

Microsoft: Shortage of tech workers in the US becoming 'genuine crisis' - booz
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/258985-microsoft-lack-of-tech-workers-approaching-genuine-crisis

======
geebee
From the Huffington Post:

"The Bureau Of Labor Statistics has released its annual Occupational
Employment and Wages report, and the top-paying industries are dominated by
health care professionals. In fact, nine of the 10 highest-paid jobs in
America are in the health care industry. The only other group that made the
top 10 is corporate executives."

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/top-ten-highest-
pai...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/top-ten-highest-paid-
jobs_n_864907.html)

Here's a link to the full report:

<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm>

Like a lot of other people here, I'd support a stronger emphasis on skilled
immigration to the US, but I don't see compelling evidence of an acute
shortage of engineers relative to other fields. In fact, I think the low level
of interest in these fields is a rational response to market signals,
especially at the elite levels.

~~~
luser001
I've encountered this sort of response citing the high pay in healthcare
before. So I wanted to throw a thought out there for feedback.

A relevant point is the "carrying capacity" for healthcare professionals. The
USA can probably double the number of people employed in healthcare (using a
handwavy argument that that 40 million [edit: I earlier wrote 40%] of the
population is uninsured).

Note the number of people with the high-paying healthcare job titles: all of
them were below 100k people and many were less than 20k people.

Given that so few people work in healthcare relative to STEM, I'm not really
sure that pointing out high salaries in healthcare is relevant.

Whereas I can easily see STEM doubling employment in the USA, from the already
high (10's of millions?) employment base.

~~~
drpgq
Wait are you saying that there are fewer people working in health care in the
US compared to STEM? I don't think that's true at all.

~~~
luser001
Yep, that's what I'm saying.

I'm too lazy to look into this, but intuitively it makes sense to me.
Healthcare is basically an "exception handler" (default state of humans is to
be health), whereas STEM is the "real code".

I would expect more "real code" than "exception handlers".

Also sq. ft. of physical space devoted to healthcare (e.g., hospitals) seems
to be far less than sq. ft. of space devoted to STEM (e.g., office parks).

If dig up info to disprove me, I would be very grateful to get a correction to
my worldview.

~~~
panda_person
If by healthcare do you mean all employees who work in hospitals (including
many low paying positions), or more prestigious, higher paying positions like
RNs, MDs, etc? And what about dentists and other allied health fields?

~~~
luser001
I would definitely exclude administrators, janitors etc (because these jobs
exist in companies that are "in STEM" such as a Microsoft).

I would include medical staff like nurses, doctors, pharmacists,
psychiatrists, physiotherapists (not fitness trainers), licensed
nutritionists, dentists, dentists' assistants etc.

------
incongruity
If it were a genuine crisis, rather than a 'genuine crisis', wages would be
genuinely rising more than they are, for _anyone_ with anything close to the
skills sought. Instead, this strikes me as a push to get cheaper workers,
rather than actually paying for a scarce resource.

But maybe I'm just cynical.

~~~
cube13
According to this:

<http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm>

Developer-related positions(both research and development), are some of the
highest paid STEM-related positions available.

~~~
greenyoda
If you want to hire good physicists, you'll need to pay whatever the market
rate is for physicists. But if you want to hire good software developers,
you'll need to pay whatever the market rate is for software developers, and
the fact that they cost four times more than physicists isn't really relevant.

~~~
Luc
Hmmm... bad example, since according to the provided link physicists make more
than developers, both in mean and median.

------
sosuke
There doesn't seem to be a shortage at all. We've gotten plenty of good
candidates in our doors that turn us down because our pay is barely
competitive and our health insurance is terrible. Pay more money and you can
attract more tech workers.

Or lower your standards and make a plan to promote in company education, make
the specialized work force you need yourself!

~~~
antidoh
"lower your standards"

If I understand your intent, I would prefer to read this as "widen your
standards." You're not deciding to intake less capable people. Rather, you're
deciding to intake people of more varied specific experience.

~~~
MartinCron
the phrase that I use is "favoring aptitude over experience"

------
johngalt
The technology cycle generally goes:

1\. A few big wins causes a huge bubble.

2\. Tons of sub standard tech workers jump on the bandwagon for the money. In
some cases these are outright con artists.

3\. Average skill plummets as the market is flooded with cheap beginners and
pretenders.

4\. Market implodes. Everyone jumps off the sinking ship. Only people who stay
are dedicated to the field regardless of market dynamics.

5\. With all the pretenders and con-artists out of the way a few passionate
geniuses build a few big wins. GOTO:1

Throughout this cycle the same people who support massive layoffs during
downturns will wonder why there aren't thousands of engineers with 10 years
experience during upswings.

~~~
panda_person
Everyone is a beginner at some point.

~~~
tokenadult
_Everyone is a beginner at some point._

True enough. On the other hand, some people stay beginners much longer than
others.

------
vegas
Shortage of tech workers willing to run on carrotless treadmills reaches epic
proportions. Carrotless treadmills thrown away.

------
DenisM
I am absolutely confident there is no shortage of good software engineers
willing to drop everything and move to another part of the country for
$500k/year. Absolutely no shortage. If you raise your wages, you will find
someone to do the work. If you can't afford to raise the wages, your business
plan is not viable. I mean, I could use a houseworker to clean my house for $1
per day, does it mean I should get my wish as well? Nope.

Skilled immigration is valuable for another reason though - the more talent in
the leading industry the better it is for the country, and draining other
countries of their talent is also a valuable competition tactics.

~~~
yajoe
There are many people leaving Microsoft right now. Mostly good people. There
are four types of people who stay at Microsoft:

1) Top performers who are on a fast-track (<1% of workforce)

2) People who can't get jobs elsewhere (30%)

3) People who have families and are tied to Redmond area (40%)

4) People who can get jobs elsewhere but have visa restrictions and are afraid
to upset their status (30%)

Everyone else leaves or has already left within 2 years. I joked with a
colleague yesterday, "Hey, have you talked to anyone from the old team?"
"Yeah, I've been forwarding their resumes..."

Microsoft is working to reduce people in #2 and #3 through its performance
review system. They then want to increase people in #4 so they have more
people who can't leave them as they start cost cutting when Win8 isn't a
roaring success.

I personally find it heart-wrenching to watch friends who would leave their
abusive situations and work for a start-up but cannot due to silly visa
paperwork. I just don't trust that Microsoft would want more people to come
without restrictions to work for a specific company. It does't benefit them at
all.

I just wish skilled computer science people could work for whomever they want.
Our industry would be so much better off. So long as you pay taxes and are a
lawful person, I support anyone living in this country.

~~~
malandrew

      I just wish skilled computer science people could work 
      for whomever they want. Our industry would be so much 
      better off. So long as you pay taxes and are a lawful 
      person, I support anyone living in this country.
    

Amen to that. I wish more people though this way. Citizenship based on
birthright is a really antiquated notion in my view and I'm surprised more
countries, at least smaller ones, haven't experimented with this idea more.

------
mdkess
As a Canadian, one thing that I don't understand is why companies don't move
to Canada. I feel like working in the states, I've priced myself out of the
Canadian market (since salaries in Canada for engineers seem to be about
60-70% of what they are in the US), but I can't imagine that Vancouver or
Toronto would be that hard to build an office out of. Yet for the most part,
companies don't. From my understanding, there would be a lot of benefits to
having Canadian offices - easy to travel to the home base when needed, good
health care, better immigration laws, and a lot of local talent. When
recruiting, we recruit very heavily from Canadian schools. But then we take
everyone back to the US with us.

~~~
rayiner
Not just Canada, but really anywhere else. In any city with strong public
universities there are strong pools of skilled tech workers. But tech
companies are bizarrely centralized. Microsoft, etc, expects everyone to head
over to their neck of the woods, and a lot of people just aren't going to do
that.

Build substantially sized outputs in any of: Atlanta (Duke, GT, UNC),
Philadelphia (Penn, Penn State), Boston (MIT/Harvard), Chicago (U of C, NU, U
of I), Minneapolis (U of Minn.), Austin (U of T), etc, and you'd have access
to a large pool of well-educated tech workers. These folks aren't going to
leave their families behind and go to the left coast for jobs, but they'd love
to work for a big well-known tech company.

~~~
mdkess
I totally agree with you on this, but I think that is a separate issue at
least in that it doesn't address immigration, but I do think that it touches
at the heart of the problem.

Companies like Microsoft are willing to give kids out of school $100k/year to
move to Seattle, San Francisco or New York, but why not Vancouver or Toronto?
The Toronto-NY connection especially feels like it should be much stronger,
with Porter you can fly between the two cities from downtown for well under
$200.

------
LarryMade
How about these companies told to start offering training programs?

The US has no shortage of eager workers, some quite creative (which is good
for such jobs). The crux of this is companies are devaluing people in general,
and don't really give much care about it.

~~~
Cadsby
As someone who has been involved in the hiring of engineers at a large
multinational corporation you might recognize, there is some truth to this
sentiment.

Two of the main issues are that employers have been increasingly unwilling to
train new employees, even if they're clearly eager, bright and have the proper
basic credentials. Everyone wants to hire seasoned veterans, because logically
those people reach a higher level of productivity much faster and require less
development talent/skill set wise. While there is a specious logic to this,
it's extremely short-sided. Everyone starts at the bottom and needs an
opportunity to grow and get their initial experience from somewhere.

Even with experienced individuals, companies often don't want to pay the
premium that substantial experience in a field will confer. There were some
interesting news stories (don't remember the actual links, but they're easily
google-able) about the large numbers of former NASA engineers laid off in the
last year having tremendous difficultly finding new employment. The
interesting part is that it wasn't that they weren't getting job offers, on
the contrary many employers seemed to be eager to hire highly qualified
individuals with 20+ years of high quality experience, they just didn't want
to pay for it. These people were getting offers that were literally a fraction
of the salaries they were commanding previously.

You can't have it both ways. If you want experience, pay for it. Or else
invest in less experienced, but otherwise qualified talent.

~~~
panda_person
I agree totally with everything you said, I'd just add that I think companies
are outsourcing the training of new employees, often, to college internships.
Which is great if you are at Stanford and have lots of connections that
implies, not so great if you are a community college student or at bumfuck
state u

------
prodigal_erik
Aren't there still a lot of devs in flyover country who complain about finding
few positions? Or is the fact they chose not to relocate being weighed against
them?

~~~
WiseWeasel
They can hardly be blamed for not wanting to go live in rainy Seattle, work
under someone as uninspiring as Steve Ballmer, and put up with awful stack
ranking BS.

~~~
pnathan
Seattle seems like a great place to live to me. I would jump at the chance to
move there!

But MS might be a tougher sell. ;)

~~~
RyJones
Have Microsoft relocate you, wait a year for your relo payback contract to
expire, quit.

Or you could find a position at the many Seattle-area employers willing to
relocate you: Google, Adobe, Boeing, Valve, a whole grip of game companies.
The world, as it were, is your oyster.

~~~
MartinCron
A few of my friends here in Seattle call Amazon the "travel agent for
developers" because so many people relocate to Seattle to work for Amazon and
leave immediately after they no longer have to pay back their moving expenses.

------
jquery
I'm for skilled immigration, but can we please, please rethink the H1B
program? At the very least, don't make it so the individual goes out of status
the day they leave their job. Give them time to shop around. And get rid of
the fee/paperwork every time they switch jobs. Raise the fee to $50k and apply
it to the first employer that sponsors them only. More of the risk of holding
an H1B needs to go to the first employer that hires them, and less of it to
future employers and the H1B holder themselves.

EDIT: I appreciate the responses. Raising the fee is probably the wrong idea.

~~~
canistr
Raising the fee will only serve to benefit bigger companies (e.g. Microsoft)
and hurt smaller companies, particularly startups, from hiring.

~~~
salem
Maybe the fee should be higher for low salary jobs, to prevent the visa from
being used for bringing in low-wage employees for outsourcing firms.

------
debacle
I consider myself a competent, intelligent, relatively professional 'tech
worker.'

I just don't really want to move across the country for a job, especially one
that I probably wont have for the next 20 years.

~~~
rpwilcox
Especially one you wouldn't have for the next 5 years, given how long average
employement terms are.

Yes, I could move across the country for a job (let's say in SF), but then
someone wants me to move to Austin or North Dakota or Seattle... Rinse and
repeat. Kind of turns me off.

------
joeld42
"Shortage of tech workers" or "Shortage of people who want to work at
Microsoft"?

~~~
canistr
I'd say both. Silicon Valley has no shortage of jobs. But Microsoft has the
money for lobbying.

------
rayiner
Industry: "the government isn't training enough workers for us on the public
dime."

------
scarmig
I support loosening immigration requirements... but another complimentary
option would be for tech companies to raise wages. Why not do that?

~~~
gms
What would that achieve? Are Microsoft's wages low, in your opinion? How much
higher should they go?

~~~
geebee
This is a tough question, because I would generally prefer to allow the market
to set employment and wage levels. The problem here is that employers in high
tech are asking for special consideration - granting green cards specifically
to STEM degrees. Unfortunately, this puts us in the position of playing
favorites through government - we're deciding that there "should" be more
engineers than we're getting at current wage levels.

It feels a little strange to me, since I don't really think "should" is a
useful question. But I can see why/how the government would want to get
involved - markets aren't perfect, and engineers are particularly valuable, as
they tend to create wealth rather than just shuffle it around.

I'm probably not the greatest guy to ask, because I have an MS in engineering
and I've seen how brutal the PhD programs are. I see that the nine of the top
ten professions ranked by pay are medical specialties, with CEO as the only
non-health related one there. I understand that law isn't as great at the
middle and low level, but at the elite level, I do think it pays very well
with more career stability than engineering - and with a degree program that
has a vastly higher completion rate than almost any form of graduate study in
STEM fields (and much easier undergraduate preparation as well).

So how high should wages be? I guess I'd say that wages should go high enough
that getting a grad degree in engineering is a good way to get on that top ten
list.

But of course I'd say that, that's my degree. You shouldn't be asking me, but
you shouldn't be asking the people who want to hire engineers either. Ideally,
we'd butt out and try to let the market handle this.

I'm not fundamentalist about it - truth is, I would support a general skilled
emphasis in our immigration system. But specifically targeting a narrow band
of the workforce, under the notion that there is a "shortage"? That smells.
And after digging into the evidence, I think the "shortage" is really just a
rational response to market signals.

~~~
jsnk
I understand your point, but if you prefer to allow the market to set
employment and wage level, you should be for much looser immigration. The
government regulating immigration is anything but free market. If the
government were to loosen requirement for STEM immigrants, that is having
freer market, not less.

~~~
geebee
This is a huge disagreement between us. If you loosen immigration in general,
then you may have freer markets. But if you loosen them only in a narrow
segment of the economy and while restricting mobility in others, you may end
up creating severe market distortions that don't resemble a free market in any
way.

If almost every country and profession had equally liberal immigration
policies, then yes, I'd agree. But we're not doing this evenly, and I think
this is why so many people who hold a favorable general view of immigration
nonetheless object to these targeted visa/green card programs. As it stands, I
think that adding a green card to every STEM degree (but not every JD, MD,
MBA, DDS, etc) will end up creating market distortions that will probably just
further deter US citizens from entering this field, amplifying the cycle of
"shortages" and perhaps eventually creating exactly the "crisis" that the
policy is intended to address.

~~~
jsnk
I am not making judgment on whether or not if freer immigration is good for
economy or not. I am not making any qualitative judgment on the issue. And you
may be right that it may create severe market distortions. I don't know and
that's not what I am disputing.

I am only stating that freer immigration is having freer market, even if freer
immigration were to be applied to small group of STEM people.

Consider what I am saying with taxation. If the federal government were to
exempt income tax for a portion of population making less than $50,000/year,
then this is having a freer market, not less. Yes, it will lead to reduction
in government revenue. Yes, it may lead to deteriorating public
infrastructure. But it is still free market policy.

------
canistr
As a Canadian working in the US, I think provide a very different of the tech
industry than most Americans. The fact of the matter is that there are skilled
people with technical degrees and proficiency around the world and the best
way to hire those people is to not restrict yourself to hiring from your own
town, city, country, etc.

The US generally has higher salaries for tech positions and, as someone else
pointed out, salaries in Canada are 60-70% of the salaries in the US. Yet, a
competent new grad from a top-tier US school or a competent new grad from a
top-tier Canadian school can still effectively make 90-100k working for
Microsoft or other big companies in Seattle or Silicon Valley. 90-100k for a
new CS grad at Google? Seriously?

To me that definitely seems like market forces are driving up the prices of
new hires. And let's not forget, we're talking about hiring someone with
technical programming chops and not just your run-of-the-mill computer
technician here. The fact of the matter is that truly skilled Software
Engineers are in short supply and an infusion in STEM education to move people
towards being competent Computer Scientist and Software Engineers is what
Microsoft is saying with this.

They aren't giving pay cuts to foreign workers (or even people like me). We're
getting paid the same salary because we have the skills. If the unemployment
rate in the US is so high, it's simply because the unemployed simply do not
have the skills necessary to do the job.

------
weirdkid
"Shortage of (cheap) tech workers in the US..."

or...

"Shortage of tech workers who don't have kids or a mortgage in the US..."

Yeah, I'll get downvoted for this, but it's true.

------
malandrew
What I think would be interesting would be to add 20,000 H1Bs like tech
companies are lobbying for and an additional 10,000 H1Bs that brings in
foreign computer science and engineering teachers to teach at the high school
level. That or some similar scheme that increases the number of competent high
school CS teachers would be very valuable.

In high school I wanted to be a CS major in college, but a shitty CompSci
teacher completely killed my interest in the subject and I ended up taking a
10 year detour before returning to software engineering as a career. Plus, as
a kid there were like no adult role models around to help me out and Win3.1
wasn't exactly the ideal system to get involved with programming. The 80s was
a much better time to grow up if you were a kid interested in programming and
had access to a computer.

------
trustfundbaby
> Employers would have to pay $10,000 for each employee that receives one of
> the visas.

How convenient for Microsoft, they're trying to kill off competition for
foreign engineers from Startups in SF, NY and Boston that are starting to
realize that they can get some really good H1-b hires to work for them

------
dschleef
I will care about companies complaining about too few H1B visas when they
start paying equivalent H1B visa holders and citizens the same.

~~~
rbanffy
Since H1B workers are handed a pretty bad deal - they can't change jobs
without a huge hassle - I suppose there is little incentive in paying them
well...

Maybe lowering the O1 visa requirements...

