IT Labor Shortage: A Myth?

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Go to discussions IT Labor Shortage: A Myth? Geniuses Wanted US programmers claim they're passed over for cheaper foreign workers By Erica Manfred posted January 31, 2001 After garnering only two interviews during a 20-month search for a job near his home in Buffalo, New York, 37-year-old programmer Curtis Anderson, who has seven years programming experience, learned that two nearby information-technology firms had hired at least 15 foreign programmers. "These workers had been issued H-1B visas due to a supposed shortage of programmers," he says. Desperate for work, he was even willing to take a low-end programming job at a bank for $12 an hour, but was told he was "over-experienced." "They want programmers with exactly the same experience that the job calls for, and are not willing to do any training," says Anderson. In an industry that claims to be suffering from a labor shortage, Anderson is one of many disgruntled programmers who can't find a job. Is it conceivable that there really isn't a shortage of high-tech workers at all, but simply an excess of technology firms that would rather bring in foreign programmers for half the salary of experienced Americans? That is the opinion of a number of industry insiders. While much of the evidence is anecdotal, Norman Matloff, a computer-science professor at the University of California at Davis has come up with some damning statistics in the most comprehensive study of the problem to date, a paper entitled "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" (see related link at bottom), which he presented as testimony to the Subcommittee on Immigration of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in April 1998. "There's a mystique about this industry," Matloff says. "Both Congress and the public view computers as unfathomable machines that only a genius could program. They're terrified that if we don't have enough programmers we'll lose the last bastion of American superiority -- high tech. When the tobacco industry engages in PR, everyone ignores it because we know they have a vested interest. With the computer industry, the mystique makes it easy for lobbyists to claim that there is a shortage and no one dares to contradict them." "Industry lobbyists want cheap labor in the form of younger Americans and foreigners," he asserts. "They've worked very hard to implant the myth of a huge labor shortage." In his congressional testimony, Matloff said that employers hire only about 2 percent of their software applicants, and that they admit rejecting the vast majority of applicants without even an interview. He presented evidence of rampant age discrimination, starting with people as young as 35, and of employers using the skills issue as a pretext for shunning both older programmers and recent grads, claiming that they don't have the new software skills. Matloff says employers are largely unwilling to train programmers in new skills, although there is ample evidence that it would be both cost-effective and easy to do so. He also claims that many of the foreign programmers that the industry does hire don't have the credentials they're supposed to have. "The companies that bring them in will often falsify their credentials," says Matloff. Age discrimination is another industry-wide problem. At 40, a programmer is already considered over the hill, according to Matloff. His analysis of the reasons for age discrimination range from companies wanting workers who will work for lower salaries, to favoring those who don't have families and are willing to put in a lot of overtime, to the "I only hire those who look like me" syndrome. Many of the hiring managers are young and uncomfortable with hiring someone who looks like their parents, he said. Lack of the latest skill sets is usually the rationale for age discrimination, but employers are often not willing to hire an older programmer who has taken a refresher course in a new skill. Even young computer-science graduates from American universities often can't find entry-level jobs. "The toughest part of breaking into the IT industry is finding a company that will even look at the resume of someone with little or no experience," Christine Earman Harriger, a career counselor at George Mason University's School of Management, told The Washington Post a few weeks ago. The Post noted, "Although local schools are providing students with the courses they need to get good jobs (including work in Java, C/C++, and HTML, among others) most IT firms want employees with several years of on-the-job experience -- even for entry-level positions." One of the biggest villains in keeping qualified people out is the human-resource department, claims Matloff. "HR apparently decides to screen out the applicants who are too expensive or too old -- and then complains there's a 'shortage' of applicants," he says. "I believe that department managers would love to see some of those resumes that HR summarily rejects. Sometimes it's just ignorance. For instance, a hiring manager tells the HR department to send him someone with Java experience. HR thinks the standard is 6 years. But Java's only been around for four years." In fact, many of the Internet-related jobs posted on Monster.com demand 10 years' experience, though the Internet as we know it has barely been around for 10 years. "Power trips should not be eliminated as a factor also," Matloff says. "HR departments can be very power-hungry." A cynical fear of lawsuits may also play a role in HR decisions. "The industry loves people it can control," claims John Miano, a journalist who covers the industry and has written two programming books. "Look at the worst-case scenario," he suggests. "Abuse an African-American employee and you've got a racial discrimination suit; a woman, a sexual-harassment suit; an older worker, an age-discrimination suit. But abuse a 20-something male and what's he going to sue you for?" And a foreign worker may be afraid of losing his visa if he antagonizes his employer. Programmer Longden Loo, who after 20 years in the industry found in his mid-40s that he was no longer considered a desirable employee, thinks a public outcry on the part of disenfranchised information-technology workers might wake up the industry. "We do not buy imported vegetables grown with prison labor, or clothes made by children in virtual slavery abroad because the low bidder comes with a hidden ethical price tag," he says. "In their attempt to lower industry wages with import labor, the IT companies are serving notice to the future domestic talent pool that their efforts are better spent elsewhere than IT." Meanwhile, Norman Matloff has suggested a number of measures that he believes should become industry requirements: · The yearly quota for the H-1B program should be drastically reduced, say to 15,000 per year. It should be geared mainly to hiring "the best and the brightest,'' as was the case for the original H-1 program that preceded H-1B. · Employers who wish to hire an H-1B worker should be required to demonstrate that they made good-faith efforts to find a U.S. citizen or permanent resident to fill the position. Most important, they should not be allowed to require overly specific skills in their review of citizen/permanent-resident applicants. · Employers should hire on the basis of general programming talent, not specific skills. They should stop shunting competent programmers (old or young) into positions like customer support or software testing. They should also place far less emphasis on grades and prestige of institution when hiring new college graduates to fill programming positions, and should greatly expand college internship programs.

-- K. (infosurf@yahoo.com), February 27, 2001


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