Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 134 posts

Re: The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

#41

Post by mseebach »

polymatter wrote: post #22
gnoway wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

kneejerk reaction: like what? I haven't thought a lot about this, but I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'. What other industries/disciplines are you thinking of?

if my hypothetical children needed guidance, I'd probably advice on accounting. Huge industry that ain't going anywhere, lots of work at the low end, lots of pay at the high end, still applicable if you change job later, generally respected culturally.

What about accounting makes it inherently less outsourceable than programming? In a world where STEM is not a practical career, presumably because it's all done in low-wage countries overseas, how is accounting still being done in-house?

Re: The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

#42

Post by kyllo »

This article makes a big mistake in conflating software development with STEM in general. It shows a stock photo of a guy looking through a microsope (btw why is he looking through the lens if the microscope is plugged into a monitor? Seems redundant...), when the focus of the article is Microsoft, Google, and Facebook wanting to raise the H1-B visa cap so they can bring in more cheap coders from India.

Is there a shortage of STEM graduates in the U.S.? Absolutely not. We graduate far more STEM students (especially in research-oriented sciences like biology, chemistry, physics) than we have jobs for. These research jobs are mostly funded by government grants, and the government is cutting back due to unrelated political issues with the budget, of which the root cause is mostly failures in the finance sector.

Is there a shortage of programmers in the U.S.? Perhaps. There is massive, and growing, demand in all sectors for software developers, and our universities aren't graduating them faster than demand growth, and as a result software dev salaries are rising (or at least not falling).

But programming is not STEM, and these jobs are not scientific research jobs. They are mostly jobs building commercial software products or automating business processes. These companies have figured out that they can squeeze a little more profit out of their business model by bringing in Indians who will write code for less money and can't job-hop because they're indentured by their visa status. So when they whine about a "talent shortage," they really just mean "American programmers are too expensive" because the relatively low supply/demand ratio means they still have to actually pay them a livable FTE salary and benefits--unlike most other job categories where they can and do hire commodity temp labor. (There are several entire companies dedicated to temp/contract staffing for administrative and QA positions at Microsoft.)

These companies will pay lip service to the concept of improving the US education system to crank out more highly-skilled STEM graduates, make our country more competitive, etc. But really, it's just whining about microeconomic factors that hinder their constant efforts to trim their HR budgets. They just want cheaper coders, period.

Re: The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

#43

Post by nthj »

migrantgeek wrote: post #29

I don't doubt that companies are trying to get a piece of legislation passed that allows them to pay employees less. Increasing margins, that's what companies do. I do take issue with the idea that the talent shortage is a myth. I work for a company willing to pay a six figure starting salary plus good benefits in what's supposed to be a recession and we cannot fill our headcount. My team has been looking to fill 2 h…

I know a good developer on the market as of 3 AM this morning. Looking for remote. My email is in my profile.

Re: The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

#44

Post by danso »

willholloway wrote: post #31

As a working coder whose interests are not served by increasing US supply of coders through immigration I have a financial motivation in this meme spreading. I oppose increasing immigration because coding is one of the few remaining pathways to a solid middle class life in the US, and I don't want that to change. That said, quality hackers can feel very secure in 2013 and for the foreseeable future. The point the art…

I know that in every profession, each passionate practitioner thinks that no cheap hire can possibly replace them. And yet I think this case is especially true for the developer of custom solutions. If you believe that the majority of time spent on software is in its post-release maintenance and iteration phase, then hiring mediocre developers to build the product will only result in massively increased product lifetime costs. And throwing more mediocre developers at it won't fix the underlying issues.

It's hard to think of other building-type professions where one person can have so much sway over a company's initial success. And no, this is not because programmers are inherently more vital than civil engineers or doctors...it's because programmers have so few limits and regulations to deal with...as has been said on HN many times, just about anyone can spin up a Heroku dyno, load up incredibly powerful FOSS, and attempt a worthwhile product with little cost beside time and effort. Whereas a doctor, it doesn't matter how brilliant you are, you're going to have to jump through a lot of hoops and pay a lot of dues before you can fully develop your revolutionary treatment.

Re: The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

#45

Post by ardit33 »

graycat wrote: post #17

The article just assumes as clear and given that the immigrants have better skills, but there is no explanation for just how that could be. The technical education system in Taiwan and India is much better than in the US? Tough to believe.

Not necessary, but the top 10% of any of those countries (even third world countries), will be better than the average US dev. (not necessary better than the top 10% of engineers coming out of US).

That means that bringing the top 10% of the rest of the world here, will bring the average up, which means harder technical stuff gets done, which by itself opens up more jobs for the economy.

Any good immigration policy should make sure to filter, and bring in only the best, and making sure that they are not underpaid. One way to do that is not to tie the visa to an employer, and making sure a engineer with lets say 5 years of experience coming here has a job that pays more than the average of a engineer with 5 years of experience makes, and remove loopholes on this

This will reduce H-1B missuse from the indian/chinese consulting companies, and allow the H-1B holder to switch jobs as they choose and not to be tied down to one employer.

After 3 years of working under this visa, an H-1B holder should be able to get the green card, and have ultimate freedom on their lives.

Making these changes will just both allow best engineers in, and reduce the abuse that may happen due to the current rules on tying an employee to a employer (intenured servitude in the 21st century).

Re: The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

#46

Post by stevvooe »

skwirl wrote: post #16

As someone who has been working as a software developer for five years since graduating, the claims made by this article are completely contrary to my personal experience. Finding good developers is hard. We spend months trying to hire for positions, sometimes interviewing dozens of people, before we find someone. And we pay well, use modern technologies, have a great group of existing developers, and don't expect an…

Agreed that the articles reasoning is weak surrounding the "takin' o'r jerbs!" arguments; the cost of a lousy developer is insurmountable. However, the comparison with H-1B and indentured servitude is what is all to accurate in my personal experience. It's stomach churning to watch an individual, often a friend, be squeezed into an uncomfortable situation by an employer because of the conditions of their visa. H-1B visa's tip too much of the balance in employer/employee negotiations to the employer's favor.

Re: The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

#47

Post by [deleted] »

skwirl wrote: post #16

As someone who has been working as a software developer for five years since graduating, the claims made by this article are completely contrary to my personal experience. Finding good developers is hard. We spend months trying to hire for positions, sometimes interviewing dozens of people, before we find someone. And we pay well, use modern technologies, have a great group of existing developers, and don't expect an…

[deleted]

Re: The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

#48

Post by ximeng »

migrantgeek wrote: post #29

I don't doubt that companies are trying to get a piece of legislation passed that allows them to pay employees less. Increasing margins, that's what companies do. I do take issue with the idea that the talent shortage is a myth. I work for a company willing to pay a six figure starting salary plus good benefits in what's supposed to be a recession and we cannot fill our headcount. My team has been looking to fill 2 h…

Why not advertise on hn whoishiring?

Re: The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

#49

Post by VLM »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #33
skwirl wrote: post #16

As someone who has been working as a software developer for five years since graduating, the claims made by this article are completely contrary to my personal experience. Finding good developers is hard. We spend months trying to hire for positions, sometimes interviewing dozens of people, before we find someone. And we pay well, use modern technologies, have a great group of existing developers, and don't expect an…

The issue with the H1-B is that those workers are then close to trapped in a specific company at specific terms. It would almost certainly be better to allow employers to sponsor immigrants for a green card, or a 6-year residency card or something of that ilk, because then the employee can leave a bad working environment/move to where they are better suited. Additionally, it is problematic that the government is enco…

"and at the very least, the slave trade was one of the primary contributors to our capitalist development"

You're going to get the amateur historians all wound up with talk like that.

A better explanation was the Whitney cotton gin enabled mechanized processing about a century before the Rust mechanized harvester was invented, so you had explosive growth in a couple strategies for providing human cotton pickers ranging from ownership pre civil war to indentured servitude / peasanthood after the civil war. The gin wasn't enough to kick industrialization into high gear, although I'm sure it helped a tiny irrelevant bit. By the time they (the people) were made obsolete by the Rust Harvester, and shipped up north to the factories, we already had the worlds biggest factories to ship them to... so much for that argument. The south has never amounted to anything from an industrial standpoint until very recently and even that's a bit of a stretch.

Or if you were alluding to the earlier triangle of unhappiness (whatever it was called, triangle of something miserable anyway) then we had pretty much maxed out molasses/rum/human transportation well before the industrial revolution. The limiter was like how much land can you cultivate in the Caribbean and how many slaves can you ship there, they didn't have industrialization in the new england rum distillation industry as a limiter to growth at that time so there was no pressure for improvement. Distillation is not much of a motivator for industrialization anyway. Every couple years I alternate between brewing/distilling doesn't get enough credit for industrialization and thinking they already get too much credit.

A pretty good argument overall, other than getting the relevance of slaves in capitalism all wrong.

Re: The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

#50

Post by digz »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #39
digz wrote: post #18

This study was done by a 'non-partisan' group that's heavily backed by unions. Doesn't seem too non-partisan to me when you consider how significantly anti-immigration unions have been over the last century. The data may be valid, but the interpretation is always the most important... and a union-backed group masquerading as a non-partisan think tank hardly seems unbiased.

It's kind of funny that unions are anti-immigrant: I think this (along with their past tendencies to be anti-black, etc) have hamstrung a lot of them. Immigrant laborers and American-born laborers have a lot more in common than not: they should both be pushing for higher-wages, more job availability, and better working conditions. As such, the unions should be embracing, rather than rejecting, new immigrants, and mak…

Unions are not terribly interested in overall productivity/output. Their goal is to maximize the value to their constituents (either through wages or working conditions). By decreasing/holding stagnant the supply of labor available, they are able to force wages to be higher than they should be. Of course, as economists understand, this causes all sorts of problems.

Unions really aren't that different from corporate lobbyists...

What's more impressive I think is how vehemently anti-immigration (and to your point, anti-black at various times) the Democratic party has historically been (mostly driven by union influence) and how quickly that seems to have been forgotten by most.

Post reply on HN