Dr. Dobb's Journal February 2000
When it comes to the high-tech job market, the consensus is that the U.S. is in the midst of an ongoing Information Technology (IT) labor shortage. Fueled by industry groups that represent large corporations looking for cheap labor, studies claim that the current high-tech labor shortage ranges anywhere from 300,000 to 600,000 workers, and will explode to 1.2 million over the next couple of years.
Of course, this hue and cry isn't new. It started with a September 1997 U.S. Department of Commerce report that was followed first by the January 1998 National Information Technology Workforce Convocation, then by the February 1998 U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on H-1B visa quotas. (H-1B visas are temporary work permits that allow up to 115,000 foreign workers to be employed by specific U.S. companies, mainly in high-tech industries.) The resulting media frenzy created a cottage industry of sorts, with oodles of web sites, magazines, newsletters, consultants, and conferences.
During this period of mounting hysteria, the lone contrary voice crying in the help-wanted wilderness was University of California at Davis computer-science professor Norman Matloff, who's premise is that "there is no desperate national shortage of computer programmers." Instead, he believes, the labor shortage is a notion contrived by large companies to avoid retraining midcareer (35 years and older) programmers, in favor of recent college graduates and foreign workers who command lower salaries. Although snubbed at the 1998 National Information Technology Workforce Convocation, Matloff did appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to provide legislators with some balance (not that they listened, since he neglected to distribute campaign finance checks at the event). Matloff's testimony, along with scads of other relevant information, is available at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html.
Matloff's premise has gradually garnered support. Even the Department of Commerce, whose influential 1997 report was largely based on studies conducted by the industry-funded Information Technology Association of America (http:// www.itaa.org/), has changed its tune. In a June 1999 update, Commerce said that computer-science enrollment in U.S. universities is not on the decline as originally reported, but actually on the increase. More telling, Commerce admitted it can't determine whether an IT labor shortage actually exists at all. And the June 1999 report acknowledges that age discrimination and other questionable employer hiring practices are a factor in the IT job marketplace.
Adding further fuel to Matloff's fire is a just-completed report by the United Engineering Foundation (http://www .uefoundation.org/), a nonprofit corporation chartered for the "advancement of the engineering arts and sciences." (The UEF is the successor to the United Engineering Society, which was founded in 1904 with the support of Andrew Carnegie.) The UEF's IT Workforce Data Project is a year-long study aimed at identifying and disseminating statistics involving U.S. IT workers. Part I, released in January 1999, focused on Core Occupations of the U.S. IT Workforce, Part II discussed the Production of U.S. Degrees in IT Disciplines, Part III focused on the Foreign Origin Persons in the U.S. IT Workforce, and most recently, Part IV centered on Assessing the Demand for IT Workers. What makes Part IV so interesting -- and likely controversial -- is its inherent contradictions. Specifically, the UEF study concluded that, on one hand, there does not appear to be a general national shortage of IT workers. On the other hand, it acknowledged that many employers can't find the workers they are looking for. Finally, the study points out that there are many qualified (in terms of training and experience) IT workers who are having difficulty finding jobs. "How can this be?" the UEF asks.
Well, in answering its rhetorical question, the UEF arrives at conclusions similar to Matloff's. For one thing, there continues to be a strong preference in the job market for recent college grads who will work more and, of course, cost less. It's interesting that the UEF report also notes the high correlation between recent grads and H1-B visas. This isn't surprising, since most high-tech H1-B workers are recently graduated students from U.S. universities.
But a more disturbing trend centers on employer obsession with specific skills. Companies aren't looking for "good programmers" -- they're looking for Visual Basic, or Java, or ColdFusion, or whatever programmers. Consequently, many students, and the schools they attend, are focusing on developing narrowly defined skills, rather than the broader fundamentals required to be a "good" programmer. The long-term negative consequences of this approach are obvious -- we'll end up with legions of programmers experienced in tools, technologies, and applications that are out of date and out of demand. Even worse, those programmers will not be prepared to adapt to new skill sets because of the narrow nature of their initial training. And naturally, we'll have a managerial mentality predisposed against retraining because of short-term costs. Of course, we have that situation now, and it just isn't working -- and we can't count on another Y2K-like scenario coming along to resurrect stagnant programming careers.
So is there a IT labor shortage? It depends on who you believe, or who you want to believe. You can't deny the heaping help-wanted ads packed with programmer positions, or that career recruitment web sites are doing well enough to sponsor NFL football games. Nor can you ignore reports of programmers who can't find jobs because they are 40 years old and have MS degrees and 20 years of experience. It comes down to whether you go with the credibility of an organization like the UEF, which has no apparent vested interest, versus that of organizations such as the ITAA, which is funded by and for the benefit of profit-crazed corporations. You make the call.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com