Re: IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Andrew C Burnette [acb () acb net]
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 10:11 AM
To: David Farber; vgill () vijaygill com
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth

Dave, Vijay,

Part of the problem has been the years needed to squeeze out the
'lukewarm bodies' that showed up in IT during the dot-com boom. Some
rather ill-matched candidates are still hanging around, bringing the
value and price of our product down overall.

In the various corners of bell labs (I've been in various pieces here
and there), I never saw the H1B program abused, nor the employees in the
program underpaid. While consulting, I've seen numerous less scrupulous
companies do the exact opposite, essentially extorting 14 hour days out
of foreign nationals, for 30% less than a comparable market job. I'm
sure similar can be said of guest worker programs in any modern economy
(I don't want this to sound like a US only problem, as it certainly isn't).

That mistreatment issue is actually doubly bad, as you really want the
best and the brightest from anywhere to immigrate to the US, bring their
families, their kids, their bright ideas, pay taxes here, not send money
elsewhere and spend it here. Mistreat our guests, and why should the
unlucky soul have any incentive to want to stay permanently.

Otherwise, we're simply just training foreign nationals to go back home
and out innovate our own companies.  Self destructive business plan over
the long term if you ask me.

I like the idea of smart, interesting neighbors and colleagues. I like
them better when they stay here, enjoy life, and produce economic
activity here.  In most economists' view of what makes for a viable
community, is to watch the same dollar circulate around and around
through various spending for days or weeks. In unsuccessful communities
(e.g. inner cities), the average dollar flight time prior to departure
can be measured in hours (before the money leaves the community).

Oh well, guess it's a far more complex issue than any of us can actually
fix.

best regards,
andy

David Farber wrote:
> ________________________________________
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------
> Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
> RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
> Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com

-------------------------------------------
Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com