Dan Gillmor wrote this rant last week in response to Bill Gates and others trying to raise awareness of the serious issues we face with computer science today: not enough funding, and dropping enrollments. This in the face of a projected critical shortage of skilled IT workers in the coming years.
Gillmor's complaints:
Is there really a shortage of engineers? I don't begin to believe this, not when the bursting of the technology bubble left so many workers unemployed.
Which leads to the entirely rational reason that young Americans are not so sure they want to go into techology at this stage. The industry is notorious -- and that is the right word -- for hiring people at young ages, chewing them up with horrendous schedules and then spitting them out.
And then, of course, replacing them with people from other countries. Does anyone really think that young people's reluctance to go into computer science is totally divorced from the massive amount of outsourcing? Get real.
So let's take these in turn:
1. Is there a shortage of IT workers today? Well, certainly unemployment is above 0%, and the last figures I saw said that it was slightly higher than general unemployment. But if I turn to the back of the latest issue of the Economist, I see the following unemployment figures:
US 5.2%
Germany 11.8
France 10.2
Canada 6.8
Australia 5.1
Austria 4.6
Japan 4.5
Netherlands 6.6
Belgium 12.3
UK 4.7
Italy 8.0
Switzerland 3.8
Those are figures for age 16 and over who are potentially in the workforce (i.e. not students, not retired, not voluntarily unemployed). In every study I've seen, when you break it out by age, you see an expected strong inverse-correlation: the younger you are, the more likely you're unemployed. So the fact that these stats go all the way down to age 16 severely skews the numbers.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the lowest unemployment rate in the last 30 years was 3.9% (in April of 2000). So putting this all in context, this is actually a fairly tight labor market, and getting tighter.
But this is actually besides the point, because no one was complaining about a critical shortage of IT workers today. The point that Bill and others have been trying to make is that because of the pervasive and transformative effect that computing has had on essentally all industries and fields, there is a tremendous growth of IT jobs predicted over the next several years -- and that we are in great peril of not being able to meet the domestic demand for IT workers. We're not creating enough here, and we're not allowing them to come into the country.
Here is the Department of Labor's 2004 report on Occupational Predictions and Training. In it, (on page 72, for those following along) they state that while in 2002 (well into the downturn) there were slightly over 3 million IT workers, by 2012 they predict that we will have added another million, overall a 34% increase. They break it out into 11 sub-categories of IT workers, for those who care, and in another part of the report they give some color commentary on their reasoning behind the predictions.
2. Apart from what Gillmor claims, is the industry really hiring people at young ages, chewing them up with horrendous schedules, then spitting them out? I really think this is a lot more rhetoric than truth. In every cycle of the IT industry, there were equal shares of "anchor" companies and startups. The startups ask people to work crazy hours in return for a piece of a company that might hit it big. The anchor companies were much more family-friendly, with much more reasonable expectations, and less chance for the big payoff -- but their paychecks are cash. People voted with their feet. I don't think it's fair at all to blame this entirely on the employers. People pick their place on the risk/reward spectrum. When I joined Microsoft in 1988, I worked crazy hours and coveted my stock options. I don't work crazy hours anymore (despite my tendency to blog late at night :-). I work a lot smarter and more efficiently than I did when I was 21, so I probably get more done, but spending time with my kids is the priority in my life and I make work decisions based on it.
3. Replacing them with people from other countries. Is there offshoring today? Yes. Is it as widespread -- and as successful -- as the media likes to tell us? Not by a long shot. Let's take Microsoft as an example: Microsoft has 500 people in its India Development Center. It has somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people in its product groups in the greater Seattle area. Meanwhile, India has three times the population of the United States -- that's a HUGE market. I haven't seen figures for Microsoft's development staff in China, but my understanding is it's significantly less than 500. And China has more people than India. We have development groups in Japan, Israel, Denmark, Ireland, an a handful of other places around the world. Why? Because we sell software to people around the world, and that means that we need to build software that is appropriate for the languages and cultures of people everywhere. To do that well, you need to have people in the development team who know and live that culture. But you'd be hard-pressed to make the case that Microsoft is offshoring on any significant scale. And most companies outside of the computer industry are quickly learning that it's impractical to offshore small projects, and it's impossible to remotely manage large ones. If you're going to offshore, you need to be able to set up an operation that is largely autonomous, with great management talent (harder to find than raw programmers).
So what about the H-1B visa issue? Two-part answer. First, it's a myth that you can magically hire people from other parts of the world, bring them to the US and pay them a less-than-competitive wage. Apart from simply being unethical, it's probably illegal (I am not a lawyer), and it's also impractical: people talk, and there's no way that truly differential pay could be kept a secret. Look at the wage statistics in the Department of Labor reports: these are good jobs that pay well. Plus, the workforce is mobile (more so with every passing day) and there is always competition for good people. Second, what's really important is that they come with a good education from a top program. Microsoft spends a lot of time and effort on campus recruiting at the universities with the top CS programs worldwide (and the top b-schools, for that matter) and our non-discrimination policy states categorically that we don't care where they came from; we just care what they know and what they can do. Today, the great majority of the top CS programs are in the United States, which means that we can (and do) look domestically to fulfill most of our hiring needs.
Which brings us full circle back to Bill's (and others') main message: without a strong domestic pipeline of CS graduates, over the next several years the IT industry itself and every other American industry that depends upon computing will be in deep trouble if we don't do something to fix the severe downturn in CS enrollments in the United States. By the way, they are also seeing a similar downturn in most Western nations, and even in Australia. We are going to need lots of smart, competent IT workers, and they won't be here. It's up to the country as a whole to decide whether we want to encourage our own kids to take up CS, go to one of our own outstanding institutions, keep funding those institutions to keep them on top, and feed our own domestic industries with a talented, domestic workforce. If we choose not to, and we also choose not to let workers into the country, then the competitive companies will have no choice but to offshore -- or to move their entire operation to other countries. Because we will have denied them the workforce that they need to be competitive.
4. One more quote from Gillor's rant:
Hire some of those unemployed or under-employed 45-year-olds, Microsoft and IBM and other complainers. Then we'll begin to believe your tales of woe.
Microsoft does. Go to Microsoft's jobs-listing site and search for software developer jobs in Redmond. More than 500 open positions -- that's more than our entire staff in the India Development Center. Search on Program manager positions. Search for other technical positions throughout the US. We're trying like crazy to hire people, and we absolutely do not discriminate by age. Lots of the positions require previous experience; many require significant previous experience.
Bottom line: this is not Microsoft's, or IBM's, or any special interest's unique tale of woe. This is an alarm sounding that the United States is about to throw away a key competitive asset at the time when it is reaping its greatest reward, broadly, across American industry. And I for one am not about to let it go without a really good fight.
Pop quiz: What's the fastest growing undergraduate major in the United States? Look here for the answer.
11:17:23 PM 
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