Tuesday, June 26, 2007 9:13 PM
This article, from The Age last week, is a pretty good starting point for this blog. Everything that needs fixing starts right here:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/biztech/visa-rules-slammed/2007/06/18/1182019028185.html
Mr Kiran Karnik, a 'top representative of India's IT industry,' is furious about Australia's visa restrictions for skilled high tech workers--because the minimum salary is too high.
I'm not a financially astute individual. I've been willfully ignorant about money, in point of fact. But I'm a programmer, so I'm pretty good at plain old logic. Let's break Karnik's argument down:
Premise 1: As Karnik himself laments, there is a worldwide shortage of technology professionals, especially in the software field. Even in India. Less people are interested in becoming software engineers, period.
Premise 2: Corporations are vocally complaining that a lack of engineers is hurting their bottom line.
Premise 3: Universities are cutting computer science and mathematics departments all across the Australia., so numbersd can be expected to dwindle further.
Premise 4: Until cloning becomes a viable (not to mention legal) technology, premise 3 requires that we encourage young people to study the profession as well as providing incentive to experienced engineers to continue to practise it.
Conclusion:
Salaries are too high.
Mr. Karnik (and many others like him) attribute this as the root cause of this problem. Apparently, the basic laws of supply and demand do not apply to software professionals.
Software has the lowest overheads of any engineering discipline. Corporations and governments can afford to build bridges, roads, skyscrapers, destroyers, missile defense systems and space shuttles...but they don't have money for software development?
Please. In most big companies R&D costs less than marketing.
Software engineering is an intellectually rigorous job that requires training and commitment. As an engineer, one can expect to work long hours on tight deadlines for people who don't understand what it is that one does, or why they even need one to do it. Society has maintained the stereotype of the programmer as a socially retarded nerd while the lustre of the 'computer wiz kid' has long since tarnished over. It's a difficult and often unrewarding job and it will actively harm your prospects of getting laid. Despite Australia's booming economy and tight skills market, salaries are actually falling over here. If I was going into University right now, I'd be thinking twice before choosing to major in Comp. Sci.
When I
was at university, the 'Software Crisis' was about quality issues and blown deadlines. These issues remain, but the bigger issue by far is staffing.
The first step to attracting new talent is to acknowledge what it's worth and to actually pay for it. No two ways about it. This includes immigrants and visa workers. And it will happen, because all the weasel words and petty rationalizing in the world will not change the laws of supply and demand. The sooner the market corrects itself the better it will be for everyone.
The second is to improve working conditions. Sorry; we need budgets that give us the tools and the time necessary to do our jobs and have lives, and we managers who know what the hell they're doing. Nobody wants to do bad work and nobody wants to be on projects that fail. Even bargain-basement software costs... and a development team's salaries are nothing in comparison to those.
Thirdly, you gotta recruit. The defense forces can advertise, why can't we? The MATRIX films should have been the biggest advertisement for the software profession there ever was and, while I can hardly claim that my day job involves kung fu fighting and car chases, I do sometimes wear sunglasses while I stare at non-alphanumeric symbols flashing over my screen. Universities, governments and technology businesses need to capitalize on that--right now. The only ads I ever see show pasty white dorks wearing short sleeves and ties striding happily amongst cube farms. Who wants to be that guy? Oh, and then there are the crazy LSD phantoms who occasionally appear on my television set, trying to explain the inner workings of a CPU through interpretive dance and bad CGI. "Yes, you too can take drugs and write source code for money!"
Lawyers and accountants and doctors and stockbrokers will not build the future. Engineers are the doorkeepers, we are not a 'necessary expense'.
-- JF