InformationWeek

Bona fides: Thirty years plus in IT, desktop to corporate, mostly as an independent contractor/consultant. I've made my living by putting myself out on the edge of trends, by taking risks and solving problems.

There is plenty of talent. Many are willing and able to work, and there would be many more.

The problem is greed in a dysfunctional system.

Bear with me. Sometimes the obvious simply needs restatement, for clarity.

Historically, we (in the 'information age') are at the same place as workers in the 'industrial age': barely seen as human, with no power to negotiate with corporate ownership. The rise of unions, for a time, rearranged that relationship in the industrial work environment. Once legal regulation became important, honest contracts between the parties fell by the wayside. Workers first gained power by voting their interests, then the corporate side took over by buying the regulators. A few shills are always cheaper than fifty million workers. That outcome is clear today.

We used to pride ourselves on producing the best, no matter what product we talked about. Those days are gone. In the past couple of decades, the corporate game is based almost purely on cost elimination. Every choice is considered for cost and profit potential. Anything seen to be a cost is simply eliminated, and/or positioned in a tax-advantaged way. Taxes are a fungible commodity, if you shop in the right place. Costs are considered substantially in the current accounting period. This does make sense so long as immediate profit is the only goal, but such a corporate scheme will always put any long-term investment in a bad light. And what we do is a long-term investment.

This trend is, of course, everywhere. The relatively recent notion to 'out-source' anything that does not directly produce profit is just the latest variation. That gives complete advantage to marketing over substance, where anything is actually made. If it's 'programming', then anyone that markets 'programming' is just another choice. After all, if I make a program and you make a cheaper program, which is better? So long as nobody looks under that rock, it doesn't matter. If profit follows from 'shrewd negotiation' for something the negotiator does not understand, what difference can it make so long as the cost is lower? If 'good enough' means more profit, who will ask for more?

So long as we as professionals allow ourselves to be seen as playing chips, as fodder for the machine, we have little say in running the game. If there is no ability to comprehend a qualitative difference in outcomes, the difference that matters is money. That drives the choice. Every time.

Personally I do not prefer unionizing the IT field, but I'm sure it's an inevitable option, and it will have adherents. For a time it may work. There would be gains on that path, but probably at great cost in terms of real innovation. That would be a shame, given that IT has demonstrated worth mainly by being innovative for the past 60 years.

If the only important thing is corporate profit, and corporations are nominally regulated, and workers have no real say in the construction and operation of the regulations, and the corporations own the regulators, the outcome is perfectly clear.

All the rest is simply detail.

There was never a shortage of IT talent. The "shortages" is a propaganda campaign to justify flooding our country with cheap imported labor - as well as exporting jobs and the reason for it is because of the GATS agreement that was part of the Uruguay Trade Round that I believe created the World Trade Organization. GATS stands for General Agreement on Trade in Services. "Service" equates to jobs and people.

The large "Service" industry corporations - that would be insurance companies, IT corporations, banks, etc. pushed for the GATS agreement as an incentive to open new markets for their businesses. What a deal for them right? They get to do business in the foreign country (specifically India in the IT case) and we get to take their excess population and give them jobs over here in return. The fact that it destroys the lives of American citizens both economically and spiritually - and the fact that it is destroying the future economy of this country... what the h*ll right? It's just business.

Do a search on "Knowledge Trade Initiative"
Uruguay Round
GATS

Look on the WTO website and search for GATS to find the different "modes" of trade in services - which really amounts to nothing more than modern day slave trade.

Oh... and the Guest Worker program that the administration and ****** in Congress keep talking about? It basically is a slave trade management system - open to workers all over the world to apply for (and they will get) jobs in the United States.

When the American people were sold out by the Congress agreeing to the WTO, there was no shortage of IT professionals or engineers or any other kind of professional. But as time passes - as young people realize that they can't get jobs in the professions and if they do go to school and get the education for one, they will have insult to injury in that they will owe 10's of thousands of dollars for an education they can't use.

And the powers that be know it too. All the rhetoric you hear about "more math and science" is just as much of a lie as the "shortages" message. What is really happening in the schools is that they are being redesigned to vocational programs with enough academics to make people functionally literate and not much more. After all, if you are running a feudalistic system, you really don't want educated slaves. The "more math and science" is translated as follows:

Science class - Hair Care Chemistry
Math class - Fractions for Hair Dressers

And that is no joke.

The corporations and the politicians they own have sold out the American people and our country. Do your own research and READ! READ! READ!

The H1B program is largely a sham, to hire low-cost people. Possibly (maybe 10 percent), a few of the "shortages" are true shortages - like jobs requiring an engineer to speak a particular dialect. But, for the most part, the jobs have artfully crafted requirements to match an already identified candidate.

Once, I encountered an H1B ad for an engineer who was familiar with laser scanners (for measuring), mechanical QA, data acquisition systems, and could drive a locomotive. I met all four and applied. The company did not even bring me in for an interview.

If the H1B program was truly a talent-search paradigm, then the job postings would be in a central, or regional location, much like the foreclosure notices at the court house. Everyone knows where they are posted, and can go look. And, there would be some statistics - say, the percentage of Americans who were offered (arguably, at a below-market wage), and the percentage hired.

There's no shortage of talent. And no shortage of greed.

There's no shortage of home-grown American IT talent. Corporations just don't want to pay for it. So they spread the myth of a shortage and lobby (i.e., buy off) Congress to raise the H1B limits. Get a grip, people. It's all about money.

As for careers, college enrollment in IT is dropping. The kids have gotten the message. So the myth will become a self-fulling prophecy, and we WILL become a technologically-deficient nation.

I think there is a talent shortage at the cheap wages companies want to pay.

I am currently working for low wages. But its because of my health - I can't always concentrate enough to work a full day or I over concentrate and get exhausted before working a full day. I'm currently working as an independent contractor out of my house. If I worked for a real company I would have been fired a long time ago. But my one client, who has more work for me than I can do, doesn't mind when projects take longer than I anticipated.

He is underbidding the work that I do (web development using PHP and MySQL) because he wants to set up websites for low paying clients. He understands the costs of the design (look of the site), but he doesn't understand that it costs more for the backend to work.

There is also a shortage of people who really understand the technology and can use it effectively. Nor do some of them want to learn. And that is not limited to the US.

My client outsourced some work to India and the person doing it really only knew one way of doing the programming which was a mess to maintain.

Its a lot of work to keep up on new technology, especially for those of us who are older. I got into a bind a few years ago, when my health was better where I worked for a consulting agency doing C and database programming. Then came along Y2K and all their clients spent money upgrading. When it came time for new projects, they weren't doing C and even though I had lots of training on Object Oriented technology, they couldn't find work for me. I couldn't convince interviewers that OO was something that I fully understood. Even after I got Java certified.

Also, from some experiences I had taking classes at a local technical college, I'm not sure I trust the degrees technical colleges are turning out. I certainly would not hire a single person who was taking the any of the programming courses I took. The course work didn't involve real programming. I did not get what I wanted out of the courses at all but it was nice getting out of the house and talking with other people.

RZ got it right...it's all about the money. Corporate America made its bed, now it has to sleep in it. IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and the like have invested billions in India building up a lower cost workforce. When was the last time you heard an announcement of a similar investment in the US workforce? Now they have the gall to complain about a shortage. The only shortage is those who want to work for less money, or jobs that will stay in the US. Corporate America won't fess up and admit the truth.

Like others, I have witnessed the offshoring of jobs and seen people that are being laid off train their foreign replacements. It is extremely sad to observe.

The sad, and scary, thing is that while the first waves of outsourcing were about hands-on technical skills and everyone said don't worry about the more managerial roles, the natural consequence is that those are next. More and more of the technology jobs at all levels will be going offshore. They won't be coming back, at least in our lifetime.

Saml said: "If a college student looks at the evidence and then majors in IT, he's too stupid to be in IT anyway."

Or he is just really good and knows it.

All I can say is that those who clearly distinguish themselves from the riffraff still prosper, no matter what the endeavor may be.