Recently I was listening to President Obama in North Carolina say that technology workers are difficult to hire because we don’t generate enough Science, Technology, Engineering, Math students (STEM). I agree that the modern university doesn’t want to change to the Indian model of churning out highly trained, but unable to work independently students. But I think this problem has been exasperated by business management in the past which now we are seeing the outcome.
When I was a wee lad in technology; we were always interested in learning new things. When COBOL was the rage, we heard about these new web functions like HTML and JAVA, C++ etc. So someone would always ask if they could go to a training class on Web development. And the answer would be NO. Because once you learn this, you will quit and get a new job and who would keep our COBOL programs going? So if you tried to learn JAVA on your own and your management found out, you were then on the watch list because obviously you want to quit. When a new project opened up at your job that would need some of those skills and you asked if you could move to it. The answer was NO, who would do your old job? When your project or area was looking to be phased out and you asked what the next project was, the answer was none. We could train you, but frankly we can get all these workers out of college with Java and web development. Why should be train you? So you hoped to find another COBOL job and went through the same process.
Management didn’t want to train us because who would do our jobs and we were more expensive than the recent graduate. A few were retrained, but very few.
I suspect this was true of a lot of engineering and technology jobs. Why retrain these more expensive workers when cheap recruits were around.
So, President Obama, when you say there aren’t enough skilled technology workers in the US. There were, but those CEO’s you were talking to didn’t want us because they think we are expensive. And so they hired college grads. When those didn’t work out as well, they hired H1B’s. There are a lot of 40 and 50 year old techies out there that would love to work these jobs. Yes, they may not be 100% on top of what is hot, but they know how to work, they know how to program, just not in your hip new language and they can learn. And they have lost enough money to not be as expensive any more. Too bad, the high tech CEO’s don’t want these cast offs, when a nice H1B can do the same thing and is easier to manage. American companies don’t want us anymore. We aren’t hip enough, we not considered cheap enough, we are considered too hard to manage and we so we are thrown away like last weeks trash.
So are American Tech workers hard to find? No, look at Home Depot, at your pizza delivery guy, the guy who runs your yard service, your bartender. Look at the guy down the block that hasn’t worked in a few years because he is ‘unqualified’ and basically too old but HR won’t let them say that. We are here, you just don’t want us there.
