Re: IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: David P. Reed [dpreed () reed com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 10:41 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth

Vijay is probably right, of course, about "superstars".  However the
claim about "IT labor shortage" does not focus on superstardom - or at
least it didn't until vijay twisted the conversation there.

So this continuous debate hinges on very tentative (perhaps even
unsupportable) arguments about non-superstars - the people who far
outnumber the 5-10x productive people who, by the way don't get paid
5-10x what their peers get paid (in India the superstars are paid what
would be American slave wages).

Most IT work is not done in organizations or contexts where
"superstardom" is a prerequisite.   In fact, most IT jobs are in places
where the job skills involve knowledge that goes far beyond narrow
technical skills in one area - a banking IT person is not a cog, not
just because of some abstract "codiing IQ" correlated with the mythical
linear measure "g" that psychometricians call "general intelligence",
but because a banking IT person absorbs a lot of important domain knowledge.

I'm amazed constantly at the number of false or poorly supported
assumptions and stereotypes in this
"immigration"/"outsourcing"/"education" debate (isn't that really what
all the nastiness comes from - some deep-down anti-other, pro-"our kids"
kinds of intolerance masquerading as "logic"?).

Might as well be arguing about when IT people (whoever they are) stopped
beating their spouses.  When you start from assertions about premises of
the argument that are strawmen or mere plausible stereotypes, you will
not get far.

Throwing "superstars" in as proxies for "IT labor" doesn't add a damn
thing to the argument.  It just changes the subject.

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
>
>
>
>
>
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