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.

Comments

if that were true

[ganjadude]

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.

Re:if that were true

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The White House would not lie.

Re:if that were true

[poet]

My experience is the people looking for tech jobs now either:

A. Want more money than they are worth (no offense)
B. Are skilled in an area that is saturated (Windows admins)
C. Expect the world to be like the Google Campus (Hipsters)
D. Frankly, aren't worth hiring.

Re:if that were true

[Anonymous Coward]

My experience is that the companies hiring tech workers now either:

A. Want to pay less than people are worth (and therefore want to hire easily exploited foreign workers)
B. Want specific experience with technology that hasn't existed long enough to create it
C. Want to provide crappy working environments with clueless management
D. Frankly, won't be in business very long because they can't adapt.

Re:if that were true

[ganjadude]

B. Want specific experience with technology that hasn't existed long enough to create it

THIS!!

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.

Re:if that were true

[epyT-R]

My experience is the people hiring for tech jobs now either:

A. Offer shit pay for crazy hours and expectations.
B. Expect to pay unlivable wages under the guise of 'saturation' and then bitch they need more h1-bs.
C. Expect conformance with hipster ideals/opinions/politics. Hipsters are a pain to manage, but even worse to work for.
D. Frankly, aren't worth working for. This includes things like those manufactured corporate cultures (open offices, chaotic group work sessions designed by people who aren't engineers, buzzword infested behavioral expectations), esp the ones that push particular brands of politics as components.

Re:if that were true

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Id love to see the breakdown on where they came up with this number.

Being that Obama just pulled that number out of his ass . . . I don't think you would want to see it in any detail.

Re:if that were true

[Anonymous Coward]

A. That works both ways. Jobs are worth what the market says they're worth, too. If you can't hire anybody at a given rate, that is a market signal that you are not offering enough. If you artificially inflate the supply, then claim you're paying "market rates", there's something a bit off there...

B. That is a lame excuse. Train. You're getting a market signal that you're demanding too many skills for too little money. You just don't want to hear what the market is telling you.

Re:if that were true

[Wycliffe]

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.

Re:if that were true

[garyisabusyguy]

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

Re: if that were true

[sycodon]

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.

Re:if that were true

[bzipitidoo]

Employers are to blame for the mess. It's been an employers' market for years now, and they still aren't satisfied?! Affordable Healthcare relieves them of the burden of handling employee health insurance themselves, but many don't like it. They actually preferred having that as another hold on employees. Be a real shame if you and your whole family lost your health insurance, wouldn't it? You will do what it takes, even if that means putting in 80 hour weeks for the next 6 months, won't you?

On B, it's pretty crappy to put the burden on candidates to train for positions they might not get. Especially when the training wanted is very esoteric. Learning on the job is something many are quite capable of doing, but employers won't even accept that arrangement. Nor will they admit that closely related experience is relevant. Seems the only people companies are willing to train are cheap foreign replacements.

I have to agree on D. It's not startups exactly, it's failing companies. Startups merely experience higher rates of failure. Working on a sinking ship is horrible. As management desperation increases, what fairness and good sense they have vanishes. They began demanding extreme performance, asking for long hours with no extra pay, refusing to see that even if they get it, it won't be enough to save the company. They can turn very abusive. They also look for scapegoats. Soon they're blaming everyone but themselves. They make examples of people, firing some hapless low level employees on trumped up baseless reasons, just in case anyone doesn't get it. You're going to sweat visibly to give 110%, or they will fire you. Then for the grand finale, they don't tell anyone they've run out of money until they can't make payroll, screwing everyone out of a month of pay, and having the nerve to whine that the employees not only shouldn't complain about being cheated, but should feel sorry for them that their glorious vision didn't work out. Their pain is more important! And maybe everyone should keep on working for free in the faint hope that soon fortunes will make a dramatic u-turn and the company will profit enough to pay all the back pay.

Employers also engage in illegal and unfair hiring practices. All this talk of not beimg able to find competent people is simply not true, and is only cover for the real reasons. If they want to, they can always find a reason why someone won't do. And too often, they want to. Often they've already settled on a hire, who can be some incompetent doofus who is related to the boss. They are merely going through the motions of interviewing others, to satisfy the EEOC, knowing that they have no intention of hiring any of them.

Another thing I find hilarious is the recruiter. First those guys are in a big hurry to shove candidates into any job vaguely related to their skills, then once they get a hit, rather than go to bat for their candiadte, they're all over lhe candidate to do the heavy work to win that position. They demand that the candidate heavily alter the resume to the point of outright lies, and say all the right things. Some of the modifications they demand are just plain stupid, but they expect you to shut up and do it if you want a job. The candidates who refuse to cooperate in the mangling of their own resumes are dropped faster than a hot potato, because there are plenty more candidates where they came from.

That number

[darkain]

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.

Dice plug

[rwa2]

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?)

Change you can believe in!

[lophophore]

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.

Re:Change you can believe in!

[Sperbels]

2017 cannot come fast enough.

You don't actually believe this will change anything, do you?

Re:Change you can believe in!

[Tablizer]

2017 cannot come fast enough. The current administration...

If you think the other party is anti-imported-labor, you will be in for a second surprise. Both parties do it because the Plutocrats pay them to, and not enough voters know or care about the issue to override the influence of legalized bribery.

The available election choices kind of remind me of our family's ISP choices: Company A offers spotty connections and Company B keeps putting bogus "fees" on our bill, like insurance we never asked for. Company C only offers satellite TV, no Internet.

I wish we could vote on specific Federal issues, not just representatives.

Here's one

[michaelmalak]

This was forwarded to me today by a colleague:

Job Description:

The selected candidate will design, implement and deploy custom applications on Hadoop (Using Map reduce and/or RDD). This person will also be responsible for designing, implementing and deploying ETL to load data into Hadoop/NoSQL.

Required Skills/Experience:

• 4+ Years of JAVA Development
• Excellent understating of HADOOP ecosystem
• Experience in scheduling workflows using Oozie
• Has Knowledge On Relational Data models
• Excellent Knowledge of Linux

Preferred Skills/Experience:

• Troubleshoot Production Issues With Hadoop/NoSQL
• REST Web Services Experience
• Linux Administration
• Familiar with RDD (Resilient Distributed Datasets) like SPARK
• Knowledge of Scala Programming Language
• Knowledge of NoSQLs (Like HBase, MongoDB, CouchDB etc)

Location: Nashville, TN

Duration: 6 months Contract to Hire

Rate: 30/hr on W2

Re:Here's one

[crywalt]

This is basically what I see all the time. The listings all want experts in some stupidly named tech less than ten years old. Hadoop, Mongo, Tomcat, Pullwilly, Crankyank, GULP, GRUNT, and, god, still PHP. Also HTML5, which hasn't even been settled yet. They want all of that plus knowledge of ninety acronyms which don't really mean anything (RESTful). And there's absolutely NO ROOM for anyone to come in and pick things up as they go along. Every interviewer wants someone who can hit the ground running. Twenty years of experience on the web and a CS degree count for nothing if you're not an expert backwards and forwards in obscure minutia of SQL syntax, all tested using an online quiz designed to break your brain. Not to mention that the last job offer I got was for less money (accounting for inflation) than I got two years out of college twenty years ago, and in Manhattan to boot. After commuting I'd probably have lost money.

Re:Here's one

[tompaulco]

Yes, exactly. So why don't the employers understand that? I mean, I have had my hands on 20 different technologies over the last 25 years of my career. The fact that I don't know their special inhouse purpose built software package should not be held against me because it is "just a tool", right?

Where the heck?

[roc97007]

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?

Re:Why aren't African-Americans doing these jobs?

[Howitzer86]

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.

Quickest Solution

[Tablizer]

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.

Shortage Of

[Greyfox]

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.

Re:545,000 jobs

[YrWrstNtmr]

You're supposed to take in 3 roommates in that studio, also at $14/hr. Just like your H1-B competitors.

SOME of that is clueless HR. SOME is to get H1Bs.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.