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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.
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.
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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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?
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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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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.