Top quartile 2002 EE/CS grad here, from a prominent top-20 school. US tech firms, for the past decade, haven't even bothered to give the 'time of day' to domestic grads who apply. Job descriptions have been subjected to a steady creep where even entry-level positions are demanding 5-10 years of experience. There is plenty of US tech talent; employers just need to open their eyes, look at more than 1% of their resume queues, and start using it. Instead of throwing away the resume submissions and merely going with low-bidder foreign guest workers.
Exactly.... Someone once said something about a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and how the output certainly wasn't very likely to be of much use. Yet this is exactly what US businesses have attempted to replicate. A million Indian H-1B's on a million computers, taking a million jobs away from qualified US citizen engineers who proved themselves, in the 80s and 90s, to be superior at coding, developing and growing the economy, and innovation in general.
Is it any wonder why we have a domestic tech industry these days on the verge of collapse?
Yeah it does seem unlikely that Torvalds could have achieved what he achieved, if he was growing up in the United States. For starters, your typical Stanford attendee is looking at $50k/year in tuition and living expenses (at least), which means that they're coming out of school with $200k in debt. Torvalds could sit around, as a grad student, coding Linux, as he had the comfort of knowing that if his project failed, he could easily move into industry and get a job as a proprietary programmer, computer scientist, software engineer, etc. Contemporary graduates, OTOH, often don't even receive replies from employers to their job applications and a few years out of the workforce working on a personal project is basically the kiss of death to a programming career (under that $200k mountain of debt!).
If we want more startups, and more guys like Torvalds to start projects, then the entire culture has to be overhauled, including, but not limited to, providing career stability for domestic CS and IT graduates. Government policy needs to be oriented towards pushing salaries up for IT and programming professionals, not suppressing them through H-1B and other guest labour scam programs. Firms need to be encouraged to provide healthy pay packages for new grads especially, and housing prices need to be affordable so that the younger crowd of IT people and engineers more broadly can afford to tinker, can afford to create things in their garages. Interested High school students need to be given opportunities to come into IT/engineering/manufacturing workplaces on summer jobs -- much like Steve Jobs and Wozniak were able to do at HP in the 1970s -- giving them inspiration to create what became Apple computer!
Anything short of the above, and quite frankly, I fear the US will have squandered the future of its past leadership position in IT to countries and to companies that 'get it'.
So you've basically closed the door to all of the talent that has been working on coding for proprietary systems over the years.
Sure, that probably works for you with the glut of programmers out there, but its a lousy way of runnning a business, and certainly you're closing the door on a vast array of people who may have done what you want done, but didn't happen to have been doing it in the F/OSS world.
Its a huge problem out there, and the problem is largely the creation of the employers who have eliminated (or outsourced) all of the entry-level positions, and merely expected CS grads to go from being new grads, to being people with 5-8 years of experience, delivering production code the first day on the job (they call this, "hitting the ground running").
Some ethical grads basically go into an interview where this is the expectation, and politely explain that it takes time to familiarize oneself with the environment at hand, coding practices, and the overall schemas in use for the system.
The less-than-ethical grads go in with an attitude that they can literally do anything, churn out code the first day on the job, quality or applicability be damned.
Guess who gets the job? And guess what type of candidate has basically been locked out of the CS job market for much of the past decade?
See why we have a problem?
Bring back professionalism to the 'profession', with senior employees mentoring the newbies, proper salaries so the new employees don't have to subsist on Krap Dinner living 5 to an appartment, and workplaces with proper offices, not cube farms -- and the quality and quantity of innovation and code is certain to increase.
Why can top quartile graduates of top quartile schools send out hundreds of resumes and get almost zero responses? Why are the resume queues of average paying companies like Google chock-full of resumes, >1000 for each position they actually hire, if there's no glut?
I think a big part of the problem is that most firms essentially have HR screening resumes, and they do an awful job of such. A few resumes, usually the wrong resumes, are passed onto actual hiring teams.
As for 'high pay statistics', I would beg to disagree. Most new grads in software are darn lucky if they even get a $75k/year offer in the Silicon Valley, without a pension, or much in terms of permanancy or benefits. Meanwhile San Jose City Police officers start at $72k/year, and have their internships paid for at ~$30/hour. Figure that out, CS grads who invested a ton into their own education, barely have earnings equal to that of a police officer. And as they progress in their careers, the policemen enjoy almost iron-clad job security and big raises (ie: most San Jose cops are in the $180k/year range), while the techies seem to have to find new employers every few years, can be fired on-the-spot for practically any reason, don't receive a huge pension upon their retirement, etc.
Not to pick on police officers, but saying that techies are high paid is a big joke, especially in a place where decent, livable, middle-class houses start at $500k and go up from there.
The number of lives ruined by the offshoring/outsourcing/H-1B 'experiment' of American business certainly must be enormous.
2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, even 2005 were years that produced some of the highest quality CS graduates to ever come out of the universities, as the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s forced most schools to institute enrolment quotas for CS. Cut-off averages were routinely in the mid 80s. While, these days, and prior to the boom, even guys with 65% averages could be admitted to CS.
If employers want to hire brilliant people, they would be well advised to look to the 2001-2005 cohort, who mostly sit underemployed/unemployed right now, of CS/EE/IT graduates. Most of them never given a chance by the job market, passed over in favour of cheap foreign guest workers.
I've met the stated qualifications on nearly every job I applied for. The employers are innudated with hundreds of excellent resumes per position though (ie: Google's ratio of >1000 resumes per actual position they hire for!). That is why the whole premise that there is a shortage of coders, or a shortage of engineers (software, hardware, systems, or otherwise), strikes me as ridiculous. Especially with the stagnant salaries.
As for why an employer would want to hire employees -- perhaps to get a job done? To move their business forward? Most of the hiring in the past decade has been of guest workers, which is why the industry is in such a state of disaster. The brightest folks are on the sidelines. Remember that in the late 1990s, most good CS schools had severely restricted enrolment quotas, which meant that only the brightest undergrads were even permitted to study CS. When they graduated circa 2001-2005, entry-level opportunities were practically non-existent.
Where am I supposed to focus my efforts if employers won't even talk to me, respond to my resume, etc.? Give me a few weeks and I'll be up to speed in practically any language or API that is suitably documented. I've written code in many languages, but apparently not the specific fad language of the day. Embedded, BTW, is a superset of applications and systems programming.
As for why an employer would want to hire someone like me, well employers need smart people, right? Programming languages can be learned in weeks; aptitude and problem solving ability is far more important in the grand scheme of things.
Look, if employers were really needing people, would they really care if it took me a few weeks to learn some the syntax and API's of their language/environment of choice? Or is the whole idea of employers needing people really a big farce, and these articles appearing on CNN websites and elsewhere merely intended as infomercials to curry favour with the public to bring in more guest workers?
Of course, I avoid 3rd party recruiters like the plague -- most of them have called me up, promised the world with all their proprietary 'inside contacts', but have delivered practically nothing. But internal recruiters, like HR people, should be talking to folks like me if they're actually looking for talent out there.
As for craigslist, I've tried a few times. Didn't seem to get much in the way of professional responses. If they're not willing to pay for a job ad, then just how important is the job really to them?
I realize my skillset is more hardware-centric than software (I am an EE after all, and most of my coursework/projects concentrated on the communications/networking side of things, not app programming or Java), but everyone knows that the embedded skillset is somewhat more difficult to learn than applications programming -- so why guys like me aren't being picked up merely for our aptitude is really hard to understand.
You can say that again, but firms like Google/Microsoft/ most other tech firms/Etc. don't bother to even *sample* more than 1% of their resume queues, so adding more noise probably won't make any difference. The sampling rate isn't even high enough to ascertain any statistically relevant or meaningful measure of the quality of the applicant stream.
I'm willing to bet that if tech firms were willing to take *all* candidates for their jobs into serious and legitimate consideration, that they would have no problem filling all of the positions they have available. But throwing away 99% of the resumes without even looking at them definitely is highly problematic.
Exactly Walterbyrd. US tech schools were chock full of the best and brightest US citizens in the late 1990s and early 2000s, chasing the riches of the 'new economy'. When they graduated, circa 2001-onwards, they were met with an industry that mostly slammed the door in their faces and only hired foreign workers on the H-1B visa -- a few firms like Google excepted who mostly picked up tech industry castoffs from previous years.
Tech employment in the USA has not expanded from 2000 levels, but over a million H-1B and Green Card recipients now are in the US IT workforce. Which means that over a million American citizens have been displaced, including most new grads from the past decade.
What is the plan to integrate the past decade's worth of grads into the workforce? Is it any wonder why the economy is collapsing when a decades worth of some our brightest grads basically have been condemneed to a live of unemployment and poverty, because an industry that they gave some of their best years in college to study to become productive members of, decided to reject them in favour of cheap imported labour?
I apply to jobs in big cities. I have a big city address and phone number. But I can't afford to live in a big city anymore. Still, as a top quartile EE/CS grad, I can count the number of responses to my job applications (thousands of them) on my hands over the past decade from tech employers.
When I used to apply to jobs on Monster, it wasn't uncommon to see most jobs, even entry-level ones, have 100, 150 other applications submitted. Gave up on that and started targetting recruiters directly. Still no bites. Which leads me to believe that the whole concept that there's any worker shortage is complete bullshit.
Yeah right.. Why is most of my 2002 EE/CS graduating class, from a top quartile university, chronically unemployed for much of the past decade? Employers not even responding in good faith to our applications? While the business guys had very little trouble, comparatively speaking, joining the workforce?
I've personally coded assembly for embedded TCP/IP projects, and designed embedded ethernet solutions, yet hundreds of resumes later to prominent firms in the business, and not even a single reply to my applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Top quartile 2002 EE/CS grad here, from a prominent top-20 school. US tech firms, for the past decade, haven't even bothered to give the 'time of day' to domestic grads who apply. Job descriptions have been subjected to a steady creep where even entry-level positions are demanding 5-10 years of experience. There is plenty of US tech talent; employers just need to open their eyes, look at more than 1% of their resume queues, and start using it. Instead of throwing away the resume submissions and merely going with low-bidder foreign guest workers.
I did insert paragraphs, Slashdot deleted them for some reason.
Exactly.... Someone once said something about a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and how the output certainly wasn't very likely to be of much use. Yet this is exactly what US businesses have attempted to replicate. A million Indian H-1B's on a million computers, taking a million jobs away from qualified US citizen engineers who proved themselves, in the 80s and 90s, to be superior at coding, developing and growing the economy, and innovation in general. Is it any wonder why we have a domestic tech industry these days on the verge of collapse?
Yeah it does seem unlikely that Torvalds could have achieved what he achieved, if he was growing up in the United States. For starters, your typical Stanford attendee is looking at $50k/year in tuition and living expenses (at least), which means that they're coming out of school with $200k in debt. Torvalds could sit around, as a grad student, coding Linux, as he had the comfort of knowing that if his project failed, he could easily move into industry and get a job as a proprietary programmer, computer scientist, software engineer, etc. Contemporary graduates, OTOH, often don't even receive replies from employers to their job applications and a few years out of the workforce working on a personal project is basically the kiss of death to a programming career (under that $200k mountain of debt!). If we want more startups, and more guys like Torvalds to start projects, then the entire culture has to be overhauled, including, but not limited to, providing career stability for domestic CS and IT graduates. Government policy needs to be oriented towards pushing salaries up for IT and programming professionals, not suppressing them through H-1B and other guest labour scam programs. Firms need to be encouraged to provide healthy pay packages for new grads especially, and housing prices need to be affordable so that the younger crowd of IT people and engineers more broadly can afford to tinker, can afford to create things in their garages. Interested High school students need to be given opportunities to come into IT/engineering/manufacturing workplaces on summer jobs -- much like Steve Jobs and Wozniak were able to do at HP in the 1970s -- giving them inspiration to create what became Apple computer! Anything short of the above, and quite frankly, I fear the US will have squandered the future of its past leadership position in IT to countries and to companies that 'get it'.
So you've basically closed the door to all of the talent that has been working on coding for proprietary systems over the years. Sure, that probably works for you with the glut of programmers out there, but its a lousy way of runnning a business, and certainly you're closing the door on a vast array of people who may have done what you want done, but didn't happen to have been doing it in the F/OSS world.
Its a huge problem out there, and the problem is largely the creation of the employers who have eliminated (or outsourced) all of the entry-level positions, and merely expected CS grads to go from being new grads, to being people with 5-8 years of experience, delivering production code the first day on the job (they call this, "hitting the ground running"). Some ethical grads basically go into an interview where this is the expectation, and politely explain that it takes time to familiarize oneself with the environment at hand, coding practices, and the overall schemas in use for the system. The less-than-ethical grads go in with an attitude that they can literally do anything, churn out code the first day on the job, quality or applicability be damned. Guess who gets the job? And guess what type of candidate has basically been locked out of the CS job market for much of the past decade? See why we have a problem? Bring back professionalism to the 'profession', with senior employees mentoring the newbies, proper salaries so the new employees don't have to subsist on Krap Dinner living 5 to an appartment, and workplaces with proper offices, not cube farms -- and the quality and quantity of innovation and code is certain to increase.
Why can top quartile graduates of top quartile schools send out hundreds of resumes and get almost zero responses? Why are the resume queues of average paying companies like Google chock-full of resumes, >1000 for each position they actually hire, if there's no glut? I think a big part of the problem is that most firms essentially have HR screening resumes, and they do an awful job of such. A few resumes, usually the wrong resumes, are passed onto actual hiring teams. As for 'high pay statistics', I would beg to disagree. Most new grads in software are darn lucky if they even get a $75k/year offer in the Silicon Valley, without a pension, or much in terms of permanancy or benefits. Meanwhile San Jose City Police officers start at $72k/year, and have their internships paid for at ~$30/hour. Figure that out, CS grads who invested a ton into their own education, barely have earnings equal to that of a police officer. And as they progress in their careers, the policemen enjoy almost iron-clad job security and big raises (ie: most San Jose cops are in the $180k/year range), while the techies seem to have to find new employers every few years, can be fired on-the-spot for practically any reason, don't receive a huge pension upon their retirement, etc. Not to pick on police officers, but saying that techies are high paid is a big joke, especially in a place where decent, livable, middle-class houses start at $500k and go up from there.
The number of lives ruined by the offshoring/outsourcing/H-1B 'experiment' of American business certainly must be enormous. 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, even 2005 were years that produced some of the highest quality CS graduates to ever come out of the universities, as the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s forced most schools to institute enrolment quotas for CS. Cut-off averages were routinely in the mid 80s. While, these days, and prior to the boom, even guys with 65% averages could be admitted to CS. If employers want to hire brilliant people, they would be well advised to look to the 2001-2005 cohort, who mostly sit underemployed/unemployed right now, of CS/EE/IT graduates. Most of them never given a chance by the job market, passed over in favour of cheap foreign guest workers.
I've met the stated qualifications on nearly every job I applied for. The employers are innudated with hundreds of excellent resumes per position though (ie: Google's ratio of >1000 resumes per actual position they hire for!). That is why the whole premise that there is a shortage of coders, or a shortage of engineers (software, hardware, systems, or otherwise), strikes me as ridiculous. Especially with the stagnant salaries. As for why an employer would want to hire employees -- perhaps to get a job done? To move their business forward? Most of the hiring in the past decade has been of guest workers, which is why the industry is in such a state of disaster. The brightest folks are on the sidelines. Remember that in the late 1990s, most good CS schools had severely restricted enrolment quotas, which meant that only the brightest undergrads were even permitted to study CS. When they graduated circa 2001-2005, entry-level opportunities were practically non-existent.
Where am I supposed to focus my efforts if employers won't even talk to me, respond to my resume, etc.? Give me a few weeks and I'll be up to speed in practically any language or API that is suitably documented. I've written code in many languages, but apparently not the specific fad language of the day. Embedded, BTW, is a superset of applications and systems programming. As for why an employer would want to hire someone like me, well employers need smart people, right? Programming languages can be learned in weeks; aptitude and problem solving ability is far more important in the grand scheme of things. Look, if employers were really needing people, would they really care if it took me a few weeks to learn some the syntax and API's of their language/environment of choice? Or is the whole idea of employers needing people really a big farce, and these articles appearing on CNN websites and elsewhere merely intended as infomercials to curry favour with the public to bring in more guest workers?
Of course, I avoid 3rd party recruiters like the plague -- most of them have called me up, promised the world with all their proprietary 'inside contacts', but have delivered practically nothing. But internal recruiters, like HR people, should be talking to folks like me if they're actually looking for talent out there. As for craigslist, I've tried a few times. Didn't seem to get much in the way of professional responses. If they're not willing to pay for a job ad, then just how important is the job really to them? I realize my skillset is more hardware-centric than software (I am an EE after all, and most of my coursework/projects concentrated on the communications/networking side of things, not app programming or Java), but everyone knows that the embedded skillset is somewhat more difficult to learn than applications programming -- so why guys like me aren't being picked up merely for our aptitude is really hard to understand.
You can say that again, but firms like Google/Microsoft/ most other tech firms/Etc. don't bother to even *sample* more than 1% of their resume queues, so adding more noise probably won't make any difference. The sampling rate isn't even high enough to ascertain any statistically relevant or meaningful measure of the quality of the applicant stream. I'm willing to bet that if tech firms were willing to take *all* candidates for their jobs into serious and legitimate consideration, that they would have no problem filling all of the positions they have available. But throwing away 99% of the resumes without even looking at them definitely is highly problematic.
Exactly Walterbyrd. US tech schools were chock full of the best and brightest US citizens in the late 1990s and early 2000s, chasing the riches of the 'new economy'. When they graduated, circa 2001-onwards, they were met with an industry that mostly slammed the door in their faces and only hired foreign workers on the H-1B visa -- a few firms like Google excepted who mostly picked up tech industry castoffs from previous years. Tech employment in the USA has not expanded from 2000 levels, but over a million H-1B and Green Card recipients now are in the US IT workforce. Which means that over a million American citizens have been displaced, including most new grads from the past decade. What is the plan to integrate the past decade's worth of grads into the workforce? Is it any wonder why the economy is collapsing when a decades worth of some our brightest grads basically have been condemneed to a live of unemployment and poverty, because an industry that they gave some of their best years in college to study to become productive members of, decided to reject them in favour of cheap imported labour?
I apply to jobs in big cities. I have a big city address and phone number. But I can't afford to live in a big city anymore. Still, as a top quartile EE/CS grad, I can count the number of responses to my job applications (thousands of them) on my hands over the past decade from tech employers. When I used to apply to jobs on Monster, it wasn't uncommon to see most jobs, even entry-level ones, have 100, 150 other applications submitted. Gave up on that and started targetting recruiters directly. Still no bites. Which leads me to believe that the whole concept that there's any worker shortage is complete bullshit.
Yeah right.. Why is most of my 2002 EE/CS graduating class, from a top quartile university, chronically unemployed for much of the past decade? Employers not even responding in good faith to our applications? While the business guys had very little trouble, comparatively speaking, joining the workforce? I've personally coded assembly for embedded TCP/IP projects, and designed embedded ethernet solutions, yet hundreds of resumes later to prominent firms in the business, and not even a single reply to my applications.