IP: Re: Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> X-Sender: larry () pop walltech com (Unverified)
> Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 01:42:18 -0700
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
> From: Larry Tesler <larry () nomodes com>
> Subject: Re: IP: Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage
>
> Dave,
>
> Matloff's paper is so full of holes and non sequiturs, it is not funny.
>
> For starters, let's look at his primary gripe: age discrimination.
>
> Suppose Mary and John both apply for a job. Mary has experience doing the 
> job and is very knowledgeable and fast. John has never done the job 
> before, lacks necessary skills, and demands 50% more pay besides. Both 
> John and Mary are citizens, and neither is a felon. But their ages differ. 
> Which would be discrimination: hiring John or hiring Mary?
>
> It is obvious to me that if the employer hires Mary--the more qualified 
> candidate who asks less in salary--there has been no discrimination of any 
> kind. It can only be discrimination if the less qualified candidate gets 
> the job, or, in the case of equal qualifications, if the candidate that 
> demands to be paid more gets the job.
>
> Then the question is, what kind of discrimination? If less qualified John 
> was hired over more qualified Mary at higher pay because of his gender, it 
> would be sex discrimination. If he was hired over Mary because of his 
> race, it would be racial discrimination. If he was hired over Mary because 
> of his age, it would be age discrimination.
>
> In Matloff's example, Mary (not the candidate's name) is hired. But 
> Matloff claims it is age discrimination, even though Mary is the more 
> qualified candidate. The reason? She is younger than John! The employer, 
> in his view, should give age preference to the older candidate, despite 
> his higher cost and inferior skills.
>
> To add paranoia to illogic, Matloff insinuates that employers try to infer 
> age from resume and purposely screen out the older candidates. That would 
> certainly be age discrimination. But to claim it is a rampant practice 
> without evidence is unsound scholarship.
>
> Matloff tries to apply his topsy-turvy age discrimination logic to H1-B 
> visas, which entail entirely different issues. By law, employers not only 
> can, but must, discriminate against aliens without papers.
>
> Matloff then cites the fact that some top employers hire only a few 
> percent of applicants. He says this statistic proves that there cannot be 
> a shortage of software engineers. But the fact that a woman gets 100 
> marriage proposals--many from strange drunks on the street--and only 
> accepts one does not prove that there is a surplus of eligible husbands.
>
> These are some of the flaws in the logic...
>
> First, software engineers jump from company to company. When there is a 
> shortage of a skill, those who have it move from job to job to take 
> advantage of the situation and win positions, perks and pay. A lot of 
> resumes is as consistent with a shortage of engineers as it is with a 
> shortage of positions.
>
> Second, many engineers covet jobs with top tier firms because (a) despite 
> Matloff's insinuations that they are out to underpay, they actually pay 
> more from a total compensation standpoint than most places those 
> applicants are working now; (b) it is a great career step, a well-regarded 
> employer to list on a resume; (c) as with top tier universities, the 
> harder it is to get in, the more people want to get in.
>
> Third, many applicants send resumes to 50 or 100 companies in hopes of 
> improving their situation or just getting a change of pace. If every 
> employer hired 50% of the applicants, every applicant would start work at 
> 25 new jobs. The math does not work.
>
> Employers do indeed see a lot of resumes. But who has time to interview 
> hundreds of candidates for one job? Employers trim the list to manageable 
> size by reading the resumes. The poor fits to the job come in every age 
> group--as do the good fits and the highly skilled candidates.
>
> Some applicants have no programming skills at all. They hope to move to a 
> higher-paying career path.
>
> Some applicants blast their resume to an automated distribution list. 
> That's spam telemarketing, not discriminate selection of a potential employer.
>
> Fourth, he does not cite statistics on accepted applicants, only hired 
> applicants. Accepted applicants often get many offers, accept the best, 
> and turn down the rest. The rejected employer hires someone else instead. 
> This counts as one hire in the statistics, even though the employer made 
> two offers. And sometimes an employer has to make five or ten offers 
> before a candidate accepts.
>
> I could go on. But this email would be longer than the paper itself.
>
> Larry Tesler
> President, Stagecast Software, Inc.
> Average software engineer age: 41.2
> Average other employee age:    41.5
> H1-B visas: 1 out of 14 employees, and not the lowest paid SW engineer
> Job openings today: None
>
>
> > X\Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 20:01:56 -0600
> > To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
> > From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat org>
> >
> >
> > Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage
> >
> > by Dr. Norman Matloff
> >
> > Due to an extensive public relations campaign orchestrated by an industry 
> > trade organization, the Information Technology Association of America 
> > (ITAA), a rash of newspaper articles have been appearing since early 
> > 1997, claiming desperate labor shortages in the information-technology 
> > field. Frantic employers complain that they cannot fill many open 
> > positions for computer programmers. (Footnote: Our focus on computer 
> > programmers here is explained in the section "Reason for the Focus on 
> > Software.")
> >
> > Yet readers of the articles proclaiming a shortage would be perplexed if 
> > they also knew that Microsoft only hires 2% of its applicants for 
> > software positions, and that this rate is typical in the industry. 
> > Software employers, large or small, across the nation, concede that they 
> > receive huge numbers of resumes but reject most of them without even an 
> > interview. One does not have to be a "techie" to see the contradiction 
> > here. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be 
> > hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants.
> >
> > The hidden agenda of the ITAA public relations campaign which began in 
> > 1997 turned out to be to leverage Congress to increase the yearly quota 
> > of H-1B work visas, under which employers were importing tens of 
> > thousands of programmers to the U.S....
> >
> > http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html