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Management To Blame For IT Worker Shortage?
MrX writes: "In this story about a study on CNet news, it says the labor shortage in IT is more a management problem then anything else.
'The unhappy truth, the study points out, is not that there are few people available to do IT work, but that once they are hired they are often poorly managed. In addition, many IT jobs are ill-designed and boring, leading many employees to become dissatisfied and leave.'"
What shortage? We get tons of people that apply for our IT positions here... farmers, lawyers, teachers, child-care workers, nuclear waste disposal engineers, israeli air force pilots... Yes, these are -actual- applicants. What's sad is that these are some of the ones that make it through the first screening... yikes.
Actually it's pretty obvious to me that the fact that we never bring these people into the profession is precisely why there is a shortage. If you search monster.com for intro level jobs doing anything IT, you won't find any. "Junior level DBA wanted" or "C++ programmer with 0-2 years experience wanted" just isn't out there. The problem is that experience and talent are only weakly correlated and the clueless fools (managers, HR dolts, and recruiters) would rather have an idiot with 5 years experience than a genius who programs for fun in his spare time.
I'm willing to bet that within 6 months at least half of the folks in your list could be earning money for you. Sure the training will cost a little, but it's ok to pay entry level people less to offset this.
Hire the one that seems "smartest" with a good work ethic; offer them half of what you would someone more experienced; pay for them to go to a training class in everything you think they should know; make them agree to reimburse training costs if they leave within 2 years; Give them a 20% raise every six months for the first two years.
My guess is that if you advertised these things you'd have some extremely gifted applicants who want to change fields and would probably be highly competent MUCH faster than you think.
A "Hardcore IT" person can learn to use any platform, anywhere, anytime to meet his/her goal(s). They know that the computer is just a tool, and that some things are easier to use than others, but all of IT was built by humans to be used by humans.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
IT is doomed to suffer this fate for some time. I recently left a company where the IT department will not stop bleeding, employees were leaving at unbelievable rates! But the company is throwing more and more money at the new employees, creating a market gap between the old and the new. Thus, the old must leave. It's a cycle right now, not as simple as above, but with more elements like these below:
1) Mismanagement:
This is common, we're hired to come in and fix the problems that "management" can't. We're given deadlines of 3 days for a project that will take 6 months or a deadline of 3 months for a project that will take 6 hours. How can you respect this? These people are making more money than you? Time to leave.
2) Lack of Learning
You walk into an environment ready to help the company move to the next level, organize, commenting code, making it modular, smaller, efficient, structured. But it's the same code and there are new technologies out there. The technical "classes" are useless because what you really need is hands-on baptism by fire learning! But you never get that chance because another department who has done it before gets to do it again OR the company hires a consultant who "knows" the technology to come in and do it for you so you can support it. How do you get to learn it? Time to leave.
3) Poor Work Environment
You don't hold meetings so you don't really need an office, right? You don't move around much so you don't need that much space, so a 5x5ft cubicle is okay, right? It's better if you can communicate other programmers if they are sitting really close to you, right? That New Jersey office space is far cheaper, and you don't need the prestige of the Wall Street office like the salespeople, right? Wrong. Time to leave.
4) No Recognition
Because the people you work for need to go to even more simple business people who couldn't possibly comprehend why it took you so long to hand code everything from scratch because they wouldn't use open source for "security" reasons, they don't even bother mentioning your name. You could have written thousands of lines of code each day, no debugging necessary, other programmers in awe as you pound on the keyboard and it doesn't really matter. Why? Because upper management has no idea if you were good, stellar, poor, or committed fireable offenses in your code. They are more likely to reward the customer service rep on the phone who saved a $200 account...because they understand it.
5) Pigeonholing
You've developed a great specialty, you are the fastest and most knowledgeable in your area in the company. I hope you enjoy it! Because now you're going to do that same work for the rest of your time at the company. Time to leave.
6) Corporate Apartheid
Why? No, WHY do companies insist on putting IT on a completely different floor, building, city, state than the rest of the company or departments? I know it's annoying to have some gimp come over and ask you the Sun networking professional how to make an equation in Excel, but at least they can become more technical and improve the company. And information flows both ways, we like to learn what the hell the business is doing!!
7) Lack of Expert Recognition
Attention management: The grass is NOT greener on the outside. Sometimes it is, but that is a last resort. Many times the best place to look for a technical solution is to ask your technical staff. Yes, you can even pull them off that Priority #1 project to strategize about the technical future of the company as opposed to getting blindsided by new technology.
8) The good, the bad, the ugly
All it takes is hiring one shitty IT person. YES, they do exist, there are many. Hire one and the rest of them wonder why the hell they are around that place making the same salary as the idiot in the next cube. Time to leave.
I wish I could isolate all the factors and start creating a new model that companies could go from and improve all of our working conditions. But I think that we are in times that require an accelerated learning curve that nobody can keep up with except for those of us in the fray. The pace of change in our industry promises to keep management and non-tech people out of comprehension of our contributions for years to come.
All we can do is to try to lessen to gap and keep it from widening too much. Mix the tech and non-tech employees, treat them with the same amount of respect. Ask if you can improve their job. Do their reviews on time. Send them home if they work late all the time, kick their asses out the door so they don't get burned out. The usual management techniques will work.
Jayson Pifer
Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.
And read /. a lot. Like I'm doing right now. The thing I hated most about my previous job was that my immediate boss had way too many things to manage, and way too many meetings, and didn't have enough time to give me anything useful to do. In my current job, I'm waiting on stuff (mostly third party software) for some Sun boxen I've been putting together.
Not that it matters much to me yet, but all three of the managers responsible for each of the computers are hard to find, and seem to always be in meetings.
"We must be getting work done--we're certainly having enough meetings!"
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"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I'll turn 48 next saturday. I've been a programmer, since I was 19... Last time I looked for a job it took me 2 years to find a company that would hire me. The time before that it took me 2 weeks. The difference? My beard turned gray while I was at my last job. Funny how that happens.
I'm highly educated, and have up to date skills. I have a wide range of experience. I have shipped a LOT of real products to real customers. I'm willing to work for a reasonable salary.
The kid in the next cube with 2 years experience, NO formal training, who has never shipped a finished product, regularly gets offers for 20% to 40% more than I currently make. I apply for the same jobs and don't even get a rejection email.
Most of the programmers I've known over the last 29 years have given up trying to work as programmers. Not that they don't want to. It's just that it is very very hard to get a job as a programmer if you are over 40.
I can also tell you I have experienced what happens when you get "daddy" tracked in a job. All of the sudden you can't get a raise, can't get any more training, suddenly it isn't in the companies "best interests" to send you to conferences. "What, just because your kid is on the way to the emergency room you think you should be able to leave before 10 P.M. tonight? Remember, we hired YOUR, we didn't hire your family!"
I don't know why I so stupid as to stay in this business. I can tell you that there is NO shortage of IT talent in the US. There isn't really even a shortage of CHEAP It talent in the US. There is a shortage of IT talent that is stupid enough to work 80 hours/week for a fixed (small) salary, no benefits and NO RESPECT!
stonewolf I'm no ghost dog
That certainly has been true in my experience. It was rare to find a good manager, one who made going to work a pleasure. Usually I had to merely take pleasure in doing a good job despite management's efforts or the corporate politics.
When a developer finds a good fit with a clued-in manager, they tend to stay. For all the rest of us, the PHBs eventually get us disgusted enough to move on.
As for undervaluing the contribution of IT, that was always the case. Sales & Marketing were the stars, always, and IT was an afterthought. That was true both in corporte culture as well as management opportunities. The sales guys, no matter how idiotic they were, got to move up the ladder far faster than the best of the IT staff. I always attributed that to the VPs not knowing what we did but actually did understand what the sales guys did.
These idiots are beginning to get what they deserve if IT staff are leaving in droves.
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Private Essayist
It would be more productive to extensively train the managers to be competent in dealing specifically with bright and knowledgeable people, rather than ignoring a fundamental problem with IT work, which is that the more complex the work, the harder it is for managers to avoid being oafish fools about dealing with people who often are much smarter and more knowledgeable than they. This problem will only get worse as complex technologies continue to creep into every aspect of formerly simple products and services.
Hiring as a manager the venture capitalist's son-in-law or the college buddy is just not going to work anymore, not that it ever did ....
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Instead of a shortage, it's more of an inability to keep people; that's one reason why it's so easy to get temp work.
Read the paper and check out the ads sometime; they have totally unreasonable expectations of what skill-sets they expect people to have. Just going through college is not enough; you can graduate from mine with a degree in Computer Science, and never learn C if you're careful, just Java, assembler, and maybe a functional language and something else, like SQL.
But then you don't have seven years experience in web design, or five years experience in Java, or a working knowledge of RPG, or something else equally ludicrous.
Of course, these requirements are padded, as are most people's credentials; but I'd much rather people said what they meant and were honest about the job requirements and the work environment. Lying to prospective employees is not a good way to start anything.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
IT workers are often very poorly managed. It's really sad, but it's not only the company's fault. There seems to be a general philosophy of "chasing the bucks" in the IT world that's based off of cynicism with corporations. I can fully sympathise with those types of feelings, but I don't necessarily think that they're the best way to go about things.
For example, when employers are constantly treating employees like dogshit, working them 65 hours a week, and trying to screw them out of the only 2 weeks worth of vacation a year that they're stingy enough to grant, employees lose respect for the organization that they're working for. If you love your job, and you like the people you work with, suddenly the pay isn't the only factor in whether you stay or whether you go. If on the other hand you hate your job and don't have any respect for where you work, then it's "Just about the bucks" and higher offers will cause you to leave with no regrets.
I've been working in American IT for a few years, and I'm totally sick of it. Recently, I got a job offer in Germany, making a lot less money, but offering a steady 40 hour work week, 4 weeks vacation a year, and the people I really liked. The corporation seemed to care whether I lived or died. So I turned down offers of $70,000+ to investigate that offer. Unfortunately, for personal reasons related to my family in the states, I wasn't able to take it, but had I been in a more flexible situation, I would have taken it in a heartbeat to have what I think every IT person wishes they had: quality of life
How many people do you know in IT who wake up at age 40 saying Oh my god, I've got a huge pile of money, but I hate my life because all I ever do is work? I know a lot of them. When employees cynical views of employers and the exploitative tactics that employers use against their employees rule the field, then yeah, you're going to have a lot of job hopping, and a lot of burned out pissed off disillusioned IT workers.
I'm in their ranks. Are you?
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Rant - I don't want to create unecesary negativity, but I don't think that the shortage is going to get much better anytime soon. Maybe lots more people will go into the computer field and study comptuer science in colledge, but that won't do a fucking bit of good. I am taking computer science and engineering courses and I can't stand how everyone seems to be there because they think for some odd reason that if they complete four years of school and graduate with some kind of engineering degree that they are going to be showered with money out of nowhere. These people are not geeks by any means, and while that isn't something that is nessecary to you job, they have no true interest in computers. If there wasn't extra money at stake then they would look down on engineering as boring, technical and something they would never want to do. They don't see the big picture, and suck up everything they learn in their classes as the absolute truth and think that they don't need anything else which is very very wrong. So in a few years after lots of people start coming out of computer science looking for jobs they are certainly going to find them, and they're going to be horrible at what they do because they won't try to build on their knowledge because all they care about is money. Not to mention arrogance which is another story all together. I am not the only one who feels like this right?
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
I'm poorly managed but probably in a different sense than many of you are thinking. I don't have a bad manager--heck, I barely HAVE a manager. That's the problem. I spend a lot of my time haring off on things that either don't need doing or don't need doing by me. I've finally learned to just look blank when the tech support person comes over with questions about how to make NT work: "I dunno," I say, and go back to programming (on Linux, thank God). In some ways I like this (freedom, and not just to mess around, but to do the stuff that I know needs doing) but in other ways I hate it (no "roadmap").
In my previous job (as a "team leader") I tried to take a more active role in managing the programmer's time. I always had a mental list of every project each person (3 of them) were working on and a rough idea as to status. Once in a while (every couple days) I pop in and make sure my head matched reality. It seemed to work pretty well--I didn't have any complaints and even got one compliment (from a programmer). Just think of the team as a furnace that needs a constant supply of coal--boredom is 90% of the problem. (the rest is variety--color some of your coal read 8^))
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Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Let me rant a bit about how f'ing stupid many IT candidates are. I get their resume in which they claim to be Software Engineers or some such thing. They claim shell programming skills yet have trouble explaining how to list processes on a machine. They claim knowledge of 'Internet Technology' but don't know HTTP from TCP or a router from a NIC. They claim java programming but can't explain pass by reference.
There are plenty of these types out there. The qualified ones get hired extremely quickly. In the bay area hiring someone is like looking for housing.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
It doesn't take reaching 40 to realize
American work values really lag behind many European job considerations. There are bad managers everywhere but they can certainly have a field day with tangled webs of woe such as the US "health care system"...
I've worked both places and it _still_ shocks me how completely and totally money-seeking essentially RUNS everything in America. the majority are out to get every buck they can and (I thought this was a joke until I lived in the US and experienced it non-stop) people often do define themselves in financial terms. It is tiring and leads, however subliminally, to all kinds of unhappiness.
Americans really DO tend to get their identities from what they buy, whereas in general Europeans get them more from what they do. A generalization of course but even the most resolutely opposed American has to deal with this, every day.
Thus the tone of weariness form the posts already up here on this topic is entirely typical of the whole US working world and not merely IT positions.
(I'm mostly talking to the companies/Madman/etc here)
What the hell ever happened to apprenticeship, and entry level positions? The company I work for (~100 people, growing with no problems finding people) trains our own. The key is to hire smart people, who show a little spark.
Nortel, IBM, and everyone else wouldn't touch me with a 10 foot pole when I finished my hard science grad degree, but my current employer did. Now they have an engineer with 3 years experience in a dozen of the most sought after skills. Now they don't have to go screaming all the way to the feds with a crybaby story about not being able to find anyone.
Quit crying and invest something in people. Quit asking for the feds to import your gold for you.
Its true. At one of the Job Posting sites, I remember seeing a poll for Job Satisfaction and 95 percentage were of the opinion that they were not happy with what they are doing. Its quite surprising. I feel that as long as you have a Good Architect and a Manager who listens to his team, the team would stay. I have been in situations where the company wasnt doing so good, but people stayed because of their manager. Loyalty is hence hard to find and come by in the IT job market.
If companies could hire managers who know the different between HTTP and FTP, between Kernel and Shell, could stand up for his team in Management meetings and take a beating for it, could explain in lucid detail to the management about schedule slippages and cover everyones ass and not just his then he would build a team which would stick through thick and thin for him. But from so far I have seen, this particular breed is dying fast. Everyone wants to cover their ass first.
Just providing Nerf gun battles and ping pong tables doesnt motivate people. People motivate people. Good diplomatic Managers tend to motivate people to excel in their work and make them stay. Making them stay back after six everyday and not reward them is begging them to leave. Most of the firms, even the big ones doesnt have a clue as to how to retain people. I would rather choose a firm which has Quake 3 deathmatches every alternate days or Fridays, where my Manager understands what I do and not judge me for my errors, where he first covers my ass and then his if i screw up,is the first one to comment or reward anyone who deserves it.
I havent found one, but being a sucker I am still looking.
Rapid Nirvana
The "IT shortage" is NOT for a lack of skills and it's not because younger people will work for less money.
The fact is, most tech jobs (sysadmin, programmer, web developper, etc.) are not 40hr/week jobs. They're demanding 60, 70, 80 hour per week jobs. And they're all "salaried" jobs, which means no extra pay for extra hours.
Now young people fresh out of college, and immigrant H1B visa workers have little else in their life to occupy them. They are single. They have no kids. Thus they are able to accept the abusive work hours employers expect them to put out.
But now something new has happened. The first BIG wave of IT industry workers are just now starting to reach their upper 30s and 40s. And that first wave of H1B workers are nearing the end of their 6 year temporary visas.
Tell me, what happens when a 70 hour/week employee gets married or has a kid?
Suddenly he or she has to cut back working hours to 50 or 40 hours per week as a responsibiliy to their family.
The employer sees this as MAJOR SLACKING OFF BY SOME OLD GRAYING BASTARD. So he's either FIRED. Or sees his salary cut 40% and is FORCED to quit because he can't support his family on a pay cut like that.
The employer then puts an ad out and discovers that lots more older IT workers are applying than years ago when he put that last ad out. These older workers suffer from the same problem... having a life.
So suddenly the employer screams that there is a "shortage of IT workers" and demands the government allow more H1B visa workers in so he can continue his abusive employment practises.
Well, IMO, it's time employers are FORCED to play fair and give up their extremely abusive practises. Naturally they won't want to as screwing people over is highly lucrative and profitable. Well, it is wrong to discriminate in your hiring practises againse people who are (1) married, or (2) have kids. So pardon me if I don't cry for your sorry assed IT shop and it's fuck-you hiring policies. I feel absolutely zero pity for you poor staff strapped IT shops who are only looking to screw people over.