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Colosseum Builders, Inc.
Custom Software and Software Consulting
Located near Exits 14 and 142 in New Jersey.
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Colosseum Builders, Inc.Custom Software and Software Consulting
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Testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee John M. Miano Presented August 5th, 1999 Contents 1. Summary *2. Introduction to H-1B *3. The Programmer's Guild *4. H-1B is Cheap Labor *5. The Cost of H-1B Visas *6. H-1B is Now a Business *7. Helping Our Competitors With H-1B *8. Why the H-1B Quota Is Being Used Up *9. No Limit on H-1B Visas for People With Graduate Degrees *10. There is No Shortage of Programmers *11. What About Productivity? *12. Education and Job Training Is Not the Answer *13. Finding a Programming Job Isn't Easy *14. Age Discrimination *15. Older Workers and The Decline in Software Quality *16. Why Companies Can't Find Programmers *17. How to Clean Up the H-1B Mess *18. Summary *19. Biography *Appendix A. Price Lists From Immigration Lawyers *Appendix B. Advertisements from Passthrough Companies *Appendix C. Advertisement for Foreign Workers *
I became acquainted with the H-1B program in 1996 while working on a project at a company that had fired its entire programming staff and replaced them with imported workers on H-1B visas. There is a huge loophole in the H-1B program that allows employers to avoid any restrictions on the use of H-1B workers as long as a 3rd party bodyshop supplies the workers. This company boasted that they would save $11,000,000 by replacing their American workers with foreigners who were willing to take low pay in exchange for the opportunity to work in the U.S. In the boardroom, the argument for using imported workers must have been compelling. They were probably presented with statistics showing American programmers made $50,000 per year while in some companies programmers made less than $5,000. Since getting large numbers of H-1B workers is simple and cheap, for those not familiar with the realities of software development, there were few inhibitions against taking the drastic step of firing hundreds of Americans and replacing them with H-1B workers. For those of us with experience in software development, the outcome was predictable. The H-1B workers made such a mess that within a couple of years the company had to discard them and bring in an army of consultants, including myself, to do the best we could to patch things up so that they could continue support their business. Imagine a Fortune 500 company turning over its computer systems to a high school for a class project and that should give you an idea of the extent of the disaster. This company learned the hard way that collectively these H-1B workers were not highly skilled, nor even marginally skilled. They were completely incompetent. In this story everything worked out in the end. The experiment conclusively showed that using H-1B workers to replace Americans does not save money. The bodyshop was fined for illegally underpaying the H-1B workers. The only problem was that hundreds of Americans lost their jobs needlessly in the process. The ease with which H-1B workers can be obtained and the laxity of the law governing their use makes experiments like this one easy for companies to try. There are those who try to portray the H-1B-dependent bodyshops as the abusers of the system. Examples such as this one demonstrate that they are only part of the problem. The bodyshop did not callously discard hundreds of Americans so who is the real villain? Supporters of the H-1B point their finger at the bodyshops as the source of the abuse in the program while at the same time they want the bodyshops to be able to stay in business with a supply of H-1B workers to pass on to others. I organized the Programmer's Guild in the Summer of 1998 in order to create an organization to represent the professional interest of computer programmers. The idea had crossed my mind many times over the past few years. Two recent events caused me to take action. Last Summer PBS ran a series called "Surviving the American Dream" which described the hardships older workers who were laid off from the defense industry experienced. After seeing it, I felt that there ought to be some way to screen people with technical background for an aptitude for programming. However, I realized that even if such people were identified and trained no one would hire them. At the same time PBS was airing this series, the H-1B battle was raging in Congress. The contrast between the images of highly-educated people not being able to find jobs and software industry leaders arguing that they were so desperate to find people that they needed to import them from other countries was striking. I announced over the Internet (www.programmersguild.org) that I wanted to form an organization with the following goals:
About 400 programmers have joined us so far. We expect that H-1B will be a major issue for the 1.1 Million voters in the programming profession as well as members of their families during the 2000 election. In many foreign countries factory workers earn less in a day than Americans make in an hour. Over the past couple of decades we have watched the nation's high-paying factory jobs vanish and go overseas to take advantage of these cheap workers. Advocates of the global economy claimed that these factory jobs would be replaced by technology jobs but we now see that industry wants to export the technology jobs as well. Software development is one of the most labor-intensive businesses in existence today. In some parts of the world, programmers make less than $5,000 a year. With rising spending on software development there is increased pressure to reduce costs. The cost reduction method that is easiest for most people to understand is to user cheaper programmers. In recent years many companies have tried out overseas software development as a cost saving measure, urged on by glowing reports in trade newspapers. Unfortunately companies only make their successes public, resulting in the press presenting a distorted view of offshore development. Instead of finding great success, companies are learning that doing software in countries with cheap labor is not really cost effective. Writing software is not like making sneakers. There are many reasons the results from offshore development are generally poor. When you go to a 3rd world country to develop software you have to:
There is a simple solution to these problems: If you can't move the factory to the low cost workers, why not move the low cost workers to the factory? For that we have the H-1B program. Salaries are lower for H-1B workers
If the majority of H-1B workers really were "highly skilled" and essential to the economic health of the republic, one would expect them to be at the high end of the salary scale. Here a representative of Tata, a foreign bodyshop and one of the largest users of H-1B visas, explains why his company was paying an average of only $35,000 per year to engineers working in San Diego even though this was lower than the prevailing wage. By Indian standards, $35,000 is a phenomenal salary, he [Saju James] said. At home, these programmers would make about $2,500 a year. "With the money they save here, they can go back to India and build a house," We hear companies tell tales of not being able to find programmers. However, suppose a company were to raise its programmer salaries to the level of one of the starting pitchers on the New York Yankees. Not only would such a company have no difficulty finding programmers but they also would have first pick of all the programmers in the country. The reality is the companies cannot find American programmers at the price they want to pay. This is an extreme example, but in reality it does not take a multi-million dollar salary to attract programmers. We are dealing with the difference between a $50,000 and a $35,000 salary when discussing H-1B workers. The interesting thing about programmers is that money is not our prime motivator. Surveys in the trade press consistently show that factors like the work environment and flexibility are much more important. Low cost steps, such as dumping the office dress code, go a long way towards making a company attractive to programmers. This year I contacted a broker about a consulting programming position advertised on the Internet. The requirements for the position closely matched the topics of one of my books. The broker immediately said "Don't bother, they are looking for a foreigner." He explained that the hourly rate they would pay was so low that only H-1B bodyshops were intended to fill it. The company in question is one of the largest non-bodyshop users of H-1B visas. In theory, employers are supposed to pay the prevailing wage to H-1B workers but this is easy to circumvent. While there are a wide range of programming-related tasks, there is no standardization of job titles in the industry. Even the Department of Labor's computer-related job categories are meaningless to those of us in the profession. People who do telephone support tend to make less than programmers. C++ programmers make more than Visual Basic programmers. People in network support functions often make less than all of the above. It is easy to lump different computer-related jobs together to produce a distorted wage to base a labor certification on. While government labor statistics are good for year-to-year comparisons and determining overall trends, they are not good sources for determining prevailing wages for computer jobs. Many companies protest that the high cost of H-1B visas prevents them from using them as a source of cheap labor. Compare:
The high cost of an H-1B visa is a myth. Since you can get H-1B workers through a bodyshop, a company does not even have to deal with the hassle of making the visa application. The bodyshop handles all the visa processing.
When Congress created the H-1B program in the early 1990's it could hardly have imagined that one of the unintended consequences would be that foreign companies would set up operations in the U.S. whose sole purpose is to supply workers on H-1B visas. The top users of H-1B visas are all bodyshops. Many of these bodyshops have few, if any, Americans in programming jobs. It is no coincidence that many of the studies alleging the existence of a huge shortages of programmers that are used to justify the expansion of the H-1B program are funded by organizations representing H-1B bodyshops. While the practice of exporting software development to low-wage countries has generally been unsuccessful so far, our competitors are taking steps to change that. There would be no better way for another country to develop a software industry than to be able to send workers to the U.S. to have them trained in software development and the ways of U.S business. That is exactly what we are seeing with H-1B. It should be no great shock that many of the largest users of H-1B visas are foreign companies. While the U.S. has embarked upon a policy of creating dependence upon foreign workers, including providing training for them, other countries are working at creating opportunities in technology for their citizens. Many argue that the reason the H-1B cap was reached this year is because of the growing demand for programmers and workers in other technical fields. I offer a different explanation that I believe is more consistent with the facts. The H-1B quota is being reached because of the huge supply of people who want to work in the United States and the establishment pipelines to bring them here. One of the myths of the H-1B program is that companies have to go to foreign countries to find H-1B workers. In reality, the H-1B workers are already here in the United States looking for work just like the rest of us. Companies can choose from hiring an American or they can pick up an H-1B worker already sitting in the U.S. waiting for work. The H-1B pipeline has already brought the workers here. One of these pipelines is the H-1B bodyshop. These are companies whose business is importing H-1B workers and peddling them to other companies. Many H-1B bodyshops are subsidiaries of foreign companies. Hiring an H-1B worker through a bodyshop is as easy as ordering a pizza and it has the added benefit that it insulates the company that actually employs the H-1B worker from legal liability. The top users of H-1B visas are all bodyshops. What should be surprising is that these companies tend to hire few, if any Americans for the types of positions where they use H-1B workers. There's no better way to avoid discrimination claims from Americans than by simply not hiring them. Another pipeline for H-1B workers is the passthrough company. A passthrough company serves as the employer on the H-1B application but exerts no control over the H-1B worker whatsoever. The worker pays the legal fees and, once in the United States, he must find his own consulting job. The passthrough company takes a percentage of the H-1B worker's earnings. Passthrough companies have no managerial control over their "employees". Yet another pipeline is American universities. In the software industry there are very few jobs that require a graduate degree in computer science. Job postings asking for a master's degree are rare and I have never seen an advertisement for a programming job that required a Ph.D. Graduate degrees are most valuable for those looking for work in academia. Since the number of these jobs is extremely limited, there is little incentive for Americans to get graduate degrees in computer science. At the same time, the focus of most universities is their graduate programs. Since the job market cannot support large graduate programs, universities are forced to recruit foreign students. In many schools the majority of computer science graduate students are foreign. One of the ways to attract foreign students is with the possibility of a job in the U.S. Immigration lawyers also have gotten into the act. Many of them advertise to foreign workers over the Internet and help match them up to bodyshops. The worker is expected to pay the legal fees and may have to pay an additional fee for job placement services. The press has reported on proposals that there should be no limit on the number of H-1B. While that may sound attractive to American universities who have become dependent on foreign students to support their bloated graduate departments and immigration lawyers who would collect the legal fees, Congress should keep in mind that no limit means just that: "No Limit". The inevitable result of such legislation would be the explosive growth of quickie graduate degree programs all over the world. Having no limit on H-1B Visas for people with graduate degrees would be tantamount to having no limit at all on H-1B Visas. Most of the evidence that suggests there is a chronic shortage of programmers falls into one of two categories: claims that companies can't find programmers and studies paid for by software industry groups. The former I address in Section 16. I only mention the studies produced by representatives of the H-1B bodyshop business because they have been so frequently quoted in the press. The flaws in these studies claiming chronic programmer shortage have been well documented elsewhere. As they are embarrassing examples of the junk science that passes as research these days I will consider them no further. After the Iranian revolution, the price of gasoline doubled in a matter of months. There are about 1,135,000 Computer and Math Scientists employed in the U.S. A shortage of 150,000 programmers (there are those who claim it is much larger) would mean 10% of computer positions are vacant. If a shortage anywhere near that large existed we would see programmer salaries doubling. The Department of Labor's statistics show a moderate increase in salary for computer professionals (about 3-4% per year) over the past few years. This increase is higher than that of some professions and less than that of others. Overall programmers are only doing slightly better than other professional occupations. If there is a huge shortage of programmers, it does not show up in the salary data. The low unemployment rate for programmers is frequently cited as a reason why we need more H-1B visas. However, the same is true with programmer unemployment rates as with salaries. The unemployment rate for programmers is low, but in the current economy this is true across the board. In reality, it's not the unemployment rate among programmers we should be concerned with, but that among other fields and among older workers who have been forced out of the profession. As we move to more technology-based society, Americans need to be trained in technology fields. Each H-1B visa takes away an opportunity for someone outside the field to move into the programming profession. While there is no overall programmer shortage, there is a shortage of programmers who have experience in the skills that are currently in fashion. A job opening that requires 3 years experience in Java, HTML, CGI, TCP/IP, C++, Object-Oriented Development, PERL, XML, Oracle, Unix, Windows NT, IRIX, and SQL may require a salary of well over $100,000 to fill. In the software business, resumes do not get past the gatekeepers in personnel unless they have all the requirements that have been listed for the job. A person with all the skills listed above except for PERL will be rejected out of hand even though it is something that can be learned in a week. What this does is drive salaries sky high for people who have the skills that are in demand at the moment. While the average salary for a programmer is about $54,000, a position with Internet-related requirements, like the one above, could be $130,000. Here is where the economics of H-1B comes in. If you have to pay artificially inflated salaries for high-demand skills, you can keep your overall costs the same by using H-1B workers to fill the low-skill programming positions. The software industry has created a dilemma for itself by its shortsighted hiring policies going back for many years. Collectively, the industry has refused to hire people without experience. Since people have to scrape to get the magic 2-3 years experience that industry demands before hiring, programmers have little incentive to stay put with a company once they get that experience. Couple that with the ending of corporate loyalty towards employees and the disappearance of retirement plans and you can see that there is a strong incentive for programmers to take the best deal that comes to them. Standard corporate yearly pay increases do not keep up with the artificially inflated market value of having experience using particular tools. Training employees on a hot tool over a year could add $20,000 to their value on the job market while, due to the corporation's compensation policies, the employees may only get a $2,000 annual pay increase. The result is that training employees increases the likelihood that they will leave the company. Since training employees may make them more likely to change jobs, the simple solution is to only hire people who already have experience in the tools the company wants to use. This has the effect of driving the salaries of those who have experience in high demand tools even higher. This expectation to hire people who need no training has resulted in a steadily increasing salary spiral for fashionable skills. For example, while many Internet-related skills (e.g. HTML and JavaScript) are easy to learn, in many cases the industry has bid up salaries for people with these skills to over $100,000 per year. High turnover does not have to be a part of the programming industry. "Computerworld" recently did a feature on the 100 best places to work. "Turnover rates at the Computerworld Best Places to Work are dramatically low compared with other companies – 50% to 75% below the national average." When I worked for Digital Equipment, for several years in the period before the downturn I saw very few people leave. Currently I am working with a company where several members of the project team have been with the company over ten years and the rest have spent almost their entire careers there. One of the reasons companies have fallen in love with H-1B visas is that Americans and permanent residents can quit. If an H-1B worker loses a job, the next stop is the boat home. Several years ago I was speaking with the personnel manager for a company I was working with while she was working on an H-1B visa application. She told me that her manager loved hiring H-1B workers because they could not quit. There are two important ways to reduce costs in a labor-intensive business: get cheaper labor and increase productivity. In a capitalist system, efficiency improvements only come when there is an economic need. The gas guzzling turbojets on airliners were replaced by more efficient turbofans after the steep rises in fuel costs during the early 1970's. The next generation of more efficient jet engines will not show up on airliners until fuel prices rise. While some companies have taken programmer productivity seriously (Microsoft deserves special mention), little progress is being made in the industry as a whole. Where software is unusual, if not unique, it is created by thinking. One example of where companies ignore programmer productivity is in the office environment. What kind of environment is best for thinking? If your children needed to do their calculus homework you would have them do it in a quiet room and not in front of the television set. Likewise if you want to make programmers productive you would put them in enclosed offices to keep out noise. However, of all that has been written about the importance of the work environment for productivity, in the past 15 years I have seen quiet offices steadily being replaced by noisy cubicle environments within the industry. A couple of years ago I joined a project that was not making any progress. The company has placed the entire team of about a dozen programmers in a conference room. Each time the phone rang it disturbed the entire team. So did each conversation and knock on the door. The inevitable result was that very little got done. The management's response to the lack of progress was to add more people. With twenty people there were twice the number of disturbances and still nothing got done. The management continued to add more people until there was no more space to add any more. This was a project that could easily have been completed in the same period of time by six developers and many times that number were working on it. The point here is that at the senior management level, the view that speed is a function the number of bodies assigned to the project is very common. Cheap H-1B workers allow more bodies to be thrown at a task for less cost. Much ado has been made over the number of computer science graduates and how that relates to an alleged programming shortage. The reality is that most programmers do not have CS degrees and there is no evidence to suggest that those who do are better prepared to succeed in the profession. The only common factor I have found among most top programmers is musical ability. I break the areas of knowledge used in computer programming into three categories (Languages, Business, and Engineering) and qualitatively rate their relative importance as shown in the following chart.
Languages This component consists of the ability to use various tools in software development, such as programming languages and databases. Business Business knowledge is the non-computer information and experience required for a particular application. If you are programming a retail banking application, you need to have some level of knowledge of how a bank works. Even developing hard-core programming, such as operating systems or games, requires business knowledge. There is a customer no matter what you are writing. While you can't write programs without knowing a programming language, I believe business knowledge is more important that knowledge of programming techniques. A chemist who knows programming is in a better position to write a molecular modeling package than a programmer who knows chemistry is. This explains why people with so many backgrounds are in the programming profession. Engineering The largest component of programming knowledge I call engineering. By this I mean knowing how to put together computer systems and, especially, who to do it the right way. The engineering component only comes from experience. There is no way to learn it in a classroom. While I put a high value on engineering and experience, the industry considers languages most important in its hiring process. This is one of the reasons why older programmers have such a hard time finding jobs. The programmers America needs are already out there. The programmer pool is not limited to those with computer science degrees. The number of discarded older programmers alone is enough to cover the entire gap that is alleged to exist. The makeup of the programmer population in this country clearly shows that there are untapped pools of talent that the industry has overlooked. Last month I taught a programming class. The student who did the best was a former airline pilot who taught himself programming. If we need more programmers, we need to look at people with experience in other fields. For people with the aptitude, the training needed to bring them to a higher skill level than the typical H-1B programmer is very small. Job training courses will not make this transition happen. I expect that the $500 job training fee added last year to the H-1B application fee will have absolutely no effect whatsoever. Putting people through courses in the hope that they will pick up jobs is futile. As the folks at Northern Virginia Community College discovered, unless employers are committed to expanding the opportunities to people outside the profession, job training will have little effect. One of the arguments that employers use to justify the need for H-1B workers rather than training Americans is that because of the rapid pace of the industry, they need people who already have the skills. They would have you believe there is a university in the Himalayas where it never rains and the temperature is always 76 degrees F, that turns out programmers by the thousands who receive all the training they need to be productive in the American business world. The reality is that the majority of H-1B workers do not have all the skills required for jobs when they arrive and a lot of on-the-job training takes place. Recently I was working on a project that was going to use a software tool that was relatively new so people who knew it were in short supply. The company I was working for announced they would hire an expert on the tool for the project. Since the software I was writing depended on this tool, I bought a book to learn about it. As weeks passed, I learned how to use this tool and was able to write the software we needed with it. Eventually the tool "expert" was hired who turned out to be an H-1B worker. However, he knew nothing about the tool he was hired for as an expert. He was learning from the same book I had used months earlier. This position was an opportunity for someone to learn some of the latest in programming but it went to an H-1B worker rather than an American. Employers are willing to train H-1B workers because H-1B workers are bound to their employer. Notice that the training investment for learning this skill was a $35 book. Many programming skills can be learned easily. Even learning programming languages is not that difficult. No programming language is as complicated as French. The differences among common programming languages are not nearly as great as between French and Spanish, let alone Spanish and Russian. Here are four examples of equivalent code written in four different programming languages. C if (balance < 0)
printf ("Get a loan\n") ;
else
printf ("Pay the bills\n") ;
C++ if (balance < 0) cout << "Get a loan\n" ; else cout << "Pay the bills\n" ; Pascal if balance < 0 then Ada if balance < 0 then You can see that the similarities among programming languages are greater than their differences. Once you learn a couple of programming languages, the rest become pretty much a matter of learning where to put the semicolons. With all of the propaganda about programmer shortages, one might get the impression that anyone who can spell C can instantly get a programming job. Unless you are in the high demand 3-5 years experience range, it's tough out there. When I started out in 1984, it was nearly impossible to get an interview for a programming job. Everyone wanted two years of experience, but no one wanted to give experience. I would have looked at another profession if it weren't for a lucky break. My father learned of a position in the company he worked for and I was able to get in. My first programming job paid $9 an hour. Even in 1984, that was not a lot of money. Once I had reached three years of experience, things changed completely. At that point everyone wanted to hire me. For a period of six months I went to an average of 2 interviews a week and had the pick of jobs. My next job search came after working for Digital Equipment for eight years. I, with tens of thousands of others, was laid off. Once you have been laid off companies look at you very differently. In the weeks before I was let go, I was talking to several companies about changing jobs. As soon as I was laid off, these companies suddenly were no longer interested. Since then, I started my own consulting business and have worked on my one. While business is good, finding programming work is still very difficult. I can easily see how people who have been laid off and did not have my advantage of having written books and articles would have a terrible time finding a job, especially if they were over 40. One of the many disgraceful hiring practices in the software business is the treatment of older workers. The industry wants young. Recently I went through an Internet newsgroup and search for all the jobs that gave experience requirements. The highest number of years requested was 6. Positions specifying at least 3 years of experience were called "senior". In a survey taken by "InformationWeek" of information technology managers, only 2% of the respondents said they were likely to hire someone with more than 10 years of experience. I have no explanation for the rampant age discrimination in the industry. I have heard the theory that older workers have families and can't devote the hours but I see older worker in other fields putting in long hours. I do not believe that age discrimination in the software industry is entirely a question of money. A couple of years ago I interviewed an over 50 worker for programming position. The candidate was a recent immigrant (which suggests he did not want a lot of money) who had trained himself in programming. My evaluation was that he would be suitable for an entry-level position. The management said that they thought he was too junior for the position and rejected him. However, they ended up filling the position with a 20-something programming with no more experience. No one comes out and says "He's too old." because of the legal problems. Here is a quote that comes pretty close. "Unfortunately, a lot of the guys we interviewed who are ex-Gramman engineers were involved with the way things are done at a big organization," Otto said. "They did one thing. That's all they did. I need an engineer who can work on three or four difference things and be part marketer, too." Would you want to drive across a bridge designed by a 25-year-old senior architect? How about ride in an airliner designed by a 26 year old senior engineer? As I pointed out in the Section12, the most important ability required when designing large engineering systems requires experience. Unfortunately industry places very little value on experienced programmers. One would expect to see poor quality in an industry that casts off experienced workers and that is exactly what is happening. The steady decline in software quality has been the most disappointing aspects of the software industry for me. Ten years ago, the operating system on my desktop computer could go for months without a reboot. The one I have now cannot get through an afternoon without needing to be restarted. While writing this document, the word processor crashed ("Access Violation") forcing me to undergo a serious recovery effort. I am going to make a bold prediction here. I believe that the current level of quality in software development is so low that we will have a serious problem with computer systems that can't handle the year 2000. Everyone, except for a few apocalyptic doomsayers, knew that the year 2000 was coming so there is no excuse other than incompetence for not being able to handle it. If software is being written that can't handle predictable events, such as the change of the millenium, you can be certain we are doing even worse with the unpredictable. Remember how the software industry discards experienced workers the next time you read in the newspapers about a radiation treatment machine that fries patients, a funds-transfer system failing and costing a bank tens of millions of dollars, or an airliner crashing due to a software failure. One area where I agree with advocates of the H-1B program is that many companies cannot find programmers. I am not saying the programmers are not out there, but rather that companies cannot find them. If you have ever seen how many companies try to hire programmers their lack of success would be no mystery to you. Imagine someone from Europe coming to the U.S. for the first time. After searching the New York sewers for 2 weeks he goes home and announces to his friends "The are no alligators in America." Ever since it became clear there would be push for another H-1B expansion six months ago, I started to scan the New York Times each Sunday to look at the number of programmer jobs advertised. While each week there are usually a couple of pages of advertisements, almost all of them are from resume brokers and bodyshops. There are rarely more than a dozen advertisements from actual hiring companies. The same is true on the Internet. Brokers flood the newsgroups but postings from hiring companies are rare. The number of broker advertisements is deceiving indictor of the number of programming jobs that are available since many brokers are trying to fill the same jobs. Earlier this year I saw a consulting job posted on the Internet that used a tool I had written about in one of my books. I called the broker that made the posting and was told "Sorry, that job was filled months ago but send us a resume anyway. " That same job was posted regularly for six months after I called and may still be. If programmers do not know a company has jobs available, they are not going to apply for them. The next time you hear a company say that they have thousands of unfilled programming positions, ask them what newspaper they are advertised in. It is traditional in the software industry to have a laundry list of requirements for job openings. Candidates are not considered for positions if they do not meet all of the requirements listed for a job. It is not uncommon to see the statement "Candidates who do not have all listed skills will not be considered" in a job posting. Requirement lists are frequently absurdly long, often with over ten specific skills. It is even common for a job posting to have only a subset of the full list being used for screening. I often encounter job postings that include skills that are not even being used on the project. At the extreme, such lists often contain requirements that are impossible to meet (e.g. requiring 3 years experience in something that has only existed for 2). I even encountered a case where a company had misspelled an acronym and would only consider people who misspelled it on their resume as well. If you went on a search for a house and told the real estate broker that you wanted
and refused to look at any houses without those features, your choices would be extremely limited. One might even say that a housing shortage existed. On the other hand, if you were willing to consider 4-bedroom homes in nice neighborhoods and were willing to redecorate before you moved in, you could meet your requirements and have a large number of houses to choose from. Likewise, companies that expect candidates to meet all of their requirements have to expect to pay premium and endure long job searches. Companies that are willing to be more flexible in their requirements and training will have an easier time. In June, I called a broker about a contract job he had posted on the Internet. The company had listed in their requirements 4 different operating systems, 3 programming languages, and a molecular design package. By some coincidence I had experience in all the requirements listed so I called the broker. He said he would call the company and get back to me. An hour later, the broker called back and said the company's personnel people wanted to know if I had experience with another product that I had never heard of before. I responded "No". He said he would get back to me again. The broker called back later that afternoon and told me that the personnel people would not even look at my resume if I did not have experience in the addition product as well. I searched for information on this particular product and found that it came from a company with nine employees. In other words, this company had created a set of job requirements that no one in the world could possibly meet.
The workplace environment goes a long way towards attracting (and retaining) programmers. Inexpensive things, such as
can make a big different in attracting programmers. Likewise, rigid dress codes, reserved parking spots and poor equipment are highly effective means pushing top programmers to other companies. Executives cannot complain in public about how their corporate policies discourage programmers from wanting to work for them. They can complain in public about a an alleged programmer shortage.
Ask the people in any company why they cannot find programmers and the #1 answer will be the corporate personnel department. The existence of character of "Catbert, The Evil Human Resources Director" in Dilbert is no coincidence. I could write an entire book on rude treatment of candidates by personnel departments. Because of the frequent contacts between recruiters and personnel people and the frequent exchanges because recruiters and programmers, when companies have bad personnel departments their reputation gets spread widely. Late last year someone I know at a large corporation asked me if I would do some consulting for him. After setting up the deal, he gave me the name and number of someone in personnel who was expecting me to call in order to finish the paperwork. I called the personnel representative every day for two weeks until the Christmas holiday. I called every day for two weeks after the Christmas holiday. Each time I called I either was told she was not available or I left a message on the voicemail system. To this date, she has never returned my call. That was a case where I had already been selected by the management to do the job. Imagine what happens to a regular candidate for a position. Executives in corporations cannot complain in public that their personnel department causes problems in hiring. They can complain about an alleged programmer shortage. Getting H-1B workers through a bodyshop often means the hiring managers can bypass the personnel bureaucracy entirely. Due to the Internet and the high turnover in the industry, a company's reputation as an employer of programmer gets spread widely. Not only do companies screen resumes, but applications also screen companies. Consider this. When leaders of a corporation appear in public to announce that importing more H-1B workers is the only solution to their employment problems, how does that affect their reputation as a place for programmers to work?
The long-term solution to the problem with the H-1B program is to eliminate it and go back to a system with stricter requirements, something more along the lines of the previous H-1 program. Our goal should be to have a program that is restricted to people who actually have unique skills. As the system is set up now, companies that want to bring in people that actually have exceptional skills are unable to due so because the H-1B quota is being consumed by bodyshops dumping low skilled people into the country. Realistically, the number of H-1B workers who are highly skilled is only on the order of 10,000 per year. Failing in an overhaul of the system, there are some simple steps that Congress could take to reduce the abuse in the current system. Bodyshops do not have a need for H-1B workers. The need for a worker exists only where the worker is placed. If a company needs an H-1B worker, it should make the application. It should make the labor certification and, most of all, it should take responsibility for obeying the law. As long as one company can supply H-1B workers to another, the protections in the law will remain a sham. There is no reason the H-1B program should be used by foreign companies as a training ground for their workers. Companies with more than 15% (let alone 90%) of their workers on H-1B visas simply should not exist. The application fee is absurdly low. It is so low, that that individuals can purchase their own H-1B visa and use the program as a backdoor route for immigration. Raise the fee to $20,000. $3,000 per year is a reasonable fee to bring in people who have skills that truly have exceptional skills. The employer should be required to pay all H-1B visa costs, including legal fees. Top computer programmers make over $100,000 year. To ensure that the H-1B program is only used to bring in highly skilled workers that will help advance the economy, there should be minimum salaries based upon those at the high end of the profession. A minimum salary of $100,000 for H-1B workers would not be unreasonable provided they actually were highly skilled. The penalties for violating the law are a joke. In the recent Exotic Granite & Marble case, the company was forced to pay back pay of $99,000 and a fine of $3,000 for underpaying H-1B workers. You can't get better odds than that in Atlantic City. With the potential savings so high and the fines so low, assuming you get caught, this is a clear signal to employers that it is OK to violate the law. If Congress does nothing, or abolishes the H-1B program entirely, the labor problem will correct itself. The H-1B abuses will continue, but the fate of the republic will not be threatened by the lack of foreign workers whose skills are so low they command less than $50,000 in a high technology field. During last year's H-1B debate, the computer industry told us they only needed a temporary increase in the H-1B quota to get them over the hump until they could start training Americans. It's only a year later and they are back for another increase. The software industry has no intention of weaning itself off of the H-1B program unless it gets a big push. It should be clear that we are dealing with an addict. The H-1B program is now the drug that allows the computer industry to avoid having to deal with its labor problems. The H-1B program is not the best solution to for bringing skilled workers into industry. H-1B is not even the least expensive in the long run. H-1B is simply the easiest. It is easier to ask Congress for more H-1B visas than for the industry to fix the problems it created for itself. If American wants to increase the number of programmers, we need to make the profession attractive and provide opportunities for people to enter it. H-1B reduces the prestige of the programming profession and every H-1B visa takes away the opportunity for an American to take a technology job. The computer industry did fine before the H-1B program. It will prosper without an increase in H-1B visas or even the program's end. John Miano earn his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1984 from the College of Wooster. After working as a programmer for several companies, including eight years at Digital Equipment, he started his own software successful consulting business, Colosseum Builders, Inc. In addition to being the chairman of the Programmer's Guild, he is the author of two programming books and numerous articles for computer-related magazines
. Appendix A. Price Lists From Immigration Lawyers
Appendix B. Advertisements from Passthrough Companies
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