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My common sense frustration here is how can the US possibly have a critical shortage of developers on languages that are 20 to 50 years old? We have the third h

My common sense frustration here is how can the US possibly have a critical shortage of developers on languages that are 20 to 50 years old? We have the third highest population in the world and claim to have excellent education, and these are high paying jobs at 2x-3x the national average yearly income. So what qualifies the shortage? Is it like agriculture where Americans are too entitled for the work? Are Americans viewed as generally too low quality?

joubert 6y ago
“Foreign nationals account for 81 percent of the full-time graduate students in electrical engineering, 79 percent in computer science, 75 percent in industrial engineering, 69 percent in statistics, 63 percent in mechanical engineering, 59 percent in civil engineering, and 57 percent in chemical engineering.” — https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/americas-stem-crisis-threatens-our-national-security/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/americas-stem-cri...
- noobermin 6y ago
  College courses aren't necessarily zero sum if SV would considering hiring from state universities.
  - joubert 6y ago
    Thanks. The reason I quoted this statistic is because I was surprised that there aren’t more Americans interested in taking advantage of the excellent education in STEM. Could it also tell us something about interest in the field generally? We also see significant immigrant ratios in entrepreneurial ventures: "Immigrants are “almost twice as likely” as native-born Americans to become entrepreneurs, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation." --- https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/10/25/55-of-americas-billion-dollar-startups-have-immigrant-founder/#3b634ba448ee https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/10/25/55-of...
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    Of course the bay area does hire tons of state university hires. I'm one of them. My first job was a fang. My undergrad wasn't in the top 100, my grad was maybe in the top 50, not sure but probably #50 ;-). I did a lot of programming in school, I practiced interview questions before I went. I've always been puzzled why other people run into this wall and can't break through.
rootsudo 6y ago
1. Developers dying, aging out, retiring. 2. No real investment/push into learning legacy langauges. 3. Philippines/Indian BPO encourage and actually train on the job. If you look at accenture/whatever agency, even IBM, they'll guarantee a job in that country if they stick with the on the job training. In those countries, entry level, know nothing developers make $500/$1000 a month, best, vs being experienced in the USA and making a minimum of $5000. 6-12K/yr is waaayyy cheaper then, 70K/yr. I feel like it's employer idea of infinite monkey theorem. It's not entitlement, it's that in the USA, employers have to compete and everyone can easily get a job in IT that isn't even programming for $40-50k, think of help desk. All you have to do is show up, restart a few computers, and be relatable.
- austincheney 6y ago
  > 6-12K/yr is waaayyy cheaper then, 70K/yr. Isn’t that irrelevant? People working in the US on an H1B are not earning such low foreign wages.
- hogFeast 6y ago
  It isn't that easy to get a job in IT. It is easy if you have the right background. I knew a kid who could program reasonably, was pretty smart but didn't go to college. Got "hired" somewhere on help desk, was on a training contract for 3 months (he was just doing normal work, no pay), offered minimum wage job at end, didn't get paid for overtime, and got fired when he wanted to leave work at 6 because he had arranged to meet family for his birthday. I think many people significantly understate how bad the US job market is for a very significant minority of people. Also, you are massively overstating how good development is in the Phillippines or India. India churns out masses of CS grads who have never seen a computer. The economics of training are different US/India but the incentive there is the low wage. Remove that low wage incentive, and companies I think there will be investment into US citizens. (Btw, where I am there are for-profit companies that train ex-army people to do software development...it works pretty well...but no-one asks: why aren't tech companies doing this? Like these companies employ people on very exploitative contracts, why don't companies just do this themselves? There is something wrong with how tech companies are run).
hyper0perator 6y ago
The shortage is false, a form of gaslighting, artificially created so that corporations and academic institutions can keep costs low and suppress wages by flooding the US market with cheap labor that also bypasses usual employment standards available to US citizens. Eric Weinstein has done some really good research into this. 'How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers' https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_NSF_SG_Complete_INET.pdf https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_N...
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  Are you talking dev or academia? I read the paper and I'll give you my dev focused response. The paper is focused on phd supply in academia and the most recent dates referenced are the last 1990s. It has brief discussion of knowledge workers but not really devs. It's not relevant for devs in the us at least since the dot com boom until now. There's a giant shortage of capable devs. i'm from the us in case it matters to you but in my 25+ years as a professional engineer across a few fangs, midsize and several startups all those companies wanted to hire every capable dev they could find. Microsoft used to have 5k plus openings when I was there and the other fang had similar. We hired all over the world and the us. We never hired as many as we wanted. New college students grads could make over 100k and we still couldn't hire all we wanted. I worked on creative, original software. I think there is a hiring area that could be impacted by large number of immigrants in tech and that is more IT like positions. There's an oversupply in my experience of people that put software packages together, keep the it infrastructure of a company running - those are crucial jobs too, just like devs writing original software, but there's a lot fewer people in it support and maybe that's part of the issue.
- austincheney 6y ago
  I read the paper but I did not see any indication of wage depression. Here are the trends I am observing from the comments of this thread: * Immigrants in the US on visas earn less than US citizens. I have seen no data on this. How much less do immigrant software engineers earn as a percentage? * Any evidence discrediting knowledge worker shortage is centered on academics. I am a senior software developer with 20 years experience at one of the largest and wealthiest employers in the US. Despite that I have no formal education in the subject matter. I am either entirely self taught or in some other disciplines trained by the military. So it seems, from my perspective, centering the discussion to academics is just a distraction.
hogFeast 6y ago
I think the issue is some combination of: cheap alternative, unwillingness to train, unwillingness to consider a certain type of person, and unwillingness to take a risk (even if the alternative only secures you mediocre product). Companies just have lots of choices. It is too hard to employ an American, maybe they need to get up to speed, they need to be paid more. Immigrants will live 10 to an apartment, they can be disposed of quickly, they do anything to keep their job because they don't want to get deported...I mean...who would you rather employ? I have seen this in other countries. I remember reading about a Greek charity teaching computer science to illegal immigrants...most of those people were leaving countries where youth unemployment was actually LOWER than Greece. Another good example is Monzo (although a terribly managed company), they grew by just hiring all the CS wizards couldn't have done the job. Call it nativist or whatever...it is a tragedy when people or companies are allowed to shed their responsibilities to the societies in which they live. It is very possible, it is just most tech companies are very bad at hiring/employee development (and why do they have to be good when you have H1B).
proc0 6y ago
It's a tough job no one really likes. I've tried to make programmers of almost everyone I know, almost nobody wants to even try it out.
- austincheney 6y ago
  This is my experience as well. High pay, accommodating working conditions, and great benefits are clearly not the right motivators. I suspect, contrary to many people’s desires, this is ultimately not a conversation about economics but a conversation on absent discipline and self motivation.
NotSammyHagar 6y ago
There are just too many jobs and not enough qualified devs. Even in the pandemic. It's worse if you block our international people by limiting visas. There's already a shortage of devs of course in he US. Plenty of companies have thousands of openings even in the pandemic - of course there are places that stopped hiring or even shutdown and people lost jobs. If you lower the labor pool size, pay should go up, ease of employment should go up for those who can work here. There's already a shortage of engineers in those special fields like cobol. So it will be even harder for banks for hire for them if you can't get say people from India to move here and work on that. If you are working on a modern language with modern tools, libs etc (c++ or java) why would you want to go back to that old world where there were probably not tests, automation like we have today? If you have 10 years exp in one of the say top 10 tech cities in the us you are probably making at least 300k. I just don't see banks hiring someone like me and paying me enough more to match that far less desirable job. So that leads to banks only having a hiring pool of people who will work for less for various reasons (location, less exp, not interested or trained on c++). I think this will just lead to more outsourcing to other countries, even though that has its own +/-, and imagine a world where some large us banks lost so much tech ability they are dependent on people in other countries (maybe already happened).
- austincheney 6y ago
  You are replying to something not stated. Why is there such a shortage given the high wages, population size, access to education, and so forth?
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    I saw it as the underlying issue. It's because CS is hard, people don't think they can do it, they don't know about the opportunities, they don't have the education or the pay is not enough for the intellectual demands. If a job is too stressful or they treat you like shit or demand overtime (ie gaming world for overtime) then just work somewhere else.

joubert 6y ago

“Foreign nationals account for 81 percent of the full-time graduate students in electrical engineering, 79 percent in computer science, 75 percent in industrial engineering, 69 percent in statistics, 63 percent in mechanical engineering, 59 percent in civil engineering, and 57 percent in chemical engineering.” — https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/americas-stem-crisis-threatens-our-national-security/ https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/americas-stem-cri...

noobermin 6y ago
College courses aren't necessarily zero sum if SV would considering hiring from state universities.
- joubert 6y ago
  Thanks. The reason I quoted this statistic is because I was surprised that there aren’t more Americans interested in taking advantage of the excellent education in STEM. Could it also tell us something about interest in the field generally? We also see significant immigrant ratios in entrepreneurial ventures: "Immigrants are “almost twice as likely” as native-born Americans to become entrepreneurs, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation." --- https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/10/25/55-of-americas-billion-dollar-startups-have-immigrant-founder/#3b634ba448ee https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/10/25/55-of...
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  Of course the bay area does hire tons of state university hires. I'm one of them. My first job was a fang. My undergrad wasn't in the top 100, my grad was maybe in the top 50, not sure but probably #50 ;-). I did a lot of programming in school, I practiced interview questions before I went. I've always been puzzled why other people run into this wall and can't break through.

rootsudo 6y ago

1. Developers dying, aging out, retiring. 2. No real investment/push into learning legacy langauges. 3. Philippines/Indian BPO encourage and actually train on the job. If you look at accenture/whatever agency, even IBM, they'll guarantee a job in that country if they stick with the on the job training. In those countries, entry level, know nothing developers make $500/$1000 a month, best, vs being experienced in the USA and making a minimum of $5000. 6-12K/yr is waaayyy cheaper then, 70K/yr. I feel like it's employer idea of infinite monkey theorem. It's not entitlement, it's that in the USA, employers have to compete and everyone can easily get a job in IT that isn't even programming for $40-50k, think of help desk. All you have to do is show up, restart a few computers, and be relatable.

austincheney 6y ago
> 6-12K/yr is waaayyy cheaper then, 70K/yr. Isn’t that irrelevant? People working in the US on an H1B are not earning such low foreign wages.
hogFeast 6y ago
It isn't that easy to get a job in IT. It is easy if you have the right background. I knew a kid who could program reasonably, was pretty smart but didn't go to college. Got "hired" somewhere on help desk, was on a training contract for 3 months (he was just doing normal work, no pay), offered minimum wage job at end, didn't get paid for overtime, and got fired when he wanted to leave work at 6 because he had arranged to meet family for his birthday. I think many people significantly understate how bad the US job market is for a very significant minority of people. Also, you are massively overstating how good development is in the Phillippines or India. India churns out masses of CS grads who have never seen a computer. The economics of training are different US/India but the incentive there is the low wage. Remove that low wage incentive, and companies I think there will be investment into US citizens. (Btw, where I am there are for-profit companies that train ex-army people to do software development...it works pretty well...but no-one asks: why aren't tech companies doing this? Like these companies employ people on very exploitative contracts, why don't companies just do this themselves? There is something wrong with how tech companies are run).

hyper0perator 6y ago

The shortage is false, a form of gaslighting, artificially created so that corporations and academic institutions can keep costs low and suppress wages by flooding the US market with cheap labor that also bypasses usual employment standards available to US citizens. Eric Weinstein has done some really good research into this. 'How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers' https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_NSF_SG_Complete_INET.pdf https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_N...

NotSammyHagar 6y ago
Are you talking dev or academia? I read the paper and I'll give you my dev focused response. The paper is focused on phd supply in academia and the most recent dates referenced are the last 1990s. It has brief discussion of knowledge workers but not really devs. It's not relevant for devs in the us at least since the dot com boom until now. There's a giant shortage of capable devs. i'm from the us in case it matters to you but in my 25+ years as a professional engineer across a few fangs, midsize and several startups all those companies wanted to hire every capable dev they could find. Microsoft used to have 5k plus openings when I was there and the other fang had similar. We hired all over the world and the us. We never hired as many as we wanted. New college students grads could make over 100k and we still couldn't hire all we wanted. I worked on creative, original software. I think there is a hiring area that could be impacted by large number of immigrants in tech and that is more IT like positions. There's an oversupply in my experience of people that put software packages together, keep the it infrastructure of a company running - those are crucial jobs too, just like devs writing original software, but there's a lot fewer people in it support and maybe that's part of the issue.
austincheney 6y ago
I read the paper but I did not see any indication of wage depression. Here are the trends I am observing from the comments of this thread: * Immigrants in the US on visas earn less than US citizens. I have seen no data on this. How much less do immigrant software engineers earn as a percentage? * Any evidence discrediting knowledge worker shortage is centered on academics. I am a senior software developer with 20 years experience at one of the largest and wealthiest employers in the US. Despite that I have no formal education in the subject matter. I am either entirely self taught or in some other disciplines trained by the military. So it seems, from my perspective, centering the discussion to academics is just a distraction.

hogFeast 6y ago

I think the issue is some combination of: cheap alternative, unwillingness to train, unwillingness to consider a certain type of person, and unwillingness to take a risk (even if the alternative only secures you mediocre product). Companies just have lots of choices. It is too hard to employ an American, maybe they need to get up to speed, they need to be paid more. Immigrants will live 10 to an apartment, they can be disposed of quickly, they do anything to keep their job because they don't want to get deported...I mean...who would you rather employ? I have seen this in other countries. I remember reading about a Greek charity teaching computer science to illegal immigrants...most of those people were leaving countries where youth unemployment was actually LOWER than Greece. Another good example is Monzo (although a terribly managed company), they grew by just hiring all the CS wizards couldn't have done the job. Call it nativist or whatever...it is a tragedy when people or companies are allowed to shed their responsibilities to the societies in which they live. It is very possible, it is just most tech companies are very bad at hiring/employee development (and why do they have to be good when you have H1B).

proc0 6y ago

It's a tough job no one really likes. I've tried to make programmers of almost everyone I know, almost nobody wants to even try it out.

austincheney 6y ago
This is my experience as well. High pay, accommodating working conditions, and great benefits are clearly not the right motivators. I suspect, contrary to many people’s desires, this is ultimately not a conversation about economics but a conversation on absent discipline and self motivation.

NotSammyHagar 6y ago

There are just too many jobs and not enough qualified devs. Even in the pandemic. It's worse if you block our international people by limiting visas. There's already a shortage of devs of course in he US. Plenty of companies have thousands of openings even in the pandemic - of course there are places that stopped hiring or even shutdown and people lost jobs. If you lower the labor pool size, pay should go up, ease of employment should go up for those who can work here. There's already a shortage of engineers in those special fields like cobol. So it will be even harder for banks for hire for them if you can't get say people from India to move here and work on that. If you are working on a modern language with modern tools, libs etc (c++ or java) why would you want to go back to that old world where there were probably not tests, automation like we have today? If you have 10 years exp in one of the say top 10 tech cities in the us you are probably making at least 300k. I just don't see banks hiring someone like me and paying me enough more to match that far less desirable job. So that leads to banks only having a hiring pool of people who will work for less for various reasons (location, less exp, not interested or trained on c++). I think this will just lead to more outsourcing to other countries, even though that has its own +/-, and imagine a world where some large us banks lost so much tech ability they are dependent on people in other countries (maybe already happened).

austincheney 6y ago
You are replying to something not stated. Why is there such a shortage given the high wages, population size, access to education, and so forth?
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  I saw it as the underlying issue. It's because CS is hard, people don't think they can do it, they don't know about the opportunities, they don't have the education or the pay is not enough for the intellectual demands. If a job is too stressful or they treat you like shit or demand overtime (ie gaming world for overtime) then just work somewhere else.