High-tech and Foreign Workers

Last night PBS ran a report on "High-tech Companies Seek to Hire More Foreign Workers" which looked at companies trying to be able to hire more foreign high-tech workers as well as the political reaction in Washington.

I have mixed thoughts on the whole thing. Assuming a steady demand for technical talent, an increase in the number of available works (supply) means the average salary (price) for technical talent will fall. From a purely selfish point of view, that makes me hesitantly against allowing more and more foreign workers into the United States.

At the same time, again from a supply & demand perspective, I think additional foreign talent might actually lead to an increase in demand, overcoming the downward price shift of the greater supply. Why? Well, to quote the article, "Companies like Google, Yahoo, eBay were all founded by immigrants." Each of those companies has certainly created a larger demand for technical talent.

I also can't help but wonder if native-born Americans already have an upper hand at landing technical positions. Increasingly, these jobs are requiring "soft skills". To quote The Rabid Paladin:

This is what lies at the heart of recent calls for developers to learn "soft" skills and develop better communication. That's because, unless you work in some back-water in the benighted hinterlands, the days of the cave-troll coder are over. A developer can no longer count on being isolated from users, managers, or <shudder> marketing weasels.

When I review resumes for software development positions where I work, I've noticed a large gap between foreign-born applicants and native applicants in their ability to communicate in the English language effectively. Domestic applicants certainly aren't all perfect communicators, but more often than not the foreign born applicants include cover letters with sentences like:

My area of interest being networking from the start of computational studies has inspired me to choose it as my concentration. With the best knowledge gained at [school] backed with my undergraduate study at [other school] in Computer Science makes me a strong candidate for this co-op position.

and

Being groomed under variant working circumstances and pressure conditions have made my abilities effective to handle rigorous work schedule faced at corporate level. This gives me a great confidence level to work with great and reputed organization like yours.

If the job position requires the applicant to interact with a client or a group (something I believe is becoming increasingly comment), such awkward language puts the typical foreign candidate (at least in my experience) at a strong disadvantage.

Programmers Who Can't FizzBuzz

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror is "incredulous" at the experiences he is reading about on the blogosphere of applicants to software development jobs not being able to complete simple programming exercises during interviews. Allow me to add to his incredulous-ness.

I interview prospective co-ops where I work. These are generally Computer Science majors who have completed a technical ciriculum of at least four 10-week 4-credit classes in computer science, three of those classes in Java, one in C++.

So, when they show up for an interview, I expect they should be able to write some code on a white board. I use a few different programming exercises, one of which is a very slight variation on the FizzBuzz program. How I phrase the description for the program:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. For multiples of three (3) the program should print “Blue” instead of the number. For multiples of five (5) print “Green” instead of the number. For numbers which are multiples of both three (3) and five (5) print “BlueGreen” instead of the number.

Assuming it's a common language I know well enough to read, they are welcome to whatever language they'd like.

The first thing a good share of candidates tend to be tripped up by is remembering what the modulo operator is. Some developers also can't remember what the write/print line method of their favorite language is. Rather comically (to me, a coding dork), I had one candidate use a method he invented called writeln, although his program only worked if this "writeln" method did not append a new line (which is the convention of *ln methods).

Anyhow, this more technical stuff aside, they almost always get tripped up on figuring out that the solution invovles something more than a simple if (mod 3 case), else if (mod 5 case), else structure. They generally start off with that structure and then get flustered when either they figure out on their own (or I point out) that in some case their program will print both a color and the number or doesn't print out the "BlueGreen" case correctly.

For the heck of it, I pulled up a JavaScript Shell and pounded out a solution to time myself. In 65 seconds, I pounded out this:

for (var i = 1; i <= 100; i += 1) {
    var res = '';
    if (i % 3 == 0)
        res += 'Blue';
    if (i %5 == 0)
        res += 'Green';
    print( res == '' ? i : res );
}

Now, it's probably a lot easier to code on a computer than a whiteboard, and being in an interview adds stress and probably decreases how clearly you can think, so I'm not expecting 65 second answers from the applications. But, these Computer Science students pretty regularly fail to be able to correctly complete this really simple exercise at all.

It makes me wonder what they're teaching at my alma mater these days...

(Also, for the record, though pretty much all applications have taken CS 4, the C++ course at RIT for CS majors — and answer "yes" when I ask "so, you understand pointers" — I have yet to find an application that can answer #3 of Joel Spolsky's "Test Your Self" quiz. Not very encouraging.)