The Plight of the Graying Tech Worker | Hacker News Reader

The Plight of the Graying Tech Worker

sloanreview.mit.edu

89 pointsqwerty24258694 comments

This excerpt says a lot:

"Employers should be more cautious about pursuing strategies that discount the contributions of older workers. In recent years, some companies realized too late — after older employees had departed — that longtime employees possessed critical knowledge and experience. Moreover, whatever cost reductions companies achieve can be ephemeral if young hires move on to other opportunities."

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/managing-organizational-...

I posted that a day or two ago because of that exact issue. Organizations that don't try to retain knowledge (and we're in a knowledge-based industry!) will lose it over time, and they won't even know what they've lost. Until it's too late.

We had a project where our partner had let go of a bunch of senior engineers. They later (as part of the new project) had to re-design a lot of hardware components and incurred a significant delay because no one knew how the system worked anymore, and the new people were too junior to do a proper job of it anyways.

The last thing my father was involved in at his work with a international corporation was attempting to set up a better training methodology for passing knowledge on from the retiring boomers to the new staff. It was met with utter apathy - I don't know if it even continued after he retired.

Interesting. Was that apathy from the new staff, who weren't interested in spending time acquiring institutional knowledge vs skills/experience which would increase their value in the marketplace? Or apathy from the corporation itself, which didn't understand the value of the knowledge it was losing?

From the corporation itself - there seemed little reward to the investment by their reckoning.

problem with the industry is short term vision. today even the CEO will make lots of money if they drag the company in the mud for short term perceived profit (doesn't even have to be actual profit).

splitting cost centers and being the manager of the one that gets more income than outcome associated in some spreadsheet makes zero more money but pays lots of bonus and promotions. same for launching tons of features aligned with some strategic goal, even if it completely destroy obvieties like market reputation (eg YouTube kids) or is ridden with bugs that you discounted as "will implement on phase 2. because agile" (don't even get me started on documentation and maintenance runbooks, your waterfall dinosaur!)

now get off my lawn!

Isn't that what publicly traded industry is supposed to do? Maximize the returns for the shareholder each quarter?

A company is supposed to maximize returns over its lifespan, while also upholding an ethical standard and a set of values.

Its an interesting problem, because that's generally not the goal of individual workers, including those in management roles. Their goal is usually on a much shorter term - get promoted quickly.

industry perhaps (though this is debatable); industry is not society however. confusing the two can be problematic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i28UEoLXVFQ

Ask any Graying Tech Worker, whether (s)he wants to recommend the same career path to his/her kids. Ask why they don't recommend the path.

Basically, the Industry has made it hard for Americans to seek tech a career path--for the following reasons.

(a) get rid of older workers (b) offshoring (c) use H1-B to suppress wages, even though Google/Facebook will pay $200K to junior developers. The industry is not just Google/Facebook

When it comes to India, where offshore companies operate, you see the same: (a) get rid of expensive workers, as delivery managers to show profit by hiring cheaper warm bodies (b) Tech Industry, just like any other industry, has lots of 'bullshit' jobs. Instead of getting rid of bs jobs, replace them with cheaper warm bodies, and capture the profit. (c) For average Indians, unlike Average American Kids, there are no better alternatives to seeking a job in tech sector. So, there is more competition for 'billable hour' jobs at offshoring companies.

>Ask any Graying Tech Worker, whether (s)he wants to recommend the same career path to his/her kids. Ask why they don't recommend the path.

I’ve heard people say this for many, many professions, not just tech. Lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, politicians, architects, bankers, etc. maybe once someone spends a career inside an industry it has just lost all the glamor and they only see it as mundane work.

That's true. But I have seen many STEM students flocking to consulting, investment banking, law, MD, etc.

It's important to read this article w/out a political agenda as I don't the researchers have one. Aging in a young industry is a topic worthy of even more coverage.

Most of these old workers were young when they called it a 'Young industry' and I expect all the old workers around in the 90's just shook their heads about this being a young industry. Most of the really big discoveries were done, documented and in some cases patented in the mid 1970's. That's 45 years ago.

We are not so young, and I think a lot of the ills in our industry can be attributed to characterizing us as young. It isn't that young. We know better about any number of things, and we excuse it as youthful indiscretion.

Most of the software activities we do today were laid out in the late 90's and those involved stealing a bunch of ideas from older discoveries or other industries's discoveries in the 70's and 80's. It's all old. We've just been refining execution and improving tools (painfully slowly for my tastes) for the last 20 years but it's really the same stuff.

You're saying nothing is new under the sun. Okay sure, but there are measurable demographic and numerical changes in the technology workforce and certainly growing up with technology had led countless currently young tech workers to where they are. That's not to say tech never existed or there were never young hotshot. Millenials, like boomers, are a large workforce and its possible we are describing a bimodal distribution.

There may be plenty of older workers but IMO, the sheer quantity of younger folks, who are told truthfully that tech is a great wage in a bad wage economy, those billion younger people globally and the youth of many successful founders and high performers, those are the main contributors to our perception as young.

FWIW it goes boomers, generation X, Millenials (with a capital M). The names except for Millenial (which is pejorating) aren't that good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation

They’re not overreacting. My analysis of employee-level U.S. Census Bureau data and qualitative interviews show that U.S. tech workers over age 40 have good reasons to be concerned about how globalization affects their career longevity. In addition to competing with greater numbers of skilled foreign workers, older tech workers are now also more likely than younger workers to lose their jobs when technical work moves overseas.

All that said, it would be a mistake to rein in U.S. immigration policy. Here’s why.

The largest and most prominent visa category for employment-based immigration to the United States is what’s known as the H-1B visa. Some 90% of H-1B visa recipients are individuals under age 40.7 Typically, economists analyze the effects of immigration through an apples-to-apples comparison of immigrants and nonimmigrants in the same general age and education bracket who are looking for employment. However, peer displacement doesn’t appear in that data set because the salary differences between workers with H-1B visas and domestic employees of similar ages and skills are minimal (in part due to a law requiring companies to pay an H-1B worker the “prevailing wage” for the position).

I don't see how it follows that adjusting the US immigration policy is a "mistake". Isn't the increased supply of workers putting downward price pressure on salaries? Even if H1B requires a prevailing wage, that wage will go down to meet the increased supply of talent that additional developers bring.

The rest of the article is behind a paywall. Presumably they have justified their earlier statement.

Your reasoning sounds reasonable, but it falls for the lump of labor fallacy. Having more smart and talented people makes our society better off, not worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/07/opinion/lumps-of-labor.ht...

I'm on the SMR editorial team — we've removed the paywall on this, so you should have access to the full article now.

That might be the case but that NYT opinion article didn't cite any research to back up its assertions.

It's pretty hard to imagine how more developers wouldn't lower salaries though. I say this as someone who's done a lot of hiring. It's really hard to find good people and they can command a premium (fair market wage). Being able to hire H1Bs helps hiring managers but I don't think it helps developer salaries at all.

The "NYT opinion article" is written by a Nobel prize winner, and he's describing the opinion that most economists hold towards the lump of labor fallacy.

If you're curious to learn more, there's plenty that come up in a simple Google search.

> It's pretty hard to imagine how more developers wouldn't lower salaries though

This is the textbook definition of the lump of labor fallacy.

I mean, it's also not the case that labor markets are immune to supply and demand. As always, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

The whole point of the "lump of labor fallacy" is that growing the workforce will increase both the supply and demand. This is why unemployment is comparable across 1900 and 2000 America, despite the population exploding.

The answer isn't always somewhere in the middle. If someone tries to convince you that the Earth is flat or that climate change isn't happening, I would hope that you will lend more credence to the experts instead of believing the answer is somewhere in the middle.

Utility is maximized for society as a whole when the workforce grows. However, my utility is not equal to society's. In fact, selfishly speaking, I would be better off if h1b was shut down, licensure roles introduced, etc etc.

As someone who's hired many people on H1B visas, I strongly disagree. There was always local talent that could do the job I needed, I just didn't have budget for them. If hiring an H1B worker wasn't an option, the company would have had to pony up for the more expensive developer.

H1Bs also distort the market because getting a sponsored visa is a huge deal for a lot of people. Yes they may make slightly less than market but they have the ability to come to the US legally and have all of the paperwork filled by the hiring company (and legal support).

As another commenter mentioned, they're also locked into your company and can't quit without leaving the country. Another win for hiring managers.

None of this is good for local talent though. It's absolutely naive to believe that the supply of labor has no impact on its cost.

> There was always local talent that could do the job I needed, I just didn't have budget for them.

So you're saying that you willfully violated federal law by bringing in guest workers for cost reasons alone.

There's always domestic talent available. You just need to pay for it. Most companies look for ways around that including H1B and hiring jr developers and hoping for the best.

"Being able to hire H1Bs helps hiring managers" for sure, but H1B need to be sponsored by the firm they're working for, with the implied threat of losing their residency right if they can't keep that job. It's blatantly exploitative and not a free market at all, so the "lump of labor argument" doesn't apply in this case. Basically, any support for the H1-B program in its current form means you're supporting a race to the bottom in workers' rights.

A related effect is that almost all H-1B's count as "diverse" in HR statistics. If so, then currently there would be intense pressure to hire the H-1B candidate over a citizen, even if the former required a higher salary.

I have some skin in this game. I was rejected at Google for mysterious reasons after passing the all-day and hiring committee. No way to know, but I am indeed pale, male, and stale (and a citizen). If you look at Google's own diversity reports, their fraction of people like me has falling like a stone for several years now.

Wow, a troubling rationale. They’ve doubled in size in the last five years, your rejection, and an increase in diversity do not equate to not hiring white people. They just didn’t hire you.

I’d find it concerning to jump at anti-immigrant rhetoric so quickly.

Both I and my wife are second generation immigrants. I have no issues with immigrants at all, and I've worked my entire career besides H-1Bs and other PRs. If you had asked me five years ago, I'd have expressed a (somewhat naive) wish that we just drop national borders altogether, for the purposes of immigration. (I'm a bit more sanguine these days.)

I wasn't aware that Google was still growing that fast. That makes the reduction in the proportion of non-diverse employees a little more credible. On the other hand, it makes the sibling poster's thought (headcount reduction) a little less credible.

Obviously, they didn't hire me, and in the end, I have no idea why. They probably barely know why themselves.

No comments on your take on why they did not hire you but just curious who can override the hiring committee at google?

Seems weird they go through so much trouble hiring and it still comes down to one person giving their ok?

My understanding is that there's a final "executive review", which is almost a rubber stamp, in that only one or a few percent are nixed at this level. In the early days, supposedly it was literally Sergei and Larry. These days, I imagine it's the head of the division in question, or perhaps one of their direct underlings. Or, perhaps, (plot twist), they pump the entire thing through an ML model. :-)

One thing I've learned in my (long) career is that wealthy companies don't really need to care about how much they burn during the hiring process. (For starters, your labor is free to them at this point.) That's just the way it is.

Google's hiring process is set up to prevent as many false positive hires as possible, at the expense of false negatives. It's pretexted under the assumption that a bad hire is more detrimental/harder to fix than missing a few good hires. Eric Schmidt talks about it in How Google Works.

It's an intense process for sure. I interviewed with Google and made it through the process for a Linux admin job they had at Ashburn, VA, which was near to where I was living at the time (Reston). I had worked at the UUNet data center for almost 5 years at this point, but I took a job with a government contractor instead, as the pay was over 10k higher and the job a better fit. Google interview processes are no joke. It takes forever and the interview questions and practicals you get can make you doubt yourself. I don't regret not taking that job. I knew the guy who eventually filled that role and he said the job was very intense and very busy.

> I was rejected at Google for mysterious reasons after passing the all-day and hiring committee. No way to know, but I am indeed pale, male, and stale (and a citizen).

There is no evidence to support this. Google headcount is a scarce resource / bottleneck for a lot of teams, so it's just as likely the headcount was reallocated or reorged during your hiring process. There's also more than one hiring committee for some roles/teams, and you may have been vetoed by the second.

I was told that I was rejected at final executive review, supposedly due to a general property of my resume that many might hear as a euphemism for "too old". Particularly annoying, since that property was in plain view from day one.

As I said elsewhere, I can only guess at the true story. And it turned out to be a good thing--I found a better job (for me).

I think my original point stands, though. H-1Bs are almost by definition "diverse", and in the current cultural environment that makes a difference. Unless one is living under a rock, it's impossible to miss the advantage that that gives in the hiring market.

Your original point is still cognitive bias. You were likely vetoed by the executive hiring committee who reviews the resume, the work, the answers to interview questions, and and any other information in your hiring packet - with the specific reason for vetoing is not typically shared. Making it to the hiring committee does not guarantee hiring, nor does it guarantee you were the only one going through interviews for the position.

The fact that you have reasoned yourself into a position to blame immigrants for failing the hiring process, without evidence, shows prejudice. I think even you subconsciously know this on a certain level because of your using a throwaway.

See sibling replies, if you like.

Ageism is very much an issue in Silicon Valley ( they want young workers with not a lot of responsibility, make the office look like Disneyland, ply them with free food and then work them to death). I work for an AI company in Boston and we have engineers all over the spectrum - from 20s to the 60s. We work hard, but we also have a work-life balance.

This has already perplexed me on this shift - on discrimination on older tech workers and woman in tech compared to now- because 40 years ago THEY were the predominant tech force. The idea of the young white-asian male being dominant in this work force is relatively new, correct? What shift happened?

Looking at degrees in the US, IIRC, the shift did happen in the mid/late 80s. I have no idea what might have caused it, but basically the male/female ratio was pretty consistent until then, when male degrees suddenly skyrocketed while female rose slowly, at a pace very closely in line with the previous pattern.

To add, in regard to H1B, In some instances it's a national security issue. You have highly paid foreigners who can't quit (unless they want to go home), working on sensitive, sometimes morally questionable projects.

I'm apologetically opposed to foreign workers. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that.

Years ago, I worked for a rather well known security/dev company in Northern Virginia. We had two arms to the company: the gov contractor side, which required security clearances and the dev side. The dev side hired a few H-1B visas and within a year, the boss, a former H-1B visa holder himself, now a citizen, slowly, but surely purged the Americans from the dev team in favor of people from his country. We all complained, but to no avail. Six months later, the place had two Americans: the good looking admin assistants. That was it. This happens all the time. I have friends in Northern Virginia that I still keep in touch with and they say nothing has changed. The IT payscale has been run down because of this. Same thing is happening with a certain large HW vendor here in Houston. Filled to the brim with H-1B visa holders while native sons and daughters are given the brush off.

This really doesn't match my experience. As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level. I changed jobs a year ago and got lots of interest from a wide variety of employers from a big enterprisey place to a small local startup, two smallish local fintech firms, and a SV software company's regional dev center where I landed. I'm in my mid forties. I can't really explain the difference in your experience vs mine other that perhaps the location.

> As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level

Amen. I've been in a few US markets (non CA/NY) over the past 20+ years. Finding a decent number of available/skilled software engineers is always a challenge. If they're skilled (beyond competent), they're employed or doing their own thing.

I've recently taken a 6 month contract, and have been amazed at the quality of the team, but... they're really having trouble finding people - people that wouldn't be a net negative on the team (there's both cultural fit as well as skill fit). And yes, they're hiring junior folks from area bootcamps and training them up. Doing real training - reviews, handholding, explaining, testing - is a real investment, and takes a lot of time.

This has been one of the few teams I've worked in where I've been pleasantly surprised at the level of quality of everyone in the company (10 in the group I'm in, around 65 in the company altogether I think).

I'm watching how they interview/hire/expand, and... it's tough. They could easily bring on more people quickly who would be a net negative, and cause more problems (I've seen that many times - I was the net negative problem at least once!)

The problem has multiple parts: pay, benefits, and definition of "skills". Two years ago I did a search for software engineering jobs within 30 miles of my geographic area, which covered Boston. I had a steady stream of opportunities. After three months of disappointment, I called off the search.

I received an offer from an organization I loved: the industry, mission, people I met, everything was perfect. My interviewers halted the interview after 30 minutes, saying that they were going to start the hiring process. The salary became the stickler. The job was mine if I wanted to take a $10-15K decrease in salary. Unfortunately, I had to let it pass by. (In retrospect, I should have taken it. I would have caught up in pay within a few years. Oh well.)

Another organization seemed pretty inline with my goals and personality. The tech was interesting and I mostly aligned with it. The stickler became the vacation time. I have 4 weeks of vacation. They needed me to start again at 2 weeks. (2 weeks, seriously?) Doing so would have screwed up family life as my wife has 5 weeks. Honestly, I can trade salary sooner than I can trade vacation time.

Employers seem to have strayed into Crazy Land with the requirements for "skills". A skill, to me, isn't the knowledge of the Python ecosystem or Java ecosystem for building applications. Python vs. Java is just a knowledge of tool sets: Stanley vs. DeWitt. It's easy to learn one if you know the other. Skill is choosing the right trade-offs in design for the particular organization and industrial sector you're working in. It's knowing when transaction throughput is more important than rock-solid error handling. When extensibility is worth the extra abstractions. When readability trumps everything for a particular organization due to the skill level of the other development teams. Yet, employers have gotten to the point of not just requiring particular tools, but particular versions of them.

So, I'm not convinced the problem is a lack of available software engineers, at least not completely. Much of the problem in hiring is outrageous demands from employers.

You, sir, said the above beautifully and truthfully. I recently (last year) suffered through the same thing. Ever notice the faults in some of the job postings? 5-7 years experience with a tool that has been out for 3 years? Funny. Or my favorites: DevOps... what a joke. Any good sysadmin, especially *nix, should be able to write shell scripts well, at least using Bash, maybe some Perl and Python. But no. I recently saw a posting for a sysadmin job in Houston where no one would have qualified. They wanted the candidate to have 10+ years of C# systems programming experience! For a sysadmin job. Not many sysadmins with those skills are still sysadmins. In addition, they wanted nginx, Apache, IIS, MySQL, MS SQL, Docker, Kubernetes, and many others. Very few people know all of that in one go.

From the job description, one can surmise they wanted a developer for the price of a sysadmin. No thanks.

Fair. Are you offering competitive wages that appeal to local workers?

My impression was that both organizations were offering reasonable salaries for the market but I wasn't directly involved in the compensation talks.

> As a tech lead / team lead over the last five years in a small East Coast market I've experienced real difficulty finding competent Software Engineers at any level.

Pay more. Google and Facebook use ridiculous interviews because so many people want to work there. They still hire thousands of people every year. Why? Mostly because they pay mid-level engineers over $200k. Can't afford that? Then we're not talking about "not finding people" anymore, just about not affording them.

$200k in Silicon Valley != $200k in a small east coast market. Hell, it doesn't even compare to the DC Metro area.

From talking to friends and family that live out there, plus a few folks who used to live in the Bay Area, someone earning $120k here would have to earn at least $200k out there to get the same standard of living.

> someone earning $120k here would have to earn at least $200k out there to get the same standard of living.

So are people flocking to the DC area to work as software engineers, then? If so, good job. If not, you know what you have to do.

> to get the same standard of living.

That highly, highly depends on what you spend your money on.

Doesn't this assume that the interviews even get to the offer stage? How does paying more remedy 80% of your applicants failing fizzbuzz on the phone interview? If you don't have the name recognition of the FAANG you're probably getting subpar applicants regardless.

> Doesn't this assume that the interviews get to the salary negotiation stage? If you don't have the name recognition of the FAANG you're probably getting subpar applicants regardless.

People talk about salaries, they know who the top hitters are. Here in London there are many hedge funds you never heard of that have 20 engineers fighting for one spot, because they pay 100k GBP, whereas most startups complaining about lack of people pay 40k.

Paying more attracts more applicants.

It does not attract more applicants because they won't know about it unless you advertise a specific amount, which then creates other problems. You'd get a flood of useless people if the number is high. Some other people, underestimating themselves, would not apply. You remove the flexibility to hire both junior and senior people because one single pay number can't fit both. Even if you provide a range, you have the problem of pessimists and optimists assuming very different things about where in the range they might fall.

You could make the same argument about Rembrandts or anything else there's a shortage of. Finding and affording are the same thing in this context.

And regarding the original post, Google/Facebook pay $200k/year to H1Bs too.

Our team right now is about 3 developers (1 part time consultant). This is about a year into a recommendation by me to can the old team. The old team was about 9-12 developers located in Pakistan. The new team is pretty much Americans (all their lives). We are all remote.

The 3 of us have:

* Migrated significant portions of the PK team's Angular 1 app to React

* Introduced GraphQL

* Fixed migraine sized security holes (no priv. checks in about 30% of the app)

* Migrated from some system that was SUPPOSED to be docker swarm to kubernetes

* Introduced 4 major feature releases

* Building systems and configuration formats designed for code reuse rather than building brittle shit code

* Actually implemented elastic search in a useful way (the old team installed a shitty unreliable version and used it for a non-essential purpose)

* Migrated the 90% of the JS codebase fraught with patches to typescript.

I get that none of the above is stuff that can be "fully" grok'd from an outsider, but basically I'm saying the team is doing the code right (instead of poor, not up to spec) releasing features waay faster, fewer bugs, in less time with 1/3 the people. The price? It's actually cheaper by about 20% (maybe about 10k less per month).

I'm not a writer, and am definitely poor at story telling, but there's a major problem in my eyes when we say we have to hire people out of the country or are H1B holders first.

I experienced something similar at a prior job. But, IMO it's not about foreign workers, but about cheap workers. A cheap worker is a cheap worker no matter where you find them. A very capable person on the other side of the world is not going to be working in a cheap sweatshop. They will be moving on as quickly as possible to better paying jobs.

I have to agree that I think this has to do with hiring cheaper labor. I'm not sure whether they are immigrants or not has very much to do with it. I think that immigration probably helps to increase the labor pool seeking jobs in the US in the tech industry. I would imagine the more seasoned foreign engineers/devs/etc. probably would be less inclined to uproot their lives and move to the US. While immigration might be an issue, I think it's really just a problem with a desire to hire younger and cheaper labor regardless of whether they are US citizens or not.

There is still tech on the east coast, but it's nothing like the allure or salaries that are offered out in Silicon Valley. Actually, I feel like most of the really talented individuals from the east coast make their way out west unless they have some other non-job things keeping them rooted out here or they happen to land a pretty decent job at a fintech, adtech, etc. company out on the east coast.

But I see a lot of companies thinning their IT staff and the people who are most likely to go tend to be the >40 crowd. Probably because they are more expensive, management doesn't perceive them as being as "up-to-date," and there's less runway in their career. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if some of it is that they want less experienced individuals who will just do what their told and might be less opinionated about things. To me this causes a huge problem with system and application architecture, because you lose all of that expertise of years spent developing and dealing with different situations that I believe can give you a lot of insight into how things should be architected.

I'm 50. Been in IT across three decades. There is very little in my wheelhouse that I cannot do or learn within a very short amount of time. Yet... I fight to find decent work that I am more than capable of doing.

IT salaries in Texas suck horribly. I've fought this since leaving the East Coast. Being that my wife is from here and my own parents are long gone, I agreed to let my wife be near her own family.

At 50, I can:

- Admin anything *nix or Windows under the sun. I used to run Sun E10Ks for Network Solutions and more than 100 FreeBSD/Linux servers at one time. - Can write Python, Perl, Ruby, PowerShell, C#, Bash, awk, and am learning Go as I write this. - I can build any web server or database server under the sun, can write programs to do basically whatever a server or sysadmin might need, usually in a matter of hours, not days. - I can perform security assessments, as I used to be a pen tester. I have the experience and the certs (required from a previous employer).

Yet... I struggle to find work in my own damn country! IT for older workers does indeed suck. I now work for a non-profit coding and some other IT work. Not a bad fit, but the money could be a lot better. On the East Coast, I was a six-figure guy. Here? Good luck, even if you're 30 and have a masters in whatever and 10 years of experience.

Am I bitter? A little. American IT workers, unless they are current darlings in a hot area or arena, struggle. I'm actually working on starting my own MSP IT firm with a suitable partner almost my own age whose experience rivals my own. Good MSPs in this area can do very well.

This is the first time I've seen anybody say "The US has plenty of tech workers" – every single IT company I know is desperately trying to hire people, all the time. And this is at multiple tiers: innovative consumer companies, government contractors, small web design shops, large companies looking to bolster their teams.

And regarding your H1b comment, I have posted about 10 jobs in my career. In every single one, 95% of applicants were "foreigners" (work visa holders, new college grads) – the sufficient talent pool just isn't there locally, we have to fill it with more immigrants coming to our shores. And we weren't at all looking at cost at that point.

The only class of people I constantly hear are starting to feel the pain of being less in demand in IT, are older people.

> every single IT company I know is desperately trying to hire people, all the time.

have they tried increasing the pay?

or hiring junior people and training them (and paying them increases as they improve so they don't leave)?

Um, yes? At least some of them. Perhaps you may have noticed the effect of tech workers' high salaries on the price of housing in some cities?

Whatever, I'm a citizen, 29yo, and have been rejected from enough tech jobs that I don't bother applying or looking anymore because I'm not going through the ridiculous interview processes. The last one I applied to (Amazon), I had to study a bunch of leetcrap, fly out on-site to get rejected by some dudes who were checked out the whole time. Other companies pay is so low that it's not worth it, simply because it's really expensive to own a home here. If tech workers were really in demand, all of the above wouldn't be the case. The only way to win the game is to not play it. I'm staying put.

Typical behavior from IT companies. I once interviewed with a large distribution company who needed a firewall engineer, something I did along with pen testing for almost 5 years. They hired the guy with the masters right out of Baylor because... he had a masters. He failed the firewall test we both sat through. He didn't know that firewalls route before they NAT. He didn't know what a state table was or how they are used. He didn't know how to set up a multi-spoke VPN. I knew and know all of that. Yet... he got the job even though he likely couldn't find his ass with both hands. I've learned to not be as bitter about stuff like this because most of the time, good employers value experience over education, as they should.

There is not much I cannot do given the chance, yet being given the chance is the operative word.

I'm in Houston, the 4th largest city in America. We have tons of qualified IT workers, yet the big companies all prefer to hire the foreigners. They're cheaper. I attend tech get-togethers enough to know this. Half the guys in the meetings are under 30, degreed, talented, but the companies still hire the foreigners. Trust me, there are PLENTY of IT people here.

Good to hear! What meetups do you attend? (serious question). I'd love to make a trip out there (I'm in DC) to find some local talent. Maybe we'll open up a satellite Houston office if this is truly the case. :-)

I am part of several of these:

https://www.meetup.com/find/tech/?allMeetups=false&radius=25...

But you can see the vast numbers of people involved, this being a massive city with tons of talented people living here.

>> every single IT company I know is desperately trying to hire people

Encourage them to list their open positions on the monthly Who's Hiring thread.

If hiring foreigners is only about getting cheaper labor, why do all the best paying tech employers (FAANGs, unicorns, quant trading firms etc.) have so many foreign born workers on staff? America is only 5% of the world’s population, if you want to hire the most talented people possible, you will inevitably see substantial foreign representation. I work with plenty of non-citizens who get paid millions of dollars a year. I don’t think they were hired because they were cheap.

It's not only about getting cheaper labor -- that's what many people get wrong. It's also about dodging the rules of the free market: an H-1B holder can't just get up and leave the company if they don't like how they're being treated. Sure, it's theoretically possible, but it's a hell of a lot harder for an H-1B holder than for a citizen or a permanent resident.

It's a dichotomy. There are well qualified tech workers who get H1Bs and high paying jobs and there are body shops. There are companies that have tech components who want to outsource for example. One of the reasons to enforce higher pay is to enforce the former. There's supposed to be gov't monitoring of salaries etc... to check for abuse and also public transparency so that authorized workers can see their value. These offers are supposed to be publicly posted in the office and you can also see official H1B public filings to see how your salary matches official offers (although the online data will have a job title and not necessarily the job specific role/criteria that the public posting in the workplace would have).

H1-B covers both folks who are based outside the US when they were recruited and students who graduated from US schools and transitioned from F1 (student visa) to H1-B. If you go to computer science/STEM departments (at least for the top schools), you will notice that a significant portion of them are foreign students. It is thus not surprising to see a lot of being hired.

Also, foreign students being hired after graduating from US schools are very much less likely to be cheated upon when it comes to pay.

> I'm apologetically opposed to foreign workers. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that.

If the world was that easy... let's see, please find the flaw in the following:

- I'm apologetically opposed to universities creating more CS classes. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that.

- I'm apologetically opposed to hiring remote workers. <insert current location> has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that.

- I'm apologetically opposed to replacing local IT services with cloud. The US has PLENTY of tech workers, ranging from help desk to the nerdiest graph theory scientists. This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop. I find all the excuses just that.

The issue is complex. Yes, there's likely lots of companies for which one of the main short term reasons to hire foreign talent is to reduce employment costs for the local employers they would replace. But companies and economies aren't zero-sum systems. Hiring bright (and cheap) talent means you can do more things cheaper which would allow your company (and economy to grow), which allows hiring more and producing more (or extending provided services).

My opinion is that the main reason IT payscale has suffered was that the services they provided can be easily replaced with cheaper alternatives (immigrant workers, remote workers, cloud services). People that manage to get to the US have already undergone a very strong selection (even if the H1B process through which they were brought was abused), they are some of the best people their country has to offer which means the country that gains them has an advantage over the one that loses them.

> This is nothing more than companies getting cheaper labor. Full stop.

From the opening lines of the article:

> In 1975, immigrants accounted for one in 12 inventors in America. Today it’s one in 3.5.

It seems unlikely that if this was purely cheap labour, that this would result in more inventors (assuming they're not using some alternate definition of inventor that I'm unaware of)

I think you should pay more attention to complaints about patent farming. Generating a patent isn't a matter of being exceedingly clever, here. It's being a little clever, having bosses that are obsessed with patent applications, and either not caring about it or not having enough power to say no.

That's a good point. Having a patent in your name technically qualifies you as an inventor, and as you've correctly noted, patent farms are a thing.

Most large American corporations with a software development division appear to be patent farmers. Sooner or later the attorneys and the accountants take over.

To add, it's strange to me foreigners are anywhere close to work which requires a security clearance. Or for that matter at places where privacy (take: selling out rights and data of Americans) has recently become an issue.

Apparently the law is completely backwards from what is required for national security. Most places are prohibited from discriminating against people who have foreign connections. This dramatically increases the risk of spying. A more reasonable law would go the other way: if there could be exposure to trade secrets or bulk personal data, even via an unused ethernet port under the table, then those with foreign connections ought to require a security-aware escort.

It's not unusual to have a gov't business line. There are large construction firms for instance that build govt buildings and all of the employees require clearance. Salaries are higher in cleared jobs generally.

Great read!

Great article!

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