Comment Re:Advice from a senior IT professional (Score 1) 140
Outsourcing is not necessarily a bad thing, you just switch and work for the vendor.
There is outsourcing and then there is in sourcing. Its about companies and organizations wanting to find the balance and meeting their current needs. Ive seen HR outsourced, ive seen engineers outsourced, there is onsite outsoruced employees. Lawyers by default are "outsourced" you have companies that retain lawyers and companies that prefer to hire legal aid.I also know of former colleagues who are enjoying better salaries as they are retrenched and outsourced but rehired by the vendor. Its about the compensation. Salaries and Compensation is dependent more on supply and demand conditions as well as your starting point rather than the job itself
My brother started his career in IT 4 years earlier than me. There was a mass drive to allow immigrants with IT and other technical degrees to fill the void. After 5 years of IT my salary matched his starting and my company is known to be a lot more generous in granting salaries.
Conditions that determine your next pay check are more
1. Salary Budget
2. Market Rate of Increment (10% over your current)
3. How desperate they want you (how many other people are in the market as the hiring organization perceives, some company want an IT guy, some want specifically MCAD, CCIE etc, some just want a dgree)
4. How desperate you want the job
5. Whether the HR manager likes you
6. Whether the hiring manager likes you
The introduction of "Indian and Chinese" massively increasing the labor supply. Remember these two countries account for more than 35% of world population. IT is surpressed first as most migration policies allocate preference to migrants with technical degrees. But as globalized workplaces take off and work becomes more mobile all vocations will be suppressed due to higher supply. Add to it the indigenous supply of degree graduates is growing, more people are getting higher qualifications including masters and phds. So the supply grows huge. This puts major downward pressure on factors 2 &3 and squeezes you in 4 as you have less options.
You can earn a lot just be artificially reduce the supply and or join one market where the demand is much higher
You reduce the supply by taking certifications, the more you have you join a more constricted job supply as you are classified by hiring organizations as certified and of better quality as compared to someone who isnt. While I don't like paper tigers, this is how the market works. And remeber a higher starting pay check is in general better. Remember increments are also dependent on.
That or you join the market where the demand is higher, I would imagine the demand for cloud computing developers is significantly higher than for helpdesk in most parts of the world. But specializing has its pitfalls, when the tech depreciates you are pretty much find yourself back to square one think cobol and crystal reports.
Working with customers tend to be better, because by default you are in a short supply market, anyone can be a sales person but a sales person who can maintain relations is very much desired(Factors 3 &6) as customers pay for everything. however if you get something wrong those factors reverses for you.
Countries in Europe and north Americas will see decline as economic activity moves to Asia, companies perceive substitution viability and when growing operations in Asia makes more sense. Once they feel that they can substitute an in-house staff for a vendor, or a 24/7 support team in asia, demand drops (factor 3). these changes are hard and inevitable.
If you switch to other professions, youll be disappointed latter as all professions will face the same fate.
Bringing back to the point, freelancing faces the same pressures it just that there's a huge supply now. If you freelance, you are better off doing your own startup with products not services. Then its back to how good you are in generating a product with demand.
All other things like getting more cert or switching fields are in my opinion playing around with the basic factors. Understand them and probably your compensation will start to grow.