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Nearly 8million tech jobs will go unfilled in US this year

After years of sending high-tech production work abroad, U.S. companies are increasingly shipping sophisticated software development and other engineering jobs overseas because they can't find enough qualified workers here.
The escalated hiring of brainpower abroad, however, is carrying with it concerns about efficiency, management and the spontaneous creativity that comes from having employees working on projects together in the same place. About 10% of Southern California's 8,000 software firms are now relying on skilled workers in foreign countries--up from barely 1% two years ago, said Rohit Shukla, president of the Los Angeles Regional Technology Alliance.
That number could jump to 30% within the next few years if the high-tech labor shortage persists and the ceiling on skilled foreign worker visas isn't adjusted, he said. Leonard Shneyderman, a native of Russia, is using five Russian programmers to help him build his GameColony.com Inc., a year-old Internet entertainment firm in Newport Beach. He and other immigrants who have started U.S. technology companies are quick to use skilled foreign workers. "There is a talented pool of high-tech engineers abroad that is inexpensive and largely untapped and can be there for the taking," he said. Major companies that have long relied on low-skilled laborers overseas are now aggressively taking advantage of the growing pool of high-skilled engineers in countries such as India, Israel, Pakistan and Russia. Nearly one-third of Microsoft Corp.'s 34,000 employees are based abroad, working on everything from translating software to marketing and sales. In recent years, the company has added more than 100 software developers in India and Israel and opened research facilities in China and England, Microsoft spokesman Mark Thomas said. But some experts see little reason to increase the amount of skilled work sent to foreign lands.
Norman Matloff, a UC Davis professor of computer science, said many high-tech firms have intentionally misled the public about the supposed labor shortage as a way to boost the number of visas for skilled workers. "Countries like India and Russia have developed quite a sophisticated base of computer science professionals more than able to contribute significantly to development projects," he said. And for many company owners, the timing couldn't be better. This year, U.S. companies will have an estimated 1.6 million high-tech job vacancies, but less than half will be filled because of a dearth of home-grown techies, according to a new study by the Information Technology Assn. of America, an Arlington, Va., trade group representing 26,000 companies. Frank Kavanaugh turned overseas out of frustration. The chief executive of OhGolly.com Inc., a Newport Beach builder of Web sites for small businesses, said that after an extensive search, he hired two U.S. computer programmers. But they never reported to work.
Contributing to the spate of overseas outsourcing is the increased difficulty of bringing foreign software engineers to the United States to work. The Immigration and Naturalization Service said it has stopped accepting visa petitions for skilled foreign workers. The agency said it has received enough applications to dole out 115,000 of the special visas, the maximum permitted for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.
That hits companies like Microsoft the hardest. The Redmond, Wash., behemoth has openings for more than 3,000 technical and research employees. Spokesman Thomas acknowledged that the company will have a tough time importing qualified workers in the near term, despite a hearty supply of skilled labor in some foreign countries.
India, for instance, has 4.1 million technical and scientific workers and is churning out an additional 70,000 computer programmers and developers a year, said Navtej Sarna, spokesman at the Indian Embassy in Washington. India, like Malaysia, Israel and other nations, is beefing up its high-tech sector "with an eye toward attracting high-paying jobs from the U.S. and other developed nations," said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Assn. of America.

U.S. companies will have openings for more than 1.6 million information technology workers this year. But more than half of those jobs will go unfilled in the U.S. because of a lack of qualified employees. Here are the openings, by position, and the number of jobs that won't be filled.