In some (or maybe a lot) of areas in tech jobs there are very few native born Americans. Why is that? I suppose it’s because there simply are not enough people born in the US who want tech jobs? Or they think it’s too hard to study to get into a tech field? Or something else?
For example I started a new job not too long ago. They introduced 21 new employees and there was only 1 person born in the US, me.
Very widespread misperception that there are no tech jobs due to offshoring and H1Bs.
I think it’s primarily that people think that tech jobs are both really hard, require a lot of intelligence, and a lot of really specialized training, and as a consequence are high paying jobs.
That’s only really true for a select set of jobs; there are plenty of tech jobs where you can be dumb as a stump and only need a minimum of training- call center positions and cable monkeying come to mind.
Also, there’s the situation where due to the perceptions, people don’t want low-mid paying tech jobs, but FOB indian guys will jump at that chance, so that’s why we all feel like we need to learn Hindi and Chinese to work in technology here in the US.
There is a strong cultural bias against Science and Math. This starts off in grade school. Many, many grade school teachers are really bad at these and/or hate the topics. Kids absorb this bias in addition to just plain not learning the material well due to bad teachers.
The educational system has also changed into a learn it/take the test/forget it mentality. Kids don’t remember anything they learned a few weeks ago. (I taught Computer Science at the college level. The students ability to forget was amazing. They deliberately planned on forgetting stuff the second the test was over.) This is a major problem in tech fields. You can’t be successful if you keep throwing everything you learn down the memory hole. In softer fields, it’s easier to fake it. Not so much in tech.
This is part of a larger “cult of stupidty” that is growing in our society. Knowing stuff, thinking logically, etc., are frowned upon. Many famous media personalities routinely make fun of smart people.
It is little wonder that so many kids don’t dream of going into tech areas.
I don’t think there are Americans out of work with tech skills due to foreign people taking the jobs. At least not where I live.
Seems like the demand for people is just higher than can be filled with Americans. So the gap has to be filled someway.
American =/= white.
Those Indian and Chinese looking fellows may be just as American as you are. But, as mentioned earlier, I strongly suspect that many caucasian families will not push their kids to work as hard in the mathematics related diciplines in school as the Tiger Moms from Asia. And guess what is a prerequisite to all those tech degrees…
Don’t know about current popular culture and its attitude about math. However, isn’t this the geek golden age?
Totally true about teacher’s math phobia though. If you look at math text books in elementary, they are completely designed from a verbal approach, because they have been designed by teachers, who went into education because they didn’t like/do well in math to begin with. Og forfend they would use a symbolic equation when three run-on paragraphs will do instead.
trupa, white French Canadian, 11 years in the tech/telecom industry.
OP, in what area do you live where “Americans seem to shun tech jobs” ? ETA: also, what kind of tech job do you have? And what do you consider a “tech job”?
Unless you mean “Native American” (aka American Indian), I’m not sure I agree with the premise as a general statement. Yes, there are lots of people born elsewhere, or with foreign heritage, in high tech industries. But I’m not sure how out of proportion it is.
I write low level software for cell phones at a major company…definitely considered high tech. My aisle has five people in it, and three of us were born in the US. The team I’m on is between 1/2 and 3/4s American born. There are other teams with a little different balance.
I’m not sure I see that much of a difference at my local grocery store…or, for that matter, at the car dealership I was at today.
I live in RTP area NC, I write statistical software for data analysis.
Tech jobs to me are related to engineering, software/hardware or medicine/biotech/chemistry/physics.
All of the studies and stats disagree with you. H1B is being abused to higher cheap labor which is part of what you are seeing.
I’ve read those reports, and they suffer from some pretty serious methodological flaws. Here’s an overview of some of the more serious failings, for example.
I get really pissed off when I hear this. One company I was at had its entire (largely high tech) labor force liquidated when it was purchased by another company. There were people there with skills that you simply do not learn in schools – they were the “black arts” skills, picked up on the job. You can argue that “Well, they’ll all get jobs now, because theyt’re highly skilled”. Nah-uh. They’d have to move elsewhere, or the HR department would figure that they’re too old, or too highly paid.
I know that I, myself have been unemployed multiple times, and it’s not as if people were waiting to pounce on my high-tech skills.
There are lots of highly skilled, high tech Americans, but employers dont want to hire them. It’s cheaper to set up R&D locations overseas, or to bring in someone on an H1 visa who you can pay less (supposedly illegal, but done, I understand), and who are tied to your company because if they try to leave, they can lose their status and get shipped back overseas.
Part of it is that engineering and science are difficult subjects to study in college. This article mentions an attrition rate of 40% in the STEM programs (“Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree.”). A big reason suggested is because while engineering sounds like a great idea, the grind of the courses leads college students to drop out of STEM programs. Another article mentions that engineering programs require more homework than do the softer subjects (humanities and social sciences) and there’s less grade inflation in the engineering programs. (I was always annoyed at what I heard about the grade inflation at places like Harvard; according to the Boston Globe nine of ten students graduated with honors from Harvard in June 2001. Meantime, RPI preferred to grade on a curve, so that some of us were guaranteed poor grades.)
This is amazingly ignorant. I hire software developers, and right now, if I hire someone who needs H1-B sponsorship, that means I can’t actually have them on-board until October 2014. I would love to hire people who are already authorized for work in the US, but I can’t find 'em. Or I can’t find enough of 'em, anyway. No one is refusing to hire Americans with adequate skills in favor of H1-Bs.
America creates or has created so many tech jobs of all levels for products that are being used all around the world , its difficult to find all the people needed for these jobs just in America.
I work in a top tier tech job, and my department is easily 90% non-American born, which includes “white” engineers - some from Europe. This is not a matter of bias - this is also how the resumes come in.
It wasn’t this way 30 years ago when I started, but it is going to continue to be this way because that is the population of grad schools these days.
I really don’t think this is happening because “Americans” are stupid or because of bias. Tech jobs are good relative to mcJobs, but not so good relative to things like medicine, business and (up until recently) law. Most people in this business have been laid off at least once (not me) so why deal with this aggravation when you can go to school and become one of the people who do the firing?
I see this happen a lot in corporate IT; when times are tight they’ll lay off good people with lots of experience and the “black art” knowledge because they’re well paid, and when times are good and the department expands again, they don’t rehire people with the same skill levels; they hire a bunch of young/mid-level guys without the experience because they’re cheap.
I’ve been unemployed several times as well, and it’s been much more of a fight to find a job than all this “OMG! Tech worker shortage!” business would imply.
I personally think it’s a combination of unrealistic HR job postings and bad geographical distributions.
By “unrealistic HR job postings”, I mean one of two thigns- first, the ones where the actual boots-on-the-ground managers write up a “ideal candidate” job posting, knowing nobody has that set of skills and experience, but then the HR drones take it as gospel and then report being unable to find qualified people. Second, the ones where the skills/experience are unrealistic. I remember seeing a job posting in about 1997 for a JAVA developer with 5 years of experience. (hint: JAVA came out in 1995). Nobody on earth save maybe the language designers could possibly meet that requirement, so again, no qualified candidates.
By bad geographical distribution, I mean that some factory in Rockdale, TX may have a job opening for an IT manager or network admin, but few tech people want to up and move to Rockdale. Or there may be something similar in Hutchinson, KS or somewhere in eastern Kentucky. Nationwide, there may be a shortage, but in tech-heavy areas like Silicon Valley, Dallas, Austin, NYC or Los Angeles, those jobs may not be particularly short.
Yeah, I’m trying to figure out where all these tech jobs are. My husband majored in IT, computer networking, and there seems to be hardly anything out there for him - even as an intern or temp worker. So much so he pretty much just gave up the serious search and started his own development and consulting business. Perhaps this field is not high tech enough to count for the OP?
As bump is saying - might be geography and where we’re located! But when one of us has a steady job, you don’t exactly want to give that up easily. Still though, not my perception that there’s a huge shortage where we are.
And of course there are TONS of job postings that say “unemployed should not apply” and even more that say “this is an entry level position for someone with at least 3-5 years experience”. It’s absolute hogwash.
Does your husband have certifications (Cisco in particular)? I think those are mandatory in the networking field.
Please keep in mind that students entering college to to Science and Engineering are woefully unprepared. Usually, they have no idea what they are getting into and don’t have the background to succeed.
When the Big Enrollment Crunch hit Computer Science, departments got swamped with majors. Many colleges would have 1000 or more students thinking they were going to be CS majors. Outnumbering all other Science majors combined.
One place I was at once had 50% of incoming students saying they wanted to major in CS. Um, we didn’t have an undergraduate program folks. Read the bulletin. Needless to say, the admin was really keen on us starting one. We pointed out that dozens of faculty would have to be hired within a few years.
Anyhoo, what departments had to do was flush as many out as possible ASAP. At another place, our goal was 50% in the first programming courses. 60% out in Data Structures. And even then, most of the remaining people didn’t have the skills necessary to finish the degree.
The really sad part was at the same time the teaching of programming in high schools was dropping off (students were taught apps instead), so that almost all of these students had never written a program, had no idea even what Computer Science was, and had no clue how to think logically and rigorously.
The fields aren’t really hard if you have they background and inclination. They’re Everest if you’re a typical US high school graduate.