Hard not to revisit this subject when there is so much material out there right now.  Vivek Wadhwa in the Washington Post:

American companies must be provided with the incentives to invest in their workers as they used to. As recently as the 1970s, America’s most respected companies would make significant investments in workforce training. IBM, for example, took non-technical workers and taught them technical skills. They then trained these technicians to be computer programmers, sales reps, or product managers. New recruits received a year or more of training before they were expected to become productive.

I don’t know any company doing this anymore.

Today, nearly all American companies, including IBM, expect new hires to be productive on day one. These employees are given a day or two of “orientation” at best. Companies routinely fire people whose skills are obsolete and hire replacements with the right skills to maximize quarterly revenue and profits. Employers often fear that if they spend too much on skill development, employees will become more marketable and leave.

I’m afraid we are guilty as charged.  At a small company, I can understand this problem more than at a larger company.  At a small company one might not have the resources to invest in training in the early days.  And yet, it is precisely at these small companies that many people investments are made.  Are being made. Right now.  If you’re one of those small companies making excuses about investing – stop.  Stop making excuses.  Just start figuring out how to invest.

Fred Wilson (and others) have been advocating for immigration reform – and in particular for doing a better job of hanging onto talented people who want to start companies in the US (thus, the startup visa movement).

Vivek Wadwha, Eric Ries, and now Mike Bloomberg have all weighed-in in favor of the Startup Visa.  Bloomberg has also advocated allowing any foreign nationals to immediately get a green card with their diploma – allowing them to stay and work here in the United States.

As Fred writes:

Do yourself a favor and read the entire speech. It’s not long. Mike lays out a sensible and intelligent way to reform immigration laws without getting into the contentious issues that have held back immigration reform for many years. And if you agree with the Mayor, do everyone a favor and call your elected officials in Washington and tell them you are also for intelligent immigration reform (as opposed to comprehensive immigration reform). I’ve done that and it has helped. Getting your voice into the chorus on intelligent immigration reform would be helpful too

One thing is clear – our visa and green card processes are broken.  There is no transparency, and no predictability.  And we’re losing out on a lot of talent and a lot of well-educated graduates (arguably bad process outcomes).

Vivek Wadhwa writes that there is no simple answer to the question of whether there is a shortage or a glut of engineers:

So there are many issues here. But the national debates about competitiveness, immigration, and education, typically focus on the issue of supply and demand of engineers and scientists. They paint this issue in black or white when it is shades of gray.

And he makes a few additional points supporting the notion that educational institutions don’t always teach the specific skills companies want, and that our corporations aren’t investing in teaching the skills they want to their employees either.  The combination of these two effects leaves many companies feeling as if there is a shortage in general, when it may really be specific areas of shortage instead.

Of course, a shortage of people with the right skills has been a real problem in the BPM space – so this is nothing new to us.  And we think the primary answer is to invest in the people you hire to keep them up-to-date with the skills you need, while augmenting with help from outside your organization (leverage).

However, there was one point where perhaps the cause-and-effect were mis-stated:

The world’s best and brightest aren’t beating a path to the U.S. any more. In previous years, H-1B visas for foreign nationals were in such high demand that they had to be awarded by lottery. This year, the annual quota of 65,000 hasn’t even been used yet. Instead, these workers are staying home and entrepreneurship is booming in countries like India and China.

I don’t believe the lower number of H-1B visas has anything to do with the demand from foreign nationals to live and work in the United States.  The issue is that you can’t get an H-1B visa without a corporate sponsor.  Many companies have pulled back on hiring H-1B’s – partly because of the economy or their own circumstances, partly because of moderating labor costs for US nationals, partly because of public (and internal) backlash against abuses of the visas (mostly other than H1B), and partly because many of the multi-nationals have offices in various countries around the world – and may prefer to hire these same people for lower wages in their home countries.  I think the Startup Visa movement was one great way to help keep talented H-1B visa holders in the United States, and I think it illustrates that the problem is one of process, rather than demand imbalance.

On this blog, we typically discuss leadership in the context of BPM projects, initiatives, and programs.  Because BPM efforts typically cut across departmental and organizational boundaries, they also typically require an extra measure of leadership to convince people to something when they don’t report in through the chain of command.

A recent article on TechCrunch by Vivek Wadhwa points out that leadership is often lacking in Silicon Valley firms as well.  This isn’t the popular refrain about startups (outside of the startup community itself) – mostly the popular coverage of startups is about swashbuckling risk-takers who conquer new ideas and disrupt industries. And then there are the stories about the unique management approaches of startups (queue the last 8 years of articles about Google).

But the picture Vivek paints is one of managers who aren’t prepared for the responsibility they have on multiple fronts.  This is essentially an argument about the Peter Principle writ large: because most managers in Silicon Valley startups don’t receive any management training, they’re unlikely to be good managers.  Worse, they’re unlikely to be good leaders.  They’re getting promoted into these positions because there isn’t anyone else to do it.

Vivek advocates for explicit management training.  But it is easy to get caught up in the idea that you have to get a Masters degree to learn something new.  I think the real point of management or leadership training is to get potential leaders OUT of the day-to-day grind, and IN to a setting that facilitates free thought.  When listening to leadership and management training material that has real context for a leader’s current management situation, the recipients are more likely to assimilate that knowledge into the way they think and operate. Vivek reports on research at Duke University:

The conclusion of the researchers wasn’t surprising: many high-tech companies are young, so their systems and procedures for grooming leaders aren’t well developed or firmly established.

Maybe this is why so many tech companies suffer from morale problems, missed deadlines, customer-support disasters, and high turnover. And this may be one of the reasons why so many tech startups who succeed in selling their vision and raising millions in financing are just a flash in the pan.

But lest readers in bigger firms take comfort in this, there is a lesson to learn here about how we approach developing leaders within larger organizations as well.  The first thing I’d say, for BPM leads, is read this previous post on our blog.  Secondly, realize that you can foster leadership development on your team without a formal, executive-sponsored, program. It isn’t as easy, of course, because you have to take responsibility for it at a more local, personal level.  But on the other hand, your star pupil can’t be rejected from your own leadership program, but might not be included in the corporate program.

Vivek appears to recommend several kinds of educational opportunities (MBAs, Executive MBA’s, and more creative programs).  We recommend something a bit simpler for many of our BPM colleagues – attend a small conference (like bpmCamp), and take time to invest in sharpening the saw.

TechCrunch and Vivek Wadhwa have a controversial article up about Age-ism in high-tech in the US.  TechCrunch is no stranger to controversy, having also just caused a bit of a stir around systemic gender bias in the venture-funded tech startup business.

Vivek makes a few key points. Paraphrasing, High Tech companies prefer younger workers because:

1. They are cheaper (salary, benefits, insurance, etc).
2. They have fewer competing interests (lower percentage are married with kids)
3. They are perceived to be easier to mold (into culture fit)
4. They are perceived to be “more current” on whatever the latest technologies are
5. They can be trained up on new tech more cost-effectively than older workers

I’ve certainly seen this logic play out, but more in the 90′s than today.  I see a lot of pressure from small companies to hire someone who already knows the technology in question, not someone who still has a lot to learn.  I see a lot of companies hiring someone with an existing track record.  Hiring a college recruit is a multi-year, long-term investment – which a lot of startups aren’t ready to make.  But perhaps things are a bit different in the Valley than in Austin.  Perhaps there, the pressures are more like the pressure to offshore: get the cheapest labor inputs you can get.  Certainly, one way to do that without the pain of offshoring, is to hire less experienced (or less costly) talent. In fact, in another article, it was predicted that labor (or jobs) will migrate to less expensive parts of the US (this seems logical, over time, if other parts of the country prepare people with the right skills).

My observations about experienced hires (I won’t say older) in the same order as above:

1. Usually (but not always) much shorter ramp-up time from day 0 to first fully independently productive day.
2. The competing interests are also balancing interests – keeping more experienced team members balanced emotionally, more so than some less experienced hires.  They have other positive things going on in their lives which allow them to pursue work with confidence, rather than fear of failure.
3. Whether easier to mold or not, it is easier to judge what an experienced hire’s real work values are – and to find people who already align with your values, rather than trying to mold (some might say brainwash) less experienced hires.
4. Often more experienced hires are actually more current on the new tech than students, because it takes quite some time for educational institutions to switch gears.  I remember distinctly Stanford University rolling out its C++ computer science classes (intro classes), just as Java was about to hit the scene.  It was several years before Stanford switched the curriculum to start with Java, though they did start offering a class in Java right away.  It was many years before we could hire people with Java skills learned in college that were more than trivial.
5. This last point is true, if you assume ramp-up time is equal, and that the less experienced worker is cheaper than the more experienced hire. However, as I pointed out in my comment on TechCrunch, I have come to believe that learning itself is a skill, which can be practiced and improved over time.

We run a services business at BP3, so it isn’t apples to apples comparison with the TechCrunch article, but there are a few more things that we note about our firm when we talk to candidates.  First, our business requires a lot of travel for nearly everyone on our team.  That is easier to accommodate when you’re single (it may even be a benefit) than when you have a family.  And while it may be true that younger or less-experienced people are more likely to be single, it really has to do with family vs. no family.  Because our firm is run by people with families, we take our commitment to make our job sustainable for our families *very* seriously.  Second, if we’re going to pay for experience, we want that experience to be relevant to our specific business – that of BPM.  I’ve had conversations with people who have previously made considerable salaries, and are interested in switching to focus on BPM – but they don’t know the BPM space yet, or the specific technologies we use to support BPM.  I tell those folks that they can’t expect to switch into BPM and not have a hit to salary in the short-term.  But I believe that is true for any career change -when you switch specialties, your compensation takes a (hopefully short term) hit.  If it is a good long-term change,  compensation will catch up to and surpass the old compensation at some point, but more importantly, the career change will breathe new life into working.