Slashdot Mirror
Battle of the Ages; Stereotypes Collide
JCOTTON writes "A CIO.com article By Phil Murphy explains that "The hype around the shortage of qualified legacy technologists grows each day. Pundits would have us believe that 1.5 million COBOL programmers will suddenly disappear one day, leaving any company with legacy technology in dire straits. The truth is that there are far more programmers with legacy skills looking for work than there are jobs for them, as evidenced by organizations like Legacy Reserves, which functions as a training and job matching service for unemployed or underemployed programmers wishing to modernize their skills."
This article explains many of the issues facing "the upper half" of Information Technology workers."
People still using COBOL can migrate to COBOL.net. Fujitsu implemented a this abmonination.
now that the geniuses with their MBAs have figured out that overseas outsourcing is an even bigger disaster than domestic outsourcing was. ("But how can that be! It's CHEAPER!") I'm hearing from recruiters again. IT is such a huge force multiplier that it's stupid to do anything that will jeopardize its effectiveness. Labor cost is only one variable in the multivariable problem, kids.
Sure, the PHBs will whine about the need for cheap H1-Bs that they can abuse, but I don't see Congress being all that sympathetic at the moment, or at the very least they're too fragmented on the issue of immigration in general to get anything done.
Boom times are here again! Well, no, but at this point somewhat better than average middle class employment will do.
I hope the above is modded funny. I did COBOL programming when I was back in school. "Easy English-Like syntax" and changing buisness users into programmers, does not fit the description I remember. I remember Assembly lanuage was more of a bitch to write in, but for an advanced generation lanuage it sucked. I still remember the prof. deducted points off my final COBOL project becuase he 'didn't like' recursive programing, jerk.
I've dealt with these guys. They are satisfied with what they're getting out of that type of system and will keep it till the power surge blows it away. Hell, I wouldn't be suprised if some of them checked Ebay for replacement hardware. I'm sure they know were they put those 5.25 floppies.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
http://www.bls.gov/search/ooh.asp?ct=OOH
Pick just about any job and in the listing you'll find something like this:
Employment of XXXXX is expected to grow about as fast as the average for all occupations over the 2002-12 period. However, job opportunities are expected to be very good because a large number of XXXXX are expected to retire in the coming decade, creating many job openings.
Does anyone truly believe this? No. The only group of people that typically exploit this figure is someone trying to sell you something.
Read up on your history of programming languages, of Grace Hopper's writings on COBOL, and if you can find them (very difficult), contemporary advertisements/reviews of COBOL for the time - you will find that indeed, it was marketed as a "simple, english-like" language for business people. At the time, it was very simple - compared to custom assembler for each mainframe (which was almost always different between machines even from the same manufacturer, like IBM), COBOL was a breeze!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Firms are populated by some of the dumbest blindest self serving retards on the planet. There is no shortage of labot. Let me repeat that - THERE IS NO shortage of labor.
What there is a shortage of is 45 year olds with 20 years of experience in a 5 year old technology and willing to relocate halfway across the country for a 50% pay cut on a contract basis for six months.
The COBOL jocks who are still around are not in it for altruistic purposes. They are in it to make a killing. Don't think so? Ok - more than half of the country's COBOL, etc. hands were fired in the mid 90's with 'consolidation' and 'modernization'. Then those same idiots who fired everyone freaked out when they simply couldn't answer their own auditors questions about Y2K.
It was magic. All the middle aged guys who got fired coming back to work and literally pulling a rate number out of their ass. $100/hr sound ok to you? $125? Good cause that's what it's to cost you.
Well here we are 4 years into a capital investment recession in IT and guess what? Those same old Mainframes are still around and COBOL and CICS and JCL are still running on them. Because that work NEVER got done ten years ago. It was too expensive and was crowded out by Y2K.
So second generation executards call in the oldtimers again, this time to 'fix' the mainframe problem because the leases are coming due and the CFO is absofuckinglutely convinced that and ICC capital lease iis more expensive than junking everything and starting over.
Hey I've heard this Opera before. It was called "Client Server Computer".
But make no mistake about it my fellow greyheads. They have about as much respect for you and your skills as they have for the beaker that collects bull semen. What you have to do is rape them on the contract.
And in 3 or 4 years and the progress is excruciatingly slow and they suddenly come back from Gartner executive retreats with the new found knowledge that mainframe is new paradigm they must strategize, optimize and leveragize they'll drop all the migration efforts and put their money back into mainframe system development.
Trust me, IBM would not continue to invest all that money in MVS and z/OS Large Systems if they thought there was a limited future in it.
Every couple of years there is the same old new revolution in commercial IT. It's part of the scenery like starving African children with automatic weapons. Sell them more weapons.
Unfortunately businesses are too preoccupied by a meaningless certificate of certification than can do spirited and capable scientists.
Businesses looking to hire IT staff may be but if you go to a company that specializes in solving software problems you will be turned down just for having certificates on your resume.
Just remember, there are jobs for IT specialists and jobs for Computer Scientists. They aren't the same thing. There are far more jobs in IT than there are in CS but there are still far too few good Computer Scientists for the number of jobs available.
I live in Seattle and was recently lookinging for work. I also saw plenty of positions that were open and never filled. There are a couple reasons I see for companies not filling these positions:
.Net and we feel that if we were able to recruit more overseas workers that all of our problems would be solved."
A. The companies did not get any qualified candidates.
This is possible, but not likely. The IT field in Seattle was hitting 10% unemployment for the last few years.
B. Companies are gathering resumes for future hiring.
The need to hire and the money to hire don't always coincide, so companies need to figure out the best time to bring on new people. These companies could be putting "feelers" out to gauge job demand. For example, if they get 1000 resumes one month, then just 10 the next month, then demand for jobs has gone down and they might actually run out of cheap, qualified candidates soon.
C. Companies are listing positions, but not actually hiring.
Companies could also just be using this as a ploy to go to Congress to get more cheap H1-B's. "Mr Senator, we were unable to find any software engineers with 10 years of experience programming
D. Companies are listing positions with inflated requirements to only get H1-Bs.
I've seen jobs that I've applied to get rewriten to include Indian speaking requirements. Employers generally have to prove that local candidates don't qualify for the jobs they post before they can bring in someone from overseas. Unfortunately, there's no law that states companies can't tailor their job description to one, specific, foreign candidate.