From the Huffington Post:<p>"The Bureau Of Labor Statistics has released its annual Occupational Employment and Wages report, and the top-paying industries are dominated by health care professionals. In fact, nine of the 10 highest-paid jobs in America are in the health care industry. The only other group that made the top 10 is corporate executives."<p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/top-ten-highest-paid-jobs_n_864907.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/top-ten-highest-pai...</a><p>Here's a link to the full report:<p><a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm</a><p>Like a lot of other people here, I'd support a stronger emphasis on skilled immigration to the US, but I don't see compelling evidence of an acute shortage of engineers relative to other fields. In fact, I think the low level of interest in these fields is a rational response to market signals, especially at the elite levels.
If it were a genuine crisis, rather than a 'genuine crisis', wages would be genuinely rising more than they are, for <i>anyone</i> with anything close to the skills sought. Instead, this strikes me as a push to get cheaper workers, rather than actually paying for a scarce resource.<p>But maybe I'm just cynical.
There doesn't seem to be a shortage at all. We've gotten plenty of good candidates in our doors that turn us down because our pay is barely competitive and our health insurance is terrible. Pay more money and you can attract more tech workers.<p>Or lower your standards and make a plan to promote in company education, make the specialized work force you need yourself!
The technology cycle generally goes:<p>1. A few big wins causes a huge bubble.<p>2. Tons of sub standard tech workers jump on the bandwagon for the money. In some cases these are outright con artists.<p>3. Average skill plummets as the market is flooded with cheap beginners and pretenders.<p>4. Market implodes. Everyone jumps off the sinking ship. Only people who stay are dedicated to the field regardless of market dynamics.<p>5. With all the pretenders and con-artists out of the way a few passionate geniuses build a few big wins. GOTO:1<p>Throughout this cycle the same people who support massive layoffs during downturns will wonder why there aren't thousands of engineers with 10 years experience during upswings.
I am absolutely confident there is no shortage of good software engineers willing to drop everything and move to another part of the country for $500k/year. Absolutely no shortage. If you raise your wages, you will find someone to do the work. If you can't afford to raise the wages, your business plan is not viable. I mean, I could use a houseworker to clean my house for $1 per day, does it mean I should get my wish as well? Nope.<p>Skilled immigration is valuable for another reason though - the more talent in the leading industry the better it is for the country, and draining other countries of their talent is also a valuable competition tactics.
As a Canadian, one thing that I don't understand is why companies don't move to Canada. I feel like working in the states, I've priced myself out of the Canadian market (since salaries in Canada for engineers seem to be about 60-70% of what they are in the US), but I can't imagine that Vancouver or Toronto would be that hard to build an office out of. Yet for the most part, companies don't. From my understanding, there would be a lot of benefits to having Canadian offices - easy to travel to the home base when needed, good health care, better immigration laws, and a lot of local talent. When recruiting, we recruit very heavily from Canadian schools. But then we take everyone back to the US with us.
How about these companies told to start offering training programs?<p>The US has no shortage of eager workers, some quite creative (which is good for such jobs). The crux of this is companies are devaluing people in general, and don't really give much care about it.
Aren't there still a lot of devs in flyover country who complain about finding few positions? Or is the fact they chose not to relocate being weighed against them?
I'm for skilled immigration, but can we please, please rethink the H1B program? At the very least, don't make it so the individual goes out of status the day they leave their job. Give them time to shop around. And get rid of the fee/paperwork every time they switch jobs. Raise the fee to $50k and apply it to the first employer that sponsors them only. More of the risk of holding an H1B needs to go to the first employer that hires them, and less of it to future employers and the H1B holder themselves.<p>EDIT: I appreciate the responses. Raising the fee is probably the wrong idea.
I consider myself a competent, intelligent, relatively professional 'tech worker.'<p>I just don't really want to move across the country for a job, especially one that I probably wont have for the next 20 years.
As a Canadian working in the US, I think provide a very different of the tech industry than most Americans. The fact of the matter is that there are skilled people with technical degrees and proficiency around the world and the best way to hire those people is to not restrict yourself to hiring from your own town, city, country, etc.<p>The US generally has higher salaries for tech positions and, as someone else pointed out, salaries in Canada are 60-70% of the salaries in the US. Yet, a competent new grad from a top-tier US school or a competent new grad from a top-tier Canadian school can still effectively make 90-100k working for Microsoft or other big companies in Seattle or Silicon Valley. 90-100k for a new CS grad at Google? Seriously?<p>To me that definitely seems like market forces are driving up the prices of new hires. And let's not forget, we're talking about hiring someone with technical programming chops and not just your run-of-the-mill computer technician here. The fact of the matter is that truly skilled Software Engineers are in short supply and an infusion in STEM education to move people towards being competent Computer Scientist and Software Engineers is what Microsoft is saying with this.<p>They aren't giving pay cuts to foreign workers (or even people like me). We're getting paid the same salary because we have the skills. If the unemployment rate in the US is so high, it's simply because the unemployed simply do not have the skills necessary to do the job.
"Shortage of (cheap) tech workers in the US..."<p>or...<p>"Shortage of tech workers who don't have kids or a mortgage in the US..."<p>Yeah, I'll get downvoted for this, but it's true.
What I think would be interesting would be to add 20,000 H1Bs like tech companies are lobbying for and an additional 10,000 H1Bs that brings in foreign computer science and engineering teachers to teach at the high school level. That or some similar scheme that increases the number of competent high school CS teachers would be very valuable.<p>In high school I wanted to be a CS major in college, but a shitty CompSci teacher completely killed my interest in the subject and I ended up taking a 10 year detour before returning to software engineering as a career. Plus, as a kid there were like no adult role models around to help me out and Win3.1 wasn't exactly the ideal system to get involved with programming. The 80s was a much better time to grow up if you were a kid interested in programming and had access to a computer.
> Employers would have to pay $10,000 for each employee that receives one of the visas.<p>How convenient for Microsoft, they're trying to kill off competition for foreign engineers from Startups in SF, NY and Boston that are starting to realize that they can get some really good H1-b hires to work for them