IT labor boom a mirage to some

Industry vets debate need for worker visas

By Barb Cole-Gomolski
08/10/98 Don't tell William Spence about the IS labor shortage. For 18 months he has tried unsuccessfully to land a programming job.


After being laid off from his research job at Stanford University, Spence, 47, thought he could turn his passion for programming into a new career. He was wrong.


Some information systems professionals are being left out of the information systems labor boom, perhaps because they are perceived as too old, too expensive or lacking today's hottest skills.


Unemployment among IS professionals over 50 is about 17%.


Linda Kilcrease, a veteran IS manager now employed by a large manufacturing firm in New Jersey, said she thinks the IS labor shortage is bunk. Kilcrease and 250 of her associates were laid off in 1994 by American International Group, Inc. (AIG), an insurance giant in New York. Kilcrease said the IS team was replaced with foreign contract workers, who were in the U.S. on H-1B visas.


"The company bragged about how it would save $11 million by doing this," she said.


AIG officials said the company outsourced the management of most of its applications to contractors in 1994 in order to save money but declined to comment further.


"The only shortage is one of cheap labor," said Norm Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis. Matloff is a vocal critic of a report issued by the Information Technology Association of America, a trade group in Arlington, Va., that puts the number of open IS jobs at about 346,000.


According to Matloff, companies have hyped the labor shortage to get Congress to raise the annual cap on the number of visas issued to skilled foreign workers.


The ITAA said its research shows that 10% of IS jobs are currently open. It claims that companies are having trouble filling jobs because applicants don't have the required skills.


Matloff said abuses of the H-1B program -- it is supposed to be reserved for highly specialized skills that aren't readily available in the U.S. -- are adding to the woes of people such as Spence. Age discrimination and the increasing pickiness of employers also are making it hard for some IS professionals to find work, Matloff said.


Recruiters said that generally job prospects for IS workers are good. But the best offers are going to younger applicants who have hot skills in areas such as enterprise resource planning applications, said Celine Bundy, senior counselor at Technical Connections, a Los Angeles-based IS placement firm.


"If you are not skilled in the hot technologies, you better get reskilled," said John Davis, president of John J. Davis & Associates, an IS executive placement firm in New York. "Companies are not going to wait around for workers to get up to speed."


That is a lesson Ed Curry, 39, learned the hard way. Curry thought he was so marketable that when he closed his computer engineering consultancy in 1996, he rewarded himself with a month off. But when he sent out resumes, nobody was biting.


Last year, he got only five months' worth of contract work as a software engineer. This year, he has logged about four months of contract work.


The experience of being unable to land a permanent IS position shocked Curry, who said he is proficient in seven programming languages. His conclusion: Companies don't want to pay for his experience.


"I've had headhunters tell me that it would take them too long to find me a job," Curry said. "They don't want to waste their time on me when they can place entry-level people immediately."