"Companies are being pressured to not give permanent employment to whites." I have not seen any evidence of this in the software industry at all, especially when you compare it to the amount of employment equity publicity surrounding other sectors. An actuary friend who formerly worked at Old mutual for instance made the point that they were no longer hiring white actuaries. There is similar pressure present in the accounting field. Certainly I have not noticed any pressure from governemnt being brought onto the IT field, certainly nothing in the press. I think there are a number of reasons for that but the biggest one is that this is a less consolidated field than say accounting or life insurance. What I mean by that is that there are not a lot of "big fish" to target and up till now the government has targeted those big fish. In software development you have many small players and not a few giants. Pressure may eventually be brought to bear when those larger industries have been covered. Don't forget however that if your company is less than 50 people (when I last checked), you do not have to subscribe to employment equity rules. How many purely software development companies can say they are larger than this number?
I have never perceived there to be preference for non whites in the java programming industry. Not something I can say for other industries. I think the other reason however is that there is a shortage in any case so merit has been the primary driver. Companies are saying "how can I hire a non white, I can't find any!". Don't forget as well that in the current South African socio-economic climate there is a personnel shortage in other industries as well, in fact, Sunday's career times (part of the sunday times) reported that the shortage in the engineering sector (a related industry) is more acute than in the computing sector. 1 in 3 job adverts in the career times are for engineers. As for the reason for the shortage of good java developers, there just aren't enough java developers entering the industry to cope with the demand. Other issue is that you don't necessarily get a good java developer merely by them going through computer science at University. It takes more than that.
