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Obama Administration Claims There Are 545,000 IT Job Openings

Posted by samzenpus on from the are-you-hiring? dept.

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.

10 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. if that were true by ganjadude · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:if that were true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    2. Re:if that were true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:if that were true by ganjadude · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
    4. Re:if that were true by epyT-R · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:if that were true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:if that were true by Wycliffe · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. That number by darkain · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Dice plug by rwa2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?)

  4. Re:Here's one by crywalt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.