Re: IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: vijay gill [vgill () vijaygill com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2008 9:10 PM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth

I see it is time to trot out the standard response to this yet one more time.

The basic axioms are this: people are not interchangeable cogs, especially not in certain industries like people that 
make software for a living, top class scalable infrastructure builders and engineering ops people.

The very best top people tend to be about 5-10x as productive to the baseline (see joel on software where he explains 
this in great detail backed up by stats and evidence). More importantly, as mentioned, the average engineer simply 
cannot produce solutions that the top talent can. Now, an IT shortage may be induced by people looking for more low 
cost employees who are going to write in house accounting software, but for anyone for whom software and operations are 
a competitive advantage, simply cannot _afford_ to have less than superstars working for them. Anyone ask Quark how 
their offshoring/outsourcing deal is working out for them btw? I'm vaguely curious.

Anyway, to get to the point - I am a hiring manager, I see about 10-20 resumes a week (this is after they have been 
prescreened by our recruiting staff who see on the order of a 100-200), and I maybe signal 1 or on a good week, 2 for 
phonescreens. Out of those phonescreens - btw done by engineers, not people who are worried about niceties of headcount 
or SG&A, maybe 1 in 10 gets selected for an on site. And of the on sites, maybe 1 in 5 gets recommended for hire. And 
superstars tend to cost money, much more money than an average engineer, so by extension, if I was hiring for cost, not 
talent, I would be better served by hiring folks off the street, who used to run their office LAN with a single cisco 
26xx and an exchange server or two, and who sometimes wrote a few scripts, or worked on AR software, and have them run 
global infrastructure and write code that can walk a billion documents in a second, because they'd be cheaper? I don't 
think so.

So, what this means net net is that I simply cannot find enough superstars to fulfil my hiring requirements, and it is 
the height of hubris to think that the US has all the talent locked up, there are plenty of superstars outside the 
country, and if I cannot bring them here, what I will do is open up offices THERE and bring them on board in their own 
country. And some of them will learn and get bored and head off and start their own software and ops shops. In fact, 
bring in top talent and keeping them here is a competitive advantage to the US, but hey, why do that when we can fill 
the short term wage requirements of folks who frankly, probably are not that good, else they already would have 
superstar jobs.

/vijay





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