There is not a shortage of STEM graduates. However, from an employer's point of view, there is a shortage of cheap STEM graduates. Hence the recent tech company uproar over the skilled visa changes.
Those are the same thing. You may as well say that there is no shortage of food in Venezuela, just a shortage of cheap food.
The reason companies can't get STEM grads at the prices they're willing to pay is because those STEM grads can simply work for a company willing to pay more. That's not a problem for the grads (you bet your ass I'm not complaining too much, haha), but it is for everyone who wants to hire them.
And a lot of the proposed immigration changes won't actually reduce the price of these workers either. If anything, it's a power grab by large consulting companies and bigger software shops to be able to hire up the best talent, and just lay off the rest:
> And a lot of the proposed immigration changes won't actually reduce the price of these workers either. If anything, it's a power grab by large consulting companies and bigger software shops to be able to hire up the best talent, and just lay off the rest
Isn't it just the opposite? The large consulting companies are the ones paying these low wages. They submit a lot of applications and, because it's a pure lottery system, soak up a large portion of the available H1B visas.
This means that small, struggling companies like my own cannot hire H1Bs to get the talent that we desperately need. A higher wage floor or an auction system would mean that we would actually stand a chance at getting an H1B visa approved for the 1 hire that we need.
You say there's a shortage, yet all software development jobs available require a Bachelor's degree plus 3-5 years of experience. That doesn't seem like much of a shortage to me.
I've a genuine question here. So, what are the STEM graduates doing who didn't want to work for the cheap wages? Did they find something that pays better? If not, why didn't they take up the lower wage job since it's better than nothing?
In relation to programming specifically, I once saw someone on Quora put it perfectly. It effecticly stated that we don't need more programmers. We need more senior developers with 10+ years of experience.
That's hilarious from the perspective of someone with the 10+ years of experience I got employers telling me I have to work 3 times as hard as people half my age or I'm out. We don't really treat STEM employees with much in the way of respect especially post 2008.
I think it all comes down to the big difference between having a degree and being productive at a company, along with how free the labor market is.
I have worked at a few places that just didn't take people out of school at all, because they saw that the amount of time the typical graduate they got was a net negative to productivity, compared to how long people stayed at the company, didn't add up. They figured out that in their case, given their relative inability to tell the highly productive recent grads from those that would not be productive in a year, that it was better for them to spend resources paying experienced people really well, and letting other companies sort out the good and the bad. Thinking like that leads to some kind of farm system: People that are just body shops, where the good people manage to go to a next tier of company quality.
A shortcut for this is a degree from a nice enough university, as there are many companies out there that will interview anyone coming from a prestigious university, but would not give the time of the day to a recent graduate from, say, Missouri Rolla.
And let's not forget the madness that is interviewing in big tech companies. All of that 'optimizing to avoid false positives' idea is really saying that people that don't have a specific interviewing shape, but are very good when at a job, don't have a chance. I have a job at one of those tech companies, but some of my favorite developers from earlier in my career just can't pass the interviews, even though I think they are, in practice, better than your averaged hip company employee.
So it all comes down to how we are terrible at figuring out good performance, and how training people just isn't a good economic decision when they can just leave to a place with a bigger budget in a year or two.
To be fair, this is another place where employers are screwing themselves. If we could carry a portfolio like all those marketing people they hire, then the selection process would be a lot easier.
Many developers with 10+ years of experience are married. Once you get to 15+ or 20+ most are married with children. An entry or mid-level salary does not cut it. There are mortgages to pay, braces to buy, schooling fees, nannies, the works.
I know hundreds of people in these categories. They go work on Wall Street or other industries where those with 10+yrs experience get paid commensurate to their experience.
I guarantee if tech jobs paid market wages for higher experience there would be no shortage.
My experience is that many tech jobs on Wall Street no longer pay more than tech jobs at tech companies. I probably know more developers who have capped out at high 100s or 200s at banks than I do at Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc.
I have 10+ years of experience---17 actually, or more depending on how you count. I am sitting out the hiring market: instead I'm doing consulting, freelancing, and my own projects. The problem isn't a shortage of 10+ year developers. The problem is too little variance in developer salaries. I look at the salary ranges on StackOverflow and don't see any that are interesting to me. Compared to what I can make on my own, they don't come close. There is tremendous variance in developer productivity, and salaries don't keep up with it. I don't see the same problem with doctors, lawyers, accountants, or many other professions and trades, where your compensation can keep growing all your life. I think 10 years is about when many developers jump ship to management or a second career. I feel very lucky that I can continue doing the programming that I love. But if you want me to come back to full-time employment, it's going to have to be a salary that reflects 17 years of lessons learned, and the productivity, maturity, business sense, and technical judgment my clients are paying for.
So I think you're right that it's not about new grads, but about proven senior people. That's exactly when the salaries plateau. So the people here saying "It's not a shortage if you're paying too little" are right too. There are new grads getting hired for $130k total comp, or even $200k. Offer me $300k plus remote and I'll probably take it. Offer me $400k and maybe I'll even move. Of course that sounds outrageous, but my point is it shouldn't. Not if you consider the difference in value senior people can provide.
Chimes with anecdotal experience hiring in London. Glut of really well educated, keen and passionate juniors but tumbleweed when trying to hire seniors, even at higher salaries.
Consider that senior developers are busy and aren't going to make time to prep for interviews that lead to a job landing them a $15k-$20k bump (before taxes). Together with all the other intangibles (culture, nature of project work, career paths) it makes jumping ship difficult to gauge.
Three suggestions - 1) raise the compensation for seniors 2) offer more interesting projects/products 3) use a different interview process for seniors, they hate algorithm quizzes
Most software companies just churn out database-backed MVC apps. After 5 years of that any good developer would be bored.
Well, why would those senior people want to apply and work at your company? This is not snark; this is a real question you need to be able to answer if you want a chance at hiring those senior people. Why would a senior person want to up and leave their position, which likely already pays pretty well, and treats them pretty well?
Just put all the current buzzwords on your resume. They won't know the difference. You'll screw up the technical interview somehow just like everyone else does, and they'll scratch their heads and go "no one is as smart as me! shortage!" and they might hire you anyway because you said you liked the same movie as they did, or something equally trivial.
The older I get the more I wonder how much it has to do with very few people making it 10 years without moving into an different industry that doesn't treat their talent like assembly line workers that they don't have to pay overtime.
Lumping 'IT' in with STEM is a historical mistake from the days when IT was not a mass-market phenomenon, but firmly the territory of academia, government ventures, defense contractors, safety-critical systems, and research.
Today its placement increasingly serves to muddy facts and justify various views and policies on H1-Bs and the like, either in favor or against. In truth, IT should be split into its own category with distinct analyses and approaches, addressed independently from S, E, M, and the leftovers of T.
Even as an immigrant to the US, I agree with this. A large part of the shortage is self-inflicted.
Did we see a shortage of American workers who could do the job right away?
YES. Not many people work in the same area of technology. There really aren't many people working in some areas of tech.
Did the employer try to compromise on their requirement of "rockstar coder with 1000 wpm typing speed, PhD in app programming, merge k-sorted arrays in 15 mins with good syntax and no compiler?"
NO. And this is why there is no shortage. It's their demand for rockstars when reality is most companies are mediocre (at best). It's not shortage, your company sucks, interviews suck and nobody wants to work there.
There are tons of articles on the "STEM shortage", but frightfully few about how to get graduates into their first job. Moving around once you've gotten a year or two under your belt is easy. I have seen lots of perfectly qualified people do other things because they couldn't get their foot in the door.
Nobody wants to foot the initial cost. "They'll just take another job elsewhere" is what I always hear, but employers never seem to recognize that junior devs choosing to move on reflects more on the employer than the dev. It's human nature to always think the issue is with someone else...
> Did the employer try to compromise on their requirement of "rockstar coder with 1000 wpm typing speed, PhD in app programming, merge k-sorted arrays in 15 mins with good syntax and no compiler?"
Or when they want years of experience with a specific framework, library, or other system.
I remember looking at Java positions last year (before I got my current job), and a lot of them would sound nice until I got to the item about "Must have X years of experience with Spring".
Yeah, I have a whole bunch of core Java under my belt, and I made the requirements for everything else, but because I don't have experience with that one library, I'm shut out.
In my experience, almost all of those "must have X years of experience with Y" requirements are written up by HR people who are loosely interpreting poorly understood requirements told to them by either the hiring manager, or other HR people. In many or most cases, the people writing up those job postings are not the same people who would be interviewing or hiring you, and they're more aspirational requirements than anything else. They hope that someone with X years of experience with Spring will magically come out of the woodwork and send them a resume, but they're just as likely to hire a fresh grad who doesn't know anything about Spring other than what they skimmed on Wikipedia right before going to the interview. And the people doing the interviewing and hiring might actually be fine with that.
Basically if something looks perfect except for some random "must have X years of experience in Y" requirement, just apply anyway. Most likely it won't be a dealbreaker for them (the hiring manager at a decent-sized company may not even know that that was in the job posting), but the worst case scenario is that you won't get the job but will get some good interview experience.
I remember shortly after Oak was renamed Java (so, maybe 1995? Certainly before the Java 1.0 release), at my startup, we wanted a Java person even if we had to retrain a C person. I gave my must-have/nice-to-have sheet to whoever was responsible for staffing and was surprised a week later to see a "Must have 5 years experience with Java" on the posting. When I asked her about it, she said that she had cribbed it from a Tivoli recruiter!
A few years later, I was applying somewhere (Samsung?) for a semiconductor design position - and they wanted 5 years experience on "Mentor Graphics 8"[0]. I was semi-fluent on "Mentor Graphics 6", but that was a no-go.
It sounds as if things haven't changed.
[0] The naming scheme has changed, so this nomenclature is itself a no-go today.
That's a huge problem in the Javascript space, especially considering how quickly it moves.
As far as I'm concerned, if a candidate has experience with Ember or Angular, I would never turn them down because they have not yet had the opportunity to work with React. A little bit of on-the-job training and some trial by fire, and most likely they'll be fine.
If I'm ever on the hunt for a new employer, I'm looking forward to getting turned down because I don't have 2 years experience working with Vue.js. It's idiotic, but I can guarantee it'll happen.
If people shopped for food like they hire engineers, they'd starve to death. I have to wonder if there's not some "corporate anorexia" thing that shares pathology with food disorders.
Last job I had, we were doing quite well but market conditions changed. They effectively now have a 0.00% software presence.
It just isn't possible, given the basic makeup of the company, for there to be anything other than very basic bug fixing going on - the leadership team simply can't cope.
When I was there, I pretty much ran on one-page specs, if there was a written spec at all.
We were violently successful. SFAIK, just because of parts cost, that's all scrapped now. :)
The people that are left are of the "fix one, create three" level. One has a degree in CS but has never actually learned the trade. I did what I could, but he was perpetually interrupted. God bless 'em, but it's true.
In the end, unless your business is critically dependent on software, you may be better off without us.
That reminds me of a "C" level boss I had at a tech company. In a private meeting he said, "George, I think this team is not world class." Like he had discovered a crucial flaw that needed to be fixed. The product (that made them millions) was not world class in its design or engineering. The management of the company and its strategy was not in my opinion the best in the world. Sometimes there is this fever dream of excellence that prevents managers from being realistic about what is really necessary to get a thing done.
A shortage, by definition, requires a situation where the price cannot rise. Of course, if the price is rising, then the poorer businesses are priced out of the market and no longer need developers. As long as price can rise, a shortage is impossible. Even if there was only one developer in the entire world, the services would eventually go to the highest bidder and everyone else would be priced out of the market, leaving no demand for other developers.
That leaves me wondering what force is preventing price from rising in the case of developer talent?
From my experience job searching, it seems that companies are looking for someone to fit the job description exactly instead of being willing to hire and to train someone. And when they can't find anyone, they complain about a shortage of eligible workers.
It's really difficult to find a job the traditional way (submit resume/cover letter, interview, etc.) in this economy. The article makes a good point that if there was a shortage of STEM talent, companies would be drooling over everyone with a B.S. degree, but I haven't really seen that.
I do agree with the article that there is a STEM literacy problem...I have friends in grad school constantly complaining about people gaming the peer review system, students getting by on shoddy research, etc. I've had co-workers that I've been really disappointed with in terms of having solid engineering fundamentals.
If the article is right, and there's not a STEM shortage, what would you tell a high schooler applying to college? What field should they study so that there's a better chance of them having jobs?
The approach Harvey Mudd took to get more women into Computer Science could (and should) probably be applied across all STEM fields, and to all student types.
The overhaul of the computer science curriculum to make it more inclusive began the year before Klawe arrived from Princeton, where she was the dean of engineering. The school had redesigned its introductory course, required for all first-year students, to emphasize practical uses for programming and team based-projects, and switched from the Java programming language to Python, which more closely mimics the way humans communicate. The course is broken into three tracks, including one for students with no programming background.
To make everyone feel at ease, professors urge know-it-all students who always have their hand in the air to talk during office hours, instead of in class.”Too often, people with experience are taking up all the air time,” Klawe says.
As a result of the changes, women who take the introductory course are more likely to leave with a positive impression of programming, and often sign up for the second class in the sequence. Many go on to internships or research projects in the field after their first year, and by then, they’re hooked.
>Many go on to internships or research projects in the field after their first year, and by then, they’re hooked. //
Are these the same people who are leaving the industry after a few years? Seems like if you hoodwink people in to something that's not really their vocation then that's the sort of effect you'd expect?
> professors urge know-it-all students who always have their hand in the air to talk during office hours
This was unbelievably annoying when I was in school, since the questions those kids asked were always completely off-topic and added nothing to the class. I didn't major in CS so I only took a few classes in that department, but I almost never noticed the same behavior in any other subject despite it being a daily occurrence in my CS classes (until around 3rd year courses).
This just sounds like it's drastically lowering the difficulty because then people don't quit so easily.
And I'm sure that's true ... but makes the situation worse by making it hard for even people who would make the higher difficulty level to find the knowledge in the first place.
Paying market wages to STEM workers may sway them away from going to work at hedge funds and other industries. Paying sub-market wages and expecting to find top talent will lead to shortages, much like trying to purchase a new BMW for $500.
I think it's likely that both sides of the argument are correct. There are a large amount of STEM jobs that are not being filled, while at the same time there is a surplus of STEM graduates.
The takeaway is that businesses don't just need people that have STEM degrees, they need people that will add value to their company. Just because you have a STEM degree does not mean that you'll be a net positive for the company.
It seems to me that incentives for colleges right now are way out of wack. They're not doing a good enough job at preparing students for actual industry roles (elite institutions being the exception), yet their enrollment rates and the cost of their tuition keeps going up.
> The takeaway is that businesses don't just need people that have STEM degrees, they need people that will add value to their company. Just because you have a STEM degree does not mean that you'll be a net positive for the company.
I agree. I graduated a long time ago with a CS degree and almost a minor in business. The CS foundation helped with all the learning I have done since then, but if I think about the most valuable classes I had in college they were economics, accounting, finance and management. Of course some jobs need PhD level CS without any other skill, but the majority of positions need someone who knows how to program plus <insert skill here>.
Having worked with a lot of people with "elite" degrees, I disagree with this a lot. I walked out of school with much more relevant experience than I feel they have (through both school and co-ops). Don't get me wrong, they're all smart people, but knowing how to write merge sort in haskell is different than knowing how to comfortably use git.
So is the engineering crisis and the talent shortage and the diversity gap. You think Facebook wants more H1Bs because it wants to promote diversity? You think it's because of a shortage? That's not how these things work. It just so happens that what's currently en vogue aligns with the business interests of the largest tech companies in the world.
Specifically, Mark Zuckerberg is a co-founder of FWD.us which "is mobilizing the tech community in support of policies that keep the American Dream achievable in the 21st century, starting with commonsense immigration reform" according to their website [1].
The major issues they lobby for are (1) increase in H-1Bs (2) illegal immigrants. The one thing they don't talk about is legal immigration paths for people on H-1Bs. People on H-1B from India and China have long backlogs for Green Cards, which causes them to stick with one employer for long, with reduced negotiation leverage, and there by depressing wages for the entire industry. But FWD.us does not have a care for that aspect of immigration - presumably because this helps the bottom line of everyone involved in FWD.us. Meanwhile they don't miss any opportunity to shed crocodile tears for the plight of DREAMers. Sigh!
Readit News
"There is a shortage of STEM graduates at the price I want to pay."
The reason companies can't get STEM grads at the prices they're willing to pay is because those STEM grads can simply work for a company willing to pay more. That's not a problem for the grads (you bet your ass I'm not complaining too much, haha), but it is for everyone who wants to hire them.
http://fightthefuture.org/articles/hr-170-will-all-large-com...
Isn't it just the opposite? The large consulting companies are the ones paying these low wages. They submit a lot of applications and, because it's a pure lottery system, soak up a large portion of the available H1B visas.
This means that small, struggling companies like my own cannot hire H1Bs to get the talent that we desperately need. A higher wage floor or an auction system would mean that we would actually stand a chance at getting an H1B visa approved for the 1 hire that we need.
You can say there is not shortage of anything if you want to pay a good price. Then ignore what I said or remove the word 'shortage' for your world.
There is a gap between cheap and the good price. Sometimes "cheap" is too cheap.
I have worked at a few places that just didn't take people out of school at all, because they saw that the amount of time the typical graduate they got was a net negative to productivity, compared to how long people stayed at the company, didn't add up. They figured out that in their case, given their relative inability to tell the highly productive recent grads from those that would not be productive in a year, that it was better for them to spend resources paying experienced people really well, and letting other companies sort out the good and the bad. Thinking like that leads to some kind of farm system: People that are just body shops, where the good people manage to go to a next tier of company quality.
A shortcut for this is a degree from a nice enough university, as there are many companies out there that will interview anyone coming from a prestigious university, but would not give the time of the day to a recent graduate from, say, Missouri Rolla.
And let's not forget the madness that is interviewing in big tech companies. All of that 'optimizing to avoid false positives' idea is really saying that people that don't have a specific interviewing shape, but are very good when at a job, don't have a chance. I have a job at one of those tech companies, but some of my favorite developers from earlier in my career just can't pass the interviews, even though I think they are, in practice, better than your averaged hip company employee.
So it all comes down to how we are terrible at figuring out good performance, and how training people just isn't a good economic decision when they can just leave to a place with a bigger budget in a year or two.
I know hundreds of people in these categories. They go work on Wall Street or other industries where those with 10+yrs experience get paid commensurate to their experience.
I guarantee if tech jobs paid market wages for higher experience there would be no shortage.
So I think you're right that it's not about new grads, but about proven senior people. That's exactly when the salaries plateau. So the people here saying "It's not a shortage if you're paying too little" are right too. There are new grads getting hired for $130k total comp, or even $200k. Offer me $300k plus remote and I'll probably take it. Offer me $400k and maybe I'll even move. Of course that sounds outrageous, but my point is it shouldn't. Not if you consider the difference in value senior people can provide.
Three suggestions - 1) raise the compensation for seniors 2) offer more interesting projects/products 3) use a different interview process for seniors, they hate algorithm quizzes
Most software companies just churn out database-backed MVC apps. After 5 years of that any good developer would be bored.
Deleted Comment
Today its placement increasingly serves to muddy facts and justify various views and policies on H1-Bs and the like, either in favor or against. In truth, IT should be split into its own category with distinct analyses and approaches, addressed independently from S, E, M, and the leftovers of T.
Did we see a shortage of American workers who could do the job right away?
YES. Not many people work in the same area of technology. There really aren't many people working in some areas of tech.
Did the employer try to compromise on their requirement of "rockstar coder with 1000 wpm typing speed, PhD in app programming, merge k-sorted arrays in 15 mins with good syntax and no compiler?"
NO. And this is why there is no shortage. It's their demand for rockstars when reality is most companies are mediocre (at best). It's not shortage, your company sucks, interviews suck and nobody wants to work there.
Nobody wants to foot the initial cost. "They'll just take another job elsewhere" is what I always hear, but employers never seem to recognize that junior devs choosing to move on reflects more on the employer than the dev. It's human nature to always think the issue is with someone else...
* If your first year or two was at a "top company". Significantly more difficult if you worked anywhere else.
Or when they want years of experience with a specific framework, library, or other system.
I remember looking at Java positions last year (before I got my current job), and a lot of them would sound nice until I got to the item about "Must have X years of experience with Spring".
Yeah, I have a whole bunch of core Java under my belt, and I made the requirements for everything else, but because I don't have experience with that one library, I'm shut out.
Basically if something looks perfect except for some random "must have X years of experience in Y" requirement, just apply anyway. Most likely it won't be a dealbreaker for them (the hiring manager at a decent-sized company may not even know that that was in the job posting), but the worst case scenario is that you won't get the job but will get some good interview experience.
A few years later, I was applying somewhere (Samsung?) for a semiconductor design position - and they wanted 5 years experience on "Mentor Graphics 8"[0]. I was semi-fluent on "Mentor Graphics 6", but that was a no-go.
It sounds as if things haven't changed.
[0] The naming scheme has changed, so this nomenclature is itself a no-go today.
As far as I'm concerned, if a candidate has experience with Ember or Angular, I would never turn them down because they have not yet had the opportunity to work with React. A little bit of on-the-job training and some trial by fire, and most likely they'll be fine.
If I'm ever on the hunt for a new employer, I'm looking forward to getting turned down because I don't have 2 years experience working with Vue.js. It's idiotic, but I can guarantee it'll happen.
It just isn't possible, given the basic makeup of the company, for there to be anything other than very basic bug fixing going on - the leadership team simply can't cope.
When I was there, I pretty much ran on one-page specs, if there was a written spec at all.
We were violently successful. SFAIK, just because of parts cost, that's all scrapped now. :)
The people that are left are of the "fix one, create three" level. One has a degree in CS but has never actually learned the trade. I did what I could, but he was perpetually interrupted. God bless 'em, but it's true.
In the end, unless your business is critically dependent on software, you may be better off without us.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
If you compare this to other fields with a glut, for example English literature majors, you'd see that they only hire rockstars.
That leaves me wondering what force is preventing price from rising in the case of developer talent?
It's really difficult to find a job the traditional way (submit resume/cover letter, interview, etc.) in this economy. The article makes a good point that if there was a shortage of STEM talent, companies would be drooling over everyone with a B.S. degree, but I haven't really seen that.
I do agree with the article that there is a STEM literacy problem...I have friends in grad school constantly complaining about people gaming the peer review system, students getting by on shoddy research, etc. I've had co-workers that I've been really disappointed with in terms of having solid engineering fundamentals.
If the article is right, and there's not a STEM shortage, what would you tell a high schooler applying to college? What field should they study so that there's a better chance of them having jobs?
Usually a scientist, programmer, engineer, or mathematician is made in elementary school.
https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bia...
The overhaul of the computer science curriculum to make it more inclusive began the year before Klawe arrived from Princeton, where she was the dean of engineering. The school had redesigned its introductory course, required for all first-year students, to emphasize practical uses for programming and team based-projects, and switched from the Java programming language to Python, which more closely mimics the way humans communicate. The course is broken into three tracks, including one for students with no programming background.
To make everyone feel at ease, professors urge know-it-all students who always have their hand in the air to talk during office hours, instead of in class.”Too often, people with experience are taking up all the air time,” Klawe says.
As a result of the changes, women who take the introductory course are more likely to leave with a positive impression of programming, and often sign up for the second class in the sequence. Many go on to internships or research projects in the field after their first year, and by then, they’re hooked.
Are these the same people who are leaving the industry after a few years? Seems like if you hoodwink people in to something that's not really their vocation then that's the sort of effect you'd expect?
This was unbelievably annoying when I was in school, since the questions those kids asked were always completely off-topic and added nothing to the class. I didn't major in CS so I only took a few classes in that department, but I almost never noticed the same behavior in any other subject despite it being a daily occurrence in my CS classes (until around 3rd year courses).
And I'm sure that's true ... but makes the situation worse by making it hard for even people who would make the higher difficulty level to find the knowledge in the first place.
The takeaway is that businesses don't just need people that have STEM degrees, they need people that will add value to their company. Just because you have a STEM degree does not mean that you'll be a net positive for the company.
It seems to me that incentives for colleges right now are way out of wack. They're not doing a good enough job at preparing students for actual industry roles (elite institutions being the exception), yet their enrollment rates and the cost of their tuition keeps going up.
I agree. I graduated a long time ago with a CS degree and almost a minor in business. The CS foundation helped with all the learning I have done since then, but if I think about the most valuable classes I had in college they were economics, accounting, finance and management. Of course some jobs need PhD level CS without any other skill, but the majority of positions need someone who knows how to program plus <insert skill here>.
Having worked with a lot of people with "elite" degrees, I disagree with this a lot. I walked out of school with much more relevant experience than I feel they have (through both school and co-ops). Don't get me wrong, they're all smart people, but knowing how to write merge sort in haskell is different than knowing how to comfortably use git.
The major issues they lobby for are (1) increase in H-1Bs (2) illegal immigrants. The one thing they don't talk about is legal immigration paths for people on H-1Bs. People on H-1B from India and China have long backlogs for Green Cards, which causes them to stick with one employer for long, with reduced negotiation leverage, and there by depressing wages for the entire industry. But FWD.us does not have a care for that aspect of immigration - presumably because this helps the bottom line of everyone involved in FWD.us. Meanwhile they don't miss any opportunity to shed crocodile tears for the plight of DREAMers. Sigh!
[1]: https://www.fwd.us/