heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tth_sEc6.2.7
Frantic employers complain that they cannot fill many open positions for computer programmers. Software employers, large or small, across the nation, concede that they receive huge numbers of re'sume's but reject most of them without even an interview. One does not have to be a techie'' to see the contradiction here. A 2% hiring rate might be unremarkable in other fields, but not in one in which there is supposed to be a desperate'' labor shortage. If employers were that desperate, they would certainly not be hiring just a minuscule fraction of their job applicants. The campaign succeeded, with President Clinton signing the increase into law in October 1998. Yet in 1999 the industry started calling for even further increases in the visa quota, which it attained in October 2000. Citations for all statistics and quotes given in this Frequently Asked Questions section are available in the body of this paper. Question: The industry says that it will need H-1B visas temporarily, until more programmers can be trained. Question: Why are the H-1Bs de facto indentured servants? Question: How has the high-tech slowdown since 2001 affected H-1B usage? Question: Rather than H-1Bs being a source of cheap labor, the industry claims that legal fees make the H-1Bs actually more expensive than American workers. Question: The industry lobbyists say the alleged high-tech labor shortage is due to the failure of our K-12 educational system to develop math skills for engineering careers. Question: Are large numbers of university computer science majors foreign students? Question: The industry lobbyists claim that the H-1Bs tend to be the best and the brightest'' from around the world. Question: What about the industry lobbyists' citing of the Asian-born entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley? Question: The employers claim to hire the H-1Bs because they have work experience in specific software skills. How is it that the H-1Bs possess skills the Americans don't? Question: The industry claims that each job held by an H-1B generates several new jobs for Americans. Question: Since the industry says that the H-1Bs are so important to them, has it lobbied Congress to expedite the greencard process? Question: The industry says H-1Bs comprise only a small percentage of their workers. Question: How was the industry able to get Congress to pass the H-1B increase in 1998, given that a Harris Poll had shown that 82% of Americans opposed the increase? Question: Does this discussion really boil down to whether one should protect the natives? Question: The industry lobbyists say that only a tiny percentage of H-1B visas lead to complaints about underpayment of wages. Question: Why not just have an open-borders policy, at least for high-tech workers? What would be the harm of issuing instant green cards to anyone with experience as a programmer or engineer? Question: In all this high-tech labor shortage'' talk, what kinds of workers are we discussing? Question: Is there a desperate'' shortage of programmers? Question: Don't low unemployment rates among programmers indicate a labor shortage? Question: True, the fact that industry employers hire only about 2% of their programming applicants in spite of an alleged programmer shortage'' does sound strange. But could the low hiring rates simply reflect a situation in which the same applicants are applying to many employers? If for example an applicant sends re'sume's to 12 firms, that might make the overall applicant pool look 12 times its actual size. Question: Why are the employers being so picky in their hiring? Question: Industry employers say they have to hire only programmers with specific software skills, because they have urgent needs to finish a product quickly. Question: The industry lobbyists point to large sums of money they spend recruiting programmers. Question: The industry lobbyists cite astronomical sums of money the industry claims to spend on training. Question: Industry employers say that the reason they reject all programming applicants who lack specific software skills, is that they receive such a huge volume of re'sume's. They don't have time to interview everyone, and thus need to use some filter to winnow down the the pile of re'sume's. Question: If employers really would be better off hiring on the basis of general programming talent rather than on specific skills, won't market competition solve that problem? Won't the employers with better hiring policies naturally rise to the top of the market? Question: Some older programmers do quite well in the field. So if an older programmer is having trouble finding programming work, isn't it his/her own fault for not keeping up with changes in the technology? Question: Since the issue of specific programming skills is central, is the solution to increase government or private training programs? Press accounts in the year 2000 have reported that the training programs funded by the H-1B fees are resulting in actual hires. Question: The industry dismisses concerns about older programmers by claiming that those programmers' experience is in COBOL, a language popular in the 1960s and 1970s but radically different from the languages used today. Perform this simple five-minute experiment: Just call any firm which hires programmers - a large firm, a small one, new, old, any location - and talk to the HR Department. Ask them if it is true that they reject the vast majority of their programming applicants without even an interview. After they confirm this, ask them why they do this, and they will say that the vast majority of the applicants don't have some new software skill set the employer wants, even though the applicants have years of programming experience. What they really mean (some insincerely, some sincerely) is a lack of programmers with work experience in a specific software skill, say the Java programming language. The technology changes extremely rapidly, so it will always be the case that the vast majority of programmers do not possess the newest software skills - no matter how many programmers the schools produce. Producing more programmers would just give employers more people to reject. Question: Are the H-1Bs paid the fair prevailing wage,'' as claimed by the industry? There is a broad consensus that the H-1Bs are indeed exploited in terms of wages and working conditions. Most H-1Bs are de facto indentured servants, unable to switch jobs. Thus they cannot leave for a higher-paying job elsewhere, nor can they negotiate higher wages with their present employers by threatening to leave. So, they have lesser opportunities than do normal workers who are free to move about in the market. Thus it is indisputable, from basic economic principles, that on average they are making less money than they would if they had their freedom. Question: In all this high-tech labor shortage'' talk, what kinds of workers are we discussing? Though usually not mentioned by the lobbyists, the discussion is about computer programmers. And note that this is not about engineers either - among the H-1B workers, computer science graduates outnumber the electrical engineering graduates 15-to-1. Question: Is there a desperate'' shortage of programmers? The only ones claiming a shortage are the industry and their allies. Consider: * No study, other than those done by the industry, has confirmed the industry's claim of a shortage. The same is true for studies performed at the Urban Institute and UC Berkeley. If employers were so desperate, they could not afford to be so picky. The industry's own study estimated that the claimed shortage' is only driving up salaries by 3%. If employers were desperate, they would be willing to pay much higher wage premiums. And though figures like 7 or 8% are a few percentage points above inflation, they are still very mild. If employers were desperate to hire, as they claim, they would certainly be willing to pay a premium of more than 7%. Wages in almost all professions have been going up at least this much. Surveyors and dieticians saw their salaries increase far more than programmers in 1997, beating inflation by 20% and 17%, respectively. When the industry...
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