After a mid-career fling with graduate school, in 1996 Alan Ezer stepped back into the job market. Though hardly cocky, he thought his prospects were good. The high-tech boom was echoing from coast to coast, and Ezer's resume showed a decade of computer-programming experience, topped by a four-year stint at Citicorp in New York.
Ezer, 45, knew he'd have to update his skills, so he taught himself Java and put a clever demonstration of his facility with the language on the Web. He lowered his salary sights from the mid-US$50,000 range to $40,000. (and if it came down to it, even $35,000 would be OK, he thought.) And over the course of the next two years he sent his resume to some 150 companies - not answering every ad he saw, only those where a match appeared likely.
From all of that came one interview.
"Even though I had spelled out my background on my resume, when they saw me, they decided I didn't have the work experience they required," Ezer says.
Remarkably, in the time that Ezer searched fruitlessly for work and saw his retirement savings dwindle to "a couple of thousand dollars," the idea of a high-tech labor shortage went from industry claim to accepted wisdom.
A January New York Times article was headlined, "High-Tech Jobs Go Begging." The piece reported trade-organization claims - echoed last fall in a Department of Commerce report - of hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs. The story concluded: "If the talent drought continues, the entire national economy may feel the effect of lost wages and slowed innovation ... [a]nd the competitive advantage that the United States has long held in technology may be at risk."
That kind of talk is noticed in Washington, where an industry push to expand a visa program that already allows tens of thousands of foreign computer professionals into the country each year has gained momentum. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the matter and, according to the Times, the White House, a foe of low-skill foreign workers, is now considering supporting an increase.
Throw-away professionals
That the high-tech industry is not friendly to older workers is hardly new, or a secret. Even the Information Technology Association of America, which is leading the push to increase the number of foreign workers allowed into the United States, has reported that four in every five programmers are 44 years old or younger. And Bill Payson, who helps older IT workers find jobs through his organization Senior Staff 2000, told TechWeek that older workers run into "out-and-out discrimination" in the industry. Payson focuses on workers over age 50, but there are plenty of engineers and programmers younger than that who are also struggling to find or keep a job in the industry.
Take Paul Peterson, age 46. His father was a scientist and three of his uncles where engineers. "I grew up in a science world," he says. In 1976, Peterson received his degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, one of the top engineering schools in the world. Twenty-two years later, he is managing a Radio Shack store in Walnut Creek, California.
Peterson appreciates that Radio Shack has given him a chance to work, and lauds the company for "going strictly on performance" in its hiring and promoting. But he's earning a salary less than one-third what he made in his last job at an oil refinery, and moreover, he's not doing what he was trained to do: engineer.
"It's very discouraging," he says. "You think people must be looking at you and thinking, 'Oh, this poor guy working at a retail store, he must have never finished college, maybe not even high school.'"
Peterson spent several years "designing and building large mathematical models of all the refinery processes" for oil-refining giant Tosco. In 1995 he, along with many veteran colleagues, was laid off. While admitting he doesn't have work experience in the object-oriented languages that are in vogue today, Peterson says he's always been able to learn what he needed to get the job done.
"I'm just a real computer guy," he says, which may be a 46-year-old engineer's way of proclaiming, "I am a geek." He's studying networking protocols, and Visual Basic and Visual C, and is willing to work for as little as $10 an hour to get on-the-job experience in the field, but he can't seem to get his foot in the door.
"If the experience isn't exactly what they're looking for," he says, "it's like they hold it against you." So now Peterson is taking night and correspondence courses in law.
"Seems like that might be one of those few professions left where people think having a few years behind you is beneficial," he says.
Brown eggs in purple boxes
Sandy Raddue started in computer programming about the time Peterson did, in 1978, "when everything was done on punch cards and paper tape and with big computers." The industry changed a lot over the next 14 years, but Raddue hung in there as a software QA specialist, always "learning what I had to learn to stay current," she says.
By 1992, Raddue was a self-described victim of Silicon Valley burnout. She got out to start her own interior design business, did that for five years, then decided that she missed getting a paycheck every couple of weeks. Raddue and her husband and two kids were living in Reno, Nevada, then but had lived in the Portland, Oregon, area before, and she knew her chances of landing a job would be much better if she traded Great Basin for Great Northwest. So she did.
"I bought the Portland paper, saw an ad for a software QA director at $120,000 a year, and knew that except for a couple of minor little specifics, I had everything they needed. I thought, wow, this is going to be a piece of cake." What she didn't know was that even during a "high-tech labor shortage," those missing "minor little specifics" would translate to "an out-of-date skills set" in the company's eyes.
"It made no sense," Raddue said. "There's no doubt in my mind that I could have quickly learned whatever it is that needed to be done. Moreover, as the director, you wouldn't be in the trenches using those very narrow skills anyway. Yet if you didn't have the in-the-trenches work experience - not just the knowledge, but the actual experience - they didn't want to talk to you. I knew then that finding a job was not going to be easy."
What Raddue began to see was this: "The high-tech companies are like somebody who says they want to buy eggs. They go into the store and there's the egg section and it's full of eggs. They happen to be brown eggs in purple boxes, but as far as you and I can see, they're eggs. The high-tech company, though, they're looking at them and standing around saying, 'I'm looking for white eggs in green baskets. Guess there are no eggs here.'"
Raddue, a hard-charging and articulate woman, eventually found a company - she prefers it not be named - that was willing to give her a shot. But she counts herself lucky.
"I can see what a struggle it is for the older engineers and programmers," she says. "I wish this were a profession where the older you get, the more you're appreciated. But it's not. I think a lot of the younger people, they're afraid of the knowledge and the depth of understanding that the old-timers have."
Raddue and others wonder what message the cold shoulder is sending to young people - the very people the industry says it needs to convince to study engineering and the computer sciences.
"If I was the son or daughter of a fellow who lost his job when he was 40 or so and wasn't able to get back in it at a decent-paying level despite doing everything he can to make himself competitive," Peterson says, "well, I wouldn't want to go into the science field. I think that's something that's going to really hurt the industry in the long run."
