So what qualifies the shortage? Is it like agriculture where Americans are too entitled for the work? Are Americans viewed as generally too low quality?
2. No real investment/push into learning legacy langauges.
3. Philippines/Indian BPO encourage and actually train on the job. If you look at accenture/whatever agency, even IBM, they'll guarantee a job in that country if they stick with the on the job training. In those countries, entry level, know nothing developers make $500/$1000 a month, best, vs being experienced in the USA and making a minimum of $5000. 6-12K/yr is waaayyy cheaper then, 70K/yr. I feel like it's employer idea of infinite monkey theorem.
It's not entitlement, it's that in the USA, employers have to compete and everyone can easily get a job in IT that isn't even programming for $40-50k, think of help desk. All you have to do is show up, restart a few computers, and be relatable.
Isn’t that irrelevant? People working in the US on an H1B are not earning such low foreign wages.
I knew a kid who could program reasonably, was pretty smart but didn't go to college. Got "hired" somewhere on help desk, was on a training contract for 3 months (he was just doing normal work, no pay), offered minimum wage job at end, didn't get paid for overtime, and got fired when he wanted to leave work at 6 because he had arranged to meet family for his birthday.
I think many people significantly understate how bad the US job market is for a very significant minority of people.
Also, you are massively overstating how good development is in the Phillippines or India. India churns out masses of CS grads who have never seen a computer. The economics of training are different US/India but the incentive there is the low wage. Remove that low wage incentive, and companies I think there will be investment into US citizens.
(Btw, where I am there are for-profit companies that train ex-army people to do software development...it works pretty well...but no-one asks: why aren't tech companies doing this? Like these companies employ people on very exploitative contracts, why don't companies just do this themselves? There is something wrong with how tech companies are run).
There's already a shortage of devs of course in he US. Plenty of companies have thousands of openings even in the pandemic - of course there are places that stopped hiring or even shutdown and people lost jobs.
If you lower the labor pool size, pay should go up, ease of employment should go up for those who can work here. There's already a shortage of engineers in those special fields like cobol. So it will be even harder for banks for hire for them if you can't get say people from India to move here and work on that. If you are working on a modern language with modern tools, libs etc (c++ or java) why would you want to go back to that old world where there were probably not tests, automation like we have today? If you have 10 years exp in one of the say top 10 tech cities in the us you are probably making at least 300k. I just don't see banks hiring someone like me and paying me enough more to match that far less desirable job. So that leads to banks only having a hiring pool of people who will work for less for various reasons (location, less exp, not interested or trained on c++).
I think this will just lead to more outsourcing to other countries, even though that has its own +/-, and imagine a world where some large us banks lost so much tech ability they are dependent on people in other countries (maybe already happened).
Why is there such a shortage given the high wages, population size, access to education, and so forth?
I suspect, contrary to many people’s desires, this is ultimately not a conversation about economics but a conversation on absent discipline and self motivation.
— https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/americas-stem-cri...
Could it also tell us something about interest in the field generally?
We also see significant immigrant ratios in entrepreneurial ventures: "Immigrants are “almost twice as likely” as native-born Americans to become entrepreneurs, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation." --- https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/10/25/55-of...
'How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers'
https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_N...
There's a giant shortage of capable devs. i'm from the us in case it matters to you but in my 25+ years as a professional engineer across a few fangs, midsize and several startups all those companies wanted to hire every capable dev they could find. Microsoft used to have 5k plus openings when I was there and the other fang had similar. We hired all over the world and the us. We never hired as many as we wanted. New college students grads could make over 100k and we still couldn't hire all we wanted.
I worked on creative, original software. I think there is a hiring area that could be impacted by large number of immigrants in tech and that is more IT like positions. There's an oversupply in my experience of people that put software packages together, keep the it infrastructure of a company running - those are crucial jobs too, just like devs writing original software, but there's a lot fewer people in it support and maybe that's part of the issue.
Here are the trends I am observing from the comments of this thread:
* Immigrants in the US on visas earn less than US citizens. I have seen no data on this. How much less do immigrant software engineers earn as a percentage?
* Any evidence discrediting knowledge worker shortage is centered on academics. I am a senior software developer with 20 years experience at one of the largest and wealthiest employers in the US. Despite that I have no formal education in the subject matter. I am either entirely self taught or in some other disciplines trained by the military. So it seems, from my perspective, centering the discussion to academics is just a distraction.
Companies just have lots of choices. It is too hard to employ an American, maybe they need to get up to speed, they need to be paid more. Immigrants will live 10 to an apartment, they can be disposed of quickly, they do anything to keep their job because they don't want to get deported...I mean...who would you rather employ?
I have seen this in other countries. I remember reading about a Greek charity teaching computer science to illegal immigrants...most of those people were leaving countries where youth unemployment was actually LOWER than Greece. Another good example is Monzo (although a terribly managed company), they grew by just hiring all the CS wizards couldn't have done the job.
Call it nativist or whatever...it is a tragedy when people or companies are allowed to shed their responsibilities to the societies in which they live. It is very possible, it is just most tech companies are very bad at hiring/employee development (and why do they have to be good when you have H1B).