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Management To Blame For IT Worker Shortage?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Sep 28, 2000 02:15 PM
from the now-that's-pretty-funny dept.
from the now-that's-pretty-funny dept.
MrX writes: "In this story about a study on CNet news, it says the labor shortage in IT is more a management problem then anything else.
'The unhappy truth, the study points out, is not that there are few people available to do IT work, but that once they are hired they are often poorly managed. In addition, many IT jobs are ill-designed and boring, leading many employees to become dissatisfied and leave.'"
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Management to blame for IT Worker Shortage?
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Remember the source of this study (Score:3)
a professor at wharton was paid to come up with this, which (1) gets the professor's name in the paper for re-stating the totally obvious, perhaps with some half-assed stats to back it up and (2) helps drum up demand for mcKinsey, who will (for a huge fee, of course) restructure your job descriptions in marketing legalese, stir the pot a little, issue a nice shiny report with pretty graphs (perhaps [gasp] with a PowerPoint presentation too!) and leave everything underneath almost exactly the same.
these guys are just advertising how badly their services are needed by every company in existence.
it is very self-serving, and both cnet and now slashdot have fallen for it. or, more likely, they dont care that they are providing free publicity for a paid advertisement, because it caters to their audiences exactly what they want to hear.
you didnt fall for it, did you? are these observations really that illuminating to any of you at all?
unc_
Try finding Smalltalk programmers... (Score:3)
However, the moment you stop dipping the ladle into what M$ oriented education system pours out of the pipeline (or sewer,) you run into some real shortages.
Also the geographic distribution leaves a lot to be desired. While I might find some Smalltalkers on the West coast, since the company is in New Yorl City, I'm sucking wind...
I have lived in Kansas city (cheap,) in Atlanta (not so cheap,) and many places in between and I have lived in Canada (the dollars less, the taxes comparable but the cost of health insurance won't kill you,) and in the 'States, (but I had to almost double my salary to get a decent fraction of the life style I had out in the mid-west.)
The disparity in salaries betwen the coasts and the center of the continent and across borders, never mind oceans, is responsible for a lot of false appearances and income estimates.
Yes, MIS (mis-)management is partly to blame, but they're also subject to the vagueries of geography, salary and expectations.
I'm sure that lots of people would envy my salary and immediately reconsider when they hear that I can't really afford a car here. (Then again in New York City, you can pretty much get away without ownning a car. We pity the commuters.)
Re:There's no shortage... (Score:5)
Actually it's pretty obvious to me that the fact that we never bring these people into the profession is precisely why there is a shortage. If you search monster.com for intro level jobs doing anything IT, you won't find any. "Junior level DBA wanted" or "C++ programmer with 0-2 years experience wanted" just isn't out there. The problem is that experience and talent are only weakly correlated and the clueless fools (managers, HR dolts, and recruiters) would rather have an idiot with 5 years experience than a genius who programs for fun in his spare time.
I'm willing to bet that within 6 months at least half of the folks in your list could be earning money for you. Sure the training will cost a little, but it's ok to pay entry level people less to offset this.
Hire the one that seems "smartest" with a good work ethic; offer them half of what you would someone more experienced; pay for them to go to a training class in everything you think they should know; make them agree to reimburse training costs if they leave within 2 years; Give them a 20% raise every six months for the first two years.
My guess is that if you advertised these things you'd have some extremely gifted applicants who want to change fields and would probably be highly competent MUCH faster than you think.
Re:This ones a bit touchy... (Score:4)
A "Hardcore IT" person can learn to use any platform, anywhere, anytime to meet his/her goal(s). They know that the computer is just a tool, and that some things are easier to use than others, but all of IT was built by humans to be used by humans.
It's A Neverending Cycle (Score:5)
1) Mismanagement:
This is common, we're hired to come in and fix the problems that "management" can't. We're given deadlines of 3 days for a project that will take 6 months or a deadline of 3 months for a project that will take 6 hours. How can you respect this? These people are making more money than you? Time to leave.
2) Lack of Learning
You walk into an environment ready to help the company move to the next level, organize, commenting code, making it modular, smaller, efficient, structured. But it's the same code and there are new technologies out there. The technical "classes" are useless because what you really need is hands-on baptism by fire learning! But you never get that chance because another department who has done it before gets to do it again OR the company hires a consultant who "knows" the technology to come in and do it for you so you can support it. How do you get to learn it? Time to leave.
3) Poor Work Environment
You don't hold meetings so you don't really need an office, right? You don't move around much so you don't need that much space, so a 5x5ft cubicle is okay, right? It's better if you can communicate other programmers if they are sitting really close to you, right? That New Jersey office space is far cheaper, and you don't need the prestige of the Wall Street office like the salespeople, right? Wrong. Time to leave.
4) No Recognition
Because the people you work for need to go to even more simple business people who couldn't possibly comprehend why it took you so long to hand code everything from scratch because they wouldn't use open source for "security" reasons, they don't even bother mentioning your name. You could have written thousands of lines of code each day, no debugging necessary, other programmers in awe as you pound on the keyboard and it doesn't really matter. Why? Because upper management has no idea if you were good, stellar, poor, or committed fireable offenses in your code. They are more likely to reward the customer service rep on the phone who saved a $200 account...because they understand it.
5) Pigeonholing
You've developed a great specialty, you are the fastest and most knowledgeable in your area in the company. I hope you enjoy it! Because now you're going to do that same work for the rest of your time at the company. Time to leave.
6) Corporate Apartheid
Why? No, WHY do companies insist on putting IT on a completely different floor, building, city, state than the rest of the company or departments? I know it's annoying to have some gimp come over and ask you the Sun networking professional how to make an equation in Excel, but at least they can become more technical and improve the company. And information flows both ways, we like to learn what the hell the business is doing!!
7) Lack of Expert Recognition
Attention management: The grass is NOT greener on the outside. Sometimes it is, but that is a last resort. Many times the best place to look for a technical solution is to ask your technical staff. Yes, you can even pull them off that Priority #1 project to strategize about the technical future of the company as opposed to getting blindsided by new technology.
8) The good, the bad, the ugly
All it takes is hiring one shitty IT person. YES, they do exist, there are many. Hire one and the rest of them wonder why the hell they are around that place making the same salary as the idiot in the next cube. Time to leave.
I wish I could isolate all the factors and start creating a new model that companies could go from and improve all of our working conditions. But I think that we are in times that require an accelerated learning curve that nobody can keep up with except for those of us in the fray. The pace of change in our industry promises to keep management and non-tech people out of comprehension of our contributions for years to come.
All we can do is to try to lessen to gap and keep it from widening too much. Mix the tech and non-tech employees, treat them with the same amount of respect. Ask if you can improve their job. Do their reviews on time. Send them home if they work late all the time, kick their asses out the door so they don't get burned out. The usual management techniques will work.
Jayson Pifer
Poorly managed? (Score:4)
And read /. a lot. Like I'm doing right now. The thing I hated most about my previous job was that my immediate boss had way too many things to manage, and way too many meetings, and didn't have enough time to give me anything useful to do. In my current job, I'm waiting on stuff (mostly third party software) for some Sun boxen I've been putting together.
Not that it matters much to me yet, but all three of the managers responsible for each of the computers are hard to find, and seem to always be in meetings.
"We must be getting work done--we're certainly having enough meetings!"
In defense of managers (Score:3)
I know it's not fashionable to look at things from the enemy's perspective, but has it ever occurred to you folks that the reason there are so few good managers is that managing people is hard? Let's try looking at this from a couple of different perspectives.
Where are you going to find good people to do all this? Where do you find someone who can keep both the technical details and the corporate goals in mind, who's reasonably intelligent and has a decent set of ethics and yet doesn't mind sitting in rooms full of Machiavelli wannabes and Just Plain Dumb people, and who's willing - all to often - to do all that for less money than some of the people "under" them get paid? There really is a shortage of quality people in the industry, but it's not a shortage of hands-on techies; it's a shortage of managers who aren't scum or morons or both.
I whine about my job as much as anyone, but I honestly don't think there's anything I could find myself doing in my prized role as an individual contributor that would be worse than being a manager. It is necessary to have someone else to do all that stuff, but I'm damn glad it's not me. Next time you feel like a few minutes of manager-bashing, spare yourself at least one second to give thanks that you have a better job than they do.
Re:Do u discriminate against married or people w k (Score:4)
I'll turn 48 next saturday. I've been a programmer, since I was 19... Last time I looked for a job it took me 2 years to find a company that would hire me. The time before that it took me 2 weeks. The difference? My beard turned gray while I was at my last job. Funny how that happens.
I'm highly educated, and have up to date skills. I have a wide range of experience. I have shipped a LOT of real products to real customers. I'm willing to work for a reasonable salary.
The kid in the next cube with 2 years experience, NO formal training, who has never shipped a finished product, regularly gets offers for 20% to 40% more than I currently make. I apply for the same jobs and don't even get a rejection email.
Most of the programmers I've known over the last 29 years have given up trying to work as programmers. Not that they don't want to. It's just that it is very very hard to get a job as a programmer if you are over 40.
I can also tell you I have experienced what happens when you get "daddy" tracked in a job. All of the sudden you can't get a raise, can't get any more training, suddenly it isn't in the companies "best interests" to send you to conferences. "What, just because your kid is on the way to the emergency room you think you should be able to leave before 10 P.M. tonight? Remember, we hired YOUR, we didn't hire your family!"
I don't know why I so stupid as to stay in this business. I can tell you that there is NO shortage of IT talent in the US. There isn't really even a shortage of CHEAP It talent in the US. There is a shortage of IT talent that is stupid enough to work 80 hours/week for a fixed (small) salary, no benefits and NO RESPECT!
stonewolf I'm no ghost dog
Re:Rare to find good managers (Score:3)
You are not the first person to point this out, but, to be honest, I've never understood this logic. Isn't everyone in the organization needed? If any one group suddenly quit, wouldn't the whole organization go down?
For instance, if the sales folks stopped selling, we go out of business. But by the same token, if the IT folks stop developing, the sales folks have nothing to sell, and we go out of business. Same result.
Since every worker is needed to do his or her part, what difference does it make if one group is playing the part of the revenue-makers, and another group is playing the part of the cost center? If either group quits, the results are the same.
It's that "cost center" mentality that drove me nuts, for it directly led to the odd concept that sales folks were more important than the IT staff. They weren't. We were all equally needed.
________________
Re:That's a load of crap! (Score:3)
Perhaps you aren't looking in the right places (monster.com is a favorite of IT recruiters).
Or maybe, your job just isn't interesting enough to attract the type of people you want or you are in a sub-basement at the town waste treatment center?
Unless you live in a biggish city, people are probably going to have to re-locate to work for you. Expand your search and be willing to pay for them to move. When they get there, be sure to send the guiness deliveryman by three times a week.
They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen
Rare to find good managers (Score:4)
That certainly has been true in my experience. It was rare to find a good manager, one who made going to work a pleasure. Usually I had to merely take pleasure in doing a good job despite management's efforts or the corporate politics.
When a developer finds a good fit with a clued-in manager, they tend to stay. For all the rest of us, the PHBs eventually get us disgusted enough to move on.
As for undervaluing the contribution of IT, that was always the case. Sales & Marketing were the stars, always, and IT was an afterthought. That was true both in corporte culture as well as management opportunities. The sales guys, no matter how idiotic they were, got to move up the ladder far faster than the best of the IT staff. I always attributed that to the VPs not knowing what we did but actually did understand what the sales guys did.
These idiots are beginning to get what they deserve if IT staff are leaving in droves.
________________
Very True (Score:3)
Oh Wait...
Competence Shortage (Score:4)
It would be more productive to extensively train the managers to be competent in dealing specifically with bright and knowledgeable people, rather than ignoring a fundamental problem with IT work, which is that the more complex the work, the harder it is for managers to avoid being oafish fools about dealing with people who often are much smarter and more knowledgeable than they. This problem will only get worse as complex technologies continue to creep into every aspect of formerly simple products and services.
Hiring as a manager the venture capitalist's son-in-law or the college buddy is just not going to work anymore, not that it ever did ....
I believe that. (Score:5)
Read the paper and check out the ads sometime; they have totally unreasonable expectations of what skill-sets they expect people to have. Just going through college is not enough; you can graduate from mine with a degree in Computer Science, and never learn C if you're careful, just Java, assembler, and maybe a functional language and something else, like SQL.
But then you don't have seven years experience in web design, or five years experience in Java, or a working knowledge of RPG, or something else equally ludicrous.
Of course, these requirements are padded, as are most people's credentials; but I'd much rather people said what they meant and were honest about the job requirements and the work environment. Lying to prospective employees is not a good way to start anything.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Direct cause and effect relationship (Score:3)
but that once they are hired they are often poorly managed
No kidding. This is a flaw with current executive management thinking. It's the old "if it ain't broke don't fix it" that causes us to work for piss poor managers. They see an IT worker doing a good job, and figure that he's fine where he's at, and that they shouldn't touch him.
Then you have Steph sitting around the corner, who simply doesn't have a clue. He keeps fouling things up, and costs the company way too much money.
So what happens? Steph gets promoted. Why is it, that in the IT field, the clueless are promoted faster then the insightfull? I can tell you why,... it's the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
many IT jobs are ill-designed and boring, leading many employees to become dissatisfied and leave
No shit! And it's not that they're simply ill-designed. They're designed EXACTLY how the designers want them. Do they want an experienced IT worker who's been around the block, and can provide solutions? No,... because it would be a direct threat on management's credibility. And as I've pointed out, management is composed of people who were too dumb to be passed up for promotion.
The IT field is in a flux. Nobody knows how to find competent workers (college degrees, nor certifications gurantee competency), let alone know how much to pay them.
Want a serious approach to labor shortages? Free the radical limitations that our corporate executives have placed upon us. Refuse to require college degrees and certifications. Hire people, not resumes. And for god sakes, if somebody doesn't know what the hell they are doing, don't promote them, can their ass!
Precisely why I left coding... (Score:3)
...and went into product management, so I could manage instead be managed.
When you get right down to it, the first 80% of coding (which takes 20% of the time) is fun, since that's where the design decisions and experimentation goes on. The last 20% (80% of the total time) sucks, because it's churning out the boring bits of the code, or driving yourself nuts debugging.
Unfortunately, 80% of your career goes into doing 20%-work. By the time you get to the fun stuff, you're cynical and sick of it.
Not to mention that many of the people who love coding so much that they stick with it that long have no management skills, but are expected to start managing because they're senior people. The last company I was at lost the best coder I've ever met for this reason -- they tried to get him to manage people, when all he wanted to do was code.
The hierarchies that work in other industries don't work as well for software. Every industry has a grunt labour component, but in IT, it seems that you're more likely to get out of grunt labour by switching companies or fields than by working your way up.
Some problems in IT... (Score:5)
For example, when employers are constantly treating employees like dogshit, working them 65 hours a week, and trying to screw them out of the only 2 weeks worth of vacation a year that they're stingy enough to grant, employees lose respect for the organization that they're working for. If you love your job, and you like the people you work with, suddenly the pay isn't the only factor in whether you stay or whether you go. If on the other hand you hate your job and don't have any respect for where you work, then it's "Just about the bucks" and higher offers will cause you to leave with no regrets.
I've been working in American IT for a few years, and I'm totally sick of it. Recently, I got a job offer in Germany, making a lot less money, but offering a steady 40 hour work week, 4 weeks vacation a year, and the people I really liked. The corporation seemed to care whether I lived or died. So I turned down offers of $70,000+ to investigate that offer. Unfortunately, for personal reasons related to my family in the states, I wasn't able to take it, but had I been in a more flexible situation, I would have taken it in a heartbeat to have what I think every IT person wishes they had: quality of life
How many people do you know in IT who wake up at age 40 saying Oh my god, I've got a huge pile of money, but I hate my life because all I ever do is work? I know a lot of them. When employees cynical views of employers and the exploitative tactics that employers use against their employees rule the field, then yeah, you're going to have a lot of job hopping, and a lot of burned out pissed off disillusioned IT workers.
I'm in their ranks. Are you?
it probably won't get too much better (Score:5)
I bet 50% is waste (Score:3)
Small companies have it slightly better, but only because cancelled projects usually lead to layoffs or bankrupcy, rather than redeployment into another doomed project.
Re:How can this contribute to a worker shortage? (Score:3)
So, are you disputing the chief claim of the study, or did you just not bother to read it?
They may not be digging ditches or flipping burgers, but they're not toiling in the code mines, either.
In addition, Cappelli cites an unwillingness on the part of employers to hire older IT workers with more experience. I'm just now leaving the "youthful and hungry" stage of my professional career (translation - I'm 27), but conversations with my elders in the industry seem to bear out that claim.
I won't bother to reproduce the entire remainder of the article here, other than to say that it's pretty evenhanded in that it grants that a certain shortage of IT workers exists, while simultaneously taking employers to task for their hiring practices.
What does "poorly managed" mean (Score:5)
In my previous job (as a "team leader") I tried to take a more active role in managing the programmer's time. I always had a mental list of every project each person (3 of them) were working on and a rough idea as to status. Once in a while (every couple days) I pop in and make sure my head matched reality. It seemed to work pretty well--I didn't have any complaints and even got one compliment (from a programmer). Just think of the team as a furnace that needs a constant supply of coal--boredom is 90% of the problem. (the rest is variety--color some of your coal read 8^))
--
Shortage of intelligence? (Score:4)
There are plenty of these types out there. The qualified ones get hired extremely quickly. In the bay area hiring someone is like looking for housing.
Re:Poorly managed? (Score:4)
You're right. In my last job, I read
Every once in a blue moon on slashdot, some troll attack will occur whose basic thrust is that slashdot is a bunch of hypocritical morons running windows only paying lipservice to linux, because after all, it's been admitted that the majority of hits on slashdot come from windows machines.
I don't know if that's true about the hits or not, but even if it is, I'd expect that that is due exactly because of people working in IT jobs who check out slashdot 25 times a day because it's more interesting that staring at their desk. I used to check slashdot quite often, and it was always from a windows machine, since that's what management "suggested" we use. Ah but isn't the line between suggesting and issuing an edict thin?
Re:realizatioin before age forty (Score:5)
American work values really lag behind many European job considerations. There are bad managers everywhere but they can certainly have a field day with tangled webs of woe such as the US "health care system"...
I've worked both places and it _still_ shocks me how completely and totally money-seeking essentially RUNS everything in America. the majority are out to get every buck they can and (I thought this was a joke until I lived in the US and experienced it non-stop) people often do define themselves in financial terms. It is tiring and leads, however subliminally, to all kinds of unhappiness.
Americans really DO tend to get their identities from what they buy, whereas in general Europeans get them more from what they do. A generalization of course but even the most resolutely opposed American has to deal with this, every day.
Thus the tone of weariness form the posts already up here on this topic is entirely typical of the whole US working world and not merely IT positions.
Re:That's a load of crap! (Score:4)
(I'm mostly talking to the companies/Madman/etc here)
What the hell ever happened to apprenticeship, and entry level positions? The company I work for (~100 people, growing with no problems finding people) trains our own. The key is to hire smart people, who show a little spark.
Nortel, IBM, and everyone else wouldn't touch me with a 10 foot pole when I finished my hard science grad degree, but my current employer did. Now they have an engineer with 3 years experience in a dozen of the most sought after skills. Now they don't have to go screaming all the way to the feds with a crybaby story about not being able to find anyone.
Quit crying and invest something in people. Quit asking for the feds to import your gold for you.
Job Requirements? (Score:3)
Heeellllooooo? Is anyone home?
Re:What about the IT worker (Score:3)
Most Programmers are not happy with what they do! (Score:4)
If companies could hire managers who know the different between HTTP and FTP, between Kernel and Shell, could stand up for his team in Management meetings and take a beating for it, could explain in lucid detail to the management about schedule slippages and cover everyones ass and not just his then he would build a team which would stick through thick and thin for him. But from so far I have seen, this particular breed is dying fast. Everyone wants to cover their ass first.
Just providing Nerf gun battles and ping pong tables doesnt motivate people. People motivate people. Good diplomatic Managers tend to motivate people to excel in their work and make them stay. Making them stay back after six everyday and not reward them is begging them to leave. Most of the firms, even the big ones doesnt have a clue as to how to retain people. I would rather choose a firm which has Quake 3 deathmatches every alternate days or Fridays, where my Manager understands what I do and not judge me for my errors, where he first covers my ass and then his if i screw up,is the first one to comment or reward anyone who deserves it.
I havent found one, but being a sucker I am still looking.
That's not just the IT world (Score:3)
The same phenomenon happens to contractors in other fields. I was an administrative contractor (read: temp) for years. I used to get placed for jobs that asked for all sorts of computer skills and be set to making copies. The employers figure the more skills a person has, the better they must be overall.
I also used to be able to class jobs into three types...
From the sounds of the article, far too much of the industry is stuck in category three.
Do u discriminate against married or people w kids (Score:4)
The "IT shortage" is NOT for a lack of skills and it's not because younger people will work for less money.
The fact is, most tech jobs (sysadmin, programmer, web developper, etc.) are not 40hr/week jobs. They're demanding 60, 70, 80 hour per week jobs. And they're all "salaried" jobs, which means no extra pay for extra hours.
Now young people fresh out of college, and immigrant H1B visa workers have little else in their life to occupy them. They are single. They have no kids. Thus they are able to accept the abusive work hours employers expect them to put out.
But now something new has happened. The first BIG wave of IT industry workers are just now starting to reach their upper 30s and 40s. And that first wave of H1B workers are nearing the end of their 6 year temporary visas.
Tell me, what happens when a 70 hour/week employee gets married or has a kid?
Suddenly he or she has to cut back working hours to 50 or 40 hours per week as a responsibiliy to their family.
The employer sees this as MAJOR SLACKING OFF BY SOME OLD GRAYING BASTARD. So he's either FIRED. Or sees his salary cut 40% and is FORCED to quit because he can't support his family on a pay cut like that.
The employer then puts an ad out and discovers that lots more older IT workers are applying than years ago when he put that last ad out. These older workers suffer from the same problem... having a life.
So suddenly the employer screams that there is a "shortage of IT workers" and demands the government allow more H1B visa workers in so he can continue his abusive employment practises.
Well, IMO, it's time employers are FORCED to play fair and give up their extremely abusive practises. Naturally they won't want to as screwing people over is highly lucrative and profitable. Well, it is wrong to discriminate in your hiring practises againse people who are (1) married, or (2) have kids. So pardon me if I don't cry for your sorry assed IT shop and it's fuck-you hiring policies. I feel absolutely zero pity for you poor staff strapped IT shops who are only looking to screw people over.
Maybe your expectations are too high.... (Score:3)
Lots of times, they pass up excellent candidates because thay are afraid to consider if a person is trainable, and can be trained quickly. Flame me all you want, but no school teaches anything which can be applied evenly across any similar technology. The best candidates for the job are those who can adapt what they know to what's new and has been placed in front of them.
if (Book sense eq Common sense) {
print "Lousy hiring criteria!!!";
};
Here's a slightly off-topic, but comparable example:
All those schools pumping out 'certified' IT professionals by the droves on the "You paid - You made the grade" philosophy are also to blame.
Ask yourself, would you hire a newly certified person regardless of what they did before going to school, or would you hire someone who's been working with computers for a while and has provided good value as an employee of a previous company in that capacity without certification. Someone who has, through self teaching, dabbled in UNIX and is not intimidated by it, will be an ideal candidate for hire. They didn't go into school to earn a 'free ticket' into a job. They want to learn and expand their mind to be more useful. Those who are self taught are easily trainable.