Posted by Norm Matloff on March 09, 1998 at 17:32:05:
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.