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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.
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
there's a local techshop near me (bay area). I have a membership there and its quite a cool hackerspace.
they have openings. guess how much they are willing to pay to be a DC (stupid term, 'dream consultant')? its a staff position where you have some mechanical skills (laser cutters, drills, lathes, CNCs, you name it) and yet you can make more money deliverying pizzas or probably just sitting on unemployment ;(
they are willing to pay less than $15/hour! for someone who has DIY and/or industrial machine skills. if that's not an abuse of the labor market, then what is? even the 'teaching jobs' there pay less than a living wage. I have no idea how the people who 'work' there get by, I really don't.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
or at 0 an hour wait for the bank to take it?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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.
and then get fired for not having a place to properly eat, sleep, and bathe yourself before showing up? Never mind a house, a studio apartment is tough to nearly impossible to maintain at $14 an hour.
membership is about $125/mo, fixed price (less if you buy a special, sometimes around holidays).
housing in the bay area is $500k for a broken down POS. not kidding. rent is $2000 for a one bedroom apartment. $2500 for 2 br in many places. insane, huh?
and techshop is probably the most equipped hackerspace in the country. its amazing what they have.
but my point is still this: why are the wages at such a place so low? you can make more changing oil at a gas station!
the bay area is filled with software weenies, totally useless when it comes to anything physical that needs building or fixing or designing. so, its not like there are tons of people who even COULD effectively work there.
the ones there generally are cool, friendly and all - but I do wonder if they have another job or maybe lots of room mates. its not even close to a living wage, though, and that kind of annoys me. wonder how much the exec staff makes (sigh).
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
I'm black and I've got a pretty technical job. It's not IT, it's better (to me). I could easily get a low level IT job if I wanted to.
When I was a young teen, I saw a few kids like me but not very many (black OR white). Computers were very much a "nerd" thing. This was about 15 years ago, so I doubt anything has changed. These days it might even be worse, since back then it was a necessary evil, which can now be worked around with tablets and smart phones.
These days, even the most run-down, underfunded inner-city libraries have computers with Internet connectivity, along with books about programming.
I learned Basic in just such a place. The library in a Boys and Girls Club. They didn't have the internet until shortly before I moved on. They had rows of old Apple //e, Macs, and old DOS systems. I was practically their unpaid IT person, fixing all of the things the other kids would break. They even gave me one of those computers my last day there when I moved out of town.
That doesn't answer your question exactly. Suffice it to say, kids don't want to be nerds if they can help it, especially black kids. Oh well. More jobs for me.
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.
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.
Party Shmarty. All known politicians are spinners. Mr. Carter was probably the closest we had to an honest prez in recent history, and he was booted largely for saying things people didn't want to hear.
Honesty doesn't fly in our system. Voters want to be told they can have their cake AND eat it too. Mention difficult trade-offs, and you are dead meat.
Table-ized A.I.
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?
You're supposed to take in 3 roommates in that studio, also at $14/hr. Just like your H1-B competitors.
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!
LOLWUT? I could afford my three-bedroom house on minimum wage if I had to. And it's a decent house in a nice neighborhood, too. You need to wise up and GTFO of whatever high cost-of-living shithole you're in, especially if you can't make the high salary to justify it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
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.