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I had to research this for my greencard a while back. Here’s a fun stat for ya: USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year. USA creat

by Swizec 4y ago

I had to research this for my greencard a while back. Here’s a fun stat for ya: USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year. USA creates about 50,000 new comp sci graduates per year. There are an order of magnitude too few Americans every year for the jobs available. Whatever you think of the H1B (and it has many problems), I doubt it’s coming even close to bridging that gap. source with links to sources: https://swizec.com/blog/software-engineering-best-job/ https://swizec.com/blog/software-engineering-best-job/

smolder 4y ago
You may have a point, but there at least a few degrees apart from Comp Sci that can lead to software development, nevermind mid-career direction changes and boot camps.
guessbest 4y ago
Is the USA the only country which has 10x more positions than freshly graduated students? If so, then America is the only country in the world which adequately compensates software developers which would mean it is unusual for another country like India and China to even have software developers if they would be better employed in the United States. Maybe the point of computer science programs is to serve as future American immigrants.
- toast0 4y ago
  > which would mean it is unusual for another country like India and China to even have software developers if they would be better employed in the United States. There's lots of reasons software developers in India and China would remain in India and China, but one big one is obtaining a visa and permanent residency to live and work in the US is hard in general, and more so for people in populous countries with many emigrants destined for the US; I think it's India, China, and Mexico that have the three longest queues for green cards where there's a limit per country of birth. There's certainly a path to immigration through a computer science degree. Especially advanced degrees, which give preferences to visa applications. If you can afford it, get a bachelor's in your country of origin, come to the US for a Masters, work on OPT visa after graduation, hope it converts to H1B, work on H1B until you get a green card, is a well worn path, but there are others.
no_wizard 4y ago
Comp Sci isn't the only way (nor the only major) that can satisfy the conditions of software development jobs. Thats a pretty narrow lens. You need to also look at adjacent majors like Software Engineering, Software Development etc. A lot of smaller regionally accredited universities in the US have diversified on this. The pool is much bigger than 50K. you're also discounting the fact that there are layoffs, businesses closing etc. There may be 500K new positions per year, and say 250K layoffs / closures etc that isn't accounted for in this. Now I don't have the numbers on total layoffs but this should be adjusted. I would heavily dispute this problem on the whole. Look at how hard it is to get hired as experienced engineers right now, that tells me there is less slack in the system than this leads on. H1B is also suppose to have a unable to train element, which needs to also be addressed EDIT: and as others pointed out, that is taking the stats on their face value, which is questionable in and of itself, as the source is a bit dubious
- Swizec 4y ago
  > Look at how hard it is to get hired as experienced engineers right now I think that’s just what happens when you flood the market with 200,000 qualified people in a short amount of time (and those people have extremely narrow definitions for what counts as a good enough job). The overall trend, measured in decades, remains that there just aren’t enough software engineers. Yes even including all the software engineers that didn’t study comp sci. Even outside USA it’s rough. When I was in college the average completion time for a comp sci degree was 7 to 8 years because people kept getting jobs and forgot to graduate. All our professors complained about the sky-high 3rd/4th year dropout rates.
afavour 4y ago
> USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year. I absolutely do not buy that number. The citation you've given is "GoRemotely" who a) only cite that for one year, 2017 and b) are obviously biased towards inflating numbers.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Even if true, it doesn't necessarily follow that there's a shortage of workers in a sector because the number of new grads is way under the number of job postings per year. Even if we assume only comp-sci grads are suitable for 100% of those positions (which is definitely not true) it still doesn't necessarily mean that there's an under-supply. We'd need a lot more info to figure that out.
lifeonlars 4y ago
This is a really questionable statistic. Your link cites a blog from a jobs site. They don't provide any citation for the 500,000 number. Both sources refer to it as the "number of job openings" that year (2017). Obviously this isn't new demand for software engineers, most job openings are vacancies caused by people moving in the industry and will be filled by other people moving. If there are around 1.5 million SEs in the USA and average tenure in a job is 3 years then this explains all the job openings right there.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  The article says 500k globally, not in the US. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the number is more like 400k over the next 8 years.
  - lifeonlars 4y ago
    Iinm the article has two numbers: global software developer numbers growing by 500,000 per year. And 500,000 job openings in the United States in one given year.
bdcravens 4y ago
> USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year. Article doesn't say that. Its says that's global: > Despite the pandemic, the number of software developers grew by 500,000 globally in 2020 Additionally earlier in the article, it shares numbers which supports a much smaller number: > ...make this the most accessible 6-figure job in USA. At 1,400,000+ members and 22% projected growth, it is the biggest and among fastest growing high-paying jobs The Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies that there will be 411k new software jobs between now and 2031, not per year: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... Given the number of 50k grads per year, 400k employees for 411k jobs isn't a massive shortage. (Not to mention that many jobs opening aren't for grads, but for senior developers)
commandlinefan 4y ago
> There are an order of magnitude too few Americans Go to /r/cscareerquestions. Every single post is about a recent comp sci graduate who's applied to _hundreds_ of jobs in the past year without a single offer. There aren't too _few_ qualified Americans looking for work.
- labcomputer 4y ago
  I agree OP's estimate for job growth is off by an order of magnitude, but I don't know if r/cscareerquestions is strong evidence of an oversupply of qualified workers in general. First, it's not a random sample of CS graduates--there's a lot of selection bias there. People who face a lot of rejection are going to want someplace to vent. Second, I've absolutely phone-screened people (not a lot, but some) with CS degrees who couldn't do something simple like fizz-buzz. I'm not taking about nit-picky "you forgot a semicolon" or style things. I'm talking about "fundamentally not getting for-loops". It wouldn't surprise me if the bottom 0.5% of CS graduates each year apply to hundreds of openings, and get rejected by every single one. Finally, we're in the contraction part of the business cycle right now. I do believe that new grads today/this year are having a harder time finding jobs, but the total number of people employed at tech companies seems to be falling this year, too. Citing jobless American CS grads would be a more powerful argument if jobs were growing at the same time.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
logicalmonster 4y ago
There's good and bad ways to count stuff and have a high degree of confidence in the result. Counting the number of Computer Science graduates in a year seems like a fairly trivial problem where you could get an answer within ~1% of objective reality by simply counting public information and published figures. But how do you count the number of jobs that are actually available? How does anybody distinguish between "real jobs" and companies just putting feelers out there to harvest resumes, manipulate the immigration system, and keep appearances up to investors in trying economic times? A lot of engineers that are looking for work right now strongly feel that a lot of job postings out there are just utter bullshit and many job posts are posted with no real intention of hiring anybody. The best way to measure supply/demand trends might be to look at wages. That's one thing that's really hard to fake and get wrong. Are Computer science graduate wages going up or down? If there actually was a massive shortage of computer workers near the level you describe, wages would be on a rocketship straight upwards right now. Are they? A lot of engineers are seeing that wages in tech seem to be plummeting right now.

by Swizec 4y ago

smolder 4y ago

You may have a point, but there at least a few degrees apart from Comp Sci that can lead to software development, nevermind mid-career direction changes and boot camps.

guessbest 4y ago

Is the USA the only country which has 10x more positions than freshly graduated students? If so, then America is the only country in the world which adequately compensates software developers which would mean it is unusual for another country like India and China to even have software developers if they would be better employed in the United States. Maybe the point of computer science programs is to serve as future American immigrants.

toast0 4y ago
> which would mean it is unusual for another country like India and China to even have software developers if they would be better employed in the United States. There's lots of reasons software developers in India and China would remain in India and China, but one big one is obtaining a visa and permanent residency to live and work in the US is hard in general, and more so for people in populous countries with many emigrants destined for the US; I think it's India, China, and Mexico that have the three longest queues for green cards where there's a limit per country of birth. There's certainly a path to immigration through a computer science degree. Especially advanced degrees, which give preferences to visa applications. If you can afford it, get a bachelor's in your country of origin, come to the US for a Masters, work on OPT visa after graduation, hope it converts to H1B, work on H1B until you get a green card, is a well worn path, but there are others.

no_wizard 4y ago

Comp Sci isn't the only way (nor the only major) that can satisfy the conditions of software development jobs. Thats a pretty narrow lens. You need to also look at adjacent majors like Software Engineering, Software Development etc. A lot of smaller regionally accredited universities in the US have diversified on this. The pool is much bigger than 50K. you're also discounting the fact that there are layoffs, businesses closing etc. There may be 500K new positions per year, and say 250K layoffs / closures etc that isn't accounted for in this. Now I don't have the numbers on total layoffs but this should be adjusted. I would heavily dispute this problem on the whole. Look at how hard it is to get hired as experienced engineers right now, that tells me there is less slack in the system than this leads on. H1B is also suppose to have a unable to train element, which needs to also be addressed EDIT: and as others pointed out, that is taking the stats on their face value, which is questionable in and of itself, as the source is a bit dubious

Swizec 4y ago
> Look at how hard it is to get hired as experienced engineers right now I think that’s just what happens when you flood the market with 200,000 qualified people in a short amount of time (and those people have extremely narrow definitions for what counts as a good enough job). The overall trend, measured in decades, remains that there just aren’t enough software engineers. Yes even including all the software engineers that didn’t study comp sci. Even outside USA it’s rough. When I was in college the average completion time for a comp sci degree was 7 to 8 years because people kept getting jobs and forgot to graduate. All our professors complained about the sky-high 3rd/4th year dropout rates.

afavour 4y ago

> USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year. I absolutely do not buy that number. The citation you've given is "GoRemotely" who a) only cite that for one year, 2017 and b) are obviously biased towards inflating numbers.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Even if true, it doesn't necessarily follow that there's a shortage of workers in a sector because the number of new grads is way under the number of job postings per year. Even if we assume only comp-sci grads are suitable for 100% of those positions (which is definitely not true) it still doesn't necessarily mean that there's an under-supply. We'd need a lot more info to figure that out.

lifeonlars 4y ago

This is a really questionable statistic. Your link cites a blog from a jobs site. They don't provide any citation for the 500,000 number. Both sources refer to it as the "number of job openings" that year (2017). Obviously this isn't new demand for software engineers, most job openings are vacancies caused by people moving in the industry and will be filled by other people moving. If there are around 1.5 million SEs in the USA and average tenure in a job is 3 years then this explains all the job openings right there.

bdcravens 4y ago
The article says 500k globally, not in the US. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the number is more like 400k over the next 8 years.
- lifeonlars 4y ago
  Iinm the article has two numbers: global software developer numbers growing by 500,000 per year. And 500,000 job openings in the United States in one given year.

bdcravens 4y ago

> USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year. Article doesn't say that. Its says that's global: > Despite the pandemic, the number of software developers grew by 500,000 globally in 2020 Additionally earlier in the article, it shares numbers which supports a much smaller number: > ...make this the most accessible 6-figure job in USA. At 1,400,000+ members and 22% projected growth, it is the biggest and among fastest growing high-paying jobs The Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies that there will be 411k new software jobs between now and 2031, not per year: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... Given the number of 50k grads per year, 400k employees for 411k jobs isn't a massive shortage. (Not to mention that many jobs opening aren't for grads, but for senior developers)

commandlinefan 4y ago

> There are an order of magnitude too few Americans Go to /r/cscareerquestions. Every single post is about a recent comp sci graduate who's applied to _hundreds_ of jobs in the past year without a single offer. There aren't too _few_ qualified Americans looking for work.

labcomputer 4y ago
I agree OP's estimate for job growth is off by an order of magnitude, but I don't know if r/cscareerquestions is strong evidence of an oversupply of qualified workers in general. First, it's not a random sample of CS graduates--there's a lot of selection bias there. People who face a lot of rejection are going to want someplace to vent. Second, I've absolutely phone-screened people (not a lot, but some) with CS degrees who couldn't do something simple like fizz-buzz. I'm not taking about nit-picky "you forgot a semicolon" or style things. I'm talking about "fundamentally not getting for-loops". It wouldn't surprise me if the bottom 0.5% of CS graduates each year apply to hundreds of openings, and get rejected by every single one. Finally, we're in the contraction part of the business cycle right now. I do believe that new grads today/this year are having a harder time finding jobs, but the total number of people employed at tech companies seems to be falling this year, too. Citing jobless American CS grads would be a more powerful argument if jobs were growing at the same time.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

logicalmonster 4y ago

There's good and bad ways to count stuff and have a high degree of confidence in the result. Counting the number of Computer Science graduates in a year seems like a fairly trivial problem where you could get an answer within ~1% of objective reality by simply counting public information and published figures. But how do you count the number of jobs that are actually available? How does anybody distinguish between "real jobs" and companies just putting feelers out there to harvest resumes, manipulate the immigration system, and keep appearances up to investors in trying economic times? A lot of engineers that are looking for work right now strongly feel that a lot of job postings out there are just utter bullshit and many job posts are posted with no real intention of hiring anybody. The best way to measure supply/demand trends might be to look at wages. That's one thing that's really hard to fake and get wrong. Are Computer science graduate wages going up or down? If there actually was a massive shortage of computer workers near the level you describe, wages would be on a rocketship straight upwards right now. Are they? A lot of engineers are seeing that wages in tech seem to be plummeting right now.