Date: Sat, 7 Mar 1998 17:37:14 -0800 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm & Subject: immigration and the middle class---second of two excellent articles To: mailing list Here is the second article, this one highlighting even more the issue of age discrimination. This illustrates what the host of a radio talk show pointed out yesterday puts an entirely new and potentially quite ---------------------------------- powerful light on The Great Immigration Debate: the impact on the ---------------------------------------------- middle class. The host, Brenda Payton, an African-American columnist for the Oakland Tribune, noted that most of the discussion on adverse impacts of immigration on jobs has centered around the urban (and largely black) underclass, whereas the H-1B work visa issue now seems to impact U.S. workers in the middle class. With the waves of corporate downsizing etc. of the past few years has come increasingly pervasive age discrimination. This is something that everyone in the middle class can relate to---and the two articles here show that the presence of H-1Bs is providing an "out," an alternate labor pool, for employers who don't want to hire the older workers. There are a couple of minor inaccuracies (one of which I pointed out to the USNWR fact checker who called me yesterday, but somehow didn't get corrected), but they are just that, minor. This is a very good article. Norm Business & Technology 3/16/98 US News and World Report Too old to write code? The software industry's labor shortage may be a myth BY JAMES LARDNER The United States faces a critical shortage of computer programmers--there's something on which Microsoft and Netscape and the federal government can all agree. The software industry's top lobbyist sees a "fundamental threat" to America's continued economic growth, and the Clinton administration is worried enough to be entertaining a proposal to increase the number of temporary work visas for foreigners with high-tech skills. Five years ago, everyone was asking, "Where are the jobs?" Deputy Labor Secretary Kitty Higgins said recently. "Now, we've got the jobs--where are the workers?" Meanwhile, in Benicia, Calif., Paul Peterson, 46, a self-described geek who used to earn $65,000 a year writing business-modeling software for oil refineries, is managing a Radio Shack store for less than a third of that income, having failed to land so much as an entry-level job in his own field. In San Jose, Calif., James Wick, 62, counts himself lucky to be employed, for now, as a contractor on the year 2000 problem (story, Page 42). Before that chance came along, Wick had left the profession, demoralized by his failure to convince a series of young job interviewers that a 30-year career with Control Data and General Electric, among others, had taught him anything of value. And in Queens, N.Y., a year-and-a-half search has netted Alan Ezer, 45, just one job interview, despite 10 years' experience and a nifty demonstration on the Internet of his self-taught virtuosity in Java, a programming language that is much in demand. Frustrated job seekers are not the only ones who wonder how employers can be so hungry for talent and, at the same time, so picky about finding "somebody who can do whatever they need, has been doing it for the last three years, and is doing it right next door, this minute," says Steven Laine, a Los Altos, Calif., systems-management consultant. This all-or-nothing approach leads some hiring managers to let vacancies go unfilled for months, says Andrew Gaynor, a headhunter based in Redwood City, Calif., rather than consider an applicant who, with a little training, "could easily come up to speed in a few weeks." Another Bay area headhunter, Susan Miller, notes that while pay scales for programmers with hot skills have reached "insane heights," much of the money is spent "stealing people" from other companies. "Everybody wants the same person," Miller says. "This is one of the problems in Silicon Valley that's making me rich, as a matter of fact." What shortage? Norman Matloff, a computer scientist on the faculty of the University of California--Davis, has made himself the scourge of Silicon Valley by depicting the programmer shortage as a piece of flimflam that diverts attention from two potentially unattractive software-industry practices: ageism and a growing reliance on foreign workers. Employers typically hire between 2 and 5 percent of the programmers who apply, Matloff says, drawing his numbers from the public statements of corporate recruiters. Even in the smaller subset of applicants who get called in for personal interviews, no more than 25 percent receive job offers. "There's just no way," he argues, to square such figures with the idea of a shortage. The shortage is cold economic fact, and Matloff's suspicions are "nutty," Harris Miller counters. Miller is the president of the Information Technology Association of America, which estimates that 346,000 "core" jobs in the computer industry stand vacant, while demand is increasing at the rate of nearly 100,000 jobs a year--three times the number of computer-science majors flowing through the nation's colleges. The move to loosen restrictions on foreign programmers is, in any case, just a stop-gap measure, according to Miller. The industry's long-term goal, he says, is to lure and train more Americans, especially minorities, women, and other underrepresented groups. To that end, the Clinton administration is pushing a $28 million program of training and job-networking initiatives. But Matloff argues that what the industry mainly wants is the ability to fill its personnel needs with recent college graduates and noncitizens--the two categories of workers predisposed to work the longest hours for the least money. To skeptics, the programmer shortage is only the latest episode in what Michael Teitlebaum, a demographer who served as vice chairman of the 1990-96 National Immigration Commission, calls a "sad history" of similar alarms that proved to have been overblown. In the late '80s, the National Science Foundation predicted a vast looming shortfall of scientists and engineers--a prediction followed almost immediately by large-scale layoffs and plummeting incomes. The evidence offered for the current shortage--basically, the testimony of a sampling of hiring managers--is hardly rigorous, say critics. Besides, the market tends to correct such problems. Matloff argues that an increase in computer-science graduates over the last few years (following a decline for several years) shows that people are taking steps to rectify the situation. Age discrimination--the countercharge of many older programmers--is also a tough case to prove. The threat of litigation makes employers careful about whom they let go, Matloff says. It is in hiring, he argues, that they feel free to act on their preference for youth, and the notion of rapidly changing skills not only gives them a legal leg to stand on but also gives many of them, he concedes, a sincerely held and socially acceptable rationale for behavior that they might otherwise avoid. Ageism becomes more pervasive and insidious, in Matloff's reckoning, when the managers engaging in it genuinely fear that by hiring an older programmer they may be burdening their companies with someone who will turn out to be a vital step or two behind the curve. But the net effect is to drive older programmers from the field, he says. He cites a 1993 national survey of college alumni, which showed that only a fifth of the computer-science graduates who started out in the profession were still in it 20 years later. (The comparable figure for civil engineers was 52 percent.) Confirming the trend, he adds, are more recent U.S. census data, which show a strikingly high unemployment rate of 17 percent among information-technology workers over the age of 50. (By contrast, unemployment among professionals over 50 as a whole is around 2 percent.) But the thesis that Matloff and others put forward may be less of a case for the courts (though it will surely be heard there) than it is a quandary for the nation. In an era of convulsive change, Americans have sought comfort in two survival strategies: higher education with the accent on science and technology, and a lifelong readiness to adapt. In the software industry, there is widespread agreement that careers tend to be short-lived, and, especially in software-development companies, that employers are exceedingly reluctant to take on people who don't already have exactly the right "skill set." Retraining, according to headhunter Miller, is widely associated with handholding and unacceptable delay. Strange addiction. "The half-life of an engineer, software or hardware, is only a few years," Craig Barrett, president and cofounder of Intel remarked in 1996, responding to a pesky question about a wave of downsizings. Many older programmers say that this kind of thinking has less of a basis in the work itself than in an industry tradition of long hours. The hours in turn arise partly out of the "addictive" appeal that programming puzzles have for many young people, according to Eric Weinstein, a labor-market analyst and mathematician at MIT. But, as Weinstein goes on to say, employers, too, become addicted, to the idea of "bottling" the monomania of the young "and using it year-round to run your business." The result is that a programmer may start out as "Captain Ahab going after Moby Dick, and then sooner or later you have to decide between the whale and a wife and kids," Weinstein says. It is when such considerations enter the picture that "the employer can lose interest in you." If the motivations behind the computer industry's personnel practices are murky, so are the economics. A company that focuses its recruiting on recent college graduates will end up getting more hours of work for fewer dollars, but no less an authority than Bill Gates has pointed out that the habit of skill matching tends to be at the expense of general programming ability. "We're not looking for any specific knowledge," Gates said, "because things change so fast and it's easy to learn stuff." Experience counts. Programmers themselves say that by thumbing their noses at older workers, companies may miss out on real-world abilities that tend to transcend programming languages. "Say we're making a system for a supermarket," says Bill Bruns, 48, a consulting programmer who works in Silicon Valley. "A kid out of school" might not think to ask, as a veteran programmer instinctively would, "What happens if somebody drops a bag of groceries on the keyboard?" With plenty of fanfare, the software industry has launched a public-relations campaign (including a video featuring the actor Jimmy Smits) to dispel the nerd-with-the-pocket-protector image that, according to industry surveys, is depressing enthusiasm for computer science. "Too bad we can't have a TV program called L.A. Engineering," Harris Miller says, "where we could have a lot of good-looking guys and girls driving fancy cars." Critics suggest that if the industry wants to be more alluring, it might do better to start with what Maryfran Johnson, the executive editor of Computerworld, calls its disposable-employee mentality. Even as the software industry anguishes about narrowly defined or temporary shortages, it may be creating a more serious problem, Weinstein warns, by turning the programming field into one with a life expectancy rivaling that of pro football. Because careers tend to be short, he argues, even the spectacular-seeming salaries of Silicon Valley stars aren't nearly as impressive as they appear. These issues, which have yet to figure very much in the thinking of college students choosing a field to major in, tend to hit some programmers with a jolt soon after they make the transition into the work world. "As a student on the outside looking in, you hear the rumors of big bucks," says a 27-year-old Hewlett-Packard engineer. "What they don't talk about is how long you get them for." A few years down the road, he predicts only half-jokingly, there will be programmers out on the street carrying signs that read "Will Code for Food." Special exception. One thing that spurred the Hewlett-Packard programmer to think along these lines was a job interview in which, two years after getting his master's degree in computer science, he was told that a special exception would have to be made to hire him, because the position had been slotted for a recent college graduate. The advent of the $800 computer, and the expectation of many consumers that software will come bundled in, have created "obscene price pressures that roll downhill to the worker," he says. "We're all scared." The skill cycles are worrisome to people with jobs as well as those without them. "First there's a shortage--then people respond, and you get kind of a glut with the particular skill," the Hewlett-Packard programmer says. "And then a newer technology comes along and takes its place. The new skill may not be that hard to learn, but the perception of the industry is that you can't learn it. There's a whole marketing mantra that goes with it, even if it's not really that new." Thus, even for someone with a good job, a programming career becomes "like musical chairs. When the song stops, the objective is to make sure you're sitting on your seat." Critics of the computer industry's labor practices suggest that they can be traced, in part, to the archetype of the obsessed geek working night and day in the garage, or grabbing a few z's in a sleeping bag on the laboratory floor. Students of this theory find a cause for hope in Gates's widely publicized reveries about marriage and fatherhood. It is only a matter of years, Computer World editor Johnson says, before the industry discovers that a programmer who needs to leave work at 5 to pick up a child from soccer practice just might have something to contribute.