http://www.zdnet.com/zdtv/zdtvnews/features/story/0,3685,2109200,00.html


Old Components
Has Silicon Valley discarded a generation of programmers?
By Mark Eddo


ZDTV News 7-28-99


Silicon Valley says it's suffering a critical shortage of qualified workers.


Companies are even lobbying Congress, asking for more work visas for
overseas engineers. But some people say high tech recruiters are
overlooking some very qualified employees.


Steve Shultz should be happy. He's an engineer with more than 20 years
of experience, living in Silicon Valley during the biggest technology
boom ever.


But he's spending months sending out resumes and going to job fairs. And
even with the high tech boom, he still can't find a full-time job.


Shultz explains his predicament: "All these companies had these booths, and
I thought, 'Well, definitely I must get something.' But when I didn't get
something, I thought, 'Well, I must be in a group that they are not even
looking at.'"


That group is older workers.


Shultz says the industry considers him too old to write code.


"Industry doesn't think that the workers in my category can be retrained,
and that is simply not true," he says, "because I've spent my whole career
learning new things."


US high tech firms say they're still trying to fill hundreds of thousands of
vacancies. They've been complaining that the shortage will soon punch holes
in the US economy.


Now the Senate has passed a bill to let in 30,000 more foreign high tech
workers every year. The cap on so-called H1-B visas will go up from 65,000 a
year to 95,000, eventually reaching 115,000 a year.


But not everyone agrees that the solution should come from across the sea.
University of California at Davis Professor Norman Matloff calls the whole
thing a ploy to get cheaper workers and lower wages.


"We do not have a desperate labor shortage. Therefore we do not have to
increase the H1-B quota," Matloff says. "In fact, on the opposite, what we
need to do is decrease it because it is contributing to rampant age
discrimination in this industry."


Those are fighting words to bosses like T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress
Semiconductor. Rodgers argues that, if the United States does not let in
immigrants, the jobs those foreign high tech workers would have occupied
will go overseas.


"It's exactly backwards to what the anti-immigration crowd says," Rodgers
says. "And the reason it's backwards is they don't deal with data and they
don't deal with logic. They deal with emotion: 'I don't want immigrants, so
I'll make up reasons they don't hire old people.'"


Silicon Valley companies like Cypress insist there simply aren't enough
homegrown engineers out there, and the fight for college graduates is
fierce.


"Recruiters were walking around the hallways in [the University of
California at] Berkeley with signs hanging around their neck: 'We'll trade a
pizza for a resume.' Literally," Rodgers says.


But labor groups insist companies should be concentrating more on training
older workers and minorities. Matloff says companies are still picky about
who they hire and how much they will pay.


"If people were desperate, they would be willing to hire more than two
percent of their applicants and be willing to pay premiums of more than
seven percent," Matloff says.


Shultz says older American workers like himself deserve a chance. "We have
to come up with a plan to get people back into the workforce, because now
they are bringing in a quarter of a million people extra in the next five
years," he says.


Older programmers may already be seeing their skills come back into demand,
courtesy of the Year 2000 bug. Few college grads are familiar with the
archaic code that was used to create the early mainframe computer programs
most prone to this problem.