Right now, depending who you speak with, there is either a shortage or a glut of IT professionals in the USA. Those who maintain there is a shortage tend to say it can only be eliminated by immigration reform allowing more H1-B visas and green cards. Those who see a glut point to high IT unemployment figures and what looks like pervasive age discrimination. If both views are possible — and I am beginning to see how they could be — we can start by blaming the Human Resources (HR) departments at big and even medium-sized companies.
HR does the hiring and firing or at least handles the paperwork for hiring and firing. HR hires headhunters to find IT talent or advertises and finds that talent itself. If you are an IT professional in a company of almost any size that has an HR department, go down there sometime and ask about their professional qualifications. What made them qualified to hire you?
You’ll find the departments are predominantly staffed with women and few, if any, of those women have technical degrees. They are hiring predominantly male candidates for positions whose duties they typically don’t understand. Those HR folks, if put on the spot, will point out that the final decision on all technical hires comes from the IT department, itself. All HR does is facilitate.
Not really. What HR does is filter. They see as an important part of their job finding the very best candidates for every technical position. But how do you qualify candidates if you don’t know what you are talking about? They use heuristics — sorting techniques designed to get good candidates without really knowing good from bad.
Common heuristic techniques for hiring IT professionals include looking for graduates of top university programs and for people currently working in similar positions at comparable companies including competitors. The flip side of these techniques also applies — not looking for graduates of less prestigious universities or the unemployed.
The best programmer I know is Paul Tyma, 2014 Alumnus of the Year of the College of Engineering at the University of Toledo in Ohio. Paul later got a PhD from Syracuse University and that is what scored him an interview at Google where he became a senior developer, but it’s doubtful that would have happened had he settled for the U of T degree where he learned most of his chops.
It’s very common for the best programmer in any department to have a low quality degree or sometimes no degree at all. This person, this absolutely invaluable person, would generally not make the HR cut for hiring at their company today. Those interviewers from the IT department would never know they existed.
Same for the unemployed. Layoffs are deadly for IT reemployment. If you don’t know who to interview it’s easier just to decide you’ll only talk with people who are already working somewhere. A bad employed programmer is viewed as inherently superior to a very good unemployed programmer. This of course eliminates from consideration anyone who was laid-off for any reason. Speaking as a guy who was fired from every job I ever had (you’d fire me, too — believe me) if I was trying to find a technical job today I’d probably never work again.
It doesn’t matter why you lost your job. The company moved and you couldn’t move with it for some family reason. Your startup failed. Your boss was an asshole. You were an asshole, but a brilliant one. You were older and dumped (illegally I might add) to save money. It doesn’t matter how smart or skilled you are if HR won’t even put your name on the interview list.
One way around this is the moment you are fired or laid-off go back to school. When you graduate with that new degree or certificate you’ll be desirable again — in debt, but desirable.
And so we have the appearance of IT labor shortages at the same time we have record IT unemployment. And because the head of HR isn’t going to admit to the CEO that such bonehead policies exist, they are kept secret and the CEO urged to lobby for immigration reform.
Headhunters don’t help, either, because they see the source of their hefty commissions as luring working programmers from one company to another. Unemployed programmers don’t need luring and so don’t need headhunters.
There are exceptions to these trends, of course, but they are rare.
Those ladies down in HR are typically damaging their companies while simultaneously working very hard trying to do what they believe is good work. It’s a paradox, I know, and one that’s for the most part unknown by the rest of society.
The answer, of course, is to either improve the quality of HR departments, making them truly useful, or make them dramatically less powerful, maybe eliminating them entirely from hiring.
I’d recommend doing both.
A) Any good hiring manager (not HR!) is looking for candidates everywhere, all the time.
B) The best opportunities come from networking, not applying to companies through systems that heuristically mine resumes for potential candidates. Who do you know there? Who do you know who knows someone there? It’s about relationships. Firing your resume off to a company through a system (ahem, “Jobvite”) is fraught with peril.
C) The sad thing is I’ve seen from personal experience that candidates can graduate from a Bachelors or Masters program in Computer Science or Engineering and literally not know how to program at the new grad / new hire level. As in, they don’t pass even my pseudo-code test. (And I’m a manager.)
As to point a) You’re exactly right, but so is Bob. I know one hiring manager who through networking found three perfect candidates for positions in his department last year. He referred them all to HR. Guess how many came out the other end of HR? Zero. HR had filtered out the perfect, hand-picked candidates for his position and didn’t let them through.
This would seem to me to imply that the hiring manager had too little power and HR too much. What’s the point of personally recruiting if you can’t personally see the candidates through the process? The hiring manager might as well just be a walking business card in that case. I’m lucky to work at a company small enough to have no HR department, and all our hires that have worked out long term have been recruited through meatspace networking. I think we profit from the way large companies ignore people from non-traditional backgrounds and those who don’t look good on paper; we certainly can’t lure them with massive paychecks or benefits, but we also don’t need to, and we have more intangible rewards to offer, like a relaxed, sane environment without misguided management and red tape.
Another aspect of the recruitment process is the software in use by the HR departments. Taleo’s recruitment module is part of a lot of Oracle shops’ implementations, and in the deployment segment no one in the HR function makes useful decisions about configuring the system.
Thus you see HR recruitment systems that sort out any on-line employment applications that have an employment status =/= current, or in real world terms, discards any candidate that isn’t currently employed.
Or you see systems that sort out any applications that fail to contain specific keywords, yet HR hasn’t obtained the keyword list from the hiring managers.
Etc. etc.
Back in the day, I was one of those people who wouldn’t have come out of the HR filtering techniques when I got hired into IT in the mid-90s. The guy who recommended me had bypassed HR and went to the manager who needed the person, and he invited me in for an interview. HR never had let my resume through.
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That said, I also think that the main reason why companies claim there’s a shortage of IT people in the US is that they’re looking for IT people who can do the work for incredibly cheap salaries, as in $40-50k/year. People who are looking for a job at $70k and up are priced out of the market, because companies don’t want to pay a premium for anything.
Bingo. This smarts personally as the position that is my backup (systems engineering/operations) has been unfilled or marginally filled for the last eight years. We have these stupidly complex systems (mainly because we don’t “do” architecture, which is for sissies, apparently) so my job is mainly troubleshooting the breathtakingly non-intuitive. I get paid pretty well for that after all this time.
The problem is, getting someone with comparable skills will have a comparable cost, and the company is not willing to pay that. Our personal white whale is the bright but inexperienced kid who will quickly learn not only all these standard platforms but these one-off homegrown systems as well.
Good luck with that.
Amen. Sing it brother!
The problem I have with the network magic is when you are an introvert. You could be a superb IT guy with deep concentration and solution ability but don’t mingle well. Too bad, so sad.
That’s where motivation comes in. Even a turtle comes out of his shell to get what he needs.
Yes, totally agree. You can’t attack someone for lacking ‘motivation’ when it’s simply not in their DNA to cold call or collar people looking for a job.
Another problem with the networking argument: it gives immediate advantages to higher-wealth/better connected individuals. It’s the old thing: my dad was CEO of this. Knows this guy who’s CEO of that. Get’s me an interview. That whole path is pretty discriminating.
I’d recommend HR having much less power in the hiring process. In fact I agree with Bob: let them have zero power. I’ve recently moved from a company where HR have a strangle hold on all hiring processes, which means that the typical process lasts 6 months, to a company where I didn’t meet HR until I signed my contract. I met my manager and his boss. That’s the way to do things.
I am a hiring manager at a large corporation. In the past my best candidates came from word of mouth networking/recommendations – in fact that is how I got my foot in the door during the dotcom boom via a contact from college.
However, with the consolidation of HR those old tools of word of mouth are largely irrelevant – because the HR department is really a firewall between you and candidates. The only way for someone to get on the list – is to pass through the HR filter today. As much as you would like to offer the job to someone you know would be the best candidate – you never get a chance to see them.
Ultimately this aligns with the company’s desire to avoid risk – at the expense of longer term health that is predicated on qualities that largely in areas that are immeasurable in traditional ways.
This evolution is driving me into early retirement – rather than staying around any longer to preside over its descent into further mediocrity. Of course, I won’t be ‘retiring’ – as much as reinventing myself to do things the way I know they need to be done to help people get what they want and need from systems and software; the lowered stress/frustration level will more than make up for the cut in pay (and who knows – maybe I’ll make more than I do now if I make a lot of people happy).
So true, I network 24 x 7 in every way I can.
I research everything I can about STEM Jobs, EEO-1 Reports, Etc..
I can show you exactly what is happening in respect to STEM jobs.
I talk to many in my shoes via my work at Keep America At Work.
Yet, I can’t buy an interview, and the low paying jobs say “I can’t hire you because you won’t stay when times get better” which leaves people like me in a very bad spot.
The sad thing is, I am but one of what I think is at least a million people after comparing the jobs created in the STEM industry versus the H-1B visas issued, and the re-issuance of visas when they are renewed every three years
My first job out of college had me working “third shift”, roughly 10 pm to 6 am. After a year of it I needed a change to a “normal” schedule. At the time I was writing test programs on Genrad board test machines for circuit boards. A job opening for a new semiconductor division within the company for a Test Engineer to write test programs on Sentry VII integrated circuit test machines appeared on the company jobs site. Looking over the qualifications, it seemed apparent that I met all of them. So I submitted my resume according to HR guidelines. A week or so later I got a rejection letter from an HR drone. For some reason s/he didn’t think I was qualified for the job. “BS”, said I. So I sent my resume with a cover letter directly to the hiring manager. Within a few days I had both an interview with him, and the job. For the next ~10 years in that line of work I think it’s safe to say that I was that “star programmer” you talked about.
Since then, every job I had in the high-tech sector was obtained by circumventing HR drones. In addition to the filtering function that you mentioned, the only other reason they exist is to keep the company from being sued. Not the [potential] employees; the company. They’re completely useless, IMO.
Don’t forget that above all, those in HR want to keep their jobs. That, above all else, is what matters to them.
Would you hire any HR person that you know?
Finally, Jerry Pourmelle’s Iron Law of Beauracracy still stands: there are those in an organization that work towards the goals of the organization, and there are those in an organization who work towards the functioning of an organization. This latter group will eventually rise to power and control the organization.
That explains HR in a nutshell.
I started work in the mid-60s when computers had a fairly limited penetration in work systems. So at that time HR was called “Payroll” and since large work forces were often paid weekly in cash there was a need for a fair number of people to be working hard.
With the advent of computerized payroll and bi-weekly or monthly direct bank credit the workload evaporated. So the payroll managers scrabbled to build “HR” to fill the vacuum, helped along by an avalanche of new legislation on safety, discrimination etc. Fairly quickly this new and rather self important department grew. With management bullshit mantras like “people are our most important asset” (they are,but the people who say it always sound like they don’t mean it) awarded itself a place at the top table and grew like all bureaucracies.
It is a particularly hard area to cut because it can claim a kind of moral importance. Cut Training? – no of course not we need to build our skill base (even if much training is of doubtful value). Cut Hiring assessment testing? We cannot be sure that we are selecting according to best practise ( even if many assessment tests are of dubious value)
2 Civil Engineers in Electronics I know worked in companies that was bought by a Foreign company.
They were both offered to move to Denmark/England. They declined and found new employment locally. I suspect somebody bought “empty shells” and lost out on the hard to replace developers. The very best developers often see no reason to move and find alternative solutions.
I guess that some companies are looking for the best developers that are willing to relocate.
Great article Bob as it puts forth every single problem I’ve ever had with HR and technology. Some may find it sexist to say that HR is just women, but the only men I’ve met in it were the women’s CFO bosses who also knew nothing about technology. I’ve never understood why it’s become such a female-oriented profession.
I’ve never gotten hired via any HR or recruiter with the exception of a Big Pharma company where I was actually their third choice. The best jobs I’ve had were all ones where those in management I met and networked with and managed to get a job thus circumventing the HR sorting who would toss me because of lack of paper diploma credentials. Were it up to HR (including one HR director who was blackmailing the company) I would have never had a job anywhere. With an English Literature degree I’m essentially the antithesis of technology work, but despite this I’ve managed to squeak out working in the industry for 15 years although now my age (nearing 40) is heavily against me.
Surely it’s not just HR – very few people understand what makes a good programmer. I suspect very few managements understand programming that well. On top of that, technology continues to move so quickly that it’s extremely difficult to stay on top of the latest languages, methodologies etc. If you don’t understand programming and you want a dozen mediocre programmers, it’ll be cheaper to get a dozen offshore mediocre programmers than US or European ones.
HR Departments have gone from finding the best candidates from tens or perhaps a hundred resumes, to how to quickly elimate 99.9% of the hundreds or thousands of resumes they receive for each job postings.
The emphasis on higher education (Bachelors Degree or better) has left many of us who shepered the tech age thru the 80s and 90s unqualified to compete.
It’s my contention that this is all about bargaining power. America has only one governing principle: free contract. In such a society bargaining power is everything. What you make is a function of your bargainign power. Big Money types, the elites of our society, have been systematically undermining all other groups bargaining power and they have been for a long, long time.
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The CEOs hate paying a lot for labor. They view programmers as labor.
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In the late 1960s they began shipping jobs to Singapore as a way to break American labor. In the 1970s this fanned out to other areas in South East Asia. In the 1980s it spread to China. American workers were competing with 3rd world peasants. I read somewhere that they equivalent of 44,000 factories has been relocated from America to China since 1978.
In the 1980s CEOs told workers to go back to school and learn IT. Many did. The up and coming generations moved into IT in heavy numbers.
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Still, during the 1990s, despite the flood of people moving into IT, the cost of IT labor was the only thing growing. Information technology was the highest cost center for most corporations – and still is. (The median wage has remained flat since 1972, thanks to off shoring). It peaked in the run up to 2000. You can bet that the CEO class was smarting to do something about that.
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Then came W: as in G W Bush, and they got their chance. H1B visas, other visas, looking the other way over visa violations all served to drive IT wages down. At one point, around 2004, the CIO of Citicorp bragged that the average cost per hour for IT talent would soon by $25. He was obviously trying to please his boss. Things didn’t work out that way, but they sure did try.
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In fact the economic elite have worked tirelessly to undermine the agencies of various other groups bargaining power: collective bargaining for working class, affordable quality education for the aspiring middle class, inflated quotas and lax enforcement of visas restrictions for technology workers, they even attacked and destroyed ACORN an agency that existed to help the very poor maximize the bargaining power our system affords them, puny as it is. Meanwhile the CEOs enhanced their own bargaining power through deregulation. Keep in mind, they will attack collective bargaining or any other form of collectiveness EXCEPT for collective ownership, otherwise known as the limited liability joint stock corporation. As a form of collective ownership, the corporation gives the rich enormous bargaining power advantages.
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Since 1972, the productivity of the economy has gone up more than 150%, yet wages remain flat. That didn’t happen by accident. But for CEOs the thorniest problem is IT. They can outsource or in source the work to cheap labor, but the labor is of low quality. It never seems to occur to them to work for a fair arrangement where they can coexist with their labor. Perhaps its power they want more than success in managing their companies.
I don’t understand the H1-B problem, and I’d love an explanation.
I’m here on an E3 visa, and the employer needed to prove that Americans were not available to do the job, and that I wasn’t going to be undercutting existing jobs because of wages.
Aren’t there similar requirements on other visa types?
Bob has covered it like probably nobody else. Try reading these (in no particular order):
https://www.cringely.com/2012/10/15/so-sue-us-why-big-companies-like-ibm-arent-afraid-of-h-1b-lawsuits/
https://www.cringely.com/2012/10/23/what-americans-dont-know-about-h-1b-visas-could-hurt-us-all/
https://www.cringely.com/2013/07/18/so-thats-how-h-1b-visa-fraud-is-done/
https://www.cringely.com/2013/04/25/two-h-1bs-walk-into-a-bar-more-on-the-visa-scam/
The first article does NOT completely cover it. It says you won’t dare sue a big corporation over wage discrimination in favor of foreign workers, because the big corp. has an army of lawyers. While that’s one reason, it’s not the main reason.
The main reason is that YOU CANNOT SUE. You do not have a “cause of action”. The law is explicitly written to say that the government can sue, or the foreign worker who is being underpaid can sue, but the US worker losing his job or job opportunity is not allowed to sue. The court will reject the suit for lack of cause of action.
Look it up and read the law. I found it once, you can find it just as easily. It says that in plain enough words that a non-lawyer can see exactly what it means.
well there are similar jokes on other visa types, leading to the same kind of lying…
Based on some Googling, there isn’t much difference between the terms of the E-3 visa and the H-1B, other than the fact that the former is limited to Australian citizens whereas the latter is open to anyone in the world. In practice, the latter is also heavily in demand by Indians (mostly) and Chinese, who make up a significant portion of graduate students in US universities.
Define “prove”.
One could argue that it is exactly the IT revolution that allowed productivity to grow while wages remained flat. Also, the commodification of attention.
Then why haven’t the workers shared in some of that growth? Management surely has.
It is all about bargaining power. What you make is a function of it.
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The other thing your wage is a function of is the pile of money that you are bargaining over. So if you have a big pile and sufficient bargaining power, you will have a nice wage.
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If you have insufficient bargaining power, it doesn’t matter how big the money pile is, your wage will not grow.
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Luckily wages don’t tend to shrink: this is called “sticky wages” and economist have done all kinds of work on this. Its just a phenomina that exists.
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(when a society’s wages are grossly over priced vs productivity, wages don’t go down, instead the currency fluctuates driving down the value of the wage that they earn. This, in short is why Spain has massive unemployment – after the creation of the Euro – tons of money flooded in (mostly for housing) raising wages, then the Great Recession hit, and Spain was stuck with high wages but low productivity. Because of sticky wages, wages don’t go down, so instead employment goes down. Ordinarily the currency would adjust on the international market accordingly to Spain’s productivity, but Spain shares its currency with Germany which won’t allow inflation to occur in the Euro, so they are stuck with high wages and strong currency, ergo high unemployment).
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If bargaining power remains stable, then wages rise with increased productivity – because increased productivity increases the size of the money pile.
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Since American productivity has increased something on the order of 150% from 1972, had worker bargaining power remained where it was at, today’s workers should be earning 150% more than they currently do.
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Because their bargaining power has decreased, the wages have remained flat. Meanwhile CEO and executive pay has gone up 300%. The rest has gone to share holders, 80% of which are the top 0.1%
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High wages? In Spain? Are you kidding?
No, the reason that so many people are unemployed here is that thousands of people dropped out of school at 16 (sometimes younger) to work in the construction sector when it was booming. When the financial crash came, they were left high and dry and without even completing high school. Then, instead of investing in retraining courses and similar, the government spent all the country’s money saving banks.
And wages absolutely have gone down. All public sector employees have had significant pay cuts and while 6 years ago, people used to worry about being ‘mileuristas’ (the average wage for a graduate in expensive cities like Barcelona and Madrid was around €12,000 PA net), many would kill for that kind of wage now.
I’m sorry but while your economic theories may or may not be right, applying them to Spain implies total ignorance of what has happened here.
In the aggregate, wages still are sticky, especially compared to currency fluctuation. Though wages are sticky, but that doesn’t mean they do not decline. If the currency declines, that absorbs much of the shock of a loss of competitiveness. A declining currency still is a decline in pay as all commodities cost more.
The textbook case for this is comparing Ireland and Iceland. Both small economies. One had its own currency the other did not. The one with its own currency bounced back surprisingly quickly, the other still has below 2008 employment levels.
Pay deflation is awkward, takes much much longer, and as you can see, is very painful.
In the alternative, if Spain had had its own currency, it would have had a less painful recession, but if what you say is true, and people fore-went education and training in massive numbers then they would be looking at a painful period even if they had had their own currency – just not as painful – once the building boom ended. Again, a currency that reduces its value is not without pain because the price for commodies all going up.
I was a contractor at Sprint in 2001 when they went around to all the contractors and told them that they would have to accept lower pay. The alternative was losing ones job. On the other hand, I’ve never heard of employees having been overpriced, been given a choice of losing some pay or losing all pay – accept during the great depression (my own grand father went through that – but had a job through the entire depression as an insurance underwriter) – usually companies just do massive layoffs. Perhaps the world would be better if wages were floating point.
That was a real piece of information that you offered. I was unaware that so many people dropped out of school to do construction. I recall a Bruce Springsteen song talking about that… “I got a job doing construction at the Joneston Company, but lately there has been much work, on acount of the economy”…just painful.
You undermine your point trying to make out ACORN as anything else but a socialist / criminal organization.
Some of what you say about bargaining is correct. The ruling class which includes all democrat politicians at higher levels is certainly undermining outsiders bargaining power.
But you are remiss in pointing out Bush and NOT including Obama. Obamao wants to open the flood gates to let a bunch of 3rd world’ers into the country directly.
I suspect this is all because you are a libtard so try harder next time to do better with your reasoning.
Of course what I say is correct – these are more the facts concerning the mechanisms of our society at work and not so much a matter of opinion.
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Socialism is not a crime, per se. All forms of insurance, for instance, are a form of socialism. I pay my car insurance premium; you have an accident; some of my money goes to pay for your car being fixed — or as Marx might have said, from each according to their surplus, to each according to their need, but I say that only to antagonize you 😉 Now, some forms of socialism are private, some are semi-private, some are non-profit, some are public, and the case of Social Security, you have an insurance policy run by the government, not for profit, universally applied. Without Social Security, the Phoenix metropolitan area would have cratered after 2008, but fortunately many old people that lived there kept receiving their Social Security checks even as the economy itself cratered.
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Basically, ACORN was founded by a bunch of rich, liberal church ladies (something about some Christian ethic to help the poor, or some such thing) who wanted to help the poor. As rich people, they knew all about manipulating the levers of societies bargaining power. They just wanted to help the poor do the same. What drove ACORN out of existence was a scam that was, on a moral level, a crime. The only people who really have a grudge against ACORN where the wealthy on the right, and the people that haul their water.
In regard to Obama, most liberal/progressives are unsatisfied with him because he is too far to the right – that’s why he has low poll numbers but wins elections anyway (most liberals don’t like him but see Obama as the lesser of two evils). Obama himself has said that if you look at his policy positions, he’s farther to the right than Richard Nixon was.
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I agree with what you say both Republicans and Democrats like to import people. Republicans because they undermine the bargaining power of labor – and lets face it, a lot of people vote Republican for single issues, but the only issue Republicans pursue and realize is that of the very wealthiest. Democrats like immigration because they believe today’s immigrants are tomorrow’s democrats (or their children) – this could be no truer than it is today: most immigrants are non white, and nearly all non-white racial groups, be they from East Asia or South Asia or Latin America react the same way to ethno-white chauvinism from the Republican party as one might imagine African-Americans do – they vote at something like 90% for Democrats.
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I am a liberal progressive, because I want more bargaining power for ordinary people, of which I am one. I think a “tard” label should be applied to someone who votes against their interest. In general Republicans work to shift societies resources upwards and Democrats work to shift societies resources downward to ordinary people. Most of that shifting is a reflection of bargaining power, I maintain. Evidence supports that shifting resources upwards does not enhance my bargaining power nor create more jobs (redundant). There are lots of lists out there showing job creation by the party in power. Since before WWII, the best Republican administration (I believe it was Reagan) did worse than the worst Democratic administration (I believe that was Carter – yes, deep down you know its true, too, the rate of job creation was greater during the Carter years than during the Reagan years – I know, I have Republican friends, its hard to swallow).
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I don’t take exception to the “tard” label. Vote your self interest, as you are supposed to do in a representative system, and let the “tard” label fall where it will. If you or anyone else can convince me that my self interest is better served by voting for conservatives/republicans, I will of course do that. But the evidence is running pretty heavily the other way.
Thank you TimKa for an intellectually honest answer to someone that has, instead of using intellect to argue his case, resorted to the name calling that most of the intellectually bankrupt members of his party choose to use. I didn’t know who I was politically when I returned to the US after 30 years living abroad and it took me quite a while trying on the arguments of each party to realize that neither party represents me totally. Unfortunately there are too many that see it as a us versus them.
I agree with you it is all about bargaining power and feel that the captains of our economy just don’t get it that a good economy comes from empowering us middle class programmers, and other folk, with a good wage so that we can buy the goods that they wish to sell. Most economists whose opinions I have read say that it is consumers that keep an economy nicely afloat yet the short-sightedness of those that always seek to oppress labor is totally unproductive if not ruiness. H1-B is an example of a policy that makes more money for the company at the same times it damages the economy of the nation.
Face it America you are no longer a democracy but a corporate state mascarading as a democracy. Corps rule. Bad news – as long as there is huge income disparity around the world US corp’s will pile on the H1-B visas. Good news – only about 50 years or so before China and India grow so big that their companies will headhunt you to work for them… maybe even less than that.
550 million people actually voted in the last Indian election. I’m still awed by that number. They gave their new MP a massive mandate. Let’s see what the end result of that is… maybe democracy still works!
There were no H1B visas before George W Bush? That’s news to a lot of people.
There were, of course. The quotta’s went up, the enforcement went down, as you might expect when a business friendly candidate becomes president. That’s why they say “elections have consequences”.
Actually the H1B visa quota went down quite rapidly after Bush’s election. It peaked at around 195k/year (I think in 2001) and within a couple of years was down to 65k/year, which is where it has stayed since (other than a US advanced degree quota of an additional 20k/year.)
“The CEOs hate paying a lot for labor”
They do not mind being payed for their labor:
‘In 1979, International Harvester was the fourth-largest company in the US when. McCardell was named CEO and chairman and one of the highest-paid CEOs in the country. He was charged with shaking up the company to increase profitability. McCardell fired 11,000 of the company’s 15,000 managers, whom McCardell felt were too close to UAW shop stewards. McCardell actions led to record sales of $8.4 billion and record profits.’
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“Perhaps its power they want more than success in managing their companies.”
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True – By 1980-82, IH had incurred a combined three-year loss of $2.4 billion—the largest such three-year loss for any American company in history at the time. Pushed by the company’s debtor banks, the board finally agreed to fire McCardell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_McCardell#International_Harvester
“The CEOs hate paying a lot for labor”
They do not mind being payed for their labor:
‘In 1979, International Harvester was the fourth-largest company in the US when. McCardell was named CEO and chairman and one of the highest-paid CEOs in the country. He was charged with shaking up the company to increase profitability. McCardell fired 11,000 of the company’s 15,000 managers, whom McCardell felt were too close to UAW shop stewards. McCardell actions led to record sales of $8.4 billion and record profits.’
“Perhaps its power they want more than success in managing their companies.”
True:
By 1980-82, IH incurred a combined three-year loss of $2.4 billion—the largest such three-year loss for any American company in history at the time. Pushed by the company’s debtor banks, the board finally agreed to fire McCardell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_McCardell#International_Harvester
“Deregulation” is not what these CEOs are looking for. Large companies complain about regulation like Sarbanes-Oxley, but they really don’t mind. Big companies can afford the phalanx of lawyers that regulation costs, but small companies can’t. This creates a barrier to entry in the market, reducing the big companies’ need to innovate. It’s their version of the “moat” that Cringely was describing earlier.
How can you graduate in 2014 and later do a PhD ? That would be a fast one 🙂
I wondered about that. Maybe he just won the alumni award in 2014?
I think he meant the person was a featured speaker to the graduating class of 2014. I believe the fellow with the PhD graduated years earlier.
Great insight. I simply want to point out that from the hiring standpoint HR does the same to all professions all the time. I am a physician, division director, in a moderate-sized academic medical center. We have the same issue for every job we try to fill. The certificate that says you can, even if you can’t, is the company mandated ticket to the job interview. My best hires have been those who we found in other ways and made offers to attract. At least, though, our HR doesn’t try to screen my applicants for faculty level positions; they seem to have been rebuffed often enough. I wonder if IT division directors rebuff HR? Maybe that should be the tactic. Ignore them long enough, send back their recommendations often enough, hire from other channels often enough, and perhaps they will back down and go on hiring the clerical staff that they may be somewhat qualified to assess.
On the flip side, when I needed to fire the employee who repeatedly came to work inebriated, shirked responsibility, openly defied her boss, and ultimately stalked out never to return, HR gave the employee family and medical leave, kept her on the payroll (my budget, of course), even allowed her to participate in the departmental bonus. This is what they are good for. When I said that I fired her and wanted her really fired, they whined over being sued, even though every incident had been recorded, and we had already given her family and medical leave time for rehab. It took 5 months to get this ineffective, fired employee completely off my payroll.
I think you are giving HR tomuch credit/blame. I’ve worked primarily in IT at very large corporations to very small and everything in between. About a dozen companies in the last 30 years, and in every case HR was minimally involved in my selection.
It’s IT managers that make the hiring decisions. HR does the administrative work, that should not be underestimated, it a lot of work involved in the hiring process. HR is there to ensure policies and laws are complied with during the hiring process. The same is true for FTE reduction. It’s IT again making the choice of who to let go., and in IT usually the people with high salaries and grey hair.
One thing you left out was the outsourcing of sourcing. I get multiple calls per day (literally everyday), from offshore call centers, usually all the calls are for the same job. If I’m interested I call them back, send them an updated resume and never hear from them again.
One thing you missed is the influence of foreign workers. They often come through headhunters who might keep half of their wages, so they really push these people onto HR. On the other hand many companies are dominated by foreign programmers on the IT side. So if HR asked them to interview candidates they pick more foreign people. The foreign people often don’t go through HR so they avoid the problems that you mentioned, not having the exact requirements, degree, or even having a criminal background etc. This is an area that needs regulation.
More regulation is the last thing we need. Regulation made HR important. More regulation would make HR *more* important, which would increase the need for *more* workarounds.
Find a way for HR to do its job *right*.
Maybe better heuristics that correlate the performance ratings of existing employees with their demographic and educational characteristics?
I’m not sure how much of a factor this is. What is a huge factor is that a significant fraction (even a majority) of graduate students in US universities are foreigners, and are in the job market on level terms with Americans. Such people are not susceptible to the wiles of shady headhunters, and usually negotiate very good salaries from companies. Don’t know what percentage of all H1B workers fall in this category though.
“Such people are not susceptible to the wiles of shady headhunters, and usually negotiate very good salaries from companies.” By “such people” do you mean grad students or foreign grad students? Why would they be “less susceptible”?
I meant foreign grad students. Honestly, I’m not even sure who falls for the “wiles of headhunters”. I assumed it referred to people who had never live in, or even visited, the US. Foreign grad students who have spent a few years in the country already know the lay of the land, make friends and connections, go for internships, and if they choose to seek employment, have more than enough opportunity to do so in direct ways (one being through campus offers.)
Why do I say this? Because I used to be a foreign grad student who sought and obtained many job offers, and virtually all the foreign students I knew in my field or related fields did. No one I know went through shady headhunters, or was exploited, or got a low salary at hire. My experiences may not be statistically relevant, but I don’t believe they are outliers.
As for this state of affairs, I don’t know what you (or Mr. Cringely) think about it. Definitely, foreign graduate students create more competition in the job market, though I don’t know any American student in my circle who lacked for job offers either. Now, my experience may be skewed because I went to a highly ranked school, but that’s the only perspective I can provide. If you don’t like what’s going on here, you probably should lobby your congressional representatives to have foreign students prohibited from seeking jobs. Otherwise everything that happens here is above board and very legal.
I worked as an IT hiring manager in Higher Ed (a world famous school with multiple Nobel winners) for a decade. I was also a volunteer at many graduation ceremonies. America has always graduated more citizen STEM students than it has jobs for. The foreigners are mostly the children of the third world rich. A small percentage of their home countries, but a huge number compared to our population. Many, many of them are specially recruited, find it hard, change their major, and eventually flunk out. .
The idea that Americans are no good, have it too good, and can’t compete with foreigners is another myth. What is happening is that foreigners are being preferentially recruited because it is a better financial deal for the universities. They are also taking up seats that your child and mine could have done well in, as they will do later in our workforce. This is especially unfair in the case of land grant schools (like Cornell).
What’s the main difference between a foreign STEM grad of an American university and a citizen STEM grad of the same university? The foreign STEM grad is recruited into a choice American job, whereas the American STEM grad often has to move home and wait tables. There needs to be an investigation of this.
After thirty-six years at the Itty Bitty Machine Co. and having dealt with customers that ranged from, literally, four man shops up to its biggest commercial customer (which has a minimum of 5k Indian IT staff on-site any given day because it won’t pay what it would take to lure citizens to the Middle of Nowhere to fill the jobs …) I’ll just throw my requisite cup of accelerant on the fire by stating there’s absolutely no shortage of IT skills in the workforce. H1B visas just drive down wages because, really? In my experience (I’m not saying in your experience and I am not referring to you personally) the skills of those visa holders are grossly over-rated. Their real skill is they’re cheap.
The HR problem is not just the problem of the IBMs of the world, but it is also a problem for the people who are on the H1-B visas.
I once came into a company and discovered that my predecessor had employed a large number of H1-B holders as virtual wage slaves, beholden to the company, vastly underpaid, and frightened of rocking the boat. Fixing that mess in the staff I inherited was no picnic, and it really opened my eyes to this problem.
The fix included sending some home, because we really didn’t need foreign workers for the level and quality of contribution they were making. The fix also included identifying the two whose contribution it was difficult to replace and raising their wages for the remainder of their employment, one of which went home but continued to work for the company.
And finally the fix included a lot of discussions with the general counsel about what was happening and remediation action. It certainly consumed a lot of time and energy that would never had been expended if the company had just hired Americans to do the jobs in the first place, and the dollar cost of the fix certainly consumed any “savings” using wage slaves ever generated.
I’ll toast to you Moe. The former owner of my current company got the bug for outsourcing to a certain former Soviet republic because, my right hand to God, he got a mail-order bride from there (or whatever we call it these days). While in Soviet Cheapistan, he loved that, by flashing some good ol’ U.S. cash dollars, he could bribe his way into or out of any situation.
Anyway, he misaddressed an email one time, and I got to read his actual words on the subject. “I don’t care if 80% of what they do is crap. It’s $10 a billable hour so it’s still cheaper.”
At least he was honest about it.
Yeh I know this song, 40 years in hi tech industry, Electronics,Avionics,Network operations exc, recent grad in CS and going for masters and got laid off after a big customer left. When they say we are hiring recent grads they really mean young people only, never even get a chance to show any code or skills. Guess I will have to go teach at a local school or work for the state 🙁
A few years ago, the development team in which I’m the technical lead needed to be roughly doubled in size to tackle some major new projects. The only part of the recruitment process handled by HR was fielding the contact with the recruitment agencies. The rest fell on my desk – it took about 25% of my time for a couple of months to screen 250 resumes, conduct about 100 telephone interviews, schedule and run about 40 face-to-face all-day interviews (special geographic circumstances mean we can’t do first- and second- interviews; we’re on an island). So my point is that if you want to eliminate HR from the hiring process so that you at least get to see every resume submitted, you’ve got to be prepared to invest the time of someone who’s in a position to do the job with a modicum of perspective and experience.
It’s all very well complaining that candidates miss out because they don’t fit the heuristic matches, but you’ll have to put in some real time and effort to do it any other way.
(p.s. love the implementation of the edit/delete button with a timer)
The discussion of HR being largely female in juxtaposition to a male-dominated IT strikes me as sexist in two ways: there’s the underlying sexism of the industry, and then there’s Bob’s commentary on it, which seems to me to be borderline dismissive.
Facts are not sexist.
But the selection of which facts to present can be sexist.
Especially if gender isn’t really relevant to the issue at hand. The real issue is the lack of the technical expertise required to evaluate the candidates appropriately.
But it’s true. The companies that have HR departments are invested in having a ‘diverse’ workplace, so they will hire lots of women where they can. In terms of programmer hires, women will get better offices and other perks. That HR doesn’t have a clue about engineering is not surprising either.
Compare a typical HR interviewer with a Microsoft interviewer(probably male) and it is no contest.
Great post bob. Indeed the HR department does not have the experience to hire the right man for the job. I have seen many programmers getting hired who were not qualified for the job. I think it’s a good idea that these companies who’s HR department makes a mess of it should be told to other people who are appliying for a job at that same company so that they know what they can expect. The HR department has grown from a simple payroll department to a hire playground where they don’t look at the person if he or she is qualified to take the job. Nowadays if you have a phd with no practical experience you make a better chance getting the job than some one who programmed his whole life but has no degree.
If information technology human resources departments would use humans of any sex to do the initial filtering, it would be an improvement. Mostly they use bots.
Venture Capitalists also contribute to age discrimination. They prefer to find companies with young white men, like themselves.
I work for our local electric utility, and we are forced by the federal, state, and local governments to include some useless steps in our hiring process that enable the governments to win check marks on the reports they are mandated to complete in support of their jobs programs. The software supporting these jobs programs doesn’t have rooms or fields enough to list sufficient detail about the qualifications for the position, thereby enabling people without proper qualifications to flood us with resumes to which we are required to respond, yet we are required to hire a candidate that was identified through the job programs.
When hiring our network administrator last year, I followed all of the requirements of the program, but I convinced my HR manager to allow me to post a proper job description on Craigslist, with instructions in the Craigslist ad for interested candidates to apply through the local jobs center.
That approach worked well, but it is a real shame that the jobs center system is so inefficient and, frankly, ineffective for this role.
We should have known something was wrong when the changed the name of the department from “Personnel” to “Human Resources” — just something else to poorly manage like tables and chairs.
That change in terminology always bothered me as well, speaking as one with over 30 years working as a hardware design engineer.
Not defending HR (or maybe it’s another problem with HR) but many companies have a “pick a body” attitude when it comes to hiring, especially at the entry level. In other words, you have X amount of time to hire someone. If you don’t fill the position in that amount of time, it is withdrawn and you get to start over again, usually with the next budget. HR sends you crap from tech schools who’s recruiters speak their language. If you don’t like any of the candidates and don’t have anyone in mind already, you have to pick one of the pile from the tech school (who all have exactly the same resume’ and references). Just to make it even more interesting, none of them will have any interviewing skills and will just give you the same stock answers to your questions. Then when they don’t work out, because HR “recommended” them, they double down and start picking apart your management skills instead of “managing” their “resource.”
Remember, it’s call Human Resources, not Human Beings. You’re no different than coal and iron ore to them.
I haven’t even read the other comments. Maybe someone else said it. You’re way off base here. HR is there to serve management and management is quite aware of how they operate. To suggest that this is the work of a bunch of uninformed women down in HR is ridiculous. If you had stayed around corporate America long enough without getting fired yourself, you wouldn’t have written such a column. This is all about money and not some management/HR disconnect.
Along those lines, my son tells me that these days, all the buzzwords that any job requires are in his resume at the bottom in very small white font. HR people can’t see them but computers read them just fine.
Phillip: I’ve read the other comments and you did not duplicate any of them because you are off-base. The jobs I’ve gotten in tech have all been through knowing someone who knows the hiring manager or is the hiring manager. My firends all say the same thing.
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One friend of mine — an electrical engineer — was sure he was taylor-made for a position based on the job description. When he did not get a call-back, he contacted the HR person and was told that his resume did not mention DSP. He had made the mistake of writing it as “Digital Signal Processing”. Other commenters have mentioned this “keyword” problem.
In good companies, HR is QA on management. That role is not executed in almost all companies. It requires asking the subordinates of the manager about the manager’s effectiveness. Not popular with anyone except us workers.
I think the HR problem with hiring IT personnel has several causes and possible work arounds.
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1. Top management may not understand IT and may not even be concerned with producing the best products. They may be concerned primarily with increasing their own compensation by raising the market value of their company’s shares.
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2. Governments may be imposing all kinds of silly rules and regulations concerning the employees of companies that the HR department has to implement.
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3. Perhaps IT groups need to do more to promote the value of their highly skilled profession. Maybe they could put on free seminars to educate the HR staff.
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4. Perhaps IT professionals should try to avoid the HR problems by shifting their focus to using personal contacts with high ranking IT professionals within targeted companies.
There are no HR departments anymore. Most are 3rd party recruiters who run scans on Monster, Dice, Careerbuilder and Linkedin, looking for keywords in the resumes. Many hiring managers create job descriptions for “purple squirrels” which discourages alot of IT folks from applying because they don’t have “all” of the experience. Some computer languages have only been existence 5 or more years, yet they want 10 years experience. The other issue is that if a contract is offered in another state, the person may not want to move because if it is a contract they don’t know how long that will be and if it is permanent they don’t know when they will be laid off. Another issue is that some IT departments are looking for people like them so they screen out candidates who are not like them, i.e. women. As people find jobs in other states because they are unable to sell their house or move they are renting rooms which puts a strain on families. There is much more to the IT GAP as they say between jobs and candidates!
In the late 70’s I started working for one of the first companies in the 3D computerized motion capture business – we sold systems worldwide that performed 3D motion capture and biomechanics analysis. My job was installation, service and support – I have no degree, but I installed, debugged and serviced these systems worldwide for twenty years, training engineers, physicians, professors and others to use 3D motion capture and 3D analysis before leaving to found my own company. When I left the company they replaced me with five employees to do the work that I had been doing single handed. I can design and write both software and hardware and I’m very good at fault-finding both disciplines.
In the years since I left the 3D mocap company I’ve seen my job advertised many times – and each time they advertise it they ask for minimum qualifications that would mean that if I were to apply for my old job, my resume would be one of the first discarded.
Amen.
Virgil
Keep America At Work
I have this discussion with my brother-in-law.
He can’t get developers for his group, they’re like gold dust. Not getting any good candidates.
I’m exactly the kind of developer he’d be looking for (although I don’t live nearby, so I’m no good in this specific situation), but I can’t even seem to get an interview.
Something disconnected there.
Why is this thread not on Forbes?
It is. H1-Bs are “good” for tech workers…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2014/01/22/immigrant-high-tech-workers-not-costing-us-jobs/
“About the author Dina Gerdeman is a writer based in Mansfield, Massachusetts.”
The only management book worth more than the paper it is written on is “Up the Organization” by Bob Townshend, how made Avis the number 2 car hire company. His recommondation w.r.t. the “personnel dept” is, in its entirety: “Fire them all”.
After 3 decades in the business I’ve developed an orthogonal view of hiring, based on having the most success at finding work by building a network of technology professionals who refer good people around. The HR groups or hiring manager should be facilitating what is needed, not increasing friction. Most companies I’ve encountered have not developed a system of nurturing and fostering and hiring technical talent. Smart technical people should be able to figure this out but hardly anyone bothers. My take on a job interview is that I am interviewing you, if you send someone who either hasn’t looked at my resume or who knows nothing about my skills, to ask me dumb questions I’m giving you a failing grade. I’ve been astonished to interview at some highly regarded tech companies where they waste my time by sending unprepared junior people to ask me silly trick questions or tell me about their chef!
The more that a company that depends on technology the more it needs to have the skill of acquiring and nurturing technical talent. Given that the lifespan of nearly every company is much less than a human life and how quickly technology changes, this seems of critical importance for tech companies. Every time I’ve encountered the “all programmers are equivalent blocks of resources” mentality I know that the product they are building is going to fail. Every time. I’ve seen it over and over and over.
The IT guys can make a decision on hiring, but they are not allowed to call the person. I got an e-mail asking me to call the HR people, because I had totally mised their first attempt at contacting me.
HR is the moat to the corporate castle.
So true.
Let me show you something else that is happening.
http://keepamericaatwork.com/?page_id=259
I’ve been in technology for more than twenty years, the last seven of which have been as a programmer for a very large, successful and prestigious company in Silicon Valley. In my career I’ve interviewed several hundred people for programming jobs, at companies ranging in size from five people up to 100K people, and I have to say that I don’t buy that there’s a glut of programming talent that’s simply being overlooked. If there is I certainly don’t how to find them, and believe me, I and all my overworked colleagues would love to.
Until you’ve repeatedly had the experience of asking someone with an impressive-looking resume a simple question like “what’s the difference between a stack and queue?” and been met with silence, you really can’t appreciate how many people there are out there who are vastly overstating their qualifications. I have no college degree (and before I dropped out of school I was a history major) and yet somehow I managed to get hired, so if you have the skills, a lack of an advanced degree from the right school is not a meaningful barrier to being employed in technology.
I agree that the H1B program is crap. Instead of making the visas temporary and preventing the people who receive them from switching jobs, we should be putting people who qualify on a path to permanent residency, and citizenship for those who want it, and allowing them to switch jobs at will so they’re not tied to a particular employer. You don’t want to drive down the wages of American workers? Fine, rewrite the rules so they’re very simple. If you can get a job at, say, twice the median US wage, then you’re welcome to come here. If you pay your taxes and don’t get convicted of a felony for ten years, you get permanent residency. Twenty years and you get citizenship.
The biggest mistake a lot of people make in technical interviews is acting like they’re screening for a job that’s actually difficult for the people doing the role. Admit it… day to day what you do, you find easy. Whomever you hire, you hope to god will find it easy, or you failed and hired a cruddy person. You’re looking for someone else who can acquire the relevant trivia quickly and work as efficiently as you.
I say this in response to your comment, because as someone who did some mid-career interviews 10+ years out of school, I feel like a fumbled a few of this little trivial questions. Because they’d been irrelevant for 10 years. And sure, it was weird to be saying “dunno” while also correctly thinking “I could do your job better than you in a few weeks,” but it’s also true.
Most jobs simply aren’t difficult. Yet most engineers thrown into an interviewer’s role end up asking stupid trivia questions that delve into little more than the facile trivia about whatever their most recent bout of dealing with obscure (but not difficult) problems was. What they should be looking for is someone who can *be* an expert and extremely efficient in short manner, yet they interview like they’re looking for someone who already knows everything down to the gnat’s ass. And that’s not to say the brain teaser shit’s any better. They really ought to be asking what seems like idle chitchat… “what challenges did you have?” “Did you find your job difficult?” “How did you make yourself work more efficiently” but engineers, in my experience, ask none of that to experienced people… the HR people seem to think everyone’s asking that sort of thing but engineers never do.
They ask trite shit about stacks and queues. Engineers suck at screening people, too.
And there in is why just about why so may hiring decisions are made outside the process where a company interviews random people with no social contacts in the company. The social contacts make up for that in saying, “this is someone who has done the role successfully and efficiently and doesn’t suck at it.” Engineers and HR are both shitty at creating processes that figure that out for random internet applicants.
Bruce, the H1B visa already has a green card track option. A half-decent employee working in a half-decent (not shady) company can get his employer to sponsor him for a green card. While the green card is being processed, the employee can stay in the country. That said, I agree with you that this visa is crap, and both restricts employee freedom and undercuts the job market. The problem is that any proposal for increase in green card numbers is a political no-no. The H1B program was instituted precisely for this purpose back in the 90s, to avoid the inevitable political fights that would result if increases in green cards were proposed. It was politically more palatable to propose a temporary visa than a permanent one. There is a country-based quota for permanent residency, and changing those quotas (necessary if you look at the breakup of foreign IT job applicants) has wider ramifications.
From a business point of view in a larger company, HR departments make sense just as IT departments make sense. IT depts exists to provide a central point of control and to direct the corporate IT strategy. Without it, there is chaos as everyone does their own thing. Recruiting is the same since having every manager do their own recruiting would be chaotic for a large company. While most programmers might not know about payrol of inventory control, at least in the it world we have analysts whose job it is is to understand that stuff and translate it into what the techies need to know (at least that’s how it worked when I was growing up in this world). I suspect the problem with HR is that there is often no intermediary experts involved so they rely on software and keyword searches to filter out the noise from the good stuff. Maybe if they called themselves ‘Human Relations’ instead of Human resources, HR people might figure out that there needs to be a personal relationship component for them to really do their job and that maybe software really isn’t cutting it.
After all, if the software gets to be good enough, why would you even need people in HR in the first place. Now THERE’S an idea!
How is it relevant for your (convincing) analysis that it is mostly women in HR? The problem seems – and I can confirm from my own experience even as a non-programmer – that HR is clueless most of the time.
I agree, Jan. That shouldn’t matter. Men following the same rules/methods should be precisely as incompetent. I’d like Bob to take a few minutes the explain exactly what he means.
Bob’s says “You’ll find the departments are predominantly staffed with women and few, if any, of those women have technical degrees.” I suspect he means the predominance of women is just a clue that HR is not staffed by people with technical degrees. If they were all men, for example, you would have to look harder to determine whether or not they have technical degrees. He’s not being prejudiced, just being aware of statistical probabilities.
[…] By Robert X. Cringely […]
Bob, I work for the three letter IT company you love to write about. One could assume that this company is particularly terrible when it comes to hiring but for the very few people that get hired that isn’t the case. I have to say I work for the R&D arm in Germany for that company and maybe there are some fundamental differences between the US and Germany when it comes to how people are hired. First of all we have many university programs and relations and almost all the people that I got hired in the past decade come from those programs. The ratio of students to regular employees in my department is about 40%, meaning for every 10 regular employees we have about 4 students. These students are either interns, part of a dual vocational training program we are so successful with in Germany or work on their BSc, MSc or PhD theses with topics of interest to us so we sponsor them. Some are even part of a very competitive program called extreme “color” (where the color is the color of the company I work for). It is very common that students start with an internship and then continue on with their thesis, some of them we work with for 2-3 years until they finish their studies. Some even get to do an internship in one of our Global R&D Labs. Me and the Mentors that work with them every day get “points” for technical leadership that positively impacts our careers. It is a win-win-win (Mentor, Mentee and my company). HR plays a very small role in the entire process, yes they get to interview a candidate before we hire them but usually that is a formality at this point. I want to share one exception however, the most valuable genius on my team has terrible verbal communication skills, he failed the HR assessment. We still found a way to keep him on and have a plan to hire him despite the HR veto but the process got lenghtier. I should also share that 95% of the hiring I see are college hires, hiring someone with professional experience is much more difficult. But since we have a training program and pipeline full of talent this doesn’t matter that much.
My nephew worked for a company as an unpaid intern for quite a while. They then hired him and he was finally getting a small paycheck until they had him train the next unpaid intern and promptly laid him off. He is now unemployed… again. Is the unpaid internship the new slave labor?
Peter Schiff was on the Daily Show explaining to Jon Stewart how the minimum wage kills jobs, especially for the poorest and least skilled. Stewart asked him who would actually work for $2 an hour? He responded, probably the unpaid interns you have on your show, and the mentally retarded. They cut the part about the unpaid interns.
I was recently laid off from an e-commerce firm which went bankrupt. And while I agree that the HR department and headhunters do not always understand what they are hiring for, and while my job is not specifically IT (I’m a business analyst working within IT), I can tell you my experience with HR and headhunters was entirely different. They were on us like flies on honey despite us being unemployed. Several of my HR contacts specifically mentioned knowing of the layoffs and preparing to take advantage. They looked at it as an opportunity.
Most of the IT people I worked with had similar experiences. This was not the case for the business folks, who had a much tougher time. Now that I am employed, I get much less contact from headhunters than I did when I was unemployed. Perhaps it is my region or perhaps it is the special circumstance of a bankruptcy related layoff, but I didn’t experience this at all.
The most important job of a manager is assembling a top-notch team. If she outsources the recruiting of candidates to HR her success will be limited and the company will suffer. Managers must embrace recruiting or they are just managers on paper.
That is all well and good if your company allows that to take place. I started at a subsidiary of a multinational corporation. In the first decade it was like working at a small company – we had about 300 employees – and we had every function a normal company would have – including our own IT, Personnel, Marketing, Operations etc departments.
It was very good for about 14 years…then it went downhill fast after the subsidiary was disbanded – and the groups merged into the main corporation. Am I frustrated? Yes – because I spend way too many cycles managing bureaucracy – instead of building/mentoring my team. My hands are tied when it comes to hiring – I am required to go through HR to get anyone in the door for an interview – much less make them an offer.
Don’t blame the hiring manager for circumstances beyond their control – this problem is systematic and beyond the efforts of the best attempts to go around the problem.
Another point: you can’t hire yourself out of trouble.
The most important job of a leader (manager is a bureaucrat – and I’m not one of those) – is to take the resources that are available to him – and inspire, mentor, train, and otherwise build them up to be the best team that they can be. Most times you don’t have the luxury of starting from scratch and assembling a winning team. If you are a new manager – your goal should be to take over the team you have – and build it up to something greater than the sum of its parts.
That means recognizing people as human beings, and putting them in the best position to succeed. Most people will respond if you’re not a disingenuous rat.
The only part of this article I really disagree with is the part at the end where Bob says “for the most part unknown by the rest of society.” I don’t know where Bob got that idea, but pretty much every savvy person who’s been working in the technology industry for a decade or two has figured out by now that the single biggest impediment to a company hiring qualified candidates is the department itself that does the hiring. I’ve heard this idea more times than I can count in most of the companies I’ve worked for.
At a company I used to work for, a co-worker of mine who’d graduated from a world-leading university complained that he kept getting his hiring references rejected. He knew a lot of very smart people who’d also graduated from the same university, and so he would suggest them as potential hires, but the hiring manager kept rejecting them because “they don’t have any relevant work experience.” This was a company that worked with a rather specific type of software, and the chances of us getting an application from someone with extensive experience in this niche field were low. From the perspective of my university-grad co-worker, it made sense to hire people who had graduated from a top-tier university since that showed that they had the ability to learn new concepts and work with them dynamically. But for some reason the hiring manager tended to hire people that seemed to be poorly matched to the job.
I finally realized that things were way off kilter when I was personally asked to assist in interviewing a particularly qualified candidate. He was an older gentleman who had about 20 years working with our particular branch of software. That’s a rare find. The guy was probably one of the few people in our region (maybe the world) who knew more about our field than I did. After the interview, I spoke with the hiring manager and said “It’s obvious that he knows what he’s talking about. He had all the answers to all the interview questions.” The hiring manager nodded and said “That’s what I figured. He’s too experienced. We don’t think he’d stick around if he got hired here.” I thought he was joking at first, but sure enough, we ended up not hiring the guy. I doubt that anyone could have found a better candidate anywhere, and so they rejected him out of the fear that he was too good to stay with us.
When it comes to HR, mass hysteria seems to be the rule. They’re trained on things like administering benefits (healthcare and dental) and workplace law, and as Bob says, they honestly want to help and believe that they’re doing good work, but most of them lack the faintest clue on how to actually select good candidates for a position. Most job seekers learned years ago that the only way to get a good fit within a company is to go over the heads of the HR department altogether.
If it were known to “the rest of society” the problem wouldn’t exist. Why pay good money to an entire department (HR) if in trying to do their best they are making things worse? I suspect that is Bob’s point about the problem being “unknown”.
Why not have a department that makes things worse? We pay a lot more money for entire federal agencies that make things worse all the while with the best of intentions.
Bob’s comments match the sexist stereotype that existed from the 60s/70s onward and still exists in some part and in some places today. HR is a gatekeeper and very little else. They help obfuscate the process because most companies want to do some things that aren’t 100% pure and HR are always the folks who help them cover it. The lack of HR professionalism is facilitated by the quid pro quo inherent with co-conspiritors; the main carrot management can offer is tenure and ever-increasing power/control despite any drawbacks or widening gaps between the current HR skill set and gradually increasing industry norms.
Age discrimination is real and has been a problem for many years. This is such an easy thing to check it is amazing there has been so little enforcement of US laws in this area. The same can be said about H1B’s. There are a lot of new college graduates who can find jobs too.
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It is true humans don’t read the first rounds of job applications. The best way to bypass the filtering process is to take the job description and edit it slightly to your situation. Sad but true.
My father worked for AT&T for forever, responsible for their internal training. Back in the day, AT&T and companies like it recognized that there were not enough candidates with the direct experience they desired. What did they do? They hired smart people and trained them in the skills that were needed. AT&T’s training department was (is?) huge.
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I think the companies pushing for more H1-B’s are taking the view that people need to come with the skills they desire. But really, how many IT folks can’t pick up most of the skills a job requires with a little training and reading a few manuals. Companies just don’t know how to figure out which candidates are smart.
Totally sexist post, blaming the women in HR. You might as well say they only hire good looking men, not smart ones. The problem is HR process, resumes, etc., are filters. First off, any filter can be gamed. Second, at the elite levels no filter is a reliable indicator of ability.
I can only speak for myself, but I got laid off from a large hard drive manufacturer in early December 2013 as part of a large R.I.F. I pretty much took the rest of the month off and started looking in earnest once the new year started (LinkedIn “job seeker” account at around $30/mo.).
Luckily I had several competing offers by the middle of January and I didn’t have to take a pay cut.
I think it is all about playing the “buzzword bingo” game. I always try to get familiar enough with hot technologies to credibly put them on my resume, which seems to work. As one example: in order to get an earlier job, I had to have “EMC” on my resume. Luckily I had played with an old CX300 for enough time to put it on there. However, the job I was hired for ended up being “all NetApp, all the time” and I never had to touch an EMC product.
I’m in my mid-40’s so maybe I haven’t quite reached the age discrimiation yet?
I maintain that most of these companies really don’t need the people they say they do. I think in a lot of cases they think, we would like to get more software or installs or work done on the network so we must need more people? Yet they have learned since the great Web debacle of the 90s to do with less, wait just a little longer to get things done. Also they have decided in a lot of places what the prevailing wage is, and that is what they will pay. A company in the berg where I live, I kid you not had an ad for a .NET programmer experienced with ASP.NET. I have that so being recently unemployed I applied. Now this was at a rate half of what the same person would expect to make in Silicon Valley. The interview started very well, I answered their question well, gave them my experience on projects, work ethic then we started the add ons. How much experience did I have with Active Directory, how much managing a large SQL DB, did I have experience with PCL controllers???? It seemed at that point they were just seeing how much they could get on the cheap, and since I didn’t quite have enough….. That job I know went unfilled for well over a year. The job would change, sometimes their HR department, sometimes a head hunter, I do not know if they actually ever hired someone. Like economist say if there was a true shortage, they would start raising wages to poach people from other companies and that is sure not happening!
Bob will you do some digging here
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/sierra-nevada-challenges-nasas-space-taxi-deal-spacex-boeing-n212916
I wonder if there isn’t something of a chicken and egg problem going on. Another comment above touched on this: sure, you could cut out HR, but then an *enormous*, time-consuming burden falls on the hiring managers. Has anyone ever seen just how many resumes come in? Then there’s the phone tennis for scheduling phone screens, and all the logistics management that goes with scheduling an onsite interview.
My previous job was at a Fortune 100 manufacturing company. I helped with an IT *intern* recruiting event from just *one* college. I don’t remember how many resumes we collected, but it took about six people three hours just to make a quick first pass and cut the stack down to 50 or so resumes worth looking at more closely.
Now I work for a small company (about 40 people), and I see our HR staff spending the majority of their time just filtering through resumes.
HR-based hiring does indeed suffer from the problems Bob enumerates. But I think that’s created a negative feedback loop of sorts, where job-hunters know that; so they all take the “shotgun approach” to resume submission, literally blasting their resume out to every single job opening (even those that are only marginally related to their interests and/or qualifications).
As a hiring manager (and someday job-seeker), I do agree that the best way to hire or get hired is from one’s network: “Hey, you’re good at XYZ, my hiring-manager friend is looking for someone who knows something about that, let me introduce you.” But the problem for me—and I can’t imagine I’m alone here—is that I already work 50+ hours a week at my for-pay job; I also have a wife and two young children: where’s the time for building this big professional network that’s going to land me my dream candidate or dream job? Not to mention, I’m an introvert.
Maybe recruiters are supposed to fill this void? But in my experience, they don’t really care about finding and placing the right candidates in the right positions—they just want a lot of churn for their commissions. Before we established that HR would deal with recruiters, I did a bit of it myself. Most of them were cut from the stereotypical used car salesman cloth.
You get HR to assign dept-specific staff/recruiters so that when you’re looking for IT talent or sales guys or whatever your company does you get a person with some experience or exposure to that market. We’re not that big and our HR parcels out work by segment to help address this problem.
This is pretty much the case as I have come to understand. I have applied numerous times to the local (major) university. Even when I had a recommendation from a dean, or the head of a department, I would never even hear back that my resume/application was received. And headhunters? Sheesh. I get a pretty constant stream of notices about open jobs (mostly contracting), and fewer than 25% actually match my resume. A couple of tech keywords (mention you worked for a database company, you get database administrator jobs), and they are off and running. Many are for east coast positions, while I’m on the west coast.
And H1-B, near as I can figure from a recent employer, can be basically a case of indentured servitude – a nice cheap employee who can’t go look anywhere else.
Blech.
With Person of Interest headed to syndication, perhaps people will be more inclined to pay attention to what HR is doing.
I’ve worked in IT doing network support since 1997, and I’ve never quit one job, with the next one lined up. I’ve always taken a break between professional gigs, and then gone out looking for the next thing. Every. Single. Time.
“They are hiring predominantly male candidates for positions whose duties they typically don’t understand.”
Years ago the first desktop OS I learned in school was CP/M. After graduating I was being interviewed for an entry level management trainee position when the interviewer (male, BTW) asked me if I knew DOS. I stated that I knew CP/M ( I know, but I was stupidly honest when I was a kid). The interview looked at me and said, “Sorry, but we really need someone who knows DOS.” End of interview.
“HR hires headhunters to find IT talent or advertises and finds that talent itself.”
That’s your biggest mistake. No one “finds” talent by advertising. You find talent by getting off your duff from behind a computer display and going out into the professional community to meet people who do the work you want done — and you entice, cajole, seduce and otherwise encourage them to come talk to your company about a job you need done.
Advertising for resumes is akin to a dog with a note in its mouth looking for a human friend. It’s long past time hiring and recruiting were both taken away from HR. http://corcodilos.com/blog/6249/why-hr-should-get-out-of-the-hiring-business
Just considering my history since the late 1990s many of the points Bob makes ring true in my case. For a civil service IT job at a large, public university I received a form letter stating I was unqualified even though I was highly qualified. I called human resources and to my surprise they connected me to the woman who did the applicant screening. After a pleasant discussion she admitted to me that she was new at her job (three months) and knew nothing about computers — she did reverse her decision and I later had an interview.
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In another case, this time for a civil service job with state government, a state agency CIO and a project director wanted to hire me for their project — little did they realize that a HR screener would also declare me unqualified. When I spoke to her and dared to use the word “appeal” she became venomous — I did not pursue it. Through an amazing coincidence two years later I worked with the woman who was hired in my place — she was sent as a trainer to my workplace at the local police department. Though she superficially had a portfolio of recent and relevant experience in the preceding ten years she was in fact incompetent and being bumped from assignment to assignment until she got bumped out of her jobs. That seemed to be her history.
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Are these cases anecdotal? Of course they are but they are representative of the incompetence, malfeasance and cronyism I have routinely observed and experienced. My worst experiences have been when I have gone to interviews where the “fix” is in for some other applicant. Though I know of no cases of such behavior with my current employer I know of another federal agency office where such things occurred because I was friends with the guy hired.
You are 1000% correct.
I worked in HR for 2 years at a major midwest healthcare system. For 1 of those years I was involed in a massive IT hiring initiative.
The HR staff I worked with was 99% female, 100% of them did not have technical degrees, and 100% of the people who worked on hiring IT personnel came to me to ask how to hire IT personnel. The one’s that got through to the managers were the ones who knew all the buzzwords, but lacked the experience.
They did not want to hire older candidates because they wanted too much money. They did not want to hire too young of candidates with lots of real-world experience because they lacked a degree. They didn’t want to hire perfect candidates because they didn’t know what the hell they were looking for.
My organization has 10,000+ employees (and is growing). The biggest problem I have found is that the IT executives (including C[I/T]O) don’t even have a basic understanding of IT. This is the situation healthcare IT finds itself in: We have unqualified people hiring unqualified people to report to unqualified people.
After my 2 years in HR, they realized I was God’s gift to their IT department, and they hired me into an IT role.
Astounding.
As Steve Jobs said to an HR exec once at Apple “I’ve never met one of you people who didn’t suck”.
I find it interesting that, if Steve actually said that, the only record of it on the web is from this website: http://guestworkerfraud2.zymichost.com/
I bet Apple has an HR dept though!
This thread makes for great reading and contemplation. I add the comment that the topic raised extends far beyond consideration of those working in IT.
The role of HR has changed massively over the last decades. When I entered the Hi-Tech industry in the late 1970s we all had the perception that the Personnel Department (as it was then known) had our best interests at heart. They would acquire appropriate talent for the company; they would know and understand the staff; they would have empathy; they would be skilled at dealing with different kinds of people; they would take some responsibility in training and career development; they would be orchestrating succession planning.
Whilst this may have been totally or partly true, it is certainly not the case now in any company larger than ~150 people. On the occasions I dealt with HR in the last few companies I worked for, it was always the same experience; they don’t know who I am or what I do; they don’t know what skills or experience my role requires; they don’t know what my group or department does; they don’t even know how the company works as a complete business entity.
HR is simply the police force employed and empowered to ensure the company’s policies and rules are mandated and followed to the letter, and nothing more. The change has been brought about by market forces driving companies to be ever more cost-conscious; adherence to progressively more demanding health and safety rules; the need to be clinically and dispassionately efficient in terminating large numbers of people as the business continually re-organises itself; and a need for the company to be seen to be behaving politically correct at all times in all matters.
So, visit HR nowadays and what kind of person and characteristics do you find who will last the distance and rise to great heights in their part of the organisation? Cold, clinical, matter-of-fact, super-busy and efficient; able to articulate and follow the companies policies and rules; a convincing practised manipulator; zero or contrived empathy with your situation; credible and fluent, unperturbed in delivering blatant lies. Stick all these words into a search engine or bounce them off a psychologist to discern the ideal candidate to work in HR and what have you got? At best, someone who almost certainly has a personality disorder of some kind and at the worst….yikes, a psychopath!
The term HR is no longer the most appropriate acronym. For those of us beyond a certain age the H is forever interpreted as being something related to people; their feelings; their hopes and dreams etc. This invokes entirely the wrong impression in today’s world where the unrelenting pressure on organisations has resulted in money becoming more important than people. Perhaps MAD – Minion Acquisition and Disposal – would convey the function more accurately.
HR is always, always, always the worst part of any company. Endless bureaucracy and b/s, you can trace any bad policy in a company almost directly back and HR department, and yes – staffed with catty women. They pick through resumes for key words, not having any clue whatsoever what they are doing. They cherry pick market research analysis that confirms their stupid hiring and salary policies, and then always point to that as the basis for their methods and stipulations. When you submit the suggestion that perhaps the HR function should be outsourced, the alarm bells go off, “oh no, that’s a core function with an organization, you can’t have happening, we need that right here local to the company…”. HR is full of lying c*nts, more concerned with organizing feel-good symposiums and facilitating sensitivity training courses. External pimp recruiters are basically the bastard learning-disabled stepsiblings of HR morons
Whoa. Not up to your usual standard, Bob. (Except for the part about Tyma, I can personally attest that he *is* in fact the nuts (hi Paul!)). I mean, fine, if you’re trying to stir up some controversy, there’s nothing like a little sexist elitism, unless it’s a whole steaming pile of it.
But I expect way, way better of you.
Maybe HR departments exist because, oh, I don’t know, they *know something about hiring*? That their employees are specialists, no less than the geeks? I don’t want to spend the time keeping up-to-date on employment law and schmoozing recruiters, thank you, I have code to write.
WRT academic quals and layoffs, OK, full marks. But that’s why you specify your requirements to the HR department! If they told you, as a software guy, “build us a good records system” and then walked away, you’d excoriate them for dereliction of duty as a customer. Same goes for IT staff wishing to recruit: Tell them what you need, give them criteria for evaluation that aren’t laughably banal, and let them do their jobs. To say “we need a good software developer” and walk away is a guaranteed fail — on the part of the customer, not the IT staff.
Thanks for injecting a little common sense into the discussion. If a company is big enough to require an HR department, they must consider it a tool, like a pencil, that does what it’s guided to do.
I have a co-worker who tells me a story about a previous company he worked for which was looking for a technical addition to the team. Resumes were being screened by HR, and no-one suitable was getting through. The manager of the team asked them all to brush up their resumes, and submitted them all to the opening. None of those went through either. The manager got permission to bypass HR, and the role was promptly filled.
Paul Tyma is also an excellent teacher. He wrote one of the first Java books, Java Primer Plus. His company, PreEmptive Solutions, also provided Java training back in the late 1990s, and Paul came to our workplace to train us for a two day class. We took him to lunch at the Brewery Exchange in Lowell, MA on his last day of class.
A big reason we have lower wages is that today labor competes globally. Just like our products compete with other products produced around the world, labor competes with other labor available globally. The more interconnected the world becomes the greater the competition. Its not just IT. Anything that can be done abroad more cheaply, without sacrificing quality, will be done elsewhere.
There is no shortage of IT workers in the US, but there is a shortage of IT workers who will work for low wages. As someone who has worked as a VP of Software Development for large US companies allow me to explain how the whole scam works.
1.The CEO or CFO says the IT budget is out of control and something must be done about it. At the same time the Development team is getting increasing pressure to deliver and at the same time increase security.
2. HR with the complicity of IT develops job descriptions that are extremely arcane and frequently combine disparate skills. An example is a GUI developer who also has extensive TCP skills and perhaps throwing in compiler design for good measure.
3. HR then advertises for these skills in the US. Inevitably a few candidates, even for such a disparate skill set, come out of the wood work. But the company is extremely picky so unfortunately no one meets the high standards required.
4. Legal gives demonstrable evidence to the US government that they have tried, but failed to hire US candidates. Don’t you know; there is a tech skill shortage in the US. H1-B visas are clearly required. And so the company goes through the H1-B process ensuring they apply early to avoid disappointment.
5. Months later the visas come through thanks to immigration legal teams who make a nice few bucks out of the process.
6. Typically HR then contacts agents in Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai and the search is on for candidates. Indian candidates (I know I spent many months in Bangalore) are inclined to overstate their ability and experience and so there are plenty of candidates who appear to meet the criteria. On occasions coaching from agents also helps.
7. Soon candidates are shortlisted and made offers. Relatively low ball by the standards of US workers, but not to worry as the company is promising them assistance in moving to America. Almost every candidate accepts.
8. Some months later they arrive at the company. Unfortunately in the intervening time IT priorities in the company have changed or shifted, but what can we do. These candidates have arrived anyway. Oh well, there are plenty of things for them to do in IT. And perhaps a few Americans are let go in the process just to save some money.
9. After a suitable period of waiting, say 12 months, the process is repeated slowly whittling down the number of US workers and increasing the Indian workers.
It works every time. And large numbers of immigration layers, H1-B lobbyists and large US tech companies are involved in the destruction of the American worker.
Re: “…there is a shortage of IT workers who will work for low wages…” Really!?!
[…] I think it’s telling that many organizations still use this term to label the office that hires, manages, and fires employees. And such organizations, at least in the IT industry where I’ve had some experience of them, often don’t do a very good job. […]
I fully agree with the article. I have seen people filtered out by HR because the advert was looking for a specific degree and the candidate had a higher one but HR had no clue about the meaning of the abbreviations. In general, I believe HR departments should be disbanded altogether and having people-focused individuals distributed in the departments.
What I love seeing are jobs with requirements: “must have 5 or more years of experience with [skill X]”, where X is a technology that is only 1 year old. Brilliant!
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The Times of India is now reporting on the Palmer case regarding fraudulent use of H1-B visas.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Infosys-whistleblower-H-1B-workers-have-minimal-skills/articleshow/46609164.cms