Oblivious to the Obvious

Date: Wednesday, September 25, 2002 2:16 PM

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Harris Miller of the ITAA actually told the truth for a change - he said
that the short term hiring outlook for computer/IT is bleak. This reporter
should have asked him why things have changed so much since his May 6th
interview with Computerworld. In that interview Miller said that within the
next year there will be 1.1 million jobs created and a shortage of over
600,000. Why do so many reporters consistently refuse to ask Miller a couple
of tough questions like for instance why has he been so consistently wrong
about shortages?

Let's take a look at the numbers at the end of this article. IT workforce
has grown by a net 85,437 positions since January. On September 11th
Computerworld reported that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
recently reported that it granted 60,500 H-1B visas in the nine-month period
that ended June 30. Put these two figures together and the conclusion is
rather obvious to anyone but ComputerWorld journalists - 100% OF THE JOBS
CREATED IN 2002 WERE TAKEN BY H-1Bs!

Since L-1 visas typically parallel H-1Bs in terms of numbers, there were
probably an additional 85,000 positions that were replaced by one or the
other of these visas.

IF L-1 VISAS ARE INCLUDED IN THE COUNT THEN TOTAL JOB GROWTH FOR AMERICAN
CITIZENS IS NEGATIVE!

Just in case anybody is starting to think that Harris Miller is coming clean
and finally admitting that there are no shortages, just three days earlier
(Sep 20) he attended a meeting with aerospace people in Washington D.C.
Miller warned that "the United States is facing an alarming shortage in
skilled workers." Then one day after (Sep 24) he told the Washington Post
that he was revising his previous shortage figures from 1.1 million to
834,727. Miller's forked tongue says different things depending on the
audience - and the journalists seem totally oblivious to the obvious.

http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2002/0,4814,74458,00.html

Demand for U.S. IT workers remains soft, survey shows

By THOMAS HOFFMAN
SEPTEMBER 23, 2002

Although the U.S. IT workforce has grown by 1%, or 85,000 jobs, since the

beginning of the year, the short-term hiring outlook continues to remain
bleak, according to an updated report being released today by the
Information Technology Association of America and Dice Inc.
Telephone interviews conducted in July and August with hiring managers at 84
IT vendor companies and 216 non-IT companies revealed that "the original
optimistic hiring forecast at the beginning of the year has been tempered by
the economy," said Scot Melland, president and CEO of Dice, a New York-based
provider of online recruiting services for technology professionals.

Many unemployed IT workers are shifting the blame elsewhere. Computerworld
regularly receives letters from disgruntled IT professionals who claim that
they have in-demand skills such as C++, Java and Oracle training and yet
haven't been able to find work for months. Many of them point the finger at
H-1B visa holders and offshore programming outfits, where a growing number
of companies are shifting their development and maintenance work to reduce
costs.

Influence From Overseas

Earlier this month, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) announced plans
to study whether and to what extent the H-1B visa program is costing
Americans jobs (see story). The results of that study are due out next year.

But some IT professionals say offshore outsourcing is having a more
significant and longer-term impact on U.S. IT workers.

Outsourcing not only leads to job cuts; it also allows corporations to avoid
paying unemployment taxes when demand for labor slackens, said Norman A.
Lane, president of Aztech Professional Services Inc., a Phoenix-based
consulting and contracting firm. Lane contends that to prevent tax losses to
the federal government, U.S. companies that engage in offshore outsourcing
should pay a levy "on every outsourced job to compensate U.S. taxpayers."

ITAA President Harris Miller has been a lightning rod for H-1B critics,
since the Arlington, Va.-based trade association is largely made up of
technology vendors such as IBM, Cisco Systems Inc. and others who have made
extensive use of foreign IT specialists. While he said he believes the
economy has been the biggest culprit, even he acknowledges that offshore
programming "is having an impact" on the U.S. IT job market.

"The real challenge is offshore programming—not the few thousand [IT
workers] that come to the U.S., but the workers in Ireland and South Africa
and India that are paid much less to do the work," said Miller. "I think
there is more work going offshore in part due to the pressure to keep costs
down, and there's huge downward pressure on software vendors to keep their
labor rates down," he added.

"So much work is going offshore, we're putting ourselves at a substantial
[intellectual capital and security] risk," said Linda McInnis, an
independent contractor and head of the hiring initiative at BostonSPIN, an
Acton, Mass.-based group of 1,200 Boston-area software professionals.

Labor Daze
Key findings from the ITAA/Dice updated IT workforce study:

The U.S. IT workforce has grown by a net 85,437 positions since January,

from 9,895,916 jobs to 9,981,353.

Employers added 782,466 IT workers and dismissed 697,029 IT employees

during the period.

The number of IT worker layoffs has dropped substantially in the past 12

months. Between January and December 2001, companies released 2.6 million IT
workers, more than 218,000 per month. Between July 2001 and June 2002, the
monthly total dropped to 116,000.

Companies have hired far fewer IT workers in the past 12 months. Between

January and December 2001, companies hired 2,090,492 IT workers, compared
with 1,564,931 workers between July 2001 and June 2002. Hiring dipped 25%
during this tracking period.

Top in-demand skills haven’t changed much since earlier this year. C++,

Oracle, SQL and Java remain at the top of the list, and demand for these
skills has held steady or increased slightly.

If current hiring trends hold, the total U.S. IT workforce will reach just

over 10 million workers by the end of the year, 10% below expectations
earlier in 2002.

Base: Telephone interviews with hiring managers at 300 companies, July and
August 2002
Source: The ITAA/Dice annual workforce study "Bouncing Back"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57486-2002Sep23.html

Tech Job Market Still Weak, Report Says
Companies Scaling Back Hiring Plans

By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 24, 2002; Page E05

Technology workers hoping for more plentiful job opportunities later this
year may be disappointed. A survey of managers in the tech industries showed
that many are cutting back on their hiring plans even further.

In January, more than 1.1 million jobs were slated to be filled over the
next 12 months, the Information Technology Association of America found in a
survey of hiring managers. But yesterday the organization released an
updated report that lowered the number by 27 percent, to 834,727.

The rockiness of the tech job market may not bode well for the economy as a
whole in years to come, the ITAA said. When demand for technically skilled
employees eventually rises, many may have left the profession and fewer
people will have entered it.

"My concern is that a sluggish job market today could turn off many
prospective information systems and computer science students, resulting in
rampant IT talent shortages a few years down the road," ITAA President
Harris N. Miller said in a statement.

More technology workers were hired than fired in the first six months of
2002, but the industry added only 85,437 net jobs. And while mass layoffs
have largely subsided, finding new employment may still prove difficult
after dramatic declines in 2001, when the industry shed 528,496 more jobs
than it gained.

The association predicts that the sector will remain sluggish throughout
2002. The total tech workforce is now expected to top 10 million workers by
the end of the year, 10 percent lower than previous predictions.

Information technology companies -- as opposed to non-tech companies that
employ tech workers -- are making the biggest reductions in hiring plans.
The sector accounted for only 5 percent of all tech hires in July, down from
20 percent in January. That may prompt technology workers to seek work in
other industries, said Scot Melland, president and chief executive of Dice
Inc., an online job-board company.

"To me that indicates that the market has stabilized -- it has not gotten
any better or any worse," Melland said.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

http://www.aerotechnews.com/starc/2002/092002/IT_Workers.html

Journal of Aerospace and Defense Industry News Sept. 20th, 2002

United States has shortage of information technology workers The United
States is facing an alarming shortage in skilled workers to protect the
nation's critical infrastructures from cyberterrorism and other threats, say
homeland security and high-tech experts.

"There is going to be more demand for people with information technology
skills," Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association
of America, said during a cybersecurity conference in Washington sponsored
by the MIS Training Institute. "It is a huge problem we have in this
country - not having enough people with adequate skills and training."
Stressing the need to make information security second nature, Mark Holman,
deputy assistant to the president for the White House Office of Homeland
Security, said the president's forthcoming national strategy for
cybersecurity addresses the need for skilled workers to help defend computer
networks.
Holman said the strategy aims to be a "living document" that will grow and
change as the technology changes. The document contains sections that
address home users' security and network security issues, Holman said. It
also categorizes critical infrastructure issues by industry, such as water
filtration, electricity or telecommunications.
Government and industry also must educate each other about infrastructure
vulnerabilities and threats through information-sharing analysis centers and
other partnerships, according to Ronald Dick, director of the FBI's National
Infrastructure Protection Center.
Dick noted that although about 90 percent of the nation's infrastructures
are owned and operated by the private sector, "the scale at which the
private sector looks at vulnerability assessments is very narrow from a
national infrastructure-protection standpoint."
Finding and retaining skilled workers to protect the military's critical
infrastructures also must be a priority, according to Curt Weldon (R-Penn.),
who chairs the House Armed Services Procurement Subcommittee.
Weldon said the military is facing a crucial shortage in information
security specialists, in part because workers with those skills can earn
more money in the private sector. "It's been a challenge to keep that level
of competence in the military," Weldon said. "We're still on the cutting
edge, but ... it's extremely difficult."
Weldon said he plans to propose a new scholarship program in which the
federal government would pay the undergraduate and graduate tuitions of
students seeking careers in information security. Those students in turn
would spend several years as "cyber warriors" in the military.
"Information dominance" will be a military buzzword in the coming years
because terrorist networks and enemy states that could never match U.S.
strength on the battlefield are looking to cyber warfare as a central
strategy, said Weldon.
"All that smart technology that allows us to dominate any battlefield at any
time is all computer-dependent," he said. "We've never fought this kind of
threat before."
A failure to protect the nation's critical infrastructures could have
disastrous consequences, both at home and on battlefields abroad, Weldon
said. "We don't know when or where the next attack will occur," he said.
"But I can tell you this: It will involve information systems."

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