The Real Truth About the STEM Shortage

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-truth-about-the-stem-shortage-that-americans-dont-want-to-hear-2013-5

by kp27 • 13 years ago

95 121 13 years ago

Given that immigration laws are import quotas, that the free market will fix things is a confused argument. There's no such free market in software engineering labour.

tejay• 13 years ago

> There's no such free market in software engineering labour.

Can you explain this a little bit? Not trying to sound combative, just would like to hear your thoughts!

jacques_chester6• 13 years ago

Well to sabotage myself, there's no free market in anything. "Free market" is a fuzzy set.

Import quotas are well studied. When you limit the number of foreign cars, foreign commodities etc that can enter your country, you drive up the price. Local suppliers of those goods will benefit at the expense of local consumers of those goods.

But humans, unlike cars or bananas, come with lasting and deep impacts on a local society. It is a very human thing to wish to control who belongs to your ingroup, even if that ingroup is an abstraction of continental scope and with hundreds of millions of existing members.

But the fact the immigration restrictions arises from ancient social logic doesn't change its economic nature, its economic morphology if you will. And immigration restrictions are isomorphic onto any other import quota. They artificially raise the price of local suppliers (US citizens) at the expense of local consumers (US companies).

As an Australian this is less of a problem for me. We have a special secret backdoor into the US engineering market in the form of the E-3 visa.

stcredzero4• 13 years ago

Well, there's freelancing, but that market has serious problems with flows of information. (Which would be worth tons of money, if you could solve them.)

jacques_chester6• 13 years ago

There's freelancing and remote work, which are less restricted.

The flow of information between transacting parties is a fairly central problem of economics. It's believed to be why companies exist (since alternatively the logical end point for a perfect free market is a thin gas of individual, rational agents), and it explains the "Market for Lemons".

Solving that problem preoccupies a large part of the economy. And making it worse, another large part. All hail the Red Queen.

eli_gottlieb12• 13 years ago

In order to usefully define a market you must define it as a closed system. Otherwise, you can push the price of anything at all to whatever you like simply by "importing" asymptotic quantities from "outside".

By the same reasoning, the Second Law of Thermodynamics poses no problem for any creature living on Earth, because we can always import more energy from the Sun.

jacques_chester6• 13 years ago

Nonsense. You can build a workable model, you just need to accept that any such model is imperfect.

Strictly speaking, "if you wish to build an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe". Fine, but the rest of us have work to do and can cope with imperfect models.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

From the article:

"There is a different kind of shortage, but the American people won't like to admit it.

"What there is is a shortage of ultra-elite American-born talent, and Silicon Valley wants to hire the very best in the world. The view from Silicon Valley is that a lot of the US talent, while bountiful in number, just doesn't stack up."

That is the nub of the issue. Several of the leading companies in high-tech industry believe that "hire the best" is the most successful way to compete with other companies, and that requires hiring from a worldwide pool of job applicants. An immigration lawyer might point out that the "outstanding ability" O-1 temporary worker visa category

http://minsk.usembassy.gov/temporary_workers.html

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind10/c3/c3s5.htm

allows people who are truly world-class experts to enter the United States to work. (If I remember correctly, that is how Fields medalist Terence Tao was able to gain his faculty position at UCLA as a citizen of Australia, although his visa status may have changed meanwhile.) But, yes, demonstrating that a person meets the O-1 visa requirements is difficult for an employer, and even at that only allows temporary residence (not a "green card").

That American graduates of STEM programs vary wildly in quality of preparation for demanding work is why any smart company will hire workers on the basis of work-sample tests rather than on the basis of college degree requirements.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

Until companies in general emphasize actual job task performance rather than school credentials in hiring, visa regulation reform won't do the whole job of helping companies meet their hiring needs.

kyllo• 13 years ago

What there is is a shortage of ultra-elite American-born talent, and Silicon Valley wants to hire the very best in the world. The view from Silicon Valley is that a lot of the US talent, while bountiful in number, just doesn't stack up.

That's a tautology. By definition, there's always going to be a shortage of ultra-elite talent. If we had a surplus of job candidates with that level of talent, it wouldn't be considered elite anymore.

SV wants easier access to the entire world's pool of ultra-elite talent, not just the US's. They want more selection and lower prices.

I don't blame them, but I don't think what they want is necessarily what's best for America. I think we would be better off if companies went back to the old-school method of "hire smart people locally and train them for the specific job skills." Because you have to train people anyway, no one is really a plug-and-play hire.

Glyptodon2• 13 years ago

I already want to bash my head in every time an employers wants to make me waste a weekend writing basic algorithms.

Plus if that's really the problem than what's needed is a credentialing system. However, most people here will point out that "doing algorithms for a test has nothing to do with real world 'rock star' productivity," and then continue to use their own versions of competency tests.

I know lots of real engineers and they never seem to have multiple rounds of massive technical interviews filled with technical questions despite working on and designing large complex systems that can often kill people if things go wrong. Though job ads do seem to have the same issues with demanding lots of experience in pointless skills.

...

latch• 13 years ago

My take on this is that anywhere you look, most developers are poor to mediocre. The problem isn't specific to America. What is [mostly] unique to America is that immigration restrictions is the only thing stopping them from swooping up above-average talent from other countries (in no small part thanks to good salaries and the near-mythical nature of the valley)

In other words, Portugal (as a random example) has the same shitty breakdown of poor/average/good developers as the US, but a not-insignificant number of the good ones are hirable.

stcredzero4• 13 years ago

One company I worked for didn't look for and hire rockstar talent. They had a shop in India with lots of diligent guys who followed instructions, a decidedly inelegant architecture with lots of "repeating yourself," and a good position in an industry where just getting data from one place to another and usefully aggregating it made you tons of money.

Don't underestimate the value of being in the right market and simply knowing how to manage people.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

That is probably one of the most difficult things for the 'average engineer' to understand.

Solve a person's problem and you'll profit, doesn't matter if it is the worse hack ever invented, if it's reasonably easy to use and/or fulfills a need it gets the money.

outside1234• 13 years ago

the part they missed is that they also want indentured workers as well, as in, workers that can't switch jobs for 3-4 years while they get their green card.

mratzloff• 13 years ago

Yes, this is extremely relevant.

Note that 1 in 5 STEMs don't work in software because of pay or working conditions (we can assume that means, for instance, long hours).

But if you're scared of being fired (and therefore deported), startups have a free hand to exploit you.

thurn• 13 years ago

I believe (IANAL) that once you have a priority date, you keep it even if if you switch jobs.

jtchang• 13 years ago

Of course large corporations want immigration reform!

They don't want to pay for mediocre talent in the US when they can get someone just as good overseas. The reality is that technology is eating the world and there aren't enough good engineers to create everything we need.

I think some reform is definitely necessary. The need for top engineer talent is just going to get worse (and not just in the US...all the countries will need them). If immigrants want to come to the US I feel we should welcome them.

stcredzero4• 13 years ago

I think a significant part of SV's problem, is that there's an "old boy" mentality, just with different trappings. I bet a lot of the actual people who lived in the milieu portrayed in Mad Men believed they were living a sort of heightened humanity and were helping to make the world a better place. I also think that is exactly what many in SV and the Bay Area actually do; that's not a justification to look down on and prejudge fellow human beings, however. Sometimes, I wonder if I'm getting a little flavor of what pre-revolutionary Paris was like.

crazygringo• 13 years ago

I just always assumed this was the case, since everyone talks about wanting to hire only "A" engineers.

But I'm not so sure we Americans should be "offended" by this. This article says:

> The view from Silicon Valley is that a lot of the US talent, while bountiful in number, just doesn't stack up. But Silicon Valley doesn't want to just come out and say this, since it will sound offensive to a lot of American-born grads.

I mean, of course, only 5% of American engineers are going to be in the top 5% of American engineers, for example. It's not a national failure. It's not offensive. That's the entire conversation about "A" engineers. Any country needs to look outside its borders for additional top engineers.

Then, the article goes on to paraphrase Silicon Valley:

> "Hey America, please raise the visa limit. There's a shortage of STEM talent that is willing to work for what we'll pay that also meets our high standards.

I'm not really convinced that pay has anything to do with it. The general problem really seems to genuinely be finding engineers that are good enough, just in the recruitment process period -- at least in many cases.

The article tries to use statistics to show that some STEM majors go on to other fields. But saying that 18.7% of CS majors aren't working in their field because of pay/promotion/working conditions doesn't strike me as unreasonable at all. I mean, maybe they're the "C" engineers or something, and they decided they're better at something else. Or they just enjoy something else more. The article certainly isn't proving that they're the "A" engineers everybody wants, and that they've gone on to brain surgery instead because that's more lucrative and has better working conditions.

ryanSrich• 13 years ago

> I'm not really convinced that pay has anything to do with it. The general problem really seems to genuinely be finding engineers that are good enough, just in the recruitment process period -- at least in many cases.

It's neither the pay nor the talent. It's the combination of both. Companies in SV want to pay the highest talent the least amount of money. They do this while masking their actions as a shortage of STEM workers in the US. Programmers are the new labor force and just like the ones before it are being outsourced for cheaper work. Only this time the employees must come here.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Any country needs to look outside its borders for additional top engineers.

But the quote isn't saying they want 5% engineers; it is saying most available engineers are not satisfactory. This does not have much to do with top 5% engineers naturally being restricted in number.

eli_gottlieb12• 13 years ago

It's very definitely a pay issue. It's also a hiring issue: most of Silicon Valley deliberately makes it as difficult as possible to pass the hiring bar.

There is one company with whom I've interviewed once, gotten an offer, and then been rejected when I applied later in a separate round after a year and a half doing other things. There's another company where I interviewed once, got an offer, did something else, interviewed later, got rejected, was recommended for an internship later, got put through such a bureaucratic fuck-up that I didn't even receive a technical interview before they'd selected interns for all their slots for the year, and they still regularly try to recruit me every few months (including this past month), despite my being a grad-student right now. Then there's a third company that keeps continually sending recruiters my way every so often despite rejecting me with no reason given every single time.

I'm not naming names, but these are big, famous companies. Literally everyone on this entire board knows these companies and "knows" about their absolutely ravening hunger for engineers, "knows" about their six-figure offers for new college grads (I never got one of those, but I graduated in 2011).

If these are the recruiting, filtering, and hiring practices at three of the world's largest technology companies, then I have to declare, fuck it, there's no shortage of "talent", aka: skilled labor. There's a shortage of top-5% skilled labor willing to jump through the right hoops, with the right Luck Bonus stat on their character sheet to get through the outright random filters, who are willing to take the salaries on offer after all the crap they just went through to find a job.

By contrast, I'll tell you how I found my (No evil eye /spits!) internship for this summer. I checked the "Who's Hiring" thread on Hacker News for interesting internship positions, sent a bunch of cover letters, had one Skype interview with the CTO of a very nice company, received the initial offer, negotiated a bit (nothing too heavy, it's an internship after all, but a slightly nicer deal on tax status and travel expense), and accepted the offer. As far as I can tell (again, No evil eye /spits!), they're a very nice company doing highly interesting work that could even potentially inspire me towards new research directions in my grad work, and I'll be pretty glad to spend my summer vacation with them.

And at no point whatsoever did I have to recite the definition of a red-black tree, figure out how to jump out of a spinning blender when I've been miniaturized, or solve an Advanced Algorithms exam problem.

pfortuny• 13 years ago

I understand your anger. But exiting a blender when minituarized is really necessary!

Honestly, if they do not TALK with you, it is probably a worthless job. And by talk I mean questions and answers are full duplez, like POSIX sockets.

Blender!

dyno123453• 13 years ago

SV firms want greater level of engineer perfection 1) than they actually need and 2) than their testing methods can actually detect.

#1 I can almost understand as an emotional thing, #2 I find much more frustrating

incision• 13 years ago

>Then there's a third company that keeps continually sending recruiters my way every so often despite rejecting me with no reason given every single time.

Same deal here.

Most frustrating is that I don't know how they found me as I don't have a public resume nor do I have any real idea what they're really looking for as they seem intent on being "confidential" (incredibly vague) about everything.

arohner5• 13 years ago

> It's very definitely a pay issue.

How do you know this? From my own experience trying to hire in this economy, and from talking to other people hiring, the problem is finding good engineers that are hirable at all [edit: local or remote, for any amount of money]. When I've lost a candidate due to him taking another offer, the reasons have always been unrelated to money. Things like "The other company's problems are more interesting to me" or "I'd prefer to work locally in my current city, rather than move to SF or work remotely".

jimhefferon• 13 years ago

In short: they want people with more than a C+ in C++.

wavefunction2• 13 years ago

Silicon Valley may be different, but for most of today's software development, you just need someone who can write managed code that's maintainable.

I'm willing to tackle any sort of technology project, but do we really need to reinvent the system bus? (A friend tells me about 6 months of meetings with the team arguing over piddling details in a simple system bus implementation that will probably get scrapped when the next team comes in.)

learc832• 13 years ago

There's a big problem with the bar graph in the article. They are lumping Engineering Technology together with Engineering and Information sciences in with Computer Science. Engineering Technology is completely different from Engineering, just like CIS is completely different from Computer Science.

Grouping those together is like grouping employment numbers for electrical engineers and electricians just because they have the same root word in their titles.

The article also talks about "foreign born students... crushing the homegrown talent." If they're talking about foreign born students at US universities I wouldn't say they are "crushing" US students at all. From what I've seen the reason so many foreign students are accepted has more to do with them paying way more tuition than in-state students than anything else.

danzig13• 13 years ago

I have an MIS degree and have had no trouble working alongside CS grads my entire career. Likewise for my family member with an Engineering Technology degree. I don't think there is that huge of a gap. It is still about getting your foot in the door and doing things on the job.

learc832• 13 years ago

>I have an MIS degree and have had no trouble working alongside CS grads my entire career.

Sure, but how much of that has anything to do with your MIS degree.

Sure there are CIS majors who can program, and there are high school dropouts who can program as well. But CS degrees teach you how to program while CIS degrees do not. They prepare you for two completely different fields. Employment figures for Software developers and IT people are very different.

>Likewise for my family member with an Engineering Technology degree

Engineering Technology is also a different field. Again, sure there are people with engineering tech degrees that work as engineers and are paid like engineers, but the vast majority do not.

null_ptr2• 13 years ago

"foreign born" is such a sneaky word, too. They could just as well be American citizens.

twoodfin• 13 years ago

Believe you me, if the big immigration reform effort in Washington were just about bringing in new STEM workers via an expanded or reformed visa system, it would be done by now. Certainly a majority of Republicans and Democrats are for it in the abstract. Mitt Romney wanted to "staple a green card" to every STEM graduate's diploma.

But that's not what the debate's about, and it's fairly silly to claim otherwise. The debate is whether or not any immigration reform will be "comprehensive", the Washington euphemism for amnesty and normalization of the existing illegal population. There is a not insignificant block of both Democrats and Republicans who will not allow anything short of a "comprehensive" bill to pass because they believe it's the only shot to achieve such normalization. There's also a reasonable argument often made that opening the doors to STEM graduates and other "desirable" workers while forcing the existing illegal population to continue to skirt the law is de facto discriminatory, because of the way the demographics of those two groups line up.

Zuck & Co. are taking the reverse position: They're pushing for the STEM reform they want just in case this time reform really does make it over the hump, and are happy to push for normalization as well, since it is the only likely path to that result.

Anyway, I don't know how I feel about normalization, but I do know that any nation that has skilled workers who will contribute much, much more than they take lining up to get in would be crazy not to let them in.

roasm• 13 years ago

There isn't just a shortage of ultra-elite local talent, there's even a shortage of halfway competent local talent.

I've done a lot of hiring, mostly from colleges, and I can tell you that there are some schools that should just shut down their CS departments. You know there's a problem when you've given someone a 4 year degree, and they can't even get through a for loop. There's a reason fizz buzz is an interview question.

I refuse to outright ignore any school because I believe great people can go to any school (or no school at all), but some schools I have experience with are definitely a strike against you on your resume.

tosseraccount4• 13 years ago

"There isn't just a shortage of ultra-elite local talent, there's even a shortage of halfway competent local talent."

Don't all businesses and consumers complain about finding quality on the cheap? This is not special to tech nor specific to a region, right?

powertower2• 13 years ago

There was an article going around here some time ago about a company in the described position that was literally flabbergasted about not being able to hire all the top engineering talent that they wanted in the US ... at $14/hour pay.

That pretty much summed up the real issue for me.

bayesianhorse2• 13 years ago

I have a problem with "If supply of workers is short of demand, price should go up". In a very basic view this makes sense. But not in even slightly more sophisticated models.

A company makes a certain "marginal" revenue off the employee. It's not always easy or even possible to compute the exact amount, but the salary is limited by this marginal revenue. The difference between marginal revenue and salary is the marginal profit. If that profit is too small, management might not be able to get the money to even hire this employee.

Supply and demand in the labor market is a very fickle thing, and I am certainly no expert. But adding job opportunities and subtracting immigrants is not going to fly.

eli_gottlieb12• 13 years ago

If labor is too scarce for capital to successfully exploit the hell out of it, that mostly means capital should just give up and shut down, handing control over the means of production to labor.

gloob• 13 years ago

But first, how about we let capital usurp the political system for its own ends? That seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

dyno123453• 13 years ago

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=revenue+per+employee+ap...

Seems likely to be a pretty safe margin

TulliusCicero3• 13 years ago

You realize that's revenue, not net income or profit, right?

aghull• 13 years ago

I have a lot of problems with this article.

> What there is is a shortage of ultra-elite American-born talent, and Silicon Valley wants to hire the very best in the world. The view from Silicon Valley is that a lot of the US talent, while bountiful in number, just doesn't stack up.

So you're saying that the US has a shortage of the world's best talent? And that Silicon Valley wants to be able to hire the world's best? Those 2 suppositions seem too obvious to bear mentioning. Are we supposed to expect the majority of the ultra-elite of anything to come out of the US?

Then the article looks at average salaries for STEM workers over time to "prove" that there's no shortage based on "the fundamental laws of supply and demand." OK, but average price would only rise if the supply-to-demand ratio was also shrinking, not if it was relatively constant. I don't see this brought up in the article.

Glyptodon2• 13 years ago

I have a huge issue with what the article says because we constantly also hear about how foreign scientists and engineers aren't as creative, innovative, or competitive and how countries like Japan, China and India have issues fostering creativity, independence, innovation, individualism, etc., which are supposedly exactly what we need in developers.

Likewise the most talented scientists, engineers, and developers I know are always the ones who have a harder time finding work. Why? Because they can intimidate potential bosses and co-workers without meaning to. Because they're indifferent a lot of marketing schlock or the jargon flavor of the month. And because really smart people constantly undersell themselves. In fact, smart people who don't are most likely narcissistic. (Yes, this means most 'rockstar' 'talent' is neither.)

The average person, regardless of what hip SV types spouting the kool-aid say, is unlikely to feel comfortable hiring someone who makes them feel threatened, confused, or inferior. Even with the best intent to hire people 'more talented' than the manager or existing developers, there're many other divides that preclude there being more than a small difference in skill.

dougabug4• 13 years ago

Richard Feynman's account of his experience teaching in Brazil speaks to your first point. Focusing purely on test scores, fact regurgitation, and formulaic problem solving misses far more important abilities such as grasping underlying fundamental concepts and applying them to novel situations.

tosseraccount4• 13 years ago

There is no tech labor shortage.

[ source : http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html ]

If there was a labor shortage, wouldn't real U.S. wages have been going up?

If I want a $5 Prime Rib Eye steak, and can't find it, is there a beef shortage?

Raise wages, and the talent will come.

groaner• 13 years ago

If I want a $1,000,000,000 unicorn, and can't find it, is it because I'm not paying enough?

The fact that many SV companies want mythical beings to solve their engineering problems is an entirely different issue, but this does not invalidate their claims of a "shortage." It just means that they have failed to come up with a business that is capable of being worked on by the existing talent pool.

nightski• 13 years ago

If you could take a horse and teach it to become a unicorn, then I'd say yes.

eli_gottlieb12• 13 years ago

If you want a unicorn at any price and your business simply cannot deal with the fact that unicorns don't exist, then you suck and you deserve to fail.

I don't mean you in specific, but this is the simple fact about unicorn hunting.

EDIT to note: this does not apply in the mythical "Lake Wobegone"-like areas people are sure to point out to me, where I've heard that a full third of the population are unicorns ;-).

powertower2• 13 years ago

> If I want a $1,000,000,000 unicorn, and can't find it, is it because I'm not paying enough?

To be fair with the analogy, that should rather read...

> If I want a $1,000,000,000 unicorn, one out of the 100 that are in existence, and I can't find someone to sell it, is it because I'm not paying enough?

The answer then becomes - Yes.

Top engineers in the US are not mythical creatures, they do exists. Hence why the original analogy is disingenuous.

crabasa4• 13 years ago

> Raise wages, and the talent will come.

I'm astonished by this attitude. I hate buzzwords like "human capital", but it should be obvious that it's incredibly time consuming and resource intensive to produce people who can program in mainstream languages and platforms. This is not simply an issue of mining more coal or growing more corn.

tosseraccount4• 13 years ago

All business is ruled by the laws of economics. Supply and Demand determine prices. Silicon Valley is not exempt, nor ... and more to the point ... should it be.

zanny2• 13 years ago

Except he is exactly right. If the salaries are competitive enough, all the smart people who are currently attracted to sitting around in wall street making millions doing nothing truly productive might think twice and consider CS or SE.

It isn't an instantaneous turnaround - new talent doesn't come out of the woodwork overnight - but give it 5 - 6 years and if average salary went up another 30k you'd have a % more college students entering the field due to the market demands for it.

That is how it always works with worker shortages.

tosseraccount4• 13 years ago

Pro competition Economist Milton Friedman dismissed H-1B as a subsidy ... [http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/72848/H_1B_Is_Just_An... ]

'Nobel economist Milton Friedman scoffs at the idea of the government stocking a farm system for the likes of Microsoft and Intel. "There is no doubt," he says, "that the [H-1B] program is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy." '

arohner5• 13 years ago

That's specifically about H1-Bs, as opposed to a hypothetical "no limits" visa.

He also said "There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state". Compared to "free and open immigration", yes, H1-Bs are a subsidy.

jellicle• 13 years ago

Except that this isn't the truth. H1B imported engineers aren't the best in their field, working for top wages. They're middling-low, working for below-average wages. They pull down wages for the entire software engineering field by about 6%, say the studies.

If H1B's are really the best software engineers in the world, why are they being hired for less than the average wages in the U.S. for average engineers?

I appreciate that there's a persistent media myth that H1B is about getting "top" engineers, but this has been thoroughly, totally debunked and should be roundly mocked whenever it shows up.

khuey3• 13 years ago

Truly world-class engineers can be brought to the US on O visas. H1Bs are trying to fill a need for good or even great, but not amazing, engineers. Which is why it's a tragedy that so many of the spots go to shitty outsourcing firms for mediocre wages.

ktsmith2• 13 years ago

Depending on the field getting an O visa can be exceptionally hard as they are intended for exceptional people. One of my clients has four or five employees with O visas and these people are all top of their field including a nobel laureate. You could easily be in the top 5% of your field and get rejected for an O.

pandaman7• 13 years ago

They could not get O visa for Linus Torvalds. Not amazing enough, eh?

untog• 13 years ago

I take exception that argument because, well, I'd like to think of myself as an exception. I arrived in the US as an H1B and while it's difficult to talk about my skills objectively, I am certainly not paid below-average wages.

I don't doubt that the majority of H1B visa holders are as you say. But the system can work correctly- I and many others I know are hopefully proof of that. So, "totally" debunked? No.

Retric2• 13 years ago

There is a separate visa for top tallent. H1B's are randomly assigned because it's about body's not tallent. Which is not to say we don't get top tallent randomly, but if your paying 400k/year you don't need to risk the H1B lotto.

PS: you only need 3 on that list and 4, 6, and 8 are not that hard to meet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_visa

avemuri2• 13 years ago

Source?

I'm questioning it simply because I remember from browsing US News stats during my grad school applications that pretty much every graduate department in STEM fields was 20-50% foreign students. I only looked at the top 20-30 schools, but that's a pretty substantial cohort. Maybe there are sweatshops out there that hire middling-low candidates at below market wages, but it's hard to dismiss the presence of a large pool that certainly ARE the best in the field.

ng12• 13 years ago

Being in graduate school has nothing to do with being the best in the field. Very few American-educated STEM majors (or, at least in CS) go on to grad school since they can easily get the same job with a BSc as a foreign student with a MS.

Getting a masters can help fast-track you in the visa process and make your resume more attractive for employers who are largely ignorant about Indian/Chinese/etc education systems. It's more of a competitive necessity for a foreign student.

pandaman7• 13 years ago

While it's true that the bulk of H1B are bodies for Indian body shops it's not a problem with H1B, it's the problem with the corrupt government issuing visas to body shops.

And it's true that H1B's are not the best engineers in the world. However many of the best engineers in the world are H1Bs.

Stratego2• 13 years ago

It's true based on what data, exactly?

null_ptr2• 13 years ago

> Except that this isn't the truth. H1B imported engineers aren't the best in their field, working for top wages. They're middling-low, working for below-average wages.

That's a blanket statement. There's a difference between the H1B mill contracting firms and H1Bs that are directly recruited by top companies, and paid on par with their American employees. The H1B mills give genuinely talented workers who fully deserve their positions a bad name, and that's a real shame.

cesarbs• 13 years ago

Glad someone pointed that out. That distinction seem to be constantly forgotten in this debate. Top companies recruit H1Bs using the same process they use to recruit Americans.

BadassFractal• 13 years ago

I was going to say exactly this. As an ex-H1B myself working for a top firm, I can guarantee you I was in no way top of the line at the time. I was very much equivalent to every other average USA top 5 CS school graduate working with me at the company, and that's to say, not particularly impressive in any way.

Moving to SF/SV and working with the startup and open source communities has really opened my eyes to what a "top engineer" really means, and I sure as hell wasn't one (or surrounded by them) at BigCorp.

Real top talent is really hard to get hold of, and the dozens of thousands of H1Bs are absolutely not that top 5%.

The way I see it, H1B is a way to get slightly cheaper decent labor for big enterprise firms, and you occasionally luck out and get a few great gems in there. Even better if you can lock them in to your company for 10 years waiting for the green card to get approved.

crabasa4• 13 years ago

This article is needlessly sensationalistic and the claim that there is a "shortage" of ultra-elite engineers illustrates a basic misunderstanding of math. But it does show us what a red herring the phrase "STEM" is.

Let's not get bogged-down in STEM, or the differences between Engineering and Computer Science. There are massive differences both in the curriculum and quality of instruction even inside the field of CS.

I believe there is a massive shortage of people who are capable of programming in mainstream languages and platforms. The tool chains that have been developed to solve problems for online retail, advertising, travel, media, entertainment, etc are now in the process of being applied to virtually every other industry.

I think the failure of our industry (post-2000) to attract more people to this field is sad. I think the emphasis on ultra-elite SV talent ignores the broader application of programming to the world at large, and perpetuates an attitude that people who program are special, as opposed to simply being passionate practitioners of an increasingly creative trade.

Below are some interesting links I've picked up on this subject:

http://braythwayt.com/2013/04/29/calling-all-hackers.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-scien...

http://readwrite.com/2012/05/17/computer-programming-for-all...

zanny2• 13 years ago

Hey, I'm a CS grad who can write / has written a lot of C, C++, Java, C#, Python, and Javascript all pretty well (though I've been mostly using C++ / Python / JS so I'm rusty on the others) but I'm still job hunting after a year out of my BS mainly because I went to a small private school and I'm not the A talent this article talks about.

If people needed bodies that can just write (or test, or comment, document) mainstream languages, I shouldn't have this much resistance to job hunting in Philly and NY (I live in the middle of nowhere PA, which doesn't help) even when I offer to come visit in person.

I do think it is a maligned pipe dream amongst hiring departments of getting one of two things - 1. A 5+ year veteran a couple pay grades below what they are worth or 2. A rockstar supergenius savant that gradated college at 16 and knows every language from Cobol to Clojure. Going with someone like me (and I like to think of myself as an average SE) seems like settling to them, and they don't really need the work right now, they just want to exploit the productivity of a rockstar below their pay grade.

crabasa4• 13 years ago

I'm bummed to hear you're still looking for a job, especially based on everything I'm hearing about the opportunities in New York. Are you willing to relocate, or are you specifically looking for a remote role.

In any case, I'm certainly not making the case that it's easy to get a job. Virtually every step in the process is broken, from education to vocational training to job placement to recruiting. I think it's fair to say that companies have really not figured out how to hire. The current solution reminds me of overengineering: you hire an 9, even though you only need a 6 because you know there's a +/- 3 margin of error.

wmil• 13 years ago

Of course if Silicon Valley CEOs were smart about immigration they wouldn't try jumping on the "comprehensive immigration reform" bandwagon. Or even pushing for an increase in the number of visas.

Instead they should be pushing for a H1B salary floor in the 90k-100k range. This would allow them to claim the majority of the existing H1B pool, and it's hard to argue that jobs like "Food Service Manager" are jobs America vitally need foreign workers to fill.

TulliusCicero3• 13 years ago

This would never fly politically. "They want to give IMMIGRANTS six-figure jobs while Americans are unemployed???"

jacques_chester6• 13 years ago

Australia's 457 visa program requires employers to pay foreign workers the same amount as a local worker, specifically to prevent downward pressure on wages.

Still, the politics are still fraught with TOOK EHR JERBS stuff.

laurentoget• 13 years ago

The main argument of the article is 'If there was a shortage in STEM salaries would rise'.

Comparing the salary ranges in London and Silicon Valley on the two recent polls on HN seems like a pretty flagrant sign that the salary may not have risen recently but developers definitely commend a good bit more money in the US than in London. ( the mode for london seems to be between LBP 30k and 50k, which is $45k-$75k, whereas bay area salary mode is between $120k and $130k )

Disclosure: While having my salary multiplied by 3 was not the main reason for me to move from academia in france to industry in the US, it certainly was a plus.

wavefunction2• 13 years ago

Maybe the real problem, is the quality of the recruiters and HR and business people? Sure, technical people find it very easy to dismiss non-technical folks (_especially recruiters_) out of egoism, but maybe there's some truth to it?

I keep hearing about "rockstar" this and that, but aren't actual rockstars (rather than professional musicians) known for being unrealistic assholes?

WalterBright• 13 years ago

Let's see:

1. Companies want to pay as little salary as possible

2. Programmers want to get paid as high a salary as possible

It's almost as if supply and demand was more than a theoretical concept!

michaelochurch• 13 years ago

I find it utterly ridiculous that people are complaining about a "talent shortage" when a typical 35-year-old software engineer can't buy a house in the Bay Area.

You tell a shortage by price signals, and useless bikeshedding executives out-earn engineers by quite a bit, but no one takes this (I hope) to mean that there's a useless-meddling-executive shortage.

This concept of a "talent shortage" is hereby banned until we're seeing 25-year-old software engineers buying third homes. When we're at that point, we can start worrying about this so-called "shortage".

There is a shortage of talented people doing useful things for society, but that's more of a job shortage than a people shortage.

natrius• 13 years ago

That's a Bay Area problem, not an industry problem. I don't hear the same housing complaints from people in Austin and Seattle.

yekko3• 13 years ago

There is a shortage of good people willing to work for peanuts. There is no shortage of good people.

Offer 500k/year, you'll have more people than you can manage.

TulliusCicero3• 13 years ago

Yes, but this reasoning only goes so far. In order to pay all your engineers 500k/year, you'd have to absurdly profitable. Maybe MS and Google could pull that off, but most companies could not.

yekko3• 13 years ago

Then those other companies are not competitive and will wither away in a Capitalist economy.

Problem solved.

tl;dr: paying high salaries is becoming a competitive advantage.

eli_gottlieb12• 13 years ago

Even MS and Google can't pull that off. However, MS and Google and Apple certainly do receive about $400k-$500k of revenue per employee-year. And their median engineer's salary is roughly $100k +/- $5k. EDIT: Turns out someone found and posted the numbers for net income, actual profit, per employee-year. These companies can afford some higher freaking salaries.

So either they can afford to raise salaries, or non-engineers are much more productive and highly-paid than engineers, or these firms just like being as exploitative as they can in terms of maximizing revenue-per-employee and minimizing salary costs.

arohner5• 13 years ago

This is amazingly bad statistics.

The author is using self-reported surveys of STEM majors who didn't work for an SV company to answer the question of what SV companies are looking for. There are giant assumptions: 1) they wanted to work for an SV company 2) they're not deluding themselves about why they didn't get offered an SV job. A much better source would be to actually ask the SV companies why they didn't hire someone.

As someone who has been actively hiring for the last six months, trying to grow our team from 5 to 10, hiring is really damned hard. You'll get a mountain of crappy resumes, and a few really good resumes. Some of the really good resumes will turn out to be really good people, some of them will accept offers somewhere else, and some of the people that initially appeared great will test poorly, or you won't click with them personally, or something else.

Aside from technical ability, startups also need to look for a certain personality. At my own company, we're strongly influenced by the Valve Handbook. We like to hire people that understand the problem on their own and say "I think this is the most important thing to work on". Not every STEM major has that capability. We also like to hire generalists, or people who aren't afraid of learning how to do the things that need to get done. Both of these reduce our hiring pool.

I know founders of funded SV companies who aren't in the country legally. One in particular has a pHD, published papers, and is quite literally creating jobs. The O visa is a possibility, but it's a ton of paperwork. The H1B is tricky to use for founders, because the visa requires that their "boss" be able to fire them. Also, the H1B window is short, and the next opportunity to hire someone on an H1 is something like Fall 2014.

I've not given offers to candidates because their visa situation was too risky. As in "I'm in the country legally today, but I have to go back home for a few weeks, and I may or may not be able to get back in".

Every company I've talked to is in a similar situation, in terms of being desperate for hirable, highly skilled engineers, at any price.

adpirz• 13 years ago

I'm more of an observer to the field, so I'm curious, what does a "bad" resume look like? And what kinds of things do you find on those few good ones?

My assumptions are that everyone is applying with decent CS background and at least a BS in the field, or is that off?

arohner5• 13 years ago

The assumption that you can distinguish good and bad engineers through their resume is flawed. Some of the better engineers I've worked with didn't go to school. Some of the worst engineers I've worked with got advanced degrees at reputable schools.

The biggest secret in software is that we simply don't know how to teach software. Half of all graduates in all relevant programs, at all universities, are simply unhirable. Talented, second-year interns are more valuable than the median graduate.

We know how to take talented students and make them better, but we don't know how to identify talented students early, and we don't know how to make untalented students even barely competent.

Stratego2• 13 years ago

Where in this article is it acknowledged that the mechanics of supply and demand are radically impacted during a recession?

Where in this article is the rate of employment and remuneration of STEM workers compared to the mean employment rate and remuneration of all American works?

gojomo• 13 years ago

The EPI study keeps misleading people. Key points to remember:

(1) The EPI is a unionized-labor think tank with strong anti-immigration views. Its research – its selection of figures and spin – will always be in service of that goal.

(2) This latest EPI report, like a similar one before it, uses industry-wide and degree-wide averages with no adjustment for cohorts of experience/age. It is thus possible for the 'average' to go down if there is an in-rush of new younger workers (or equivalently, less-experienced career-changers at starting salaries).

As a simple contrived example, assume an 'industry' starting with two workers, a entry-level worker at $50K a year, a senior worker at $100K a year. The average is $75K.

A year passes. Business is booming and there's a shortage of well-qualified workers. The senior worker gets a raise to $125K. The now-junior worker gets a raise to $62.5K. The company would like to hire more senior stars, but they're all already doing well in other industries (or other countries and deterred from working domestically by immigration barriers). Still, the sector is growing so they hire two new promising entry-level workers at $50K each, one recent graduate and one career-switcher, who were both making just $40K last year in non-STEM work. Maybe one of them will be a domain-specific star, with salary to match, once trained-up in a year or so.

Every single person in this scenario got a 25% year-over-year raise... but the 'industry average' compensation dropped from $75K to $71.9K, split over a larger and earlier-in-career base.

If you live in the simpleminded, interchangeable-STEM-laborer world of the EPI analysis, this is a crisis. There are plenty of "STEM workers" because every "STEM worker" is just like every other "STEM worker" and the new entrants haven't magically started making the old $75K average simply by putting on a STEM-worker-jumpsuit. But really, everyone's doing better, the industry is talent-constrained and responding with both salary increases and legally-allowed hiring, and would be able to expand more if other truly 'senior' industry-skilled people were available.

(3) The EPI report uses wordcrafting like "[f]or every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job" to create the impression many STEM graduates are left without a desired job. But there's plenty of evidence (including in their own report) that STEM-graduate unemployment remains low, and lots of workers happily go into non-STEM jobs with STEM degrees, or into STEM jobs with non-STEM degrees. (In particular, many STEM graduates prefer the pay and challenges of other fields – law, finance, consulting, even many sales and small-business roles – and may have taken their STEM degree simply out of intellectual interest, not as strict occupational training.)

So the healthy churn of matching of people with jobs where they, individually, thrive gets spun by EPI as implying we have more STEM graduates as we need. They seem to think of a STEM degree as if it were chiefly a 'union card' giving you the right to work in some rationed job role... and if not everyone with these cards takes those jobs, too many cards were issued. Cut back on the STEM worker supply, from schools and immigration, pronto!

That's the kind of fixed-pie, world-oblivious analysis that did wonders for the big-three US auto industry... don't let the EPI port that thinking into the high-tech world.

We need as many smart, trained workers - from schools and career-changers, foreign and domestic – as we can get.

derricki• 13 years ago

I joined Silicon Valley as a grad student at Stanford in 2007, and I've been on both sides of hiring multiple times. I'm now the recruiting committee chair for an ambitious startup. The key to the article is: "What we may have is a 'STEM majors who have the skills that Silicon Valley prefers' shortage."

For me the issue is not that schools don't teach a certain algorithm or design pattern, but it takes a lot of searching to find someone smart who is also diligent, dedicated, hard-working, and responsible.

Every university should ask their students to read the short essay "A Message to Garcia" (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17195/17195-h/17195-h.htm) that tells the story of the dependable servant Garcia. The author exclaims: "By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing"

The Real Truth About the STEM Shortage

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