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The Myth of America's Tech Talent Shortage

141 points by awwstn 14y ago

ww520 14y ago
America does have a tech talent shortage. It's the shortage of rockstar developers willing to work for low wage.
VLM 14y ago
A quote from the article also applies to the recent fad of promoting STEM education in K-12 etc. "Roughly twice as many American undergraduates earn degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines than go on to work in those fields." Maybe if my kids grade school gets their way, we can boost that to four times, or even more. Those numbers are almost as bad as recent law school grad stats. Needless to say as a life long STEM guy I'm strongly encouraging my kids to avoid the STEM field at all costs. I'm not annoyed at my kids school for focusing on STEM; its a very good educational technique and not any worse than other educational fads. As a vocation choice STEM is as likely to be as unrewarding as trying to become a rock star, a pro NBA player, or a fine arts painter, but those classes are great in K-12 schools. Those examples, and STEM, make truly excellent hobbies, but awful jobs, at least for most of the participants. I may not know the right answer, but I know STEM is the wrong answer. I'll still love my kids anyway, no matter if they become unemployed programmers or unemployed musicians, but I hope they can do better financially with their lives both for themselves and the grandkids, by being quided out of "hobby" jobs like STEM and music and art and into something with a profitable future.
- gnoway 14y ago
  kneejerk reaction: like what? I haven't thought a lot about this, but I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'. What other industries/disciplines are you thinking of?
  - VLM 14y ago
    "I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'." There's a large number of extremely wealthy and extremely powerful people working publicly as hard as they can against that belief, and the government has been purchased to be on their side. Very few things unite everyone in power both in .biz and .gov quite as well as the destruction of STEM as a middle class or better lifestyle. My advice is be very careful when going up against a united powerful opposition like that. Like I wrote, I may not know the right answer, but its not very hard to figure out STEM is, or is soon going to be, the wrong answer.
    - angersock 14y ago
      That's quite a claim there--would you mind elaborating on your reasoning? Perhaps it's just due to my current existence in a very productive city, but STEM (and vocational training) seem to be both very much in demand and rewarded.
      - VLM 14y ago
        To elaborate I would advise reading the article and the HN posts.
      - VLM 14y ago
        Alright enough enough I apologize for the somewhat curt answer above stop downvoting me. I'll be more verbose and more polite. Estimate a ratio of "we need more STEM" vs "we need less STEM" in .biz, .gov, mainstream media, etc. Does anyone other than internal "tech" sites ever discuss how the pool is too big and getting too large and maybe we need licensing and unionization and apprenticeships or some way to shrink it? Lets say maybe 100 to 1 ratio? Are there any paid PR groups or lobbying groups at all on the side of the STEM worker? Any? Not even one? How bout on the other side? Oh, dozens you say working to increase the supply and drop the cost (aka our salary). A continuous stream of one unified voice from .gov, .biz, and .edu that we need more STEM grads, more STEM immigrants, more STEM is what "we" need or else. Yet... talk to people who aren't paid PR shills and its all poor working conditions, more grads than jobs, ageism, underemployment/overeducation. Sure you'll get a few quisling types who think that supporting those trying to destroy them will somehow personally save them, although historically that never seems to work out. And there's maybe 3 or 4 cities with a high cost of living and a shortage of techies... at least right now... at least supposedly. A tiny subfield with real demand as opposed to PR demand like petroleum engineering has explosive salary growth rates... supposedly we're told the demand is even higher for code slingers, well, OK, show me the increasing salaries and the unemployment rate approaching zero. Oh that's not happening nationwide without lies, damned lies, and statistics? Well someones lying then, or at least not telling the whole truth. Do you think the guy who stands to make a higher profit could be lying to you? Nah, Management and PR are transparent and clean as glass... How about the .gov guy purchased by the .biz guy, has a politician ever lied to you? Hmm. How bout that .edu guy who's salary more or less depends on convincing kids to enter his field, does he have any conflict of interest, or at best well intentioned delusion? Yet a VERY few lone voices in the wilderness, with no economic interest (or not much anyway) suggest maybe the emperor really does have no clothes, but they must be making it up because their reward for it is ... nothing at all? A better life for their kids? +5 of HN karma? Seems a pretty small reward at best for a lot of work. So that's my interpretation of the players on the field. There's the completely unorganized STEM workers, and absolutely everyone else united against them with a common cause, identical PR campaign, for fairly rational similar economic reasons. I wonder which side will win? Now compare our response to other fields involving labor forces and import/export and immigration and .gov policies. We seem to be failing ourselves in the PR war compared to ... well compared to pretty much every other field of human endeavor other than maybe the pot growers, congressmen, and sex workers. And there's a substantial overlap there at that. Actually they probably do a better job of self promotion than we do.
  - polymatter 14y ago
    if my hypothetical children needed guidance, I'd probably advice on accounting. Huge industry that ain't going anywhere, lots of work at the low end, lots of pay at the high end, still applicable if you change job later, generally respected culturally.
    - mseebach 14y ago
      What about accounting makes it inherently less outsourceable than programming? In a world where STEM is not a practical career, presumably because it's all done in low-wage countries overseas, how is accounting still being done in-house?
      - VLM 14y ago
        Strange as it sounds, fraud prosecution. If a software dev lies or the product is buggy nothing really happens to anyone, but at least in theory a fraudulent or incompetent accountant could go to jail, and that's not happening in Outsourceland, so fundamentally at least some of it has to be done locally. Most of the lowest level of data entry and paper shuffling has long since been disposed of via automation, so already mostly only decision makers remain. Its not a bad idea.
        gnoway 14y ago
        Well, I think this is shortsighted. H1-B is 'bad' because it's increasing the number of workers competing for the same pool of STEM jobs. Steering your kids towards accounting increases the number of workers competing for the same pool of accounting jobs. Except, I think STEM associates a lot more with 'growth industry' than accounting.
        VLM 14y ago
        I would disagree with the first paragraph in that a large number of .gov, .biz, and .edu personnel have a unified voice encouraging kids out of all other fields and into STEM. So the pool of grads is smaller in accounting therefore its a better job market for them to enter. My two kids are not going to tip the demographics such that accounting is now flooded. I do agree with the second paragraph in that accounting is more employable. If there's a web 2.0 crash or something, a tax accountant at a dotcom can more or less transfer into tax accountant job at an oil company. On the other hand a NAS storage engineer is pretty screwed via pigeonholing if he wants to get hired as a petroleum engineer. Much larger job pool in accounting.
- davidw 14y ago
  > As a vocation choice STEM is as likely to be as unrewarding as trying to become a rock star, a pro NBA player, You could always point your kids towards economics - they'd spot the flaw in the above pretty quickly: a lot of STEM stuff is not zero-sum. If more people work on building more stuff, it's probably a net gain for the world. The NBA, on the other hand, by definition, can only have one champion per year, and only have N teams per year.
  - VLM 14y ago
    "it's probably a net gain for the world." The problem is my kids live here, where none of the benefits accrue. We could immigrate to India? I do agree that in a very cold hearted sense, "the world" is better off with my kid in a homeless shelter and 100 people in India finally getting enough rice to eat, vs my kid being rich and 100 people in India starving to death. But once you're a parent, its very hard to be objective enough to doom your kids. Even worse is the "probably" part, if it just results in a civilization wide increase in wheel spinning and finger pointing and delays. Then almost everyone loses.
    - zenbowman 14y ago
      Why do you assume your kids will be unemployed?
      - VLM 14y ago
        The point of the article was only half the grads can get jobs in STEM right now. Then you factor in the usual ageism so those with jobs in tech only really get half a career at best, maybe less, of course other STEM fields aren't as discriminatory as tech. Then factor in the intense desire by .gov and .biz to drive down wages by increasing H1B. Then factor in the median (median not mean) american inflation adjusted income has been in decline for about two generations in a mostly consumer based economy (oh oh). A rising economy might not lift all boats but a sinking one doesn't help much either. Then factor in an intense push to increase the STEM labor supply in K12 by STEM school initiatives and so forth. If the odds of employment in the field are 50:50 now, I would estimate in a decade or two it seems reasonable to be worse than 25% employment. They could very well be in the top 25% of their class, but that sounds like risky odds to me. If you were aiming at underemployment vs unemployment I do somewhat agree with you. There are already issues with receptionists and admin assistant jobs requiring advanced education, and seemingly all the waitresses I've met have a bachelors degree in "something". Anecdotally in the 70s when aerospace engineers with PHDs were driving taxicabs, I suppose a masters would at least guarantee a school bus driver job, making the education and training hugely wasteful because it has nothing to do with the job, but at least the employee gets to eat and may or may not have healthcare insurance. From that point of view I do agree with you that having a STEM degree means maybe they'll at least be able to get a job stocking shelves at the food store or something, and the kids without STEM will be unemployed completely.
- czbond 14y ago
  Agreed - as Mark Cuban says [paraphrased, when asked about what kind of technology the question asker should master] - Technology Sales.
- stmchn 14y ago
  I dislike that this kind of discussion lumps everything in STEM as one big amorphous blob. STEM covers a lot of really diverse fields which, big surprise, means that some fields within it are doing well while others, not so much.
- marshray 14y ago
  > As a vocation choice STEM is as likely to be as unrewarding as trying to become a rock star, a pro NBA player, or a fine arts painter Baloney. :-) If we total up the number of people who support a middle-class or better lifestyle solely with income from activities as "a rock star, a pro NBA player, or a fine arts painter" I think we'd see multiple of orders of magnitude fewer than those doing the same in STEM fields. For example: "as of 2009, GlaxoSmithKline employs an estimated 99,913 people around the world, and 12,800 of these employees work in GSK’s research teams to discover new medicines" http://www.numberof.net/number-of-gsk-employees/ http://www.numberof.net/number-of-gsk-employees/ Compared to: "Each team may have 15 players on their roster, 12 of which may dress for each game. Since there are 30 teams in the league, at any one time there is a maximum of 450 players on NBA rosters" http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_total_number_of_players_in_the_NBA http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_total_number_of_player...
- whiddershins 14y ago
  I can't begin to understand how you could make a comparison between a STEM career and music, art, or professional sports. I have worked, directly, for decades as both a professional musician and as a user interface designer, a web programmer, a graphic designer, and an internet marketer. I am a far more competent musician than any of the other skills. My resume in music is in the top 1/100th of a percent. I have been doing music far longer, and with more devotion. But I can far more easily pay my rent doing any of the other things listed. I can make mediocre user interfaces all day long and cover my mortgage with a week's salary. While doing web marketing on the side. And learn python in my spare time. If I want a world class musician to come to my studio and play, I can probably get them to do it as a favor, or for a small fee. If I want someone to do some coding for me, no amount of money seems to be sufficient. It makes my brain explode when people in computer science try to compare their lifestyle to that of a musician's. I have lived both. They are completely, utterly, unlike each other.
  - VLM 14y ago
    Let me quote one of your other posts completely out of context: "And I live in NYC" The other 98% of us in tech do not live there, and most certainly do not have employment opportunities like you describe. Looking at the cost of living there, vs here, I kinda wonder about your claim of the mortgage being 25% of takehome, that doesn't add up unless you're in a really bad part of town or make an amazing amount of money. I live in what is locally about a 90th percentile income house, which in NYC would be what, like 5 million bucks? So that must be quite an income to pay that mortgage. I will tip my hat in your direction WRT music, there's making a living, and there's making life worth living, so thanks for making music in whatever small way you're doin it. However you just have to realize that if you don't live in Manhattan or SV that being "into" tech is a heck of a lot more like your music experience than like your tech experience. I've done extremely well and I'm incredibly lucky and/or arrogant depending on how I feel at the time of comment, but I'm well aware than for every one of me there's like 10 equally skilled guys sitting in a call center or pulling cat-5 cable or resetting passwords all day or even worse sitting at home, or working as a bartender or carpenter or truck driver or something. Nothing wrong with being a carpenter, something wrong with having a BSCS and your best offer is framing houses or driving a truck. I was just lucky, unlike the two people I'm talking about.
dspeyer 14y ago
> Could it be that schools aren't teaching their students the right stuff, that despite their fancy credentials, today's grads lack the programming chops or logical prowess needed to succeed at a Google or Microsoft? Not so much. Having done interviews at Google, and given a lot of very low scores to people with impressive degrees, I'm inclined to say yes. The author thinks that this would cause wages to rise, but the argument there looks pretty sketchy.
- dpritchett 14y ago
  Given that there's not an actual college major titled "Google SWE II", I'm not sure what sort of standards you're expecting out of people. (What I understand to be) Google's favorite tools - C++, Java, algo/data structure theory - don't exactly describe a holistic CS/SE/MIS curriculum. I'm sure a specifically designed trade school curriculum could train intelligent people up to ace valley hiring tests in two years or less.
  - nickbarnwell 14y ago
    Anyone who's gone through a holistic CS curriculum should be able to fairly easily pass the Google/Facebook/MS/Palantir-esque interview process (for new grad positions) with flying colours. The typical algorithmic questions they give are things likely seen verbatim in second year maths and algorithm/data-structure courses, while the system design stuff is fairly pedestrian. Specific knowledge of any language was unnecessary, and they really honed in on CS fundamentals. I do think they probably miss out on some smart people who scraped by in classes to pursue personal interests and could easily learn the material, but given the state of most new graduates it's probably a fair trade-off. (Disclaimer: I interned at Google after my Freshman year. I'm an English Lit. major and completely self-taught; I did not think the interviews were particularly difficult)
    - dpritchett 14y ago
      I think we agree with each other. I did a master's in CS from a school not known for CS and I'm pretty sure I'd fail Google's interviews unless I could put in a few weeks of focused preparation. Meanwhile I'm happily employed in Memphis and Google seems to have a recruiting pipeline in place that works for them.
analyst74 14y ago
I think countries that want more immigrants could learn something from Canada. In one of the recent reforms, it started to favor those who can fit into the country better -- those who have spent several years studying or working here can get immigration visa much easier and faster, without needing any sponsors. This ensures a few things: 1, it reduces the chance of some highly educated immigrants failed to adapt to local job market and ended up doing manual labors, or consuming social assistance. 2, it gives the market more power to influence who should get in the country. 3, companies cannot hold foreign workers hostage, because after a couple years, the workers can fast-track through immigration visa without them.
- vowelless 14y ago
  They also have(had?) this interesting track-to-residency by piggy-backing on the American H1-B visa [1]. This gives them a great filter for skilled laborers. [1] http://www.albertacanada.com/immigration/immigrating/ainp-srs-US-visa-holder-criteria.aspx http://www.albertacanada.com/immigration/immigrating/ainp-sr...
criley 14y ago
How many times is this going to be reposted to HackerNews? How many times are we going to bring up the same issues with this interpretation? Like, for example: the assumption that every STEM graduate wants to work in STEM fields, and that the failure of a STEM grad to find work in a STEM field is a failure of the STEM field instead of a personal decision of the STEM grad to pursue whatever career they want.
- davidw 14y ago
  > How many times are we going to bring up the same issues with this interpretation? Another great reason to flag articles that are primarily political in nature, although I have to admit this one is fairly close to a lot of us.
- ebbv 14y ago
  So every issue only gets one post at HN and then it's done forever? Since this is an issue which is actively being reformed right now, it seems to me that posting current (same day), informational posts about it is totally valid.
  - criley 14y ago
    There are no new developments, just more news outlets using (subjectively) bad interpretations of existing ideas/data. Look at a site like http://www.memeorandum.com http://www.memeorandum.com -- for any one news story, a dozen news outlets report on it (discussion section of links). That's what's going on here: a new outlet decides to report on the same information that someone already scooped and we already discussed, and then we start the dog and pony show up here again and repeat all of our discussions with the same information we had 3 days ago, and 5 days ago, etc, when the other articles came out. We had some brilliant people make some brilliant comments last time around, will we achieve that quality on the repeat post? Is it worthwhile to redo the effort?
    - roc 14y ago
      > " Is it worthwhile to redo the effort?" Last time around certainly wasn't the first time around for this issue. So if HN was in the habit of retiring subjects, there wouldn't have been any of those brilliant comments you referred to. And yet you're going to use those comments to argue for the retirement of the subject?
skwirl 14y ago
As someone who has been working as a software developer for five years since graduating, the claims made by this article are completely contrary to my personal experience. Finding good developers is hard. We spend months trying to hire for positions, sometimes interviewing dozens of people, before we find someone. And we pay well, use modern technologies, have a great group of existing developers, and don't expect anyone to work more than 40 hours a week. If you are a GOOD developer, the opportunities for you are endless. And the bar for being a "good" developer is NOT very high relative to the range of abilities found among all software developers. Even horribly incompetent developers do not seem to have much trouble finding work (they do have trouble finding work at this company... usually). I think the reason why roughly one third of "computer and information science" graduates aren't working in their field is because they themselves chose not to work in this field. The work isn't for everyone. I know quite a few people who majored in CS, were able to grind through it to get their degree, but can't stand the thought of doing this for a career. Their motivations for going into the field out of high school vary, and many are misguided, but how can you really hold a 17 year old to making a 40 year life decision? We need more good developers. If we were allowed to hire more international developers, I can tell you we would not hire one crap developer "because they are cheap." A crap developer does not just do less quality work than a good developer, they do NEGATIVE work that costs the company more than the salary difference between them and a good developer. From a self concerned strategic standpoint, the U.S. should use the opportunity of immigration reform to steal good developers from other countries. We are a country of immigrants, and immigration will always be important to us. Let's use it to capture the best and brightest from the rest of the world. That is how we stay on top.
- NkVczPkybiXICG 14y ago
  If you pay well enough, finding good developers isn't that hard. Many "good" programmers I know would very likely jump ship at their current job for 600k/year. You've just got to find a better middle ground.
  - deleted 14y ago
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graycat 14y ago
The article just assumes as clear and given that the immigrants have better skills, but there is no explanation for just how that could be. The technical education system in Taiwan and India is much better than in the US? Tough to believe.
- dpritchett 14y ago
  Western education is fairly individualistic; it may not churn out the same level of hard-CS devotion as Eastern school systems. Check out 'coding' competitions like Top Coder and IOI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Informatics#Multiple_IOI_winners http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Infor...
- ardit33 14y ago
  Not necessary, but the top 10% of any of those countries (even third world countries), will be better than the average US dev. (not necessary better than the top 10% of engineers coming out of US). That means that bringing the top 10% of the rest of the world here, will bring the average up, which means harder technical stuff gets done, which by itself opens up more jobs for the economy. Any good immigration policy should make sure to filter, and bring in only the best, and making sure that they are not underpaid. One way to do that is not to tie the visa to an employer, and making sure a engineer with lets say 5 years of experience coming here has a job that pays more than the average of a engineer with 5 years of experience makes, and remove loopholes on this This will reduce H-1B missuse from the indian/chinese consulting companies, and allow the H-1B holder to switch jobs as they choose and not to be tied down to one employer. After 3 years of working under this visa, an H-1B holder should be able to get the green card, and have ultimate freedom on their lives. Making these changes will just both allow best engineers in, and reduce the abuse that may happen due to the current rules on tying an employee to a employer (intenured servitude in the 21st century).
  - mjmahone17 14y ago
    Why should immigration policy filter out immigrants? One of the pushes behind Arizona's economic boom in the 90s and 00s was the influx of immigrant labor (who then bought houses that needed to be built/bought services that needed to be provided, and paid taxes for the government to hire more people to build/do more things). Immigration policy shouldn't support non-free labor, but it's unclear why we should only be focusing on the "best" immigrants, rather than trying to let in as many people as possible who will help build their communities.
digz 14y ago
This study was done by a 'non-partisan' group that's heavily backed by unions. Doesn't seem too non-partisan to me when you consider how significantly anti-immigration unions have been over the last century. The data may be valid, but the interpretation is always the most important... and a union-backed group masquerading as a non-partisan think tank hardly seems unbiased.
- mjmahone17 14y ago
  It's kind of funny that unions are anti-immigrant: I think this (along with their past tendencies to be anti-black, etc) have hamstrung a lot of them. Immigrant laborers and American-born laborers have a lot more in common than not: they should both be pushing for higher-wages, more job availability, and better working conditions. As such, the unions should be embracing, rather than rejecting, new immigrants, and making sure that laws are passed to protect the immigrants' interests (such as eliminating the H1-B in favor of more green cards, say), because they are essentially the same interests.
  - digz 14y ago
    Unions are not terribly interested in overall productivity/output. Their goal is to maximize the value to their constituents (either through wages or working conditions). By decreasing/holding stagnant the supply of labor available, they are able to force wages to be higher than they should be. Of course, as economists understand, this causes all sorts of problems. Unions really aren't that different from corporate lobbyists... What's more impressive I think is how vehemently anti-immigration (and to your point, anti-black at various times) the Democratic party has historically been (mostly driven by union influence) and how quickly that seems to have been forgotten by most.
whiddershins 14y ago
Every time I try to hire someone to do any tech work for me, I am convinced there is a shortage of tech talent. It is cray hard to hire people, leaving aside price. It is hard to even get people to discuss working for me, before compensation is even discussed. And I live in NYC, not under a rock. And I'm friendly. Sure seems like a tech shortage to me.
- Spooky23 14y ago
  My cousin is a contractor. He says the same thing about drywall guys. My boss when I was stock clerk in high school said the same thing about cashiers. Hiring people is hard. Most good people already have jobs, so you need to find folks transitioning or starting out. There's a risk either way. The more specialized the skill, the harder it is.
- Spooky23 14y ago
  My cousin is a contractor. He says the same thing about drywall guys. My boss when I was stock clerk in high school said the same thing about cashiers. Hiring people is hard. Most good people already have jobs, so you need to find folks transitioning or starting out. There's a risk either way. The more specialized the skill, the harder it is.
- gav 14y ago
  We've been having problems hiring in NYC, there's definitely a shortage of good tech talent here. Just an anecdote: in the last month or so we've had two candidates not show up to an interview because they've already accepted another job.
whiddershins 14y ago
Every time I try to hire someone to do any tech work for me, I am convinced there is a shortage of tech talent. It is crazy hard to hire people, leaving aside price. It is hard to even get people to discuss working for me, before compensation is part of the picture. And I live in NYC, not under a rock. And I'm friendly. Sure seems like a tech shortage to me.
chrisbennet 14y ago
"Now, let's review some microeconomics. In a free market, it is almost axiomatic that the market always clears. That's a technical term that means that when somebody tries to sell something, if they are willing to accept the market price, they will be able to sell it, and when somebody wants to buy something, if they are willing to pay the market price, they will be able to buy it. It's just a matter of both sides accepting the market price." - Joel Spolsky " Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html Sure, if you can't find developers to work for you at any price than there probably is a shortage of developers in your area. If you could find developers if you paid twice as much as you are offering, then that is a clue that the market price is just higher than you can or are willing to pay.
- jellicle 14y ago
  And if you can double the number of developers by importing them from abroad while keeping the number of jobs constant, the clearing price will inevitably fall to reflect increased supply with constant demand. There, was that so hard? Yet some people seem to have trouble believing it. It's almost as if people are regurgitating their political beliefs instead of looking at the situation honestly.
- dpritchett 14y ago
  I don't think any of us really doubt that Facebook and Google could find (or train!) the talent they need in the U.S. at a price below, say, the $200,000 profit per employee Google brings in [1]. As a developer living and working in the U.S. I'd certainly love it if legislative conditions forced the above companies to hire people like me at a few hundred thousand a year more than my current salary. The interesting question to me is whether or not there's a valid reason to suppress permanent immigration (not the revolving-door bodyshop kind) of talented developers who would effectively drive down demand for my services. Again, I'd love to see my salary double or triple overnight thanks to favorable legislation, but I don't know that I have a good economic or moral case for that preference. [1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=net+income+per+employee+for+google%2C+for+facebook%2C+and+for+apple http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=net+income+per+employee...
ttrreeww 14y ago
So... after I got my green card (was on H-1B), my base salary skyrocketed from around 110k-ish to 150k
- ardit33 14y ago
  I have an H-1B and already make more than you, so that doesn't mean that H-1B will prevent you from demanding a high salary. I have had to switch jobs though and reset the Green Card process though, which is a bit nervewreking.
  - ttrreeww 14y ago
    Yeah, if you don't care about the green card, switching job easily get you huge raises. (I've seen people fell off the H-1B train and had to go home, so be careful)
  - angersock 14y ago
    Out of curiosity, having brought up the subject: What the hell do you do that justifies that >150K USD, especially if you aren't a founder? Are you a founder? What's going on? I'm genuinely curious.
migrantgeek 14y ago
I don't doubt that companies are trying to get a piece of legislation passed that allows them to pay employees less. Increasing margins, that's what companies do. I do take issue with the idea that the talent shortage is a myth. I work for a company willing to pay a six figure starting salary plus good benefits in what's supposed to be a recession and we cannot fill our headcount. My team has been looking to fill 2 headcount positions for months and it's dry as hell. Our search includes the entire US since working remote is acceptable. Candidates often look good on paper but they can't whiteboard even simple problems. It seems every company with decent staff has made them happy and no one decent is jumping ship right now especially when trying to recruit from the larger companies. I'm getting sick of all the hyperbole on this site. I think I'll be uncommenting my hosts file entry to block it for a while.
- nthj 14y ago
  I know a good developer on the market as of 3 AM this morning. Looking for remote. My email is in my profile.
- ximeng 14y ago
  Why not advertise on hn whoishiring?
  - jtbigwoo 14y ago
    The commenter may not want his or her posting history associated with his or her employer.
- mixmastamyk 14y ago
  > but they can't whiteboard even simple problems. Not sure how accurate that statement is, but as quality software is not written on whiteboards under pressure you may be looking at the wrong things. There's a guy here that frequently brings up the work-sample test, and some data exists confirming it to be a indicator.
  - AznHisoka 14y ago
willholloway 14y ago
As a working coder whose interests are not served by increasing US supply of coders through immigration I have a financial motivation in this meme spreading. I oppose increasing immigration because coding is one of the few remaining pathways to a solid middle class life in the US, and I don't want that to change. That said, quality hackers can feel very secure in 2013 and for the foreseeable future. The point the article makes about the ample number of programmers graduating US universities is belied by the essential truth of FizzBuzz. It is not graduates that are in short supply, it is high IQ individuals that can solve problems with computers. That is not going to change. As a consulting coder I find the demand for custom apps to be incredible. Almost everyone who asks me what I do for a living follows up by saying they want something built. Most are filtered out because they don't have the budget, but the demand (willing and able) is incredible. There are just not that many people with the tenacity and analytical thinking to deal with the realities of building the kind of software the world needs. My feelings here are best articulated by David Mamet through the character Levene in the play Glengarry Glen Ross: "You can't learn that in an office. Eh? He's right. You have to learn it on the streets. You can't buy that. You have to live it."
- danso 14y ago
  I know that in every profession, each passionate practitioner thinks that no cheap hire can possibly replace them. And yet I think this case is especially true for the developer of custom solutions. If you believe that the majority of time spent on software is in its post-release maintenance and iteration phase, then hiring mediocre developers to build the product will only result in massively increased product lifetime costs. And throwing more mediocre developers at it won't fix the underlying issues. It's hard to think of other building-type professions where one person can have so much sway over a company's initial success. And no, this is not because programmers are inherently more vital than civil engineers or doctors...it's because programmers have so few limits and regulations to deal with...as has been said on HN many times, just about anyone can spin up a Heroku dyno, load up incredibly powerful FOSS, and attempt a worthwhile product with little cost beside time and effort. Whereas a doctor, it doesn't matter how brilliant you are, you're going to have to jump through a lot of hoops and pay a lot of dues before you can fully develop your revolutionary treatment.
kyllo 14y ago
This article makes a big mistake in conflating software development with STEM in general. It shows a stock photo of a guy looking through a microsope (btw why is he looking through the lens if the microscope is plugged into a monitor? Seems redundant...), when the focus of the article is Microsoft, Google, and Facebook wanting to raise the H1-B visa cap so they can bring in more cheap coders from India. Is there a shortage of STEM graduates in the U.S.? Absolutely not. We graduate far more STEM students (especially in research-oriented sciences like biology, chemistry, physics) than we have jobs for. These research jobs are mostly funded by government grants, and the government is cutting back due to unrelated political issues with the budget, of which the root cause is mostly failures in the finance sector. Is there a shortage of programmers in the U.S.? Perhaps. There is massive, and growing, demand in all sectors for software developers, and our universities aren't graduating them faster than demand growth, and as a result software dev salaries are rising (or at least not falling). But programming is not STEM, and these jobs are not scientific research jobs. They are mostly jobs building commercial software products or automating business processes. These companies have figured out that they can squeeze a little more profit out of their business model by bringing in Indians who will write code for less money and can't job-hop because they're indentured by their visa status. So when they whine about a "talent shortage," they really just mean "American programmers are too expensive" because the relatively low supply/demand ratio means they still have to actually pay them a livable FTE salary and benefits--unlike most other job categories where they can and do hire commodity temp labor. (There are several entire companies dedicated to temp/contract staffing for administrative and QA positions at Microsoft.) These companies will pay lip service to the concept of improving the US education system to crank out more highly-skilled STEM graduates, make our country more competitive, etc. But really, it's just whining about microeconomic factors that hinder their constant efforts to trim their HR budgets. They just want cheaper coders, period.
- freyr 14y ago
  > There is massive, and growing, demand in all sectors for software developers, and our universities aren't graduating them faster than demand growth, and as a result software dev salaries are rising (or at least not falling). This is a direct contradiction to what's claimed in the article, namely that dev salaries are not rising to the extent that would be expected if there were a true shortage.
enoch_r 14y ago
> As shown in the EPI graph below, in 2009 less than two thirds of employed computer science grads were working in the IT sector a year after graduation. How horrifying! Now present the relevant statistics for history majors, economics majors, or English majors.
- jfb 14y ago
  Well, English/history/&c. majors are usually not presented as vocational training, as it seems that CS is these days, so it's not entirely a useful comparison.
zenbowman 14y ago
The article makes the mistake of assuming that everyone who graduates with a computer science degree can actually work as a professional programmer. Cheating and copying were extremely widespread when I did my undergraduate and even graduate level computer science work at a top-20 engineering school. Maybe 10% of students were actually people I could consider hiring. This goes for both American and foreign students, I don't make the false claim that Americans are not as smart as foreigners or don't work as hard. Dishonesty and dishonor was the norm, and in my experience, most of the people who actually did their own work and had a knack for engineering went on to do very well.
sabat 14y ago
Define "talent." It doesn't mean "anyone with a CS degree."
dusklight 14y ago
Speaking as someone who has interviewed quite a lot of people, I would say we have an ample supply of kids who started programming in college and successfully graduated with a 4-year degree, or even a masters. But we have a huge shortage on people who can actually write code and be hireable.
- nthj 14y ago
  Which totally makes sense, and I'm unsure why students don't think this one through. It's like saying, "I want to be a career musician", spending 4 years learning music theory, and then expecting a job playing the piano with an orchestra. If you want to make great music, you've gotta spend a lot of time playing the piano.
  - gamechangr 14y ago
    "I'm unsure why students don't think this one through". MONEY. Financial aid is available for classes, but not for self learning. Classes take a large percentage of your (would be) self learning time.
jtbigwoo 14y ago
When someone says "I can't find enough qualified people for X", the reader should always append "for what I am willing to pay." Miraculously, there never seems to be a shortage of qualified Wall Street traders, university administrators, or any number of other highly paid professions.
pauljonas 14y ago
The important takeaway that is lost/neglected both in the article and the comments is that the bulk of H1-B visa is allotted to cheap body shop entry level developers. A lot of fussing over high end Google / Microsoft positions obscures this truth that is evident from perusing the actual H1-B statistics. I've posted here before, but within a short commute from my home in Arizona, I can tally thousands of jobs displaced by the combination of H1-B / offshore (and this is not an either/or but a both/and strategy). Does anyone contest that this is countervailing effect on new vocational entries? And the truth that median/average salaries have not raised significantly exposes that indeed, to call it a shortage is myth. I suppose it depends upon the local market but here I see developer positions (PHP web development) being filled at $7.50 - $15 per hour, hourly rates bested by those not even possessing a college degree. Now, before somebody spouts off some PHP bashing and that those job slots merit only that pay level, consider that those old school / mainframe programming jobs that were supplanted by NIV / offshore coders paid 2-3X this mark for a less comprehensive skill set.
ef4 14y ago
I can summarize the problem with the data in one sentence: a degree in computer science has almost no correlation with your usefulness as a programmer. So a glut of people with degrees does not imply that there is no skill shortage. Really good programmers, like musicians, almost invariably start practicing as children. By high school, they know enough to be dangerous. By college, they're operating on a qualitatively different level than their peers who are trying programming for the first time. (Hence the widely-reported bimodal distribution of student performance in introductory college CS classes.) Can someone starting at age 18 still become a great programmer? Almost certainly. But they need to put in the vast amount of times and intense effort that it takes, and that gets harder to accomodate the older you get.

141 points by awwstn 14y ago

ww520 14y ago

America does have a tech talent shortage. It's the shortage of rockstar developers willing to work for low wage.

VLM 14y ago

A quote from the article also applies to the recent fad of promoting STEM education in K-12 etc. "Roughly twice as many American undergraduates earn degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines than go on to work in those fields." Maybe if my kids grade school gets their way, we can boost that to four times, or even more. Those numbers are almost as bad as recent law school grad stats. Needless to say as a life long STEM guy I'm strongly encouraging my kids to avoid the STEM field at all costs. I'm not annoyed at my kids school for focusing on STEM; its a very good educational technique and not any worse than other educational fads. As a vocation choice STEM is as likely to be as unrewarding as trying to become a rock star, a pro NBA player, or a fine arts painter, but those classes are great in K-12 schools. Those examples, and STEM, make truly excellent hobbies, but awful jobs, at least for most of the participants. I may not know the right answer, but I know STEM is the wrong answer. I'll still love my kids anyway, no matter if they become unemployed programmers or unemployed musicians, but I hope they can do better financially with their lives both for themselves and the grandkids, by being quided out of "hobby" jobs like STEM and music and art and into something with a profitable future.

gnoway 14y ago
kneejerk reaction: like what? I haven't thought a lot about this, but I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'. What other industries/disciplines are you thinking of?
- VLM 14y ago
  "I tend to equate STEM with 'profitable future'." There's a large number of extremely wealthy and extremely powerful people working publicly as hard as they can against that belief, and the government has been purchased to be on their side. Very few things unite everyone in power both in .biz and .gov quite as well as the destruction of STEM as a middle class or better lifestyle. My advice is be very careful when going up against a united powerful opposition like that. Like I wrote, I may not know the right answer, but its not very hard to figure out STEM is, or is soon going to be, the wrong answer.
  - angersock 14y ago
    That's quite a claim there--would you mind elaborating on your reasoning? Perhaps it's just due to my current existence in a very productive city, but STEM (and vocational training) seem to be both very much in demand and rewarded.
    - VLM 14y ago
      To elaborate I would advise reading the article and the HN posts.
    - VLM 14y ago
      Alright enough enough I apologize for the somewhat curt answer above stop downvoting me. I'll be more verbose and more polite. Estimate a ratio of "we need more STEM" vs "we need less STEM" in .biz, .gov, mainstream media, etc. Does anyone other than internal "tech" sites ever discuss how the pool is too big and getting too large and maybe we need licensing and unionization and apprenticeships or some way to shrink it? Lets say maybe 100 to 1 ratio? Are there any paid PR groups or lobbying groups at all on the side of the STEM worker? Any? Not even one? How bout on the other side? Oh, dozens you say working to increase the supply and drop the cost (aka our salary). A continuous stream of one unified voice from .gov, .biz, and .edu that we need more STEM grads, more STEM immigrants, more STEM is what "we" need or else. Yet... talk to people who aren't paid PR shills and its all poor working conditions, more grads than jobs, ageism, underemployment/overeducation. Sure you'll get a few quisling types who think that supporting those trying to destroy them will somehow personally save them, although historically that never seems to work out. And there's maybe 3 or 4 cities with a high cost of living and a shortage of techies... at least right now... at least supposedly. A tiny subfield with real demand as opposed to PR demand like petroleum engineering has explosive salary growth rates... supposedly we're told the demand is even higher for code slingers, well, OK, show me the increasing salaries and the unemployment rate approaching zero. Oh that's not happening nationwide without lies, damned lies, and statistics? Well someones lying then, or at least not telling the whole truth. Do you think the guy who stands to make a higher profit could be lying to you? Nah, Management and PR are transparent and clean as glass... How about the .gov guy purchased by the .biz guy, has a politician ever lied to you? Hmm. How bout that .edu guy who's salary more or less depends on convincing kids to enter his field, does he have any conflict of interest, or at best well intentioned delusion? Yet a VERY few lone voices in the wilderness, with no economic interest (or not much anyway) suggest maybe the emperor really does have no clothes, but they must be making it up because their reward for it is ... nothing at all? A better life for their kids? +5 of HN karma? Seems a pretty small reward at best for a lot of work. So that's my interpretation of the players on the field. There's the completely unorganized STEM workers, and absolutely everyone else united against them with a common cause, identical PR campaign, for fairly rational similar economic reasons. I wonder which side will win? Now compare our response to other fields involving labor forces and import/export and immigration and .gov policies. We seem to be failing ourselves in the PR war compared to ... well compared to pretty much every other field of human endeavor other than maybe the pot growers, congressmen, and sex workers. And there's a substantial overlap there at that. Actually they probably do a better job of self promotion than we do.
- polymatter 14y ago
  if my hypothetical children needed guidance, I'd probably advice on accounting. Huge industry that ain't going anywhere, lots of work at the low end, lots of pay at the high end, still applicable if you change job later, generally respected culturally.
  - mseebach 14y ago
    What about accounting makes it inherently less outsourceable than programming? In a world where STEM is not a practical career, presumably because it's all done in low-wage countries overseas, how is accounting still being done in-house?
    - VLM 14y ago
      Strange as it sounds, fraud prosecution. If a software dev lies or the product is buggy nothing really happens to anyone, but at least in theory a fraudulent or incompetent accountant could go to jail, and that's not happening in Outsourceland, so fundamentally at least some of it has to be done locally. Most of the lowest level of data entry and paper shuffling has long since been disposed of via automation, so already mostly only decision makers remain. Its not a bad idea.
      - gnoway 14y ago
        Well, I think this is shortsighted. H1-B is 'bad' because it's increasing the number of workers competing for the same pool of STEM jobs. Steering your kids towards accounting increases the number of workers competing for the same pool of accounting jobs. Except, I think STEM associates a lot more with 'growth industry' than accounting.
        VLM 14y ago
        I would disagree with the first paragraph in that a large number of .gov, .biz, and .edu personnel have a unified voice encouraging kids out of all other fields and into STEM. So the pool of grads is smaller in accounting therefore its a better job market for them to enter. My two kids are not going to tip the demographics such that accounting is now flooded. I do agree with the second paragraph in that accounting is more employable. If there's a web 2.0 crash or something, a tax accountant at a dotcom can more or less transfer into tax accountant job at an oil company. On the other hand a NAS storage engineer is pretty screwed via pigeonholing if he wants to get hired as a petroleum engineer. Much larger job pool in accounting.
davidw 14y ago
> As a vocation choice STEM is as likely to be as unrewarding as trying to become a rock star, a pro NBA player, You could always point your kids towards economics - they'd spot the flaw in the above pretty quickly: a lot of STEM stuff is not zero-sum. If more people work on building more stuff, it's probably a net gain for the world. The NBA, on the other hand, by definition, can only have one champion per year, and only have N teams per year.
- VLM 14y ago
  "it's probably a net gain for the world." The problem is my kids live here, where none of the benefits accrue. We could immigrate to India? I do agree that in a very cold hearted sense, "the world" is better off with my kid in a homeless shelter and 100 people in India finally getting enough rice to eat, vs my kid being rich and 100 people in India starving to death. But once you're a parent, its very hard to be objective enough to doom your kids. Even worse is the "probably" part, if it just results in a civilization wide increase in wheel spinning and finger pointing and delays. Then almost everyone loses.
  - zenbowman 14y ago
    Why do you assume your kids will be unemployed?
    - VLM 14y ago
      The point of the article was only half the grads can get jobs in STEM right now. Then you factor in the usual ageism so those with jobs in tech only really get half a career at best, maybe less, of course other STEM fields aren't as discriminatory as tech. Then factor in the intense desire by .gov and .biz to drive down wages by increasing H1B. Then factor in the median (median not mean) american inflation adjusted income has been in decline for about two generations in a mostly consumer based economy (oh oh). A rising economy might not lift all boats but a sinking one doesn't help much either. Then factor in an intense push to increase the STEM labor supply in K12 by STEM school initiatives and so forth. If the odds of employment in the field are 50:50 now, I would estimate in a decade or two it seems reasonable to be worse than 25% employment. They could very well be in the top 25% of their class, but that sounds like risky odds to me. If you were aiming at underemployment vs unemployment I do somewhat agree with you. There are already issues with receptionists and admin assistant jobs requiring advanced education, and seemingly all the waitresses I've met have a bachelors degree in "something". Anecdotally in the 70s when aerospace engineers with PHDs were driving taxicabs, I suppose a masters would at least guarantee a school bus driver job, making the education and training hugely wasteful because it has nothing to do with the job, but at least the employee gets to eat and may or may not have healthcare insurance. From that point of view I do agree with you that having a STEM degree means maybe they'll at least be able to get a job stocking shelves at the food store or something, and the kids without STEM will be unemployed completely.
czbond 14y ago
Agreed - as Mark Cuban says [paraphrased, when asked about what kind of technology the question asker should master] - Technology Sales.
stmchn 14y ago
I dislike that this kind of discussion lumps everything in STEM as one big amorphous blob. STEM covers a lot of really diverse fields which, big surprise, means that some fields within it are doing well while others, not so much.
marshray 14y ago
> As a vocation choice STEM is as likely to be as unrewarding as trying to become a rock star, a pro NBA player, or a fine arts painter Baloney. :-) If we total up the number of people who support a middle-class or better lifestyle solely with income from activities as "a rock star, a pro NBA player, or a fine arts painter" I think we'd see multiple of orders of magnitude fewer than those doing the same in STEM fields. For example: "as of 2009, GlaxoSmithKline employs an estimated 99,913 people around the world, and 12,800 of these employees work in GSK’s research teams to discover new medicines" http://www.numberof.net/number-of-gsk-employees/ http://www.numberof.net/number-of-gsk-employees/ Compared to: "Each team may have 15 players on their roster, 12 of which may dress for each game. Since there are 30 teams in the league, at any one time there is a maximum of 450 players on NBA rosters" http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_total_number_of_players_in_the_NBA http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_total_number_of_player...
whiddershins 14y ago
I can't begin to understand how you could make a comparison between a STEM career and music, art, or professional sports. I have worked, directly, for decades as both a professional musician and as a user interface designer, a web programmer, a graphic designer, and an internet marketer. I am a far more competent musician than any of the other skills. My resume in music is in the top 1/100th of a percent. I have been doing music far longer, and with more devotion. But I can far more easily pay my rent doing any of the other things listed. I can make mediocre user interfaces all day long and cover my mortgage with a week's salary. While doing web marketing on the side. And learn python in my spare time. If I want a world class musician to come to my studio and play, I can probably get them to do it as a favor, or for a small fee. If I want someone to do some coding for me, no amount of money seems to be sufficient. It makes my brain explode when people in computer science try to compare their lifestyle to that of a musician's. I have lived both. They are completely, utterly, unlike each other.
- VLM 14y ago
  Let me quote one of your other posts completely out of context: "And I live in NYC" The other 98% of us in tech do not live there, and most certainly do not have employment opportunities like you describe. Looking at the cost of living there, vs here, I kinda wonder about your claim of the mortgage being 25% of takehome, that doesn't add up unless you're in a really bad part of town or make an amazing amount of money. I live in what is locally about a 90th percentile income house, which in NYC would be what, like 5 million bucks? So that must be quite an income to pay that mortgage. I will tip my hat in your direction WRT music, there's making a living, and there's making life worth living, so thanks for making music in whatever small way you're doin it. However you just have to realize that if you don't live in Manhattan or SV that being "into" tech is a heck of a lot more like your music experience than like your tech experience. I've done extremely well and I'm incredibly lucky and/or arrogant depending on how I feel at the time of comment, but I'm well aware than for every one of me there's like 10 equally skilled guys sitting in a call center or pulling cat-5 cable or resetting passwords all day or even worse sitting at home, or working as a bartender or carpenter or truck driver or something. Nothing wrong with being a carpenter, something wrong with having a BSCS and your best offer is framing houses or driving a truck. I was just lucky, unlike the two people I'm talking about.

dspeyer 14y ago

> Could it be that schools aren't teaching their students the right stuff, that despite their fancy credentials, today's grads lack the programming chops or logical prowess needed to succeed at a Google or Microsoft? Not so much. Having done interviews at Google, and given a lot of very low scores to people with impressive degrees, I'm inclined to say yes. The author thinks that this would cause wages to rise, but the argument there looks pretty sketchy.

dpritchett 14y ago
Given that there's not an actual college major titled "Google SWE II", I'm not sure what sort of standards you're expecting out of people. (What I understand to be) Google's favorite tools - C++, Java, algo/data structure theory - don't exactly describe a holistic CS/SE/MIS curriculum. I'm sure a specifically designed trade school curriculum could train intelligent people up to ace valley hiring tests in two years or less.
- nickbarnwell 14y ago
  Anyone who's gone through a holistic CS curriculum should be able to fairly easily pass the Google/Facebook/MS/Palantir-esque interview process (for new grad positions) with flying colours. The typical algorithmic questions they give are things likely seen verbatim in second year maths and algorithm/data-structure courses, while the system design stuff is fairly pedestrian. Specific knowledge of any language was unnecessary, and they really honed in on CS fundamentals. I do think they probably miss out on some smart people who scraped by in classes to pursue personal interests and could easily learn the material, but given the state of most new graduates it's probably a fair trade-off. (Disclaimer: I interned at Google after my Freshman year. I'm an English Lit. major and completely self-taught; I did not think the interviews were particularly difficult)
  - dpritchett 14y ago
    I think we agree with each other. I did a master's in CS from a school not known for CS and I'm pretty sure I'd fail Google's interviews unless I could put in a few weeks of focused preparation. Meanwhile I'm happily employed in Memphis and Google seems to have a recruiting pipeline in place that works for them.

analyst74 14y ago

I think countries that want more immigrants could learn something from Canada. In one of the recent reforms, it started to favor those who can fit into the country better -- those who have spent several years studying or working here can get immigration visa much easier and faster, without needing any sponsors. This ensures a few things: 1, it reduces the chance of some highly educated immigrants failed to adapt to local job market and ended up doing manual labors, or consuming social assistance. 2, it gives the market more power to influence who should get in the country. 3, companies cannot hold foreign workers hostage, because after a couple years, the workers can fast-track through immigration visa without them.

vowelless 14y ago
They also have(had?) this interesting track-to-residency by piggy-backing on the American H1-B visa [1]. This gives them a great filter for skilled laborers. [1] http://www.albertacanada.com/immigration/immigrating/ainp-srs-US-visa-holder-criteria.aspx http://www.albertacanada.com/immigration/immigrating/ainp-sr...

criley 14y ago

How many times is this going to be reposted to HackerNews? How many times are we going to bring up the same issues with this interpretation? Like, for example: the assumption that every STEM graduate wants to work in STEM fields, and that the failure of a STEM grad to find work in a STEM field is a failure of the STEM field instead of a personal decision of the STEM grad to pursue whatever career they want.

davidw 14y ago
> How many times are we going to bring up the same issues with this interpretation? Another great reason to flag articles that are primarily political in nature, although I have to admit this one is fairly close to a lot of us.
ebbv 14y ago
So every issue only gets one post at HN and then it's done forever? Since this is an issue which is actively being reformed right now, it seems to me that posting current (same day), informational posts about it is totally valid.
- criley 14y ago
  There are no new developments, just more news outlets using (subjectively) bad interpretations of existing ideas/data. Look at a site like http://www.memeorandum.com http://www.memeorandum.com -- for any one news story, a dozen news outlets report on it (discussion section of links). That's what's going on here: a new outlet decides to report on the same information that someone already scooped and we already discussed, and then we start the dog and pony show up here again and repeat all of our discussions with the same information we had 3 days ago, and 5 days ago, etc, when the other articles came out. We had some brilliant people make some brilliant comments last time around, will we achieve that quality on the repeat post? Is it worthwhile to redo the effort?
  - roc 14y ago
    > " Is it worthwhile to redo the effort?" Last time around certainly wasn't the first time around for this issue. So if HN was in the habit of retiring subjects, there wouldn't have been any of those brilliant comments you referred to. And yet you're going to use those comments to argue for the retirement of the subject?

skwirl 14y ago

As someone who has been working as a software developer for five years since graduating, the claims made by this article are completely contrary to my personal experience. Finding good developers is hard. We spend months trying to hire for positions, sometimes interviewing dozens of people, before we find someone. And we pay well, use modern technologies, have a great group of existing developers, and don't expect anyone to work more than 40 hours a week. If you are a GOOD developer, the opportunities for you are endless. And the bar for being a "good" developer is NOT very high relative to the range of abilities found among all software developers. Even horribly incompetent developers do not seem to have much trouble finding work (they do have trouble finding work at this company... usually). I think the reason why roughly one third of "computer and information science" graduates aren't working in their field is because they themselves chose not to work in this field. The work isn't for everyone. I know quite a few people who majored in CS, were able to grind through it to get their degree, but can't stand the thought of doing this for a career. Their motivations for going into the field out of high school vary, and many are misguided, but how can you really hold a 17 year old to making a 40 year life decision? We need more good developers. If we were allowed to hire more international developers, I can tell you we would not hire one crap developer "because they are cheap." A crap developer does not just do less quality work than a good developer, they do NEGATIVE work that costs the company more than the salary difference between them and a good developer. From a self concerned strategic standpoint, the U.S. should use the opportunity of immigration reform to steal good developers from other countries. We are a country of immigrants, and immigration will always be important to us. Let's use it to capture the best and brightest from the rest of the world. That is how we stay on top.

NkVczPkybiXICG 14y ago
If you pay well enough, finding good developers isn't that hard. Many "good" programmers I know would very likely jump ship at their current job for 600k/year. You've just got to find a better middle ground.
- deleted 14y ago
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14y ago

graycat 14y ago

The article just assumes as clear and given that the immigrants have better skills, but there is no explanation for just how that could be. The technical education system in Taiwan and India is much better than in the US? Tough to believe.

dpritchett 14y ago
Western education is fairly individualistic; it may not churn out the same level of hard-CS devotion as Eastern school systems. Check out 'coding' competitions like Top Coder and IOI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Informatics#Multiple_IOI_winners http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Infor...
ardit33 14y ago
Not necessary, but the top 10% of any of those countries (even third world countries), will be better than the average US dev. (not necessary better than the top 10% of engineers coming out of US). That means that bringing the top 10% of the rest of the world here, will bring the average up, which means harder technical stuff gets done, which by itself opens up more jobs for the economy. Any good immigration policy should make sure to filter, and bring in only the best, and making sure that they are not underpaid. One way to do that is not to tie the visa to an employer, and making sure a engineer with lets say 5 years of experience coming here has a job that pays more than the average of a engineer with 5 years of experience makes, and remove loopholes on this This will reduce H-1B missuse from the indian/chinese consulting companies, and allow the H-1B holder to switch jobs as they choose and not to be tied down to one employer. After 3 years of working under this visa, an H-1B holder should be able to get the green card, and have ultimate freedom on their lives. Making these changes will just both allow best engineers in, and reduce the abuse that may happen due to the current rules on tying an employee to a employer (intenured servitude in the 21st century).
- mjmahone17 14y ago
  Why should immigration policy filter out immigrants? One of the pushes behind Arizona's economic boom in the 90s and 00s was the influx of immigrant labor (who then bought houses that needed to be built/bought services that needed to be provided, and paid taxes for the government to hire more people to build/do more things). Immigration policy shouldn't support non-free labor, but it's unclear why we should only be focusing on the "best" immigrants, rather than trying to let in as many people as possible who will help build their communities.

digz 14y ago

This study was done by a 'non-partisan' group that's heavily backed by unions. Doesn't seem too non-partisan to me when you consider how significantly anti-immigration unions have been over the last century. The data may be valid, but the interpretation is always the most important... and a union-backed group masquerading as a non-partisan think tank hardly seems unbiased.

mjmahone17 14y ago
It's kind of funny that unions are anti-immigrant: I think this (along with their past tendencies to be anti-black, etc) have hamstrung a lot of them. Immigrant laborers and American-born laborers have a lot more in common than not: they should both be pushing for higher-wages, more job availability, and better working conditions. As such, the unions should be embracing, rather than rejecting, new immigrants, and making sure that laws are passed to protect the immigrants' interests (such as eliminating the H1-B in favor of more green cards, say), because they are essentially the same interests.
- digz 14y ago
  Unions are not terribly interested in overall productivity/output. Their goal is to maximize the value to their constituents (either through wages or working conditions). By decreasing/holding stagnant the supply of labor available, they are able to force wages to be higher than they should be. Of course, as economists understand, this causes all sorts of problems. Unions really aren't that different from corporate lobbyists... What's more impressive I think is how vehemently anti-immigration (and to your point, anti-black at various times) the Democratic party has historically been (mostly driven by union influence) and how quickly that seems to have been forgotten by most.

whiddershins 14y ago

Every time I try to hire someone to do any tech work for me, I am convinced there is a shortage of tech talent. It is cray hard to hire people, leaving aside price. It is hard to even get people to discuss working for me, before compensation is even discussed. And I live in NYC, not under a rock. And I'm friendly. Sure seems like a tech shortage to me.

Spooky23 14y ago
My cousin is a contractor. He says the same thing about drywall guys. My boss when I was stock clerk in high school said the same thing about cashiers. Hiring people is hard. Most good people already have jobs, so you need to find folks transitioning or starting out. There's a risk either way. The more specialized the skill, the harder it is.
Spooky23 14y ago
My cousin is a contractor. He says the same thing about drywall guys. My boss when I was stock clerk in high school said the same thing about cashiers. Hiring people is hard. Most good people already have jobs, so you need to find folks transitioning or starting out. There's a risk either way. The more specialized the skill, the harder it is.
gav 14y ago
We've been having problems hiring in NYC, there's definitely a shortage of good tech talent here. Just an anecdote: in the last month or so we've had two candidates not show up to an interview because they've already accepted another job.

whiddershins 14y ago

Every time I try to hire someone to do any tech work for me, I am convinced there is a shortage of tech talent. It is crazy hard to hire people, leaving aside price. It is hard to even get people to discuss working for me, before compensation is part of the picture. And I live in NYC, not under a rock. And I'm friendly. Sure seems like a tech shortage to me.

chrisbennet 14y ago

"Now, let's review some microeconomics. In a free market, it is almost axiomatic that the market always clears. That's a technical term that means that when somebody tries to sell something, if they are willing to accept the market price, they will be able to sell it, and when somebody wants to buy something, if they are willing to pay the market price, they will be able to buy it. It's just a matter of both sides accepting the market price." - Joel Spolsky " Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html Sure, if you can't find developers to work for you at any price than there probably is a shortage of developers in your area. If you could find developers if you paid twice as much as you are offering, then that is a clue that the market price is just higher than you can or are willing to pay.

jellicle 14y ago
And if you can double the number of developers by importing them from abroad while keeping the number of jobs constant, the clearing price will inevitably fall to reflect increased supply with constant demand. There, was that so hard? Yet some people seem to have trouble believing it. It's almost as if people are regurgitating their political beliefs instead of looking at the situation honestly.
dpritchett 14y ago
I don't think any of us really doubt that Facebook and Google could find (or train!) the talent they need in the U.S. at a price below, say, the $200,000 profit per employee Google brings in [1]. As a developer living and working in the U.S. I'd certainly love it if legislative conditions forced the above companies to hire people like me at a few hundred thousand a year more than my current salary. The interesting question to me is whether or not there's a valid reason to suppress permanent immigration (not the revolving-door bodyshop kind) of talented developers who would effectively drive down demand for my services. Again, I'd love to see my salary double or triple overnight thanks to favorable legislation, but I don't know that I have a good economic or moral case for that preference. [1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=net+income+per+employee+for+google%2C+for+facebook%2C+and+for+apple http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=net+income+per+employee...

ttrreeww 14y ago

So... after I got my green card (was on H-1B), my base salary skyrocketed from around 110k-ish to 150k

ardit33 14y ago
I have an H-1B and already make more than you, so that doesn't mean that H-1B will prevent you from demanding a high salary. I have had to switch jobs though and reset the Green Card process though, which is a bit nervewreking.
- ttrreeww 14y ago
  Yeah, if you don't care about the green card, switching job easily get you huge raises. (I've seen people fell off the H-1B train and had to go home, so be careful)
- angersock 14y ago
  Out of curiosity, having brought up the subject: What the hell do you do that justifies that >150K USD, especially if you aren't a founder? Are you a founder? What's going on? I'm genuinely curious.

migrantgeek 14y ago

I don't doubt that companies are trying to get a piece of legislation passed that allows them to pay employees less. Increasing margins, that's what companies do. I do take issue with the idea that the talent shortage is a myth. I work for a company willing to pay a six figure starting salary plus good benefits in what's supposed to be a recession and we cannot fill our headcount. My team has been looking to fill 2 headcount positions for months and it's dry as hell. Our search includes the entire US since working remote is acceptable. Candidates often look good on paper but they can't whiteboard even simple problems. It seems every company with decent staff has made them happy and no one decent is jumping ship right now especially when trying to recruit from the larger companies. I'm getting sick of all the hyperbole on this site. I think I'll be uncommenting my hosts file entry to block it for a while.

nthj 14y ago
I know a good developer on the market as of 3 AM this morning. Looking for remote. My email is in my profile.
ximeng 14y ago
Why not advertise on hn whoishiring?
- jtbigwoo 14y ago
  The commenter may not want his or her posting history associated with his or her employer.
mixmastamyk 14y ago
> but they can't whiteboard even simple problems. Not sure how accurate that statement is, but as quality software is not written on whiteboards under pressure you may be looking at the wrong things. There's a guy here that frequently brings up the work-sample test, and some data exists confirming it to be a indicator.
- AznHisoka 14y ago

willholloway 14y ago

As a working coder whose interests are not served by increasing US supply of coders through immigration I have a financial motivation in this meme spreading. I oppose increasing immigration because coding is one of the few remaining pathways to a solid middle class life in the US, and I don't want that to change. That said, quality hackers can feel very secure in 2013 and for the foreseeable future. The point the article makes about the ample number of programmers graduating US universities is belied by the essential truth of FizzBuzz. It is not graduates that are in short supply, it is high IQ individuals that can solve problems with computers. That is not going to change. As a consulting coder I find the demand for custom apps to be incredible. Almost everyone who asks me what I do for a living follows up by saying they want something built. Most are filtered out because they don't have the budget, but the demand (willing and able) is incredible. There are just not that many people with the tenacity and analytical thinking to deal with the realities of building the kind of software the world needs. My feelings here are best articulated by David Mamet through the character Levene in the play Glengarry Glen Ross: "You can't learn that in an office. Eh? He's right. You have to learn it on the streets. You can't buy that. You have to live it."

danso 14y ago
I know that in every profession, each passionate practitioner thinks that no cheap hire can possibly replace them. And yet I think this case is especially true for the developer of custom solutions. If you believe that the majority of time spent on software is in its post-release maintenance and iteration phase, then hiring mediocre developers to build the product will only result in massively increased product lifetime costs. And throwing more mediocre developers at it won't fix the underlying issues. It's hard to think of other building-type professions where one person can have so much sway over a company's initial success. And no, this is not because programmers are inherently more vital than civil engineers or doctors...it's because programmers have so few limits and regulations to deal with...as has been said on HN many times, just about anyone can spin up a Heroku dyno, load up incredibly powerful FOSS, and attempt a worthwhile product with little cost beside time and effort. Whereas a doctor, it doesn't matter how brilliant you are, you're going to have to jump through a lot of hoops and pay a lot of dues before you can fully develop your revolutionary treatment.

kyllo 14y ago

This article makes a big mistake in conflating software development with STEM in general. It shows a stock photo of a guy looking through a microsope (btw why is he looking through the lens if the microscope is plugged into a monitor? Seems redundant...), when the focus of the article is Microsoft, Google, and Facebook wanting to raise the H1-B visa cap so they can bring in more cheap coders from India. Is there a shortage of STEM graduates in the U.S.? Absolutely not. We graduate far more STEM students (especially in research-oriented sciences like biology, chemistry, physics) than we have jobs for. These research jobs are mostly funded by government grants, and the government is cutting back due to unrelated political issues with the budget, of which the root cause is mostly failures in the finance sector. Is there a shortage of programmers in the U.S.? Perhaps. There is massive, and growing, demand in all sectors for software developers, and our universities aren't graduating them faster than demand growth, and as a result software dev salaries are rising (or at least not falling). But programming is not STEM, and these jobs are not scientific research jobs. They are mostly jobs building commercial software products or automating business processes. These companies have figured out that they can squeeze a little more profit out of their business model by bringing in Indians who will write code for less money and can't job-hop because they're indentured by their visa status. So when they whine about a "talent shortage," they really just mean "American programmers are too expensive" because the relatively low supply/demand ratio means they still have to actually pay them a livable FTE salary and benefits--unlike most other job categories where they can and do hire commodity temp labor. (There are several entire companies dedicated to temp/contract staffing for administrative and QA positions at Microsoft.) These companies will pay lip service to the concept of improving the US education system to crank out more highly-skilled STEM graduates, make our country more competitive, etc. But really, it's just whining about microeconomic factors that hinder their constant efforts to trim their HR budgets. They just want cheaper coders, period.

freyr 14y ago
> There is massive, and growing, demand in all sectors for software developers, and our universities aren't graduating them faster than demand growth, and as a result software dev salaries are rising (or at least not falling). This is a direct contradiction to what's claimed in the article, namely that dev salaries are not rising to the extent that would be expected if there were a true shortage.

enoch_r 14y ago

> As shown in the EPI graph below, in 2009 less than two thirds of employed computer science grads were working in the IT sector a year after graduation. How horrifying! Now present the relevant statistics for history majors, economics majors, or English majors.

jfb 14y ago
Well, English/history/&c. majors are usually not presented as vocational training, as it seems that CS is these days, so it's not entirely a useful comparison.

zenbowman 14y ago

The article makes the mistake of assuming that everyone who graduates with a computer science degree can actually work as a professional programmer. Cheating and copying were extremely widespread when I did my undergraduate and even graduate level computer science work at a top-20 engineering school. Maybe 10% of students were actually people I could consider hiring. This goes for both American and foreign students, I don't make the false claim that Americans are not as smart as foreigners or don't work as hard. Dishonesty and dishonor was the norm, and in my experience, most of the people who actually did their own work and had a knack for engineering went on to do very well.

sabat 14y ago

Define "talent." It doesn't mean "anyone with a CS degree."

dusklight 14y ago

Speaking as someone who has interviewed quite a lot of people, I would say we have an ample supply of kids who started programming in college and successfully graduated with a 4-year degree, or even a masters. But we have a huge shortage on people who can actually write code and be hireable.

nthj 14y ago
Which totally makes sense, and I'm unsure why students don't think this one through. It's like saying, "I want to be a career musician", spending 4 years learning music theory, and then expecting a job playing the piano with an orchestra. If you want to make great music, you've gotta spend a lot of time playing the piano.
- gamechangr 14y ago
  "I'm unsure why students don't think this one through". MONEY. Financial aid is available for classes, but not for self learning. Classes take a large percentage of your (would be) self learning time.

jtbigwoo 14y ago

When someone says "I can't find enough qualified people for X", the reader should always append "for what I am willing to pay." Miraculously, there never seems to be a shortage of qualified Wall Street traders, university administrators, or any number of other highly paid professions.

pauljonas 14y ago

The important takeaway that is lost/neglected both in the article and the comments is that the bulk of H1-B visa is allotted to cheap body shop entry level developers. A lot of fussing over high end Google / Microsoft positions obscures this truth that is evident from perusing the actual H1-B statistics. I've posted here before, but within a short commute from my home in Arizona, I can tally thousands of jobs displaced by the combination of H1-B / offshore (and this is not an either/or but a both/and strategy). Does anyone contest that this is countervailing effect on new vocational entries? And the truth that median/average salaries have not raised significantly exposes that indeed, to call it a shortage is myth. I suppose it depends upon the local market but here I see developer positions (PHP web development) being filled at $7.50 - $15 per hour, hourly rates bested by those not even possessing a college degree. Now, before somebody spouts off some PHP bashing and that those job slots merit only that pay level, consider that those old school / mainframe programming jobs that were supplanted by NIV / offshore coders paid 2-3X this mark for a less comprehensive skill set.

ef4 14y ago

I can summarize the problem with the data in one sentence: a degree in computer science has almost no correlation with your usefulness as a programmer. So a glut of people with degrees does not imply that there is no skill shortage. Really good programmers, like musicians, almost invariably start practicing as children. By high school, they know enough to be dangerous. By college, they're operating on a qualitatively different level than their peers who are trying programming for the first time. (Hence the widely-reported bimodal distribution of student performance in introductory college CS classes.) Can someone starting at age 18 still become a great programmer? Almost certainly. But they need to put in the vast amount of times and intense effort that it takes, and that gets harder to accomodate the older you get.