Is there really an IT talent shortage? | Hacker News Reader

Is there really an IT talent shortage?

informationweek.com

28 pointsrosariom22 comments

It seems that there are certain skills which are difficult to hire trained workers for. However, the real problem is very, very few IT employers are willing to take any risk and train skilled, U.S. workers.

This is the opposite of how technology employment used to work. Factories could not hire enough trained workers, so they trained them on the job. It never ceases to amaze me how HR insists on skills with a particular niche technology. Often, no tightly-related skills will suffice even for junior positions i.e. Mercurial instead of Git.

Also, everyone wants to hire senior employees who specialized in one technology for most of a career. Finding someone like that is becoming less and less common.

I remember one position years ago when I was still in college where the recruiters demanded five years of job experience with Windows 2000 or they were not interested. The product had not existed that long. The only person qualified to take the job was a liar.

AFAIK 5 years is the minimum length of the mainstream support period for MS products, and is the length for Win2000.

(Recycling my own old comment).

The whole "shortage of IT talent" hysteria is way overblown when you look at the actual numbers. Just one example, latest DICE salary report:

http://media.dice.com/report/2012-2011-dice-salary-survey/

Contrast the opening sentence:

Technology professionals enjoyed their largest annual salary growth since 2008, according to the 2012-2011 Salary Survey from Dice, the leading career site for technology and engineering professionals.

... with the actual numbers:

After two straight years of wages remaining nearly flat, tech professionals on average garnered salary increases of more than two percent, boosting their average annual wage to $81,327 from $79,384 in 2010.

So, let's see. While the inflation is chugging along at ~3% per year, we get 2 flat years, followed by a 1% increase? So basically, we make less money each year? Is the tech industry an economic miracle? Are programmers the one must-have product whose prices get lower when it's in short supply and the buyers have pockets full of cash? Or is there a simpler explanation?

Even better, go ahead and play around with same title, different seniority.

Junior iOS programmer: http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=junior++ios+programmer&l...

Senior iOS programmer: http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=senior++ios+programmer&l...

See how juniors get raises, while seniors get flat-lined? That's the downward pressure of H1Bs as well as evidence of buyers' (hiring managers) actual purchasing behavior markedly different from "we can't find anyone who can do basic fizz buzz! we need people with skillz!".

"There is an IT talent shortage problem"

- management translator -

"The problem is we're paying IT people more than the minimum wage. Also the minimum wage is too high"

We haven't had 3% inflation since before the crash of 2009.

According to the BLS, inflation was 3 percent in 2011. More to the point, the salary increase from 79,384 to 81,327 cited offers an increase of less than 1.5 percent annually. That is lower than inflation for every year in the last ten except 2008.

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infla...

One of the worst aspects of the immigration debate is that somehow the concept of skilled immigration has gotten all tangled up with the notion of a specific shortage in the STEM (or more narrowly, the IT) workforce.

I agree with you that there is no evidence of a general shortage in IT talent. A RAND study also found no evidence of a shortage of STEM workers at the graduate level, either (in fact, it found that the American aversion to PhDs in science and engineering is rational and market driven).

In spite of this, I do support a stronger emphasis on general skilled immigration. Australia and Canada's points system would be a good model. If you look at Australia's points system, you'll see that a licensed plumber or electrician will get as many points as an IT worker (in fact, based on the assessment, a plumber may well get more).

The gem in the article is this:

Testifying earlier this week on behalf of IEEE-USA, a group representing more than 200,000 technical professionals and students, Bruce Morrison told a Congressional immigration policy subcommittee that the talent needs of U.S. companies would be better served by deregulating the process by which employers sponsor new hires for permanent residency. This would allow foreign workers to participate in the talent market on a more equitable basis.

"If an employer is willing to pay a substantial fee to sponsor a skilled foreign worker for a green card -- which means he or she can quit if they are underpaid -- that is solid evidence the employer actually needs the worker's skills," he said in prepared remarks. "But if an employer is only willing to pay a fee for a worker who cannot quit without going back to the beginning of the green card process, that indicates the employer is more interested in the indentured character of the visa, than in the worker's skills."

The last company I contracted with only had H1B Visa people working there. No doubt they would all have moved to new jobs if they could (the company was falling apart).

While there are restrictions an individual with an H1-B may transfer jobs even after they've applied for permanent residency. American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act of 2000 (AC21).

Right. I think (please correct me if I'm wrong) the thing that prevents them from making a transfer is that the green card application gets reset. That could be a multi-year setback in their path to a green card.

Nope, AC21 allows you to transfer even if you have applied for permanent residence. There are restrictions based on where you are in the process and that the new job meets certain criteria.

This rings a bit more true for me. There is no shortage of workers for enough money. I can offer $100,000/year for an IT worker and get flooded with resumes. The larger companies however like to buy at a discount, and the discount comes from someone in a foreign country taking part of their pay in dollars and part of their pay in the right to work and live in the US. That seems to vary with individuals of course but my observation at Sun, NetApp, and Google was that it could be worth up to 50% of the base salary for an individual to work in the US. That is a heck of a gap to fill.

It would be great if the H-1B system was updated to allow sponsored people to work anywhere as long as it was in the field they had said they were going to work in and they didn't spend more than say 180 days being unemployed. I suspect you would find that a lot of the "push" for more H-1Bs would fade away (although that is just a guess). I'd really like it if we could grant automatic H-1B status for 3 years for anyone who got a doctorate STEM degree as well.

In the US I have no idea, but the same tune is being sung in the UK at the moment.

All the while I'm receiving job postings for 'mid-level' software engineering positions requiring 3 or 4 years experience in a bunch of things, offering in the range of £25-30k. Which is basically an insult. Inflation adjusted I earned more than that as a fresh graduate 13 years ago. So it's no wonder there are recruitment problems.

(There is much better money out there, and I'm getting it, but it's no wonder some people are having trouble recruiting really)

There are very few positions which cannot be filled by increasing the compensation. For those which can't, you may need to re-assess your company's culture.

from what I see in some job ads, there is certainly a shortage of super-talented puzzle-solving rockstar ninjas with 5 years experience in 10 technologies who are just out of school and will work over hours for minimum salary and a ping-pong table.

And don't forget they get to wear jeans to work. That surely makes the job more compelling.

There is no shortage of IT workers, there's however shortage of "IT talent" Most IT workers I have met are mediocre at best. Companies want rock stars. That's the problem. Worse of all, they are use to paying average salary for average programmers and don't reward rock stars appropriately.

I had an interview recently. In this interview, I was told that 9/10 of people interviewing for the position for which I was interviewing couldn't write a simple loop to reverse a string. I'd like to attribute that to performance anxiety, but I had office hours for Computer Science students. I know that isn't what it is.

Note that this was for a position asking for between 1 and 3 years of experience.

> "[A]t a time when the U.S. economy needs it most, our immigration policies are stifling innovation. The 2013 cap for the H-1B visas that allow foreign high skilled talent to work temporarily in the U.S. was exhausted by June 2012, preventing tech companies from recruiting some of the world's brightest minds."

I don't think anyone argues with this. Just set a lower limit of $200K per year and you can hire as many people as you want with no red tape and no limits.

There's a shortage of cheap talent.

This uses the term 'IT Talent'. That is a sure sign it will be an amazing article.

This is posted in InformationWeek. Second sign it will be awesome.

But seriously. Why is that kind of articles on HN?

The answer to a question in most headlines is a 'no'. But in this case, it's a 'yes'.

No, I haven't read the article.

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