IT Jobs To Drop In 2009 393
ruphus13 writes "A new Goldman Sachs IT report recently released states that IT jobs will be dramatically reduced in 2009, starting with contract and offshore developers. From the article: 'Sharp reductions likely in contract staff, professional services and hardware, and almost no investment in cloud computing.' The article goes on to say 'The CIOs indicated that server virtualization and server consolidation are their No. 1 and No. 2 priorities. Following these two are cost-cutting, application integration, and data center consolidation. At the bottom of the list of IT priorities are grid computing, open-source software, content management and cloud computing (called on-demand/utility computing in the survey) — less than 2% of the respondents said cloud computing was a priority.' Postulating a 'pointy haired boss' problem, an analyst goes on to say, '[Grid computing, Open Source and Cloud computing] require a technical understanding to get to their importance. I don't think C-level executives and managers have that understanding.' But they do control the paychecks ..."
Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of IT is an expense without adequate ROI. Huge IT support staffs were a consequence of poor products, badly implemented systems, a glut of unnecessary purchases, etc. While some IT functions will always need on-site support, better-designed systems and software (including middleware) should make it possible to reduce IT staffing costs.
Think of all the other functions that have disappeared over the past century: typing pools, filing clerks, huge mail rooms. The armies of help desk types will go the same way.
bad article (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't see any reasons backing up these postulations. Especially the downturn in contractors. Is this yet another case of these companies reporting something just so they can report something?
PHB gets it (Score:3, Insightful)
Grid computing, Open Source and Cloud computing] require a technical understanding to get to their importance. I don't think C-level executives and managers have that understanding.
In my country, we have a saying: "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" In this case, the milk is open source software and the cow is the developer.
Pund-IT? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but it's hard to take your message seriously when your company name is Pund-IT. From the name, I think you'd have been better off with Pun-dit. Or Pwnd-IT, which is pretty much what a lot of consultants are going to be feeling like next year.
At any rate, anyone who has been around business through a down-cycle or two would know that this is common sense. New programs, new ways of doing things, are saved for when the budget Gods are feeling generous with surpluses, not when eveyone is tightening their belts. There are, of course, exceptions to this... but anyone who thought that, in general, discretionary spending would increase over the next year really needs to have their head examined.
Re:More out of work programmers means.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Surely companies must be feeling the pinch of the US dollar on their offshoring deals.
Re:I doubt.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Outsourcing only pays off for VERY well managed and VERY well organized 3rd party organizations that you can trust 100% and as a rule, they don't exist because they don't exist ANYWHERE. You need to have an onsite presence much like IBM and Microsoft has in order for offshoring to really payoff. Otherwise you are not saving anything and may even be paying more... regardless of what some pitchman may tell you.
Why I do trust this survey, but see it as flawed.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Software development isn't something you do as a businessperson because you want to pay for people to work on computers - it's something you do because you want something made or done.
Businesses will still want things made, and they will still want things done, because they are still going to be responding to a changing market, and they still want to be able to make new stuff, or change the stuff they currently make.
Software may be expensive to develop and test, but it's still one of the cheapest things you can mass produce, and one of the cheapest ways you can modify an existing product line to expand your market.
The emphasis will certainly be on return on investment - and there will be very nice plans on exactly how to spend the least possible, but the moment the competition has a feature that looks to harm the product line, *gasp* - suddenly the design for the product will have to be retrofitted, testing will have to be expanded, or the product release cycle will have to be accelerated to get that new feature in!
I completely understand this survey though - while companies do care if they end up spending more than they initially estimated, they just need to estimate low costs now, thanks to economic pressures to show the illusion of fiscal improvement and concern for the shareholder's resources.
So to show productivity when all you have are plans, you plan to make better features, spend less, and beat the competition - then ask for more money when you have more to show, which would only go to waste if you stopped now.
What this illusion accomplishes is a bit backwards though - there simply won't be as much open planning of large software project, and more emergency dollars and small contracts. You end up spending much more - much like the shift towards low cost estimates, but then using contractors and emergency spending in the Iraq war. It's the way the game tends to be played in poorly planned business and government - and it's very alluring if you only care about a small set of things going into it.
Ryan Fenton
Oh no! (Score:4, Insightful)
Someone in the media said I.T. jobs are going to drop next year? They *MUST* be able to tell the future! =p
On a serious note, I'm glad I.T. jobs are going to decrease. Hopefully it will align with I.T. jobs demanding more expertise and more actual work getting done, instead of having a "cloud" (or "grid", if you will) of Windows-only support drones reading scripts to you over the phone while you try to get support for a purchased product.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the age old problems is the assumption that IT for most companies is simply capital expenditure. ROI is hard to measure for IT for most companies.
Picture a DR situation where an office is lost to fire. If the company didn't invest in adequate protection then that company is now often out of business losing entire client databases or even contracts. Now proper DR would not only save all your data so you can keep doing business but potentially you might not even have downtime as is the case with banks. This is of course federally mandated but the company I work for is a private entity and practices the same philosophy.
Then of course comes the automation, once a task is automated it is no longer reflected in ROI even though the system is still in place years later supporting it.
Course I'm one guy managing over 40 servers across five sites so I don't foresee a reduction in IT staffing anytime soon for this company.
You're right though, tight times means you spend the extra time to finish your deployments instead of investing in new projects. This means your environment becomes more cohesive and the new stuff later will snap in easier since everything will be well documented by then.
Consider the downtime a nice roadblock allowing you to audit everything you currently have to make sure you are using everything efficiently.
Virtualization for the win, we'll utilize our hardware more effectively while increasing functionality.
Truck driving school here I come! (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously....I look in the paper and it's filled with ads for drivers. That and health care professionals. And as I would rather stick a pencil in my eye than work in health care, I figure my misanthropic ways would be better shifted toward driving.
I'm 46 and have to basically totally switch careers as there are just aren't any jobs in my profession anymore. It's over saturated. I hardly ever see an ad for IT or anything related in my area. As scary as it sounds, changing directions even this far into life may not be a bad idea.
Even with fuel prices sky-high, trucking will be with us for a while as lets face it....everything within your eyesight right now reading these words was all delivered or transported some way via a truck (unless you're looking out your window at a tree or something).
Re:Pund-IT? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, as someone who is in consulting, we tend to use the term consultant to define someone who comes in, provides a solution, and goes out (e.g. strategy consulting, management consulting etc). Typically, the purchasers involve C-level execs (or other top execs) who want to define a strategy (short term or long term, business, finance or tech etc), oversee an M&A deal etc.
An example of a top tier consulting firm would be McKinsey.
Contractors are people who are hired to actually do the job (e.g. a coder who is brought in to code) rather than consult. A tech consultant in my experience would assist the architects with defining the technology strategy and choosing the right vendors, SOWs, SLAs etc, but would not be part of the implementation process. A PMO consultant would assist with the program management process, but not necessarily manage the program per se. A marketing segmentation consultant would analyze the right market segments and tell you what markets to pursue and how, but not actually do it for you.
If the economy is doing badly, people need consultants to optimize the organization, help them with the layoffs, assist them with restructuring etc. Also, bad economic conditions are perfect conditions for companies to swallow their competition and other smaller companies, so more M&A deals and an increased demand for more sales etc.
Just my two cents!
Re:bad article (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, our revenue stream was less than expected for 2008 so they decided to start slashing budgets. One would think a 16% reduction in revenue would result in a 16% reduction in budget but I actually had mine cut by more than 50% and IT isn't alone here.
Executives like to use the times are tough argument to carve out more money for themselves thus making times tougher. It's hard for me to believe cash flow is low when private planes and houseboats are being bought instead of the owner reinvesting back into the company like he had already done. It's his right to do so of course since it is his money. Of course I know the ole times are tough argument is simply BS.
The writer is clueless!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I guess it's time to jump ship (Score:3, Insightful)
Happiness isn't money. Happiness is doing something that you enjoy during your 8 hour workday. I'd MUCH rather make a lesser salary than your nurse friend and solve problems for 8 hours a day than changing people's IV's and checking people's medical charts. Yes, I'm over generalizing the nurse... but my point is that if a career like that sounds equally as enjoyable as your IT career to you, then by all means... jump ship.
Re:bullshit. they will drop maybe in u.s. (Score:4, Insightful)
if you are a mechanical engineer, you may not be able to find any jobs. you cant lower your expectations and go doing plumbing.
but in i.t. we have the ability to downgrade our expectations. a programmer can downgrade expectations and work during a recession coding small contract jobs until economy gets back on track, for example. even by only himself/herself. or a network engineer/ server admin can find small jobs enough to make a living in web hosting industry in the meantime. actually many of them can turn into full time jobs. a civil engineer cant do that.
Re:Truck driving school here I come! (Score:5, Insightful)
There are ads for these positions because:
1.They have a lot of turnover.
2. Newspaper ads attract certain industries. For you, you should be looking at dice, careerbuilder, etc.
Employers dont really expect IT people to be looking at dead tree medium for jobs.
Re:Truck driving school here I come! (Score:3, Insightful)
As a 47 year human, 28 year vet of the IT industry I can feel your pain. However, the road is long and he who lives in the mind can easily go batters on the mind numbing crawl that is the highway.
If possible, reinvent the skills and sell the hell out of the fact you got more life experience then those snot nosed zombies coming out of college factories (with minimal respect to current graduates). If that does not work, there is always the lottery. I got my eyes on the next power ball to provide my next career change, owner manager of an equestrian center.
One can dream...
Re:Cheer up, the outlook is great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, god forbid society ever moves forward or that the unfit don't make jobs. If this was a 100 years ago you'd be screaming at the car manufacturers for depriving horse drivers of their incomes and of light bulb manufacturers decimating the poor candle makers. I also I take it you want the mentally disabled to be paid as much as a PhD? After all they have families to.
Re:Integration (Score:5, Insightful)
You've been lucky. After the "*does it*", the usual response from the ones who want it done is "But I wanted this, this, and that". Where "this, this, and that" are requirements which were never brought up before and which are completely beyond the capabilities of the products you were integrating.
Re:I guess it's time to jump ship (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, I think I should prepare to jump the IT ship pretty soon
...
Question is: Am I wrong?
Answer is: Depends.
What do you do? Are you a helpdesk monkey? A Winderz admin? Are you competent?
If you're coasting, then you're likely to be RIFed. Deadweight gets trimmed. If you're deadweight, you'd do well to jump somewhere before the cuts -- looks better in interviews ("I felt that I wasn't being challenged enough, and began to look for somewhere else to <strike>coast</strike> excel.").
If you're competent, then you'll be fine. You might have to move to where the jobs are, if they dry up around you.
Another important question is: Are you happy in IT? Or are you just there for the money? If you're just there for the money, you're likely to be deadweight, and you might as well jump to whatever the current fad is, or, possibly to something that you like doing.
I was in IT for a decade. I excelled, didn't want to become a PHB just yet, and looked elsewhere. Took a few years, but I found a way to leverage my skills and experience as a sysad into a development career. I've thought about med school, but I'm just too used to a six-figure income to think about going back to poverty for 8+ years.
Re:I doubt.. (Score:5, Insightful)
that offshore jobs will go first. They're cheaper than local jobs.
Only in the short term. What's happening now (based on my anecdotal evidence, which is all one really needs here on /.) is that a lot of large companies are realizing this. Difficulty in communications, poor timing (What, you need that fix now? Sorry, you'll have to wait until tomorrow morning), and some of the shoddiest work you've ever seen are all contributing factors.
On the surface ,it's a very appealing model: you write up some requirements, communciate them to your offshore team and wow! magic! they return to you a finished product.
But here's what they don't tell you in the brochures (again, based on my experience managing and working with offshore vendors): a) if you don't spell out every single technical detail - almost literally to the point of writing the software yourself -- , you can't rely on them to do it right. b) you can't rely on them to communicate to you the things that they need clarification on, unless you are ready to spend a lot of time asking for t. c) the code you get back wll be virtually unmaintainable, with no thought given to refactoring, common functionality, or future mainitenance d) most of the development seems to be done by people with low experience (just out of the schools, which don't seem to teach anything relevant to the real world) and little skill e) if they have issues, do not expect to learn about them unless you constant ask for them. DO expect them to sit idle and not take any initiative if an issue occurs.
So all of this goes to say: it looks too good to be true, because it is. The old saying is that you get what you pay for -- and it still holds true. And after many years of budget overruns and software that doesn't do what it's supposed to do, companies are finally beginning to realize that.
Re:bad article (Score:5, Insightful)
Well said.
I think "times are tough" means "times are tough for you, stupid worthless little peons, but not for me -- I'm the fat cat who passes through everything to the customers and to the employees".
Of course I don't think any job is worthless. Even simple jobs need to be done and done well. The fact that our corporate kitchen often stinks after it's been mopped doesn't contribute anything to productivity, to put it mildly. Every job is important and should be respected. It's too bad execs do not understand this well these days.
Also, a decent company exec tightens his own belt when the times are tough and leads by example. Decent company execs, where the fuck are you? Do you exist anymore? I sure hope so.
Re:Another empty pundit pontificating (Score:2, Insightful)
And it's very likely that with a new regime will come a drastic cut in oil prices....
Sorry, but that's totally unlikely. We're at the beginning of permanent decline in global oil production. It's called peak oil. Also, the problems in the USA economy are deep and pervasive, not small. Peak Oil represents a global 'Limit to Growth', which is something our economy, which requires growth to remain healthy, can not tolerate. From now on, which regime is in power can have little affect on oil prices or the economy. The coming energy decline, and the way it will reduce all economic activity, will be a major driving factor in reducing all IT-related jobs, globally, in coming years.
For the rest of this century, the only way oil prices will go down substantially (and temporarily, at that!) is due to demand destruction. For example, if the USA economy collapses, such that the USA can no longer afford to import oil (largely shutting down the USA transportation system, including food distribution), then global oil price may drop for a while as the global economy absorbs the 15% of global oil production that the USA can no longer afford. Excepting this or similar events, the price of oil will go UP UP UP and availability of oil will go DOWN DOWN DOWN.
I personally like and approve of your sig, "Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War". However, evidence suggests it may not be correct, or at least not in line with our basic psychology. Oil and energy shortages, combined with population and energy demand longages, are already causing standards of living to drop, worldwide. This makes peace less likely and more expensive, and makes war more likely and more profitable.
"War analyst Stanislav Andreski concluded that the trigger for most wars is hunger, or even 'a mere drop from the customary standard of living.' Anthropologists Carol and Melvin Ember spent six years studying war in the late 1980s among 186 preindustrial societies. They focused on precontact times in hopes of collecting the 'cleanest, least distorted' data. Andreski, it seems, was right. War's most common cause, the Embers found, was fear of deprivation. The victors in the wars they studied almost always took territory, food, and/or other critical resources from their enemies. Moreover, unpredictable disasters-droughts, blights, floods, and freezes -- which led to severe hardships, spurred more wars than did chronic shortages.
This also holds true among modern nations. In 1993, political scientists Thomas E Homer-Dixon, Jeffrey H. Boutwell, and George W. Rathjens examined the roots of recent global conflicts and concluded, 'There are significant causal links between scarcities of renewable resources and violence.'"
"In short, many wars seem to be a mass, communal robbery of another social group's life-support resources." --- THE DARK SIDE OF MAN: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence, by Michael P. Ghiglieri
And finally my own sig:
--- "Further economic growth is neither possible nor desirable. Modern industrial economy is not required for cultural or spiritual growth, and poses a threat to human survival." -- D. Orlov
Re:Duh.Get your ADD/Dyslexia meds Chris Mahan (Score:3, Insightful)
You shouldn't be so proud of the fact that you're a stronger flavor of douche than someone else.
I'll never understand this argument... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Another empty pundit pontificating (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand your well-reasoned reply.
I have to counter with the fact that the pump up in oil prices is artificial, and was started when the money ran out of the mortgage and hedge fund markets. This money needs to make money, and is always looking for a bull market. It found oil and other commodities.
While we'll also agree that oil consumption is overall a bad thing, and has done great damage to the environment, it is an artificial crisis, and bears no resemblance to supply and demand other than the limitations imposed on oil refinery capacity in the US. The limited capacity has the effect of amplifying the current trend, and every oil/political news sparrow fart of an RSS alert drives the price up. That's because there's a huge lump of money that needs to be making money as long as it is perceived that we'll continue to buy. No, it's not natural supply and demand. It's a squeeze job.
Look at what happened when GB the elder left office. Oil dropped in 1993 dramatically, to under $1/gal in most places. At the end of his term, it shot up, but nothing like what happened in late 2001. It dipped, then followed war. When the war in Iraq was artificially over, it dropped again as the mortgage and hedge funds were pumped (after all, there were no dot-coms to fund with exaggerated exuberance).
That money started leaving in 2006 because of all of the negative signs and that's when oil started to rise in price. Any old explosion in Nigeria or bellowing from a Venezuelan blow-hard president-for-life would cause a nice little bump up. Sneeze in the currency market? Bump. Look at the sneezes, follow the money.
You've been seduced by the pimps of the oil companies and the US press, which plays along like a lapdog with their huge benefactors, just as Washington, Inc., does.
But my sig represents not only the economy of peace, also the morality of it. I long for the day of great energy that doesn't pollute, but also a world that plans for the resources of the many that don't get to eat at night, or sleep under a roof, or get to know the luxuries of what we in the west call 'the basics'.
Re:Cheer up, the outlook is great! (Score:4, Insightful)
God knows that I would love to live in a society where lay offs and cheap labor and two week notices are the things of the past. However, our world is not based on what is right. If you want to survive, you must learn how to play the game. Go read The World is Flat and perhaps you'll get a thing or two.
I have been in very tough positions in my life and those hard situations taught me something really important: Learn how to adapt and how to survive. Nobody, except for you, is interested in your survival. Corporations and governments would love to have employees that are barely smart enough to do their jobs while keeping their mouths shut. They feed on the paycheck mentality and we, suckers, are going for it. A cycle of clean up in any industry is a good thing because every time it happens, it teaches us a valuable lesson.
I am too sorry for families that go through financial losses due to lay offs. So the first thing that you should do is to ensure that your family can survive and live on one income. This automatically translates into living within your means and having a well stocked savings account. I made a pact with my wife that we will never work in the same industry just for that freaking reason. I know it sounds cruel, but what the hell am I supposed to do? Unionize? Complain about Indians stealing my work? Kill all H1B visa employees? Encourage gov't subsidies of IT shops?
Once I realized that organic chemistry sucked, I decided not to get involved into anything related to chemistry, biology, medicine etc. I would be a great fucking disaster as a doctor or anybody who is even remotely responsible for well being of anything that lives and breathes. Also, I have monkeying around with grease and you won't find me in any garage fixing cars for living. I mean, I could do that for living, but I would suck and it would be totally unfair to other people (I am saying that because I had enough connections to land a cushy job in the field that is not of an interest to me). Unfortunately, there are still many people who got IT jobs just because. These byproducts of on-line universities and strong family connections tend to fuck things up and I honestly feel no problem if some of them lose their jobs while IT experiences downturn. Why? Because people who a knowledgeable and competent will always find jobs. This is not related only to IT. In every industry there is a good fraction of people who tend to spend most of time talking on the phone and doing things besides what the get paid for. How is losing those guys a problem? This so-called downturn mentioned by GS is a red flag to everybody (GS is good at creating panic) that perhaps it is time to review career plans, get some education and think about the future. So rock on :)
Re:Duh. I'll answer, directly my man (on degrees) (Score:4, Insightful)
E.G.#1-> I remember telling a bunch of network techs, or rather, first asking them:
"Do you know how to find the midpoint of an array, without knowing the total # of elements"
& not a one of them could...
We had this kid in my research lab who was a fabulous hacker and pretty solid scripter, but didn't know what a for loop was. One of the best programmers I know is self taught (which is the way a lot of people got into the field)). On the flip side, I've got classmates who are so lost on fundamentals that they don't know what an object is (seriously, one professor gives that question on exams and it kills students.)
I've seen far too many people get through their degrees through a combination of cheating, relying on partners, and cutting and pasting code to really trust it. One of the worst programmers I know has a 4.0; he writes hacks that work well enough, but that I wouldn't trust anywhere near production code (mostly 'cause I've seen it fail miserably in production code 'cause he didn't comprehend real time debugging.)
Forget it, Med is already crowded. (Score:2, Insightful)
Everyone else had the same idea too, and big hospital management is having the same H1B ideas that everyone else had too. Engineering is a zero, which is a good reason for declining enrollment. Law has always been a crap shot as are most insurance/sales/bank cubicle jobs. Medicine still pays well and there are lots of employers. But guess what, the same kind of regional consolidation is taking over and the biggest hospitals have started to import H1B, aka slave, labor. Insurance companies are doing their part to force the same kind of throat/cost cutting all around. The downturn is only going to accelerate these trends. If we get another republican administration, Medicine will look like software, aviation or broadcast media.
Bottom line, keep doing what you do best. Trends will always betray you.
Re:I guess it's time to jump ship (Score:2, Insightful)
It may depend on where you are. Here in California, there has been a nurse shortage for over 20 years. There are loads of nurses from English-speaking countries working in California to fill the gap. I don't know if that shortage will continue for another 30 years, but considering the aging of the US population, I wouldn't be at all surprised.
I don't buy these stories of the imminent death of IT as a career, either. I've been in IT for nearly 30 years and it's never left me wanting. Sure, there are some jobs than could be sent overseas - probably even mine - but there will always be plenty of local IT jobs, too. You can't outsource or offshore *all* of your IT work no matter how hard you try.
Your friend who quit driving trucks to go into IT in 1998 was going in just in time to get caught up in the dot-com bust a couple years later. I didn't really get to cash in much on the dot-com boom, but I was working for a company that was already stable and profitable before the boom, and I didn't lose my job in the bust. Is IT still a good field to be in 8 years after the bust? Sure is. I'd probably have to be a doctor to make more than I do in IT, and the stress would be a lot higher, probably.
Re:Integration (Score:1, Insightful)
Which works perfectly fine if you are an integration contractor. You just bill them $150/hr for the time it takes to do "this, this, and that".
Re:I'll never understand this argument... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I'll never understand this argument... (Score:5, Insightful)
Carly Fiori OTOH, isn't beat down by life. Her slightest whim is translated into reality to the limits of human civilization. She's secure, doesn't constantly worry about her job going away, her medical care being pulled. Doesn't ever wonder if there will come a time when she can't eat.
You'd think people like that would have the simple human decency to accept a few incredibly minor limitations on their desires in exchange for massive benefits to millions and millions. You'd think that, and you'd be wrong.
Re:Duh. I'll answer, directly my man (on degrees) (Score:2, Insightful)
For someone with a mere 16 years in industry, a degree in maths, and 26 years of programming, can you enlighten me as to the answer to this?
"Do you know how to find the midpoint of an array, without knowing the total # of elements"
Either I'm parsing the question wrong or it's impossible. You could poll [2N] until you hit an exception but this doesn't work on machines/languages that simply crash when you access an array out-of-bounds. So what's the general solution?
Re:Truck driving school here I come! (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously....I look in the paper and it's filled with ads for drivers. That and health care professionals. And as I would rather stick a pencil in my eye than work in health care, I figure my misanthropic ways would be better shifted toward driving.
You're an IT professional, and you're looking for employment opportunities in THE NEWSPAPER...?