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The IT Labor Shortage
Carnage4Life writes "Dr. Dobbs Journal has a very insightful article on the shortage of IT professionals that is constantly being touted by the media and industry execs. It debunks this myth by discussing the results of the IT Workforce Data Project which indicate that there is anything but a shortage of IT professionals in industry today.
" Good points, talking about the oft-heard of preference for recent grads and such. What do you folks think? Is it hard to find a job?
Seriously folks, if you were looking for "IT Staff" wouldn't you want people who knew the technology you were using inside and out, and have worked with it for a few years, or a fresh off the street CS/MIS Grad?
It would depend sharply on the sort of work I was hiring the person for. If I just wanted someone to put a pretty GUI interface on the front of a database that someone else designed, I'd look for someone with lots of experience with the specific technologies I wanted used, and wouldn't worry about their degrees. If I want someone to analyze requirements, then design the database from scratch, I'd look for someone with a CS degree and some database experience, and wouldn't worry a bit whether or not they had experience with the specific database engine I wanted to use. The second sort of person is far rarer, and far harder to recognize when you encounter him or her.
I'm 15 years old and i know that they're are lots of jobs now but i'm just afriad what will it be like in 10 years? Do you think it will be as good as it is now or so many parents will want their children to go into CS and IT that it will just become overcrowded. Do you think this is possible or i am just worring too much?
The university system is not poised to effectively teach Computer Science. Respected schools like Cal Poly still teach Ada as a core language. The IT world changes much too fast for the university sytem to keep its curriculum current. Recent grads leave with a degree; training in obsolete areas; and a whole lot of theory with little practical relevence.
I have to disagree with the the claim that schools can't teach real Computer Science with Ada. I also have to disagree that a sound theoretical basis is useless.
I have a true Computer Science background. Backed up with a lot of theoretical math background. Having a fundamental understanding of Computer Science is invaluable as a Programmer, Tester, Analyst, Project Manager, and all of the other roles that Programmers fill in most software and IT shops. I've filled all of those roles and more.
What is useless (and comes out of a lot of Universities) is a degree in writing C programs or writing Java programs. My undergraduate work did not involve a lot coding. It did involve a lot of talking and drawing pictures. So many of the young programmers I meet don't really understand the magic box that they are sitting in front of. They lack basic architecture and algorithms understanding. They are clueless about even simple tree-traversal concepts and finite-state machines.
But, they have written moderate-size school projects in 1 to 4 languages. Big whoop.
I'd like to see a lot more sound Computer Science taught (with Turing Machines, Ada, Pascal or even BASIC, although I think I'd prefer Pascal or Java. Its pretty hard to develop certain bad habits (which annoy me personally) in either.).
I'd also like to see some non-programmer oriented IT degrees. The skills that lead to good Programmer/Analysts are not the same as the skills that lead to great sysadmins. Why can't we train them differently?
Geez, I'm starting to sound like a real old geezer. I'm not even 30. Oh wait, approaching 30 is old geezer these days.
There is no such thing as a shortage of anything. In economic terms, supply = demand; always! Just because I want to pay a doctor 10 bucks for X-Raying (they still use those, right?) my sprained foot; doesn't mean there's a "shortage" of doctors. What it means is that I don't want to pay the market rate ... more like $400 ... for those services. This society needs more, better police, lawyers, doctors and teachers. Is there a labor shortage in these fields? No. The only "shortage" is people's willingness to pay for those services.
IMHO, its finding someone truly skilled in the IT field that's the problem.
*points to the mass of MSCE's next door*
Granted, some of them _are_ smart. But the majority of IT workers I enounter now would have a hard time telling sendmail.cf/apache confs/etc from thier arse. The whole 'I got my cert, Im cool now' attitude I see really bugs me since it devaluates the skilled workers out there.
Like grits? Who doesn't!
Good title for a magazine article?
I agree, it should really be called the "compentent IT shortage". You could say it was just that I didn't look in the right places or didn't study hard enough, but right here in Portland, Oregon I had fair amount of difficulty finding a position programming.
When I did get one in a small start-up, I found myself working with mostly incompetents. In the past year, we've chewed through three contractors who had resumes making them look ten times better than me, but lasted an average of two months after demonstrating that they couldn't so much as write a half-decent web page.
I'm not saying that I'm a guru or anything, but I didn't even know what "ASP" stood for before I started here, so I expected anyone who claims to have three years of web development experience to at least be able to teach me *something*.
</rant>
This rant was moderated up? There are so many half-truths and outright lies in the above, I don't know where to start, so I'll just pick a couple of the points. You said, "low pay." That is absolutely not true. INS requires that you pay people with an H1B visa 20-50% more than you would a US citizen. I know this, because I've had the INS threaten me twice, because I only paid a web designer from Belerus 25% more than I paid the other people on staff. INS does a very good job of protecting the rights of the people on an H1B. You also said, "If you quit, your visa is void, immediately." According to my attorney (who works near full-time handling immigration for BMW), there is no visa that under any circumstances is revoked immediately, other than for criminal activity. In the worst case, you have 10 days to find another job. I just had a graphics designer quit, and INS gave her until the end of August to find another job. In another case, a former employee of mine was granted an extention, because he "needed time to dispose of property." In other words, he had bought a new Porsche Boxter, and he told INS he needed to sell before he left the country (he is from Singapore, a right-hand drive country). INS gave him 90 days, and he found another job w/ an H1B visa in that time. Yeah, real tough.
Yo, sup, I be kickin tha UNIX style proppa for
over 10 years, dig! I get mad hoez. Next month
I be goin to Vegas to roll the dice wit my boss.
Sometimes we just kick it at the crib and crack
40's, true. A brutha with phat skillz ain't got
a worry. We jus' kick back and watch them fools
whine about they MCSE and they college while
we keep it real and live large.
(On topic: There be a lot of shorties in IT,
true.)
For the recent college grads searching for work: Completely ignore all "x years experience required" statements in the job descriptions. Always apply to everything that otherwise looks interesting, especially if it's for something new you want to learn and have never done before (what CS student ever encounters an AS/400?). You may find that the exp. filter has filtered out all other applicants and you're one of the few or the only one to apply for the job. If they call to interview you, you have no need to apologize for not meeting the exp. requirement. They already read your resume before they called you.
I recently moved from Nebraska to Tulsa, Oklahoma. I banked on it being easy to find a job in our industry (as a sysadmin in fact). I have about 6 years experience with AIX and 3 years experience with SUN/Solaris, and I run Linux at home (7 years), but didn't expect to find a Linux job. However, I have had NO luck (over 6 months) finding a job as a Unix admin or network admin (DNS, DHCP, assorted other). I'm finally working for an ISP because of my proficiency programming, scripting, and Linux admin ability. I'm having a very good time, but I'm being somewhat underpaid....which probably makes things even. I even bought a house in the NE Oklahoma area (before finding a job). Maybe I'm a fool ? Danny change at to @ to email :)
I've been out of work for over a year now. I have some experience with Java, doing application development, and Foxpro experience. I did a lot of work with C and Unix/Linux in college, but around here (Omaha, Nebraska) they want more experience, or they want mainframe people. I don't get the point of the local college teaching I went to teaching Unix and C, if it's not used much around here. And I'm also not willing to relocate. Makes me feel like I wasted my education.
Well, according to my post, your pay scale should be somewhere between $40,000 and priceless, which it is.
But since you know what the big red button is, *and* know enough not to touch it, you deserve a raise!
My numbers weren't supposed to be *too* accurate, just the sentiment behind them. See, it was supposed to be funny. I need to mark those posts with "HUMOR" again...
And I couldn't get to the Dr. Dobbs article. But their primary source had a lot of cool info, and said a lot of the things we're saying here: just because there are a lot of IT professionals out there, that doesn't mean they know how to do what *you* want them to, and they aren't all necessarily qualified.
Oh, and sorry about the NT, man. I hope you like your job. I know NT Administrators that don't do much more than reboot the server when the printer queues stop working. Scary stuff...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Maybe the fact that you're giving such an outrageous salary requirement is part of the reason you're getting interview you don't want?
Perhaps the going salary for what you really want to do is out of line with your expectations.
I agree with what you say. In San Jose (silicon valley) I just give recruiters an outrageous salary requirement (2x my current) and they still manage to get me interviews that I don't want.
My favorite thing about HR requirements comes from about four years ago. One wanted someone with 3-5 years experience with linux (that's a pretty elite group) and another wanted at least 5 years experience with NT in a production environment! I still have the clips from my fishwrap around here somewhere.
_damnit_
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Uhh, he would fly back. Given the salaries most programmers make, this shouldn't prove to be a significant financial burden.
-Stu
The people doing the hiring are often looking for keywords, and often in things few people have cause it's new. Few HR people know how to match a resume to a job.
For instance a place looking for XML that turns down people with SGML(cause they don't know what it is), but hires HTML designers cause they thought XML came from HTML.
-Peace
Dave
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
im a high school graduate, i have CCNA, MCSE and i know several programming languages. BUT, i havent been able to find a job for over two months now. its either because i have no formal education or because there just arent any jobs. maybe its cus no one really likes me.
Global warming is good for you!
It seems that there are currently two types of IT professionals in the US at the moment. Those who are competent and those who are 'certified' by a commercial organisation.
I suggest that there should be an independant not for profit organisation which requires a certain level of academic qualification *and* experience to join. An example of this is the 'British Computer Society'.
There are several levels of membership from 'Associate' to 'Fellow' depending on experience and qualifications. It encourages experience, training and *professional standards*!
British Computer Society:
http://www.bcs.org.uk/
Deleted
It's easy to find headhunters. All you have to do is rot-13 encrypt a copy of your resume, print it out, crumple it up and toss it into a construction site just before they pour the foundation.
Within three or four hours, your Yahoo mail account will have hit its 10-megabite limit, chock full of emails from headhunters from as far away as Chechnya who haven't really read your resume yet, but are sure they have Just The Job For You!
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
I just got an offer from a company well above my current salary for doing basically the same work. Not to say I'm not worth it of course ;).
I think that if there isn't a shortage if IT folks there is at least a shortage of IT folks with good skills.
I'm seeing friends of mine ( sorry guys ) that are getting hired at outrageous salaries when they don't really have the skills to perform the job as well as it could be. And it isn't like they are overselling themselves they are being honest. Maybe companies are investing in talent and I have a horrible idea of what good salaries are.
I'm getting calls weekly from headhunters (I'm not sure how a-typical that is though) wanting me to leave my job for "A lot more money doing better things" ( at least that is the common phrase ).
Anyone else with similar observations?
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
Hey I'm in boston...want to hook up? J/K but your right about the market here its fierce...the last offer I got was from a company I didn't even hear of until they called.
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
I am not sure which IT industry they think folks are "possibly over the hill at 30 and certainly over the hill at 40". In my IT ship, I am the youngest software engineer at age 29 (just turned last week). Of the 30 software engineers that I work with, a total of 2 are under 30. The mean age is certainly above 40 years old.
The reason for this is that in my department, we never hire recent college grads. The main reason is that we want intelligent people with a lot of experience. I have the fewest years of experience at 5. Most folks I work with have 10-15 years experience in software engineering. Some "old timers" even have more than 15 years.
I left a start up full of recent college grads because I grew bored teaching the same concepts to new folks who would then bolt after 2 years to garner a higher salary. I went to my current job because of the wealth of knowledge, experience, and expertise of my colleagues.
We don't have to stay up all night to get our jobs completed because we: 1) Actually conduct analysis and design on our software before we build it and 2) know what the hell we're doing.
Chalk one up for the old timers...
--
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Because we know how to figure stuff out. We all know that we don't know everything about software development and are willing to find the best solution.
;)
;)
Not to mention the inferiority complex to provide the impetus to continuously prove yourself..
(Besides, quite honestly, things change so quickly that tying yourself to a technology too tightly can be suicide.. Best to have mastery of basics and a whole 'lotta metaknowledge IMHO.. I'd rather understand 10 or 20 good commands or tricks than know every single command line switch to a single command..
Your Working Boy,
The jobs are out there. The money is out there. All you need is a pulse and the willingness to move to Silicon Valley.
Weird, IIRC the last pencom survey I checked put NY Metro area as the highest-paying IT region.. Though many of those jobs are as shirt + tie bank/broker slave techs..
Beware the IT Pimps..
Your Working Boy,
This is a repost of sorts from a previous job related article. But it seemed to fit the purpose (altered as well to fit more into this one).
Seems that in Canada, employers are less likely to hire less experienced programmer / administrator / developer to fill a position. Also with the Y2K scare and the leap year scare many companies up here put a hiring freeze into effect (TransAlta being one I can recall) which is taking a long time letting down.
I have looked though a lot of Online job sites and receive job listings from the newspapers online. Which this I normally see the following criteria for what seems to be a junior position:
This brings up the question of applying to another city, province or country... Does this not make you look like a less promising Candidate? I mean you obviously cannot just show up for an interview (unless you can afford flying from Calgary to Toronto on a daily basis). This added to the simple fact that they would probably have to help you move seems to put any interview I have been interviewed with (over the phone) into a scare.
Of course, perhaps it's just me.
Are cabs in NYC a mere fraction of the cost of cabs most anywhere else or does everybody live 1 block away from their jobs?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If you have time to go out and look you're obviously not spending enough time on learning computer stuff : )
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Maybe the moderation system should include things like "insightful troll" that gives a +1 and a -1 at the same time : )
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
While your experience is great, the reason we are looking for perl programmers is:
1. Our existing code is all in perl,
2. It works, works fast, and works well
3. So why fix what ain't broken?
We are doing some work with PHP, but that's experimental, and may never enter production. If it does, it will work alongside our existing perl code; in the real world, you use the tool that works best for your application.
And I AM NOT a personell dept. - I am the sysadmin for the company. We ask for specific skills because those are the skills we require - the same as any other job in the world. And it is not some HR person that interviews you here; the geeks that you will be working with do that.
The biggest requirement for work here is that you must have that hacker/tinkerers spirit, and must jell well with the other people you are working with. Unfortunately, there is no real way to express that in a resume. While I don't doubt you have the technical background to do the work, the arrogance you just spewed out would kill you in the real world. Where I work, we are all a bunch of really skilled geeks, but we are also good friends.
The job offer is serious; we are looking for perl programmers and a webmaster in an all Linux/OpenBSD environment. If you are interested, let's see a link to the resume.
(I will not post on this subject further, as it seems to be a poor forum to do this)
This is absolutely true. I've been interviewing perl programmers and webmasters for the past month; NONE of them were qualified for the work. Competency can't really be taught; it's aquired through experimentation and experience.
Incidently, if you are a good perl programmer with Linux experience and wish to work at a great stert-up in Menlo Park, CA, reply to this thread with a link to your resume. I will contact you.
funny thing is that 2/3 of the "average" in some places, after factoring in cost of living, can actually be a 1/3 raise (well... maybe not quite, but you get the idea).
-
--bc
-----------------------------------------
the amazing bc
latin/funk flugelhorn & trumpet
webnaut, music junkie, sysadmin from hell
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
well... my experience is this:
6 months ago, i was offered another job out of the blue from a headhunter who got my name from a friend. it was about an $18K increase over the amount that i was making with my current employer at the time. i worked, and still do, for a software company in the midwest. my company counter-offered me with a $20K raise, and office with a window, and a laptop, as well as a few other little perks, including a sizeable bonus.
i have no degree, i am 23 years old. i have played with these infernal machines since i was 11 years and learned unix when i was a freshman in high school. but i work hard. i work 55-80 hours a week. i can say that i feel appreciated. the company i work for is a good one.
my job consists of just every duty that an IT person could be asked to do: support/helpdesk, sysadmin nt/unix/novell, design and implement networks (including wiring buildings), install software for customers, data conversions, custom programming, and a plethora of other tasks. you might say i'm the perfectly rounded (no pun intended) IT guy.
finding a job around here takes about a month. i have several friends that have gone unemployed for 30-40 days, but landed a $40K+ job in spite of it. there are always tons of job offerings in the paper, but the pay is pretty weak. but, from our standpoint, it's difficult to find IT people who are good enough to pay them the big bucks and you don't have to put a lot of resources into training. it's kind of a double-edged sword. i think companies are willing to pay good people good money, but most HR departments don't know a good IT person from adam.
------------------------------------------
the amazing bc
latin/funk flugelhorn & trumpet
webnaut, music junkie, sysadmin from hell
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
I've talked to people in a dozen corporations (my friends now, but it's a practical example) and almost all of them say that their department is adequately staffed. Only startups are having any problems aquiring IT professionals - and that's because by their nature they can't afford to pay for them.
It's called the laws of supply and demand - they're paying high costs so they want to increase supply to lower them. This is why Congress is being pressured into allowing immigrants with computer skills in - they're trying to decrease costs. There is no shortage. I repeat, there is no shortage.
>A college degree is no different. It doesn't >mean anything unless you can back it up with >some good sample code or a good answer to an >algorithm question in the interview.
Parsimony is all well and good, but do you mean that you throw out resumes that have any sort of ``education'' section? How about someone who just memorizes a bunch of code snippets based on what other interviewees have shared? Of course, social engineering of interviews NEVER happens and it's a good thing, too.
Personally, I'd take the poor interviewee with the degree (if it's a real degree like EE/CS/Math/Physics/ and so forth) over the swell interviewee with no degree, but YMMV, I reckon. Maybe you don't get that choice, what with the parsimony and such.
Free trade means services to, not just bars of soap.
Stuart Eichert
Stuart Eichert
There is an urgent shortage of beer. Even though my local supermarket has a lot of beer on the shelves, it is not the right kind of beer. Specifically, it is too expensive. In addition, I think you will agree that the beer you can buy cheaply stinks - it doesn't taste right, it doesn't get you drunk, and people insist on calling it "water".
I guess there are a number of issues...
1. You can never get enough of what you want. Good IT folk are hard to find - just like good plumbers, artists, football players.
2. It takes a while to sort the good ones from the bad ones - you wouldn't hire john elway based on a couple of interviews, you'd want to see him play.
3. The ones you can find tend to be expensive, hard to retain, and prone to poaching
4. Many companies see their staff as a resource to exploit; they are often unwilling to invest in training. Good IT folk don't grow on trees - they need to be trained, developed, coached, whatever.
5. Many employees see their employers as a short term gig, seek to extract the maximum value before leaving for a better job.
6. 4 and 5 become a recursive process with no exit clause.
7. it is probably difficult for geeks to move out of their chosen technical area of expertise, because being a geek implies a certain obsession with something - hardware, software, whatever. However, as you get older, have a higher salary expectation etc., you have to be able to offer your employer significant additional value to compete with a 21 year old fresh from college. If you can't keep your technical skills up to date, you can expect some pretty bad stuff to happen as you get older.
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.
One would imagine that in a situation where there was even anywhere near enough workers in a given field, there would not be half as many completely knowledgeless people running around with "certifications" and "experience".
And I thought I was alone.
I, like you, also fake it, but I don't fake it well enough to find a job doing it. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that I live in a very non-technical southern Vermont town.
I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'
That's the History Erasor Button!
I can see the fnords!
Sorry but companies don't retrain so when they don't need your skill set, its: "Geez I'm sorry but we're going to have to let you go..." And then the office manager escorts you to your desk with a box and waits while you put in all your sh*t before showing you to the door. (This I know from [bitter?] personal experience...)
The other side of the coin is that if you're employed by a company to do , you can expect to be bored sh*tless because you've been pegged as "the <x> person" and the rest of your life you're going to be "the <x> person." (Been there too...)
What's the answer? Like, I doan 'no' Eh?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Oh and another thing. If there is a perceived shortage and the IT industry can get the government to buy into that theory, they are given a larger number of aliens they are allowed to bring into this country on work VISAs. But, we all know that they never work for less than we do so it shouldn't be a problem! "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink"
Actually there are minimum salary levels for foreign workers who are brought into the US on H1B visas to work. I think it is $60,000 at the moment - not a fortune but high enough to discourage exploitation when you consider the cost of the visa application and relocation costs. How do I know this? I am a 37 yr old UK resident who is just about to move to the USA to start a job with a consultancy in Pennsylvania. I spoke to one of the VP's of the company and they said they had real problems finding people with significant business experience who knew how to program. So go figure...
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
Using the basic concept of supply and demand:
Prices (also called salaries) for highly skilled tech workers are high.
When prices are high, quantity demanded is high.
Therefore we have a great demand for highly skilled workers.
We would have a shortage if demand would exceed the supply of highly skilled IT workers.
But the mechanism called market price will keep us from getting a shortage. This is the reason for high wages.
Only if wages would be too low, there would be a shortage.
Shortage is the wrong term. However, we definitely have a very high demand.
My resume was a bit out-dated. I was assistant mgr before working for Corel, then I returned as the full-time manager, which I did for almost 2 years.
And, the funny thing was that they actually made fun of me for knowing UNIX as well as I did at the time. Well, it's about a year and a half after I finished up my schooling, and out of 30-some people who started the class, only six of us got our degrees, and I, the UNIX geek, was the one with the highest GPA. Gee, I wonder why? :-)
You are so right.
:-)
:-).
I can't tell you how many times I've talked with MCSEs who didn't have a clue of what they were talking about. "I am certified in NT, but how do you do it in '95". If you are an MCP/MCSE, you should know what you are doing since you are indeed an expert.
There is a parallel with karate. In karate you are expected pass your exam for your belt not because you study for that exam, but because you are in fact that belt already.
I know sufficient amount about operating systems from both fronts, but I am not a DBA. No, I don't have certificates or degrees. And that's not because I can't pass exams(I help prepare for them), but because I prefer to work with people who are open-minded. I actually have a couple of MCP certs, but you won't see that anywhere on my resume. That makes things a little harder when looking for next position, but I have yet to find a place where I didn't enjoy going to every day.
How do you know if you are enjoying what you are doing? That's when you forget to notice you've worked overtime.
When I was asked whether I know how to deploy Oracle 8i on some Solaris 2.6 boxes I said "I don't know this now, but I will read at least 2 different sources of information and research common pitfalls before I even try to do it."
Since I knew everything else that was required, I got the job.
What beats me is the fact that apparently people don't believe in self-training. In other words, I am expected to pay $4000 to basically have a book read to me and so I can crawl around the test labs. Well, I can just as easily buy this book in electronic format thanks to O'Reilly and have a pleasant female voice read it to me for free. For $4000 I can also have a network of machines setup at my place
About the fakers... Look at products from one well-known software company. I happen to know a few people they hired and how they got hired. Fake resumes, no real skills, but vocabulary of a seasoned professional as well as interview scripts. The people I refer to are employed as software testers. Suddenly 63,000 bugs isn't a mystery anymore
The mercenary point is also interesting one... Quite frankly I got tired of my family saying "you are working there for too long and are underpaid" when I worked in 1 place for over 1.5 years and at another for over 2 years. Loyalty may be something that's lacking today over the illusion of happiness through financial rewards. Well, guess what, the saying that money doesn't make you happy is true.
I would pass up a 10% raise at a different company if I have to leave my current one. Of course if it's above 50%, that basically means I am underpaid.
If you want to be a mercenary, do short-term contracts and do not accept permanent offers. Don't take a permanent high responsibility position such as product manager and resign it in 5 months before your product is out.
Being a mercenary is great in the beginning as it's probably the fastest track to senior levels. Once you are at a senior level, you are expected to be with the company for a while, act as a mentor to your juniors and so on. Can you be a manager for only 3 months? Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? If it doesn't, you are a mercenary.
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Network Administrator
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
That is an interesting view...
:-)
Yes the good IT people want to be paid a lot. But is it really a lot? Since our assistance is crucial to operations of the business, we can't be neglected.
Say you do 9mil/year in sales. A brilliant IT person suggests a few improvements to bring the sales to 13mil/year. Is he/she not worth the 6 figure compensation after this?
It is all relative, and I realized that after saving some company a lot of money. Yes, it does take a long time to find a new job when your minimum salary requirements are quite high.
Shortage of talented people? Well, I believe that's the unfortunate reality of planet Earth at this point of time in any industry
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Network Administrator
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
I disagree...
;-), wishing to have me refer them candidates for free (contractor references). I treat this type as annoying telemarketers. Do your own damn homework and read the resume ONLINE. If someone bothers to ask me to send them a Word 97 *gasp* format resume I simply say that this application is not available for Solaris, Linux, or whatever I am on at the moment. Do your own work of conversion.
It's true I've had e-mails like:
Hi, I've received your e-mail address and would like to interview you.
Please send your updated resume, 2-3 former managerial references and 1-2 contractor references.
Thanks.
What this tells me is that this recruiter is not someone I want to work with. They are impersonal, clueless (You worked with Solaris but I need UNIX
Finding a good agent (someone who is truly willing to work in your interests) is a job in itself. If I can remember agents names (Julie Youngblooded of Integrated Parnerships, Marci Hendrix and Leah of some other company, Heath Horton of Trouver, Erin Capriotti of K Consultants, Kristine Klemm of Deloitte & Touche), then they are truly a pleasure to work with and really care about what your career. Those are all the names I remember after being in constant contact with tons of recruiters over the last 2 years.
How do I know I like the person I am chatting with? Usually when my originally scheduled 30 minutes interview runs into over 2 hours and no one is visibly tired. When you choose to work with a recruiter and choose her as your agent, your chances of getting a dream job are much higher when she knows exactly what you want and your long-term objectives.
I've been to enough interviews to easily turn the tables on the recruiters and screen _them_ instead.
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Network Administrator
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
Reason for poor phone tech support?
;-). Those who are competent enough, usually dislike answering same questions from newbies all day long. And they can't even tell people to read the manual (How rude! The dumb tech wants me to read this x00 pages book!!!) and have to read off it. Moreover, they have to use plain English explanations of rather advanced topics usually.
:-).
Just try to get a senior professional to answer phones 8 hours per day
I'd rather do something that requires more use of brain, so I get maybe 2 calls a month with some really arcane issues that are fun to solve
When I call for support, very rarely naturally, I bypass 1st line with a statement like "Hi, I have this cluster problem, would you transfer me to someone who knows this type of environment? Thank you!"
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Network Administrator
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
IMHO
maths grads == great computer scientists
comp sci grads == great computer engineers
I'm comp sci. and was itching to get into industry for the last 2 of my 4 year course - it was all good stuff to learn but I wanted to build systems.
3. How much pay you are looking for.
I find this one to be the biggest factor.
There is a rule I read some where, that for a recent grad, or any person who is currently unemployed, it takes at least one month of searching for every $10,000 you wish to make.
For me it was also what type of environment I was willing to work in. I refused to apply to a certain company because I didn't want to wear a suit nor did I feel it was within the company's rights to do drug tests on employees. Not that it would have been a problem, I just don't like those kinds of invasions of privacy.
On the other hand the job I did end up in is the "data tech" for a small cable TV company I do everything from installing cable modems to network admin duties, to abuse@, to fibre optic based network design. I don't make as much as I might have in some other jobs, but the benefits I get are great and I can truely say I love my job. (just not getting up in the morning to get to it)
Web designers are all over the place. Why did you need to hire someone from Belarus? What kind of special skills did you need, that he managed to acquire in that former Soviet state? Or what out of the way town did you locate in just so you could go hiring people from outside the country?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
You want efficient and Java at the same time? No wonder you aren't getting any resumes.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If a software developer DOES know how to delete a node from a doubly linked list AND learned that from on the job experience, then I do NOT want to hire them because they will waste to much tim re-inventing things that have already been done and nicely packaged up in many languages already.
Such details are generally NOT of concern for programmers in higher level languages like Perl or Java or even C++. Standard resources and classes provide that for you. If I were hiring to code in those languages, those details would be unimportant.
OTOH, it might still be good to ask that question anyway and see if they answer in a way I just did in the above 2 paragraphs. If they did, I'd probably hire them.
Were you hiring for a C or assembly programming position?
Head hunters and recruiters (99.9% of them) could never have asked the doubly-linked-list question. So that's how their resume slipped through.
Now can you tell me how to search for the node in a binary tree which is has the next higher key than the given key when the given key is not actually present in the tree?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Show where your job opening is being advertised.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Businesses need to pay these programmers and order of magnitude more than the average. If they are that crucial to the corporate success then give them an offer they cannot refuse: $250,000/yr plus $250,000 worth of stock options a year. THAT programmer will f------ a-- STAY there!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Your problem is that you are a competent manager. Now if you were an INcompetent manager like most of them in business, then you, too, will get to see the same shortage that all the others see. So because you are competent and know what you are doing, you are missing out on all the opportunities to whine like your INcompetent counterparts in corporate American.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'd like to see a web site that lists all these supposed sysadmin jobs.
Seriously, I find it hard to believe all this that recruiters are saying. I want so see some kind of evidence that these jobs really exist as opposed to recruiters merely collecting resumes.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
How many employers in Philly are paying programmers at least $200K?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Secondarily, software engineering is unique in that it can be applied to so many different areas, where an chemical engineer, for example, will never work as a mechanical engineer, and even more -- a chemical engineer specializing in petrochemical refinement will probably never work in pharmaceuticals. But as an IT engineer, I might work with one or all of these other engineers in the course of my career, and gain enough experience to be useful to all of them.
So the competition isn't for bodies, it's for bodies with a wide enough range of skills to be applied to numerous projects.
Finally, The real difficulty is that with {programmer burnout, poor management, and the project completions} etc., the required skill sets change drastically over what might be a person's whole IT career. This makes it difficult hard for companies to retain people with a wide enough skill set to be useful on multiple projects, because once those skills are developed, the person is usually worth alot more than they are being paid in their present position.
All of which says to me, there's no shortage in the labor pool -- there's a shortage in the "stable expert" labor pool.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Back in the '70s gas shortage my pappy said, "You watch, when gas hits $1.00 a gallon, there'll be plenty of gasoline." So, last week I got a call from a headhunter. We got on famously and discussed a gig for which I was quite thoroughly qualified. After she looked at my resume she said the company was looking for someone with 2 years experience, not 20. And they were willing to pay about half what I'm making. I laughed and told her to instruct them to camp out on Calvin College's doorstep. Maybe they'll find an entry level kid who'll work for that. "Shortage" articles are written to make sure a ready supply of exploitable younger workers enter the profession. There will always be a "shortage" of any sort of people willing to work at below market rates.
Has something happened in the past month or so? I most recently looked for a job in December.. after about a month, I found a job I was thrilled to do, and jumped at it.
All quiet for a month and a half.. then suddenly I'm getting 3-4 voice mails a -day- from recruiters. It's still continuing.. what's going on? My resume is hardly that stacked either.. It's not like I'm an MCSE or have -any- certifications.. couple years doing support, 1 year webmaster/sysadmin.. so there's plenty of people out there more desireable/more marketable than me, yet the recruiters are beating down my door. So if you're having trouble finding work, come to DC. Just don't drive. Our roads are filled enough as is.
I'm not going to leave where I am, even for more $. There's something to be said for a job where you actually don't mind going to work in the morning, and even sometimes enjoy it, and the people. Learning quite a few sysadmin skills at a small company that I likely wouldn't get the chance to learn somewhere larger.. things like this are worth more than $ in some cases. To me at least, YMMV.
Oh, and if you do come to DC, please stay to the right on the metro escalators if you aren't walking. Thanks.
BilldaCat
I'm young, and I've had a job doing assorted computer/tech work since before I was 18. I can remember a time, before I started doing this for a living, that I thoroughly enjoyed programming. I loved being able to pour my creativity into a small, yet satisfying hack in its own right. It was the first thing I did in the morning and the last thing at night (usually a couple of hours before the morning ;).
Then, I was an Operations guy in a data center for a school district with an old Burroughs system; it wasn't long before I started spending less time with my home systems. After a while I was promoted to a programmer, without a pay or title increase, and got to spend my nights writing Y2K fixes in Cobol, and looking for ways to make the old Unisys mainframe stop thinking it had a card reader attached to it (all the data for the "jobs" being run was hardcoded in the programs themselves, as a sort of legacy from a time when the card reader was replaced with a disk pack and nobody bothered to rethink the way the system should work).
Nowadays, I've got a new job as a Remedy developer, trying to build forms and systems using a tool that isn't suited to programmers. (If you've never done Remedy, don't do it. It can pay damn good, but as far as I care, it's simply not worth it. If it's in the job description, find a different job.)
I can't hardly stand to look at a computer anymore. I hate the damned things. I hate having to deal with a cranky NT workstation fitted to an old P200MMX system on a slow network with a slow server. I hate having to fight my development system every damned step of the way to get it to do what it should be able to do. What used to be art, for me, has become an exhausting chore. I've effectively had my hacking bits torn from my body. I'm tired of working for bosses that don't get it, companies that talk about "Business Process Mastering and Improvement" but yet never change the way they operate, I'm tired of the doublespeak, and if, one more time, I'm given three days to build what should take a week, I'm going to go postal.
Unless you can get into that sort of Employment Eldorado, a place with some think tank that pays you to be an artful hacker, it's simply not worth it anymore.
I'm ready to go get a job with the national park service, meanwhile...
IT shortage? Who cares? For me, that's kinda like somebody reporting that there's a shortage of acid rain in the world.
Well, it's not just HR. For the most part (obviously, there are exceptions; I'm making a generalization based on my experience so far), companies aren't designed to work with your Real Programmer. A Real Programmer tends to be a loner, someone who should be handed the project that nobody else can figure and left alone to get it done, and not dragged off to team-building exercises.
The Real Programmer will clash with management, because the Programmer simply can't be managed, and the managers (for the most part), don't realize it.
The Real Programmer will also want to run around the company and fix everything that they see to be broken; companies don't like that. They like to get their business running in a particular fashion, and then just keep throwing resources at it, even after that particular business method has become a crawling dinosaur.
Companies want code grinders and code monkeys, and the occasional pseudo-geek to act as the team's glue. They don't want the Real Programmers, because the Real Programmers won't fit in, and if the Real Programmers are smart, they'll avoid the companies.
You'd like Steve McConnell's book on this, "after the gold rush". Get it from a library since it's a read once thing.
:)
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
That being said. . . I currently am teaching a class of 15 students, all government employees, all being retrained into NT Network Engineers (the host agency runs a mixed Solaris-NT environment. . .) I'm teaching them what it takes to pass several of the MCSE exams. But I'm also reminding them that not every problem requires a Microsoft solution, and more often than not the complicated method they've practiced to do it the M$ way is not the way it's currently done, and in reality, you follow ($foo) instead.
Even so, only about 10 of the 15 have what it takes to be decent network engineers of any sort, much less the much-ranted-about MCSEs. . . Heck, I've used my MCP status in the past to say to customers: yes, you COULD do it with a Microsoft solution, but you could do it another way, instead, with lower cost and better stability. And was believed, because I ***WAS*** Microsoft Certified. . . .
Bottom line: MCSE on a resume means you passed a battery of tests. So does the B.A. on my wall. When evaluating a resume, the thing to look for is whether the candidate has a decent quantity of cluons, or if they're spouting large amounts of bogons. Interview the former, roundfile the latter....
I believe that it simply requires:<BR>
1. A letter of employment provided by the employer<BR>
2. the employee to return to Canada and recross the border (with the letter) once per year.<P>
Can anyone provide additional information?
I by no means am disregarding CS/MIS Majors, however I do know for a fact that a significant number of CS/MIS Programs don't teach the latest technology, and have a difficult time keeping up with all the changes.
Yes, I agree, partly... I'm a CS student (two years left) and the stuff we are taught is supposed to be a basis, so we can learn any technology easily. It's no point really in teaching the latest technologies since by the time we're out and working it's most likely old technologies. I try to be updated with as much technologies as possible, but I know lots of people at the university that don't care and only knows what we're taught.
No, Senior UNIX Administrators are paid a lot of money. Use an online headhunter site to do a comparison. MJP
Don't try that "protecting the children" shit you people use to keep the tits and bad words off my TV. --Seanbaby
That's funny, I know lots of people who make more than 60k.....
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
If there is an IT job shortage, why am I still getting paid shit?
Speak truth to power.
After nine months at my first position I was laid off (for lack of work). I found another job within a month. My most recent job change took a lot longer, but I wasn't desperate--I was looking for a Linux-related job in a very small radius all the way across the country. It took me less than 6 months to find it.
However, I've also been on the other side. I've interviewed a lot of "candidates" (I use the term loosely) who knew diddly-squat about programming. I had one guy answer the question "What interests you about computer programming?" with "I just follow the money." That interview ended quickly.
But even worse were the people who had taken "All About Visual Basic" at DeVry and thought that qualified them for more than a data-entry position. I handed them a programming test that asked them to implement a "large number multiplication function" in VB. I specifically said that the numbers could be of "arbitrarily large size". I still got bozos trying to use the VB "Long" (or even "Variant") type. *heavy sigh*
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
"I make up answers to questions I don't know, because they expect me to have the answers"
No offence man, but that is *totally* uncool.
Not to mention that it's a gigantic red flag to anyone who does have a clue that you are beyond useless.
I know I would much rather hire a guy how *knows* the limitations of his knowledge and is willing to admit it. I certainly would be much more interesting in talking to, and hanging around with him!
Pay serious attention to the behaviour of the wannabees and to the behavior of the true gods like Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Larry Wall, or whoever you admire. The true guru's are not afraid to say "I don't know".
There's nothing wrong with not knowing some things. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, this is a HUGE field. NO ONE can know all of it 100%. Just like there are no doctors who specialize in everything.
I guess what I'm trying to say it, don't be shy about admitting what you do know, and what you don't know. You'll be more useful to everyone, and people will respect you a LOT more!
If you went to the job fair at the dane county coliseum you would have been able to talk to many potential employers for when you graduate. Also, from what I heard, there weren't many jobs for MCSE's. Most wanted UNIX type Admins... many looking for UW grads. So don't worry. If you're going to stay around here you shouldn't have any problems finding a decent job.
There really is a shortage of progrmmers, with the particular tool set of experience that HR likes to flog as being the only kind of people to hire. If your resume does not match exactly the particular tool set that they are looking for, then you are out the door.
There are currently two kinds of programmers:
One is a "Tool Set programmer" (notice the lower case). This person only knows how to program in one tool set and has no clue as to what the machine itself is doing underneath. A lot of recent graduates fall into that category. They reimplement the C Standard Library in C++ since they never bothered to learn C when learning the Tool Set. Probably limited to MSVC as well. These are greatly loved by HR.
The other kind of the programmer is the Real Programmer (notice the case). Talks to the machine in whatever language is needed (about a week or so to learn a new language, maybe a week more for OOP based language), knows what's going on inside the machine and has solved some really nasty problems in their time. It takes time to raise a Real Programmer, they are an eccentric and highly volatile quantity and just don't fit the mold that HR departments tries to put on everyone. They are worth their weight in gold, but first they have to get past HR.
What we have is a shortage of Real Programmers. The Tool Set programmer just does not have the background to solve the problems thrown at him.
...Alpha
You are right dead on with the want ads. I'm currently looking for a job and have probably ruled myself out of applying to many because of requirements that after I really look at them are totally insane. One of these days I'm just gonna start calling these people up and call them on it.
Tech Support and Help desk are not likely to improve unless employers recognize the importance of those positions. I have seen several listings around St. Louis by companies looking for help desk and/or tech support help, and wanting to pay $6-$8 per hour. Hmm...starting salary at friggin *Taco Bell* is $6+, more if you're not a dumbass. I know St. Louis is not the valley , but it is a major metro area, and with the current economy, you're lucky to find a warm body with 42 chromosomes for $6 an hour. *That's* why staffing involves pulse and being able to say 'computer'. Anyone with even half a brain will find an MCSE program or something similar & come out far ahead. Which takes us back to underqualified uppper positions - hmm, I'm starting to ramble.
I agree wholeheartedly with your perspective. I also would be placed in the naive category as someone who thought originally that people do what they enjoy and aren't chancing after $s. I have been interested in computers since I laid my hands on an Apple IIc in elementary school in the mid-80's.
Anyway, a classmate of mine and myself have looked at two trends in utter disgust: 1) our classmates are in it for the money, 2) finding a good company with solid ethics is getting harder. We simply want to work for a living, make decent money, doing a decent days work (maybe a bit more than that). Right now the only alternative seems to be start a business ourselves, build it on the foundations that others have mentioned previously and hope that the 10% of the graduating population like us will seek us out and join in our efforts.
It is a shame as a college Junior having to say to myself "don't become bitter [about the way things are in the job market]."
Anything else I would add would be redundant.
Kudos to Slashdot for making this discussion possible and to all those who have added to it.
well, I can't seem to get to Dobbs right now. However, there seems to be an eternal ambiguity about exactly what an "IT worker" is. Some sort of distinction should be made between programmers and architects that need a 4 year (or more) degree, admins (that need a 2 year degree), and operators (that can get by with a few months of training).
No, this is not EDS. True, there is dress code - you have to wear clothes, when there are customers around :-). Everyone has their own office (a real office with a real door), half the conference rooms and the commons have fire places... The technology is new and interesting - large client-server systems, web-based applications, right now I am using the Xerces XML processor from Apache to implement prototype data interchange connection...
No pay-back of training costs either - you only need to give a week's notice, or two weeks if you work directly with a customer.
And still, there is shortage of competent people...
Employees on H1B visas have harder time changing jobs, but not much harder than others. How much harder is to wait for 2 months to change jobs, compared to a person, who has for example a house, and needs to sell it.
Also, there is never a requirement for payback. If anyone has agreed to such a requirement, then they deserve the "indentured servitude" position. Even then, if they are competent, they will probably find a different employer who will sponsor them for the H1B transfer, and will cover the payback.
The real problem is not the H1B visas - it's the slow employment based immigration process. Once that process has started, then the foreign national practically cannot leave the company, which is sponsoring him, and they cannot receive significant raises, or be promotted, if that would change the nature of the job.
2. Maybe it does not apply everywhere, but somewhere not only the payment is less for foreign
workers. The employer also has to pay some social security, etc. for local workforce, and with a well-written contract it can be legally evaded for foreigners.
This is illegal for H1Bs or permanent residents.
As to the argument that the foreign worker is paid more - maybe that is true in some cases but the general case does not bear that out ... take a look at the hardcopy ComputerWorld and look at the careers section - look away from the flashy ads touting all of the big pimps and look at the hordes of little print lines asking for Masters degree, experience, all for 25K a year! Those are there to meet the requirement that the "job cannot be filled by an American".
These ads cannot meet the requirement for issuing an H1B or an employment based green card. The "prevailing wage" is determined by the states, where the job is in, and the recruitment process is checked both at the state and the federal level (it takes currently 6 months to 3 years to complete such a check for employment based green card). If you believe that these ads are used for meeting the Labor Department requirement for employment based visas, you should write to your representative or senator and request an investigation. You will be surprised how well they respond sometimes, especially in an election year!
Since when is misinformation considered "insightful"? Did you even read the responses to this BS?
Finding a job where I am is easy, there are many open. I get calls every few weeks from headhunters or recruiters. I am happy where I am at and don't want to jump ship so I usually blow them off.
I think area is the big factor, some places have more opportunity then others. I doubt that there are alot of jobs for what I do (systems administration) in some little town in the middle of Nebraksa with a pop of 1000. But in an area like S. California there are many jobs.
Man, I am posting alot today. Must be making up for not posting much or something heh.
this space for rent
Simple answer - because of who I will be living with there.
Ken
But - in the time I have been a contractor, there has less than 3 weeks where I have not been in a contract. I am three months into a 12 month contract - back at a place where I was several years ago. The secret - do a bloody good job, have the skills that people want and know how to write good English (as well as C / Perl / whatever).
But - the things I have noticed here is the "snobbery" between various industry sectors. Banking has always viewed itself as the elite sector - and you cannot get an IT job in banking unless you are already in banking. This has been so for as long as I have been working. But this is now extending to other areas - particularly Telcos / Internet companies. I came very close to getting a role as an applications development manager for one of the biggies in the Internet industry (clue: they are owned by MCI). But - because I had not had Telco experience, they decided no to get with me.
Meanwhile in my current position, I am developing new e-commerce strategies, managing the overhaul of the complete applications development strategy, ya da ya da. UUNet's loss, not mine.
There is a shortage of good, experienced IT people - who can relate to an organisation's business needs.
Ken
<BLATANT JOB AD>
As a postscript - I am wanting to move to the US - Dallas in particular. Anyone who has a job going for a highly experienced apps dev manager, IT strategist, consultant . . email me at
rayk@transport.nsw.gov.au or
landkray@zeta.org.au
</BLATANT JOB AD>
I finished my schooling 3 months ago. It's been 3 months of solid job searching for me. Guess what - I'm still unemployed. I have experience, both from volunteer work and employment, in the areas I'm looking for work in. I have all the classes for my 3 year degree in Computing Science and I graduate in May. I had good marks, but not exceptional. I'd prefer work in my area of the world (Edmonton, Canada), but I'm not picky and have been applying all over. But I'm getting rejected by people like McDonalds & Wendy's.
I put out about 5-10 resumes a day. My resume's been on Dice for 2 months. (it got me one of my 2 interviews) I don't have the years of experience that everybody wants, so I'm unqualified for IT jobs. I'm finished my degree and I've worked as a technician and a webmaster, so I'm unqualified for other jobs.
-Dexx
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
Ooops, that 4th paragraph should say ...
Of course, if a company has the size and the cluefulness, they try to grow and train the team in such a way as to avoid "suddenly needing an expert" and being over a barrel since this will often cost $100+ per hour.
- bridgette
Even though I haven't read the article because the server is slashdotted...
I'll agree that there is a shortage of *qualified & cheap* IT people. What can you expect after these mega corporations go through "corporate downsizing"? The ironic part is that several companies that laid people off have recently rehired them -- at twice to 4x what they were being originally paid.
-Michael [Remove two parts of address to mail me]
Shortage of people trying to be in IT fields? No.
Shortage of *talented* people in IT? Yes.
Not long ago I was a Teaching Assistant for a computer science class for computer science majors only. The class was full of people, but most of them were very much not adept nor interested in the material, but instead in the big bucks they keep hearing about. Sometime you'll try to tell people in the most informative way about the issues involved in a certain problem and point them in the right direction, but they will only give you blank looks and want to know exactly how to solve the particular problem at hand without thinking about it. There are talented ones, and there are the ones willing to try to think for themselves, but far too many just want the answers handed to them on a silver platter. Everytime I delt with studens like that I felt bad that computer science was just the pot of gold for so many people...
On another note, people keep talking about people not paying the right amount of money for IT people, but I want to know what *is* a good 'going rate' for starting salries.. I had a couple of offers and am now working with one company for an ok sum, but don't know how to compare it with the average. Anyone know statistics for various areas or know where I can find these statistics?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I was righting this long thing.. and then figured, screw it. If you want to know about IIT, email me. I'm a freshman here, and so far I'm quite happy with my choice. I know how other colleges go at it (from friends/visits), etc. The only bad part I've found is in general for all CS, to many people go into it for $ (and rarely used a computer). The classes are damn good, but in ITP (intro to prof.) they asked for a lecture on how OS's work.. and I almost cried from disgust at how little people knew. They get weeded out first year, as they can't handle the simplist classes. And its far worse in other places, some like UCSC make you do psuedo code first semester, and basics of C second. In others I've seen/heard about, they're bent on getting you a good job, not the education. IIT's damn good.. so if you want to heard the whole rant...
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
>I'd also like to see some non-programmer oriented IT degrees. The skills that lead to good Programmer/Analystsare not the same as the skills that lead to great sysadmins. Why can't we train them differently?
RPI, for example, has introduced a new 'IT' major. While I have my doubts about the current form of this program, the idea is sound, and could help with people who want to learn programming (style, etc), but are focused on something other than being a programmer...
I'm starting to feel old, and I'm not even 25 yet...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Like I said, I have some reservations about the way the program is currently constructed, but I think that it could be a good thing in the future...
a ndnowitwontrebootandIdontknowwhatthatlit tleyellownumbermeansAHHH!) and how to deal with users and their everyday problems. If you are interested in gaining even more experience on campus, the student union has student sysadmins (used to do that, along with a few other things).
I did a CompSys Engineering degree, and came close to the dual-major with CS (which wasn't an option until later in my junior year, otherwise I probably would have that, too...
Understand how computers work and how computers work together. And take NetProg with Dave Hollinger. One of the best instructors I've had on the CS side of things. Real IT skills can only be learned through experience (like, ohmygodtheAIX/Novell/NT/whateverserverjustcrashed
I'd reccomend the dual CS/CSYS, but if you aren't into the lower level hardware end of things, it might not be for you (though the requirements seem to change every year).
--
tower@alum.rpi.edu
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
It seems that it's easy to hire people with flavor-of-the-day skills and certifications -- and there are more than enough recruiters acting as certification factories these days -- but it seems almost impossible to find talented, experienced software professionals.
Most of the guys who are interviewed for jobs at the companies where I work (I'm a self-employeed consultant) fall into the "I just got my X certification," where X is some M$ cert. Their recruiters sell them as able, experienced pros: "This guy is sharp; he's even certified."
The sad thing is that most people hiring in the I/T sector don't know how to tell the wheat from the chaff. I'd say that about one-forth to one-third of the "able, experienced" pros that get hired are let go within two weeks because they can't cut it. A good portion of the remainder limps along, little better than deadwood. Sad, indeed.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
I'm self taught in linux (I hardly touched a computer until the summer of 1998) I took an administration course just to hone things up and put it on my resume, became A+ certified (which means jack) just to put it on my resume. I apply for 3 to 10 jobs a day and I have had only had one interview. Why? Because I was a truck driver for four years and have no IT work experience, ability I have though. I thought the 'new ' economy was supposed to lust after self taught ambitious people. I'll do your carpel-tunnel job for the same pay as my hernia-job. epseps@hotmail.com
See, the dumb fuck suits have no problem paying jizzloads of money for some self-styled consultant or retarded fucking MBAs with dollar signs in their eyes who can barely use their e-mail, but the attitude at a lot of big companies is that computer folks are trade school assholes who can be treated like children, so they won't pay real money. Usually, they get what they pay for. Unless you want to work for the financial sector, where you watch dumbfuck MBAs who have the following skills 1) know spreadsheets 2) can be colossal assholes make 10 jizzloads of cash. I recommend getting some real knowledge and experience, then become one of those self-styled consultants.
Well, enough ranting, I don't believe in classifications, qualifications, or experience that much. If you're depending on the knowledge someone already has, then you're dead meat and don't even know it yet. Some people are smart, and some ain't.
The one part where discussions about qualifications or academic background or experience make sense is hard-core programming. If you don't know why a quicksort is quick, you're going to have a hard time no matter what your so-called qualifications are. And the art of really good programming is about as far from a trade school experience or even a BS can get. It takes long-term dedication to get real depth.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
There are sooo many people in colleges nowaday that are in IT type career paths merely because they heard it makes money. IT requires a good deal of maintanance. These people party and don't spend any time on their studies.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
IEEE-USA just went waaaay down in my estimation. And I used to be an electrical engineer too...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Any normal employee, that possesses the correct skills, knowledge and enthusiasm to do their job well, would see significant benefits to encourage them to get promoted.
For most employees, management leads to more interesting work and a much better salary.
But a skilled IT person will receive a good package without ever going beyond a team leaders roll.
Also, technically, their job will be most interesting at this level.
With IT having such a high profile in most boardrooms, IT managers receive an unusual amount of attention.
So anyone in IT, middle management, will find himself or herself in meetings all day, not perusing the things they were once enthused about.
While they learn man management skills they will loose touch with the detail of rapidly changing technology that allows them to tell a perfectly good idea like Java from a working solution to a real world problem.
For the skilled IT person, management doesn't look particularly attractive.
The unskilled IT person?
They probably have an interest in playing with technology but not with the nuts and bolts of how it works (And therefore what works!!!).
These managers are typified by their strategies based on the latest industry hype and selecting staff without a question more complex than how do you declare a variable!
As more unskilled people enter IT departments, so more move into management without competition, compounding the problem.
There is no shortage of people, who call themselves IT professionals, because they can find employment.
But how many of them have the skill level that you would expect from say, a junior medical doctor, who may earn less than IT professionals.
There is no shortage of IT professionals.
Just a shortage of people that understand computers!
Hmm thats funny I knew how to do both of those.(Along with everyone else reading this) I am just a physicst who does some programming as an "aside". Maybe we should let the CS grads do physics and the phycist's try CS for a few years :)
Nonsense - there is no minimum or maximum for H1, the law states "at minimum market rate for the job".
Companies hire H1's because there aren't enough talented Americans to do the jobs. Companies sponsor green cards so they can keep those talented foreigners.
Find me an infinite supply of competent US citizens, I'll hire them. Seriously.
This is simply untrue bullshit. One of the legal requirements of an H1 is that you pay foreign workers at least as much as the rate for US residents; did AC ever hire an H1 worker and have to file an LCA? Does AC even know what an LCA is? Thought not.
H1's can be transferred for around $1500 in legal fees, chicken feed compared to today's hiring costs. If you are in the north east, it takes around 2.5 weeks end to end (Vermont centre). Here in Texas, 2.5 to 4 months, but worth it for someone good. No, if you're on an H1 you can't walk out on a Thursday at 2pm coz the boss pissed you off, but you sure as hell can find another job and get it transferred.
Do you really think companies would jump through the millions of hoops set out by the well-meaning, benighted INS if there were tons of competent developers flipping burgers? Is Orrin Hatch smoking crack? Why did my local congressman's policy exec spend an hour on the phone with me asking how the H1 process should be improved and what impact it was having on the local high tech economy?
We are hiring competent people of every race, creed nationality and whatever, H1's, TN-1's or not. Anyone who thinks this is easy can damn well get their butt down here and do some recruiting for me.
(And, if you want a job with a tier one venture funded startup in Austin TX, good salary, stock options, etc. etc. and can write efficient and scalable server-side Java, email me for my work address ASAP)
Well,
I've had about 5 people come to me (and I'm no one special) and asked me if I knew anyone to fill a tech possition (for sysadmin or programmer in most cases). All 5 times I've sent them a few of my old unexperianced students (back from when I used to teach networking classes 6 months ago) and all of them have wound up highering one of my students.
so, yes... here in ISRAEL (.il or the lame in mind), there is a big shortage.
Quick question: Why is the IT world, whatever IT means, any different than any other profession? Is it just me, or is there a shortage of qualified and hard-working anything? Qualified and smart lawyers, preachers, teachers, insert any profession here.
I see alot of people making a big deal about the shortage of competent "IT professionals." How about, a shortage of "professionals" in any field?
Georgia TECH's co-op program is better known.
You say "Georgia" and people thing UGA.
Ga Tech's CS program is relatively well respected.
Its ratings have been consistantly going up in the school ratings for a few years now. (and people say that those ratings are typically 4 or so years behind the actual changes).
I will be graduating from Tech with a CS degree in May, and I think I have a degree which is worth something. (I go to interiews and when I mention "Ga Tech" people say: Oh thats a good school)
I don't know about IllinoisTech, so you'll have to look into that.
If you are planning on going into grad-school, Ga Tech is a nice place to be (right now).
Luck!
Someone Moderate this up as funny and insightful. This is one of the best posts I have seem in a long time. 1 == true == I agree. 0 == false == I disagree. Only geeks can convey so much information so well.
Benman
I like my job too, even though I could probably be paid more at some other place. I keep thinking about the "total package." I have tons of freedom and I can work on interesting problems. I also go home at night and I have time to do things with my wife. To me that is worth more than (say $15k or $20k increase in salary.)
There was a chapter in a very poor VB book that I read once that I almost fell on the floor laughing at. I don't remember it verbatim, but the chapter was on recursion and it went something like this:
- -
Recursion is when a programmer writes a function that calls itself. This is usually an error on the programmers part and should be avoided at all costs. Recursion is bad
The "Recursion is bad" IS a verbatim quote from the book.
------------------------------------------
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
After 20 years, I found out something. If you don't love programming, it will destroy you. I wish I had a dollar for every knucklehead who told me "I hate to code but I like the money". They always ended up as a manager or a headhunter or unemployed. And people who can't code make the worst IT managers because they have nothing to cushion their fall and they don't understand the projects assigned to them.
Yes there is a shortage of programmers because it's a genetic skill. Programmers are born, not trained. You have to have a programming mindset to be a good programmer. And if you don't have it, you will hate doing it and no amount of money will satisfy you.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
I changed jobs six months ago. I was looking very seriously for 6-7 months, and somewhat seriously for about six months before that. In the end, I found that I could get a job that paid about what I'm making, give or take, on about a week's notice. I could get a great job that I liked within a month if I was willing to give up half my salary. But to get a great job that I liked at the salary I wanted -- that was tough.
One recruiter gave me a rule of thumb: expect to spend one month looking for every $10K you want in salary. Worked out about right in my case. What you want has a lot to do with how easy it is to find it. If all that matters is the salary, and you really are worth what you're asking for, you can get placed pretty quickly in the Washington, DC, area. If you're going to be picky, it may take quite a while to find the perfect fit you're looking for.
Turn it around -- I also have had to recruit. If you ask for a network engineer, you're going to get flooded with CNE and MCSE types (both certified and those still working on exams, or thinking about it), but you're not going to have a great selection of anyone with the right experience and salary range. I had lots of pressure to hire tremendously overqualified people at exceedingly low salaries. If you want entry level, they're out there. If you want certified (or certifiable), they're out there, too. My previous company would hire a temp at $100+ per hour to do work that we could have hired an entry level tech to do for $25K. At the same time, when recruiting, they'd insist that that entry level tech have a CNE and A+ certification, and disqualify anyone who wanted more than $30K.
On the recruiting side, there was a tremendous gap between what the company wanted, and what they were willing to pay for. They concluded that there was a shortage. I concluded that they were daft.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
Hey /.
:P
I'm 18. I go to high school, I even was placed in college two years early by my loving administraition (OK, I think they put me in college to get me to shut up ), and do you know where I work?
I work at a grocery store.
The reason being isn't that I haven't tried. I have spammed my resume to every box I know of (have to stay local for college and high school) and they never answer. Everyone is head hunting because they figure that the people already employed are worth something. But I hate to say it, I have seen some MCSE and A+ people walk out of college doors with a smile on their face and I think to myself, "This is why I got into Linux".
It's not that Microsoft sucks, it fills a niche for people who just want it to work without the hassle of setup or finding apps. On the other hand, I became spiteful of MS after I realized what a load of crap their software was after a job at an ISP. I wasn't the admin, but I was answering tech support phones in a temporary position. What ended up happening is my term of employment expired and their central admin was hired for another company for probably twice his salery and a lot of extra goodies, and I ended up back at a register.
I think (keep in mind that the following opinion is presented by someone who has only had intro and first classes in VB, C++, and HTML) that the main problem in the buisness is that everyone is looking for certification. When I went for that tech support job, the admin quizzed me on the phone about various situations. He could care less if I failed evey grade between here and preschool, so long as I could do the work he would take me in. He eventually got me started on doing the administraition for the Linux boxen at the ISP, and I took off from there.
I'm self educated in Linux, and can't find a job because I am certified in NOTHING. Another thing to consider is that self educated people (so long as they haven't picked up a bla-blah-for-dummies book) is that they usually know what they don't know. I can tell you right now, I can't do frame relay, I haven't configured sendmail, samba, or vhosting, and I should learn perl. I plan on doing these things in time, but how can I expect the situation to change when everyone is busy eating each other's employees or looking for crap certification?
I can't even get my HOWTO page on PPPoE in Linux posted (if anyone is baffled by the ADSL-HOWTO they have up, make sure you tell them so, I'd love to have mine alongside the existing one). Heck, Linux is taking off, and I might just have to go back to answering phones at a Linux company if that's what it takes, but I'll always feel like I shorted myself if I did that.
If anyone is near philly and wants a young employable person, I'm reachable at Tiberian@Jacked-In.Org. Come and get me. And hey, if I never hear a peep out of anyone, I'll know I was right in what I posted.
--Joshua
"If it is broken, fix it. If it is fixed, improve upon it. This becomes one helluva cycle."
CGI? You got to be kidding. You should take a look at J2EE, then maybe you can attract and retain some talented programmers.
Well, my current job is as the everything person at a very small company. I've been attempting to learn how to do stuff, with nobody else with any real skills working with me, and based on skill I picked up working on my Physics degree and in some subsequent computer related jobs.
When I posted my information to a few job sites I got plenty of responses, mostly from tech recruiters. I got a few interviews, but no jobs that I wanted to take, was qualified to take, and was willing to take me. I did have some strict criteria, and I do feel that if I was fired tommorrow I would have a decent job within a month or so.
On the other side of coin, we have tried to hire people to help out here, but I'm not sure that we are ever going to be able to find someone with the right skills, in the right price range, willing to become part of such a small company.
There seem to be a lot of resumes and job offers flinging all around these days, but few of them latching on to one another. Employers want everything but the kitchen sink, but this is just to make up for the fact that they may jump ship by the time they've been trained.
All the same, an exciting time to be in this business.
You could load Slashdot on a 286? Impressive...
--
"A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye." -- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
I would have to agree with this. As a contractor in the UK (shortly due to get a royal screwing from the Government over here), I've seen a lot of people in the industry take the P*** big time when it comes to timesheets and work.
I try to be as honest as I can and it is a point of honor that I have never taken a day off sick without being incapable of working and things of a similar nature. I hope that my employers recognise this and respect it, but I fear that there are too many people out there that take advantage of it.
It reminds me of a joke about the world's oldest man....
Teamwork is essential. It gives the enemy someone else to shoot at
I've just noticed that hitting Esc while typing in a comment will erase said comment. Grrrr!!! It's a vi trap! Pull back! ;) I've forgotten what I wanted to say. I'll try again later.
Ahh, something I actually know about. I am in the middle of my second year at GA Tech, as a Computer Engineering major. I will say, Tech, like any school, will get you the education you take from it, but it does so in a much more intense and self conscious way than most. I will say, that we have a great CS program (most of my friends are in Comp-E or CS), but if you take the route of the frat boys or SGA management types, you can slide by, off of other peoples work. I have found that one of the biggest advantages to going to such a large hardcore engineering school is that it is very easy for me to surround myself with Geeks. Certainly not everyone here is a Geek, but they are pretty pervasive here. In my opinion, if you are up to the challenge, it is an excellent school, one of the best.
On the other hand, don't go into it with any illusions of a wonderful program full of happy helpful professors. One of the reasons our school has so much industry respect is that is really prepares you for dealing with the industry. Our profs aren't very good, but the expectation is very high- that is what makes the program good- they say- you do X by date Y, now go do it. There is very little hand holding, and it is up to you to utilize your available resources and get it done, and if you can't, then don't expect much pity. That is very much how the industry works- expectation is put forth, and you just have to figure out how to meet it. Don't forget, our mascot may be the yellow jacket, but our campus symbol/central location of campus is a painfully fallic 83 foot tall, twisting, spiraling, tri-pointed shaft, known as The Shaft. It is there for a reason.
If you have any questions about the school though, or getting plugged in, my icq # is 25834656.
At Tech we have all the technological resources available, and a lot of industry respect, but utilizing it is up to you. Also we do have one of the best co-op programs in the world- so far I have finished 3 periods of school, and I am working now on my third period co-oping (I work for the IT dept of a major telecomm company in Raleigh)
I don't respect your opinions, but I respect your right to hold them
It is sad, but there a lot of people in the CS department at my university who are in it for the money. But not me. I am here because I find the subject matter pretty intuitive and fun.(read: not really hard work)
So usually I sit in class and watch the hands go up when the professor asks how many people have enrolled in this class, and pretty much I feel sorry for those people because if they ever graduate, they will never have a job they enjoy!
Of course, the only job I ever had in the industry was a 6-month coop positions with a large, well known technology company, and they basically just subsidized me reading Slashdot for 8 hours a day.
Oh that's a bunch of bleeding heart bull pucky! There's no shortage of *jobs*, money, *or* employers willing to pay. The last time I decided to change jobs, I put a message out on my Linux Users Groups saying I was looking. By 3:30 the next afternoon, I had a better job with a 50% raise. In fact, every job I've had in the past 5 years has increased my salary by 50%. I have no degree, yet I get calls/spam from head hunters weekly offering me stellar salaries. Nobody is trying to enslave anyone. *sheesh*
The jobs are out there. The money is out there. All you need is a pulse and the willingness to move to Silicon Valley.
I'd have to comment that the presence or lack of a degree in C.S. seems rather irrelevent. Many of the most brilliant and talented geeks I know are completely self taught and if they do have a degree, it may be in an unrelated subject. Furthermore, many of the just-out-of-school graduates I've hired have no clue where to start.
The university system is not poised to effectively teach Computer Science. Respected schools like Cal Poly still teach Ada as a core language. The IT world changes much too fast for the university sytem to keep its curriculum current. Recent grads leave with a degree; training in obsolete areas; and a whole lot of theory with little practical relevence. Consequently, when new grads walk into the office, programmers with any real experience look at these kids like they're from Mars!
Trying to find a part-time job took me over three months, and within that three months, I only had gotten two responses (including my current job). I did have many offers to work full-time, but with me being a full-time student, I would have such a tough time doing that.
-motardo
I'm working at a small company, and, basically, I'm all of them, including the VHDL design bit (plus a bit of Verilog as well). Since I haven't got the time to actually code the front-end to the database I'm leaving that to our first-tier support guy.
We hired him because he had affinity with computers. He just left college with a degree in electronics and I'm showing him all corners of the IT spectrum, from Linux and HP/UX adminning through VHDL design, PCB design, M$-Access, SQL, perl, C++ and whatnot, just to test his smarts.
He doesn't pretend to be an IT professional, or boast about experience, but he picks up things quickly, and says 'Oops' when he makes a mistake (like rebooting the file server).
It's people like this you want, not the ones who wave an MCSE (yuck!) diploma at your face and don't take responsibilities for their actions. They're honest, driven, and far more prone to cross over to other specializations than other people. However, people with that much drive and so little ego are indeed hard to find.
I am one of the people who has multiple physical disabilities (i.e. can't talk clearly, cannot drive a vehicle, etc.). I can do computers very well.
:)
Is it me or do employers get worried about people like me? Also, I don't get paid very well (35K) and it took me almost a year to find my first full-time job as a Web developer (now, I am a SQA tester for Web stuff). I am talking about salary jobs with fringe benefits, not contract work. Currently, I have been working for a commercial real estate company in testing and doing Web development since December 1998.
Anyone else who is in similiar situation like mine? Thank you in advance for replies.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I got fed up with the recruiting process, and me and a friend started a business. It's still a baby, but we're making some money, adn there's the promise of more in the future. If you can afford to not have a job (or at least, take a part-time one like I am) for a year, go for it! The experience you get in the first six months is priceless. And you might even get to apply something you learned from school! Imagine that. We are.
lf.o
Well I know there is no shortage here in Maine. I have taken several courses in programming languages, and I will be graduating in May with an AS (Its not a BS but its something). I think I write some decent code, and I make sure it is easily readable and maintainable when I do it. But every job I phone or email about I get a reply telling me they are looking for experienced candidates only. What I want to see on Slashdot is a nice little story on how to land an Entry Level position with little to no Commercial experience but a nice portfolio of code you have written.
If I stop posting will you be happy
First you must understand what an IT professional is. Unfortunately M$ would love to make everyone think that anyone with an MCSE is an IT professional. If that were the case we would not have a shortage at all, there are several hundred thousand MCSEs around and many more passing M$s easy tests every year. But what it takes to be an IT professional is a good understanding of how a company's network operates. This means a senior network administrator should know DNS, NFS, NIS, sendmail, apache, Linux and how various flavors of Unix (at least Solaris) work together. Understanding Unix and networking seems to be the challenging part to all those new MCSEs out there. I'm sure they took a course that taught them if they added TCP to M$s protocols and added in a few numbers they would be on the net, but most MCSEs don't understand how routers or switches work, and are clueless when it comes to other internet technology like IP masquerading / NAT and how these affect network services like mail or httpd requests. They should also have a basic scripting ability and preferrably a good background in perl to help automate sys admin tasks. And you can't forget the hardware side of the coin. They should know how to take any PC clone or desktop unix box apart, replace drives, memory, etc. And setup and configure all the new server hardware you buy to keep your network running soundly. Its also a good idea for an IT professional to know how to integrate a UNIX and NT network and provide 99% uptime and keep ahead on resources.
I started here in the valley 3 years ago without a clue about how networks or Unix worked. During that time I helped build up a startup that went public and watched how a company grows and what is required of IT within the first 2 years of a companies growth.
I have to disagree when they say we have enough IT professionals. Think about the growth of internet based companies in the last year. Everyone should have a competent, professional IT person on staff. And if you consider a professional someone who can work on project level assignments, such as designing and building the company intranet (I assure you no manager or CEO knows how to design a company network or recommend server hardware better than a real IT professional), we have a serious lack of the talent that is needed. I don't even think I qualify as a senior level systems administrator and I could get my MCSE tomorrow if I wanted to.
In conclusion, it would be a much nicer internet if there wasn't such a shortage of network administrators. Problems such as the DOS attacks on Ebay, yahoo, etc. wouldn't have happened if we had enough competent IT professionals. A good way to find out if you have a top notch IT department is to check what they monitor on a regular basis. Yes they do backups and keep the network running for the most part, but do they get paged whenever a production system goes down? Do they know the status of your intranet all the time without being at their desk? Can they install, upgrade, patch and for almost all situations do their job remotely? Then they are probably an IT professional.
The third kind is the guy who was selling lawnmowers three years ago and then goes to DeVry or Coleman for two because he want to get rich with an "Internet company". I've gotten cover letters saying essentially this.
The corollary problem is that too many colleges are teaching programming as a trade, like plumbing or auto-mechanics, instead of as an _art_. Many applicants with otherwise decent training and even experience don't have the creativity factor that comes from loving this stuff!
I'm a Boston-area student taking some time off (returning to classes this summer), and I have had no luck finding anything remotely technical.
I studied Journalism (though my degree will be English with a tech writing certificate), I was webmaster for my school paper, and I worked at a Help Desk for 5 semesters. Appartently, I dont't qualify for anything because I have (a) no CS degree, (b) no "real-world" experience, or (c) no car (I live in the inner city, very close to the T).
I have a portfolio. I belong to a lug . I'm funny. I'm smart. And I'm working as a secretary. Any clues as to what I'm doing wrong?
Put my clarinet beneath your bed 'till I get back in town.
I'm one of the masses who did it "for the money". I discovered computers in college, and right after taking my second (ever) CS course, my family's already shaky finances took a turn for the worse. I didn't like programming, but I didn't want to have to move back home and starve (or work in a factory again).
Two semesters later, living on tuna and ramen and working 50-hour weeks in a factory didn't seem like such a bad idea. I was so burnt out I had nightmares about computers. I changed my major and eventually dropped out of school. I'm now working s a secretary, getting the hang of Perl, writing a webpage, and planning to take classes again (English, Tech writing certificate) this summer.
If you don't truly like programming, you're going to burn out sooner or later. I'm now glad I learned that sooner, rather than later.
Put my clarinet beneath your bed 'till I get back in town.
I'm desperately trying to hire Unix Systems Admins in NYC, and am having a hell of a time. It seems everyone is either doesn't have enough real experience, or they're already making a fortune and have sweet stock options with a pre-IPO company. There definately IS a shortage of Unix Admins here. That's also taking salaries through the roof. Typical sysadmin here with at least 3 years experience, can get about $60-80k/year. 6+ years, you're looking $120k+. Almost makes me want to start looking for a new job just so I can get a $30k raise. Every recruiter I talk to says they have 20-40 job orders for every sysadmin that walks through the door. It's definately a sysadmin's market here.
As for crap people: there are plenty to fill the spaces ...
threadeds blog
A startling example is a company I contracted for who had a really super skilled C++ programmer. His code was flawless, and worked first time etc. He was good get the idea. He basically made the companies product. He should have been made a share owner. Anyhow the company management was complete tosh, hopeless bunch of losers.
Because the chap was so good, he was in demand constantly, eventually ended up in his not having a holiday for over two years!
So, one day he said, 'enough is enough, I'm off on holiday in a month for a week'. They said if he did that they would sack him.
So it came to pass.
Within a year the company had all but gone bust and was taken over.
threadeds blog
I have ~4 years experience in any number of different cool things (SS7, unix crap, C, C++ etc etc etc) plus a 4 year degree from a massively liberal, itty, bitty learning institution in s. vermont (yes Marlboro College my friends) and I make >60k. With large numbers of options. The west coast of the US is a gravy train right now. Hop on and get some for yourself son.
It's the happiness that counts for the job, not status or money. I work in a very lax and fun environment, and although i could go make 150% more somewhere else, why would i when i love my job and am comfortable where I'm at? Do what you like, take control of your job, and have a good time. Money is third to happiness and friends, and don't you forget that.
Mike Roberto
- roberto@soul.apk.net
-- AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
Professional regulation a la architects is not going to happen now that open source is here. The analogy would be something like "you will now need a Professional Software Engineer licence to write code". I don't think so. With people all over the planet in different countries contributing to open source projects that the data infrastructure of the entire planet uses this kind of scheme would be (fortunately) totally unenforceable. Of course that doesn't mean that American big business/big gummint (is there any difference) won't try to get something like this. So be on the watch.
--
Nothing to see here. Mooooove along...
That must be why I'm having such a hard time finding jobs in the Midwest. I don't want to live in any of the cities you mentioned.
Why is it so hard to find a tech job in a large town (25k-100k)? Geez I hate cities.
Constitutionally Correct
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Company I used to work at hired a DBA who turned out to know nothing.
The headhunter had deliberately coached him on what to say in the interview, and he got past a KPMG technical interview as well.
(which revised my opinion of KPMG down a few notches)
We finally figured out he was useless through the firewall logs - he spent all day at various porn sites, and never produced any actual results.
Meow.
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
You answered your own question. Most kids coming out of college don't see an intrinsic value in pursuing a degree > then a BS. Your company is the the excemption, not the rule terms of wanting a graduate degree. Why pay an extra amount of money for a MS that maybe worthless except for a couple of jobs when you can get a job straight out (or even before) for nothing less then $45k
Eric has a point.
...
/Duncan
Many searches are run by HR depts with a very specific set of requirements. I was recently looking for sysadmin style positions. Many positions wanted specifically:
veritas exp
Specifically Solaris or HP/UX or AIX or
one group wanted me to have worked as an ISP running a network center since that was their business. I had exp on all their platforms and even had the telephony background. Not interested
I was starting from scratch in a new part of the country as I moved back to the US from Germany. If I was willing to work in NY or Silicon Valley then my contacts/former associates had jobs waiting for me.
I think that much of the problem is how to filter correctly. IT is too broad, and we need to come up with common definations for jobs. If we could do that it would be easier to find people and get jobs you want.
When I was in NY, I was hiring tech support staff for a programming product. My budget didn't allow me to hire very experienced people and I ended up hiring new grads. Since our product was networked, I was losing people 8-14 months after hire to sysadmin jobs.
It is a big mess and companies are all over the map. We need to standardized job descriptions a bit.
Duncan Watson -Rock climbing, Encryption, privacy
PGP Fingerprint -PGP Key on www.keyserver.net
Duncan Watson
And I have over 15 years of experience.
My wife and I are moving to Vancouver, BC sometime this fall. Anyone know companies that really have an IT shortage there? :)
-Legion
There are more than two states here. Why does this issue always have to end up as an argument between the 'forget the design crap lets just pound out the code' bunch and the 'abstract design concepts are always more important than trivial issues of implementation' crowd? This is not an either/or thing. Both perspectives are wrong if they fail to admit that both are important. Teaching abstract design to someone who has only the vaguest experience coding is usually a waste of time because they can't relate what you're teaching to anything and consequently won't TRULY undestand (or likely even remember) what they are being taught. On the other side, simply diving into development without a good design leads to frequent rewrites to account for things you didn't think of the first time around and programs that are not easily maintainable or extendable. Sure, you can write software this way but 9 times out of 10 it won't be even close to the quality you could have gotten simply by thinking things through first.
Frankly I'm getting tired of the smug certainty that focusing on the abstract is the way schools should go because it's the 'Right' way to do things. Schools like that produce people who can memorize stuff they don't understand, long enough to pass the tests and get their degrees. Then they get sent to people like me in the real world to re-teach them what the schools should have taught in the order they should have taught it. And I'm also tired of having to rewrite the crap that the 'code first and ask questions later' people produce. If it has to be done over then the time it took to plan first might not have been wasted after all hmmmm?
I think everyone would benefit from a little dose of reality on this whole issue. How about it?
K&R C Lives!
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
That rule protects the American workers more than the foreigners. They don't want you hiring Mexicans for $1 /hour instead of Americans for $5 (I know you'd have to pay mininum wage, it's just an example).
From the immigrant's POV, it's harder to find a job, but if you do, you get more.
It's only economical to import skilled labor, not cheap labor.
The company where I work lets us sleep in our cubicles, so I don't have to spend money on an apartment. I invest the extra money in our company's stock. My manager says the stock value is guaranteed, there's a storage room full of computer hardware for collateral in the basement.
In Boston we have such a shortage that I don't even look for jobs anymore, they look for me. I typically get 3-4 contacts a day either by phone or email offering me work. And if I'm interested, I tell them my salary REQUIREMENTS, what I'm interested in doing, and 9 outa 10 times they say ok, meet with me for 45 minutes and hire me on the spot. I'm on job number 7 in 2.5 years, never been a contractor, and usually increase my salary by 20k each jump I make. I like this economy.
PDG
"Where is my mind?"
...Of jobs of anykind in my neck of the woods regardless of the type, exceptions are always made for health care professionals, always need more of them everywhere.
Of course my neck of the woods is Nebraska USA that should explain alot, I can speak of only what I have seen and know.
Computers save man alot of guesswork, but so does the bikini
i worked with a fellow this summer who was answering phones with me at a help desk, and one headhunter called up and asked to talk to our unix people. (this was odd enough, since we are the main entrance to the unix support system there.) this guy told the headhunter that he was the main interceptor for tech support calls on that subject, and the headhunter would have to talk to him and tell him the problem. the headhunter then asked him how much he knew about solaris.
now my friend knows his stuff, so he explained some VERY basic things about solaris to the headhunter, who then came clean: he was actually trying to recruit a solaris technician from our people.
people have got to be DESPERATE for good unix sysadmins if they're doing stuff like that.
jon
-- http://www.cerastes.org
Of course there are mercenaries and dumboes out there.. The real shortage is Microsoft-based, though. If Microsoft was killed, administrators would once again need to learn the craft. Now, you've got bunches of idiots screwing up this and that, pointing and clicking their way to lamocalypse. Remove Microsoft, the idiots disappear, and the nerds will once again rule.
Preaching for the converted. Futility is fun!
Stop the brainwash
When I was a programmer, I knew all about managers like you. Wait, I still am a programmer. You see, there are a lot of people who think that just anyone can be a programmer. While I agree that the C.S. degree is not necessary, it's certainly not a drawback. Your lack of insight is astonishing. Are there then not programmers who are interested in gardening, neuro-chemistry, english literature, guitar playing, advanced mathematics, pure sciences and applied, cooking and engineering, etc? Your argument falls down flat there.
Why is everyone so intent on "disproving this myth" that there is an IT talent shortage? Don't you people know this gives you leverage when you negotiate your salary? If it were true then, yes, it would help me negotiate my salary; but it isn't. Instead, the impression that there is a shortage is being broadcast loudly by corporations via lobbyists to get the H1B visa cap raised. What does this mean for native U.S. IT workers? It effectively caps our salaries at 60k (or somewhere around there), because that's the minimum pay a foreign H1B holder can be paid. As distasteful as I find this, I can't complain too loudly, as I've always felt protectionism is wrong. Disclaimer: I'm working from memory here. The amounts may be be wrong, but the overall point is not.
--
If the only thing that is keeping you in your current job is the fact that you are the low bidder to do the work, you deserve to be flipping burgers. Exactly my point. Companies will, on the average, go with the lowest bidder. Which is going to be a lot closer to that $60k if the H1B visas are expanded. We seem to be on 2 different discussions here. I was answering your original question why there are people attempting to bust the illusion of a shortage. Good faith effort too. Instead, you turn on me; insulting, flaming and telling me I'm not worth a shit for not finding the market as lucrative as you have.
--
Delete a node from a doubly-linked list...
I explain...
Eventually, it is wrong, or coded in such an unreal manner. According to the resume, they've been working as a software developer for seven years....
Okay, I suppose it's possible that someone might have been doing some embedded programming, or something where dynamic memory allocation wasn't possible. I ask them to flip the bits in a byte. This is usually met with a blank stare, maybe some shuffling in the chair.
How do these people get here? I mean, I know they get past HR and headhunters because the resume sounds good, but have these people actually been working? I have no idea. I just that out of the last 20 people I've interviewed, maybe two of them could do either of those problems, and none of them did both. I don't even go into the meatier questions.
I'm not asking for a lot, but I think that anyone that has passed a 200 level college data structures class should be able to do the first problem, and someone should at least be able to grasp the concept of the second. All I can figure is that our colleges and universities care far more about generating profit than they do turning out knowledgeable graduates.
Face it, they make no more money from someone for kicking them out...
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
I'm not sure if it's visa problems, or companies not willing to sponsor people or what, but I have tried for years to get a tech job in Europe. Nobody seems to want anything I have to offer (not true in the US). I submit resumes to these companies, and often here that they don't work with people out of their own countries. Whatever. If there was a consulting company that specialized in this, I would love to sign up.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
Oh, I'm going to put it on there for sure.
To be quite honest, I put a lot of time and effort into it (all self study, paid for myself). Even though I no longer enjoy Microsoft and their products as much as I once did, I am proud of the hard work it took me to earn my MCSE and some of the basic concepts it taught me. I learned a lot about TCP/IP from the books, and many of the ideas (such as UNIX UIDs and NT's SIDs) helped me learn UNIX much quicker since the same concepts applied to both OSes (unique user identification numbers for each user).
As for what the original poster meant by the statement, why don't we as him or her. Comments original poster? =)
Wow, you throw out MCSEs right away, huh? That's too bad. If you think about it for a moment, perhaps you would realize you're missing some people that have real skills. There is a word for what you do: stereotyping.
I do agree that many MCSEs out there don't know what they're doing, and it is true that a MCSE proves you can only pass tests, but you may or may not have madskilz.
I personally have my MCSE which I obtained in September 1998. After that time I grew bored with the "Microsoft solution" and started looking in to UNIX. The more I read and found out about, the more I enjoyed it, found it's beauty in simplicity, and was then introduced to Linux.
I had used Linux in the past (Slackware), but after I really got into it and installed Red Hat, I've never looked back. Now, rather than going to the NT Server team at my company, I choose to hold off, and I'm now a Sysadmin supporting HP-UX, Solaris, OSF1 and run Linux on 4 of my 5 machines at home. I'm never going back to NT.
Put simply, people can and do change. I don't dispise NT like some people here, but I still won't take a job supporting it. It's a much better idea to keep an open mind and not toss aside people just because they can "pass a few tests". You just might be missing an excellent potential employee.
The best is probably www.dice.com
In all the salary surveys I've seen, Unix sysadmins on average make a lot more than MCSE's.
Here in Silicon Valley, $60k/yr is a salary for a beginning-to-intermediate level sysadmin. $80k/yr to infinity are where the senior UNIX sysadmins are at.
Nice thing about UNIX is that you really don't need any certifications. Most employers know that if you know just Linux, you can handle Solaris, and vice-versa.
1 B3T AT $85K y0U G3T tH3 G1rLI35!!!
I have been playing with computers for 12 years now, and making a "livining" from them for 6. The only certification I've got is the A+ certification, which is an absolute joke, I wrote both test in under 10min. Certifications and Degree's only add letters after some ones name. I've got loads of experience for someone who is 19, I beta tested NT Server (not one of the free giveaway ones), I have at home a Firewall, DNS, WEB, FTP, MAIL server along with VPND, and asortment of other things setup. You'd think this would help find me a job?? Nope I don't have my MCSE nor College or University. I am running my own computer business out of my basement with two other guy. We are try to get contracts/work/etc. but we're geeks, not sales people... quite painful
Anyone out there got a similar situation?
I should note to your second point: "...or the flip side which is those that know real well but are complete mercenaries and would screw over their employer or client in a heartbeat..." - in almost all cases employers of such "mercenaries" are anything, but not the lambs. They are ready to get out skin (e.g. salary/wages, benefits, etc) on each employee without any doubt in soul. Actually, they do NOT have a soul - they are employers. So, they deserve each other. Don't cry for poor employers :)
this field has been intentionally left blank
Computer science deals with information handling; the only reason it's called computer science is that computers make it possible and reasonable to process such large amounts of data that it's practical for many people to study information theory, instead of just math majors. Don't you think there's SOME reason CS departments are usually part of the Math dep't instead of engineering?
I know people who can pick up prog. languages and tools quickly because of some natural talent, but they can't design worth a shit and they pick horribly nasty algorithms to do stuff because they don't know any better.
Any yahoo can teach themselves how to code in a short timespan. (Months, maybe weeks) But it usually takes formal education to know how to code well.
Just wanna code? Go to tech school. Wanna learn how to process information ? Learn Computer Science. The theory you learn can apply to any language you want to code in.
Of course, some people attraced by the $ major in CS, graduate, and are lost. And others don't give a crap about the degree and are motivated enough to do well being self-taught. The best go to school, learn the theory, and have enough drive to learn as many tools and languages as they can.
It all depends on the location that you start looking for a job. I graduated in a city of 60000 that had 3 colleges turning out Comp. Sci. grads. Needless to say the labor market was tight there. But in larger cities, i think that all you have to do is look and you will find an IT position that is waiting to be filled.
I haven't had a chance to read the article yet (link won't load...) but I have to wonder, if there really isn't a shortage, does the government know about this? I know a lot of IT companies will hire foriegn IT people and because of the supposed shortage it is easy to get them the visas they need.
I have to agree. There is a huge difference between someone with a degree in computer science and someone who took a weekend class at ECPI to get certified in . Both could consider themselves IT professionals though.
I'm a shareholder in an small ISP. We register about 1000 domains per month and most of them have a web site requirement. There's plenty of work around here if you like small projects.
.oO0Oo.
It's great if you don't like working much. You can make a tidy sum knocking a whole site together in a couple of weeks and take a weeks off to do your own thing. No too stressful.
I work like that and by telling five people in our towns computer community my phone rings every hour with a few questions and job leads.
It's like I don't have to worry because good people with time on their hands are hard to find too.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I really find that a degree is useless. Being almost 30 and being one the 100K+ sysadmins I've found it to not be a hinderance. I Used to fix pc's for people when I was in high school. When I was 16 one of the guys offered me a job in his new company setting up and network and I took it. Nothing beats work experiance. I Find most people wil compsci degrees generally incompetent with some exceptions. Usually its people with totaly unrealted degrees, Most talented NT person, and the most talented Webmaster I know both have degrees in History. Most talented Network engineer I know is a Nuculear physics person. In the end when I interview people I dont even looking at schooling. I was 6 to 10 years working experiance or equivelent experiance (My department is an engineering department). We've hired alot of talented individuals and one is even 17 (no not an intern).
My point if I have any, is as a Director I believe that 1 year experiance is better then a 4 year degree. You can really only learn theory in college but until your into the fray and neck deep in the daily crap you really dont learn much. On the flip side for my department I wont bring on a 0 experiance person. Instead I'll pass the resume along to the NOC manager. They hire entry level people and its usually a good fit. I have to fight for my recs.
While the comment was in jest it betrays a problem that bothers me. As a high school student, who earns his spending money by providing tech support for a broad network of friends and family I found his comments to be very offensive.
More than that, it is simply bad business practice. I have earned more repeat business by telling a person: "I can't fix this, but here is someone who can" than any other way. I recently got a job writing client/server crypto breaking software for a professor simply because of it. When he proposed the project I told him I did not know enough to do it. He responded that he trusted me to give him something that worked exactly as he wanted it to, and that was worth paying me to learn how to do it. If had not been honest with the fellow he would have gone elsewhere. I get more jobs saying, I don't know how to do that but I could in X weeks than by looking directly at my resume.
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
Alright, I'm 21, in Canada that means that I am at the apex of the Baby Bust. As of this year, with the 20 year olds coming out of their two year programs, the IT workforce is starting to get the Echo. Ergo, from here on in the "youthful talent" will only grow.
I do realise that US demographics are at one or two years offset from us, but not ten years as the author suggests. Maybe I'm missing something here, but honesty I have a hard time taking the rest of the article seriously when he can't grasp simple demographics...
Such a price the gods exact for song: to become what we sing - Pythagoras
finding *qualified* people is a real bear. I think a large part of the problem is MCSE and even CNE certs are jokes nowdays (OK, MCSE *always* was, but CNE used to be a little worthwhile). Most IT folks go gunning for these, end up learning how to pass the tests, and NOT how to actually do the work, and the talent pool just gets diluted. Some managers at the company I work for are getting so desperate they're offering key spots to college grads with no experience (I'm NOT knocking college grads).
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
You can't worry about things 10 years out at any age, especially 15 years old. As far as parents wanting there children to go into CS, when did children start doing what their parents want? That's not going to happen anytime soon! Just do what you enjoy, worrying about future job markets will just drive you crazy. If you like CS, go for it.
I just graduated from UQ here is Brisbane, and applied for 5 jobs in my first week after exams. Now, I'm an average student, one that all the big companies overlook because of my gpa, but I sent these application letters to smaller engineering/it firms. Of the 5 letters, I recieved 4 requests for interviews. I got hired at my first interview.
What I'm trying to say here is that if you look in the right places, the jobs are plentiful. Especially here in Australia.
Good luck to everyone out there trying to find a job..
Okay there seems to be misunderstanding (no suprise, I AM an idiot), mostly my fault.
I make up answers, but not for my customers. i do it for frieds and family. But Nastard, that is just as bad. Nope. If I don't give them an answer, they get upset and blame me for it not working. As if i were some knd of god who chose not to help.
Customers, OTOH, who ask questions I don't know, are told so, and informed that I shall look up the answer and inform them as soon as I find it.
Why the difference. Customers pay me. Everyone else just bothers me.
Hope this clears it up.
yeah... came to me while i was waking up one afternoon. if you can find a complete lyric sheet for me to bastardize, email it to me.
Okay okay no VB bashing!! lol Kidding. Dont rag it to bad okay? I make good money and stay fed doin VB and Php *sniffle*. and no i dont think Recursion is bad.. in fact ive actually implmented a recursive function IN *gasp* VB :-)
Jeremy
I was quoting from a man page actually. rofl. DO NOT tell me you cant have multiple sockets on the same port. The dumbass was arguing with me on a MUD with 20 people online. ROFL. I was like and juse what dos setsockopt with SO_REUSEADDR do for you then my friend. I dont think I would have bothered if he was just doing it to annoy me but he was telling someone to write some code wrong. *mutters*. No I have read some utterly HORRIBLE books in my time. Altho NO laughing when I was 14 C for dummies was about all I could understand. lol. GAH that book was EVIL.
:p In fact I know it serves it purpose to do your example code in a book and declare the main function as a void but come on you have a Ph.D and you cant just do int main() and return 0 at the end of your program? I never understood that and I argued with some people over it once. lol I won *flex* :p
I have risen above void main
Jeremy
I'm living here in Utah and I have tried to find a good job in the technical industry for months... Finally I just decided to start my own business. Shortage? what shortage? There is an excess of IT people here, please take them somewhere else.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
No shit. I used to work for a company (which shalt remain nameless) that tried to hire out of US works. The staff there was %90 non-us, %10 white americans. I was one of the white americans. System admin work, for that company in the last 7 years they have had 10 system admins! Why? I don't know forgein works do come in system admin form?
Anyways, all the programers and hackers there where highly skilled people (non-us). They work C/C++ for 12-16 hours per day, 5 days a week. Really nice people, really skilled to.
The thing I never understood was that I (Unix system admin) was making 4 times the amount the head developer (ie. real hacker) was making, he was more skilled at his trade then me, he worked harder and longer hours and had more experience.
Typically programers make more than a system admin. That is the way it is, anyone can get a couple Linux boxes at home and learn basic admin in a couple month, but programmers ussually need massive amounts of college and practice to learn their trade.
I left the company awhile ago because the company was really fucking immoral about it's business practices (and can I really say this in an interview, they will think I am dis-guntled), and now I see why they had so many out of state workers.
To think about it, when the head developer/programmer was working there (still is), he was making less than my freind (based on per hour) that did manual labor (put CD's into boxes all day).
Seriouly this guy was chucking out 12-16 hour days, had developed and programed thousands of lines of code, everything from GUI to lowlevel ASM, he was a really good hacker. He once re-wrote a driver for an ATM card without source to the card nor the old driver, by him self, by hand, during the weekend, his "spare" time.
The world is fucked up. These workers should not be controlled like this. They should be able to come into the country, and be able to work for any dam company they wish. If it suckes, they SHOULD have the right of us americans have and say "This fucking sucks, you are an asshole, fuck off I am going to work at VA Linux."
They may be non-citizens, they maybe non-american, but what really matters is that they are true hackers at heart.
I want to work for a company that is controlled by geeks, not some greedy money-hungary asshole who only cares about the "bottom line"
There is 2 things more important (as far as jobs are concerned, NOT life in general), and that is people must come first, second it should be done for the "hack" or because it is the Right Thing(TM) to do. It should be done, because that is they way it should be done, NOT because it will make or loss money.
Fuck that, fuck these companies, I should go into a differant field where they care about their employees and they care about the Right Way(TM) of doing things, not the bottom line.
I would take a lower paying job that had a better office moral, higher job safication, and more "human" envoirment with
If you want to bring more workers in, that is fine, along as they do it the Right Way(TM). Make sure they have they same rights as the other people living in this country. If they don't or can't bring the workers in and give them the rights they derserve, they should not bring them in at all, because the only thing they are doing is bring them into slavery.
I could be one-sided since the only experience I have had with this is from a company that was already immoral about their business practices, so if they are already corrupted at one aspect of the business, it could of fed over into this part of their HR department.
Maybe there is companies out there that do have moral and right ways of bringing forgein work in, but for the rest of the companies that do it the Wrong Way(TM):
Fuck those companies, they should be shot.
J(ust)MHO
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Do you need a System Admin by chance?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Plus NY is ranked in the top 10 highest costs of living.
.02$ per minute you where online (not my the telco, by the ISP!), I don't know what there telco charges.
/could/ be reasonable. It also means any sysadmin that takes a job like this will mean he will be there 24/7 no matter what and he will be lucky if he can find 6 hours a day to eat/sleep/shower and relax on the "non-busy" days, if in fact "non-busy" days do exist.
$80K in NY == $40IL in almost any other city.
$120K may look like allot on paper, but not really. I was looking at a sysadmin job in Alaska, and it was running about $75K per year, + stock. I did some firgure, and I found out that I made MORE in IL doing asst. level sysadmin work then if I would of moved up there.
A 1 room "shed" up there was running for $85K, a 5 room house here doesn't break that.
I would have had allot neater systems to work with up there, the main reason I didn't go was because Alaska is fscking cold and all my family/freinds are down here.
BTW, they didn't have cusomer grade ISDN, DSL or cable there, 28.8 dial ups where $25 per/month
It depends what city, $75K in Anachod (my spelling sucks) Alaska worked out to about $150 week spendable money after bills. Which if you have an addiaction to computers and the Internet isn't really that much, plus sometimes eating and putting gas in your car is nice.
I haven't lived or even looked at what it cost to live in NY (just remebered it from when I looked up Anacorg Alaska), but for a 6+ year sysadmin that is on top of his field, 120K this
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
does it stand for Minesweeper Consultant - Solitaire Expert ;-)
;-)
This concerns 30,000 posts for people from Eastern Europe and Far East.
Like you I've also returned to school to do CS, not for the money but to learn how these nutty computers actually work. When I was selecting a university I was amazed at how many degrees were totally focussed on in demand skills that help land jobs immediately after graduating, not on teaching the fundamentals that last an entire carreer.
These schools continually boasted about the employment rate of students after graduating, not what their graduates were doing five years after. This so called shotage is probably employers realising that not all degrees are equal, some are just there to fill a gap in the employment market.
Or maybe it's the bad attitudes of recent graduates, is it just me or do they all think they're hot shit these days?
Australian? Join EFA
Hello potential employer :)
:)
I've been using and installed Linux on countless machines over the last five years. Although I have no formal experience in the IT field, I'm ready to start, because I'm out of work
*Starving Linux User in Detroit!* *grIN*
Here! Here! I couldn't agree with you more! Problem is, if they dropped all of the fat (much like the areospace industry about 10 years ago), the stock market would go in the trash... -= i Know notHing. thAt is Why i Program Komputers. =-
Oh, I forgot to mention that when I moved here a little over three years ago I was working with a consultant that oversold me to the client. The guy doing the interview kept asking me about things that I'd never been exposed to. I told him I'd be happy to learn 'X', but that I didn't have any experience in that arena. Seems the guy had taken all that the consultant said as gospel when a quick read of my resume would have shown that those things weren't even listed.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I have 20 years in this business. On a recent investigation into the Valley I was told that there were 500K openings. After registering with several head-hunters and not getting any nibbles at all I assumed that either there were not a half-million jobs to be had or that the jobs were for new-grads who would take less money and work insane hours. A friend who is VP-tech at an Oakland startup says that he has no end of interviewees, but that the problem is finding one that knows what the hell they're doing. "You will be building an object database, guided by a four-state machine..." "A what?" Simple text book stuff. There are those that go to school to learn, and others who just go.
{Deth Onastick}
Can't do something real, then go in for computers! There's easy money in that!
{Deth Onastick}
If you only hire programmers who rely on established and provided data structures and who don't grok the fundamentals, then please tell me the name of your company so I can avoid your products - because they're most likely built by robots who don't know what the hell they're doing.
{Deth Onastick}
After you take out the taxes on that $120K, you'll hava a lot less disposable income.
{Deth Onastick}
There are two types of people to consider. Those who are capable of doing a good job (certifications or not) and 'social prostitutes' who will do or say whatever it takes to get the job.
Unfortunately the second group gets control (sucking up) and everone else suffers. The incompetent ones get to be managers then they make unreasonable demands (asking for people with 10 years of java or 15 years of perl experience) then they cry shortage amd hire their friends while the others now out of a job cant find work.
There are exceptions but for all that I have seen its not what you know but who you know.
This type tends to eventually do an MBA, and unfortunately gets put into a position managing geeks by somebody who made it into management through sales and thinks that MBA + some tech experience = competent tech manager.
Well, I'm a professor in CS and the grad class every year is snapped up, with job offers coming from all over North-America. Getting a job is never the issue, it's assumed you'll have one. The only question is how big is your salary, and every year the answer is 10% higher. In the mean time, we have bright people with a Master degree in Chemistry or PhD in physics transfering to CS because the couldn't find a job in their field. The same is true in all the other universities I'm familiar with.
IMHO, companies often shoot themselves in the foot when they are looking for people because they look for very specific skillsets, like, for example, I've seen listings like this:
Java/Corba/Servlets/UML 1+ years in each.
Well, there aren't a whole lot of candidates that meet these requirements, but there are others that have maybe C++ background or Smalltalk or PowerBuilder or some other translatable skill that might be willing to learn Java. Of course, the company also want someone that meets these requirements to be in some predefined range like 40-60K. Good luck, I say.
Couple this kind of HR bungling with the loss of the social contract between employee and company, and you get a "shortage" of cheap people - everyone who's any good usually ends up independent consultant or body-shop consultant. There's not a shortage of people, there's a shortage of people who are adept at hiring the right people. The old are discriminated against, the Indians are taken advantage of, the recent grads are robbed of a lot of their early life, and the companies scream for more H1-B's. The hell with that - make do with the workforce you have, and stop treating people like disposable diapers.
I have 10 years experience in all types of IT work. I have worked as SysAdmin for UN*X, Novell, and WinNT networks, worked helpdesk, planned networks, wired buildings, fixed workstations, built servers, troubleshot all kinds of problems, and alot more. I STILL have trouble finding a job because I don't have a degree.
I have trouble getting responses to my resume' because I have never been to college and don't have certifications. It's a shame really, as I have a strong work ethic and am very competent.
I live in Tampa FL and see every week in the paper jobs listed that require very specialized knowledge, lots of experience in multiple environments, and degrees and/or certifications. These jobs should pay over $40K and are listed at $35K or less.
I am underemployed, overworked and underpaid. I am planning to attend school in the summer and work towards a degree, but in the mean time I will not be working up to my potential, because some HR drone thinks that without a degree a person can't be qualified. And I will probably leave Tampa because the pay is better elsewhere.
If there is a shortage of IT people, it is artificially created by HR and managers.
Of course, this is only my opinion, I could be wrong.
Personally, I'm sick of manager types who can draw pictures, but cannot relate it to reality (code) they keep telling me I need to think at a higher level. Well, a higher level is total bullshit if it is not grounded in code. If you write even a moderate-sized program in C, you really do need to know tree traversal, unless you want a really crappy program.
In my opinion preferring foreign workforce rather than domestic is not only about the costs. Many of my buddies work abroad, and I found some common points among what they told about it. I think some of these points can make a foreign worker really more attractive:
:)]
1. Foreign workers often feel like they have to equal higher expectations, therefore they work harder than a local guy of the same qualification and capabilities.
2. Maybe it does not apply everywhere, but somewhere not only the payment is less for foreign workers. The employer also has to pay some social security, etc. for local workforce, and with a well-written contract it can be legally evaded for foreigners.
3. Without detailed knowledge and with a good CV an employer is more likely to consider someone more determined, encouraged, creative, etc. from the "other side of the world" rather than from three blocks down the street. [And if he/she managed to get a permission to work in USA, it could be even true
4. We have to admit, that for any given country there are countries, where specific professions can be acquired at a higher level - like some Asian and Eastern-European countries against USA for mathematics. (See http://www.payvand.com/news/99/sep/1069.html about this.) There are also some countries, which are informally considered as "creative" countries.
5. In the bigger part of the world it is "cool" to work in USA, however it is not the same in the opposite direction, therefore - assuming that not the dumb, but the top-notch people are trying to get a job in America - in several cases a foreigner is a better choice.
6. For all it is bad, outfacing a foreigner is still easier, more effective, and less risky.
Zumu
I'd just like to say...
1) Yeah my spelling does suck, I know, it always has, and as far as i can tell will, until they impliment a spellchecker for these posts. I wonder if one like hotmails would work?
2) No, Envisonets not much to brag about, but it is the fastest growing company in the state, oh yeah and did i mention employees will soon be getting stock options...
3) You kick ass Vladinator!
1) Find a company you want to work for.
2) Realize that this company is currently employing people that aren't qualified to run a type writer...
3) Walk straight in there and say "I'm better than the poeple you have working for you now."
4) Presto! You're hired...
This stratagy has worked for me and some others i know.
Im currently employed at Envisonet and I got the job using this method.
Jainith
Oh yeah, this stratagy only works if you have the skills to back up step #3.
I'm an IT professional with a degree in computer science from ECPI, thank you! It may not be a bachelor's, but I guarantee I knew more about programming when I walked out the door than several "programmers" I know who have bachelor's degrees in CS. Today I'm a highly paid and highly competent Informix programmer/DBA. The companies in my area are more likely to hire from the "trade schools" than the colleges because they actually teach real world, up to date languages and systems instead of FORTRAN, etc.
Death is but a doorway.
Here, let me hold that for you.
After a number of years as a roadie and househusband, I returned to the local community college 4 years ago to get a degree in networking (my original degree is in history). The reason was that I was, and am, fascinated with networking-- it's like, way, way, cool! Most of the folks I went to school with were strictly in it for the money. Most of them are looking for work. I think the deal is that you just can't do this work consistently unless you are in it for more than money. Sure, the money's nice, and, yeah, I'm studying for Cisco certification, but I'm doing it because *I think that designing networks is FUN*. Lots of folx are doing the 2-week certification boot camps, which IMO are strictly BS. My employer sent me to several of the MCSE classes at New Horizons and they were a big waste of my time. Well, NT Core Technologies did finally convince me to replace our NT server with Linux, so it wasn't a *total* waste ;) . Unfortunately most HR people don't know their butts from a hole in the ground about IT. As most of them have management degrees, they unfortunately have about the same quality of knowledge about anything else. So, they use the certification as some sort of benchmark, even though, for instance, having a CCNA doesn't tell the employer whether the prospective employee did it in a boot camp that teaches you how to pass the test, or in a 2-year long class with labs, etc., that delves very deeply into what makes a network work. The thing that need to change is that someone needs to start requiring labs and/or OJT for these certifications. Also, a certain amount of class hours or web-based training. Hiring an MSCE with no experience who took their classes from some place like New Horizons or MicroAge is about as smart as hiring Uncle Duke to perform brain surgery.
With computing taking over tasks that were previously done by humans, wouldn't that mean more computer professionals are needed to design, install and maintain these systems?
I would also not be surprised if some companies are accepting newly graduated Computing professionals over the older, perhaps more experienced people. For a start, the younger people are going to be more eager to impress, and would also be a bit more energetic(?) than the older people.
I'm certainly hoping that in 5-6 years time, coming out with a masters degree, I have a good job to walk in to.
-- Michael Lee Martin
I personally think that the IT industry is right in trying to get the people they need(*g* okay, I hope so... I'm studying CS myself...), but in Germany the problem is largely homemade; during the mid-90s, job counselors over here strongly advised students not to study computer science, claiming they needed more construction engineers to rebuild East Germany (the very industry that is collapsing there now... go figure).
I don't know how it is in the US, but I think one should include what young people are told when they are looking around what to study and whether or not the IT industry is putting enough effort in that before complaining about not being able to find IT people.
Being a self-taught programmer with a vestigial C.S. degree, all I can say is ... what do you do when faced with those things? I seriously doubt that you could honestly say that every bit of knowledge you need in your IT job today (if you have one) and in the future you could pull out of what you learned in earning your CS degree (if you have one). At SOME point you have to pull out a book. If you never have to pull out a book, then I would be amazed because even some of the things you mention I would have to go back to a reference book because I just plain don't remember. One major difference between a good programmer and a bad programmer is the willingness to pull out that reference and make sure you aren't f*cking up the work, because unless you are a 100% perfect robot you will make mistakes and forget things.
I worked with a guy a few years ago whose primary career for a decade or two was as a university programming/C.S. professor. I'm fairly sure he could recite every bit of C.S. knowledge in your head and then some without ever referencing a book. He was fired within 6 months. He just didn't have what it took to *get the job done* as required because he was too obsessed with doing it 100% right. He would take a month to produce a chunk of code that I would produce in 3 days with very little extra to show for those extra 27 days' work. That doesn't work in the corporate world -- you have to balance efficiency/correctness with deadlines or your career will be sunk in no time.
I'm not trying to de-value a good degree, but I honestly never use 99% of what I learned in university. The few times I have EVER had to use anything you are talking about (or other things you didn't mention) I had to refresh my memory by reading shelved books. Part of what makes me a good programmer (better than most of my colleagues) is basic techniques I learned very early on in my university education. Everything beyond that was simply a foundation for about 1% my typical work day (I'm an IT Director for a $100 million electronics company).
Also, how can I "back up my code's correctness or efficiency"? I believe the proof is in the end-product!! I never have to back up anything if my programs WORK correctly and efficiently. What's inside only matters to the next programmer and if it's sufficiently explanatory that's all that's necessary. Because in the end we exist to serve end-users, they come first and we come second. If more companies (I'm not naming names, Microsoft) took that attitude, I can guarantee you'd see software shipping with better quality than it is today and faster than it is today.
All I can say, Anonymous Coward, is that most of what you're saying doesn't make any sense in the real world so I suggest you go out and get some real world experience.
Very true. Why don't you tell that to all the "programmers" that are getting MCSE's in order to get a better programming job.
The original post was slightly exaggerated to emphasize my point -- which is that if you think an MCSE will get you a job, it'll get you round-filed any time my opinion is asked. Having an MCSE is not itself a detriment, but waving it in my face is. Seriously, how much credit do you give a resume titled MCSE? You laugh and trash it.
On the subject of education, it's a little more nebulous. There are great PhD's out there. A PhD in world literature is likely to be a better candidate than someone with a high-school diploma, even for a technical position. On the other hand, I've found some downright stupid PhD's, too. It's the same metric. If you think the piece of paper is your ticket to a job, you can count my position out.
Its very difficult to find good developers/IT people here in the silicon valley. But the good people have total flexibility of choice of jobs at standard rates of 150/hr or over 100k salaried. Want a job.. i'll get you one if you're competent, but i'm not a recruiter.
C0D3r
What I would really like to know is that why do the congressmen make all this hullaboo about increasing H1B's . Might be they are afraid too many "colored" people might get into the country and ruin the whitey whitey scene.Note the report specifies that it is mostly asians and hispanics getting in. Why not just make the cap on H1B unlimited with the precondition that the job be advertised for at least a month for US nationals and if no qualified gut can be got at a reasonable I repeat resaonable cost just throw it open to the world
**Life is too short to be serious**
I know that there is ALOT of IT jobs here in the Valley of the Sun (Phoenix, AZ), BUT, a majority seem to be contract/consulting not Permanent. Perhaps it's just the nomadic nature of our business?
"We're gonna need a bigger boat"
Hmmm....
./ should go under ".com"?
Sounds like this is turning into a job fair. Instead of discussing the issue at hand (shortage vs. plentitude of geeks in this country) we are submitting our resumes!!! Maybe
Just to "be original": i am looking for a good c++ position. Have been developing proffessional software since i was 12, and can prove it too!
Well, I just started studing CS, and am looking back on 5+ years UNIX. Now, I personaly haven't aplied for any job (thought many offers are coming in daily) yet. Big Q: "How the hack am I supposed to find out if I qualify for Job X?". Most requierment list are filled with basics's and insight's. Is basic writing a HelloWorld, or ist basic doing DB access ? ...), but if I read post like "We need qualified IT people" I just feel worse. :o) ... -- wildcarts are sooo0 convinient "bash# rm -dR / *"
You talk about geeks and PhD's. OK do I qualify for a job if I configure an IDS for my subnet, or do I have to prove that I can set up a full blown multi-server web cache system ? I certainly f e e l underqualified (tought I probably am
Fact is, nobody tells you what you need to know, you just walk into an office and since you are desperate to get some expirience, you just say "Yes I can!".
Most headhunters don't have a clue what the jobs they offer require, thats why I won't meet with them
I just ment to draw a little attention to the problems on the other side
42 cows on a 42km road on their way to 42.org
Actualy I study in CH and have overheard this buzz on CeBit about the IT problem. I think it's fake, what they want are cheap workers, I really cannot believe you have people coming to you who don't know what port numbers are ... this just sounds like a bad joke to me!
:) Well, there are a lot of job offerings on all those funny webpages, but, those are not for real! See, on one job are up to 7 headhunters thats why our telephone/mailing-list is jammed :-/
ludicrously difficult to find anyone on the market with even the most basic appreciation
Is that so ? This must be a UK problem then. I know about FR, DE and CH. And I see loads of IT folks around me, I wounder, if more people would study CS if I could get a job.
You might try a EU wide search and you will find your people.
btw. "real techies" most probably will get a job in the US as well, won't they?
42 cows on a 42km road on their way to 42.org
Having read through the volume of posts, I noticed that one thing was constant, people are saying lack of a College degree is harming their search for a job.
Let me preface this by stating I have no degree, but I am curently working on one in MIS. I have experienced first hand the trouble you can run into when applying for a job w/o a degree. However, I've been a geek since I was 10 (I'm 26 now) starting with the venerable Atari 800XL to the multinode network I have at home now.
I personally think a College degree is overrated when it comes to IT. Really good IT people love what they do, and because of that they work on it all the time to become better. The site I'm at now requires a BA to get in, but contractors don't need a degree. I came on as a contractor, and they were impressed enough to hire me, even though I have no degree. I love what I do, and I use the companies paid training to learn all sorts of stuff. The contractor conversion route is a fine way to get in, but you need.... *drum roll* experience to get hired. that's the catch 22. I got my experience by settling for a job making enough to get by, doing routine coding/support, and used that time to sharpen my skills.. a year later I bailed and joined the contract ranks. Don't assume you deserve 60K+ because you can hack with the best, the companies that are going to pay you that expect you to know how to function in a corp. environment, and that's learned through experience. On the flip side, I'm learning college will teach you how to be a programmer, how to think in data stuctured and algorithms, and solve problems. Some people are good enough that they don't need that base, I find it helps me greatly.
I am the lord of the pun. Dance Knave!
I've recently graduated college and have found almost nothing by way of work in my field of training. I think the biggest issue is that companies aren't really sure of what they are looking for. Many of the jobs I have applied for have been for Junior level programmers, but require 2-3 years of experience. I don't know about anyone else, but that isn't my idea of junior anything.
The chains are broken
Loki is free
Ragnarok is at hand...
Added to this are the frequent calls from 'network engineers' with a collection of certs that have never built a network larger than the 2 stations they have at home. Again, these people expect to paid upwards of $50k to start..
We have implemented a sort of apprentice program though.. I have kids that haven't graduated high school geting paid $30/hr and older guys that just want to keep busy making as much or more.. We get some great help to get us over the rough spots, and they get the experience they need (and some cash)..
I have yet to see any type of shortage, unless it's of clients willing to pay a reasonable rate for competent work..
feydakin
Death and poverty like me so much, they've brought friends!
I think that people who are constantly claiming that there is no IT shortage are really just trying to keep the shortage around. They have an interest in a tight labor market. Let's face it, the more demand there is for us the more we're worth. Anyone who has experience in just about any IT field knows that they are in demand. I recently went "on the market" out of curiousity for how many other opportunities there were and was blown away by the number of calls and offers I've received. Where I work now, we just offered someone a job, who told us that was the 4th offer he had received that week alone. The bottom line is that if you honestly don't think there is a shortage, it's probably because you don't have the assets people want!
The IT industry annoyingly immature. One time there will be a heavy demand for people with particular skills and the bozos think if you work in one technology you cannot do the other. And the y wine that they cannot find enough people. There is fundamentally something wrong in the way they recruit. I was a victim of that approach. I had lot of C++ and CORBA on Solaris but one space age company put me on hold permanently telling that right now they need only JAVA people inspite of me kicking butt in their OO design interview and C++ interview. If I were to recruit for my company I look for people with lots of potential than anything else.
Me for example, I have a tough decision to make in the next month or so. I can go to GeorgiaTech and get all the benefits of a large state institute or I can go to IllinoisTech in Chicago and get the benefits of a smaller school which may mean fewer options, but at least what they do do they should do well. As opposed to the massive scale of GTech were some classes and students are bound to slip through the cracks into "flake-land." Georgia's co-op program is better known though...(this could go on for pages...) Anybody out there got an opinon/ bit of advice/ flame to share on this topic?
I am aware of the fact that most people do not put these two colleges that close to each other in ANY sort of ranking. Personally even I did not at first. However there are some interesting things about the IT industry that make this matter less. This whole set of posts has to do with people who have IT degrees but not the know-how. Such people will not have very successful careers regardless of where they get their degree. Now here is the interesting tidbit: In 1999 graduating Comp Engineers from IIT reporting an average annual salary of 45.6k, but GT graduates with the same degree reported an average starting salary that was only 45.1k. True this is not a very big difference, but the fact that the supposedly better school came out on bottom indicates that most people, while they think coming from a good school is nice, are more interested in what you learned at school, not what school you learned it at. I have heard a great deal to this effect over the last year as I searched for my own future school. Hence, while GT undeniably has better facilities, IIT has a much more attentive environment, and there are, evidently, not nearly as many freeloaders around. So what value can I attribute to all of GT's added opportunities if I find myself unable to take advantage of them?
The different quality of life I would experience at either of these two schools plays a very large role in which one choose to attend. I have visited both IIT and GT. GT for a two-hour tour and seminar deal, but IIT for an entire weekend. While at IIT I stayed in one of the frat houses, and got to experience "Greek life", IIT style. To give you an idea:
1. Dancing (surprise!)
2. Euchre, standard bet was $0.50 a game OMG!
3. N64
In addition, drinking was rather curtailed and the standard beverage was soda not beer.
However, the GT respondent has a point, due to the sheer size of GT it would be rather easy to surround myself with fellow geeks, except for one problem; I have a tolerant disposition which causes flakes, extremists and weirdoes, to seek me out and cling to me with incredible tenacity. For example, among my best friends are found: the class valedictorian (my role model), a Marxist, an anarchist, several children of Baptist missionaries (this would be less weird if I was not Roman Catholic), the only kid in the class expected to not graduate. I can just see myself "carrying" half a dozen flakes through the introductory engineering courses and into their sophomore year. I have already done this with the future dropout, and I do not look forward to doing it again. True I could cut them off, but I find that requires a sort of callousness spirit, which I proudly lack. Although, I may be forced to acquire it in the future. (and the debate roars on...)
Mostly depends on where I'm willing to work and what I'm willing to do. In this area of the south, IT jobs are pretty slim, but then again, so are firms that use a lot of IT.
So far, the major decider as to whether you can or cannot find an IT job is location. Fortunately, the US is still a relatively free country, and you can move. Personally, I'd rather stay in the area I am now. I took my current job at about 2/3 of the average salary so I could stay in this area.
If you're willing to move to where the job is you'll have no problems, but if you live in an area where IT jobs are tight, good luck. Don't forget to factor in cost of living when you're looking at all the money you could be making in San Jose though
Because we know how to figure stuff out. We all know that we don't know everything about software development and are willing to find the best solution.
Not to say that degreed people are idiots, just that there are far too many of them that learned enough to make it through school and then immediately turned off there brains, figuring they knew all they needed to know in order to get a good job.This industry doesn't need more people, we need more people who care about doing a good job, about meeting their mileposts, that care about developing solid, maintainable applications
Phew! Rant mode off
Remember a programming language is not a religion, it's a tool. The problem is when the only tool people have been exposed to is a hammer (or C/C++/VB/Whatever) then they think everything is a nail.
For our company VB was a move up! Before the current IS department was in place everything (and I mean everything) was done in Access. Talk about crap.
Personally, I would love for us to move to C++ for some of our apps, but frankly we don't have the people (or office space to hire more people) to give us the extra time it would take. Fortunately, most of our request are for simple database access stuff that VB is pretty good for.
Contrary to popular PHB belief all people who didn't go to college are not uneducated, we're merely BS free
I was always curious about that shortage. I've been seeking employment for 20 years. I've written bios's, compilers, assemblers, debuggers, a 32-bit operating system, a high-level language (to hit the highlights). My system compiler compiles in less time than it takes to just make a copy of the source. I didn't read the Dragon book or anything; I invented everything as I went along. In hardware I've built tons of stuff including a Multibus controller without data, just by scoping the signals. I've reverse engineered binaries to repair them and port them to different systems. There is no employment opportunity for those with 160 IQ and can do anything. My employment history was in nuclear underground testing, so when I apply someplace they say they don't have a nuclear department. I never touched anything nuclear, I created all types of gadgetry, electronic & otherwise. My daily product was things never before done by human hands. Can they use someone like this? Obviously not.
Oh, so true. I can hardly count the number of applications or systems where, after the programming job is done by some guys fresh out of some computer training program working for some it consultant firm, $ multiple millions have been paid for the hardware, and then the sysadmins sit tearing their hair out trying to keep a system running that is taking ten times the resources it should and basically screaming at the meetings that they have to fix their bloody crap code.
Usually it takes a year or two to get through to management that they've paid for junk that shouldnt see the light of day, and that's usually around the times that the vendors delivering the hardware start looking embarrased, saying they cant sell us hardware that can handle the pressure, we are already overdimensioned by far, and maybe something should be done about the application...
It's not hard to find a job now, but it's
hard to find a GOOD one.
The dotcoms have LOWERED the standards. They've enlarged the eligibility pool by hiring people without degrees, etc. They'll claim that they have to....it's nonsense.
It still takes a while to find a good job. Having just been through a dotcom, I'll never work for another one again! They'll hire just about anybody. We had plenty of folks working there who, despite being at several other dotcoms prior, NEVER ACTUALLY SHIPPED ANY PRODUCTS. People are making a living by going from company
to company, leaving at the slightest hint of trouble and NEVER ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING.
--- Speaking only for myself,
It makes a big difference if you are in college to LEARN rather than just pursue a degree.
You pursue a CS degree to learn how a computer works and the theories behind computing (plus getting an on-campus job troubleshooting or repairing computers part-time can help even a clueless CS major get some experience). Essentially with a CS degree you learn logical thought and problem solving, similar to pursuing a degree in math. This education is intended to allow students to be more efficient and be able to solve problems by providing them with a good background on the process of computing.
Yes, it's true that people who pursue other unrelated degrees will often get jobs working with computers and be better at their jobs than some people with CS degrees. The fundamental difference is often that people who haven't studied computing will know HOW to do something corectly, and maybe even efficiently, but they often won't know specifically WHY a bug or a problem occurs because they haven't studied ISA or OS architecture. They don't know that JAVA passes variables by reference and C passes variables by value, or they found out on their own (and i AM big fan of reading to teach yourself) instead of having a professor show them and explain WHY this is so.
The WHY of how things work can be learned without a degree in CS or engineering, just as anything else. But what seperates a degree in computing from working in the field of computing is this background knowledge. It's true that a lot of people will never use a lot of what they learn in college unless the pursue a post-graduate degree, or a highly-skilled job developing this knowledge. What a college degree does do is teach people to think for themselves while giving them a background of knowledge with which to start a career. You get what you make out of your own education. Enough rambling from me...
void theoremProver(){
print "this product is correct"
}
Mostly everything is close together. I've walked to work every day, during three jobs and two apartments. Being able to walk as transportation is another thing about New York that is hard to find anywhere else. $5 will get you about 15-20 blocks (3/4 mile to 1 mile) with a tip, but that is easily a feasible distance to live from work. I know people who live two blocks from work.
I disagree. I would be more inclined to say i, as in the square root of -1.
Good point, but basically what I think people don't like is the idea of a bunch of foreign workers stealing their jobs. I'm content with my salary, but from what I keep hearing, it's way below the national average. It pays my bills and I own a house. I like where I work, and I like the people I work with. I left for a year and eventually came back (for more money, hehe). Basically, this company couldn't find anyone to replace me. They hired someone and paid him a lot more (from what I've been told) and he got some things done, but quality suffered. Lots of clueless people are jumping into IT, that wouldn't even know how to code a simple database entry screen with anything other than VBA, yet they are still getting paid good salaries, because computer programming is all "magic" to most of the people that determine salaries. VBA vs C++, there just different languages right? Uhhh... No...
I live in an area where two large institutions are merging. There have been IT layoffs and a general exodus of IT professionals. The IT market is saturated with highly skilled and experienced people willing to work for .70 to .80 cents on the dollar just to get a job.
"People need reset buttons"
Did I mention that it is harder than hell to get a job!!! I have been looking for 9 months!!
"People need reset buttons"
I am a grad student in CS who has been looking for a coding job for 8 months...WTF. I have no real coding exp outside school and for fun. No one takes a chance on untested coders even if it is their life dream. So we are relegated to being sys admins on NT networks. Every time I hear about this shortage it makes me want to puke. All of the hiring companies want 6 years of XML with an additional 10 years of Java expierience or something rediculous like that.
Most of the profit in a company goes to the owners and investors of a company. As an employee, you are just an expense that management will try to minimize. Becoming an owner is where we should be putting our effort into. Not into quickly obsoleted skills that third world programmers are quickly learning. I think that programming and IT support tasks will go to low wage countries much quicker that most people expect.
IT labor shortage? There seems to be more of a labor glut in San Jose. Obviously, java people are in short supply with the dotcom startups but large shops are still in process of ELIMINATING jobs. IT labor shortage? Some agent must be pimping H1B people and getting over 50% cut on the deal.
The other thing is that we are shutting out thousands of potential programmers who could enter into a test/training program that selects the "brightest" and prepares them for entry-level jobs ... instead, these jobs are farmed out overseas to foreigners who market themselves as "experienced" when the entire basis of their experience is solely education ... education alone may be insufficient then add in the communications factor ...
:)
Personally I think companies will realize the problem with this approach. Foreign programmers might be cheap, but so is the quality of work. As an experiment, my company farmed out some relatively simple C++ work to a couple of Indian programmers who have regular jobs with the Indian branch of a major U.S. technology company. When the code was delivered, it was full of bugs. It took me almost as long to fix all the problems as the time to do the job right from scratch! (Plus everyone at work had to put up with my bitching while fixing the @#$! bugs) Their delivered source code clearly demonstrated that while they knew the C++ syntax, they did not understand object-oriented design at all!
Needless to say, we are not about to try it again any time soon....
As far as I am concerned, there are two kinds of workers in the technology field: the talented kind and the worthless kind. Care to guess which category Mr. Richard Ellis (the author of the article) falls into? ;-) People who complain about the short life cycles of their skill set should definitely NOT be in this field. I work in this field because things progress constantly and there is always something new. As matter of fact, I refuse to take a job that doesn't involve something I haven't done before. As to U.S. colleges not teaching the latest and "greatest" programming language, that's just fine. Programming languages and OSes are just tools anyway. The important knowledge is the basic concept and theory of computing and problem solving skills. When I was in school, most upper level CS courses involve very little actual coding. Most problems are discussed in pseudo code or even essays. The professors expected people to have acquired the mechanics of coding in lower level courses and did not want to waste time in the details. This is the right approach. I learned the principle of protocol layering and basic concepts of the TCP/IP stack in school. When I actually worked with a TCP/IP stack for the first time on the job, it took me less than a week to port the stack with a telnet shell and tftp application onto my embedded platform. As others have pointed out, there _IS_ a shortage of talented technology workers whom companies are busting their asses trying to hire. Heck, I am not looking for a job but I get offers once every couple of months. On the other hand, there are also plenty of the worthless kind around just to make identifying the talented ones a little harder....
I have to agree that this "shortage" is an artificial one. And yes, foreign workers figure into to the equation heavily ...
As a real life example, I am a mainframe programmer still hacking away on the big iron (IBM - MVS) ... I have some projects on the side but the bread and butter is still the mainframe stuff ...
Now, the move has been on for some time (not just at the company I currently consult at, but others too that I have worked in the past and other sites here local that fellow employees/consultants are/have been employed at) to "resource" out all support and development programming work to India - it is CHEAPER, CHEAPER by a factor of 50% or more (well, probally not in real terms after all the intangibles are taken into account but cheaper in the bean counter executive perspective ...) ... the wish is to have nothing but business analysts in the employ of the company but outsource the rest to Indians either here imported or on site in India along with company DP employees stationed there also ...
The company (a large charge card company for which whose system I support processes millions of card charges a day ...) pledges that employee jobs are "safe", but they still admit that employees may have to "retrain" into more business oriented jobs ...
I have nothing against individuals who study and work hard in technical pursuits and apply their craft competently ... but as mentioned in other posts, the "company" holds the reins of the H1B worker pretty tightly - it does not make for a "free" market of supply and demand ...
The other thing is that we are shutting out thousands of potential programmers who could enter into a test/training program that selects the "brightest" and prepares them for entry-level jobs ... instead, these jobs are farmed out overseas to foreigners who market themselves as "experienced" when the entire basis of their experience is solely education ... education alone may be insufficient then add in the communications factor ...
Another big impact is the downward effect upon salaries and rates for computer programmers ... the influx of a "captive" labor force pushes the rates down - this in turn, leads to the fact that our best and brightest (US, Canada) now elect to be lawyers and MBAs as opposed to engineers and computer programmers - supply and demand indeed - programmers in the 60s and 70s made princely wages, rates that make the present wage and salary marks appear as paltry ...
My firm has many programmers "on the bench" - while, at the same time, the marketing and recruiting people are being queried multiple times a day to sponsor an "H1B" Visa canidate that can be placed immediately at a local business site - why is that? Granted, the mainframe world differs from the PC world, but again I think it would be even easier to find native Americans that can do the pee cee weenie stuff ...
As to the argument that the foreign worker is paid more - maybe that is true in some cases but the general case does not bear that out ... take a look at the hardcopy ComputerWorld and look at the careers section - look away from the flashy ads touting all of the big pimps and look at the hordes of little print lines asking for Masters degree, experience, all for 25K a year! Those are there to meet the requirement that the "job cannot be filled by an American".
This topic touches a button with me ... again, let me state that it is not the foreign worker that I am opposed against but the notion of a restricted labor market - it is funny that big business is all for free market capitalism when it comes to laws and legislation that favor them economically but would like to restrict markets on the other hand concerning labor ...
My 2 lines of code ...
AZspot
2 huge problems I've come across: 1) bias against older workers. Not me personally (not THAT old, yet) but I have seen it. 2) stupid company rules that caps pay so you can never make more than your manager. This is so short-sided. Companies want Bill Joy to come write Java for them but he can't be paid more than his 1st level, running-out-the-clock, nice-guy-but-hangs-out-at-the-water-cooler-all-day manager. Yeah right.
I could never be hired at the site I contract/temp for now because I probably make $10k more than the guy I work for. So they are paying probably double what they could get me for to my company/pimp. Insane.
In summary: there is a shortage of younger, experienced IT workers willing to make less than 1st level managers.
Very good comments. I especially like No. 5. Perspective's needed, though. Hey, it is a huge industry and there are a whole lot of folks out there who are reasonably satisfied. IT is not a field where any one description fits everybody. It's too big and too diverse for one-size-fits-all characterizations to work (and that, in turn, is a good reason to be very careful about reading too much into my take on the career situation in the DDJ piece or the original IT Workforce projects). The practice of not counting people who have gotten ANY kind of work as unemployed in their actual main field did NOT originate with the Clinton administration. Unemployment has been counted this way forever, mainly because the Powers That Be (and Republican pols in particular) are not willing to spend what it would take to do better. The U.S. statistical system has been poorly supported for 20 years and our intelligence shows it. Yeah, there are a LOT of people out there who are not counted as unemployed but probably ought to be at least flagged as underemployed, that is, like programmers who are working as clerks or worse because they can't find appropriate jobs. Some of those people have posted accounts of their situations here. Bob Rivers estimates that "true" unemployment for technical people is about 3.3 times the reported figures. For the benefit of anybody who's delved this far into all these comments, two more points. First, I think these comments are a gold mine for anybody interested in the career scene. Many of them are really good. Second, this whole issue is gonna come up before the Congress again this Spring. The focus will be on foreign temps but I think this just might be an opportunity to inject a push for a movement to get employers to get more serious about the need their people have to keep up their skills. As far as I can tell that is the most critical issue that might actually be able to be improved. The number one problem programmers face is the need to constantly keep up with emerging tools while still putting in long hours on current technology. If you agree, you ought to start thinking about ways to put pressures on your Congressperson, because deals are going to get cut with industry and better employer practices might be able to be traded for increased access to all those people from outside the USA.
They'd rather say "yeah, we can do anything, everything we do is cool" rather than say "we made a crappy OS [bullshit skipped]
"I" and "we" are completely different, and in this case unrelated things. The purpose of open source community is not to drink beer together, or throw hordes of identical people at large projects but to combine efforts of people with different kinds of experience, goals and background. No one knows everything, but it's very unlikely that among large number of people that deal with the same problem there won't be a person that has the knowledge, experience or idea that will eventually bring the solution. Open source makes it more likely that right people will see others' work at right time.
Have I mentioned that you look like ZicoKnows?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
But it seems to me that you wouldn't consider me for a second, because I don't have EXACTLY the skill set that you want. Nevermind that with my history, anybody with a dullard's amount of brains would figure that I could swiftly move in and do the job. A dullard's amount of brains don't appear to be in the requirements document for personnel departments :-{.
(Note -- I am NOT looking for a job, I am quite happy with my current one... I was merely noting what I saw as the biggest problem facing job seekers: inflexible employers who want a particular set of 'easy to define' skills, rather than valuing 'hard to measure' skills like flexibility, intelligence, and productivity).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I'm not looking for a job, BTW, so don't even look for my resume. I'm quite happy with Phoenix AZ and I'm quite happy with my co-workers, who in my opinion are doing a damned good job even when I disagree with some of their decisions. I'll point out that your "must jell well with the other people you are working with" in reality translates to "must be like me". Of course, I must admit that I'm no different... when I'm making hiring recommendations, I'm looking for people who are somewhat offbeat but in a positive way, ability to quote Monty Python optional, and I'm looking for people who I feel can learn anything quickly, even if they don't have the exact skill set for the job. Gosh, people like me :-). But the point is that I realize this, and you, apparently, don't, somehow believing that everybody must be just like you in order to get along. I do believe that there is a value in a diverse workplace. I might not be on the same wavelength as the ex-Air Force officer down the hall (I'm somewhat liberal, he's a staunch Jerry Falwell Republican, I'm the eccentric professor in wrinkled clothing, he's spit and polish etc.), but I do believe he brings something to the company of value, and I don't bother trying to convert him to supporting Al Gore (grin).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
As for VB apps and $45k or more for new hires, it depends on what part of the country you're in. In the Silicon Valley that would be starvation wages :-). In Shreveport, Louisiana, that would be more than the CEO of the company. I do know that one of our recent new hires (well, "recent" == "last June") said that most of his new-grad friends got a job for between $40k and $45K per year, this being in Phoenix. But they were COBOL/data processing types going out into the cusp of the Y2K-fix job market too... I doubt they'd have gotten that much for doing VB!
One thing I have discovered, BTW, is that there seems to be little correlation between high college grades and "hacker talent". Most hard core geeky types apparently prefer to be hacking on their computers rather than studying :-}. But you wouldn't know this from the recruiting practices of many major companies (such as Microsoft), most of which go almost entirely upon grades for their pre-screening of new grads.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
A Temp Worker: $25,000.
An MSCE NT Professional: $40,000.
A Professional UNIX Admin: $60,000.
An Admin who actually knows what that big red button does: Priceless.
Yep, there's a shortage. That's why I'm not worried about a job.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Have you been in a position where you're looking to hire people? I have. We resorted to foreigners because it is _VERY_ hard to find great programmers out there.
Cheap H1B my ass. The INS requires you to prove that you've looked in the local market for someone to fill the position first, and even then you have to pay slightly above the going average salary for the area.
I just recently accepted an H1B job offer in New York (I'm from Canada). The offer was more than generous, and the employer definitely does not have me by the balls. If I don't like it, I'll pack up and drive back to Canada. That's key when you're an H1-B: you can't ever presume that you'll stay in the US. You need a saftey net that will allow you to return home.
And sure, getting out of a lease is annoying, but the signing bonus at my next position would more than make up for that.
-Stu
Given the rate of turnover in this industry (I've never worked for the same company longer than a year, ever, and I get the sense that my experience is typical of younger employees in the market), I'm not remotely surprised that lobbying for more H1B visas is the #1 legislative priority for American technology companies. That's why you constantly hear the wailing about a shortage of tech workers - there's a real agenda being pushed in furthering that notion.
For the record, I feel I should note that I personally oppose all restrictions on the movement of humans across national borders. I'm no xenophobe, I'm just making an observation about our present situation.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I got a job last week in a restaurant because some guy saw my [geek.] shirt from copyleft.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
You write: Personally, i think the shortage is not of IT professionals, but of competent, well-trained ones.
It goes without saying that the only people that are of immediate highly productive use in an enterprise are competent, experienced ones ("well-trained" on its own doesn't cut it), simply because the pace of development is far too rapid for companies to be able to carry out their plans by training up raw recruits. It takes years to create a top expert, and the ratio of success to failure is low. Most people end up being barely passable, definitely not the kind you'd want as head designers of anything important.
Having said that, beggers can't be choosers, and alas, while the IT shortage is a matter of some debate in the US (apparently), it is most definitely not a matter of debate in Europe. We're desperate for people in all Internet-related areas except Microsoft, and currently it seems ludicrously difficult to find anyone on the market with even the most basic appreciation of elementary things, say port numbers in TCP. I'm fed up of interviewing guys whose idea of fixing a problem is to phone up support.
So, if you're a real techie and can't find a job in the US and have a means of entry into some European country (especially the UK, please!), then come and offer us your services. The pay is good too, especially if you're skilled enough to be a freelance contractor.
(Maybe if enough folks come over, I could get more sleep.)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
No shortage of IT workers?
All I can say is, "Shh!".
Don't say these things out loud...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Don't get me wrong, I'm very much of a market realist. The fact of the matter is that good IT can save a company a great deal of money (not to mention boost earnings). My problem, however, is less a matter of the price being paid for IT, then it is simply utter lack of available talent. The talent that can usually be had by most companies is mediocre, and the price paid is steep. I certainly take issue with anyone who would say that IT talent simply isn't an issue, that it's being fabricated by companies so they can reduce their IT costs by bringing in help from the 3rd world. Clearly when one looks at the avg. IT salary since the growth of "tech" visas, it speaks very much contrary to this fact.
Furthermore, although I believe in paying what the market dictates, I don't necessarily believe this is ultimately healthy for the economy. While many large companies can afford to hire very expensive IT, most startup companies (except for some of these dotcoms rolling in VC money, but that's more of an abberation...) are being priced out by larger companies because they can not afford these kind of cash outflows. Simply put, this has adverse effects on the economy. It seems particularly silly when the US has a very backwards immigration and visa policy, that effectively only lets in nominal levels of skilled (or even semi-skilled) labor, but hundreds of thousands of unskilled people. I can think of many companies that are desperate for good IT, yet they just can't get it, even though there are millions of highly skilled IT people outside the US who're willing to work at rates they can afford. Simply put, these costs (but more importantly the shortage) are needlessly artificially high because of protectionist and backwards immigration laws.
The bottom line: If you see the great value of good IT and realize the rarity of it in corporate America, it's hard to argue economically that it would hurt our country to allow more (but not necessarily completely open) talented workers in.
I was able to get a decent job as a systems programmer for Penn State while going to school part time here. I do not have my degree (and when I do, it will be in Econ, I don't know why) but I do have some experence and I pick up stuff quickly.
It's not a linux job, there is no chance of getting in on a multi-million $ IPO, but I get to play with a s/390 mainframe and I'm now able to eat (something I sorely missed as a student)
Finkployd
I suppose that I see both at my place of employment, I have a co-worker who does nothing but pretend to know the industry.
I am more of the mercenary type. However there are rules of common decency that apply. 1. Don't divulge any private information about any former employer to benefit your new employer. 2. Don't steal any customers from your former employer.
If someone is going to offer you more money you have no obligation to turn them down. Liking the people you work with/for has nothing to do with it. You need to weigh the importance of the various benefits and how they affect your situation.
This isn't 40 years ago when you could expect to work for 1 company until you retire.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It's not hard to find a job - If you know what you're doing. I last re-meplyed myself about three months ago, and was getting 4-5 contacts a day over a 2 week period with 3 years of unix experience.
:P
I dunno what the market is like for recent graduates.. It can't possibly be more difficult. My two best friends got geek jobs without CS degrees, and without any real work experience, and both for good money.
But, like everything else, it depends on where you are and who you know. We're all in NC, so the labor market is sweeeeet. I think any metropolitan area is going to have a need for plenty of geeks.
And, warm bodies with 'experience' are never hard to find, but experience (time on a job with a CS sort of title) is no real metric of ability. It all depends on the person - some people work for 10 years at a job and only pick up the minimum to get through it. It would take five of those people to do the work of one person with actual skill.
YMMV.
--
blue
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Some CS curriculums really aim for that: they expose students to different subjects and languages in a seemingly haphazard way. That's the way to go. Others, of course, pick some kind of stream-lined path around what sells (Windows, VC++) or what is in vogue (Ada or Java or ... to the exclusion of anything else). That doesn't prepare the students for the crazy and ever changing real world.
As a guy who just got his first job out of College and used headhunters and online resume websites, forget it. Those things are shit. I got all my interviews with good companies from friends, and newspaper ads. Headhunters are complete waste of time.
Linux O Muerte!
The TOP TEN reasons why business says there is an IT labor shortage are:
Anyone who has taken Economics 101 knows (if you didn't sleep through the course) the laws of supply and demand. When the demand goes up and/or the supply goes down, the prices go up. Correspondingly when the supply is up and the demand is down, prices go down. When the unemployment is high, business is happy because salaries and wages stay low. People are willing to work for less when the alternative is no work at all. Business fights to prevent efforts by the government to raise any salaries or wages, as well as fights efforts to impose more benefits like health care. Business insists that economics are at work and things should be left alone. Turn the tables on business and give it a situation where there are indeed fewer people, which would cause salaries and wages to go up, then business suddenly doesn't want to play by the same rules, and wants the government to step in and change things to their benefit.
I suggest that the real problem in the USA is a shortage of competent management.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Reading the article is very informative:
Overall, we have more people that CAN do IT, but many aren't or are too limited or in the wrong spot.
Me, I get plenty of calls a month. I'm 32 (supposedly over-the-hill), and going fine. My guess is there's not a gap statistically - but there's a gap in will and standards.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I have to agree with the earlier post about location location location. It may be tough to find an IT job in Philly, but here in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada) its a snap.
I have just started with a new company(after fielding a few offers and at least 1 headhunter calling me per day for a month) and am working with a client in Kanata, the "Silicon Valley North." Out there comapies like Newbridge, Nortel, Mitel and Lockeed Martin have giant banners on their building asking, nay, begging for skilled workers. Nortel actually has a store in the mall across from their HQ rented out as a recruiting centre - like the Army! Newbridge (who is hiring again after being bought by Actel of France) laid off hundreds of workers a few months ago during restructuring. The competion for labour was so fierce that Nortel had recruiters in sandwhich boards getting candidates outside their AGM in the Corel Centre (arena where the Senetors play). On the day of the layoffs, they rented a Greyhound bus, which waited outside of the Newbridge offices for the laid off workers to be escorted out. HR people then brought them onto the bus, interviewed them and offered them positions then and there.
Sounds like an IT labour shortage to me up here...
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
A wise man once said there are three types of computer users.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
So, what does one do when ones local market is flooded with people who fake it real well. I'm really good at figuring things out with computers but am openly honest about what I don't know. But it seems like everyone I talk to who has a good job, knows even less than me, but looks as if they know more. So I end up working stupid jobs, getting turned down at every chance. Yes, I'm attempting to go the college route but an AA doesn't seem to be enough and I'm having hard enough time just passing classes in junior college (not college material exactly, when it comes to a job I work my butt off for them, but can't seem to equate motivate myself in formal education)
*****The university system is not poised to effectively teach Computer Science. Respected schools like Cal Poly still teach Ada as a core language. The IT world changes much too fast for the university sytem to keep its curriculum current. Recent grads leave with a degree; training in obsolete areas; and a whole lot of theory with little practical relevence. *****
Actaully you go to a college not to learn a specific language, but to learn how to program. To learn about data structures and algorithims. To learn about CS theory and about writing structured modular clode. If you understand the core basics of thinking like a programmer you should be able to learn a new language with little trouble.
If you are going to school to learn a programming language then you are getting short changed. There is more to programming than knowing syntax.
So if you were putting together your resume today, would you still put MSCE down, or leave it off?
I think the original poster has reached the point where they see MSCE on a resume as being almost at the level of putting down Basic or Pascal - it makes you question more the wisdom of the person who would choose to present that as something they were proud enough of to include on a one page summary of who they are!
When I look at resumes, I look to them to tell me what the applicant has been proud of, and what they are interested in working on in the future.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'd say that demand for people with actual CS degrees is at an all time high - I hardly ever see resumes from people with a CS degree and am very excited to see that - we just interviewed two CS grads where I work and made them both offers.
These people had also been just doing stuff on the side in thier room - I think that real interest like that will always show, and make you very appealing to people at any company with half a brain.
Apart from CS knowledge the ability to communciate well is really important, and you seem fine in that respect as well - I wouldn't worry at all!
Good luck, and enjoy your career. I know I have!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Getting an MCSE has nothing to do with writing sample code OR answering algorithm questions. MCSE's are not programmers. You should be asking them how to set up multiple domains, WINS, DHCP, how a client gets authenticated etc etc. If you're looking for sample code from MCSE's you're barking up the wrong tree. Try MCSD's.
At my company I seem to do all of the above. Granted there are others who seem to do some programing or some system admin in addition to their normal functions, but very few who do both, plus can be trusted to open up a machine and install/configure hardware (pick a Unix flavor OR winNT), or do basic database administration, excluding for a moment web-design (html & javascript) which is mostly outside of what we normally do.
I think the shortage may not be so much people with a few skills, so much as people who:
1) have a variety of skills and experiance and can be thrown into various 'ad-hock' situations.
2) can actually learn and expand their skill set relatively painlessly (for their employer) as needed.
and 3) can actually interact with other people (PHB, other programmers, clients).
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
I'm sorry, I wrote the comment at work. In fact, I think this is the first time I'm posting to /. and not at work. Believe me, posting while working is not the best thing - my job frustrates me considerably.
:)
:) .sig: File not found.
I'll be more precise, although I doubt you'll respond to it since as an AC it's harder to find your comment amidst the myriad of others
You're right. I didn't intend to insult VB, nor DLL's in general, nor any of another million things.
I'm a rather skilled VB programmer (or at least, like to think so). I like the language, and the RAD features. What my comment intended to ennunciate is that my job has been fucked over by those who came before me, who didn't have the skills but were able to present themselves as skilled.
Thus we have about 40 different DLL's to do things in the most complicated when a straight path would do better that crash constantly, but we don't have time or resources to fix them since we're constantly running prod support in addition to development. It's as much a management problem as a coding problem.
I have to say for a project that requires or would be suited to RAD, VB is quite decent. But, if you are skilled at VB as you say, I doubt highly your saying the language is decent.
It's currently at version 6, and about to hop to 7. The IDE is buggy as hell (ever missed a reference in the project file? sit around for about ten minutes for it to open so you can fix it). Optional arguments can't be user-defined types. There's no hierarchical class structure. Forms can't have user-defined properties. Etc, etc, etc. I don't mean to be bashing VB - it has it's place and uses.
We run an embedded system for computer-based testing.
I would be greatly interested in any reason you had that would explain why we should be running said system in Windows, using VB, with an Access backend. I can't personally think of any. And that's not a flame.
*sigh* I'd much rather go for C/C++ with a linux server, have the testing stations on X servers and link off the main server - no more DLL problems on each machine, etc, etc, etc. We have a sick amount of DLL's, and every time we change one thing we have to recompile 90% of them, or else we get the wonderful old "ActiveX Component can't create object". Helpful error, that.
So I guess this rant is both that VB allows people without skills to more easily foist themselves upon unknowing suits, and that VB is, while a decent RAD language, not suited to the markets the M$ targets it to (mission critical applications and doing "hey, we've integrated VB with IIS! run everything in VB").
Anyway.
That's enough from here
ls:
ls:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
I don't know what kind of crack the previous AC was smoking... I thought the site rocked!
I couldn't agree more either - I've got most of my jobs because I can walk in and say "I've been doing this since 1983. If I don't know something, I can learn it, quickly."
That, and a DEMONSTRATION that i actually know something is usually what gets me in the door. One example of this working actually was when I went to work at SBC. Didn't like it much and moved on, but I was still happy that I had been able to get into a company like that.
Scott
Hey Rob, Thanks for that tarball!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
The "shortage" is really companies wanting to have extra people to devote to growth rather than simple maintenance. They also aren't willing to pay market rate for the skillsets they need.
The recession in the early '90s made companies used to having a hundred overqualified candidates willing to work for peanuts, and now that the situation's reversed, these corporations are whining about having to take what they can get.
Any company who looks at the payscale for the position they're trying to fill and starts offering a salary at least at the middle of that scale rather than the bottom will have no problem getting the people they're looking for. Once they start valuing their IS employees as more than mere maintenance crew / union laborers, they'll find themselves having an easier time both hiring people and keeping them.
-jpowers
-jpowers
I have to agree. I know of places that have been trying to find good programmers for months. What they actually keep finding is people who took some classes in college but have no experience, or people who have been programming for a few years, but still code like they did when they first started. Too many don't have any experience, while others have not made any progress with their programming skills.
A friend told me about a potential job candidate that had a nice list of skills, but the person didn't really know any of these tools. He just put them on his resume to try to get hired...and it worked.
Miller
The reason there are so many H1 visa people and foreigners in the IT business is because they are often the only people available. Here in the US, very few people are getting 4-year degrees in CIS, and there arn't that many self-taught competent engineers. Things are different in India, for example. In India, getting a CIS degree is in the same class as getting a law or medical degree in the US. There's an overabundance of lawyers in this country but very few people graduating with CIS degrees.
In almost every company I have worked most of the engineers are from India and a lesser extent from Taiwan and China. As a senior engineer who has interviewed many people, it is quite difficult finding talented programmers. It is even more difficult in that in the networking sector I work in most of the work is in embedded systems which requires far more skill than writing standard Unix or Windows programs. For one thing, a bad pointer will likely require a reboot since there's usually no safety net and the debugging tools are often quite limited (and very often home-grown).
Sure, anyone can implement a linked list, but there arn't many people who can implement interrupt handlers or use a logic analyzer to track down a system hang.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Form the PHB perspective, sometimes you want to grow your development team for the future and you don't have any immediate need for skills that aren't currently coved by the existing team. So you find someone who is generally good (smart, problem solver, quick learner, hard worker, good communication, plays well w/ others etc.) and the past experience need not be a perfect match to some skill list.
OTOH, sometimes you desperately need someone who is an *expert* in some specifc thing and you don't have time to wait for someone already on your team to gain expertice (i.e. your database guru with an MS and 10 years experince just quit and the jr. database guys are good but they aren't gonna aquire 10 years Oracle kung foo in 6 months).
Most situations probably fall somewhere between these 2 extremes.
Of course, if a company has the size and the cluefulness, they try to
While dealing with clueless HR is annoying ("says here you've used HPUX, Solaris and RedHat, but do you have UNIX experience, I really need someone with UNIX experience" True Story!), in some situations the job description is narrow for a good reason.
Additionally, it's good to bear in mind that job listings are brodcast further and further over time (company corkboard -> newspaper) and the signal to noise ratio increases accordingly so a response to newspaper ad is gonna be screened more anally than a response to a personal recomendation. How would anyone deal with 500+ resumes? _What_Color_Is_Your_Parachute_?_ covers this angle well and is a good resouce for anyone who is job hunting.
- bridgette
I have serious doubts about any company that uses headhunters to find fresh graduates. After all, they can interface directly with the univerity career centers and not have to pay 30-100% of a years salary in commission. Because of the prohibative cost, most places will only use headhunters when they are having trouble finding the right person. When the pool of potentially qualified people is extremly small (CEO, expert in some really specific area, etc.) this is quite understandable. When the pool is really large (anyone with a BS in X) this seems very odd.
IMHO, the best plan is to use any resorces that your school has to offer (a lot of places even do on campus interviews), read _What_Color_Is_Your_Parachute_?_ and research companies and their openings on their homepages.
- bridgette
The university system (however one defines that) *is* well poised to teach Computer Science, but not programming... learning *how* to program is more important than knowing a language. A school that teaches you a language or a skill is a trade school. A school that teaches you how to think and adapt is a college/university (at least, that's the way it's supposed to be). As I told all of my prospective employers during interviews when they asked (what I think are) dumb questions about what languages I knew - A language is just a means to an end, a set of syntax that can one can adapt their thoughts and methods to. If you can learn one language, you can learn any language (most people won't believe this, and it is a great stumbling block to them).
;-) School is an opportunity to tune, refine, and expand your work, and should be taken advantage of, but just going doesn't guarantee anything. It's all about the work you decide to put into it.
People who are out to 'learn Java' or 'learn Perl' to get a job are shorting themselves. Granted, languages do take more than a day to become efficient in (like C++ multiple inheritance/polymorphism, if you go for that), but if you know *what you want to do* and plan it out, you can make fairly elegant code in almost any language (picking the right language for the job should be part of the planning, too).
Courses in Models of Computation, AI, Compiler Theory, Operating Systems (meaning scheduling, mm, kernel/library structure - not UNIX, NT, DOS), and Data Structures/Algorithms tend to separate the specific skill schools from the real thing. A semester of nothing but pseudo code can be the most elightening thing for some, because it focuses on the process, not the syntax. Too many programmers get hung up on 'I know how to do these seven things in C' and try to do everything with them... Curriculums that teach languages should only use them as a vehicle for teaching the real constructs of programming. Computer Science has less to do with the language than it does with processing that language.
I agree that many recent grads may leave without a whole lot of experience or cluefulness. Experience does count - that what internship / co-ops are for, and independant projects. I was bored and was programming BASIC when I was about 7, and by the time I graduated high school, I was proficient in a number of things, and could have gotten work straight out (IMHO). The point is, I went to school, refined my thoughts, processes, and really learned a heck of a lot that, to be perfectly honest, you can't always get from a book (when was the last time your book looked at your code and told you it was ugly? How do you know?). I'm an engineer, not a CS major, so pretty code isn't always as important to me
Some of them are from Mars, though... at least, I wouldn't doubt it...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Initiative and curiosity help you learn to think, and that's what it's all about. There are different paths for different people, and I wasn't trying to say that everyone *has* to go through a CS program, just that it can help refine the thought process (without brainwashing, of course) and hone those problem solving skills. I've always been a hardware guy at heart, and my engineering education has biased me to believe that if you can thrive in any engineering field, you have the abilities you need to adapt to any other field (I liked O-Chem... figure that one). Undergraduate educations are meant to teach you how to think and give you a base of knowledge that you can apply to the _real world_ when you get there. Graduate school is where you focus in on a particular area, and start to learn more recent things. I did hardware development on a uVax and PDP-11 in wirewrap, but the design process is essentially the same in VHDL (with which I am now rather well acquanted). Again, learning how to attack problems is the key. Some people are ready without extra schooling, and some people need that extra few years. Some, like myself, tried to take as much advantage of the opportunities that schools offer. I got a nice job as a multi-platform sysadmin at school (which was also a little extra cash), the reputation of the school helped me get summmer internships, and college was critical in my social developement, which I would have missed out on if I went straight to work - besides, where else can you get a good game of Descent going, and just taunt people verbally from down the hall (or Warcraft 2, Q-II...) 8^)
Since I've strayed from my original point (I tend to do that on an empty stomach), I'll recap:
You were right 8^)
So was I 8^)
LAN games are fun 8^)
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
That's just it... I know a few people who I graduated with who had degrees in Biomed or other semi-random fields, but had taken two or three CS courses, and a 1 credit Java intro, and made their way into work that way... Some of these people probably couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, while others were actually fairly competent. By the time I graduated, I had a few years of experience doing admin on various platforms (AIX/Solaris/Linux/NT/etc), and had enough of a clue to land myself just about whatever IT job I really wanted (one company even asked me if another offer was binding - wanted to raise my $$$ - of course, I had a tech interview with them 8^D) If you have the (some/any real) experience, are a quick learner, and aren't just faking your way through, you can land a lot of jobs... Heck, 1 credit of Java was all I took and one company wanted me to do that (no thanks!). It's a scramble to find semi-qualified people, but there are a lot who try to get by with less...
;-)
Of course, I went into hardware and microcode... figure that one
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
... on many different variables;
1. Exactly what skills you have.
2. What region are you located.
3. How much pay you are looking for.
4. Who you know and when.
5. Luck.
6. What non-pay benifits are do you want.
7. How much real world work experience do you have.
Number of workers in a specific job category is, in the end, just one factor in you finding a job.
I'm sure that there is some baker, tailor and candlestick maker out there which always employeed in his/her field.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
From the report:
Programming remains at the heart of all IT work and it is not going to disappear as a profession. Demand for IT specialists is so strong that growth is still forecast for programmers despite effects of outsourcing and automation. Needs for "worker bees" may be diminishing, but interest in the queens and kings of programming is as great as ever. At the top of the field are the gifted practitioners described by Randall E. Stross: "The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order of magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability." 6 At this level, programming is an elite profession.
That is, the report acknowledges what you and I and most others here already know--and that is, there is no shortage of morons out there who want to rake in money by bullsh-tting themselves into a well-paying tech job that is way over their head. However, there is a very big shortage of what you call "competent, well-trained ones", and which the report refers to as the "queens and kings" of programming.
Programming has always been a somewhat "elite" job, where the best programmers can outcode by as much as a factor of 25 or more. (Hell, the book "The Mythical Man Month" aludes to this, and it was written in the IBM OS360 days.) And as more and more complex web sites, applications and embedded operating systems arise out there, the demand for the competent, well trained professionals there will become a "make or break" situation: if you have one on your project, you will ship. If you don't, you will piss several millions of your investor's dollars down the drain real quick.
What strikes me as very interesting is that (1) the success or failure of a project is directly linked to having a gifted programmer on your staff, and that (2) management's failure to recognize the huge disparity between a qualified programmer and an unqualified programmer means that the chances that a qualified programmer works for a particular manager is largely luck.
This is a sad situation, but there you go.
I guess what pisses me off the most is the fact that most managers don't recognize this fact.
Come to Boston/Cambridge/Rt128. If you can tolerate working for suits and phbs, you can have all the money you want.
----------------------------------------------
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I'm shortly graduating from an EE program, and if I ever called myself a "proffessional", I might have to go sit down and cry. Especially if done when looking for work. And there's $hitloads of jobs out there for people that know how to do things.
Steve
..don't panic
I love technology. There will never be too few jobs in the computing industry. Most of our work is creating bugs. Somebody has to fix those bugs, right? And test. And do it all over again. It's a self-sustaining system. Probably doesn't even need customers. Wooo!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Anyone can pass a test. All you have to do is memorize a book. What happens when you want them to actually apply that knowledge?
... it is considered a graduate level course by the proff teaching it, yet this guy still didn't have a clue how to do sockets.
Where I'm going to school, I'm constantly shocked by the number of people I have to work with in groups that <i>do not know what they are doing</i>.
Yesterday I had to teach a guy how to use sockets for a group project in "Distrubuted Operating Systems" (we're creating a system of 5 replicated values, using 2 different methods of transaction propogation). This is the sequal to the Operating Systems class
I've encountered people that don't know what "return" does in a function! (They "passed" the course that was supposed to teach them the stuff).
Point being, yeah the paper means that they've gone through it, but did they just remember the stuff for a test, or do they really know how to use it?
That is sorta understandable.. They've done some interesting studies that the top programmers can sometimes be 10x-100x better and more productive than an average programmer. They might not write as many lines of code as the average programmer, but their code is clearer, more bug free, simpler, or more elegant. And given the cost of maintance combined with the cost of bugs, that number is VERY easy to understand.
:)
And the rarity of people in that class is also easy to understand. You don't join that class by learning C on your own. Nor by having an MCSE. You learn it by loving computer science, knowing the fundamentals, and gaining experience.
Remember Sturgens law: 90% of everything sucks.
I don't think that this is necessarily true. Maybe I just resent the comment, since I am a self taught programmer who deals all of the concepts you mentioned - maybe not the buzzwords, but definitely the concepts. I also spent many months of my life fixing a badly written C++ program from someone with lots of education, but no real world experience. So it really goes both ways. Neither education or experience is complete all by itself, and neither is worth anything if you walk around with your head up your butt. But to imply that there isn't any good self taught programmers is pure bull. Someone had to teach themselves this stuff before they could teach it to anyone else. [RANT COMPLETE]
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
I agree with you pretty wholeheartedly on this comment. But I also believe that learning to be a good thinker, which is the key to learning how to program, is usually self taught.
I chose a different route than you did. I also learned BASIC at 7, and was a pretty proficient programmer and computer tech when I left high school. I chose the the "work straight out" of high school route, worked building computers for a couple of years, and then got Novell certified and did networking for a couple more. I'm now a Software Design Engineer, working with a team of mostly degreed programmers, and my employer is paying my tuition to finally get that fancy piece of paper.
Where I work, we have a heck of a time finding competent Software Engineers. Most applicants just don't have the proper problem solving skills. I think the main skill you need on a programming team is the ability to learn quickly. And I agree that knowing how to program is more important than knowing the syntax of a particular language. When I started my current position two years ago, my main language was C (though I'd played with about 5 other languages). Now I mainly work in Perl, Java, and C++, none of which I knew when I started. I feel as comfortable in Perl and Java as I do C, even though I've known C since 1990.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Hmm. NT. Halon. NT. Halon. NT needing a halon system to put out fires.
Although I know quite well these are implemented for any hardware massed in a small room, somehow I just can't stop smiling. =)
(And yes, unix admins like breathing. in most cases. i've known a few that could live off the supply of hot air in their inflated heads. =D)
Could you toss me a couple links to these *headhunter* sites? I am about to graduate with a degree in Electronic Engineering, and am looking for a job.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
Anyone have similar/different experiences?
Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?
Can your IM do this?
Those that I know in the tri-state area say that getting an IT job there is incredibly easy, and I believe it. A simple search on dice will show you that - there are SO MANY jobs available it's not even funny (at least not to be because I don't have the money to reloacate).
It all comes down to the area you're in. It looks like NYC and Cali may in fact have a shortage of workers, because their tech economies are booming, and there are more businesses than workers. In places like upstate NY, where the economy is still sub-par, it's the other way around.
Isn't that how unemployment works in every industry?
Man's unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A
I hate Dice, because the only people that see your resume are recruiters. Recruiters who know nothing about the industry, or the job, other than the list of "requirements" that their client has given them.
I was turned down for a "web developer" job because I didn't have enough CRYSTAL REPORTS EXPERIENCE!! Can you believe that? Sheesh... okay, give me two days to look at it and I'll know your stupid CRYSTAL REPORTS. Unfortunately, it's hard to say that kind of thing in an interview.
I think in your case, you'd be hard pressed to find a job in a company that specializes in IT. Me too, apparently. Thus the apparent shortage.
But I can tell you that there are industries struggling to find IT people-- industries you've never even considered.
I work at a poultry company. I've seen my company hire morons because they can't find real applicants. Another problem is the just-in-it-for-the-money people looking for the "fast track IT job" won't even interview here, because it's a poultry company.
No, you won't get the highest of salaries (I make $41k a year, which actually isn't too bad for a single guy) but you will get that elusive Job Experience thing. I don't think anybody here has a CS degree, although at least half have a 4-year degree in something. I have a BS in physics, and another programmer has a degree in chemistry.
I'm learning a bunch of stuff that you can only get with experience, as opposed to schooling. Supply chain? EDI? Barcoding? As well as the underlying database technology, with some web development on the side (ASP). This is the kind of stuff that (hopefully) will be very favorable to a career in B2B (buzzword: Business to Business) E-commerce. Despite what you may have heard, the B2B boom hasn't happened yet, but it's starting to. Why? All the "real" B2B is still happening via good old EDI (875->880 UCS transaction sets, anyone?) which has been around for at least 20 years. That will change, but it won't be going heavily on the internet for another few years. This is very, very different from the "e-commerce" buzzword as most people know it. Actually seeing the internet used in the supply chain is still a ways off, even though the technology is there, which is why now's the time.
So what am I rambling about?
Find an ESTABLISHED INDUSTRY, one that has been around for a while and thus knows how to hire and grow employees. Many of them are just starting to grow their IT departments, and to explore what they can do with this newfangled "internet thing" and are looking for people to do it. Talk to them directly. Search them out. Look at packaging companies, manufacturing-- especially the food industry. Find out where they are headquartered. Generally they'll be hiring people with diverse knowledge as opposed to a lot of knowledge in one area-- i.e., you'll be wearing a lot of hats.
The manufacturing industry as it applies to IT isn't a cash cow (we'll never hire a $80k network admin, don't need to) but it's a definite get-your-foot-in-the-door experience builder for something much more lucrative later.
Somebody who is just looking for an immediate, high-paying IT job isn't really thinking strategically or long-term, and will often be disappointed.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Be careful man, you are one of the extreme minotiry of people alive today. Look at the Open SOurce community. They'd rather say "yeah, we can do anything, everything we do is cool" rather than say "we made a crappy OS that doesn't add anything new, looks like it was written 20 years ago, and if you want it to be easy to use you can go fuck yourself because we hate you". That's just one example thrown in because of the venue, but there are tons of examples of it. My boss goes slack-jawed when I go up to him and tell him how I fucked up. I do it directly, without glossing it over, i tell him exactly what I did, exactly how far behind it put us, everything. I tell him I've learned from it and its not going to happen again. And it doesn't. I've got other coworkers who try to pin things on me saying I put games on their PC and all kinds of other stuff. Well, who do you think gets believed when the lying employees claims are disputed?
But the bottom line is, if you can't get your job or can't impress people without lying, guess what? You're not worth paying and you're not impressive. Live with yourself.
Esperandi
...I preferred people WITHOUT comp sci degrees. 'Scuse me while I don my flame-proof suit. OK. I have found through the years that people with CS degrees tend to have much more limited outlooks on problems than those from other fields. I want people with real-world knowledge and personal depth, not people who relate mostly to computers. I've seen great programmers with math degrees, degrees in the sciences, and even in English. Naturally, I want these people to have had some cs training so they understand algorithms, but the most important factors for programming success are native intelligence and a willingness to always be learning new things.
I do agree with you on certification. It's mostly useless.
No sig? Sigh...
The availability heuristic is a poor method of proof. While you may have never ever heard of such an employer, you may be surprised to read that I have. MSCE's have a bad reputation at certain companies: as another poster put it, they are stereotyped. At many of the companies I've worked at, they have felt burned by trusting the certification only to hire several vastly unqualified workers in a row. There is often a period of backlash where anyone who is certified is disqualified from the position immediately. This often results in the hiring of a competant person because they are looking at the person's other qualities instead of just the certification. This rewards the belief in the stereotype and perpetuates it to other managers through anecdotal evidence.
I must admit that I am nervous when I see MSCE on a resume. It is really how that particular thing is displayed, though. If it is listed as an important aspect of the person's skills (near the top of a skills section or if the certification section is above the skills section), then I become questioning of the candiate's actual skillset. If it is more subdued, then I with either not notice it or understand that certain things are put on a resume to pass through the "HR filters". The real difference is int one case you are selling yourself as a skilled person, int the other you are selling the MSCE program. Since I, and many others, are disbelievers of the program, it cannot be a large foundation of your sell to me.
-no broken link
A post-secondary degree is not a guarantee for a job, certainly, but it can be an important asset in a candidate, depending upon the post-secondary institute and courses taken. The fact of the matter is that to get a worthwhile degree, you must solve problems in a wide variety of domains that you would have otherwise not have even bothered to look at. This makes the candidate more well rounded. Of course, actual workforce experience in a domain may make a candidate more appealing for a particular task (i.e. a contract postition), but when hiring for versatility (i.e. a perminant employee position), a candidate needs a lot of experience to make up for a lack of degree. Even self study does not mak up for it because, as I bolded above, a degree will force you into problems and domains you would not bother to look at.
-no broken link
Personally, I don't think finding a job in IT is at all difficult. That is if you're not looking to do web-design. People like that are a dime a dozen because it's something you can learn by just sitting on your computer all day, picking up on little details of web design. Granted you probably won't pick up Java or JavaScript or etc..., but with the overwhelming number of books that teach Java or JavaScript or whatever these too are easy to learn. However, I'm a Junior IT major who just recently got a job at an insurance company making good money working on web design upkeep and development. I had no competition, at least none that I knew of, and they didn't have to think it over, I was offered the job the same day. I think the problem is with computer majors not knowing how to present themselves to the interviewers, i.e. because they sit at a computer all day programming they have little to no people skills and that's the main thing that employers first see when you interview.
So if CS or IT majors are finding it hard to find the job of their dreams maybe they should quit playing Baldur's Gate or EverQuest all day and have some real human to human interaction. Just a thought...
Kate
That's funny, I know lots of people who make more than 60k..... I hope they enjoy their current jobs then, because if the market gets flooded with qualified 60k workers, and then they decide to change jobs, it might be a tad bit harder to find an equivalent salary elsewhere. No need to sneer. I'm not saying more visas is better or worse. I'm simply pointing out the economics of the situation. With 4 years military, a CS degree, and 2 years of unix experience, I sure didn't have anyone banging down my door last October. I feel the shortage is exaggerated.
--
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
That is honestly NOT cool. I know this is redundant and I know how easy it is to use Buzz words and use a little crafty diction to 'answer' someones question.
You just *CANT* do that if you want any kind of reputation. When im talkingw ith a client and he says, "Do you know how to do this" I will tell him. the TRUTH. If I have an idea and the little mice in my head start turning the wheels I will say, yeah I have good idea of how to accomplish that. Or no clue I can only give it my best and tell you the results. And some of the time my ideas are wrong and things are grossly more complex.
Is that my fault or his? It is *MY* fault for saying I could do it so I spend the time to learn it and do it. My fuck up im at least going to step up to the plate tell the customer its behind and work my ass off to learn and figure out how to do something.
Friends and family yeah propogate untruth to them. They are the people who run around raving (MHZ == ALL) because the guy down the street who was Microsoft certified told them so.
The point is be responsible and just be HONEST!! You are not impressing anyone in the long run.
I cant think of anything I hate more than people who will sit and argue with me or tell me im wrong when I am reading them a comment out of a Programming book and they say that they are right and I am wrong.
People who do this are evil I think. Not willing to admit they do not have a clue. It takes a big fella to admit where his faults are yeah. So.. It is in a joking manner you present this but it is a difficult and true thing that I deal with almost every day as I unlearn 10-20 myths to a client whose got a PC Support guy who is just someone who learned to install all their software.
Problem I can fix it. *reinstall windows*
*GAG*
It is not cool and frankly it offends me when people lie.
Jeremy
It seems that the shortage is in the ability to pay huge salaries for good work.
When I landed in US 4 years ago without knowing too much English, it took me 2 weeks to find work (in fact they found me). Since then, they kept raising my salary as craizy, so the headhunters run away in fear when I start talking about six digits. They don't want even to know the first digit.
And when you think that 5 years ago I was working hard, two jobs for 1k/year... altogether.
Working in Silicon Valley, I've experienced the completely rabid search for IT people first hand. From both sides. There's definitely a shortage, but it's not clear cut, and it's not across the board.
When I was looking for a new job 6 months ago, I hadn't realized that there's a distinct shortage of *nix competent people. Being a sysadmin, the second I put out my resume, I got swamped with calls. But I know of other people who live in the M$ world who barely got any calls at all when they started a job search.
Now I'm trying to get more staff to fill in positions for the company I got a job with. It's REALLY DIFFICULT. We get tons of resumes, and interview dozens of people. But none of them are competent. I've seen resumes that would make you think someone is a sysadmin god, and when they're sitting in the interview, they don't know the name of HP's flavor of unix. Even though it's on their resume!
So no, there's no shortage of IT people. But there's a severe shortage of competent IT people.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
the job shortage is a myth created so the larger companies can bring in pros from overseas and have them work here.
some of the russian, german, indian h1b's i've worked with are *extremely* skilled, and work tirelessly.
others are...ahem, as bad as the worst american programmer, actually worse because of poor language skills. their so-called degrees are worthless.
by creating the myth of a shortage, it makes it easier for companies to pressure congress into letting in overseas talent.
additionally, it keeps the pump primed -- "wow, keannu reaves(sp) was cool in the matrix, i wanna be a programmer, no problem getting a job! the paper says so!"
the last company i worked for got (literally) 200-300 resumes submitted for each opening. they whittled those down to the top ten or so, then interviewed those final candidates.
so, nearly everyone in the industry does the old "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" at the so-called "IT Shortage". It's a joke to pressure congress and keep people exciting about being a programmer.
the reality is, programmers are odd, uncomfortable people that most normals don't want to be around. yeech. i guess it's the same for lawyers, or whatever.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Senior people in their fields rarely bother learning about distinct aspects of IT outside their own domain. The lead database architect at Oracle most liklely knows nothing of VHDL nor does he/she need or want to. The lead chip designer at Intel likely knows little about implementing terabyte databases.
Because these people are unlikely to cross over into each other's fields, they do not represent one labor market.
Authors of these articles need to break down the market to the same degree we do. That means people who work on databases aren't likely to become VHDL designiers, and operating system folks aren't going to become games programmers.
In web programming, the stats may not reflect a shortage, but we can't fill our recs here at work even by half (and we're in the heart of Santa Clara, with good stock options), so my anecdotal evidence doesn't jive with the author's claims.
Lomion is dead on when he says the shortage is of qualified IT professionals. The huge demand for people who know how to make these darn machines work is incredible, resulting in a huge influx of people in to the field, many (most?) of whom have marginal talent. The popularity of tools like Visual Basic and Lotus Notes, which allow semi-skilled programmers to produce (somewhat) functional software only makes the problem worse -- the ease of developing a new program feeds the demand for more highly specialized one-off programs, hence the need for more programmers. This also feeds the market for low-level administrators, to support the machines these programs are running on. There really isn't much of a shortage for these people; low-level jobs get filled pretty quickly.
The real shortage is of senior talent. This isn't likely to change, because (IMHO) there are only a small number of people who have the drive and intelligence to advance their skills to a true expert level. This is particuarly true when looking for someone with a particular combination of skills or someone with 5+ years experience with a specific tool. In my experience, a senior level hacker with mastery of several different tools & languages is a very hot commodity. Judging from the volume of calls & email I get from recruiters, there's plenty of demand for my particular skill set :-)
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
I'm told I produced more work in my first two months here than the last two guys did in five years. Could it be that companies are tired of paying for incompetence and having to go through the process of documenting failures so that they can let someone go without fear of reprisal? There seems to be more short term assignments available than permanent jobs.
Another problem I had was that my skillset is fairly narrow (Unix Sysadm, Informix development primarily). I have years of experience, but it has all been with smaller companies who didn't run 24/7 and didn't want to shell out the cash for nicer toys, etc.
carlos
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I know that when I graduated from high school, the counselors were saying for everybody that wanted to be "assured a job", they should definately go into IT/Com Sci programs, but now that I'm ready to graduate soon, I am thinking more and more often that the job market may be slowing down, since any jabroni with brains ran out and got their MCSE, and now may be sitting in cushy IT jobs while I sweated out college for 4 years learning things like compiler design, and how to program in MIPS RISC assembly.
Meanwhile, the reason that many people out of college may not be as intelligent as those who have been in the profession a while is that (as I know from personal experience) many have to work menial jobs while in college that may have no computer exposure in order to simply pay rent. In my college town, the mainly accessable jobs for students are service oriented, not technology oriented. I am very worried that I may not have the job skills to offer an employer that another student who did not have to work through school has from sitting in his dorm room and playing around with his computer for 4 years.
Essentially, this is a problem of self-improvement, for the market will evetually evolve to a point where only the best and brightest will be tolerated in positions of power.
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
Not only is it not difficult to find an IT job, people who are not computer scientists by training such as mathematicians and other scientist seem to find themselves programming for a living. Anyone who is capable of learning how to work on/with computers is expected to, where I work. It seems to me that programmers will be the blue-collar workers of the 21st century. People will be expected to program, instead of choosing it. (Still there are those lucky few who actually LIKE to program/fix computers...) :-)
There is a bit of a shortage of top-notch programmers, which is impacting my business greatly. I can find people easily enough, but finding those who can do the kinds of things that we do (internet applications development) without a lot of hand-holding is difficult. A few weeks ago, I had to can a guy with a PhD in Computer Science for poor performance...
Any best-of-the-best CGI geeks who can work as contractors without constant supervision can feel free to send me a resume (plain text only)!
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
I work in a small shop - 35 or so people max here and in the SF office. We just went on a major hiring drive for programmers and q&a people. All the new programmers so far are foreign - to date a total of four with more coming. Since I'm not the hr person, and don't really deal with that side of the biz, I don't know what all the reasons are, but I just thought it was pretty interesting given the article's subject.
Of the nine current programmers, two are Americans - one of whom is the president and founder of the company. Kinda reflective of the current situation, or what?
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
Let's break this post down, class:
When I'm reading resumes, I immediately toss out any resume with MCSE on it.
MCSEs mean they passed a test. That means they likely have more knowledge about X than someone who hasn't. You may place any value for X that you please, it makes no difference. So, given a blank resume with just a name, and another blank resume with a name and "MSCE" on it, I will hire the MSCE. Knowing nothing else, wouldn't you too? So, automatically throwing out said resume is an act of extreme idiocy.
It doesn't mean anything unless you can back it up with some good sample code or a good answer to an algorithm question in the interview.
You obviously have neither taken the MSCE, nor gotten past your 2nd year of college. Most engineering degrees focus on problem-solving skills - you are presented a problem and it is up to you to solve it. The Cisco certification does similar.
Lastly, do you even know what empirical research is?
I really would have to say that the "IT Shortage" depends on the area you live in, and how many high tech companies are in the area.
I am sure that areas such as SoCal, and Boston, alon with the Austin, Texas area have a glut of "Paper" MCSE's who have dropped the bottom out of the pay scale and will work for less than half of a qualified, tech with 3-5 years work history.
If you are talking about the midwest, where "high-tech" companies are supposedly non-existent, finding good people who know the latest technology can be difficult, unless you are in St. Louis, Chicago, or Minneapolis/St. Paul.
Sometimes, however the "IT Shortage" is a result of unrealistic expectations, on the part of middle management.
When companies require a 4 year degree and 3-5 years work expertise, and won't even bother to take into consideration the people who have spent 3-5 years learning, and using the specific technology desired instead, they create a trap for themselves.
Seriously folks, if you were looking for "IT Staff" wouldn't you want people who knew the technology you were using inside and out, and have worked with it for a few years, or a fresh off the street CS/MIS Grad?
[flame disclamier]
I by no means am disregarding CS/MIS Majors, however I do know for a fact that a significant number of CS/MIS Programs don't teach the latest technology, and have a difficult time keeping up with all the changes.
[/flame disclamier]
"Fortune, Fame, Mirror Vain, Gone Insane..... But The Memory Remains...
Of course, the IT field is really not suited for PhDs in physics who spent most of their graduate work pounding out FORTRAN code and using graphical data analysis packages. I finally found a place that valued people with higher education as highly skilled problem solvers who can learn second (or third, or fourth...) programming languages, etc.
Eric
Why is everyone so intent on "disproving this myth" that there is an IT talent shortage? Don't you people know this gives you leverage when you negotiate your salary?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
The point is, people in these fields rarely cross over to other fields. You need to tell me about shortages in these various fields. If you tell me there is no shortage of Cobol programmers, thats meaningless to me.
There's a shortage of people who will work for peanuts. Employers like the H1B visa holders because they can rule them with an iron fist. Don't hit that "moderate" button just yet! The H1B visa requires an employer to agree to hire you and remains tied to a specific employer. Low pay? Loust treatment? Crap assignments? Too bad. If you quit, your visa is void, immediately. Maybe you can find another job fast, but gov't paperwork will take so long to complete, that your visa will expire before you can get it transferred. The result? You have to leave the country. So the employer knows he has you by the balls. You'll take whatever and like it with a big smile, because you are in no position to bargain. The employer holds all your cards. So yeah, employers like this. They can pay less than you deserve and get away with it. They want more, so they cry about the "labor shortage". Look at misc.jobs.resumes. It's packed with skilled or readily trainable people looking for jobs. But American workers are too damned expensive, they dare to try and abuse their salary to do things like buy a house, car, support a family, and spend time off the clock with family, and other non-company related activities. Bastards! Employers would prefer a cheap H1B that lives in studio apt, rides a moped, and has no life, and will work 80 hrs/week. Duh. The free market makes this a good choice. But "The Shortage" is totally bogus.
Here in the Philadelphia area there is anything but a shortage of IT professionals.
:)
.sig: File not found.
I use the term professionals very strictly. At my current company we have a strong proliferation of IT wannabes. Horrible, horrible people. And we do multi-million dollar contracts with high-profile clientele which we frankly don't deserve.
I wouldn't release our product if I had say, but being 19 and definitely the junior in the department, I don't.
It took me 24 hours to be offered this job. It took me 5 days to get 12 different offers. The market here is very hot for someone with skills, even if they don't have that little degree slip of paper or, heaven forbid, and MCSE or similar.
The problem with the current employment situation isn't really a lack of good developers or an overabundance of horrible ones, but rather no good way to certify people so non-IT types can verify who they're hiring.
MCSE as mentioned recently doesn't do the job. No certification does. Programming is as much an art as anything else which, imho, is being hacked away at by things like VB and components people just download of the 'net and hack together to get to work.
Why write my own work when I can stand on the shoulders of others to create my piss poor crap?
Whatever, maybe I'm a little sick of working here. I'm looking for a new job, as is everyone else. It's horrible.
But, with today's market (yes, I've kind of gone tangential) it should be easy to do that.
Enjoy.
Jezz
ls:
ls:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
If there isn't a shortage of qualified tech-industry workers, I'm very much at a loss to explain exactly why it is that the vast majority of companies I have personally had experience with are staffed by peopel that don't have any clue what they're doing.
One would imagine that in a situation where there was even anywhere near enough workers in a given field, there would not be half as many completely knowledgeless people running around with "certifications" and "experience".
Statistics and data projects aside, I think that anyone who looks around them and evaluates the people that he is working with and for can tell you that there are not enough qualified people in this industry.
that said, I'm not sure there are enough qualified peopel in any industry. but that's another story, I guess.
I found out empirically that people who put MCSE on their resumes just can't cut it. MCSE doesn't mean you have skills. It just means you passed a test.
A college degree is no different. It doesn't mean anything unless you can back it up with some good sample code or a good answer to an algorithm question in the interview.
And good ones aren't hard to find either. It didn't take me long to land this position. I program for a major software firm that I can't name. In addition to the thrill of a job well done, and very competitive pay (I receive $13 THOUSAND dollars every year . . . which my manager assures me is higher than most programming positions), the job is chock full of nifty benefits.
We always get the newest hardware to work on. Right now I'm sitting with a shiney new 12mhz 286 with FOUR megs of ram!!! These beasts are too powerful to even set loose on the commercial sector yet, and let me tell you, it BURNS compared to my last box. My manager assures me that I'll be the first in the department to get the new CD-ROM drives too. I love my manager so much.
Everyone gets a company sponsored apartment. It's like I never even have to drive anywhere to get to work! I have a whole 7 foot square room ALL to myself. The rags and blankets I sleep on every night I didn't even have to PAY for! You can't ask for better than that! And there's a hole in the corner that leads down to the sewers for waste removal. And over that hole is a spiggot with RUNNING WATER. It's soooooo cool! The entire package is in the greatest location too; about 75 feet below my office in the sub-basement! That's prime real-estate there!
And my manager (did I mention he's so cool?) comes and gets me and the other programmers at the beginning of every day. I don't have to spend money on an alarm clock! Not me! He comes down and PERSONALLY wakes us up, and even gives us a good minute to become aware of our surroundings before hauling us out of our rooms by the scruff of our neck! How generous!!!
He's sure to make sure we're all locked in front of our workstations with three manacles, and surrounded with a barbed wire fence. No, no other company is going to come and drag US away! We get to keep this job FOREVER! And at the end of our 18 hour workday (you can get SOOOOOO much done in 18 hours! You wouldn't believe it!) he unlocks us and PERSONALLY escorts us back home, usually taking the time to kick us into our rooms. Sure, sometimes my head hits the wall pretty hard, but we take entertainment where we can get it, and we get the best.
And food . . . Oh, we get the best food here at Microso . . . where I work. Thrice daily they pull out any waste that gets caught in the nets and grates lining the sewers and drainage gutters. I don't know what they do to it, but they turn it into the BEST stew in the WORLD! For FREE!!! And sometimes we even get nifty toys, like shopping carts and old needles. Just like a box of cracker jacks!!!
I know you're jealous and want to hear more, but I have to get back to work before my manager catches me. Last time he saw anyone reading slashdot, they were denied dinner for two months. MAN that must have sucked. But anyway, these jobs are easy to get. Just walk around Redmond Washington. You don't need to look for a job . . . they'll find you.
No offense, but is english your second language?
When you say there isn't a "shortage of IT professionals", do you mean people who merely get paid to do the job, or do you mean competent people? The problem is that when you say you use the term "strictly" that would imply the later.
In any case, as you may or may not know, the market for IT employees in Philly is very tight (I, too, live in philly). Witness: rising salaries, employers willing to pay virtually anything for competent help, the plethora of weak certification courses, etc. In what other career can a high school dropout take some certification course and make 60k++ within a year?
While you are certainly right that (atleast if I read this much correctly) employers have a hard time finding competent IT employees, I disagree with the cause(s) and some of your other statements. Although I don't disagree that you'll find atleast 20 idiots for every half competent IT worker, the problems extend far beyond just being able to test it. I think there is a genuine shortage of talented IT workers. Truely excellent IT people stand out head and shoulders above the rest, if for no other reason than 1 good IT person is worth atleast 20 monkeys. Regardless of whatever their formal credentials are, recommendations and the like are highly telling. I happen to know many employers and headhunters, the word generally is: If you have talent, give him whatever he wants. Consequently, employers have a very difficult time finding new (not age) talent, because they're generally quickly devoured.
The bottom line: Most employers have to spend absurd sums of money to get decent IT. Because skilled workers are impossible to find, employers are forced to turn to monkeys. And because monkeys are so damn ineffective, it takes 20 times as many to do the same job. Which causes the market for monkeys to skyrocket as well....
...which of course leads to the need for platforms such as NT. Which, ultimately, leads to the need for more monkeys. Which causes even more employee (non-IT) downtime, which only adds to the cost....Any sane skilled/intelligent person, of course, avoids such environments...Which naturally makes the majority of the up and coming generation virtually braindead when it comes to IT....
...sorry to run on. =)
gotta run
I spent considerable time reviewing resumes and interviewing hopeful candidates.
People with degrees may or may not be useful. Candidates with a four-year degree in traditional Computer Science were the best candidates. These people generally had the interest to complete the degree and the smarts to apply their knowledge.
People with certifications were not useful. Their certifications don't give them the creative background and basic understanding necessary to solve a problem from the ground up. They are versed only in the know-how needed to use systems popular at the time of the certification.
People with lesser degrees from lesser colleges were not useful. Their situation is similar to those who sought only a certification and tend to have skills that are specialized for the systems at the time of graduation.
Courses and certifications may be useful to those already employed in IT, but they provide little information of lasting value. Those who seek these credentials to get a job in the IT industry generally do not have the aptitude necessary to get the job done.
Students who apply themselves to a higher education in theoretical computer science have a better chance of being able to do the work. They are also more likely to innovate new technology.
I don't personally hold any degree or certification; these are just trends I have observed and will keep in mind the next time I find myself in a management position within IT (if ever).
Personally, i think the shortage is not of IT professionals, but of competent, well-trained ones. I have seen a number of programmers, developers and designers that don;t know anything but fake it real well, or the flip side which is those that know real well but are complete mercenaries and would screw over their employer or client in a heartbeat. I've dealt with both situations too often in the last year.
this space for rent
I finally managed to get into ddj.com and read the bloody thing. I was not impressed.
It wasn't about whether or not there was a scarcity of tech workers. It was about all the political crap which gets wrapped around that "issue", e.g. whether or not the US should allow more foreign workers.
Look:
And, frankly, connect-the-dots prognostication is silly. What no one wants to admit is that we've managed to create an environment (the net) in which the basics of operating a retail establishment (a store) require personal characteristics (facility with abstract thought) of the store workers (geeks) which only a comparatively small percentage of people have.
It would be one thing if ecommerce sites were like brick&mortar stores. Once you put up your KornerMart, it stays built, and you can pay all your architects, construction workers, HVAC experts, etc. and send them home. It would be one thing if new-media sites were like radio stations. Once you raise your KLUE transmitter and plug it in, you can send away the engineers who put up the tower. You can staff your KornerMart, your KLUE station with non-geeks and have your business run.
But an ecommerce site, a new-media site is constantly being reinvented. What's now is passe, so "five minutes ago". The envelop must constantly be pushed.
So long as that is true, you can expect the market demand for geeks to be rapacious. We are the only people who can run their store fronts in cyberspace, the only people who can keep the store open 24/7. They can't do without us, and as they try to expand, they will only need more and more of us.
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-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
The shortage is artificial. This is nothing more than an attempt to bring in foreign labor cheaper than local market labor. It is the same thing that the trucking companies do. I mean this as no slam on those IT professionals outside the US, but the reality is they are viewed by IT managers (not my view neccasarily) as a "cheap import". Yes, I realize many of these people are certainly not cheap or unskilled, but 98 times out of a 100 they are brought in because they are cheaper. That is the bottom line.
Companies complain about not having enough "qualified" tech workers. I wonder how many of these companies are willing to train their internal employees? I imagine very few. My company provides under $2K a year for school. That doesn't go very far. The fact that I (or anyone in my position) will recieve no pay increase when finished shows a shortage of vision on the part of management.
The shortage could easily be alleviated by companies looking within. When companies raise artificial obstacles (4 yr degree, and 3 years exp for 30K) they are going to suffer. If a company wants a trained & skilled IT workforce they should look at realistic hiring requirements, new people without experience (everybody has to start somewhere), training those employees they do have, and more to the point, keeping them. I have no sympathy for people who throw stones in glass houses and complain of windows breaking...
Couldn't have said it better myself. That's because I'm an idiot.
I've been playing with computers since the age of 12, I'm 18 now. I'm A+ certified, and wear a Linux t-shirt to job sites. I have 7 computers of my own in various places around the house, all networked together, and 3 behind my firewall. I have not one, but two 36inch stuffed TuXes from linuxmall. I am a geek, no doubt, but does this make me a genius?
You see, my friends, family, and the people I have worked with think that I am some kind of computer genius that can fix anything. The downside to this is having to listen to the endless barrage of inane questions I could care less about, and usually don't have answers for. So what do I do? I make them up.
What they don't know is; I'm an idiot. I have no idea what I'm doing. The reason I'm always working on a computer is because they are always breaking and I haven't a clue how to fix it. I make up answers to questions I don't know, because they expect me to have the answers. You know computers right? Well can you find this part to my 10-year-old apple laptop? (actually had this one)
My point is, no matter what people label you as, be it IT Professional, computer genius, or landfill worker, you are what you are, and your skills will show through. No amount of IT training or experience can make up for being an idiot.
If there is a shortage of good people (like someone else proposed), as opposed to just a shortage of people in general, then I don't see a solution soon. With all of the "carreer colleges" and "professional education centers" advertising the quick buck and easy employment, the number of people doing it for the money will only increase, and will do so much faster than the number of people who are doing it for fun, so to speak. Unfortunately, the former group is likely to have a very small proportion of "good" programmers (someday I hope to find out what that means), but it is the group that will dominate the workforce. The other group (including me, one day, I hope), as well as those "good programmers" from the first group, will have to accept that the skills of many coworkers are inadequate, or alternatively that there won't be enough people who can get the job done, and so they will be overworked.
This may cause incomes to increase, and I believe will only cause the problem to spiral out of control. Eventually the whole poverbial bandwagon will crash, and the I see one of two possibilities:
Either way, something will have to change. Maybe not anytime soon, but eventually.
Then again, I'm only a student. All of my experience is from another industry (construction), so I may be way off base. Comments?
Tim