I love my team, it’s one of the most diverse teams I have worked with in my professional career we have Indian, Italian, French, Chinese, South African, Mexican, American, Canadian, Russian, Sweedish, and more.
The I just read a paper at Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage by a Dr. Norman Matloff, the paper is a bit dated as its from 2002 but it touches on a important topic.
I won’t go into a ton of detail but this paper has a number of fundamental flaws in the assumptions it makes, the ones that I recall of the top of my head include:
· All computer programmers are equal – I guess this was a common theme, while it was not stated explicitly throughout the paper it calls out example after example that basically says any programmer can do any job, any programmer can learn any language; any programmer can be proficient in any technology, anyone who has worked on professional software projects knows that’s simply not true.
Its akin to saying a History Professor is the right guy to teach Physics, both positions require a teacher, and well the Phsyics Professor is just that so in just a few weeks he could learn what he needs to be productive; sillyness I tell you.
· Employers can’t be hurting for skilled staff because they don’t interview people who don’t have the right experience – Do you want a web developer or line of business developer writing your TCP/IP stack, how about your cryptography libraries, your driver model, maybe your firewall? These are not “language” problems and that is what the author tries to reduce the problem to, these are skills problems, expertise problems and you cannot take just any developer and give him a few weeks and they will “learn” what they need to become productive.
· Employers are not willing to hire a veteran programmer who has just taken a course in some skill – This one I agree with, no class, I repeat no class can teach the same thing experience can, I can’t count how many people I know who have taken classes on computer languages who don’t know how to compile a program without help, who have passed certification programs like the CISSP who can barley spell Information Security; there is NO SUBSTITUTE for experience, any manager will tell you that.
That experience doesn’t have to be professional, it can be personal as well, I hired one guy who did a BitTorent like protocol for fun, he had a number of other similar experiences to that one as well as a solid foundation in computer science principals while this was a college hire, from a very good school this was not why he got hired I reject people from many good schools; It was this individuals experience and personal drive that proved that he had “what it takes”.
That’s not to say this paper is all wrong, it does have some very valid points however it’s so far from balanced these valid points get lost in the muck; what I can say is that good programmers and engineers seldom have problem finding work, those that fall into that category are few and far between, more over as the best and brightest often do they have their pick of their jobs and are seldom available.
I personally was looking to fill a job in my team recently, it’s now been filled by a great guy who needed a H1B, but I literally went through thousands of resumes, most of which may have been fine “programmers” but either had insufficient skills and experiences or did not present them in such a way that I could discover them so they never were contacted.
While it is true I tend to work in niche or low level areas of computing (kernel, driver, crypto, networking/api stacks, authentication systems, etc.) I know many who have worked in other areas where they experience similar problems.
Back to my truly international team, they are great, nearly all of them had to get VISAs to be here at one point or another, the majority of them on the green card path; but one thing in common they have is that they have skills that are not readily available here in the U.S. and we turn people like them away because of this stupid VISA problem.
What do I think the problem is? To a great extent it’s our education system; its increasingly producing lemmings or worse, video game testers, not the top shelf talent we need to be competitive in this international market, but a close second is certainly this silliness around VISAs, our economy improves as an artifact of this top-shelf talent coming into the nation, these people get good paying jobs, pay taxes, buy houses, they contribute to our economy and make this nation their own.
That’s what we were founded on, turning them away does us no good.