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A couple of years ago it was reported that in 2012 more than half of all American wage earners made less than $30,000 per year. The Social Security Administration's new earnings report for 2014 is out and there's still much gnashing of teeth about the dying middle class. With earnings numbers that haven't changed much in 2 years, estimates running as high as 100 million working age Americans without a job, and no one tracking the population of H-1B visa holders, where are the jobs really?
The July 9, 2015, issue of The New York Review of Books carried a very thoughtful piece by Andrew Hacker. In "The Frenzy About High-Tech Talent," Hacker discusses a number of books and reports that address whether or not there really is a need for more tech talent, the justification for the H-1B visa program, and issues in the American educational system.
[...] Throughout his piece Hacker is basically questioning two things:
1. Is there really an unfilled need for STEM graduates, or are we actually graduating too many so that many end up unemployed or employed in different areas?
2. Are there flaws in the American education system, both at the K-12 level and in college, that lead us to be very dependent on foreign STEM graduates?
[...] The texts Hacker is reviewing, and his own information, seem to dwell predominately on overall job projections for the STEM fields. Nowhere does there appear a breakout of the job forecast for computing related job categories. With the increased ubiquity of computing across all industries and employment sectors, it seems unlikely that we will see the "deskilling" trend that may be occurring in engineering (whereby engineers create equipment that means they and others like them no longer have job opportunities). We know that there are many jobs in the "tech sector" but there are also a lot of computing jobs in banking, finance, manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, etc. We can get an accurate picture of future job openings only if we can make a good determination of the computing jobs that exist outside of the "tech sector."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 27 2015, @02:29PM
Actually, most of that is not necessary any longer.
That's because in the last couple of years, they've quietly removed the provision that H1B's can only be used in cases where there are no qualified American citizens. So now the bosses are faced with the choice of hiring a citizen who requires health insurance and a decent salary and time not working, or an H1B who you can demand works 90+ hours a week for half as much as the American makes and if he doesn't do it and pretend to like it he'll be deported. Guess which one they pick, every time?
The fundamental problem in IT is that management in large companies attempts to shoehorn into an industrial management model and activity that has more in common with scientific research. Which is to say that their mental model is basically "output roughly equals programmer productivity per hour times hours worked times number of programmers" as opposed to reality which is more like "output roughly equals number of programmers times (average percentage of days each programmer gets really good ideas minus average bug rate per day) times days worked". And then they go and desperately try to find metrics that tries to determine the hourly productivity per programmer without understanding that when you make programmers work long hours the average bug rate goes up and the percentage of good ideas goes down and causes your output to drop (even if it appears to be going up according to your metrics).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.