It's not bogus. Many if not most of the big high tech companies have open positions they can't find people for.<p>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.<p>Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech companies is that these companies want star programmers, and you can't train people to be stars. 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?<p>Incidentally, when I first started to see these articles a few weeks ago (I don't know if it was this one or another one like it), I was curious why anyone would put so much effort into saying something false. It turns out the authors work for something called the Economic Policy Institute, which is funded by a consortium of labor unions. I was a little puzzled that unions would care about this, since none of these programmers are unionized. I suppose they must see it as the thin end of the wedge.
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.<p>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.
What if employers aren't being "picky". What if deterioration in academic standards means most graduates are not competent? A CS graduate being unable to do fizzbuzz is a travesty, and should be grounds for a school losing their accreditation if widely seen.
Good overview by Professor Norm Matloff : <a href="http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html" rel="nofollow">http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html</a><p>Please note that his work is backed up research, please consult the links on his site.
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.<p>At the end of the day it's much easier to import top talent to fill the gap than to cultivate more of it in the U.S. Some companies like HackerSchool are popping up to address this need, but there's a long way to go.
Good points here, but anyone trying to hire good tech talent knows how hard it can be. "Has a degree" and "qualified" aren't even in the same ballpark, but they seem to be conflated here.<p>I am interested in the salary thing, though. I think there is at least a little bit of companies bemoaning the fact that they can't find a person to fulfill rock-star expectations on a junior salary. It's macro 101, if there isn't enough supply then increase the price.
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.<p>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 were to say the things that need to be fixed:<p>1. Once you've been working at a company for a year, you should be free to remain in the country whether you have work or not. Companies shouldn't be able to hold you hostage. Companies should probably even have to sponsor you for some sort of H1B level 2 to keep you around past 1 year. (Bear in mind, I'm not looking for the current bureaucratic nightmare, I'm looking for companies to have to give guest workers their freedom well in advance of the current six-year mark.)<p>2. If you've been gainfully employed in the country for three years under an H1B, you should get a green card automatically. No waiting around, no nothing.<p>If we do this, wages will rise naturally, and we'll see whether companies have a legitimate shortage or they're just looking for cheap labor.
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.<p>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.<p>More concretely, we need to automate programming by making it more accessible to everyone and eliminate our own jobs.
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.<p>This is why there's such a staggeringly large number of tech-all-stars whose education & experience comes from non-traditional places.
I feel sorry for my fellow H1B workers who can't leave for a higher salary elsewhere. I fell more sorry for myself and American coworkers stuck in short-term contracts with zero benefits.
The real issue is obviously lack of control over labor markets. Sure, dissolving support for unions helped, but we still live in a world where people can decide where to work and how much they'd like to be paid, and this has serious repercussions for the long term profitability of corporate persons.
During the twentieth century, US economists promoting the values of those controlling production talked about how production was fundamentally controlled by laws of supply and demand, and economic theories thinking otherwise were silly.<p>Yet flying in the face of that is this idea of a "high tech worker shortage". If there really could be a shortage of high tech workers for longer than a short period, than the bedrock idea of supply and demand are bogus. Even miniscule hurdles like visas would mean nothing - if there is a mass of talent in India and a worldwide demand for that talent, then if visas were a problem, multinationals and trans-continental consulting firms would just set up there.<p>There is no high-tech worker shortage. There's a bunch of "idea guys" sitting around who think how much money they could make if they could hire a bunch of rock-star programmers on the cheap.
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.