Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony
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Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony
#2... "may be phony"
Oh LOL, isn't this well known? Are people really just now figuring out NOW that this is, and always has been, about lowering expenses for these big companies? I mean, they aren't really even trying to hide this!
"our immigration system has failed to keep pace." The nation's outdated limits and "convoluted green-card process," she said, had left firms like hers "hampered in hiring the talent that they need."" ... "Only a few weeks after her June 2 talk, the San Diego company announced that it would cut its workforce, of whom two-thirds are engineers, by 15%, or nearly 5,000 people"
Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony
#3> What Tornquist didn't mention was that Qualcomm may then have had more engineers than it needed: Only a few weeks after her June 2 talk, the San Diego company announced that it would cut its workforce, of whom two-thirds are engineers, by 15%, or nearly 5,000 people.
How do we know that 15% isn't mostly coming out of the non-engineering 33%? And they may well still be hiring engineers massively.
Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony
#4The very real issue is the use of H1-B visas to drive down the cost of labor across the board. Its not a coincidence that real wages in the US have declined since 1970 while the percentage of population immigrants represent have tripled from 4.7 to over 14%
Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony
#5So, I can't speak specifically to Qualcomm's case, however there's a weird paradox in Silicon Valley.
There's both an excess of jobs and excess of employees. This is probably true in every industry (every Starbucks is hiring, yet everyone complains how hard it is to find a job), but it's especially true in tech.
The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. Salaries have gotten so high that even the most mediocre developers are demanding six figures. There's been a huge inflation of salaries in tech, and a decrease in craftsmanship and quality. So, companies are getting less done for more money. It's a gold rush, and we're getting to the point where "3 months experience [1]" is the norm.
I've been trying to hire. I'm not worried about high salaries for someone good. However my inbox is full of people who know half a language and want a starting salary of $130k. That's crazy.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/technology/code-academy-as...
Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony
#6All arguments aside, there's one fundamental way to answer whether companies' talent shortage complaints are "phony" or not: pay. If there really were a shortage, pay would be rising dramatically. Average engineers would make 200k, 300k... Just like doctors do. But it isn't happening. These BigCos just want more supply so they can pay even less than they do now. Plain and simple.
Edit: Doctors and lawyers make so much because of artificial governors on the supply. They're not absurdly more talented or educated than other people (e.g. engineers), there are simply fewer of them. In the case of doctors, med school is the limiting factor. The time and $ investment is nuts. For lawyers, it's the Bar exam. When there are too many lawyers, the Bar association makes the test harder. When there aren't enough, they make it easier.
This makes me want a standardized programming test so a) talent level could be gagued more accurately than a cursory glance at someone's github account and b) the supply of engineers would be choked off.
Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony
#7Wow... as a VISA immigrant, who had a VERY hard time getting through the visa process, this kind of silly american opinion is quite irritating.
When a company lays off 20,000 people, those are _not_ the same people as the ones coming in on visas. They are probably very low skill engineers. The people coming in on visa's (have you met any?) are usually way more skilled than their american counterparts. America is _winning_ by exercising this brain drain.
>These are designed to serve high-skilled immigrants but often >enable the importing of Indian and Chinese guest workers to >replace an older, more experienced, but more expensive >domestic workforce
Come on. Really? All the young indian and chinese talent I meet is way above average.
Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony
#8Until the law is passed that releases all restrictions on visa-workers and simply grants them citizenship or an extremely permissive stay-while-looking-for-a-job situation, increasing the h1-b quota is simply a means to create a reduced-rights cheaper workforce.
It really fills me with disgust to see influential people present this issue as a skills shortage, while hiring workers at reduced wages and burdening them with the threat of deportation.
Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony
#9So, I can't speak specifically to Qualcomm's case, however there's a weird paradox in Silicon Valley. There's both an excess of jobs and excess of employees. This is probably true in every industry (every Starbucks is hiring, yet everyone complains how hard it is to find a job), but it's especially true in tech. The problem is there's a shortage in qualified candidates. Salaries have gotten so high that even the most…
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Re: Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony
#10All arguments aside, there's one fundamental way to answer whether companies' talent shortage complaints are "phony" or not: pay. If there really were a shortage, pay would be rising dramatically. Average engineers would make 200k, 300k... Just like doctors do. But it isn't happening. These BigCos just want more supply so they can pay even less than they do now. Plain and simple. Edit: Doctors and lawyers make so muc…
Pay in the field has indeed risen dramatically in the last decade. Maybe not uniformly or to the level we would like (or in a way we think will last, such as being accompanied by increases in status in contrast to doctors, to expand on your example), but it has notably risen.