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The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

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Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#41

Post by muzz »

socalnate1 wrote: post #17
pg wrote: post #2

It's not bogus. Many if not most of the big high tech companies have open positions they can't find people for. If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable, and that all you have to do is train them to be Xes, and you can have as many Xes as you want. Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech…

This: "Someone asking why we need to hire programmers from other countries might just as well ask why Real Madrid has to hire so many non-Spanish players. Can't they just train more Spanish players to play at the level they need?" Very well said.

Why can't they just hire players from another team?

In the U.S., the reason why is "salary caps" in professional sports leagues.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#42

Post by larsberg »

harryh wrote: post #15
larsberg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting to see if there is still a shortage of "valley-quality graduates" in 3-ish years. The reports I'm hearing from most of the top-15 departments are of record CS enrollments starting from last year, far over even the boom in the dotcom era. Of course, the growth in graduates may not keep pace with the growth in companies!

enrollments != graduates != star programmers

Certatinly, but there's a correlation present, at least between the first two.

"Star programmers" are a completely separate problem, as Joel has mentioned before (e.g., are your stars really "Stars" if they're just the best 21-26 year olds your network knows of that are willing to live in your geographic region and not interested in graduate school?). But it's the horribly poorly managed firm that can't turn an A student from a top-fifteen CS school who did any Big Project at all succesfully into a very productive team member.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#43

Post by NoPiece »

achompas wrote: post #10
cuillevel3 wrote: post #3

Is it true IT wages are stagnating?

This paper http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill... seems to say yes: "Analyzing new data, drawing on a number of our prior analyses, and reviewing other studies of wages and employment in the STEM and IT industries, we find that industry trends are strikingly consistent: ... Wages have remained flat, with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels." EDIT: if you're skeptical of EPI, Br…

Wages have been stagnating generally, including in many industries unaffected by the guest worker program, so I'm not sure they are showing a causal relation.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#45

Post by badman_ting »

rogerchucker wrote: post #16

I can't shake the feeling that for this crowd (to which the authors/researchers belong), the term guest worker has sort of become a code for "those cheap Indians". I'm also guessing the authors (and most people in this crowd) have never associated with a guest worker outside of their field of work.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I don't see why that shouldn't be just as true for people on the other side of the issue. As in, "We have a shortage, let's get some cheap Indians in here."

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#46

Post by wunna »

pg wrote: post #2

It's not bogus. Many if not most of the big high tech companies have open positions they can't find people for. If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable, and that all you have to do is train them to be Xes, and you can have as many Xes as you want. Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech…

The stock response such arguments is: "there is no shortage of programmers, just a shortage of programmers at a given salary". Yeah right!

"There is no poverty. just shortage of people with money"

          :

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#47

Post by tseabrooks »

I've said it before, I'll say it again. Every coding job I've ever been in has ben "Always hiring". We just can't find enough people worth hiring.

We have been small groups, not pursuing H1-B visas or anything and it's possible H1B's are being given grunt work... However, the graph in this article, and really the central tenent that "we have so many tech workers not being hired, hire them first" is complete malarkey. I've gone to Undergrad and grad school. I've TA'd... The fact that even two thirds of those students find jobs (As the article claims) astounds me. Thats a higher number than I'd imagine. In two years TAing at a large research university I think I saw maybe 4 students I'd hire go through the program.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#48

Post by NoPiece »

forgotAgain wrote: post #28
pg wrote: post #2

It's not bogus. Many if not most of the big high tech companies have open positions they can't find people for. If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable, and that all you have to do is train them to be Xes, and you can have as many Xes as you want. Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech…

If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable. The basis of outsourcing at most large corporations is that people are more or less interchangeable. Someone asking why we need to hire programmers from other countries might just as well ask why Real Madrid has to hire so many non-Spanish players. Can't they just train more Span…

So if you tell Infosys that they can't have Indian H1-B cobol programmers in the US, don't you think they'll just hire them in India at even lower wages? So we lose a job, we lose the taxes they would have paid, we lose the spending in the community, and we lose good people in the country.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#50

Post by stdgy »

asr2bd wrote: post #29

Sure we may be graduating more STEM students, but I really hate when studies like this assume all students of a given field are equally talented. I'd say my university had a good CS program, but maybe 1/3 of our CS majors would get hired at top tech companies (Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft, etc) and get those really high salaries. At the end of the day it's much easier to import top talent to fill the gap than to cultiv…

But the number of new jobs at Microsoft/Twitter/Amazon pale in comparison to the number of new jobs in the domestic industry as a whole.

In fact, the vast majority of foreign worker visas aren't snatched up by the tech goliaths. They're snapped up by low-tier consulting companies. [1]

Google may be forced to look abroad to find rock star programmers, but the overwhelming majority of foreign workers brought in to the country are not rock star programmers. They're rather low paid consultants.

1: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/04/03/176134...

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