Tech industry's persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony

So, I can&#x27;t speak specifically to Qualcomm&#x27;s case, however there&#x27;s a weird paradox in Silicon Valley.<p>There&#x27;s both an excess of jobs and excess of employees. This is probably true in every industry (every Starbucks is hiring, yet everyone complains how hard it is to find a job), but it&#x27;s especially true in tech.<p>The problem is there&#x27;s a shortage in qualified candidates. Salaries have gotten so high that even the most mediocre developers are demanding six figures. There&#x27;s been a huge inflation of salaries in tech, and a decrease in craftsmanship and quality. So, companies are getting less done for more money. It&#x27;s a gold rush, and we&#x27;re getting to the point where &quot;3 months experience [1]&quot; is the norm.<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to hire. I&#x27;m not worried about high salaries for someone good. However my inbox is full of people who know half a language and want a starting salary of $130k. That&#x27;s crazy.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;29&#x2F;technology&#x2F;code-academy-as-career-game-changer.html?smid=tw-nytimes" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;07&#x2F;29&#x2F;technology&#x2F;code-academy-as...</a>

This article makes the persistent assumption that any graduate is the same as any other engineer.<p>Having worked for a whole bunch of companies over the past few years, one thing is a constant in the tech industry: there is a limitless supply of candidates for any given job, all of which are bad. It is a huge, challenging problem to find the small number of people you want to hire. I&#x27;m not sold that &quot;10x developers&quot; really exist, but I know that &quot;0x developers&quot; are plentiful: these candidates aren&#x27;t just a &quot;poor fit&quot;, they are entirely unable to do the job they&#x27;re applying for. I&#x27;ve seen far too many graduates who are entirely unable to solve the most basic screening questions, and just don&#x27;t seem able to write code.<p>In a similar vein, it is entirely reasonable for a company to be simultaneously cutting jobs and hiring, if they are cutting persistent underperformers and trying to hire more promising replacements. (Some legal fiction is necessary to do this in the current regulatory environment)

First, I don&#x27;t know how this even started. Why did tech companies all of a sudden decide there was a shortage of knowledgeable and competent workers? I&#x27;m asking because throughout my career as a programmer I&#x27;ve worked with people from all sorts of backgrounds that have not had a traditional CS degree. They have come from fields like math, IT, physics, mechanical engineering, etc. Engineering disciplines but not really computer science.<p>The kind of work I&#x27;ve seen all those people do has also varied from things like control software for fields of heliostats to frameworks for server orchestrations to search and data mining. So how is it that I&#x27;ve managed to work with so many competent engineers and yet these giant corporations can&#x27;t figure out how to hire semi-competent engineers to do some of the drudge work that I&#x27;m sure they need done? Maybe the problem is not with the workforce and the availability of knowledgeable and competent workers? Maybe the problem is their shitty hiring practices?

This is a difficult problem to discuss, in large part because not all developers are created equal.<p>There <i>is</i> a reasonable supply of entry-level and low-skill developers. I refer to them as commodity developers: Developers who have a very basic skill set, who can do only a few specific things, none of them with extreme skill, but some of them reasonably competently. They typically do web front-end work, but sometimes work in Java on server back-ends. Typical pay ranges from $80-$120k, the same as it has been for 10 years or more.<p>There also <i>is</i> a shortage of high-skill developers. Compensation north of $250k-$500k is becoming <i>standard</i> in some areas for such developers. [1] That pretty much could only happen if there were a shortage, since real wages have remained flat in general since the mid 1970&#x27;s. [2]<p>The problem is when companies ask for more H-1B employees, citing the fact that they can&#x27;t hire developers for their highest skill positions (or claiming that they can&#x27;t hire mid-skill developers at &quot;market rates&quot;, because even the mid-skill tier is asking for more money now), but then import commodity developers.<p>By importing such workers, it unfairly keeps those developers&#x27; wages down by creating an artificial surplus of employees at that level. The idea of an H-1B worker is that they are <i>not</i> supposed to be paid less than the &quot;prevailing standard&quot; for a worker of equivalent skill in the local market [3]. But if by hiring H-1B workers you&#x27;re holding down the &quot;prevailing standard&quot; in pay, that hardly seems like companies are following the spirit, or even the letter, of the law.<p>[1] My own compensation was in that range when I took a job working from remote full time, and I know several other developers at top companies whose compensation is well within that range.<p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thestreet.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;11480568&#x2F;1&#x2F;us-standard-of-living-has-fallen-more-than-50-opinion.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thestreet.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;11480568&#x2F;1&#x2F;us-standard-of-liv...</a> and many other such charts and reports.<p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;H-1B_visa#Employer_attestations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;H-1B_visa#Employer_attestation...</a>

There is a major flaw in this article. Software developers are not cogs. Just because someone has an engineering degree does not make them just as good as any other developer. Being able to write great software usually comes from passion and practice, not a piece of paper that says &quot;Computer Science BS&quot;. Some of the best developers I know didn&#x27;t even get an engineering degree. Is there a shortage of people with pieces of paper? Maybe not. Is there a shortage of people that love writing software enough to spend most nights and weekends doing it? Yes.<p>This is based on my experience interviewing candidates for two small tech companies.

All arguments aside, there&#x27;s one fundamental way to answer whether companies&#x27; talent shortage complaints are &quot;phony&quot; or not: pay. If there really were a shortage, pay would be rising dramatically. Average engineers would make 200k, 300k... Just like doctors do. But it isn&#x27;t happening. These BigCos just want more supply so they can pay even less than they do now. Plain and simple.<p>Edit: Doctors and lawyers make so much because of artificial governors on the supply. They&#x27;re not absurdly more talented or educated than other people (e.g. engineers), there are simply fewer of them. In the case of doctors, med school is the limiting factor. The time and $ investment is nuts. For lawyers, it&#x27;s the Bar exam. When there are too many lawyers, the Bar association makes the test harder. When there aren&#x27;t enough, they make it easier.<p>This makes me want a standardized programming test so a) talent level could be gagued more accurately than a cursory glance at someone&#x27;s github account and b) the supply of engineers would be choked off.

I&#x27;ve always viewed these persistent and ridiculous claims of a tech-industry worker shortage through a lens of class. To a Harvard MBA, that we programmers earn six figures is <i>prima facie</i> evidence of a worker shortage, since there&#x27;s no way that ugly nerds should be earning that kind of money for typing into a computer.<p>Programmers are workers, so investors and management should be able to siphon off their productive value the same way they siphon off the productive value of other works. That they can&#x27;t right now is an aberration, a disease to be cured with massive immigration.<p>That we&#x27;re not doctors or lawyers and make decent money is something that simply does not compute for these types.

This article makes the perennial mistake of assuming all &quot;STEM graduates&quot; are equal. This is flawed in three main ways:<p>1. STEM graduates includes many fields where there genuinely is a huge surplus of labor (we don&#x27;t really need more physicists).<p>2. Talent is critical and sadly a large number of CS graduates do not have the talent to be good developers. Many fresh graduates just don&#x27;t have the skills to cut it as a high-quality professional developer, yet the best ones have six-way auctions going. Companies are absolutely desperate for good developers, with the operative word being <i>good</i>. (Don&#x27;t even get me started on bootcamp graduates.)<p>3. The shortage of developers is most acute for senior developers. It takes about 10 years to become a truly senior developer and 10-15 years ago not many people were interested in starting a career in CS (the dot-com bust was still raw). This shortage can only be solved with time or immigration and until then senior developers can command considerable salaries ($250k+ all in).

The IEEE points out regularly that there&#x27;s no shortage of engineers. Otherwise, salaries would be going up across the board. Whenever some employer complains they can&#x27;t find engineers, ask how many people they have in off-site training right now.<p>Companies need to be paying for training that&#x27;s just conversion from one skill set to whatever skill set the company needs right now. Most programmers who are competent in at least two languages can easily learn a third. A combination of explicit training and someone to answer hard questions is usually sufficient. (There&#x27;s startup potential there - offer conversion training courses, where people who already know A are taught B. A &quot;hard question&quot; answering service, sort of like StackOverflow but paid, with a service level agreement, and without the clueless closing of questions, could work as a business.)<p>This industry has forgotten what management is for. Part of the job of management is to organize the division of labor. Not everyone can do everything. It&#x27;s the job of management to divide up the job so that no one part is too hard. Instead, we see a demand for &quot;full stack developers&quot;. That&#x27;s a confession of incompetent management.

&gt; What Tornquist didn&#x27;t mention was that Qualcomm may then have had more engineers than it needed: Only a few weeks after her June 2 talk, the San Diego company announced that it would cut its workforce, of whom two-thirds are engineers, by 15%, or nearly 5,000 people.<p>How do we know that 15% isn&#x27;t mostly coming out of the non-engineering 33%? And they may well still be hiring engineers massively.

Until the law is passed that releases all restrictions on visa-workers and simply grants them citizenship or an extremely permissive stay-while-looking-for-a-job situation, increasing the h1-b quota is simply a means to create a reduced-rights cheaper workforce.<p>It really fills me with disgust to see influential people present this issue as a skills shortage, while hiring workers at reduced wages and burdening them with the threat of deportation.

... &quot;may be phony&quot;<p>Oh LOL, isn&#x27;t this well known? Are people really just now figuring out NOW that this is, and always has been, about lowering expenses for these big companies? I mean, they aren&#x27;t really even trying to hide this!<p>&quot;our immigration system has failed to keep pace.&quot; The nation&#x27;s outdated limits and &quot;convoluted green-card process,&quot; she said, had left firms like hers &quot;hampered in hiring the talent that they need.&quot;&quot; ... &quot;Only a few weeks after her June 2 talk, the San Diego company announced that it would cut its workforce, of whom two-thirds are engineers, by 15%, or nearly 5,000 people&quot;

Shortage may be phony?<p>Ask all the unemployed engineers over fifty if it&#x27;s phony.<p>Ask all the women leaving the field after less than five years if it&#x27;s phony.<p>Ask developers who want to work remotely if it&#x27;s phony.<p>If you don&#x27;t see companies making simple, easy changes then you can be pretty assure the shortage is phony.

The very real issue is the use of H1-B visas to drive down the cost of labor across the board. Its not a coincidence that real wages in the US have declined since 1970 while the percentage of population immigrants represent have tripled from 4.7 to over 14%

There is power law distribution of programming skills as in every other field. I am a web developer, I have worked with both established companies and startups from every continent in the world. I was hired recently by a client from USA, whose previous programmer created mess of code base, they were about to go out of business, had they not hired me to fix that up. I was able to fix all critical issues within a week, and was able to start developing new features withing two weeks. Were they not hired me from outside of their geographic area, they would not have survived today.<p>So, what should you do to be able to hire good developers- 1. Broaden your horizons, don&#x27;t limit yourself to a geographic area. World is not limited to Silicon Valley.<p>2. Be willing to hire remotely. I myself working remotely from start of my carrier, it is really exciting.<p>3. Give freedom to developers, let them think out of the box. 4. Before hiring developers full time, give them some real work(may be a small contract), this is better than asking them to solve puzzles :)<p>Feel free to ping me if you have any questions, sfix [at] outlook.com

This H1-B problem is not a &quot;silicon valley&quot; problem. Those companies are unfortunately the companies that are probably doing H1-B the way it was designed.<p>The real issue is the tech industry outside of Silicon Valley providing services to everyday companies. That is truly where the injustice is and where the meat of this article is pointing at.

I think the idea that “Tech industry&#x27;s persistent claim of worker shortage may be phony” seriously misses the point. First, since it usually takes a considerable amount of time to specialize in high skill labor markets (ex. Doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.) ---- there is a gap in the signal (present vs. future). So, today there may not be enough workers that are familiar with designing chips for wearables (subset of hardware engineers). Then, because of limited supply --- prices go up. Other people see this, and are incentivized to train for the role (takes time, investment, etc.). Then, what usually down the road that causes such layoffs --- the industry changes and there’s more labor in that market because of the previous signal. This gap in the signal is a basic feature of such makrets, which makes the tech industry’s claim of worker shortage more likely true than not.

Another factor is that even though there may be plenty of graduates with STEM degrees, they may not have the exact skills a company wants.<p>Just about every job posting is looking for someone with very specific knowledge of languages, frameworks, tools, platforms. etc. How many people with a CS degree already know the technologies that your company is using?<p>By expanding the employee search to the entire world, companies are more able to find someone who has the specific skills they need.<p>Yes, they are very likely trying to hire H1-B to pay less salary. But they are also hiring H1-B to save money by not having to pay for training. Even companies that work with very obscure proprietary technologies that almost nobody knows seem to insist on hiring people who have experience with that technology rather than hiring an otherwise skilled candidate and letting them learn on the job.

Not all tech companies are the same. Google needs engineers with skills that most tech workers don&#x27;t have. You might have a CS degree from a great school and 15 years experience with J2EE, but you&#x27;re not experienced with say... reactJS. If Google (or Facebook, or startup that just raised $25M) is looking to hire a team of reactJS devs, then they can very quickly exhaust the supply of locals who have used it. From Google&#x27;s perspective, there is a shortage.<p>But some other companies, usually &#x27;IT&#x27; more than &#x27;Tech&#x27; from my experience... yeah... they can get a bit squirrely. When a company gets newly &#x27;redundant&#x27; workers to train the new migrants, they can&#x27;t really claim that there are no suitable qualified locals.

The idea here seems to be that there are vacancies for people that are good at the craft, care about it and are generally skilled. And that a lot of visas today are being taken up by inexpensive foreign labor that may not be accurately described as highly skilled. So, HN, what if the government raised the cap for US educated international students? The average quality of STEM education and the average skill is certianly higher in the US. The issue is that the international students that go through US education have to compete with other foreign workers and often don&#x27;t end up getting visas even though they are able to fill those skilled position vacancies. Curious to know the pros of cons of such an approach.

In this thread there&#x27;s a lot of complaining about mediocre developers. I&#x27;m still finishing my undergrad, and looking to go the PM route, but how do I avoid being the type of developer complained about here?

From the frequent articles I see on HN and the subsequent reactions, would it be fair to say that this is the situation?<p>There is no shortage of programmers. However, there is a shortage of programmers (of X skill level) willing to work at the salary that a company desires. And that is where outsourcing and H1B comes in. Having a larger pool of candidates (at X skill level) will force the local candidate pool to lower their asking salary. In turn, this will allow companies to keep salaries deflated and profits up.

My company has been trying to hire good Ruby and Frontend developers for... well.. a while.<p>There&#x27;s no shortage of applicants but the quality...? Eh.<p>Finding even a Junior level engineer that knows more than &quot;I can use these libraries&quot; rather than &quot;I know the language&quot; is hard in both (but especially in JS).<p>There&#x27;s a big pool... but sadly most of it is shallow.

It is also true that computer science curriculum doesn&#x27;t really cover anything but a specific subset of the software development jobs out there. The same may not apply to other STEM fields, but it is certainly true for software.

Yes, this is a constant thing in Spain too.<p>Tech companies whining about worker shortage hit the news several times every year, yet working conditions and salaries never get better.

The more I read articles like this the more I hate america.<p>america wants to be global hegemonic power without paying the price for it.<p>america only has 5% of the world&#x27;s population and deserves only 5% of the world&#x27;s GDP, and should limit itself to absorbing only 5% of world&#x27;s resource.<p>American multinationals who also control america&#x27;s govt want to absorb the best of the world&#x27;s labour and force wage suppression on its own people.<p>Guess what - its working so well that they can even ignore to invest in their OWN infrastructure, education and people.

One word: training

Wow... as a VISA immigrant, who had a VERY hard time getting through the visa process, this kind of silly american opinion is quite irritating.<p>When a company lays off 20,000 people, those are _not_ the same people as the ones coming in on visas. They are probably very low skill engineers. The people coming in on visa&#x27;s (have you met any?) are usually way more skilled than their american counterparts. America is _winning_ by exercising this brain drain.<p>&gt;These are designed to serve high-skilled immigrants but often &gt;enable the importing of Indian and Chinese guest workers to &gt;replace an older, more experienced, but more expensive &gt;domestic workforce<p>Come on. Really? All the young indian and chinese talent I meet is way above average.

&quot;we looked everywhere for someone who&#x27;d be willing to work 7 days a week with no overtime at an annual salary that does not keep up with region&#x27;s cost of living, we really tried, so it must be that there are no workers available.&quot;