This was on the front page of today's New York times.
kelly
January 13, 1998
With Boom in High Technology, Software Jobs Go Begging
By AMY HARMON
E very so often, the co-founder of Carnelian Inc., James Kittock,
hears the phones at his Silicon Valley start-up company begin to
ring in order, from one cloth-covered cubicle to the next: 0976,
0977, 0978. ... He knows -- everyone in the Valley knows -- it is
the recruiters, calling to steal his programmers away, often at
huge salaries.
Kittock, 27, cannot really blame them. Carnelian itself has been
known to resort to guerrilla tactics in what has become an
increasingly desperate scavenger hunt for highly paid digital-age
translators who can mediate between mind and machine. And like
other employers nationwide these days, Carnelian has found that
there is simply not enough talent to go around at any price.
"For us, it was a choice of lowering our standards or waiting, and
we chose to wait," Kittock said, "but it's tough to see time
slipping by and things not moving ahead because of a lack of
horsepower." His company, which develops software for Internet
publishing, could use twice the dozen programmers it now employs.
Kittock's lament echoes throughout the world of high technology and
beyond. As America relies more heavily on computer software than
ever before, the demand for people who can develop and use the
tools of the modern age has vastly outstripped the existing supply.
And the shortage is expected to get much worse as an estimated 1
million new programming jobs come open in the next nine years.
Help-wanted ads are multiplying for the coders who can write in
fashionable computer languages like Java, for the testers who find
the bugs that the coders invariably leave behind and for the
systems analysts who figure out how to make it all work together.
The talent shortage is so pronounced that members of the Clinton
administration announced Monday that the government would invest
$28 million in new initiatives to encourage training more
programmers. The initiative was announced at a meeting that will
continue Tuesday with industry officials and academics in Berkeley,
Calif., to explore potential solutions.
Under the administration's plan, which was first reported in The
Washington Post, the Labor Department will offer $3 million in
grants to schools, businesses and local governments to retrain
laid-off workers as programmers, and it will spend another $8
million to build a World Wide Web site where employers can post job
offerings and workers can post resumes. The Commerce Department
will spend $17 million to bring technology resources, including
training, to poor people.
The administration's initiatives are driven by concern about the
economic implications of the programmer shortage when information
technology, grossing more than $865 billion a year, is the nation's
largest industry, with the software segment growing more than twice
as fast as the overall economy.
What is more, the shortage is contributing to a looming crisis
known as the year 2000 problem, a legacy of a long-practiced
programming economy in which years were denoted with two digits --
using 75 for 1975, for example. Unless all date-sensitive lines of
computer code are tracked down and fixed, many businesses and
institutions, from banks to government agencies to research labs
and air traffic control centers, will be thrown into chaos or
simply cease operating on Jan. 1, 2000.
Why the shortfall in programmers? For one thing, in Silicon Valley
over the last two years, hundreds of new companies have opened, all
hungry for someone -- anyone -- who can string together lines of
computer code.
At the same time, the field has yet to recover from a downturn in
the late 1980s and early '90s, when downsizing by aerospace
companies and big technology concerns like IBM Corp. and AT&T Corp.
threw many computer scientists out of work and discouraged college
students from pursuing computer careers. From a peak of 50,000 in
1986, the number of bachelor's and graduate degrees in computer
science plummeted to 36,000 in 1995.
Yet, for students, job security is not the only issue when deciding
for or against a career in computer science. Some cite its image:
The "nerd factor," marked by the pasty pallor known as a "monitor
tan," seems to trump a recent "geek chic" trend in a notoriously
antisocial profession. And much of the work is tedious.
"We need a large technical class that is well trained to do work
that is mind-numbingly boring," said Eric Roberts, associate
director of Stanford University's computer science program.
______________________________________________________________
Where They Come From
With openings for programmers and other computer services workers
far outstripping the number of new graduates in the field,
employers are hiring more people without computer science degrees,
like electrical engineers and mathematicians, or turning to
noncitizens to fill vacancies.
Background of new employees in programming and computer services
[INLINE]
Sources: National Software Alliance
______________________________________________________________
Over the last two years, the overheated job market has pushed up
computer science enrollment, but to nowhere near the level that
analysts say will be necessary to meet the industry's needs.
Between 1996 and 2006, more than a million new jobs requiring
software skills should be created, according to a recent Bureau of
Labor Statistics report. That represents a remarkable 6 percent of
all new jobs expected to be created in that period.
But those numbers, which make no attempt to measure projected
supply, join a slew of other emerging statistics that expose the
extent of a labor shortage that could have significant economic
repercussions. According to industry estimates, 200,000 to 400,000
jobs requiring computer software skills stand open now.
In Silicon Valley, where the competition for the best and brightest
is most fierce, companies like Netscape Communications Corp. offer
perks like car washes at lunch and an in-house dry-cleaning service
that provides cubicle-to-cubicle delivery. Alex Musil, a
22-year-old who was hired recently, said he particularly enjoyed
Netscape's Le Concierge service, which handles entertainment
purchases for employees.
"I bought my parents a cruise through them," said Musil, who was
hired out of Stanford University with an annual salary of $54,000
last year.
Without enough programmers to go around, established companies are
being forced to delay or even scrap technology projects, and
start-ups are finding it harder to attract the workers they need.
If the talent drought continues, the entire national economy may
feel the effect of lost wages and slowed innovation. And the
competitive advantage that the United States has long held in
technology may be at risk.
"This is like running out of iron ore in the middle of the
Industrial Revolution," said Harris Miller, president of the
Information Technology Association of America, which represents
computing and telecommunications companies.
Paucity of Recruits: Image and Tedium Repel Students
T he most pressing question for both research and industry is how
to get more computer scientists into the pipeline.
"Despite the fact that there are huge salaries to be made, kids
don't choose these fields," said Richard Skinner, president of
Clayton College and State University in Atlanta, who heads a
Commerce Department task force on how universities are responding
to the labor shortage.
A good programmer needs to exist comfortably in the "machine
state," writing and meticulously checking and double-checking
hundreds of lines of code that are often just a small part of a
much larger project. It is a talent that is hard to come by -- and
one often disparaged in mainstream culture.
There are few role models for computer-related jobs, and even
people like Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp. and something
of a popular icon, tend to be far better known for their
achievements as business moguls than for their skills as software
engineers.
"Let's face it, when you think of a programmer, the image is an
overweight person eating Snickers bars and drinking Coke and
sitting in front of a screen with big glasses on," said Ed
Lazaowska, chairman of the computer science department at the
University of Washington. "The pitch I make to high school kids is:
'Where's the intellectual excitement? Why would you choose civil
engineering or mechanical engineering? There's only so much you can
do with asphalt."'
But Tamer Hendi, 19, a student at the Georgia Institute of
Technology, sees little that is cool about computer science. "I
couldn't see myself doing it," he said. "I'd rather do chemical or
industrial engineering, try to get a job where there will be more
dealing with people."
At this week's meeting in Berkeley, in the hope of countering the
negative image, industry officials recommended a promotion campaign
similar to the dairy industry's "Drink Milk" ads that feature
basketball and football stars and other celebrities wearing milk
mustaches. Such a campaign, which could be sponsored by the
computer industry, would promote the positive aspects of
information technology and possibly feature industry leaders like
Kim Polese, the young founder of the high-profile software start-up
Marimba.
Recruiting more women like Ms. Polese to the field is considered
crucial because the share of computer science degrees awarded to
women in the United States has fallen steadily, to 28 percent in
1994 from a peak of 36 percent in 1984. A more proportional
representation of women could go a long way toward meeting the need
for programmers.
Only 17 percent of those taking the advanced placement test for
computer science in the nation's high schools last year were women,
the lowest of any subject. Girls often lack the early math training
that many boys get. And in what Jane Margolis, an anthropologist at
Carnegie Mellon University, calls the "computer gene" response,
many women she has interviewed simply believe they are not born
with the ability to do computer science.
At the same time, many women who demonstrate both the aptitude and
appetite for programming are turned off by the nature of the work.
For example, Zoe Woodworth, 21, who was one of only six women in
her freshman computer science class of 100 at Carnegie Mellon, is
also one of three who have since dropped out.
"I love math, but I realized I'm just not a computer scientist,"
Ms. Woodworth said. "I was burned out, and I didn't care about the
subject matter. It just seemed passionless." She is now an art
major.
The bigger problem may have less to do with image than with
reality. The jobs where programmers conceive and design products
are rare. The bulk of the openings are for what students refer to
derisively as "cubicle hackers" or "code machines," people who type
endless streams of commands to someone else's specifications.
Max Edleson, a Stanford freshman who ran a corporate Web site last
summer, knows the drudgery. "I got paid a massive amount to sit in
front of my computer eight hours a day, but I got physically ill
doing it," he said. "I felt this void of thought that I couldn't
deal with."
Edleson, who said he had intended to major in computer science, is
now studying philosophy instead.
Even students like Eric Cheng, a much-sought-after Stanford
graduate student, have doubts about the profession.
"There's never a question that you won't get a job," Cheng said.
"There's just the question of will you be bored. If you go in the
movie theaters around here on opening night of any science fiction
or thriller, you can see the people with monitor tans. I just don't
want to be like that. I'm looking for more of a balance."
Graham Miller, Cheng's classmate, is already thinking about an exit
strategy. "Programmers only last up to 10 years or so," Miller
said. "After that, you need to find something else to do."
Still, for Miller and many of his colleagues, the payoff comes with
the thrill of solving a problem, of making a program work. "It's
about understanding what the computer is thinking," Miller said.
Broader Job Market: Software Producers and Clients Compete
T he hunger for programmers is not limited to companies that make
software to sell to others. As the nation's corporations reorganize
themselves to take advantage of the huge digital file cabinets
known as data bases and of communications networks and software
that allow them to increase productivity, the high-technology
help-wanted ads are increasingly posted by the likes of Wal-Mart,
General Motors and Federal Express. In the job market, that leaves
the software producers competing against the buyers of their
products.
"In the past, it was just IBM, Intel and us looking for these
people," said David Pritchard, director of recruiting for
Microsoft.
Some economists argue that the work force will naturally swell to
meet the demand as salaries for those with software skills climb as
much as 20 percent annually compared with the 4 percent annual wage
increase of the average American worker. The average programmer
earned $58,200 in 1995 and $66,500 in 1996, according to the
Information Technology Association of America. But a consensus is
growing in industry, academic and government circles that the lure
of higher pay may not, by itself, be sufficient to correct the
skilled-labor shortage.
"This is not like we need hundreds of more sales clerks," said
Shirley Tessler, a researcher at the Stanford Computer Industry
Project, a group of academicians investigating the shortage. "There
is a serious demand for high-end people. We're talking about people
to design software for a critical medical device that goes inside
your body, to do product management, to manage quality assurance."
Nor is Ms. Tessler particularly encouraged by the increase in
computer science enrollment last year. For one thing, not all of
the new students -- particularly women -- will stay the course. In
addition, almost one-fifth of all computer science students are
foreign nationals, many of whom will return to their native
countries after graduating.
Already, American technology companies have set up operations in
India, Ireland and the Philippines to take advantage of
increasingly skilled foreign labor pools. Information industry
employers in the United States sponsor some 15,000 foreign
professionals under federal immigration law, which allows 65,000
professional foreign workers to come to the United States each
year, and they are lobbying to raise the cap.
But some economists worry about relying on foreign workers to fill
the software gap.
"There's a real danger that we'll assume the market will take care
of this, and we'll be right -- only it's a global market," said
Jeffrey E. Garten, dean of Yale University's School of Management
and the former under secretary of commerce for international trade
in the Clinton administration. "Unless we become much more
deliberate in how we address this, we'll find that what could be
quite good jobs for Americans will all take place abroad."
Even global supplies of technology workers are no longer as
available as they once were. India's universities, for instance,
turn out 55,000 students in the field each year but are not keeping
pace with that nation's rapidly growing software industry.
What is more, the bidding war for software talent, in which
corporations can offer stock options and salaries that universities
and research institutions cannot match, makes it harder to find
people who will devote themselves to the long-term research that
might generate the next technological breakthroughs or to teaching
the next generation of computer scientists. The number of advanced
degrees granted in computer science has stayed flat, at about 1,000
a year, for the last decade, and doctoral students now often choose
a dissertation project based not on whether it advances basic
knowledge but on whether it represents a viable business
opportunity.
"The phrase is 'eating your seed corn,' and we will pay a price for
it," said Michael Garey, director of mathematical sciences research
at Bell Laboratories. "So many of the bright people are being
siphoned off to shorter-term opportunities that we are not doing a
good job of building the foundation we're going to need for the
next wave of innovation that might occur 10 or 20 years from now."
Filling the Void: No Experience Is Necessary
T o remove some of the barriers for people who lack experience, the
University of Washington has begun offering a "no background"
introductory class. But even if such programs succeed in broadening
the appeal of the discipline, it will take time to produce
employable graduates. Meanwhile, desperate employers are
increasingly reaching out to people who have not traditionally
considered technology jobs.
Microsoft has set up a division to train its recruits and others
who will be hired by corporate customers. The Defense Department is
sponsoring a retraining program for aerospace engineers and others
who have skills that could translate into computer expertise. Some
technology concerns are working with two-year community colleges to
train people quickly and to impart the most current skills in a
field where knowledge quickly becomes outdated.
Gail Fitzgerald, director of the Computer Task Group in Buffalo, a
company that provides entire staffs of information technology
specialists to corporations, says she is training almost anyone she
can find. After 12 weeks of intensive training, graduates will not
be able to design next-generation weapons systems, but they can
diagnose certain kinds of computer problems and earn as much as
$35,000 a year.
"We've had an accountant, a lawyer, a high school literature
teacher, a professor from the University of Alaska, several
musicians," Ms. Fitzgerald said. "We find musicians typically have
a very good aptitude."
Whatever the frustrations for employers, and however cloudy the
outlook for national competitiveness, there is one business group
benefiting in a big way from the dearth of digital talent:
technology headhunters.
"The demand is insane," said Bob Jacobs, director of engineering
recruiting for Interim Search Solutions in San Francisco. "It's a
war. I'm on the 37th floor looking at the San Francisco skyline,
and I can see 30 different empty floors where they have 20
cubicles, two programmers, and $2 million. They need to fill those
cubicles."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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