Aliens of extraordinary abilities

How tackling the tech industry’s chronic skills shortage calls for a creative approach to welcoming foreign talent.

It’s a situation I’m all too familiar with from my years working in the London start-up scene. It is a dog-eat-dog environment where it came to attracting, poaching, and holding on to talent.

At every company I worked for, I was constantly being offered cash incentives to refer candidates for the many roles that needed filling by yesterday if our roadmap had any hope of being adhered to — and this was before the whole Brexit mess and uncertainty started to make things even more difficult for everyone.

But in the U.S. the situation is, if anything, even more desperate, with an estimated 1 million computer programming jobs expected to go unfilled by 2020. Yet at the same time, there are many highly qualified foreign individuals who do want to move to, work and contribute to the economy of cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.

So although the much-talked-about digital skills gap is certainly an issue, the problem isn’t limited to a simple mismatch between talent supply and demand. The artificial barriers that bureaucracy and politics put between willing and qualified workers and the jobs which will remain vacant if they are not there to fill them is the elephant in the…