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February 27, 1998
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On the way to meet the nieces at the school bus this afternoon I was listening to Science Friday's show on the high-tech labor shortage on the radio. I continue to be amazed at how much press and how much serious government attention this gets without any of these companies admitting that what there's a shortage of is cheap, entry-level labor not programmers in general or electrical engineers in general or computer scientists in general.This discussion at least raised the question of whether the shortage is real or whether it's just that employers don't' want to pay high salaries. Actually, it was a pretty good discussion with a little more depth than the news reports have provided. One of the mistakes that a lot of the articles and radio/tv news stories seem to make is to equate the number of computer science grads with the number of available workers. This fails to take into account that only about 30% or so of people working in "computer" jobs have computer science degrees. There are people with math, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, other kinds of engineering, and even liberal arts degrees all doing similar work. And then there are the people without degrees. In my days as a hiring manager, I hired plenty of people with no degree at all because they had the requisite skills and experience. This was not uncommon in the "early days" of the current computer era (the 1970's particularly) because there were so few people in the field and so few computer science degree programs that you couldn't be picky. A lot of the wizards and gurus I worked with in my youth were dropouts - from some pretty prestigious universities. That may well still be the case. That generation of dropouts are of course above the magic dividing age of 44 (supposedly some huge percentage of the workers in high-tech are under 44 but I have no idea why 44 is the dividing age - it just is). One of the guests cited a statistic on the half-life of programmers: after 9 years half of the programmers who entered the field that year have left it, and after 18 years they all have. Unfortunately, he didn't give a source for the numbers. I sent e-mail to NPR asking for the source, but all I got back was an automated response that said they get so many e-mails it might take them 2 months to respond to my question. What I really want to know is whether anyone is studying why people leave the field so quickly and what fields they enter. The same person who cited the half-life of 9 years also suggested one of the causes of the supposed labor shortage is that older workers don't have the stamina to work the long hours and fast pace. That can't be all there is to it. A lot of people find that their priorities change as they age, so they simply may not want to work the long hours. Maybe people are less willing to relocate when their kids are in high school. That would partly explain the cohort of Massachusetts people who worked in computers in the 80's but have not moved to Silicon Valley or Bellevue. Of course many of the aging workers from Massachusetts have moved west, but a fair number haven't. And how easy is it to go back to writing code after you've been promoted to management? Many people take the management career path because they don't see a path of continued advancement as an individual technical contributor. Is anybody looking a career paths for senior technical professionals? Is anybody trying to figure out how to make the best use of senior technical talent? Wouldn't better use of the senior people leverage the work of the junior people? What about software tools? For about the last 20 years we've been hearing how software was gonna write the software for us, taking the drudge work out of programming and freeing up programmers for the design work. When is that going to happen? Simply looking at how many job openings there are vs. how many comp sci graduates there are seems to be an odd way of looking at the problem, if indeed there is a problem. | |
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