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January 12, 1998
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The supposed labor shortage in the information technology industry is suddenly getting more press. As I was listening to NPR news in the car last night, I heard this lead in to the story:
First, the report they're referring to came out in September, so I don't know how new the news is. Second, the White House officials traveled to Berkeley to attend the National Information Technology Work force Convocation sponsored by the ITAA. It's not like the crisis is suddenly so severe that White House officials had to rush to Berkeley to assess the damage and declare it a disaster area. Although the ITAA does use that emergency kind of language in their press releases:
Emergency words: critical and threatens. Words slightly less urgent but nonetheless panic inducing: shortage, quality, and quantity, competitiveness. Maybe more. Anyway, the ITAA press release that quote is taken from was clearly designed to get the government's attention. And it just as clearly worked. But back to the NPR story: are we supposed to be alarmed and aroused that government officials from the labor department went to a conference about work force issues? Sample phrases that struck me enough to jot down:
The big mystery seems to be why workers are not attracted to a career that offers "high salaries and stable employment". That's when the "nerd stigma" came up. Hmm, college kids aren't studying computer science because of the "nerd stigma"? Is there still a "nerd stigma"? Aren't geeks cool now? Or should that be "kewl"? The reporter spent exactly zero time exploring what the real reasons might be. Nor did the reporter say anything about the geographical distribution of the vacant jobs. Could it be that young people aren't going into the field because they don't want to live in Silicon Valley or Redmond, Washington? After all, even with their supposed high salaries, housing is pretty expensive. What about older, experienced workers from the days when Massachusetts was a big high tech center? Maybe they don't want to move west because their kids are still in high school or their mortgages are paid off or they like the weather (oops, irony and sarcasm alert - can I be drummed out of the online journal fraternity for using like and weather in the same phrase?). And what exactly are these IT jobs that are vacant? Do they require degrees in computer science? Could they be done by people without a college degree? There's a huge range of jobs - word processing does not require the same skills as implementing network protocols, data entry doesn't require the same skills as writing a device driver, etc. The story also mentioned "computer training for poor people". What does that mean? Who are the poor people? And what kind of computer jobs are we training them for? People are poor for lots and lots of reasons. If they're too mentally ill to flip burgers, are they well enough to write banking applications? If they can't read well enough to get a driver's license, can they read well enough to implement network protocols? If they have small children at home and can't find daycare, will the ITAA provide the daycare? And hey, a lot of the poor are elderly. What about them? I mean if you're too old to do Information Technology work at 40, how are poor elders going to do it at 80? And about those high wages, if you consider how short the careers are and figure the lifetime earnings, the high salaries don't look so good. And as technology becomes obsolete faster, careers will end sooner. For that matter, if you chart out how many hours people have to work for those salaries, they don't look that good. Maybe it's not the nerd stigma, maybe the young people want to have more free time. And just how high are the salaries with respect to the price of housing in Silicon Valley? Maybe young people want more out of life than "high salaries and stable employment". | |
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