To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Sat Dec 22 16:28:54 PST 2012 Hi, everyone, I hope you have been enjoying the holiday season. It's been a while since I've posted to this e-newsletter, due to an exceptionally busy quarter for me. I just turned in my course grades--not bad, only three days late. :-) This was due directly and indirectly to reduced resources in UC these days, but hopefully not adversely impacting the quality of the courses I give. Anyway, I've been saving up several topics to share with you here, which I'll be doing in the next few days. I'll start with an item sent to me by an alert reader this morning, concerning my favorite H-1B-related topic, age discrimination in the tech industry. This topic was covered in the IEEE's quarterly newsletter, The Institute, which you can download at http://theinstitute.ieee.org/ns/quarterly_issues/tidec12.pdf I'll also discuss a recent piece in the Economic Times, an Indian publication, which you can read at http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-company/corporate-trends/whats-the-shelf-life-of-a-techie-just-15-years/articleshow/17251620.cms as well as a recent Reuters article at http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2012/11/28/ceo-randy-adams-age-bias-silicon-valley/?ncid=txtlnkuscare00000004 The brief IEEE article, titled "Do Layoffs Target Older Workers?", has the form of a summary of reader responses to a question posed in the previous issue. The article also cites my CNN.com op-ed, which you can read at http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/25/opinion/matloff-hp-layoffs/index.html I've always been baffled as to why the age issue has failed to get much traction in the H-1B debate. Most surprisingly to me, even some of the major H-1B critics have little or no interest in the age issue. Even the pro-foreign-tech-worker Vivek Wadhwa has said far more about age than most of the academic and other critics. Around the time my CNN piece came out, I also published an op-ed for Bloomberg News. Both this and the CNN piece were invited by the publications, and both pieces generated tons of reader comments. Indeed, The Atlantic's Wire site chosen my Bloomberg article as one of the Five Best Monday Columns nationwide that day; see http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/04/five-best-monday-columns/51443/ My point is that it's ironic that Bloomberg and CNN are so interested in the age issue while the H-1B critics are not. (I should note that my two op-eds did not mention H-1B, though.) It's my observation that part of the problem is that some of the critics are reluctant to move beyond criticism of the Indian bodyshops; bringing up the age issue would put them in opposition to mainstream firms like Google. But also the critics may accept the industry's explanation that they don't hire the older workers due to lack of newer skill sets (a topic I'll cover below). But to anyone who actually watches the industry, knows what the work involves, knows how hiring is done and so on, it is indisputable--employers use the H-1B program as a means to avoid hiring the older workers (again, meaning age 35+). Presumably some who doubt the H-1B-age connection are swayed by the industry lobbyists' claims that the older workers are unemployable, due to not having up-to-date skill sets. In fact, when reporters ask me whether the tech area is any worse than the rest in terms of age discrimination, my answer is that the tech employers have a ready excuse: the tech field is changing so fast that the older workers simply aren't qualified for the new work. Or worse, the employers sometimes claim that the older workers are not even mentally capable of learning the new skills (see below). Hence the title of the above Reuters article, "Silicon Valley: Worst Place In America For Over-40 Workers?" Yet I've dismissed the skills argument in umpteen ways: * in sound bite form, citing the incidents in which major employers replaced American techies with foreign ones, and forced the Americans to train their foreign replacements, showing it was the Americans who had the skills, not the foreigners; * by citing incidents in which older applicants who exactly match the requirements in a job ad don't even get a phone interview; * by citing public statements by the employers themselves, admitting to focusing on hiring the younger workers because they are cheaper; * and most importantly, by various statistical analyses. I must hasten to add that I fully support employers who use layoffs as a means of shedding less-productive workers. (Actually, this would be far less necessary if they used better criteria in selecting whom to hire in the first place, but that's another story.) But they are often shooting themselves in the foot by avoiding the older workers. Granted, older workers cost more, but experience MATTERS. Consider an article brought to my attention by another reader of this e-newsletter, the Economic Times piece cited above. The title of the piece, "What's the Shelf Life of a Techie? Just 15 Years," is consistent with my comments on the subject, but sharply departs from my views by ascribing the problem to lack of skills: All of these new computing models require architectures that are very different from those that went before, and what older folk learnt in their engineering schools and training programmes. Mukund Mohan, CEO of Microsoft's startup accelerator programme in India, says the shelf life of certain kinds of developers has shrunk to less than a year. "My daughter developed an app for iPhone 4. Today, she is redeveloping the app to make it smarter for iPhone 5. Five years ago, developers were talking Symbian (the Nokia operating system). Today, it's not very relevant. You have to look at Android or iOS or may be even Windows 8 to stay relevant." The implication of this "even my daughter" phrasing seems to be that Mohan's daughter is a teenager. Judging from Mohan's LinkedIn page, he is about 40, so this would make sense. If that is indeed the point, then is he really saying that the girl is as productive than a seasoned programmer of age 35? She's all set to march into a highly complex project involving hundreds of thousands of lines of code? This is completely absurd. Yet the PR experts know that it sells with the people targeted by the industry lobbyists--Congress and the press. It's easy to convince these gullible institutions (worse, as the first of them is paid off by the industry) that older techies simply can't be hired, as the technology has passed them by. The iPhone apparently is the example of choice of the apologists for age discrimination in the industry today. You may recall this quote from a Seattle Times article a few weeks ago: "They want people with the newest skills," Kirkegaard said. "If you came out of software development eight years ago, by definition you would know nothing about how to write programming for an iPhone app." (Jacob Kirkegaard is a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.) Kirkegaard is incorrect in assuming that iPhone programming is a standard part of today's CS curricula, and is even more off the mark in implying that older programmers are incapable of learning to write iPhone apps. Actually, most iPhone programmers learn it on their own, either on the job or at home. Even more insidious is the notion that Mohan's teenager is actually more capable of learning iPhone programming than the seasoned 35-year-old. The Economic Times article says, Technology is changing so rapidly that older engineers must put in an extraordinary amount of time and effort into new learning and also to unlearn old ones... Shailesh Thakurdesai, business development manager at Texas Instruments India , says college hiring is a priority for the company because "freshers learn fast and do things differently, without the baggage of past experience"... SAP's Ferose says..."We find people after 40 finding it very difficult to be relevant..." The Economic Times article claims that the fundamental nature of apps has changed so much that older people have major problems adapting: The past few years have seen dramatic changes in technology. Computing is being increasingly done on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. These devices have lower processing power and storage capacity than PCs. And they run on batteries that require recharging . Hence, applications built for them must have smaller footprints and be highly energy efficient. Computing is increasingly moving towards cloud computing, where centralized IT infrastructure and applications cater to multiple users over a network, usually the internet. This is in contrast to the systems we have been used to for long, where we buy a licence for an application , which then resides in our local PC or server. This is all an excuse, folks. As I said, I often see older techies who exactly match an employer's job ad, only to find they don't even get a phone interview. But let's put the skills issue in perspective. There is really nothing "new" about these "new" technologies. Android programming is done in Java, which goes back to the 1990s. Indeed, the prime example the industry lobbyists gave in 1998 when they were pushing Congress to enact the first big increase in the H-1B cap was "Older programmers don't know the new Java language." In essence, the industry lobbyists are still making that claim today, 14 years later. The iPhone apps are programmed in Objective C, which goes back to the 1980s. Both languages are variants on the C language, which IS standard in university curricula and has been for at least 25 years (and Java is standard too). The fact that the code libraries for Java etc. now do things such as sensing that the phone has rung, as opposed to say, dispatching a message through the Internet, is irrelevant. The same basic thought processes and tools are being used as before. And as to the "revolutionary" technology of cloud computing, give me a break. This was standard in the pre-PC era. In 1980 I was working for a firm whose name even sounded similar, Remote Computing Corporation; just change "cloud" to "remote." Instead, what really counts is general programming skills. The sharp experienced programmer will always contribute more to a project--in reduced completion time, fewer bugs, better maintainability and so on--than the new grad. And the experienced programmer will learn new languages more quickly than the new grad, not more slowly, as the older guy has been through that learning process so many times. As a geologist who traveled the world and became fluent in many (human) languages once joked, "The first four or five languages are the hardest." One of the reader comments following the Economic Times article noted that Andy Rubin was about 35 when he invented Android. I would add that James Gosling was 36 when he invented Java. At risk of sounding immodest, I'll also add that though I am much older than 35, the book I wrote last year on programming in the R language has become the standard reference for coders who want to learn to program in R. And though R now is beginning to be taught in some universities, who is teaching those young ones R? It's generally people over 35, of course. The R Core Development Team, consisting of about 20 people who constantly add innovations, is all over 35. Yet R surpassed the previously most popular data science language SAS, some years ago in number of users. Yet a glance at SAS' employment Web page shows that it is typical of the software industry, such as defining a "senior" position as having five years of experience. As Senator Grassley has said about the H-1B issue in general, "People should not be fooled." Norm