Tech Czar Unimpressed With US IT Workforce 568
theodp writes, "'The IT work force is not skilled enough and almost never can be skilled enough,' said Robert Cresanti, Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology. So what does the Poli Sci grad and ex-General Counsel for the ITAA think is the answer? Open the gates to more foreign workers, urged Cresanti, including H-1B holders."
penny wise, pound foolish (Score:1, Interesting)
Pay as always is the answer (Score:5, Interesting)
Allowing companies to import all of the skilled labor at cheap prices sets the stage for a dangerous trend. Ultimately it will sink wages throughout the workforce as companies see they can start trying this in other fields.
The government seems to think it has to use tarrifs to protect the iron industry but actively participates in the lowering of wages in the IT field.
I sincerely hope this starts to become a bigger issue and the word gets out. Undoubtedly if other fields start getting hit, the politicians will start to feel the pressure.
A tech shortage eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Open-source union? (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason for the difference?: UNIONS
You may complain about unions all you want, but without them your political ass is not powerful enough to compete with deep corporate pockets and armies of full-time lobbyists.
Perhaps we could form some kind of open-source union? Just a thought.
By the way, the Rand Corporation looked into general claims of tech/sci shortages in the late 90's, and found none. It is a scam.
A worrying trend! (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a LIE!!! (Score:1, Interesting)
Skills? Who needs 'em? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is all the fault of outsourcing - I used to work in a callcentre for a now defunct computer company and while we did have some training, only two weeks mind, we had no incentive to fix problems. Even if we did have the skills, and it would take twenty minutes on the phone to fix, there was no reason to do that. I left when I got a better job, the last straw being my colleague being praised for fobbing people off because he took more calls than I did trying to fix things.
Economics: Law of Supply and Demand (Score:1, Interesting)
There is no need for the government to "fix" shortages by importing desperate labor in the form of H-1B workers or illegal aliens. When the government "fixes" a shortage, the government is damaging the normal operation of the free market. The free market works fine without government intervention.
Regrettably, most politicians (and some journals like the "Wall Street Journal") cater to certain segments of the population and outright lie about how economic laws work. For example, many Republicans favor big agri-businesses and claim that the American economy will be irreparably damaged unless Washington allows illegal aliens to pick fruits and vegetables. Many Democrats favor ethnic pressure groups like La Raza and make an identical claim.
Journals like the "Wall Street Journal" use an even sneakier strategy. The Journal repeatedly claims that increasing the American population is wonderful because doing so increases the wealth of the nation via increasing human capital. To a point, this claim is true. Consider an economy of exactly one person. That economy is pathetically poor because one person, regardless of how smart she is, cannot be equally skilled in all areas of work. Here, when I refer to wealth, I am referring to wealth per capita (i.e., GDP per capita), also known as personal wealth. If the 1-person economy grew into a 2-person economy, we can easily imagine that the wealth doubles or triples: one person is tending the vegetable garden while the other person is protecting the grass hut from wild animals.
However, consider an economy with 100 million people. If we doubled the size of this economy, then its wealth does not double. The wealth increases by substantially less than 1 percent. After a certain population size, each doubling of the population brings a rapidly decreasing percentage gain in the wealth.
The game that the WSJ plays is to ignore this concept of diminishing returns. Further, the WSJ deceptively says that doubling the population doubles the total weath (i.e., the total GDP, not the GDP per capita). Though that statement is true, it does nothing for the actual wealth that you experience. What you experience is GDP per capita, not total GDP.
Finally, there is a trade-off between (for example) a 0.1% increase in personal wealth (i.e., GDP per capita) and annoyances (e.g., pollution) created by a doubling of the American population.
By the way, identical comments about diminishing returns apply to global trade. Onces a global free market reaches a certain size, it captures most of the advantages of a large amount of human capital. The USA loses almost nothing by restricting our free trade to only free markets, which includes (at the moment) only Western nations. We should slam our markets shut to non-free markets like India, China, and Mexico. The tiny percentage gain in personal wealth (i.e., the GDP per capita) that we get by including India, China, and Mexico is completely offset by their damaging impact on Americans in the unskilled-labor market. China indirectly erodes the quality of life for Americans in the unskilled-labor market.
Then, along comes the WSJ to deceptively talk about total wealth (i.e., the total GDP) in absolute numbers, say, an increase in total GDP of $15 billion dollars. $15 billion is an eye-popping number. However, divide that number of the number of Americans to get the GDP per capita, and you see only an increase of $50. Is $50 worth destroying the quality of life for Americans in the unskilled-labor market?
Real motivations (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is this important? Both of these are groups that are all about the interests of big corporations. The BSA, in particular, protects those interests without regard for anyone in its path. So when someone of this mindset says they need to import more workers, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where he's coming from. There are two basic ways that companies in the US could increase the number of qualified workers. One is to increase salaries significantly enough to entice capable students of pursuing a career in IT. The second is to import workers from other countries often willing to work for the same or less.
For government, the two basic ways are to increase educational funding to lower the barrier for students to pursue higher education in IT and the second is to ease restrictions on workers from other countries to work in the US.
The second option is the quickest and "cheapest" solution from both a private and government perspective. The fact that he is promoting this as a solution shows that he thinks short term and not long term. It also means he thinks from the perspective of what is best for big business and not the American worker. This isn't totally surprising considering where he comes from and who got him in his position.
Education Problem (Score:4, Interesting)
You've hit on a major point. (Score:3, Interesting)
K-12 education (Score:5, Interesting)
I teach the three-semester calculus-based freshman physics sequence to a lot of engineering majors to a community college. A lot of these people are intelligent enough to learn the material, but flunk out of physics because of their weak backgrounds. It's not uncommon to look at their transcripts and see them having started their community college careers by taking Math 20, which is basic arithmetic. It's extremely difficult to start from that level, and then work your way up to the level of competence required of an engineer. In addition, many of them have really weak language skills; sometimes this is because they're immigrants, but other times it's because they entered college with a sixth-grade reading level. Some of them also just don't seem to have put education very high on their list of priorities.
The net result of all this is that at my school, the total number of students who start the calc-based physics sequence every year is something like 300, and the number who finish it is roughly 30. (Some of the loss is from students who transfer before finishing, and or students who fail calculus, etc.)
There's a pretty simple solution to the problem, which is to set higher standards in math, English, and science in K-12; enforce those standards with standardized tests; and refuse to promote kids to the next grade if they can't demonstrate that they've mastered the material. Our present system is especially harmful to people who come from working-class backgrounds. They go to lousy public schools, and they and their parents get the impression that they're getting a good education. Then they arrive in college, and find out just how much they've been screwed over by our educational system.
Of course, Slashdot's readership is disproportionately composed of tech workers who are U.S. citizens, so I'm sure there will be plenty of people howling about the damn immigrants coming in and taking away our jobs. I'm none of their ancestors were immigrants. But seriously, would you rather compete for jobs against a coder who immigrated from India, and is expecting U.S.-level pay, or a coder who is still in India, and is therefore available for 1/4 of what you'd cost? If there's a problem, it's that H-1B visas don't necessarily lead to any opportunity to remain permanently in the U.S.
Re:Or alternatively (Score:5, Interesting)
By the time I graduated high school there and came to US for college I was ready to go into the Junior level science and math courses. I graduated Summa Cum Laude easily, from an average 4 year university, without that much effort (I wouldn't say I didn't sleep nights sweating, some quarters I would just coast by...).
While kids in US where taking "typing" classes in High School we were taught about spanning trees, while the U.S. kids spent their time finding what sport club they wanted to join, we learned discrete math. Children in U.S. are babied and spoiled when it comes to science, parents never studied it much and never see a need to push their children to study it. (I am talking about the average here, of course there are schools like Harvard, Caltech, Yale and so on that does have exceptional students).
But at the same time, I would have to say that playing sports and socializing has its benefits because it builds valuable interpersonal skills which will help when it comes time to work as part of a team. That is something that was never emphasized in my early education. The key is balance, teach both, perhaps U.S. education will come around some day, I hope so, because this is a great country and I love it for it freedom and values, and I don't want to see it fall behind -- I want my children to get a good science education.
Re:Or alternatively (Score:4, Interesting)
I almost wonder if it isn't time for CS to fork. One branch can be the "ivory tower" branch where they can argue over how many traveling salesmen can dance on the head of a pin, and what really constitutes a minimal perfect spanning tree. The other can be the "engineering" branch, where students learn assembly language, language and compiler design, OS design and implementation, and how to design and analyze effective algorithms. Cover the theory behind practical software development, but emphasize the practical over the theoretical.
<WAX mode="philosophical">The best CS class I had was the one where we implemented the UNIX V6 file system. In Pascal. It was a nasty, second-year weed-out course, but everyone who made it through learned so much more about software development (especially advanced debugging techniques), it was almost as though learning the actual course material was a bonus.</WAX>