Researchers Say the Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist 454
Beeftopia sends this excerpt from an article at BusinessWeek:
"There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense," says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. "They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV." ... The real issue, say Salzman and others, is the industry’s desire for lower-wage, more-exploitable guest workers, not a lack of available American staff. "It seems pretty clear that the industry just wants lower-cost labor," Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in an e-mail. A 2011 review (PDF) by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the H-1B visa program, which is what industry groups are lobbying to expand, had "fragmented and restricted" oversight that weakened its ostensible labor standards. "Many in the tech industry are using it for cheaper, indentured labor," says Rochester Institute of Technology public policy associate professor Ron Hira, an EPI research associate and co-author of the book Outsourcing America.
STEM is for suckers.. at least now. (Score:2, Insightful)
You'd have to be out of your mind to pursue a career in the above in the USA right now.
Or; more correctly; you'd have to be out of your mind to work as an employee in one of the above. I migrated to business and finance from a electrical engineering job. My salary is new three times (3X) what I made as an engineer, which topped out at around $100k. I'll be retired, or independently set up, before I'm 45 - then I can go back to tech on my terms.
Kids aren't stupid. Ye reap what ye sow. Cough it up.
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Nice quote:
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."
From the movie "Primer" see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/P... [wikiquote.org]
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"Stupidity" is paint it with a euphemistic brush, "excuses" is more to the point.
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Could it be that the "shortage" is caused by utterly absurd job requirements?
Besides the usual five years of experience in a new technology that came out six months ago?
Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
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I think that they'd just demand MORE visas be made available.
And they'd still be claiming a "shortage" because they cannot find the talent they need at the price they want to pay.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
And they'd still be claiming a "shortage" because they cannot find the talent they need at the price they want to pay.
Yeah, amazingly enough, it turns out there is a surprising shortage of American STEM professionals willing to work as indentured servants for $25,000/yr.
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Behaviors of all industries point to a desire to keep wages lower than what they would pay in an open market.
There. Fixed that for you.
That'll be $9.99.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Informative)
All of the tech industries behavior point to a desire to keep wages lower than what they would pay in an open market.
Uh ... no. An "open market" would mean NO limits on visas. Anyone would be free to come here and compete with you.
Re:Duh (Score:4)
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The advantage is their family back home costs 1/10th as much as yours to provide for.
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The tech CEO's also maintain the fiction that H1B workers are treated fairly and paid "market standard" salaries. Well, first of all, the "market standard" is artificially lowered by all the H1B's themselves (and the Americans that they don't have to hire at a higher salary instead). And, as for "fair treatment," just try to introduce a bill to change the H1B program to set the visas to a set time limit instead of an individual job (meaning employers will no longer be able to threaten workers with deportati
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Well to be honest I understand PART of why they would be outrage over it. If I pay 5k for you to come and work and you are here for 1 day I am out 5k. Now I agree with your overall primise, as long as the employer they went to had to pay a share of that money back, prorated.
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Well to be honest I understand PART of why they would be outrage over it. If I pay 5k for you to come and work and you are here for 1 day I am out 5k. Now I agree with your overall primise, as long as the employer they went to had to pay a share of that money back, prorated.
That's the whole point. If I truly pay you a market wage you have little incentive to leave; however if I pay below market wage all I become is a labor pool for other companies. As a result, I would first try to fill jobs with local labor and if there is a shortage than use a visa program to fill them. Since there is a lower supply than demand i will pay a premium for that labor if I really need it; a true free market solution.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Informative)
So by open market you mean protected local labor market?
Reread the previous post. Nothing about reducing H1-Bs. Maybe that's the end game for the previous poster, but greatly reducing the indentured servitude aspect of an H1-B visa (especially while saying nothing about reducing the number of H1-Bs!) doesn't restrict the labor pool.
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Re:Duh (Score:4, Interesting)
Workers bear the burden of H1B -- both the immigrants and the locals. That burden could be shifted by changing the rules. For example, make the visa last three years, non-renewable, cost $25,000 per visa paid for by the employer, and once the worker has been employed for two weeks, he/she will have the legal right to quit working for employer, even if that means sitting at home playing video games and doing no work at all, and make all employment contracts that contain some kind of damages provision if the worker quits or is fired, not just void, but result in a $25,000 fine, or twice the damages provision in the contract, whichever is greater, to be imposed on the employer.
This way, if a company really wants that genius they just gotta have, they can get that person no problem. They just better treat him/her right or risk losing a substantial investment. As for getting slave labor, it would make that completely unfeasible from a financial perspective.
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So by open market you mean protected local labor market?
Reread the previous post. Nothing about reducing H1-Bs. Maybe that's the end game for the previous poster, but greatly reducing the indentured servitude aspect of an H1-B visa (especially while saying nothing about reducing the number of H1-Bs!) doesn't restrict the labor pool.
As the OP, i can say I my end game is not to reduce the number of H1B's available but to ensure H1B's actually get a competitive salary with other workers by eliminating restrictions on their job mobility. If employers had to pay the cost of an H1B plus a competitive wage, which they claim to do today, it would be more economically viable to hire someone with the requisite skills that doesn't need to be sponsored since you would avoid all the extra costs; and do not run the risk of, after paying those costs
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FYI H1B Visas certainly haven't curbed CEO pay. Makes one wonder why you can't get a guy from India with an MBA to run a
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Could you explain, where do you see open job market in the US?
Why don't you explain it since you're the one looking?
from the Institute of the Blindingly Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Gee, you think?
Seriously, as a working engineer, the fact that this hasn't been emphasised this has annoyed me for years. There is no shortage of bright, hard working engineering talent in the US, and the our schools are (and have been for years) capable of turning out as many well-educated engineering graduates as the industry requires. It's just that they want to make enough money to live a good life (and pay back the cost of their education). Graduates from the Farkistan Institue of Technology are *so* much cheaper. And they don't ask for raises or threaten to change jobs...because they would get sent home.
Do you seriously believe that a foreign H1B with an MS, working for $35k is equivalent to a US graduate?
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My company hired a kid right out of a local college. He is smart, eager to learn, and really enjoys getting into complex problems and trying to figure it all out. Unfortunately, a few months after he was hired, my company's new CEO laid off about 20% of the company. Our new kid was unfortunately cut.
That about four or five months ago. I've kept in touch with this person because he's super nice and I want to be available as a professional reference in case he needs one. He's still out of work. He wants to wo
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Tell him to apply here:
https://us-erac.icims.com/jobs... [icims.com]
We are hiring good people. The pay isn't bad considering the cost of living, the benefits are great, and I haven't been forced to work more than 40 hour a week yet.
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I'll definitely point him there. Thank you very much.
Number of interviews... (Score:3, Insightful)
How many number of interviews do companies go through to hire someone?
Last I heard, Facebook goes through ~100 people to fill 1 spot. My company goes through about 20 or so before finding a candidate worthy of a face-to-face interview... Most flunk on basic questions like "describe any sorting mechanism" (someone hands you 1000 sheets of paper, each with a page number out of order, walk me through the process you will use to sort them).
The problem isn't that there's a shortage of "tech workers", there isn't.
It's that most "tech" workers suck. If you want to hire someone who actually knows their stuff, you gotta pick them right out of school, and make sure they're actually "techy" kind (those that actually do their own homeworks because they find them interesting). Now, *those* tech workers are like 1% of "all tech workers", and yes, there's a shortage of those---but not something the h1b can fix.
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Software algorithm, or secretarial skill? Because in the real world people cannot function well at all using the same algorithms as a computer would.
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Because in the real world people cannot function well at all using the same algorithms as a computer would.
Sorting is not such a problem. And adapting your software algorithms to the needs of your computing system (here you) is a pretty important skill.
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"And adapting your software algorithms to the needs of your computing system (here you)"
Exactly, but I would argue, in this case using a computer that is so fundamentally different will require a complete rewrite and a completely different approach. I do not believe that the
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I sort decks of cards all the time using a hash / insertion sort. First I split up the suits (i.e. a 4 way partition based on clubs-diamonds-hearts-spades) then I do an insertion sort on the 13 cards. Done.
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Normally with interview questions like this you're not going to be expected to do it. Just explain how you'd do it, maybe show the first iteration or two if you're suggesting some kind of iterative solution.
I agree they're usually stupid though. I'm not a fan of this sort of questioning or in fact a fan of questions at all that ask you to solve some specific problem right there and then. It's easy for great candidates to have a moment of forgetfulness under the pressure of an interview.
I prefer to ask quest
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Actually something like quicksort / insertion sort which is what a computer would do works well for people as well.
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I think a question like this should be more about the applicants ability to "do something" as opposed to just being overwhelmed by the situation. The answer need not be perfect, it just needs to work.
It's really just a low bar to see how helpless a person is.
Can you take care of business?
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you realize that testing someone's ability to think about sorting algorithms using a spatial test will result is a lot of programmers performing poorly. Spatial reasoning is being used in conjunction with algorithmic thinking. This is something that is not practiced in school so if you asked the same people to write a quick sort in psudo-code on one of those pieces of paper, I bet you would get higher performance from the candidates.
Re:Number of interviews... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's that most "tech" workers suck. If you want to hire someone who actually knows their stuff, you gotta pick them right out of school...
'Cuz old people could never have "da skillz", right? Un-fiucking-believable...
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I honestly don't think salaries are out of line. Tech workers should make less than management, they have a smaller scope of responsibility.
While that is true for the vast majority of tech workers, for those top 5% of tech workers everyone wants this often isn't the case. The people designing and architecting large enterprise systems or creating new products in start-ups have as much or even more responsibility than their managers. When I am consulting for large corporations any managers under C-level are just window dressing compared to their systems architects. I'm sure those directors make a much larger salary, however.
$100k is so far above the poverty line that the poster (a ways) above who was dissatisfied with it is a joke
Acceptable salary rang
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100K is only a high degree above the poverty line if you avoid popular high density urban areas.
Furthermore, ANY professional position SHOULD be "far above the poverty line" as such jobs require a high degree of costly preparation. They require more than a pulse. Their price should reflect that.
The price of labor should reflect the financial overhead of being eligible for the job in question.
This sort of "You should expect whatever crumbs your betters offer you" kind of attitude is sick and depraved and ec
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The Same Game (Score:5, Insightful)
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There was that accidental experiment a couple years ago in GA. A hard crackdown on migrant labor and a invitation for local unemployeds to work the fields - a few dozen showed up and none lasted more than a couple of days.
Wall Street doesn't get that killing the middle class in the US will ruin them - that's next year's problem and all they care about is this quarter at the longest-term.
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There might have to be changes in terms. I guarantee you if they were paying $2k a day they would find plenty of labor. The question now is what's the right price between $20 / day and $2000 / day.
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Nope, I live there. Turns out that most people are entitled sons of bitches and didn't want to do hard manual labor outside all day for minimum wage. People would rather take unemployment benefits.
That is exactly the point the guy was trying to make. They won't do it for minimum wage, which is all they would get because companies are used to having an almost infinite supply of migrant labor. But once pay starts to hit $20-$25 per hour, people would flock to the job. I have a high school friend who works as a garbage man making $70k per year with an amazing pension. He would never do the job for $10/hr, but there was a high enough salary that got him to choose the career.
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"But if we shut down undoucmented workers field labor would receive far higher wages and then those jobs might be much more attractive for American workers."
Yeah and then food prices would go up meaning everyone else would expect a pay rise or demand more pay themselves to pay for the increased food costs, or people would just import food from overseas, leading to layoffs in that industry. You end up back at square one.
People expect increasing standards of living, and that means either their salary has to g
The real question is... (Score:2)
Everyone already knows this, whether they want to admit it or not.
The real question is will the US gov ever actually do anything to benefit US workers, or are they already too far under the thumbs of the hi tech companies?
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Is it limited to just hi tech companies?
One gets the impression that pretty much anything which will increase corporate profits and maximize executive bonuses/shareholder value will get approved, no matter how badly it affects US workers.
In other words, screw the workers and the domestic economy, give any concession to large corporations they ask for. I
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Bribery doesn't explain it. The American people aren't in most places voting for pro-labor politicians when they have the chance. In 2008: Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich nor Bill Richardson won the primary. Republicans who are anti labor win many many elections against Democrats who are better. Neither party is perfect but the American people aren't voting their interests.
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Haven't we covered this already? (Score:2)
It's been proven, time and time again that the H1B program and the so called "Tech Worker Gap" is a untrue and yet here is another "Research work." The H1B program is there so employers can not be affected by market forces. Couple that with non-competes, "right shoring" and non-poaching agreements that are killing the tech labor force in this country.
Globalization advances... (Score:5, Insightful)
This sort of phenomenon is a natural effect of globalization. A century ago, the world contained wealthy advanced nations, developing nations, and lots of "backward" nations which lacked modern industries and hence had a relatively low standard of living. However, this was somewhat compensated for by a low cost of living. Someone might only earn a dollar or two a day, but food was cheap and life was OK.
Enter globalization: the inevitable outcome of free-market, free-trade economics plus cheap ubiquitous transport. Within a few decades, the world became one single marketplace and - as we in the wealthier nations have seen to our cost - jobs began "finding their own level", that is being exported to the cheapest countries.
Not satisfied with that, bosses and shareholders wanted to bring in cheap labour to do those relatively few jobs that couldn't be done "at long range". Obvious examples are construction, health care, personal service of all kinds, and to some extent expensive specialities like law. (Not many lawyers in India have US bar qualifications, and even if they had they couldn't very well show up in a US court).
After the first irrational exuberance for outsourcing skilled jobs (like IT) to cheaper countries, even the most thick-headed of PHBs are now coming to recognize that outsourcing of this kind doesn't usually work too well. No matter how good the workers are, the communication problems (and often cultural discrepancies) are just too great. Hence the increasing eagerness to import cheap (but well qualified and skilled) labour to do those jobs under direct (not to say oppressively close) supervision.
Unfortunately, citizens of nations like the USA get it coming and going: the government taxes them heavily in order to provide services in a "first world" manner, while allowing business to export jobs to "third world" nations (or bring their workers to the USA to work there). This is a classic "wealth pump" which systematically sucks up wealth and transfers it to the rich.
Ironically, globalization looks set to be pretty much complete and settled in, just in time for the cheap oil that made it possible to run out. Then we'll all have to face the expense and disruption of reverting to relative economic independence within our own countries.
$11/hr. on-site techs! (Score:2)
That's what some of the service techs were getting paid to do on-site service for Dell, last time I checked. And that's in the DC metro area, where cost of living is way high!
Gee... I wonder why people aren't lining up to take those job offers?!
Slaves are always cheaper than the free (Score:2, Insightful)
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From opinion polls and actual voting results It seems to follow that you will have to exchange a large portion of the populace, too.
Re:Slaves are always cheaper than the free (Score:4, Interesting)
When will we finally get to a ruling class no longer pining for the pre-civil war days?
A friend who teaches economics was posting about this the other day. Her contention is that for all of history until the 1800's, it was fairly easy to just leave and go find some subsistence environment, so if you wanted workers you had to enslave them and force them to work for you. Now that it's not generally possible for most people to find environments for subsistence lifestyles, there's no longer any need to enslave people. They have to find jobs to survive. At that crossover, work stopped being something the lowest class of society did under force, and became something that was considered a privilege.
What BS. (Score:2)
From the crop of developers I've interviewed over the last few years, there are a bunch of under-skilled people who think very highly of themselves and want to be paid more than they are worth.
My company has hired some very bright people and paid them very well. But then there are people like this MIT grad we hired several years ago, purely based on her resume and what BS came out of her mouth, only to discover she was perhaps one of the worst developers I've ever worked with. She was fired several months l
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Exactly. The biggest issue is that it's difficult for a PHB, even a technical one, to reliably determine ahead of time who is worth 2x what everyone else is getting for a particular technology job and who is worth 1/2.
Then once someone is hired, in most companies HR makes it impossible to either give appropriate raises to those who actually deserve it or to get rid of those who aren't worth their salary as long as they're minimally performing.
All Industries, for all Time (Score:2)
So what has changed, what is different in Tech than others?
Is it that Laws have changed allowing this behaviour?
Is it that American Tech workers are demanding more than they are worth, and the companies simply cannot afford to pay that?
Is it that America has a shortage of skilled Tech workers who can do the jobs that the companies want done?
Is it that to get higher female quotas, or just non-white at least, they need a bigger pool to draw from?
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I'm not sure "not willing to pay in order to maximize profits" is the same as "simply cannot afford to pay that".
Especially when many of these hi tech companies make zillions of dollars of income which is then shunted through various countries where the banking laws allow them to pay less taxes.
This isn't so much about can't pay, as simply won't -- because these companies want to have
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Neither does the argument they need these due to a "skills shortage" which isn't real.
So, if there's no skill shortage, and this is purely about driving down labor costs ... this is 100% about greed.
The problem is we aren't on equal footing here, so they can screw us over all they want to.
Sorry, but a bunch of millionaire CEOs running multi-billion dollar corporations crying poor is just horseshit.
This is just blatant abuse of the system to give them an unfair advantage in the labor market.
If they can't pro
This was covered last year (Score:2)
Capital and Investment (Score:3)
I tend to agree, the issue in the Tech Industry isn't as much the shortage of workers, as it's much more a shortage of the Industry to pay a wage for the worker they want. In lieu of that, the Industry isn't as willing to invest in it's Human Capital, expanding training and skill sets. They're afraid if they train you, you'll go find a better job. Well, if you don't train them, what if they stagnate and don't go find a better job?
If you aren't challenging your Tech Workers, then they want to move on, to avoid being bored, to find a new challenge. But if you train them, invest in them, they become invested in their company, and if they're challenged, they're just too busy and too happy to think about if the grass is greener on the other side of the street.
There's a reason that H1B workers strive to be great English speakers. English is the language of business, and it's still where people want to move towards to be successful. If we cultivate a culture of Tech Workers to move a long...then companies become a Journey, not a Destination. Would you rather work for a company who is the proverbial Wilderness, or the Promised Land?
Invest in Human Capital. That's how a Company is built that becomes a Destination, and not just a Journey to something better.
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The way to solve the training problem is an employment contract. Both worker and company agree to a contract with salary increases and training. Workers accept less in the beginning and possibly have to pay an early termination penalty equal to some percentage of the cost of training. Employers have to pay a lot on the tail end and pay a penalty for early termination.
Works well. It would be nice to bring this back to America for non executives.
eh (Score:2)
Re:eh (Score:5, Insightful)
In more detail, let me modify one of your key sentences: "what's good for the corrupt oligarchs may not be the same as what's good for the country." Fixed that for you.
Impoverishing US workers will not "juice the success of domestic tech companies which, in the long run, may actually be better for the U.S. as a whole". One that happens it will be hard as hell to bootstrap back to an overall high standard of living in the US. Just how stupid are you to even think that?
And then there is the issue that tech workers are just the latest group to be thrown under the bus in the name of short term greed.
Here's an example of how it's done. At one point construction and industrial jobs like meat packing were all unionized. Then the unions were broken and the jobs were filled by immigrant labor. That's why there are now large numbers of Spanish speaking non-documented workers in the Midwest, for example. It's not that native US workers are not good workers, it's that the employers don't want them because they want semi-slaves. They want workers who will put up with anything, including having their wages stolen or being maimed on the job and not being able to do anything about it.
For tech workers the plan is slightly more complex. First, offshore as many jobs as possible. Second, import as many non-citizen workers as possible. Third, flood the market with a bunch of severely under-trained "coders", like Zuckerberg and his co-conspirators are attempting with code.org. Having a vast army of unemployed makes anyone with a job completely fearful and willing to settle for crumbs.
So the US middle class is destroyed? Do you think that any of the rich care? Remember what Romney said during the election. He thinks that half of Americans are scum. As far as he and his ilk are concerned, if you don't do well it's all your fault. The reality is that he and his type profit from eliminating jobs in the US. They do well by making the rest of us do poorly, and they then have the gall to blame us for not being good enough.
I guess you think that you're immune, or perhaps you want to be a serf. You sure don't seem like someone who want to work and prosper in their own country. What's wrong with you?
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We ran this experiment in the 1990s. Tech salaries went up by about 50% and the field exploded in size. Yes it was enough.
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Also a continued increase of the use of H1B visa progr
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What they want (Score:2)
What they want is more flexible workers. Guest workers are very flexible. Given that they are already immigrants, whats the difference to them if they work in New-york the first half of the year and Seattle the second?
I went through this is the late 90s/ early 2000s. I'd get a job as some company was building some new product, have solid work for a year... then there'd be the long, inevitable breakup as they found a way to lay us off another year later. So I'd go onto another project... same thing. Then my
Its a global thing... (Score:2)
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There's actually nothong wrong with wanted that.
Knowing MySql 5.2 exactly and being trained on it is a pretty good thing.
Here's the thing. In every other industry knowing such specific skills costs a crapload of money.
Generally companies provide training for such specific training to help develop people. I have a few friends in the trades. The training they receive on a per device/install type is pretty amazing. You don't get to work on anything until you get that training.
As I say, if anything, tech worker
Sure (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the "tech worker shortage" is really just a shortage of people who have no idea how to run a technical company.
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And before all the hate on MBAs: they are only taking the senior managers/shareholders desires and implementing them more efficiently than would otherwise be the case.
We still hate you for your MBA because you were "just following orders".
Libertarians Rejoice! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes siree Bob! That ol' invisible hand is really working for us.
We need government to get out of the way and let in all the low-cost immigrant labor we can get, without all those pesky regulations. Business needs to be free to innovate!
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It is too bad that we did not learn from doctors (Score:2, Insightful)
It is too bad that we did not learn from doctors, lawyers, nurses, etc. back when there was ridiculous demand for tech professionals in the 90's. We should have set up a professional governance board and lobbied for licensing requirements (licensing that the professional board controls) to do certain jobs (programming, server admin, networking, IT security, etc.). That would have stopped the race to the bottom in salaries and quality (lower pay gives you lower quality).
I'm not surprised by the research (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3)
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What is this 'work-life balance' to which you refer?
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4 weeks vacation or we needn't even start talking.
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No one I know in my industry in the United States has two weeks of vacation. Three and four are the most common, with some long-term company-people getting five.
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And you're wondering why skilled workers prefer to go elsewhere?
Re:Well Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh there's a shortage. There's a shortage of STEM jobs with ADEQUATE SALARIES. When Zuckerberg and others are up there on Capital Hill begging for more H1B visas, what they're saying is "There is a shortage of STEM workers." But what they MEAN is "There is a shortage of STEM workers willing to work for slave wages."
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While protectionism has its o
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We don't need full on product protectionism. What could work well is a tax system that rewards domestic wages.
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Alternatively, we could just stop actively encouraging the exporting of jobs.
What we have going on right now is the opposite of "protectionism". We could solve a lot of the problem by simply not doing anything. Doing nothing is not a form of "Protectionism".
At least there's an implied admission... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's one silver lining in all this bitching about needing more H-1 visas. The tech companies that can't find enough cheap labor in the US are still looking for labor in the US. They could find all the cheap labor they want as long as they're willing to outsource the jobs to India - but they've already tried that, and it doesn't work.
As one of the few remaining onshore resources in an outsourced company, I can attest to the horrible inefficiencies that outsourcing brings to a tech project. Sure, it's cheaper. Perhaps even by enough to account for all the extra process to manage the outsourced workers. But what isn't said in there is that nothing actually gets done. Our outsourced systems are gradually falling into unsupportability by a thousand bits of bad code put in by cheap offshore resources that don't have adequate guidance to get up to speed without doing damage - and aren't kept on the project long enough to ever finally do some productive work once they get up to speed.
The big guys either know this intuitively, or have tried outsourcing and know it from painful experience. Either way, asking for H-1 visas amounts to an admission that outsourcing tech jobs doesn't work. Now we just need the political will to tell them that paying crap wages isn't an option either.
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I'm horrified by what's happening to our code over time. The lack of institutional knowledge at all levels in American companies is simply breathtaking. One of the reasons the shadow IT movement grew was that IT systems couldn't be expanded because no one knows how they work. The problem is of course that our investors are now funds trading equities not long term stakeholders who plan to hold the stock for decades.
I don't know what to do because our finance system does work well, but at dreadful cost.
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The constant slashing of taxes is what got us into this mess in the first place.
Sure. The internet bubble, the housing bubble, and two wars were free.
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Even the government is culpable. The national lab where I live has frozen wages so many times that the PhD's working there are on the bottom end of the pay scale for people with their degrees.
Mind you, I have to wonder where those people on the top end are. Really, who *is* hiring PhD chemists and physicists and paying them so well?
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Is there a "Well Duh" tag somewhere?
It's like late night informercials. You might see right through this, but someone is buying it.
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Completely agree with you. Though I think a guild / professional association (like the AMA or Bar association) would be a better fit than a union.
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