IT Worker Shortages Everywhere 480
Vicissidude writes with news from the IT front in India: "The software industry body Nasscom has warned that India faces a shortfall of half a million skilled workers by 2010. The country will need 350,000 engineers a year, but no more than 150,000 of the most highly skilled engineers will be available each year." This shortfall is fueling a new development, the exporting of Indian tech jobs to the US. But will there be workers in the US to do those jobs? Reader Jadeite2 writes with a word from Bill Gates, speaking to a business forum in Moscow, who said: "There is a shortage of IT skills on a worldwide basis. Anybody who can get those skills here now will have a lot of opportunity."
Shortfall? (Score:5, Insightful)
I welcome such a shortfall.
My get-rich scheme (Score:2, Insightful)
2. ???
3. Get re-hired.
4. Profit!
Woohoo!
India needs to outsource... (Score:4, Insightful)
Might be a few years before you see an IT industry in Niger though.
Then why can't I find a friggin job?!!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm tired of the chicken-egg thing. If I don't have experience I can't get the job. If I can't get the job, how am I supposed to get experience?
Shortage smortage (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe business might have to pay IT people (Score:5, Insightful)
Until employers get over the slave owner mentality and start paying people fairly for their work, they are going to have a hard time finding good people.
Define qualified (Score:5, Insightful)
Large difference.
Re:Then why can't I find a friggin job?!!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Too good for tech support eh?
Outsource where now? Angola? Vietnam? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: "Qualified" applicants (Score:5, Insightful)
This used to require a consultant. But no, consultants are too expensive. Besides, with the falling apart of the markets, consultants have gone into other lines of work.
What's left? Dragging a net through the pool of recent graduates who studied CS, fewer every year as their older siblings tell them it's a lousy market out there.
My heart cries for you!
Re:Define qualified (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Then why can't I find a friggin job?!!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Then get an IT job with a tech support pay, get experience, then renegociate the pay. A degree is useless without experience, and an IT graduate without experience is not worth more than tech support pay, no matter the GPA.
I'm tired of the chicken-egg thing. If I don't have experience I can't get the job. If I can't get the job, how am I supposed to get experience?
I'm tired of those new graduates that all go like "I have a degree, I deserve a high paying job right now even though I have no experience whatsoever". You *can* get the job, simply not at a senior-programmer salary.
I got my first experience in a lousy job (VBA... *shudders*), with a lousy pay, but that got me the required experience to prove my worth, and get a pretty good job later on. Not everybody gets to be lead programmer on a multi-million project as soon as they graduate.
Please also say WHAT is in short supply (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, those people get fewer and fewer every day. But they're in demand, I tell you, you only gotta read the job ads!
Hopelessly naive solution (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure if you realize this or not, so don't take offense, but I want to make sure you realize that US laws don't apply in other countries. Hopefully, you understand that the country "passing the law" that you're suggesting would have to be the "poor" country being outsource to, since any laws passed in the "rich" country being outsource from do not apply. The US doesn't run the world. They just act like they do.
That said, your solution has several major problems, but the most obvious one is, "why would a country that desperately needs foreign investments pass a law that would discourage companies from investing in their workers?" Why would India pass a law requiring foreign companies to pay their Indian workers outrageously high (by Indian standards) salaries, with the obvious result of said companies simply packing up and moving to a country without such laws?
Re:Maybe business might have to pay IT people (Score:3, Insightful)
Until employers get over the slave owner mentality and start paying people fairly for their work, they are going to have a hard time finding good people.
I have your answer.... small business. I dropped my career at a major telcom company and went for less pay at a really small shop and never been happier.
Bosses treat you well, you get paid decently, get fringe benefits like living 15 minutes from home, able to telecommute 1 day a week, free donut fridays, etc....
you are not going to get the $150K sysadmin or IT job, but you will get treated like a human, actually like your job and the rare thing.... when you get up in the AM you want to go to work because the boss says "roll in at least before 9:30, but no hurry." you can leave at 3:30 because work is done today, or it's nice out... etc...
Working for a big corp to get the big $$$ so I can drive 3+ hours a day in my BMW that is depreciating faster than electronics because it noew has 180K on it and was only for impressing the suits anyways is not worth it in any way shape or form.
The good at his job IT guy will not be manager or director... only the guy with a business degree or rubs elbows with the upper managers get that position, and typically they are the most incompetent... (Hi Anil!) they dont want someone that knows what he is doing to get management jobs at corperations because it's a buddy system.
If you like corperate life and corperate polotics.. please go that way... you get paid decently some places but get treated like crap and have no life.
Go for the small business, live in rural towns and be happy.....
There is no "shortage" (Score:2, Insightful)
I know tons of people who left the industry when the crash happened, not because they could not find jobs or did not want to work in the industry any longer but because they could not find jobs that gave adequate compensation for their skills and experience. Those people are still out there and if rates increase enough they will return
There is something very wrong with a sector when there can be jobs advertised that require 5/7 years plus experience in multiple tecnologies that offer rates equal to that of a fast food resturant manager (or even less)
Re:Define qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
They require many interviews to prove your capacity - and honestly a lot of professionals with many years of experience aren't going to go for that if there are other good paying jobs available. Me included.
Re:Then why can't I find a friggin job?!!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Next, if all you do in College is get your degree with good grades, it will not do you any good. People all say "just get the piece of paper, that's all that matters", but that is complete BS. If you get internships for one or two years of your college career, you are in good shape. You have EXPERIENCE! You have a FOOT IN THE DOOR (it's not always what you know, but who you know). Plus you have had practice with interviewing, so when it comes time for the big ones, you will be more prepared.
Finally, tech support is not the only thing out there, not by a long-shot, for the fresh out of college. The path I took was consulting, and man was that a good decision. I was MIS, graduated last spring and had a job lined up since last thanksgiving. Consulting firms have a high turnover of people, which is good for the recent grad, cause that means they want YOU! As far as money, you are very likely to be making more than 40k, but not limited to. That's actually about the lowest I have heard from fellow grads going into consulting. The best part, is most consulting companies have a clear path defined for promotion/raises, so if you are committed, you will rise up quickly.
A few caveats for consulting though. Travel- it's pretty much 100% unless you are lucky enough to have a project you can commute to. Currently I'm on such a project which is nice, but otherwise, you will be in a hotel monday through thursday/friday and home on the weekends. The hours can be crazy, but that is also dependent on the project and ALL IT jobs can be like that. Like I said earlier, the turnover in consulting is higher than other IT areas and many people get burnt out from the travel/hours and leave after maybe two years, but by that point, you have gotten exposure with a bunch of companies and gained that valuable experience you are seeking.
Re:Define qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Then why can't I find a friggin job?!!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
But in all seriousness, that experience does put your decisions into perspective. You know EXACTLY how much pain just yanking that network cable will cause, and you know WHY it's more of a challenge to roll out Linux to your desktops than Windows. Employers want to be sure that you don't just have book knowledge. Just suck it up and be the broken-keyboard-swapper for awhile; if you're smart, you'll move to more interesting things quickly.
The problem is overprecise requirements... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Define qualified (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, this is exactly what every other company wants too: someone who's already an expert in whatever little niche they're working in. Then they wonder why no one's qualified for the job, yet there's plenty of people looking. WAKE UP! If someone is already an expert in whatever you're doing, then they probably already have a job, and aren't looking for a change. If you want someone to come work for you, get over yourself and be prepared to train them. Otherwise, stop complaining so much about a "lack" of qualified candidates.
Re:Maybe.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget about working in IT. Set up a company to take on IT work and outsource it! We'll all get rich in an endless loop of outsourcing!
LOOK HARDER! (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not the degree that will make you good. It's you. You will find many ways to become successful if you are experienced.
Re:Define qualified (Score:5, Insightful)
Now for the tricky question: Why? Because we've quarterly-growthed ourselves into a corner. If we miss profit estimates, making a little less profit than we expected, we lose tons of money because investors are fickle and stupid. That leads to lay-offs. That leads to missed house payments. That leads to homeless people and more companies missing profit estimates. Which starts the next wave of collapse.
It's a sign of a system that needs to break and cause huge destruction and poverty before it can heal. Brace yourselves. The rabbit hole is deep.
Demand increases as supply restricts (Score:2, Insightful)
What's amusing is the whining by those who promote outsourcing, and the ever expanding pool of H1B and other visas (L1, L2, etc), instead of the normal response of immigration quotas for people with a first world Ph.D. in the needed fields, as other countries do.
It's why our illegal immigration system is increasing, too. The market cares nothing for your politics, and tends to perfer Democrats (just look at actual investor returns and share price growth as two of many indicators) over the outsourcing Republicans.
Low tech != High tech (Score:3, Insightful)
That may be true for low-tech jobs, but certainly not for high-tech jobs like software engineering, because one good high-tech worker is worth an infinite number of mediocre high-tech workers. You either have the skills and desire to do a high-tech job competently, or else you are a liability. It is really that simple.
In modern militaries, the same trend is happening and is most evident in China's modernization where they are trying to scale down the manpower of their military, while increasing its numbers of elite troops and weaponry (in other words, make their armed forces more like the professional army of the United States). If you are in the special forces, you either have the ability to get the job done, or else you are a liability to your team. Most high-tech jobs, including software engineering (my personal profession) is the same way.
Now, a high-tech military machine or a high-tech business will inevitably have to pay a premium for labor and tools to do their job, so if your war plans or your business plan cannot adequately utilize that expensive high-tech labor and scale it to meet your objectives, then the problem is not with the high-tech soldiers or workers, but the problem is with your war plan or your business plan.
The cry by CEO's like Bill Gates that there is not enough high-tech talent out there is really just their myopic view of the business world in that being the fat, dumb, and happy titans of industry that they are, they lack the kind of entrepreneurial creativity necessary to exploit expensive high-tech talent to its full profit making potential. They treat their existing employees like trained monkeys and assume that they are smart enough to write code all day long, yet are not smart enough to demand fair compensation for their profitable work, and then wonder why they have problems attracting qualified candidates at half the going market rate for high-tech talent.
So really, the problem is not that there is not enough high-tech talent out there, rather it is the slow lumbering industry giants like Microsoft have business models that are simply not profitable for the kind of premium in salaries that smart motivated people in high-tech generally command.
Re:Define qualified (Score:4, Insightful)
I see this short-sightedness so much in the industry it drives me nuts: YOU ARE NOT HIRING A SKILLSET, YOU ARE HIRING A PERSON, if your candidate is very smart, personable and obviously would be a good fit, well, what are you waiting for? Hire them at a senior salary level and give them a few months to pick up whatever it is that you are doing.
We developers are not little interchangeable cogs in the machine (as much as people in finance, sales and sometimes management seem to think), you can't find a candidate with exactly the skills you need, the experience you want AND out of a job too!
After somebody has been developing for 5-10 years, if they are smart and sharp it's fairly straightforward to pick up a new programming language or paradigm: I am glad that not all companies are like yours, but it does sadden me that the vast majority are, where somebody pulls out a wishlist from the sky and unless a candidate can put a checkmark in every box they won't be given the time of day.
Re:Not a shortage of IT workers.... (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't go to a university to learn practical skills. You go to learn theory and foundations so that you can have a true mastery of a subject. You can learn practical skills on your own if you have the talent to earn a university degree.
If you just want practical skills, go to a trade school. You don't get a mechanical engineering degree to become an auto mechanic and work at your local Chevy dealership. Why would you get a Computer Science degree to write applications in C++/C#?
The problem with today's employment world is that employers want candidates with already-developed practical skills, but demand high-level university degrees as well when there's absolutely no reason for it. An IT employer wanting a
Re:Define qualified (Score:4, Insightful)
Then why haven't they? 95% of the people we get applying for jobs only know Java. They haven't even tried learning anything else. They teach java at the Univeristy, and java is all they think they need to know.
I'm not going to hire anyone who isn't curious enough to learn a few languages on their own.. just to see what's out there.
Hire and train now or perish later... (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize it's hard to make a business case for hiring locally for a job that could be outsourced to China or continuously training your people in new languages and technologies instead of firing one batch of contractors as soon as their project is done and replacing them with new ones, but it has to be done. There's no self-study guide or college degree that can give a newbie the equivalent of real experience, so if the IT industry isn't creating the people it will need 5 or 10 or 20 years down the line right now it isn't going to have those people. Good luck getting upper managers who can't see past the end of next quarter to understand that, though.
Re:Define qualified (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Define qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: "Qualified" applicants (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm sure the graduate shortage in India won't be an issue. Companies like Wipro or HCL will be more than happy to carry on taking on anyone who's happy to pretend they can write software. Though I do sort of feel sorry for the 3 or 4 people out of 30 who can actually do the job and end up covering for their colleagues who are at best incompetent and at worst incompetent and don't care.
Re:Define qualified (Score:5, Insightful)
Why There Isn't Ever a Shortage of Workers (Score:3, Insightful)
Companies expect a long history of experience. Actually in most programming work, your degree counts as a secondary nice-to-have. Certifications and job history count as #1 (after the salary discussion is over and both sides accept).
That's the big difference between skilled workers now and skilled workers during WWI and WWII.
During WWII especially, there was a CRISIS of qualified men to work skilled and semi-skilled jobs.
Rosie the riveter didn't go from the kitchen to slamming hot rivets into huge plates of steel overnight. She had to learn how to do it, understand quality control, and know what was a good rivet finish vs. a bad one, or her work would lead to structure integrity failure down the road.
It wasn't until after WWII that women in engineering colleges started to pop up, and employers were willing to start hiring them.
When employers are REALLY pushed against the wall, then they will make investments in training and education.
Right now, we don't have a shortage. You'll almost never be able to walk into a company without the skill they want (say, Great Plains experience) and get that training after hire. They expect--they demand that you already have it before you even fill out the paperwork.
That to me, so no indication of a real tech worker shortage. That's just employers not willing to make an investment in their people so the tasks can be fulfilled.
Re:Define qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
Dead on correct. There is nothing more pathetic than employers whining about the lack of "talent," when they have done absolutely nothing to develop "talent."
Re:Define qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
Any time a senior employee is looking for a new job, that means there's something wrong. Either their company didn't want to keep him around for some reason (either something wrong with him, or the company was stupid, since you never fire your senior talent unless you're ready to fold), or he left for some reason (he was about to be fired, or wanted a change). As you can tell, most of these reasons constitute an employee you don't want; the only ones you do are the few leaving badly-run companies, or those looking for a geographic change. Obviously, the ones wanting a career change (wanting to get into a slightly different field) aren't your cup of tea. That's not a big pool of employees when you're looking for a specific skillset.
It sounds to me like your company is very poorly run and is probably not a very good place to work.
Re:Has Everyone Here Gone Mad?? (Score:2, Insightful)
It is interesting that when your customer is external to the company, there always seems to be a financial incentive for the company to keep it's workers skills up to date. Where you only provide to internal customers, that incentive seems to be lost. In house IT is almost invariably the ones who let their (workers) skills fall behind.
Re:Define qualified (Score:1, Insightful)
Either you're in the minority or there's a lot of very vocal people in this area. I think most everyone I've known has found "I'd be happier and more productive working for your company" to set off all sorts of red flags, alarms and fireworks, because employers are looking for people that are actually going to be working for them for a while, and not just bailing out when they find some other company that they'll be "happier working for". Of course, having a huge stretch of unemployment raises eyebrows too.
A double-edged sword indeed.
Re:Those of us who supported outsourcing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, this sounds familiar. I can't quite... oh right, cars!
That right there is the future of IT in the US, and quite possibly many other job sectors as well.
Re:Define qualified (Score:4, Insightful)
Interesting stuff. I have two patents in network related material (for two things written in java), have written a lot of java, but just haven't lately. My answer would have been, "check the JDK docs and google." I've even written a specialized thread scheduler to handles tens of thousands of threads. All the programming languages vary so much... easy to lose track. At most I would have been able to say to you, "you have to be very careful with stuff like that when you need and expect deterministic behavior."
*shrug*
Superficially, it seems that this interview question isn't quite right. Give them the tools they say they're expert with. That would INCLUDE the JDK, and google, too. Have them give them the answer to you in 15 minutes. Maybe you should go look up the "programmer archaeologists" article that was on slash two or three days back. It really is getting that way, you know.
C//
Re:Define qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
==================
My perspective: junior and senior talent can be bought in various ways. Good mid-tier talent: the people who will be trained up, gain organic knowledge of your enterprise, and become your next generation leaders: these are the ones that truly harm you when they leave. Why? Because alot of the senior talent at an organization represent pontificators and knowledge sources, while your middle to senior-middle tier are your chief doers.
C//
Re:Define qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit...there is no shortage..... (Score:1, Insightful)
Typical job description: Must be a Senior Unix Admin who knows networking inside and out, Cisco certified, excellent Oracle, DB2 and MySQL required as well as 7 years of EMC and Veritas expertise. Must also be a Senior Java Developer and J2EE Architect with minimum 10 years experience and have in depth business knowledge in the healthcare and financial industries. Starting salary 50k. lol.
These are the kinds of job post I see. If you knew all that shit inside and out, you would not work for 50k in the US, that's for sure. Nobody
knows all the shit they are looking for inside and out. What they want is for you to do 5 jobs and they don't want to pay you shit.
Meanwhile, "upper management" is busy exercising their stock options and buying their 3rd vacation home on some really nice island.
Shortage my ass.
Re:Define qualified (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It used to be... (Score:3, Insightful)
The same thing happened to HR. No one has any real people skills anymore.
It's sad when an IT geek with severe personality disorders can say that.
So so so wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
Like I said before. Go find smart people and let them learn. That's the secret you've been looking for.
Re:Define qualified (Score:3, Insightful)
you have to define 'know', every ad I've ever seen requires 'business work experience' with whatever language it is that you are using. What you do in your spare time doesn't count, if on your resume they see that you worked for a C++ shop, well, if they need a java person they won't give you the time of day.
In my professional career I've programmed in C, Java, Python and Perl. At home I've dabbled in lisp, C++ and assembly: do you think I'd even be given an interview in a C++ shop? or in an embedded shop? not a chance! Also, if I had to write down the number of years, my C experience would dwarf the other three, which would make it next to impossible to get in a Java shop either.
It's always a chicken-and-egg issue: if you are hired for your skills odds are the company will require only the skills you already have, and won't allow you to get the 'business experience' in others you might want/need for another job later on...