The technology industry says there’s such a shortage of technology workers that we must not only spend more taxpayer money to train workers, but drastically loosen immigration rules.
But on close examination, the shortage does not appear to be of workers per se, but of workers who are the right age and frame of mind: young and willing to work at the salary levels the industry would like to pay.
Norman Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis, put it this way in an interesting essay: “The industry claims there is a shortage of workers when what they really mean is that there is a shortage of cheap workers, in the form of new college graduates and imported foreign nationals.”
I tend to believe it because I’ve come to understand Silicon Valley’s employment modus operandi: Hire platoons of Generation Xers who are willing to sign over their lives to the company, working ungodly hours in return for decent money and stock options. They may burn out at an early age, but, hey, that’s the way things work.
Matloff also points out that major tech companies, including some that are wailing loudest about the problem, hire only a tiny percentage of applicants. Maybe that signifies a generally putrid quality of applicants. Then again, maybe it suggests the talent pool isn’t as shallow as the industry claims.
Even if there is a shortage, executives’ complaints reek of hypocrisy. Every year, when executive pay packages become public, bosses defend their own lavish compensation by citing immutable laws of supply and demand (even though executive pay is frequently established through a sleazy daisy chain of interlocking, mutual back-rubbing). There just aren’t enough good executives to go around, they insist: Those megamillions in pay and bonuses are simply the free market at work.
When this principle moves down the food chain–that is, when rank-and-file workers find themselves in a decent bargaining position for once–suddenly the free-market economy is broken.
The industry also loves to complain about the lousy U.S. public education system, citing it as a reason for the alleged shortage.
If the industry succeeds in ramming the immigration increase through Congress, let’s hope Congress extracts something in return. One approach, suggested by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), is to require the industry to offer “extraordinary help” to schools, ensuring that there are more qualified workers available in the future.