H1B visa is a dual-intent visa where-by the person can get sponsorship for permanent residency from the employer.
It's dual-intent in the sense that staying home is dual-intent because they could apply for a visa, or being a citizen is dual-intent because you could renounce your citizenship. (Granted that unlike some visas applying for permanent residency doesn't void it, but that doesn't mean it's any faster road to permanent residency than its absence.)
If we compare job levels during irrationally exuberant boom times of 1999 to job levels during the recession of 2002, we'll find "unemployment insurance" running out not only among programmers but among every other field.
In how many other fields where unemployment insurance (no need for sneer-quotes, that's the official name) was running out were there simultaneously calls for importing workers in those fields because of a "desperate labor shortage"?
So let's have such requirements in IT too and let's see how many of the 100,000 unemployed actually can make it through. Most IT jobs are highly skilled and anyone with half a brain who wishes to be in IT shouldn't be able to just because he wants to.
A lot of people in the profession would like such a barrier to entry. How would you implement it? Unlike lawyers, we don't make the laws; unlike doctors and professional engineers we can't appeal to "public safety"; and by our nature and the nature of our employers and the current era forming a trade union is not likely.
What would be the requirements? Many who are in the field today got their undergraduate degrees (or didn't get them) before there were computer science or computer engineering degrees. Good practices are learned on the job, and particular languages and other implementation skills are a very fast moving target.
I can't speak for the other 99,999 unemployed engineers, but I was buzzword-compliant as to education, training, skills and experience. There are similar claims in various articles that Americans don't have necessary skills, but this is rarely backed up by "Here is this job, it needs these skills, I will pay relocation and offer $125,000/year for an American who has these skills or who can become current in them in 3 months time."
H1-B is not about brilliancy! It's about run-of-the-mill programmers paid "prevailing" rates which are considerably less than the market rate for good programmers.
It IS about brilliancy, when thousands of candidates from the rest of the world compete for 65,000 visas only the brilliant few can get them.
Do you have any evidence that there is skills-based competition?
Advanced degrees are only a surrogate measure, both foreign and domestic, but apparently the H1-B exemption allowing 20,000 more visas for those holding US advanced degrees is going unfilled.
There may be some who do run-of-the-mill programming jobs but that doesn't discount them as run-of-the-mill, its the visa program that ties them to an employer and doesn't give them an opportunity to go for cutting-edge jobs. They can't change employers as projects change. Disconnect the visa from the employer and you won't see many of them doing run-of-the-mill jobs at "prewailing" rates. There may still be some who come through contacts but the market will take care of such low quality workers.
There are good strategic reasons to offer protectionism for domestic high-tech workers, but I'd get off the bandwagon at that point, where the playing field has been leveled by making H1-B workers no more indentured or otherwise disadvantaged (and thus cheaper) than domestic workers. Here we are in complete agreement.
The H1 visa program enables talented, amibitious hard-working people from all around the world to pursue the American dream.
It's a non-immigrant visa. It allows these folks to get a taste of the American experience for 3 years, send the money home, and get some experience they take home when they leave.
Do they ever thank the thousands of folks who have contributed immensely to the economy?
When your Unemployment Insurance is running out because it's taken more than 6 months to find a job in your profession, one in which you're told there is some pressing shortage of labor, thanking the loyal citizens of other countries who are competing for the same jobs on an unlevel field may not be topmost in your mind.
If H1B was indeed only to hire cheap labor, has anyone wondered why we don't see foreign architects, accountants, lawyers, professors, health care workers etc in the same numbers as IT professionals since it is allowed by law?
Given that one must be PE, CPA, member of the bar, etc. to work in those fields, there is little to wonder about.
Considering a 5% unemployment rate, 65,000 is less than 0.45% of the total unemployed.
That's interesting. What do those two numbers have to do with each other?
The total of unemployed programmers is around 100,000, with more than that number underemployed or working in other fields. (I'm just going to go with Professor Matloff's figures here. The visa is good for 3 or 6 years, and the cap was higher in recent years, so there are several hundred thousand workers currently on H1-B (463,000 as of 2002 (Matloff's note 277 citing Angell.)
What the U.S. should be worried about is not the few jobs that go to these brilliant foreign talent
H1-B is not about brilliancy! It's about run-of-the-mill programmers paid "prevailing" rates which are considerably less than the market rate for good programmers.
but the day when these people do not wish to come to the U.S. anymore!
We can't hire professionals fast enough (programmers, artists, animators). The years allocations of H1B's vanish in the first two months of the year. There are simply not enough Americans to fill the posts.
There are plenty of programmers who are eligible to work in the US. Many are unemployed/underemployed, and others would leave their current jobs for a guaranteed better deal. It is a lie to say that there are not enough Americans to fill the posts. It may be the case that there are not enough Americans willing to fill your posts at the compensation you are offering.
Please cut the hypocrisy and say what you mean.
So what are our options?
Besides increasing the compensation (which is more than paycheck -- most of us older engineers, who have been through a few layoffs and unemployment, would rather have stability than the chance of getting rich) consider building your own, that is, training apt engineers. Depending of which aspect of "gaming" you're doing (and since you've mentioned physics I suspect it's a simulation) there are undoubtably programmers who've worked on the real things that you are simulating.
The programmers guild is unknowingly helping the very wealthy individuals move expertise and experience to places where it can be employed for less money.
A non-immigrant engineer (H1-B etc.) is already exporting the training when he goes back home, so that's a non-starter. If the next-best substitute for an imported non-immigrant engineer is offshore development, eliminating H1-Bs is pretty much a wash for local engineers, depending on the momentum (that is, I recognize that once they start doing half of their development in Bangalore they may decide to do all of it there.) I'm confident however that in enough cases the next-best substitute for an H1-B is a local engineer.
training and experience, something that a lot of places seem unwilling to contribute to the industry at large.
This is the same kind of negative externality, on the individual level (times many individuals) as the leveraged-buyout-sell-the-assets method of investment, both of which are akin to eating the seed corn.
A forward-thinking and lucky engineer recognizes that training and other positioning for the next job are part of the compensation for this job, but it should be easier. For now the employers are finding it cheaper in the short term to consider programmers disposable. When you no longer need skills in last year's flavor, lay off that programmer, and when you want skills, find the cheapest programmer who has those skills off the shelf.
I don't know how to change the paradigm so that the employers internalize those costs. In the long term there has to be a gain for employers as well as employees in having loyalty and longevity and stability.
There is a long tradition of bemoaning the shortsightedness that values the quarterly bottom line over long-term investments. The long view has positive externalities, even more when the investment is a leasehold improvement (engineers are not chattel -- they are free to go and to take their skills with them). What can we do, as a nation, to encourage the long view? Among other things, I think we are collectively better off if we have a viable software industry here, and that requires a pool of talent of various levels of experience. The grand new ideas come from individuals in that pool, and so do the middle managers and technical leads to bring those ideas to fruition.
In general, immigration, and immigrants-as-commodities, are regulated so that there is a slow, steady supply. The industries that clamor for H1-Bs are asking to bypass that system. Doing so is obviously to the short-term benefit of consumers of engineering, and to the detriment of domestic suppliers of engineering. Barring special circumstances, we don't do that, we keep the playing field level. The employers claim that there is a skills shortage, and that this is a special circumstance that justifies the bypassing of the usual slow immigration, but there is no inherent skills shortage (as demonstrated by all the unemployed and underemployed engineers) and to the degree that particular skills are needed, any shortage is of the employers' own making. (An experienced programmer can pick up a new language variant quickly.)
This is like oil companies claiming that there is a shortage of gasoline, and therefore, since gasoline is a necessary commodity, they should be subsidized so they can make more gasoline, while they are holding crude oil offshore and otherwise manipulating the market to create that very shortage.
Are the physics and graphics that different in gaming than elsewhere? (I borrowed from gaming sources -- and it drove our netnannying firewall nuts -- when I was doing aero. When I needed to learn some VRML to visualize 4-D trajectories, there you were, and when I needed a quick reference for STARs [Standard Terminal Arrival Routes] to infer flight plans, I found it from a flight simulator more easily than any FAA source.)
I've found the biggest learning curves are for the new employer's implementation. The basic concepts of the domain take only days to learn; the skills, aptitude, and coding practices derived from experience are what the software developer brings to the table.
Are the skills in gaming that different from other kinds of software?
I'm sure there are gaming-specific skills, but I'd imagine a lot of the constraints on the code are not so domain-specific. Too many employers want somebody who has just left the exact position being hired for, and nothing else. As a former co-worker put it, "Have you used this kind of screwdriver before?" (I write good software. I'm particularly good at complex and mathematical algorithms, but I've done it for various domains. I don't know if gaming could use my skills, but I wouldn't have looked in a gaming-specific market.)
how do you propose we actually reach people, if not through those web sites?
If you're looking for a software engineer, look where the software engineers are, rather than where the people who want to work in your field are. Same thing if you wanted to buy a new coffee machine for your break room, I suppose you might find a vendor who specializes in providing coffee machines to the gaming industry, but your coffee needs aren't all that different from any other office, just ask for bids from canteen companies, and the one you choose will be able to find your address, and find the outlet and plumbing in your break room just fine. You'll probably be happier if you choose the vendor who has a selection of herbal teas (if that's what you want) or the right roast of coffee or a machine that makes cappucino, rather than looking for a vendor who has already sold coffee machines to other gaming companies.
After I got my job I updated my resumes on those services, and added verbiage that I was now employed after several months and no longer looking. Somehow the change triggered something, and I got a bunch of calls. I usually asked the headhunters if they'd actually read my resume before contacting me.
Even when I was unemployed, and I'd checked all the boxes that I wasn't interested in relocation (I own a home and have a family. I'm in a high tech area. At some point I might have to pack it in and move to where there are jobs, but if there aren't jobs in greater Boston/128 there aren't likely to be jobs elsewhere. And I can't afford to keep a roof over my family here, while I rent a room "there" (usually metro New Jersey, sometimes defense contracts in Florida or Alabama), and commute home on a regular basis, for $30/hour) I was getting calls for jobs that required relocation, or were obviously not a fit.
An american company that wants to hire an H1B visa worker has to sign a statement saying that they have made an effort to find an american worker to do this job, but have been unable to do so, and therefore, their only option is an H1B visa worker.
No they don't.
eh? how many 35+ year old professionals do you know? How many of them have skills that apply today? It takes more than a good suit, a snappy smile, and a mathematics degree to make it in this world today.
I am a 35+ engineer. Granted I don't have an MIT degree, having attended a neighboring liberal arts school, but I've kept my skills current during 17 years in the field. The Fortran and Pascal (never did more than a week of Cobol) have spooled down to the recesses of my resume, replaced by a lot of C++ and a respectable amount of Java, HTML, Javascript, and SQL for an algorithmist. Are the constraints on a Palm device today all that different from those of a handheld device in the late 80s or on _any_ small computer in that time frame?
I was chatting yesterday with a close associate who got is SB EE/CS from Princeton in 1986 -- his real-time X patent was just granted -- and he's been out of work for about a year; another, AB Math SCL,PBK Harvard '83, PhD CS Cornell '95 is making about what a FrontPage jockey would, and has been unsuccessful in his job search for the better part of a year.
I never understood why, at my last position, they were using a home-brew class library instead of STL, except that it was written by a bunch of recent grads who wanted to write one. (Same company, even though it was less than 10 years old, suffered from a severe lack of a brain-trust.)
Hey, if I were a pencil-pusher I'd be tempted to hire a 20-something with no family obligations (even better if he doesn't even have family here, and who can't leave for a better opportunity) for a discount over someone more experienced. But there is a big difference (and the difference is hypocrisy) between being unable to find qualified workers, and being unable to pay enough to attract them, or being unwilling to hire the "overqualified".
And I haven't priced myself out of the market -- I've got a good salary level, but it's not out of line compared to what the youngsters are making; I'm willing to contract at this point (major cash flow issues) for what I was making 10 years ago, and I'm still not getting nibbles.
It doesn't make economic sense to ask if there is a "shortage" of something in a free market. If you think you see a
shortage, it's because you aren't paying enough.
As far as that goes, it's true.
But it is a perfectly possible situation that one might say "This country needs more of Profession X if we are to stay competitive with other countries, if we are to sustain this rate of growth which Profession X is generating. Universities ought to make more X's, because we can use all they can make, and as many as are made (because kids won't go into that field) will be assured highly lucrative and secure jobs when they graduate. In fact, for the short term, we should alter the usual rules about work visas so we can hire some of those best and bright X's from other countries, to keep lubricated the wheels of Industry X."
However, no matter how much the industry claims it is so, for the case where Profession X = programmer, it's not true.
Up until this recent bust, the evidence was scarcer. Professor Matloff pointed to the low rate of increase of programmer's salaries, to the poor efforts companies made at recruiting, to the self-defeating resume screening, and to the number of people in their 40s or older leaving the profession. It's a lot more painfully obvious now that there is no "shortage" of programmers.
If someone is ready to work for 50% of the nation wide median salary it's his goddamn right to use that to
make himself attractive to the potential employer.
I hope you can maintain that attitude when you're made redundant by someone who'll work for 25% of the national
median salary...
If they want to open all the borders, and close the safety net, that would be fine with me. I wouldn't mind being able to hire some 3rd-worlder to help with the household and all that, or to have the reduced cost of labor reflected in the goods and services I have to pay for. But do it across the board. Don't scream and shout about some false shortage in just one industry (well, not if it's my industry, anyway:-) ) when it just isn't so.
I'm a techie[*] in greater Boston, and none of my friends were unlucky or stupid enough to be out of work this spring and summer. (I've been:-(.)
It's at the point here where a good number of recruiters, folks I've worked with for years, have left their positions! Of those that remain few have any open requisitions even for jobs I wouldn't really want to do in normal times. I'm running about 2 or 3 weeks between interviews, even after telling recruiters I'll work for anybody at any reasonable rate doing anything (and scouring the boards and help wanted ads: there were about 4 positions for software engineers of any sort in Sunday's Boston Globe.)
[*]17+ years of software development in all the right stuff, C/C++, Unix and Windows, Visual Basic, DCOM, Java, HTML, and familiarity with many of the other buzzwords, backed by a decent education and a good, if choppy, track record.
There is no shortage of software engineers on Route 128, and everybody knows it. I'm hoping that if I can wait it out, like I did in 1989, the managers at the companies that are still afloat will stop acting so scared and lift their hiring freezes, and those who are supposedly hiring now will give up waiting weeks or months to find the candidate who exactly matches the requisitions.
Slashdot Mirror
It's dual-intent in the sense that staying home is dual-intent because they could apply for a visa, or being a citizen is dual-intent because you could renounce your citizenship. (Granted that unlike some visas applying for permanent residency doesn't void it, but that doesn't mean it's any faster road to permanent residency than its absence.)
If we compare job levels during irrationally exuberant boom times of 1999 to job levels during the recession of 2002, we'll find "unemployment insurance" running out not only among programmers but among every other field.
In how many other fields where unemployment insurance (no need for sneer-quotes, that's the official name) was running out were there simultaneously calls for importing workers in those fields because of a "desperate labor shortage"?
So let's have such requirements in IT too and let's see how many of the 100,000 unemployed actually can make it through. Most IT jobs are highly skilled and anyone with half a brain who wishes to be in IT shouldn't be able to just because he wants to.
A lot of people in the profession would like such a barrier to entry. How would you implement it? Unlike lawyers, we don't make the laws; unlike doctors and professional engineers we can't appeal to "public safety"; and by our nature and the nature of our employers and the current era forming a trade union is not likely.
What would be the requirements? Many who are in the field today got their undergraduate degrees (or didn't get them) before there were computer science or computer engineering degrees. Good practices are learned on the job, and particular languages and other implementation skills are a very fast moving target.
I can't speak for the other 99,999 unemployed engineers, but I was buzzword-compliant as to education, training, skills and experience. There are similar claims in various articles that Americans don't have necessary skills, but this is rarely backed up by "Here is this job, it needs these skills, I will pay relocation and offer $125,000/year for an American who has these skills or who can become current in them in 3 months time."
It IS about brilliancy, when thousands of candidates from the rest of the world compete for 65,000 visas only the brilliant few can get them.
Do you have any evidence that there is skills-based competition?
Advanced degrees are only a surrogate measure, both foreign and domestic, but apparently the H1-B exemption allowing 20,000 more visas for those holding US advanced degrees is going unfilled.
There may be some who do run-of-the-mill programming jobs but that doesn't discount them as run-of-the-mill, its the visa program that ties them to an employer and doesn't give them an opportunity to go for cutting-edge jobs. They can't change employers as projects change. Disconnect the visa from the employer and you won't see many of them doing run-of-the-mill jobs at "prewailing" rates. There may still be some who come through contacts but the market will take care of such low quality workers.
There are good strategic reasons to offer protectionism for domestic high-tech workers, but I'd get off the bandwagon at that point, where the playing field has been leveled by making H1-B workers no more indentured or otherwise disadvantaged (and thus cheaper) than domestic workers. Here we are in complete agreement.
It's a non-immigrant visa. It allows these folks to get a taste of the American experience for 3 years, send the money home, and get some experience they take home when they leave.
Do they ever thank the thousands of folks who have contributed immensely to the economy?
When your Unemployment Insurance is running out because it's taken more than 6 months to find a job in your profession, one in which you're told there is some pressing shortage of labor, thanking the loyal citizens of other countries who are competing for the same jobs on an unlevel field may not be topmost in your mind.
If H1B was indeed only to hire cheap labor, has anyone wondered why we don't see foreign architects, accountants, lawyers, professors, health care workers etc in the same numbers as IT professionals since it is allowed by law?
Given that one must be PE, CPA, member of the bar, etc. to work in those fields, there is little to wonder about.
Considering a 5% unemployment rate, 65,000 is less than 0.45% of the total unemployed.
That's interesting. What do those two numbers have to do with each other?
The total of unemployed programmers is around 100,000, with more than that number underemployed or working in other fields. (I'm just going to go with Professor Matloff's figures here. The visa is good for 3 or 6 years, and the cap was higher in recent years, so there are several hundred thousand workers currently on H1-B (463,000 as of 2002 (Matloff's note 277 citing Angell.)
What the U.S. should be worried about is not the few jobs that go to these brilliant foreign talent
H1-B is not about brilliancy! It's about run-of-the-mill programmers paid "prevailing" rates which are considerably less than the market rate for good programmers.
but the day when these people do not wish to come to the U.S. anymore!
Why wouldn't they want to come?
There are plenty of programmers who are eligible to work in the US. Many are unemployed/underemployed, and others would leave their current jobs for a guaranteed better deal. It is a lie to say that there are not enough Americans to fill the posts. It may be the case that there are not enough Americans willing to fill your posts at the compensation you are offering.
Please cut the hypocrisy and say what you mean.
So what are our options?
Besides increasing the compensation (which is more than paycheck -- most of us older engineers, who have been through a few layoffs and unemployment, would rather have stability than the chance of getting rich) consider building your own, that is, training apt engineers. Depending of which aspect of "gaming" you're doing (and since you've mentioned physics I suspect it's a simulation) there are undoubtably programmers who've worked on the real things that you are simulating.
The programmers guild is unknowingly helping the very wealthy individuals move expertise and experience to places where it can be employed for less money.
A non-immigrant engineer (H1-B etc.) is already exporting the training when he goes back home, so that's a non-starter. If the next-best substitute for an imported non-immigrant engineer is offshore development, eliminating H1-Bs is pretty much a wash for local engineers, depending on the momentum (that is, I recognize that once they start doing half of their development in Bangalore they may decide to do all of it there.) I'm confident however that in enough cases the next-best substitute for an H1-B is a local engineer.
This is the same kind of negative externality, on the individual level (times many individuals) as the leveraged-buyout-sell-the-assets method of investment, both of which are akin to eating the seed corn.
A forward-thinking and lucky engineer recognizes that training and other positioning for the next job are part of the compensation for this job, but it should be easier. For now the employers are finding it cheaper in the short term to consider programmers disposable. When you no longer need skills in last year's flavor, lay off that programmer, and when you want skills, find the cheapest programmer who has those skills off the shelf.
I don't know how to change the paradigm so that the employers internalize those costs. In the long term there has to be a gain for employers as well as employees in having loyalty and longevity and stability.
There is a long tradition of bemoaning the shortsightedness that values the quarterly bottom line over long-term investments. The long view has positive externalities, even more when the investment is a leasehold improvement (engineers are not chattel -- they are free to go and to take their skills with them). What can we do, as a nation, to encourage the long view? Among other things, I think we are collectively better off if we have a viable software industry here, and that requires a pool of talent of various levels of experience. The grand new ideas come from individuals in that pool, and so do the middle managers and technical leads to bring those ideas to fruition.
In general, immigration, and immigrants-as-commodities, are regulated so that there is a slow, steady supply. The industries that clamor for H1-Bs are asking to bypass that system. Doing so is obviously to the short-term benefit of consumers of engineering, and to the detriment of domestic suppliers of engineering. Barring special circumstances, we don't do that, we keep the playing field level. The employers claim that there is a skills shortage, and that this is a special circumstance that justifies the bypassing of the usual slow immigration, but there is no inherent skills shortage (as demonstrated by all the unemployed and underemployed engineers) and to the degree that particular skills are needed, any shortage is of the employers' own making. (An experienced programmer can pick up a new language variant quickly.)
This is like oil companies claiming that there is a shortage of gasoline, and therefore, since gasoline is a necessary commodity, they should be subsidized so they can make more gasoline, while they are holding crude oil offshore and otherwise manipulating the market to create that very shortage.
Are the physics and graphics that different in gaming than elsewhere? (I borrowed from gaming sources -- and it drove our netnannying firewall nuts -- when I was doing aero. When I needed to learn some VRML to visualize 4-D trajectories, there you were, and when I needed a quick reference for STARs [Standard Terminal Arrival Routes] to infer flight plans, I found it from a flight simulator more easily than any FAA source.)
I've found the biggest learning curves are for the new employer's implementation. The basic concepts of the domain take only days to learn; the skills, aptitude, and coding practices derived from experience are what the software developer brings to the table.
I'm sure there are gaming-specific skills, but I'd imagine a lot of the constraints on the code are not so domain-specific. Too many employers want somebody who has just left the exact position being hired for, and nothing else. As a former co-worker put it, "Have you used this kind of screwdriver before?" (I write good software. I'm particularly good at complex and mathematical algorithms, but I've done it for various domains. I don't know if gaming could use my skills, but I wouldn't have looked in a gaming-specific market.)
how do you propose we actually reach people, if not through those web sites?
If you're looking for a software engineer, look where the software engineers are, rather than where the people who want to work in your field are. Same thing if you wanted to buy a new coffee machine for your break room, I suppose you might find a vendor who specializes in providing coffee machines to the gaming industry, but your coffee needs aren't all that different from any other office, just ask for bids from canteen companies, and the one you choose will be able to find your address, and find the outlet and plumbing in your break room just fine. You'll probably be happier if you choose the vendor who has a selection of herbal teas (if that's what you want) or the right roast of coffee or a machine that makes cappucino, rather than looking for a vendor who has already sold coffee machines to other gaming companies.
After I got my job I updated my resumes on those services, and added verbiage that I was now employed after several months and no longer looking. Somehow the change triggered something, and I got a bunch of calls. I usually asked the headhunters if they'd actually read my resume before contacting me.
Even when I was unemployed, and I'd checked all the boxes that I wasn't interested in relocation (I own a home and have a family. I'm in a high tech area. At some point I might have to pack it in and move to where there are jobs, but if there aren't jobs in greater Boston/128 there aren't likely to be jobs elsewhere. And I can't afford to keep a roof over my family here, while I rent a room "there" (usually metro New Jersey, sometimes defense contracts in Florida or Alabama), and commute home on a regular basis, for $30/hour) I was getting calls for jobs that required relocation, or were obviously not a fit.
An american company that wants to hire an H1B visa worker has to sign a statement saying that they have made an effort to find an american worker to do this job, but have been unable to do so, and therefore, their only option is an H1B visa worker. No they don't.
I am a 35+ engineer. Granted I don't have an MIT degree, having attended a neighboring liberal arts school, but I've kept my skills current during 17 years in the field. The Fortran and Pascal (never did more than a week of Cobol) have spooled down to the recesses of my resume, replaced by a lot of C++ and a respectable amount of Java, HTML, Javascript, and SQL for an algorithmist. Are the constraints on a Palm device today all that different from those of a handheld device in the late 80s or on _any_ small computer in that time frame?
I was chatting yesterday with a close associate who got is SB EE/CS from Princeton in 1986 -- his real-time X patent was just granted -- and he's been out of work for about a year; another, AB Math SCL,PBK Harvard '83, PhD CS Cornell '95 is making about what a FrontPage jockey would, and has been unsuccessful in his job search for the better part of a year.
I never understood why, at my last position, they were using a home-brew class library instead of STL, except that it was written by a bunch of recent grads who wanted to write one. (Same company, even though it was less than 10 years old, suffered from a severe lack of a brain-trust.)
Hey, if I were a pencil-pusher I'd be tempted to hire a 20-something with no family obligations (even better if he doesn't even have family here, and who can't leave for a better opportunity) for a discount over someone more experienced. But there is a big difference (and the difference is hypocrisy) between being unable to find qualified workers, and being unable to pay enough to attract them, or being unwilling to hire the "overqualified".
And I haven't priced myself out of the market -- I've got a good salary level, but it's not out of line compared to what the youngsters are making; I'm willing to contract at this point (major cash flow issues) for what I was making 10 years ago, and I'm still not getting nibbles.
As far as that goes, it's true.
But it is a perfectly possible situation that one might say "This country needs more of Profession X if we are to stay competitive with other countries, if we are to sustain this rate of growth which Profession X is generating. Universities ought to make more X's, because we can use all they can make, and as many as are made (because kids won't go into that field) will be assured highly lucrative and secure jobs when they graduate. In fact, for the short term, we should alter the usual rules about work visas so we can hire some of those best and bright X's from other countries, to keep lubricated the wheels of Industry X."
However, no matter how much the industry claims it is so, for the case where Profession X = programmer, it's not true.
Up until this recent bust, the evidence was scarcer. Professor Matloff pointed to the low rate of increase of programmer's salaries, to the poor efforts companies made at recruiting, to the self-defeating resume screening, and to the number of people in their 40s or older leaving the profession. It's a lot more painfully obvious now that there is no "shortage" of programmers.
- If someone is ready to work for 50% of the nation wide median salary it's his goddamn right to use that to
make himself attractive to the potential employer.
I hope you can maintain that attitude when you're made redundant by someone who'll work for 25% of the national median salary...If they want to open all the borders, and close the safety net, that would be fine with me. I wouldn't mind being able to hire some 3rd-worlder to help with the household and all that, or to have the reduced cost of labor reflected in the goods and services I have to pay for. But do it across the board. Don't scream and shout about some false shortage in just one industry (well, not if it's my industry, anyway :-) ) when it just isn't so.
[*]17+ years of software development in all the right stuff, C/C++, Unix and Windows, Visual Basic, DCOM, Java, HTML, and familiarity with many of the other buzzwords, backed by a decent education and a good, if choppy, track record.
There is no shortage of software engineers on Route 128, and everybody knows it. I'm hoping that if I can wait it out, like I did in 1989, the managers at the companies that are still afloat will stop acting so scared and lift their hiring freezes, and those who are supposedly hiring now will give up waiting weeks or months to find the candidate who exactly matches the requisitions.