With this being an election year, at some point the topic of H1-B visas and the state of IT talent will come up in the IT blogs. A quick Google search shows that it’s already showing up in the political blogs (both Obama and McCain are for increases in H1Bs). I wanted to take a minute to put in my two cents.

Let me put some context around my views. I am a software developer at a large financial institution. I have been involved in the hiring processes of every company in my professional career, usually providing technical interviews for potential candidates. So I have much experience reading resumes and talking to people that I may potentially work with. I do mostly java web development using open source technologies like Spring and Struts, nothing I would consider exotic but they are hot technologies right now.

My view is simple. I am frustrated at the shortage of quality IT talent in the US. IT is an industry that is constantly changing. Unlike a field like marketing or accounting, in order to be valuable in the marketplace you need to stay up on current technologies. From my point of view, this is not happening. Let me give you an example.

As part of hiring one new java developer for our team, I recently reviewed approximately 170 resumes. Out of those, I pulled out 15 to do a phone screen. It isn’t that those were the 15 best resumes. They were the only resumes with the technologies we were looking for on them. I then did most of the phone screens. Out of those 15, we are bringing in 3 people for in person interviews. We are still in the process of doing the in person interviews, but if we get one person out of the original 170 resumes we would have a success rate of just over a half a percent.

So what was wrong with the ones we have seen so far? In the cut from 170 to 15, it was lack of the correct technologies on their resume. Now that could be due to them not including the right technologies on their resume. However, given how Spring and Struts have become basic standby’s in the Java web space, I have a hard time buying that argument. In the cut from 15 to 3, it was that the 12 that had the right technologies on their resumes, really never used them. A quick note, if you have a technology on your resume, please be able to questions that come out of an FAQ on the technology. I work for a company that has over 80 openings, at that current rate of success (which we still haven’t found someone yet…we are still interviewing two more of the three in person), it would take us reviewing almost 14,000 resumes. To put that number into perspective, if we give the average resume 5 minutes (which is generous by most statistics) it would take over 140 work days for one person to get thru all those resumes.

I wish I could say that this was a one time instance, but I can’t. Like I said previously, I have done interviews and reviewed resumes for past employers as well with similar results. I know there are people in the IT industry who are out of work. I know that projects have been outsourced. However, I also know that the companies that these projects are getting outsourced to have people who know the technologies that are required and get the job done. We, as developers, do not work in an industry where we can do some learning and be set for a career. IT doesn’t work that way. If you want to keep your job, you must maintain your skills. In IT, to maintain your skills means to continue learning new skills over your entire career. Unfortunately, IT workers in the US are doing that on a scale that is required and because of that, we have a shortage of talent that can only be filled by foreign workers.