IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth 619
buzzardsbay writes "For the past few years, we've heard a number of analysts and high-profile IT industry executives, Bill Gates and Craig Barrett among them, promoting the idea that there's an ever-present shortage of skilled IT workers to fill the industry's demand. But now there's growing evidence suggesting the "shortage" is simply a self-serving myth. "It seems like every three years you've got one group or another saying, the world is going to come to an end there is going to be a shortage and so on," says Vivek Wadhwa, a professor for Duke University's Master of Engineering Management Program and a former technology CEO himself. "This whole concept of shortages is bogus, it shows a lack of understanding of the labor pool in the USA.""
It's A Fact (Score:5, Informative)
Bob
Re:So easy to scam system (Score:1, Informative)
I do not believe that they have changed substantially since then.
Search for prevailing wage: this would be you 'going rate'. What you suggest in point 4 is illegal.
http://www.murthy.com/mb_pdf/nov2803.pdf [murthy.com]
Re:No myth here (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The way HR writes job ads is often the problem (Score:2, Informative)
I adjusted my resume 4 months ago, listing every possible skill I had, including such oddballs as AMIX administration, and surprisingly got responses. It appears listing every version of HTML I've worked with looks good to HR, even tho they're brain-dead obvious to me...
Re:No myth here (Score:-1, Informative)
The real problem most people don't realize is that there are NO magic silver bullets for finding good candidates.
Re:MS Licensing (Score:4, Informative)
Every time I do this, i remind "whoever" is listening: every time a customer has to think about this, they move some deltaE closer to saying "fuck you guys" and jumping to F/OSS, where if nothing else, licensing is certainly _perceptually_ less confusing.
Anytime a business makes it hard for customers to give it money, they're doing something wrong.
Expecting customers to keep track of licenses (with paper and a filing cabinet, in some cases!) and all kinds of other stuff is completely ridiculous. A big part of the problem is that internally, we're for the most part completely insulated from it. We do ok at responding to pain that we know about and have exposure to, and pretty badly at pain we don't understand or know about.
I'm sorry for how lame your licensing experience has been and wish I could offer some help. I'm also interested in knowing more about your virtual test lab.. one of my last projects in Redmond was working on the automation system that ran all of Visual Studio's tens of thousands of automated tests across thousands of PCs. The feedback I get is that very few companies are doing automated software testing, so I'm interested in what you're working on.
Re:Apprenticeships and lock-in (Score:4, Informative)
That's not too far from what used to be fairly common at a lot of companies, especially those that hired lots of engineers. It wasn't really an apprenticeship but it sort of felt that way in that newly hired engineers would float around between different departments learning different parts of the business for maybe a year before they settled in within a more permanent spot. That seemed to be changing, though, not long after I joined a large midwestern engineering firm. The newer guys were being hired directly into a group and expected to stay there for a long time. I preferred the older way of acclimating new hires. You got a better idea of the rest of the company and the various departments. Nowadays its more of a "hire a hit man" mentality when bringing in new people. It's no wonder they tend to not stick around very long. After they've been hired to fill an immediate niche need, they know the company won't really have any great desire to keep them around.
Re:Got a labor shortage? (Score:2, Informative)
Hire people willing to work for less.
The market will fix the problem. No need for special legislation or hire wages.
Sorry, I don't mean to be an ass, I just am, but your post bothers me because it appears to imply legislation allowing more people into our country is market interference, but the most true solution to letting the market decide is to let people in willing to work for less. We all save money as the cost of services is reduced, and unless we value Americans as people more than others it is a net positive. Even if we don't value Americans for it can be a net positive for our country. As long as foreign workers are not being abused (paid way to little, or forced to take pay cuts or lose their work status, in other words, as long as their foreignness is not being used to artificially suppress the wage), then it is a good thing. It is exactly the same economically as a machine getting invented to do the work. I mean think of the number of farm workers put out of business by the diesel engine. Or the number of computers [atariarchives.org] put out of work by computer scientists and electric engineers.
Re:Yeah, whatever. (Score:3, Informative)
The situation in the US is not the way you are portraying it. Foreign workers are well paid (by definition, given the kind of visa they need to enter the country) so they are not driving salaries down
Except [news.com] that [eetimes.com] you're [infoworld.com] wrong [gao.gov].
Re:Got a labor shortage? (Score:2, Informative)
See:
http://machinedesign.com/ContentItem/71819/LelandTeschlersEditorialFinallythetruthaboutengineeringjobs.aspx [machinedesign.com]
An editorial.Finally, the truth about engineering jobs
Members of the U.S. House got a surprising message during a recent meeting on Americas science and engineering workforce: Everything they thought they knew about science and engineering employment was wrong.
Specifically, there is no shortage of scientists or engineers. In fact, there are substantially more scientists and engineers graduating in the U.S. than there are jobs