USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year.
USA creates about 50,000 new comp sci graduates per year.
There are an order of magnitude too few Americans every year for the jobs available. Whatever you think of the H1B (and it has many problems), I doubt it’s coming even close to bridging that gap.
source with links to sources: https://swizec.com/blog/software-engineering-best-job/
Go to /r/cscareerquestions. Every single post is about a recent comp sci graduate who's applied to _hundreds_ of jobs in the past year without a single offer. There aren't too _few_ qualified Americans looking for work.
First, it's not a random sample of CS graduates--there's a lot of selection bias there. People who face a lot of rejection are going to want someplace to vent.
Second, I've absolutely phone-screened people (not a lot, but some) with CS degrees who couldn't do something simple like fizz-buzz. I'm not taking about nit-picky "you forgot a semicolon" or style things. I'm talking about "fundamentally not getting for-loops". It wouldn't surprise me if the bottom 0.5% of CS graduates each year apply to hundreds of openings, and get rejected by every single one.
Finally, we're in the contraction part of the business cycle right now. I do believe that new grads today/this year are having a harder time finding jobs, but the total number of people employed at tech companies seems to be falling this year, too. Citing jobless American CS grads would be a more powerful argument if jobs were growing at the same time.
you're also discounting the fact that there are layoffs, businesses closing etc. There may be 500K new positions per year, and say 250K layoffs / closures etc that isn't accounted for in this. Now I don't have the numbers on total layoffs but this should be adjusted.
I would heavily dispute this problem on the whole. Look at how hard it is to get hired as experienced engineers right now, that tells me there is less slack in the system than this leads on.
H1B is also suppose to have a unable to train element, which needs to also be addressed
EDIT: and as others pointed out, that is taking the stats on their face value, which is questionable in and of itself, as the source is a bit dubious
I think that’s just what happens when you flood the market with 200,000 qualified people in a short amount of time (and those people have extremely narrow definitions for what counts as a good enough job). The overall trend, measured in decades, remains that there just aren’t enough software engineers.
Yes even including all the software engineers that didn’t study comp sci. Even outside USA it’s rough. When I was in college the average completion time for a comp sci degree was 7 to 8 years because people kept getting jobs and forgot to graduate. All our professors complained about the sky-high 3rd/4th year dropout rates.
I absolutely do not buy that number. The citation you've given is "GoRemotely" who a) only cite that for one year, 2017 and b) are obviously biased towards inflating numbers.
Article doesn't say that. Its says that's global:
> Despite the pandemic, the number of software developers grew by 500,000 globally in 2020
Additionally earlier in the article, it shares numbers which supports a much smaller number:
> ...make this the most accessible 6-figure job in USA. At 1,400,000+ members and 22% projected growth, it is the biggest and among fastest growing high-paying jobs
The Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies that there will be 411k new software jobs between now and 2031, not per year:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Given the number of 50k grads per year, 400k employees for 411k jobs isn't a massive shortage. (Not to mention that many jobs opening aren't for grads, but for senior developers)
Counting the number of Computer Science graduates in a year seems like a fairly trivial problem where you could get an answer within ~1% of objective reality by simply counting public information and published figures.
But how do you count the number of jobs that are actually available? How does anybody distinguish between "real jobs" and companies just putting feelers out there to harvest resumes, manipulate the immigration system, and keep appearances up to investors in trying economic times? A lot of engineers that are looking for work right now strongly feel that a lot of job postings out there are just utter bullshit and many job posts are posted with no real intention of hiring anybody.
The best way to measure supply/demand trends might be to look at wages. That's one thing that's really hard to fake and get wrong.
Are Computer science graduate wages going up or down? If there actually was a massive shortage of computer workers near the level you describe, wages would be on a rocketship straight upwards right now. Are they? A lot of engineers are seeing that wages in tech seem to be plummeting right now.
Both sources refer to it as the "number of job openings" that year (2017). Obviously this isn't new demand for software engineers, most job openings are vacancies caused by people moving in the industry and will be filled by other people moving. If there are around 1.5 million SEs in the USA and average tenure in a job is 3 years then this explains all the job openings right there.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the number is more like 400k over the next 8 years.
There's lots of reasons software developers in India and China would remain in India and China, but one big one is obtaining a visa and permanent residency to live and work in the US is hard in general, and more so for people in populous countries with many emigrants destined for the US; I think it's India, China, and Mexico that have the three longest queues for green cards where there's a limit per country of birth.
There's certainly a path to immigration through a computer science degree. Especially advanced degrees, which give preferences to visa applications. If you can afford it, get a bachelor's in your country of origin, come to the US for a Masters, work on OPT visa after graduation, hope it converts to H1B, work on H1B until you get a green card, is a well worn path, but there are others.