It's not bogus. Many if not most of the big high tech companies have open positions they can't find people for.
If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable, and that all you have to do is train them to be Xes, and you can have as many Xes as you want.
Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech companies is that these companies want star programmers, and you can't train people to be stars. Someone asking why we need to hire programmers from other countries might just as well ask why Real Madrid has to hire so many non-Spanish players. Can't they just train more Spanish players to play at the level they need?
Incidentally, when I first started to see these articles a few weeks ago (I don't know if it was this one or another one like it), I was curious why anyone would put so much effort into saying something false. It turns out the authors work for something called the Economic Policy Institute, which is funded by a consortium of labor unions. I was a little puzzled that unions would care about this, since none of these programmers are unionized. I suppose they must see it as the thin end of the wedge.
If anyone is curious where the mistake is in this article's reasoning, it's in the assumption that people are more or less interchangeable, and that all you have to do is train them to be Xes, and you can have as many Xes as you want.
Whereas the reason there are open positions for programmers at high tech companies is that these companies want star programmers, and you can't train people to be stars. Someone asking why we need to hire programmers from other countries might just as well ask why Real Madrid has to hire so many non-Spanish players. Can't they just train more Spanish players to play at the level they need?
Incidentally, when I first started to see these articles a few weeks ago (I don't know if it was this one or another one like it), I was curious why anyone would put so much effort into saying something false. It turns out the authors work for something called the Economic Policy Institute, which is funded by a consortium of labor unions. I was a little puzzled that unions would care about this, since none of these programmers are unionized. I suppose they must see it as the thin end of the wedge.