

Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage  - barry-cotter
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html

======
dusklight
So one of the arguments in that article is, there is no labor shortage because
companies get inundated with lots and lots of resumes, but they hire only a
very small percentage of those resumes ...

But as anyone who has had to go through those resumes know, the vast majority
of the resumes are from people who are totally unqualified for the job .. the
fact that employers go through the entire resume pool and are unable to find
qualified employees proves the shortage.

And that's just basic qualifications, we aren't even talking about actually
knowing how to write good code yet.

p.s. if anyone is looking for a job and is a good java coder with some
experience in webapps and GWT, send me a message.

~~~
cosinepi
Regarding your last point, you don't seem to have an email address in your
profile.

Is this job on the east or west coast (or somewhere in between)?

~~~
dusklight
fixed it. send me your resume and all that (sorry i always thought HN had a PM
type feature just never checked)

we have people on both coasts, though we are trying to build up headcount in
the new york office right now.

~~~
cosinepi
Unless my eyes are deceiving me or you're joking, I still don't see any
contact info in your profile.

~~~
dusklight
it says i have my e-mail address there ..

in either case, dusklight@gmail.com

------
Tichy
I only read the chapter about percentages of hires, which didn't seem very
convincing to me. So firms only hire 2% of applicants, not a very meaningful
number without further information. Maybe the rejects apply to all the firms
with a robot script, which would inflate the supposed pool of available
applicants.

~~~
jimbokun
Especially considering that job applicants submit resumes to lots of firms. I
think Joel has an article about this, how every firm thinks they hire "the top
2%" because they get 50 times more resumes than they actually hire. But a lot
of job applicants and recruiters are spamming their resume to lots of
different employers in the hope of just getting one "hit." So it works both
ways.

~~~
patio11
One of his other insights in that article is gold too: who persists longest on
the labor market? The folks who transparently don't have any business being
hired. ("I cannot code a for loop in my language of choice.")

Given a cohort of 100 engineers with bell-curve distributed skills, after 6
weeks of equivalent effort in job searching, there is no reason to assume that
the pool of engineers still out of a job would have bell-curve distributed
skills (unless hiring decisionmakers are incompetent). Overlay several dozen
cohorts like that and you get the labor market: a few good engineers who just
graduated or just got married and moved to a new city, and a whole lot of
wonderful people who are perhaps not as talented as you'd want on your team.

------
jimbokun
On the one hand, an aspiring entrepreneur reading Hacker News might like the
idea of having a cheap labor pool to hire from some day.

On the other hand, I believe there is a danger in devaluing the relationship
between education, effort, and wages. With 0 wage growth over the last decade,
the American public is becoming cynical about the idea that you can work hard
to improve your situation. If industry can always import someone a little more
desperate or naive into indentured servitude the moment there is any wage
pressure, what incentive is there to improve your skills or education?

Considering the potential impact on macro-economic conditions, this might be a
net negative for an aspiring entrepreneur.

~~~
asciilifeform
> an aspiring entrepreneur reading Hacker News might like the idea of having a
> cheap labor pool to hire from some day

You mean an aspiring exploiter and member of the parasite class?

~~~
tom_rath
Exploiter and parasite?

How many jobs and how much wealth have _you_ created today?

~~~
dusklight
How is this question relevant?

Does creating jobs and generating wealth justify being an exploiter and
parasite?

~~~
jerf
It would seem to me that "creating jobs" and "generating wealth" would mean
that you _aren't_ a parasite, and barring further evidence, that you're not an
"exploiter" either.

Unless you think it's simply impossible to have a non-exploitative employer
relationship, in which case all I can say is that it's great that you don't
believe in the concept of an "economy" but personally I prefer it to the
squatting-in-a-hut-that-I-made which is the other basic alternative.

~~~
dusklight
Well, as an example. You could be creating lots of exploitative sweat-shop
type jobs, and generating wealth that that all goes to you, instead of the
people who work for you and who created that wealth in the first place.

And if you did that, you would in fact be a parasite, you are parasiting off
the wealth that is created by the people tricked/forced into working for you.
Furthermore you are parasiting off society, because you have stolen the hopes
and ambitions of those people you are exploiting. One of the basic tenets of
capitalism is the idea that the harder you work, the more reward you get. When
this is not upheld, people become disillusioned, and why wouldn't they be? Why
would I work hard and come up with new ideas and inventions, if the benefit of
my work is stolen by someone else?

I totally think it is possible to have a non-exploitative employer
relationship. I also totally think it is possible to have an exploitative
employer relationship. Surely you admit the possibility of the existence of
both types of relationships?

~~~
jerf
"Surely you admit the possibility of the existence of both types of
relationships?"

Yes, congratulations on finding my point.

By definition, if you are a net wealth suck because you are being
exploitative, then you are not a wealth producer. You're trying to have it
both ways to make a bad point. Being a net wealth increaser can't "justify"
being a net wealth sink because you can't be both at once. This smells like
weak thinking.

~~~
dusklight
I am saying it is possible to be exploitative even if you are a net increaser
of wealth. I am saying that while it is a good thing to generate wealth, the
good of generating wealth does not justify exploitation of labor, especially
when the wealth that is generated does not go to the people who created that
wealth.

------
tokenadult
As pg has said, "There is a great shortage at the high end. I know a bunch of
startups that are desperate to hire really good programmers."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133360> (specific comment)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=133331> (full thread)

~~~
chancho
Are those startups lobbying for higher H-1B quotas?

This article, and the one in the thread you linked to, are talking about large
corporations, not startups. There will always be a shortage at the high end.
That's what makes it the high end.

Incidentally, the article you indirectly linked to quotes a Duke professor
whose opinion largely agrees with the opinion of the UC Davis professor. Last
I checked, Duke was a pretty well-regarded university, so I guess that means
he's right. Or is there a flaw in that logic?

------
gaius
No less true in 2009.

------
brothers_best
If the average comptetent programmer in the US started getting paid $120k (or
more) instead of $80k, you better believe the "labor shortage" would end in a
New York minute.

The labor shortage has everything to do with keeping wages deflated by
exploiting a market-correctable short term issue, and little to do with any
long-term structural problem.

------
tokenadult
This has been submitted a bunch of times. Every time I read this article, I
think it has more to do with how a UC Davis degree is perceived in the job
market compared to other computer science degrees than it has to do with the
overall job market for computer science graduates.

~~~
jimbokun
What is your basis for saying this?

There are a lot of arguments, citing a lot of studies, in this document. If
nothing else, he has thought about this issue pretty thoroughly. If you
disagree, something more than a snide remark about the quality of a UC Davis
degree would be more convincing.

~~~
tokenadult
_What is your basis for saying this?_

Thank you for asking the follow-up question. I appreciate anyone on HN who
asks another HN participant a follow-up question to clarify the factual basis
for a statement.

To briefly respond to your question before I take my child to a doctor
appointment, what has always jarred me about this FAQ is the line

"The main answer to this question is that the vast majority of high-tech H-1Bs
are programmers, not engineers, and programming does not use math."

If this professor of computer science truly believes that it doesn't take much
math to produce a competent programmer, he has a different definition of
competent programmer from that found at some other computer science
deparments, including most computer science departments overseas. There is a
lot of industry demand for computer programmers who can program in a way that
best takes advantage of what a computer can do best, by reducing a problem to
its most mathematically correct representation.

I don't think a professor at MIT would dream of writing a FAQ with a statement
like that in it about the computer science major sequence at MIT. There does
seem to be a shortage of MIT-level programmers, even if there is not a
shortage of UC Davis-level programmers.

~~~
costan
I was about to add a new comment quoting this exact phrase (programming
doesn't require math). Thanks for expressing my thoughts in a better way than
I would have.

------
rnugent
This article is about age discrimination in high technology. It suggests a
number of reasons for it not the least of which is foreign immigration under
the flawed H1B program. Other causes are that young people promote it and try
to justify it with all the the above arguments. Each of you are complicit in
this and will, in time, fall victim to it.

What did you figure you'd do when you turn 35?

