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.""
Got a labor shortage? (Score:4, Insightful)
The market will fix the problem. No need for special legislation or guest workers.
Isn't it obvious? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's all the wording for HR (Score:5, Insightful)
So, yes it's a myth that there are not enough people to fill IT positions, there are lots of code monkeys willing to pound keys for their banana but what are the skilled IT people that these larger companies are looking for out of the box and where will we find them right now?
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Insightful)
MCSEs represent something far worse than that. They represent a severe compartmentalization of skills. After twenty years in the IT profession, I'm pretty much going to be forced to take my MCSE mainly because you just can't get a job. For some reason, management believes that this frivolous piece of paper means that a guy is some sort of uber-tech. Well, I've seen these uber-techs melt when they had to deal with a Bind server, or anything particularly weird or challenging.
The real irony here is the most expertise I've seen out of the Microsoft side of things is the guys that can understand Redmond's insane licensing system.
Cheap IT labor is a myth (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of people who have the skill sets they need, they just don't want to pay the kind of wages it takes to get them and keep them.
I am not talking about kids just out of college expecting a high paying job. I am talking about companies that want people with 10+ years worth of experience and want to pay them like a kid out of college.
It has been true for a very long time that the only way you can get a real pay increase in IT it to move somewhere else. Until companies start looking at their employees as a resource and not an expense and pay them accordingly, the situation will not improve.
All these cries to let them import labor is to allow them to rent temporary employees who can be deported at the first sign of "getting uppity" for demanding a living wage.
Re:It's all the wording for HR (Score:5, Insightful)
I seriously get tired of people who expect high-end experts to explode out of the ground whenever they want one. Lot of the time you're going to have to settle for some people who are bright, young, and inexperienced. Mix them up with some more experienced workers, and they'll do okay.
Lot of people say, "I don't want to train someone, knowing that he's going to leave as soon as he gets a better offer." The English translation of that is: "I did this guy a favor by hiring him, and piling crap work on him, and I can't figure out why he'd be so disloyal." Make your company a good place to work, and you won't have such high turnover.
Re:It's A Fact - NOT! (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not disagreeing w/your experience, simply because I wasn't there.
My point is most hiring managers don't know how to interview and frequently don't even know what skills are relevant.
My interviews routinely turn into some sort of geek dick size war (and the candidate must be polite) or a beauty pagent (where did you go to university, my professors are more glamorous than yours) or some other stupid diversion rather than the job at hand.
My least favorite is: are you kewl enough to work in our clubhouse? It's just a job, I get all the love I want at home.
It doesn't help that most jobs are using API's they barely understand. So when someone asks me an obscure question about XML bindings or hibernate, they frequently don't recognize the answer.
Anyway, I'm a little tired of hearing about "the shortage" when in fact there is none. The "shortage" (IMO) is manufactured.
It really is bogus and here's why.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The real "shortage" comes about because business is NOT able to find someone willing to come in and be an all-purpose IT person, network guru, server admin., etc. and accept pay to the tune of $11 per hour. Thats the real shortage issue. So they will further outsource the jobs and bring in foreigners on H1B's to do those jobs at substantially reduced rates. IBM and a handful of other international companies are notorious for this.
Really what it will come down to is let these large companies hire the kids for $11. You really do get what you paid for. Eventually when things begin to collapse for many of these companies, they will be force to bring in people with knowledge and experience, and best of all; pay them what they're worth.
Remember that: "What goes around; comes around"
Re:Cheap IT labor is a myth (Score:3, Insightful)
If they don't take it seriously, they can't expect to attract top talent.
Distorted perceptions (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's all the wording for HR (Score:2, Insightful)
I actually don't believe that on Slashdot, people don't RTFA, but in any case, here is the conclusion of the article. Pretty strong and pretty damning IMHO.
The way HR writes job ads is often the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Job ads often have a huge list of "requirements" as well, and an applicant missing even one of them might well be screened out. An example of this? Seasoned web developers might not bother listing FTP on their resume. In their view, requiring a web developer to have FTP experience is like requiring a carpenter to know how to use a saw. But that failure to list FTP on the resume might well mean the application is automatically trashed. I have seen HR screen out applicants for a web developer position because they neglected to list HTTP, DHTML, and Photoshop on their resume. And don't get me started about HR's lack of understanding of the difference between a web developer and a web designer.
If HR departments are the source of some of the statistical and anecdotal evidence being trotted forth in support of the existence of this "shortage", I am not surprised the picture looks grim.
Apprenticeships and lock-in (Score:5, Insightful)
There's yer problem, right there, guv.
The problem is that the IT industry, like many industries, expects to find a pool of skilled and experienced available staff, at the drop of a hat, without the company putting in any effort themselves.
The solution is apprenticeships - a variant on "I wouldn't start from here", I admit, but the only workable solution nonetheless. Start the recruitment process two years in advance, and train up the monkeys to become experts. Another benefit is that apprenticeships, unlike university degrees, have no fixed syllabus and can quickly flex to meet new skill demand trends.
The problem with apprenticeships is that various governments have regulations against locking-in staff for long periods. Companies who invest in apprenticeships see their newly-trained staff bugger off to a better-paying competitor, who can afford to pay more since they haven't invested in apprenticeships, the moment they qualify. Governments need to relax regulations on locking-in apprentices to their sponsoring employer. Governments also need to give companies better ability to fire apprentices who fail to meet expected grades on time.
Cheap, experienced, immediately available - pick any two.
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Insightful)
So, to sum up, I see no shortage of programmers, just a shortage of good programmers.
Of course testers are well payed (Score:5, Insightful)
I found out our testers are payed on a par with or more than software developers the other day. At first I was a little angry, because I get angry whenever anyone is paid more than software developers because "we make your fscking products!".
Then I thought "What would it take to get me into that job?" and I realised they were welcome to the money.
Re:It's all the wording for HR (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do you get these "skilled" people? It takes years of experience. When companies say that they are "only outsourcing low-level jobs", I call bullshit -- they are, as the farmers say, eating their seed corn. If you don't take in new people and allow them to mature on the "low level" stuff, where the hell does management think that the highly skilled people will come from? You don't normally step out of school with 20 years seniority and experience already under your belt...
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what we are facing in our organization. About 66% of our openings are technical, but our HR director is clueless -- not only in writing effective job descriptions and requirements, but also when it comes to setting compensation packages that attract good candidates. Our business analysts (which are a dime dozen) make as much or more than our application engineers.
It's almost a conspiracy: inability to hire good application engineers, limits our ability to automate business analytic processes, and increases the demand for spread sheet jockeys. Good times.
Re:It's all the wording for HR (Score:3, Insightful)
It's all about wages... (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.fispace.org/home/2004/01/_when_i_woke_up.html [fispace.org]
Professor really needs to look again... (Score:2, Insightful)
As others have said, the argument really boils down to skilled IT staff, what employers are willing to pay and what these skilled IT workers are willing to accept.
If you can buy cheaper skilled IT workers from abroad, it makes the employers happy but will ultimately lower the value of these roles making them less attractive to new workers [slashdot.org]. Rather than being self-serving, it's a short term strategy that ultimately is self-defeating. As a responsible employer that realizes they're only one small cog in the national machinery, they need to realize what this impact will have.
We also have a lack of skilled IT workers coming out of the universities, largely because universities in the Western countries are focussed on number of students and number of degrees awarded. They are driven by income and results, not by the quality of their teaching. Again, this is self-defeating as we, the nation, now pay more for tuition that adds less value to ourselves. So we're spending more and gaining less. Nationally, this is a slippery slope that leads only downhill.
Personally, what we are prepared to accept as a wage is the final part of the problem. Our acceptable wage is largely driven by our expectations of what we want and our living costs. As living costs rise, we expect our income to keep pace. If we're also led to believe that we're chasing an American dream of a white picket fence, wife, 2.4 kids, dog and a pickup then we expect a little more money. After all, isn't that why we're working in this country. Didn't you sell that idea to us? If we can't achieve that dream, we'll go somewhere else.
As a professor and former technology CEO, I'd question whether Vivek Wadwha understands the labor pool in the USA. It's a complex arrangement of personal and corporate expectations mixed in with some realities, aspirations and a need for us to exist in the real world. If you want us to live near you in Silicon Valley, you need to make sure we can live nearby. Wisconsin salaries don't work in California.
I'm a 38 year old freelance computer consultant with no degree, no longer living in the country I was born in and started work in. My skills were honed from experience and were all gained outside of any classroom. I have struggled to find skilled IT workers, struggled to find work myself and been on both sides of the fence arguing for IT staff to be paid more and also trying to keep costs down. There is no soundbite that can solve this problem.
I see H1Bs helping to solve the lack of teaching within universities and its disassociation from industry but this has to be a short-term fix or the country will suffer. Devaluing IT jobs, will only bring fewer CS students so you really need to turn this around by championing more technology universities that focus on quality, not income or results. If anything only 75% of students should pass each year, if you get more you need to make it harder. Life is hard, we pass and we fail in every aspect of our lives. Death is the ultimate failing grade.
Don't bring in H1Bs without fixing the real problem.
Re:Completely disagree (Score:-1, Insightful)
Here is how the free market works. You offer $X. You get a person who does Y. You decide Y isn't goog enough so you HAVE TO OFFER MORE THAN $X.
Stop paying "market wage" and complaining about what you get.
Re:It's A Fact (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW, unlike some of the other posts have suggested, we were offering a highly competitive salary of £60,000 per year (~$120,000).
Bob
Re:No myth here (Score:4, Insightful)
I think this is where the hobbyist has the advantage over the person with the cert.
Re:Completely disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
C is not longer an important language to learn in College. If you want to get a good C programmer, you're looking for somebody of the ages of 38 to 52 years of age. If you're stuck keeping up with legacy systems, that's what you're going to find out.
Now programmers learn Java in fancy IDE's. Never having to learn a pointer or a pointer re-direction. Make sure that you're not maintaining PL/1, COBOL or Assembly... if you have someone decent maintaining that code, make sure that he/she is happy.
You have to keep in mind that a lot of those folks come out of 2 year colleges or with the liberalism in today's universities, many of them spent their time taking macrame or latin literature as part of their CS degree.
My 2 cents...
Re:Apprenticeships and lock-in (Score:2, Insightful)
In the United States, indentured servitude was outlawed a long time ago for good reason. No one is allowed to sign away their basic rights or force others to do the same. In that case the disease would be worse than the cure.
If you want to set up an apprenticeship situation, have the master and apprentice work for a contracting company, not directly for the serviced company, and make sure the pay scales with the growing capabilities of the apprentice. That way you can lock in the contracts with the good companies based on the quality of your work. And companies that do not do apprenticing will not be able to supply as many people at the same cost, since their pay base will be significantly hire (everyone will be high-paid).
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right on the other count, too. Throw a bash prompt in front of an MCSE and watch them look at you like your dog does when you tell him a joke.
Re:It's all the wording for HR (Score:0, Insightful)
--------
I think you are forgetting the imaginary shortage that happens when someone has to train their H1B replacement. If there was a real shortage, there'd be no one to train the replacement.
If they are SKILLED enough to train their replacement, they are SKILLED enough to do the job in the first place. Explain this please?
Further, a lot of the guys that I saw replaced were replaced with snotnosed fresh graduates from [wherever] that didn't know anything practical, who went on to develop projects that all failed, simply because the real world is a little different than a school lab.
One anecdote is the 25 year old Oracle Certified DBA with a master's degree, that couldn't install Oracle on a Sun server. The guy he replaced would have had it done in just under 20 minutes. This kid fussed with it and didn't ask for help until he had been "trying" to get it to work for 2 weeks.
It's no wonder the project failed. Two weeks into the project and the database server isn't operational yet. That project is in trouble if that's the sort of issue (getting a java environment installed) that brings things to a standstill and the "overqualified" person is afraid to ask for help. 4m dollars and 1.5 years later the project was failed and people were scratching their heads and wondering what happened.
To put it into perspective, I was the one that helped him. I had the installer running in 5 minutes. I knew unix but until that day had never opened a console on a Sun server.
At the end of the day, sometimes it's just cheaper to pay the "over paid underskilled" Americans who can actually get the job done. They may not know the latest greatest UML based code generator, or the intricacies of the different kernel scheduler paradigms, but they are capable of engineering a portfolio management system in j2ee and installing a db server.
Even a master's degree in computer science is meaningless if the person carrying it around is nothing but a schmuck who's good at passing tests, writing papers, and searching for code solutions on google. Those skills don't make a good software engineer by themselves, but will enable you to get a masters degree in some cases.
-AC
Sysadmin pay, lowering standards. (Score:-1, Insightful)
For $65K/yr you can get the caiber of sysadmin who is MSCE Certified and will know that the 2.5TB RAID5 Array NTFS volume on your primary users' fileserver containing all their home directories, which just refused to mount after a simple reboot of Windows 2003 and is now saying that it is not formatted (Do you want to format it now Y/N?) will take a re-creating of that RAID volume on the controller card, a fresh NTFS format and a restore-from-tape operation and he'll have the system back up and running in about 9 or 10 hours because that's how long the operation to restore from backup tapes will take.
For $100K/yr you can get the kind of sysadmin (who may or may not be certified with any paper cert) who knows how to recognize that the raid controller card just crapped on the NTFS partition's boot sector because it's a cheap-ass Dell PERC card which chronically fails to sync and flush its write cache to disk at shutdown, and all he needs to do is run a freeware partition doctoring utility to copy the raw NTFS partition's backup boot sector back over the primary copy and one more reboot, then the whole system will be up and running again with all volumes mounted in under 15 minutes and then run a simple CHKDSK on the volume to check for any leftover filesystem errors.
The death of the entry level position (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No myth here (Score:3, Insightful)
Comments like this are just plain ignorant. A decent sysadmin (and those are few and far between, the above article notwithstanding) doesn't care what OS a box is running. The actual processes of adminning a system or network are pretty much universal. Whether it's done with a GUI or a command like is just one small detail.
Re:Got a labor shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why raise wages, when you can convince Congress there is a desperate shortage of labor, so that you can import labor from overseas and bully your workers over wages by tying a work visa to a stick and holding it in front of them?
People need to read the statement for what it is. "There is a labor shortage [at the wage we are willing to pay]."
Re:The "no shortage" talk is also self-serving (Score:2, Insightful)
I have no problem with the spirit of the H1B Visa program, but with the current manifestation the primary beneficiaries are large companies wanting to keep payroll low.
Why should I put up with IT? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Completely disagree (Score:2, Insightful)
From my reading of your hiring practices, the interview questions your using do not correlate to the 3 items for which you're looking.
You're basing your hiring on the following criteria:
Ability to reproduce rote algorithms.
Ability to solve problems on a particular platform. (python, foxpro, php, etc.)
Ability to remember items from high-school and freshman year college.
A number of highly qualified hires I've interviewed would fail your process. The candidates I'm looking for don't waste their time memorizing algorithms, or studying freshman level CS. All of your interview questions could be solved by googling.
Instead, you should be looking for candidates that can explain the pros and cons of different development methodologies, ask intelligent questions when given a development scenario, and explain how they would approach solving a problem. These three items would give you a much better correlation to the 3 skills your looking for.
There's always a shortage (Score:4, Insightful)
When you bring lots of good people into an area, you don't take jobs away from the less skillful, you create new jobs.
The problem with the H1B program is that it is structured, not just to bring in already abundant entry level labor, but to prime offshoring efforts by kicking that labor out of the country once it's obtained enough experience to be really useful. At the very least, we should not have a guest worker program for highly skilled workers, but one that clears the way for permanent residency and citizenship.
Even better, we should scrap the whole thing and fund a massive postgraduate fellowship program in a variety of technology areas, each fellowship accompanied with a handsome stipend and an invitation at the end to become a permanent resident. Of course, some knuckleheads would say it's unfair to tax Americans to pay for fellowships they can't apply for, which completely misses the point. I'm not talking about people of the caliber that are going to have trouble finding a job. I'm talking about people whose presence will create wealth and jobs.
Or, employers could compete... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a market solution that doesn't involve short-term contract slavery: employers could compete to retain their valued and newly-trained staff.
Some organizations already do this, and succeed in keeping people for a long time. Others seem to never want what they already have: The new guy with the shiny resumé can command more than the solid employee they *know* has reported to work for two years for $10,000 less. So they talk about salary freezes, while they're hiring people for more -- and that's to say nothing of what they're paying the guys in marketing....
Of course, the market seems to let some of both kinds of organizations survive, so maybe the second type is on to something.
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, flame-resistant suit on here, but - what, exactly does that statement say? In other words, why *don't* you have any certs? You say you've been turned down for a job for not having the A+ cert. You and I both know that it's a trivial cert to get, right?
Either the test is trivially simple for you, so you can pick up a quick "A+ certification for dummies" book, skim it on the train over to the testing site (or even walk in with no preparation at all), pass the cert with flying colors, and be out $100 (if you can't get your current employer to cover the cost of the test, which you usually can) and an hour of your life, and not be turned down for a job again for something so trivial.
Or - the test is difficult, it takes some preparation and experience to get through - in which case having one actually *does* say something (much to yours and my surprise) about your knowledge, determination, and commitment.
I was required (strongly asked) to get a couple of Java certifications by my then-employer back in '01. By then I'd been doing Java for a couple of years, so I figured I'd blow through the test with flying colors. Oops - turns out there were quite a few things I didn't know. Turns out that I actually learned some things studying for the test, things that actually turned out to be actually useful.
Contrary to /., taking a test doesn't make you stupider. Passing it doesn't mean you're smart,
but it does mean you're at the very least smarter than somebody who can't even pass the test.
Re:It's A Fact (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The way HR writes job ads is often the problem (Score:2, Insightful)
I've told several employers and HR people during interviews that they're misguided in their job descriptions. I actually just went through an interview for a general Systems Admin / Systems analyst position, and this is pretty much how it went:
"So... You don't have a bachelors in computer science or computer engineering, I see..." (although I do have a BA)
"Nope, I'm not a programmer"
"I don't understand...?"
"Those degrees you mentioned are programming degrees. Perhaps it is I who am confused. Are you looking to hire a programmer?"
"No... We're looking for xyz"
"So if you don't mind my asking, why are you looking for someone who hold a B.Sc or a CompEng degree, which are programming degrees?"
You get the picture, totally pisses me off. That and people who want an experienced jack of all trades who MUST have experience with various things that a jack of all trades / generalist wont. i.e. 'Must have experience in Exchange, Server 2003, WhateverSpamProgram 3.2, VB,
re: testing not a revenue-generating position (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say testing is VERY much a revenue-generating component of a business that sells software! Software inherently contains bugs, because people are not perfect. As my software coding friend used to fondly point out, "If I'm 99% accurate with all the code I write, that means roughly 1 line in every 100 I write needs fixing!"
Back when most software development efforts were 1 man projects, it was a "given" that the person writing the code would also find and fix the bugs in it. But when you develop today's large applications in a team, it makes sense to offload some of that work to another department. You don't need to waste a developer's time going back through their code for days, trying to make sure they've caught as many mistakes as possible. Delegate that out to a testing team, who can flush out the problems (even using automated tools to do repetitious stuff nobody will bother to do manually), and turn in the list of flaws found to the developers, so they're working on more focused problems.
In that perspective, a QA tester really *is* a part of the software development team, and IMHO, should be paid equally well. Both groups are working to accomplish the goal of getting a product released that delivers on what it promises.
Re:No myth here (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Got a labor shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Abusing foreign workers is the POINT of the whole thing. Those who are lucky enough to get an H1-B visa are then owned by their sponsor.
This is not a free market. If it were, we would just throw the doors open and invite any foreign IT worker to "come on down". We set up the rules so they have to have a sponsor or go home.
In general, they are paid less than a US Citizen - and there is not a lot of incentive to give them fair raises. They can't quit and look for a new job unless they can find a new sponsor.
This is a generality. Like most generalities it does not apply to every foreign worker. And it's part of a larger employment situation where IT workers in their twenties are preferred. If you do not yet have a life you don't mind 14 hour days.
And in the mean time, very few have noticed that one of Microsoft's published future plans is to dumb down IT to the point where any idiot can do it with the right software support. This may or may not be a major threat, but once they figure out how to build an operating system that actually works, you had better watch out.
Re:Got a labor shortage? (Score:4, Insightful)
I actually have to agree with Bill Gates for once... There is a shortable of skilled IT workers. Not of IT workers, but skilled IT workers. How many of you have to work other sysadmins from differnet companies? How many times do you want to go over there, and do it for them, because you think they're so inept that walking them through it on the phone is just too painfully slow.
Skilled, the key word for today.
Re:Got a labor shortage? (Score:3, Insightful)
The market will fix the problem. No need for special legislation or guest workers.
We don't have a special /right/ to the jobs here; and "globalization of the economy" is serving to drive that home.
. Frankly, I find the quality of work that my present company receives from offshore to be abysmal -- which is the other side of this coin. Somewhere between the low-mid quality, underpriced work that most offshore companies (and contractors brought in from overseas) provide; and the mid-high quality, overpriced work that most onshore employees and contractors provide, there's a happy medium.
The process of finding that is a painful and expensive one for everyone.
Re:Got a labor shortage? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Insightful)
because it can cost you huge amounts of money to get one unless your employer actually agrees to pay for it?
I've looked at certs and paying for them out of my own pocket. But $10k or so for something that will be obsolete in a few years isn't cost effective for me.
Re:Yeah, whatever. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Of course they are - increased supply means lower prices.
Re:Got a labor shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually left IT because I couldn't compete with the number of letters people waved around all the time. While they were off in their diploma mill classroom environments I was working for a living, gaining critical knowledge and problem solving skills. By the time I got around to college to formalize my education I was in possession of more knowledge than most of my professors. The courses were pure review. I dropped out a year into the program. My cohort moved on primarily to help desk and other menial IT positions. About 5% wound up with skilled IT jobs.
Prior to my college fiasco however I was in a shop that specialized in consumer and small business IT needs. I really enjoyed how my high school dropout boss who taught me more about IT than all my professors combined used to treat these paper MCSEs who'd walk through the door. I'll never forget the guy who came in right out of the clear blue and proclaimed that he would accept a position at a salary of $100k/year. My boss asked him what experience and/or qualifications he had, he responded "I've just completed my MCSE certification."
My boss said something about toilet paper and I was already in tears. My ears stopped working I was laughing so hard. I wonder if he found his dream job. :)
Then there's the guy who phoned in to the store asking for clarification of Windows 98's routing capabilities as he was constructing a network consisting of roughly a dozen computers, two NICs apiece running CAT-5 crossover cables between each computer to form some kind of, well, I guess modern token-ring setup of some kind. My boss offered to sell him a switch but was told that was excessive hardware purchase (as if the extra dozen NICs were just included with the PCs or something) and that he was an MCSE and he knows what he is doing! Now will you help me or not?
Yep. Told the guy he should become a garbage man because he's too damned stupid to work on computers. The guy came down to the store to continue the conversation in person. My boss apologized; said he was out of line. Said he was too stupid to be a garbage man. Never heard from Mr. MCSE again. Never did sell him that switch.