Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html

by barry-cotter • 17 years ago

29 29 17 years ago

heather.cs.ucdavis.edu

gaius• 17 years ago

No less true in 2009.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

This has been submitted a bunch of times. Every time I read this article, I think it has more to do with how a UC Davis degree is perceived in the job market compared to other computer science degrees than it has to do with the overall job market for computer science graduates.

jimbokun4• 17 years ago

What is your basis for saying this?

There are a lot of arguments, citing a lot of studies, in this document. If nothing else, he has thought about this issue pretty thoroughly. If you disagree, something more than a snide remark about the quality of a UC Davis degree would be more convincing.

sundae79• 17 years ago

The title is "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage ". And 95% of it is how H1-B is indentured labor. I am no smart guy but I know how to see through plain BS.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

What is your basis for saying this?

Thank you for asking the follow-up question. I appreciate anyone on HN who asks another HN participant a follow-up question to clarify the factual basis for a statement.

To briefly respond to your question before I take my child to a doctor appointment, what has always jarred me about this FAQ is the line

"The main answer to this question is that the vast majority of high-tech H-1Bs are programmers, not engineers, and programming does not use math."

If this professor of computer science truly believes that it doesn't take much math to produce a competent programmer, he has a different definition of competent programmer from that found at some other computer science deparments, including most computer science departments overseas. There is a lot of industry demand for computer programmers who can program in a way that best takes advantage of what a computer can do best, by reducing a problem to its most mathematically correct representation.

I don't think a professor at MIT would dream of writing a FAQ with a statement like that in it about the computer science major sequence at MIT. There does seem to be a shortage of MIT-level programmers, even if there is not a shortage of UC Davis-level programmers.

Tichy• 17 years ago

I only read the chapter about percentages of hires, which didn't seem very convincing to me. So firms only hire 2% of applicants, not a very meaningful number without further information. Maybe the rejects apply to all the firms with a robot script, which would inflate the supposed pool of available applicants.

jimbokun4• 17 years ago

Especially considering that job applicants submit resumes to lots of firms. I think Joel has an article about this, how every firm thinks they hire "the top 2%" because they get 50 times more resumes than they actually hire. But a lot of job applicants and recruiters are spamming their resume to lots of different employers in the hope of just getting one "hit." So it works both ways.

patio11• 17 years ago

One of his other insights in that article is gold too: who persists longest on the labor market? The folks who transparently don't have any business being hired. ("I cannot code a for loop in my language of choice.")

Given a cohort of 100 engineers with bell-curve distributed skills, after 6 weeks of equivalent effort in job searching, there is no reason to assume that the pool of engineers still out of a job would have bell-curve distributed skills (unless hiring decisionmakers are incompetent). Overlay several dozen cohorts like that and you get the labor market: a few good engineers who just graduated or just got married and moved to a new city, and a whole lot of wonderful people who are perhaps not as talented as you'd want on your team.

jimbokun4• 17 years ago

On the one hand, an aspiring entrepreneur reading Hacker News might like the idea of having a cheap labor pool to hire from some day.

On the other hand, I believe there is a danger in devaluing the relationship between education, effort, and wages. With 0 wage growth over the last decade, the American public is becoming cynical about the idea that you can work hard to improve your situation. If industry can always import someone a little more desperate or naive into indentured servitude the moment there is any wage pressure, what incentive is there to improve your skills or education?

Considering the potential impact on macro-economic conditions, this might be a net negative for an aspiring entrepreneur.

asciilifeform• 17 years ago

> an aspiring entrepreneur reading Hacker News might like the idea of having a cheap labor pool to hire from some day

You mean an aspiring exploiter and member of the parasite class?

tom_rath• 17 years ago

Exploiter and parasite?

How many jobs and how much wealth have _you_ created today?

baguasquirrel• 17 years ago

There is a false dichotomy between balancing for cheap labor and demoralizing the Average American Joe. First, I don't want to hire cheap labor. My first boss did just that (especially with the foreign kind) and his company is now under water. Cheap labor doesn't work for programming.

My last job, the company's still doing quite well, beat Q1 expectations by 50%, and we did something like fifty to a hundred phone screens a month for an average of 1 hire a quarter. That's up to three hundred phone calls for ONE goddamn programmer. Do you know how frustrating that is?

What I don't buy about the argument of the Average Joe becoming cynical is that I just don't see a lot of hard work. Binary search is something that you should have learned in freshman year of college, and yet it's still a staple of programming interviews because people regularly fail it.

There are bad apples all around and the situation remains the same with foreign programmers. There are actually very few good foreign-born programmers, just as there are very few good American-born programmers. The catch is that they've all been spoon-fed all the algorithms knowledge so you have to pose your questions in other ways, see if they can creatively apply their knowledge to real world tasks like flipping through a phone book, etc.

In all, I think the problem is more one of PR. We need to get the word out that if you are good, there Will Indeed be a job for you out there. If you love doing it, then stop being so scared of the hordes from India.

dusklight6• 17 years ago

So one of the arguments in that article is, there is no labor shortage because companies get inundated with lots and lots of resumes, but they hire only a very small percentage of those resumes ...

But as anyone who has had to go through those resumes know, the vast majority of the resumes are from people who are totally unqualified for the job .. the fact that employers go through the entire resume pool and are unable to find qualified employees proves the shortage.

And that's just basic qualifications, we aren't even talking about actually knowing how to write good code yet.

p.s. if anyone is looking for a job and is a good java coder with some experience in webapps and GWT, send me a message.

yarek• 17 years ago

I think one of the points of the article was that companies are not willing to take someone not fully qualified AND train them proves there is no shortage. If there was shortage, a company will be willing to go out of the way to hire someone. It's much cheaper to hire someone with the just the right skills, and since a company can do that (even with some work for the hiring manager) and get someone further supports the argument.

cosinepi2• 17 years ago

Regarding your last point, you don't seem to have an email address in your profile.

Is this job on the east or west coast (or somewhere in between)?

dusklight6• 17 years ago

fixed it. send me your resume and all that (sorry i always thought HN had a PM type feature just never checked)

we have people on both coasts, though we are trying to build up headcount in the new york office right now.

brothers_best• 17 years ago

If the average comptetent programmer in the US started getting paid $120k (or more) instead of $80k, you better believe the "labor shortage" would end in a New York minute.

The labor shortage has everything to do with keeping wages deflated by exploiting a market-correctable short term issue, and little to do with any long-term structural problem.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

As pg has said, "There is a great shortage at the high end. I know a bunch of startups that are desperate to hire really good programmers."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133360 (specific comment)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133331 (full thread)

chancho• 17 years ago

Are those startups lobbying for higher H-1B quotas?

This article, and the one in the thread you linked to, are talking about large corporations, not startups. There will always be a shortage at the high end. That's what makes it the high end.

Incidentally, the article you indirectly linked to quotes a Duke professor whose opinion largely agrees with the opinion of the UC Davis professor. Last I checked, Duke was a pretty well-regarded university, so I guess that means he's right. Or is there a flaw in that logic?

rnugent• 17 years ago

This article is about age discrimination in high technology. It suggests a number of reasons for it not the least of which is foreign immigration under the flawed H1B program. Other causes are that young people promote it and try to justify it with all the the above arguments. Each of you are complicit in this and will, in time, fall victim to it.

What did you figure you'd do when you turn 35?

Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage

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