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The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

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Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#51

Post by pbiggar »

lukeschlather wrote: post #32

I don't have a problem with the guest worker programs, but I think the way they are implemented is seriously screwed up for a number of reasons. The laws are written so that guest workers are basically indentured servants to the companies they work for. Furthermore, we basically give guest workers 6 years of well-compensated on the job training after which point we say "go home and enrich your home economy." If I wer…

I call bullshit. I was a H1B worker, and "indentured servitude" has no basis in reality. The job market is amazing. If I need a new job, I can literally walk into one in 5 days (eg. the time I did exactly that).

That said, points 1 and 2 are definitely worthwhile. But you're devaluing your points when you compare a high paying job with some annoying visa clauses, with indentured servitude. Indentured servitude is really serious: it's like when people talk about "raping" the environment. Don't make the comparison, it serves no-one.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#52

Post by [deleted] »

bennyg wrote: post #19
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…

It's kind of bogus. There's more reasons than what you're listing - and some help the author's statements. For starters, why throw a résumé away because it doesn't have [Top-Tier CS Program] listed? Make the potential employee pool bigger, and statistics says you'll get better candidates thrown in the mix as well. For companies that emphasize innovation and thinking out of the box, they really want a cookie cutter mo…

[deleted]

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#53

Post by nightski »

The fact is that, as a computer programmer I don't even have to look for a job currently. I am surrounded by job opportunities and freelance contracts. Very high paying ones at that. So if there is indeed not a shortage, then I am missing something. But life is good currently for developers.

More importantly, the answer to the shortage in the long term should not be to try to get more of the same. Our real goal as computer scientists should be in making our own jobs more efficient. We need to empower more users to have control to manipulate the machine they are using instead of entrenching us deeper into this never ending hole of proprietary software that continually re-invents the wheel and never works precisely how the user would like.

More concretely, we need to automate programming by making it more accessible to everyone and eliminate our own jobs.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#54

Post by rogerchucker »

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…

Table 2 in the Brookings paper says the opposite.

" In recent years, from 2009 to 2011, nominal wage growth for U.S.-born workers with at least a bachelor’s degree has been high for the most prominent H-1B occupations. The average native-born worker experienced flat annual growth in wages over that period (0.0 percent), but wage growth for those in computer occupations—the largest H-1B category—grew by 1.3 percent each year since 2009 and 2.7 percent each year since 2000 for those with a bachelor’s degree. Wage growth was even higher for engineers, with 2.1 percent growth since 2009 and 3 percent growth since 2000."

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#55

Post by meritt »

The real problem is college degrees, especially ones from foreign countries where cheating is not only commonplace but actively encouraged, provide little to zero value in a tech sector that actually expects people to be useful. The education system needs a dramatic revamping (in innumerable ways) if it wants to churn out workers capable of these jobs. Trying to compare # of jobs to # of useless degrees is, unsurprisingly, a useless exercise.

This is why there's such a staggeringly large number of tech-all-stars whose education & experience comes from non-traditional places.

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#56

Post by forgotAgain »

NoPiece wrote: post #48
forgotAgain wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

don't you think they'll just hire them in India at even lower wages?

Don't you think they already would if they could?

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#57

Post by rogerchucker »

achompas wrote: post #9
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, and that all you have to do is train them to be Xes, and you can have as many Xes as you want. What about the assertion that companies are struggling to fill these roles because (a) they demand more from potential candidates while (b) offering no more in wages than what we saw 10…

I'm not sure why you keep bringing up the Brookings paper [2] to support the authors' case. They clearly said this at the beginning: "Without attempting to fully resolve this complex issue, new detailed data on H-1B wages by occupation, presented more fully here, suggests that the H-1B program helps to fill a shortage of workers in STEM occupations."

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#58

Post by achompas »

jvrossb wrote: post #34
achompas wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. What about the assertion that companies are struggling to fill these roles because (a) they demand more from potential candidates while (b) offering no more in wages than what we saw 10…

I don't think there's granular enough information in there to support your conclusion. To illustrate, imagine that IT workers used to get paid a $100k real wage in 2000 and a $50k real wage today. Imagine computer scientists and programmers got paid a $100k real wage in 2000 and get a $150k real wage today. Bundling them all into IT would lead you to mistakenly conclude that a computer scientist would expect to make…

To be fair, it's not my conclusion. I just suggested an alternate explanation. :)

You're right that the Brookings article suggests that my quote isn't the case. I wish we had more information on how they controlled for different effects. IIRC BLS etc don't generally control for cost-of-living, and Brookings doesn't discuss the issue except for in the conclusion:

Likewise, the bureau should also consider how demand and supply play out in regional or metropolitan area labor markets, since job search and recruitment often happen locally.

I'd be interested in seeing those results, as I would expect a greater concentration of H1B workers in large metropolitan areas (SF/SV, NYC, Boston), where wages are much higher than the flyover states (where I'd expect less racial/ethnic diversity).

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#59

Post by wunna »

jaggederest wrote: post #6
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…

On the other hand, nobody in the US is even attempting to train effective programmers, let alone 'star' ones. There's a lot of room on all sides to improve the quality and availability of good technical workers. And, in the US at least, the financial industry siphons off a lot of otherwise excellent talent that could be going towards more productive ends than shaving milliseconds off automated trading.

So go do it! be the change you want! You know, if you want something done right, DIY! Setup a noble, patriotic company that only hires "Americans" and pay then $250K or $1MM salaries... Go ahead!

Stop whining and enough already with the arm-chair generalship, easiest thing in the world.

Remember this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpkJZuxSayo

Re: The Bogus High-Tech Worker Shortage

#60

Post by stdgy »

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 issue with this analogy is that the vast majority of the imported foreign workers aren't rock star programmers. They're not Real Madrid starters. They're second string junior league players. They're consultants.

Facebook/Google/Twitter/Microsoft/Amazon aren't the major users of H-1B Visas. Consulting firms are.

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

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