Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California, Davis, investigated the H-1B programme for a simple reason: he cared for his students. The sluggish economy in 1993 made them sweat for jobs. Some worked in Macy’s as sales clerks. The 1990 guest worker programme, swelling the labour pool, had exacerbated their desperation. It perplexed Norm.
Born to ‘one-and-a-half immigrants’, he grew up in East LA and San Gabriel Valley. After a short stint as a Silicon Valley programmer, he secured a PhD in pure mathematics from UCLA in 1975, then joined the UC Davis faculty.
As he intensified his H-1B research in the mid-1990s, something else, too, stirred: the tech industry. Its first wish: increasing the annual H-1B quota. Its eternal move: the ‘thought control’ tactic implanting the ‘STEM crisis’ notion in public consciousness. The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), an industry trade group, released a study in 1997. So did the Department of Commerce (DOC). They came to the same conclusion: that the country wilted from a STEM workers shortage.
Prodded by the ITAA, the DOC co-sponsored a two-day National IT Workforce Convocation in Berkeley. The New York Times published a piece on the front page, quoting the ITAA chief, Silicon Valley executives and noted academics, confirming an acute labour shortage. Other media outlets sang the same tune.
But a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the congressional watchdog, flagged ‘serious analytical and methodological’ errors in the DOC and ITAA studies. The American media ran countless pieces and news segments, featuring critics of the STEM crisis. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics (IEEE)-USA published profiles of 500 unemployed engineers amid the tech boom, calling them ‘Misfortune 500’.
Senator Spencer Abraham (R-Michigan) introduced the American Competitiveness Act in March 1998. It aimed to reform H-1B rules, increase the annual cap from 65,000 to 85,000 and create 20,000 scholarships for low-income students to study STEM. As if Silicon Valley had handed its megaphone to Capitol Hill. The tech giants devised a two-fold solution to combat the ‘labour shortage’ problem: expand the H-1B programme in the short term and increase scholarship and training funds for native workers to reduce the reliance on foreign workforce in the future.
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Norm testified before Congress on 21 April 1998. For him, the H-1B issue pivoted on a three-letter word: age. Junior employees earned less, needed fewer benefits and, without marital pressure, toiled overtime. He cited the examples of vocal proponents of labour shortage (Intel, Sun Microsystems and Cypress Semiconductors) whose hiring patterns—evident from their employment web pages, recruitment literature and lawsuits—demonstrated a tilt towards younger techies.
Age discrimination hurt American programmers as young as thirty-five. An InformationWeek survey of hiring managers found that only 2 per cent of them preferred to hire an applicant with over ten years of experience. A Network World survey stated that ‘the younger the manager, the less likely he/she’ would have hired an older programmer. Another study concluded that, on average, it took ‘three more weeks for a laid-off programmer or engineer’ to land a job for each year of age.
Sun Microsystems’s employment webpage categorised workers by their experience levels: entry level (0–2 years), intermediate (3–5 years), senior (6+ years). A position for senior software engineer on Intel’s website set the cut-off at five years of experience. Oracle, four years. Best Buy, two years. And they weren’t outliers.
Industry folks themselves admitted—or deflected—the age discrimination problem. ‘The half-life of an engineer, whether hardware or software, is only a few years,’ said Intel’s chief operation officer, Craig Barrett, at a stakeholders’ meeting. In March 1998, Bay Area TV hosted a debate between Norm and Intel’s HR vice president, Coetta Chambers. Norm said he could forward her the CVs of several wellqualified engineers and programmers, helping her remedy the firm’s ‘desperate labour shortage’. She greeted the offer with ‘awkward silence’.
The 1993 National Survey of College Graduates—sponsored by the National Science Foundation—estimated that 57 per cent of computer science graduates continued to work as programmers six-and-a-half years after college. It plummeted to 37 per cent after fourteen-anda-half years and 19 per cent after twenty-and-a-half years. Many quit the industry after an endless unemployable period, making the attrition rate largely involuntary. The sceptics, though, mentioned career changes or entrepreneurial ventures. But it should have been true for other majors, too, such as civil engineering where, after twenty years, 52 per cent of graduates still worked in their fields.
The firms claimed to covet coders with ‘hot skills’. Norm called it a ‘red herring’.21 General programming talent mattered much more. ‘We’re not looking for any specific knowledge because things change so fast, and it’s easy to learn stuff,’ Bill Gates told the Wall Street Journal in 1994. ‘You’ve got to have an excitement about software, a certain intelligence.’ A manager at Microsoft, Jim McCarthy, echoed that point in his 1995 book, Dynamics of Software Development. But Microsoft’s own employment web page demanded: ‘State your skill sets’. So did numerous other firms. Their resume-scanning machines, sniffing ‘hot skills’, snubbed many applicants.
This excerpt from ‘Wild Wild East’ by Tanul Thakur has been published with permission from Context.