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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.
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?)
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.
That just isn't my experience, nor does it reflect the reality of the market. Every company that I know that uses H1B pays very well (I don't use them). My employees make market rate and any offshore work I do usually gets more than market rate.
Now it is true that there are bad apples out there, no question but as a rule from a market perspective, I don't ever see it. I have interviewed hundreds of people in the last year. The ones that were hired, were worth it and make market rate. The ones that weren't were because of very specific things.
To answer your specific comments:
A. People are worth what the market states they are worth, period. If I can get a foreign worker that does the same or better job for less, then the stateside worker isn't worth more than that. (FTR, I pay market rate no matter what).
B. This is a lame excuse. Don't work for those companies or do what you need to do to get the experience.
C. All management is clueless except with IT is clueless. That type of arrogance pretty much makes you undesirable as a candidate. Crappy work environment? Well that is some companies no question but it is certainly not all nor the majority.
D. And this is where the mistake lays at its core. If you believe that, you are interviewing with startups and yeah, working for a startup usually sucks. Find companies that have been around a while (>5 years) and you will be in a much better position.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
I'd like to see a salary floor for H1-B at 15 times minimum wage (or 10 times the poverty level, whichever is higher)... + a 20% administrative fee.
That would probably curtail abuses of said system... it couldn't be abused for the purpose of bringing in cheaper labor then.
I think requiring them to pay prevailing wage to the worker plus put an equal amount into a fund for STEM scholarships would work decent as well.
Even if they fudge the numbers (which they do) and say it's only a 40k position, requiring them to pay an additional 100% premium to a scholarship
fund should minimize the abuse that we're currently seeing.
This could also work for other industries like truck drivers where the complaint is there are not enough drivers when the reality is that there are
plenty of people who would be willing to drive if the pay was higher.
More like train HR to not make unrealistic barriers to getting people interviewed who can do the job
I used to hire people to customize the Oracle eBusiness application stack. I was given a range of $50-60k as a starting salary. I would like for them to have 3-5 years experience (solid on pl/sql, knowledge of the table structure, some familiarity with admin functions, etc...), but anybody with those skill sets was already earning more money
So... I either get absolute liars that HR thinks are a good match, or I interview a ton of people and distinguish which experienced C programmer can make the switch, which recent graduate is willing to put out the effort to learn and which existing functional app user may be able to take on SQL and be successful
HR is the bane of getting hired into IT and Business Management are the vampires who constantly undermine IT wages because they fail to understand where value is being generated in their own company, hell most executives came from sales, so that is where they would rather pay out wages
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Well I have watched the hiring process and even helped HR screen Resumes. I had to fight with them to get them to send them on to the hiring managers. the objection? Falling short of experience in years...by six months, 1 year out of 5 required, etc. At my current employer, local HR selections have to be sent up to corporate IT HR for "review". Perfectly fine candidates are screened out for reasons they won't tell.
Corporate IT DOES have many Indians working for them. You figure it out.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.