more on Tech: A 'hostile environment' for US natives????

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Jonathan S. Shapiro" <shap () eros-os org>
Date: May 5, 2005 8:33:22 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: Ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Tech: A 'hostile environment' for US  
natives????


[For IP, if you wish]

Dave:

I think that Gene Spafford has raised several valid points. The
substantive question here is: what social obligation should companies
have to investing in ongoing training of US employees? I'm not sure what
the answer should be.

That said, there are three points Gene makes that I think could be
refined:


> But what I hear from people in the companies is:
> 1) domestic IT talent is concentrated in particular geographic areas
> -- and those people don't want to move.  There are jobs available in  
> the midwest, for instance, but people don't want to move from
> California or Boston or wherever.  Those "furriners" are willing to
> travel halfway around the globe for a good job; the domestic talent
> wants to stay in areas where there is a surplus of unemployed IT  
> people.

Given that IT companies are outsourcing constantly, and that they are
often setting up IT departments in foreign countries -- sometimes
including construction of whole new facilities -- I don't find this
convincing. Why not build that same building in the midwest? Or if not,
why not outsource to suppliers located in the midwest? The great irony
of outsourcing at the moment is that some firms in India are starting to
outsource work back to companies in the United States.

The answer, I suspect, is that IT employees in the midwest aren't
currently organized to provide competitively priced outsourcing
services. Perhaps this is a business opportunity for someone.


> 2) domestic IT talent -- particularly older programmers -- often
> don't have the skillset that is needed.   For instance, companies
> seeking to hire programmers proficient in XML and Java are not overly
> impressed with people who list their skills as Fortran, Cobol and
> Basic.

This is widely claimed, but having hired several hundred people in my
career I would say that it's not the real problem.

The tremendous advantage of "older" programmers is experience. They may
not write code faster than the youngsters, but they throw less code away
because they have developed a refined sense of engineering "taste". In
my experience, this is even true if the "older" programmers have to work
in a new programming language -- as long as the programming language is
reasonably close to something that is already familiar.

The real issue -- and I am very aware that there are many exceptions to
the following statement -- is that many older programmers (and for that
matter, older employees in general) have lost a certain kind of
professional flexibility. Taken as a group, older programmers are
reluctant to invest in refreshing their skills. To use a dog-eared
phrase, they aren't interested in learning new tricks.

In my opinion, this is a case of reaping what we sow. There exist US
corporations that consider continuing professional development
important, and they evaluate their employees (in part) on whether they
grow and evolve. In these companies, you find that the older programmers
are valued. The big fear is losing their experience.

Sadly, in most companies this is not the practice. And if you are an
older programmer who has spent 20 years working for that kind of
company, what you have learned is "professional development and
evolution is not rewarded."

The end result is that we have a large body of older programmers who
have been paid to get stale and stay that way. It's a great tragedy.

I would add only that any employee who thinks that their company will
look out for them is hopelessly naive. It's ultimately the employee's
job to stay fresh whether the company supports it or not.


>    Couple that with the fact that many employers would like
> their employees to know some math and how to write grammatically
> correct reports, and there is a problem -- we have a lot of older
> programmers who avoided the classes and training that would have
> provided these skills, and they don't feel any obligation to learn
> new things.  Meanwhile, many engineers from places such as India have
> deeper skills in math, English composition, and software engineering
> than their US counterparts, and they are willing to make the effort
> to master new skills.  (We see this in our students, too -- ask
> anyone teaching at a major US university.)

On this point I simply want to amplify what Gene is saying about current
students. The engineering students we see at Hopkins cannot write their
way out of a paper bag.


> From my perspective, the disturbing part of this is *why* they cannot
write. It's not that they lack the grammar and mechanics of writing.
It's that there is a certain discipline of problem decomposition and
organization that they aren't getting. This problem decomposition skill
is not just an issue in writing; it's a fundamental requirement for
competent engineering. From what I see, there are other engineering
fields that successfully teach these skills in other ways. In CS, we are
really bad at it.

Looking back on my own education, I can say with confidence that I
learned exactly nothing about writing in college. The foundation of my
writing skills were built in 7th grade, improved through practice in
high school, and then strongly improved by my PhD advisors. I'm not sure
that colleges are the right place to put the responsibility on this
issue. What about secondary schools?


Finally, on the subject of salaries and H1-B visas, here is some
unpleasant food for thought:

Years ago, in an ill-advised attempt to protect the US memory industry,
we put in place protective tariffs that prohibited the import of
"dumped" memory. At the same time, we allowed complete computers
containing the same "dumped" memory to enter the country with no tariff.
The end result was that (a) the US memory industry failed, and (b) a lot
of computer manufacturing went to Ireland and Taiwan, taking even more
jobs out of the US.

Capping H1-B visas is the same sort of mistake. If US software vendors
cannot hire domestic programmers at internationally competitive rates
here, they will simply outsource the entire business to other countries.
Once moved offshore, those jobs will not return. As painful as it would
be in the short term, removing the cap on H1-B visas is the fastest way
to rationalize the programmer pricing structure in the United States,
and the only way to preserve IT jobs here over the long haul.


Jonathan Shapiro
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Johns Hopkins University



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