holes voted for him? Thought so. What did you expect?
an ill wind that blows no good
540K of them are for unicorns at below market rates
All at $18.00 an hour or less
He never said the openings were all at honest wages.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I thought, the 545K number should be easy to substantiate, but googling doesn't find much. Except, an article saying that there are "as much as" 545,000 unfilled IT jobs ... in the UK. Could Obama have been reading the wrong newspaper?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Then why not fun tech educations with outsourcing? MURICA!
We've also created a huge surplus of boots and the chocolate ration has been increased to 9 grams!
forecast numbers. If the Hr1B visa limit is increased, those are the number of potential openings
the industry is telling him that will be available to the Hr1B visas; not to Americans. Also, forecast
numbers are not carved in stone, there's no obligation on the part of the industry to actually perform.
Now, I'm an engineer, and sometimes you do have to pull a number out of your ass to make useful estimates in the absence of data. It happens.
But damn, President Obama, we at least try to get the order of magnitude correct!
A half-million IT jobs sitting wide open? I am not an IT professional, but I'd say if there was this much demand for IT, we would need to genuflect at the desk of our IT guy every day at work and thank him for showing up, drunk or otherwise.
Our IT guy actually packs a bag lunch and drives a beater car, and he's actually helpful and knows his shit, so I'll go out on a limb and say that this 545,000 number is (in the words of the late, great Tom Magliozzi) "B-O-O-O-G-U-S!"
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I've been a professional coder for over 20 years, and I have never been hired for a skill I learned on the job. Every job I was hired for was using a technology I picked up on my own time.
I don't see Obama claiming 545,000 open IT jobs anywhere but the CW article. Where did Computerworld come up with that? They attribute it to "the White House" and "the Obama administration", but don't name names.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Good hiring IT companies already include a years of experience equivalency to higher education. There is basically two traditional paths in IT work. First, you get the 4 year degree and have less experience in the field with specific technologies. Second, you dive straight into the industry doing grunt work while getting whatever certifications you can along the way and generally end up being more specialized. Your hiring policies can discriminate between the two because they are actually different, or they can dictate whatever period of industry experience/higher ed ratio you view as sufficient to do a job. Even once you have applicants, you still have to vet their credentials by checking certification, employment history, and degree course catalog. Not every degree is worth something. Universities that try to pawn off bachelor degrees as just a collection of certifications are very different than ones that provide a broad understanding of IT from top to bottom with the ability to learn on their own quickly to adapt to the rapid pace of technology changes.
I have my BS in computer science and I've been able to fill the roles of system administrator in multiple OS, storage administrator, network administrator, telecom worker, QA manager, DevOps lead, and programmer. I couldn't do all that if somebody had just fed me the cisco certification path. There is a market for people who did that though.
Because the jobs I am seeing are mostly short term gigs. 3-6 months. No chance of permanent hire. This kind of work is crap if you are trying to build a career.
I'm sure they could be bought for much less.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Quick fix: send written* letters with solid facts to his staunchest critics in the other party. They have been very quick and eager to contradict him on other issues. Take advantage of such behavior and motivation.
In particular, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) have shown skepticism about "techie shortages".
* Paper tends to carry more weight (no pun intended) over email because it takes more effort to prepare, acting as a bit of a riff-raff filter, and thus screening staff pay more attention to it.
Table-ized A.I.
It should say 545,000 IT job openings in this country for foreign workers that want to come here.
It's a shortage of people with a decade of experience in C++, Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, Object Oriented COBOL, Linux, Windows, dot-net, oracle SQL and MS SQL who are also willing to accept $45,000 a year.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
H-1B visa workers stealing jobs from the American nationals or systemD?
Numbers come from data. Show me the data. These days there's no excuse for guessing. You should be able to generate that number in real time, and drill down to each individual job opening. There is no such thing as an IT job without a URL. If there is, it's not a real opening. It's a figment of somebody's imagination. If you're hiding your listing behind layers of recruiters or an internal web site, this suggests to me that you don't really want to hire anybody that badly. Your whining is on the order of "we've tried nothing and it's still not working".
All of our jobs are available to H1-B applicants who will work for 10% the going rate. Especially the jobs that are currently taken!
then I'm going to ask for $500,000 for my next salary.
... the irony of the Obama administration outsourcing the labor to fix the ACA website is all you need to know. At every level of government they're outsourcing their IT.
So I don't really want to hear from the US government on the jobs. They're doing everything in their power to fuck over anyone in the country that doesn't have a staff of lobbyists.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
First order of business is to scrap the Fourteenth Amendment. Replace it with following language:
1. Force the states to pass "shall-issue" firearm laws. This not only perhaps the only good interpretation (McDonald V. Chicago), but furthers the proper understanding that an armed citizenry is the first step to securing liberty for all.
2. Define the power and telecommunication infrastructure as a "critical security interest sector" requiring that workers employed therein be NATURAL BORN CITIZENS without pedigree sufficient to acquire residency or citizenship elsewhere. It is a sort of security clearance similar to that of South Africa had in its nuclear program. Apartheid worked in this instance and the leftie faggots know that all too well.
3. Prohibits interpretations of the Constitution that lead to harm to national security. "The Constitution is not a suicide pact".
American exceptionalism must not mean that other nations protect their citizens EXCEPT America.
Well, those companies that are happy to devalue real skilled programming labor in favor of cheaper labor pools or that are dependent on H1B workers who are unable to negotiate for wage increases or growth. It'd be fine if it was an initiative to increase CS funding and establishing more actual, highly qualified instructors and schools. Instead, it's just a handout to a bunch of "coding bootcamp" companies that provide the most basic of lessons in programming with none of the fundamental skills that lead to a long-term successful career in programming. Not that matters, because none of these companies will hire anybody over 35 anyway. After all, we all know that the web is the last programming platform ever, so why bother learning the fundamentals of computing when you can copy and paste stuff you searched for on the web?
And in ten years those jobs will all be done by programs.
How much is H-1B visa fee? It looks weird it is possible to fund anything significant with such a thing.
The US has a population of almost 320 million. Between 1% and 2% of the US population has a doctoral degree. Let's use that as a proxy for people with a STEM degree of any kind. That suggests that there's somewhere on the order of 3 million people in the US with a tech degree. If all if them were looking for jobs, then only about 1 in 6 would be able to find one. That being said, I can't tell you how many currently-filled positions there are. This probably accounts for the rest.
Let's keep in mind that most tech degrees aren't worth the paper they're written on. There are universities turning out uneducated graduates in droves. Even the good schools manage to graduate plenty of morons with passing grades. If this weren't the case, then companies like Google wouldn't feel motivated to put interviewees through these grueling, demoralizing, dehumanizing interviews. I don't like that approach to interviews, but it is an effective way of eliminating the huge numbers of college graduates who managed to pass without acquiring any skills. If the colleges had higher standards, this wouldn't be necessary.
People who can't find jobs say there aren't enough openings. Companies with plenty of openings complain that there aren't enough (good) IT graduates. Both are true. There are inordinate numbers of IT graduates. There are also plenty of jobs (open and filled positions combined).
We hear about a lack of IT jobs because the majority of IT graduates can't find jobs. When a majority complains about something, we hear about. What's left out of this is that the majority of IT graduates are also woefully unskilled at IT, although they either don't know or don't care. They spent more energy on cheating than studying, but they (or their parents) paid for their degree, and they feel entitled to get a job. Too bad they're completely unemployable.
Back when I got my bachelors degree, there was a major employer in the area that hired a lot of local graduates. Mostly they would hire them with only a cursory interview. Every single hiree, regardless of skill, was paid $30k/year (this was the mid 90's) and put through an extensive training program. Think of it as 3-month interview or probationary period. If you couldn't hack the training program, you were let go. If you passed, your skill level still didn't matter, because every one was stuck at the bottom of a waterfall design process. All you would do all day, every day was go through a stack of papers, where each paper corresponded to one function or procedure, and you would code them one at a time. Completely mind-numbing. But this company was successful at meeting predictable deadlines by employing thousands of relatively mindless IT graduates. There are still lots of companies like this, and they have to be, because this is the quality of the typical IT graduate. Those companies that adapt to the lowest common denominator do well. People get hired, and they get plenty of employees.
But we're in a super star culture. Companies want super star engineers, and engineers (however unskilled) want super star jobs. And that's where all the complaints (from both sides) are coming from.
I cant tell you how many job postings I read that said things like you need 5 years experience with X,Y, and Z.... only problem is Y and Z have only been out for 2 years and 4 years respectively.
Some of that is cluelessness in HR departments. (I recall a time where the jobs adds were filled with posts for entry level sysadmins, which demanded enough years of Unix experience that only Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna MIGHT qualify. B-) )
But some of it is part of the "hire a cheap H1B" game. By making the requirements impossible (or rejecting all but a handfull of people who already receive astronomical fees on the consulting market), they can claim that "There are no available US citizens quaified for the post." Then they hire an H1B.
Of course the H1B doesn't have the qualifications, either. But his resume is inflated (typically by his recruiting firm, without his knowledge or approval).
The employer knows the game, and isn't expecting the claimed skills to be present - just enough skill to do the actual job. But a citizen who similarly inflated his resume would be in serious trouble as a result.
The boss gets his cheap laborer, the H1B gets his job and visa, the recruiter gets his fee. Everybody is happy except the rejected US candidates.
So who checks for fraud? The boss is happy. The rejected candidates are in no position to investigate or initiate a claim. The government is not interested. (The boss' company is a big political contributor.) Nobody else has standing.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Holy Shit.
This.
100%
I'd be curious to know how your code is going to affect cache coherency. Aren't cache invisible? Do you mean affect cache performance due to coherency issues?
a sheet of paper from the Chamber of Commerce, with a "campaign contribution" check attached.
Thouroughly corrupt. The leaders of both parties are bought-and-paid-for by big business and investment ("Wall St." as apposed to "regular") bankers.
Here's the scam:
Every year congress votes on a great many bills both sides KNOW will never pass. Republicans vote for all the "conservative" ones and Democrats vote for all the "liberal" ones. Then they all pretend to fight over the big "omnibus" budget bill - which they "come together" to "reluctantly" pass (on ONE vote) "or the government will shutdown" (which never ACTUALLY happens because most govt employees are deemed "essential" and they all get back-pay if any is missed). The result is that completely flakey Republicans can vote to fully-fund stuff their base hates while having a 95% "conservative voting record", and unreliable Democrats can vote to fully-fund what their base hates while having a 95% "liberal voting record" - But in reality they all voted for the SAME STUFF that actually took effect: THE STUFF THEIR REAL BOSSES WANTED. This is why they spen millions getting elected to jobs that pay about 100K per year and still manage to get richer every year they "serve in congress"
Seems "back woods boy" Obama can't count.
The World Population is currently estimated at 700, 300, 208 hundreds or 7 billion humans.
His figure of 1 Billion Trillion New IT jobs falls flat as a lie.
Tough tittie
They can work there. Simple.
Since every day you have to eat, every month you have bills to pay, and you have no welfare to speak of, you do not have an agreement over the wage.
Since there are over half a million jobs going spare, apparently, then that shows that people aren't accepting the wage for those jobs, therefore the market is deciding the wage must be higher. That the employers aren't increasing the offer indicates another proof that there is no need for them to negotiate, therefore no agreement in the wages going on.
If you have a job you can't fill, you must raise your offer. If you don't, then the reason why the job is open is not because you haven't got the talent available to hire, but you're not willing to pay for the talent.
... they're all for PhD's in CompSci than solve any problem in the world in two days or less for a salary of 5$ an hour.
I'm deseprately looking for one of those myself. Let me know when you find one.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Bullshit
But some of it is part of the "hire a cheap H1B" game. By making the requirements impossible (or rejecting all but a handfull of people who already receive astronomical fees on the consulting market), they can claim that "There are no available US citizens quaified for the post." Then they hire an H1B.
At most 85,000 H1b visas are issued each year. 7000 per month, nation-wide, compared with 2.8 million people employed in "Information Technology." I think you overestimate the impact of H1b on your personal employability.
Is one solution for prospective employees to just put it on their resumes? It'll get past HR, and what's the sleazy hiring manager going to do, call you out and admit that the posting is shenanigans?
without a green card , going to work in the states is indentured servitude , cant change employer etc.... anyhow not putting my familly in a country with more handguns then hands to carry them , sorry no amount of money would have me live in the states
If there actually was a shortage, we'd see salaries rising and loosening of job requirements (i.e. willing to train people with half a brain, etc.)
Instead, it seems like there is a shortage of "good" people, which there will always be a shortage of regardless of field. Most people, by definition, are "average."
It's just that the open job is your current position less 20%
HR: But...but...that special in-house purpose built software package is the industry standard.
Prove it, Obama.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
All this will accomplish is to lower our wages as we have yet even more Indians take our jobs and give even more to their friends via nepitism.
Makes it sound like a like of printers need to be replaced, keyboards cleaned out, and computers turned on and off. ... So what about engineering positions?
...except for the years they issued double that by mistake...oops.
You all seem to forget one big aspect of the scam: flexibility. It is easier to hire then fire (or getting rid of) a foreign worker on contract than a regular employee, for who you have to pay for benefits/retirement plan ...
This "perfect corruption" cannot be litigated against. It simply must rot organizations out of existence, which it will when nobody can speak to each other, nobody is capable of doing the work assigned, and cleaning-up the mess made becomes 10x multiples or more vs the money saved.
All the while, honest companies with good interview practices simply take over when their big, old competitors fail to progress or vanish entirely.
In the news: 100,000 IBM layoffs last month.
This is why small & medium businesses are the future, so you don't have one honest department & one broken department but instead have a successful company and a failing company.
Oh look, my old sig already held the answer:
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
I have a Bachelors in Computer Network Technology, 14 years of IT experience, and just finished my CCNP R&S certification.
I've contracted the past year and currently looking for a position. All of the contracts I've been contacted for in the past month have been "we are looking for a recent grad with YOUR experience and certifications...the pay rate - UP to 25/hr". I immediately thought of an intern for this position as it would be a great fit for them, and the recruiter said, "no they need your experience and certs". After 6 of these calls, I flat out told a recruiter that I didn't go to school and do all this work to make that kind of money.
I started to get discouraged then downright angry at these job descriptions. They want a SQL DBA, Windows Server Admin, Unix Admin, Cisco Networking, and a Programmer all rolled in one position. I applied for this position because clearly they do not know what they really want, and they told me I was too 'CISCO' for the position. These companies want a "unicorn" but not pay for one.
I do primarily Cisco networking and security. I have learned other security platforms...for 3 years? No, so then I can't get past the robot that scans my resume. My titles have been 'Network Engineer' - since I don't have 'Security Engineer', I'm sure I'm getting ignored. Read the resume people...security is in there - I can't help the titles I was given.
I am also discouraged from working with recruiters. I want to explain to them my technical abilities because THIS is what I can do - however, recruiters don't care what you have to say - they're not technical, they don't understand what you're saying...but hitting the keywords? So I'm relying on someone to submit me for the job and really try to "sell the company" me.
I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one experiencing this right now. It has really been bugging me for the past month!
Anyone who is truly interested in seeing where the White House comes up with the numbers it uses in its talking points will require access to a doctor, a flashlight, and a rubber glove.
...and they're all for government agencies. All of course part of subsidized job programs like California's CalWORKs.
This is the classic ruse we've heard for years but in other sectors.
We need more skilled teachers! ... computer programmers!
We need more nurses!
We need more doctors!
We need more
And then the educational system ramps up to make those teachers, nurses, doctors, and programmers... but no one's actually hiring. There's a need, but that need is irrelevant unless there are jobs. Take the assertion that there are 545,000 IT jobs waiting to be filled until there's a list of positions and locations.
I cant tell you how many job postings I read that said things like you need 5 years experience with X,Y, and Z.... only problem is Y and Z have only been out for 2 years and 4 years respectively.
Some of that is cluelessness in HR departments. (I recall a time where the jobs adds were filled with posts for entry level sysadmins, which demanded enough years of Unix experience that only Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna MIGHT qualify. B-) )
But some of it is part of the "hire a cheap H1B" game. By making the requirements impossible (or rejecting all but a handfull of people who already receive astronomical fees on the consulting market), they can claim that "There are no available US citizens quaified for the post." Then they hire an H1B.
Of course the H1B doesn't have the qualifications, either. But his resume is inflated (typically by his recruiting firm, without his knowledge or approval).
The employer knows the game, and isn't expecting the claimed skills to be present - just enough skill to do the actual job. But a citizen who similarly inflated his resume would be in serious trouble as a result.
The boss gets his cheap laborer, the H1B gets his job and visa, the recruiter gets his fee. Everybody is happy except the rejected US candidates.
So who checks for fraud? The boss is happy. The rejected candidates are in no position to investigate or initiate a claim. The government is not interested. (The boss' company is a big political contributor.) Nobody else has standing.
The ONLY reason for H1Bs is "to keep the wage rate down". That takes care of the high end jobs. The 80 million immigrants and their children that the Lousy Government has flooded the country with since 1970 took care of the working class.