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Critical Shortage of IT Workers in Coming Years
Juzzam writes "The Herald Sun reports that IBM and university officals are worried about the increasing demand for IT professionals and the decreasing supply of computer science students. From the article:
'The slope shows an unbelievable decline in computer science majors,' Astrachan said. 'There are smart people no longer even signing up to take our introductory courses. We need to fix it, or there's not going to be a U.S. work force in computer sciences.'"
There may be a shortage of IT workers in the USA indeed soon.
I may then move to the USA , As one thing a shortage of workers means is a nice hefty salary.
So for those who remain in the field could very likely expect a rather nice pay rise, for those remaining jobs that don't get offshored that is (mainly tech , Services , administration etc things that can't yet be offshored easily )
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
There are plenty of talented IT professionals on the market searching for tech jobs.
:)
A couple of weeks ago, I logged in Siemens worldwide jobs site, and, in my field, 321 out of 322 open positions were in China.
Most employers could see the benefits of offering job security and paying decent salaries as an effective means of retaining the talent (and all those hours spent in training...). Instead, they hire temps, pay huge fees to temp agencies and recruiters, they "outsource", etc. Without a knowledge base, there is no future in any company.
It is more a problem of "if I pay you less, I can keep more for myself" than a true lack of qualified professionals on the market. If engineers wanted to flip burgers they would have studied at the burger flipping college!
When you can reduce my living costs to those of someone in Bangalore, perhaps then I can consider a more "competitive" salary/compensation package.
Until that time, I've got to pay my bills and feed my family. So I'll stick with my "high" Amercian salary and benefits package, thank you.
You worked for IBM Global Services, right? They're real champions at burning out anyone even vaguely competent. I have a friend still recovering from a long stint working for them.
I tell you what dude. The first time a prospective or current employee qualifies a statement with 'to be honest', his ass is fired. Man I love 'right to work' statutes.
As for your unqualified statements...my sister does training in India and while there ae some highly qualified workers there is also a hidden management structure. Typically she see's a the sharp guy or gal with an entourage of less capable employees who pay tribute in exchange for 'management' in the area of decision making. Not to say these folks are not intelligent...But, they do not have the capability of making decisions, only choosing options from a set which does not incur liability by that choice. Everything else is deferred to the 'hidden manager'.
I've seen this in USA middle management where it's not that big a deal. It is a disaster in technical areas beyond flow chart type troubleshooting and parts replacement. What I'm getting at is sure, the H1B and outsource workers my be less expensive in general, but the good ones, those who will own a problem and take responsibility for solving it, are not. The problem for USA workers becomes...
competing at the pay scales of this managed tier for jobs with employers who 'don't get it' or working in an environment where your imported supervisor wants directed drones who pay him tribute and independence is discouraged (like the post office, but that's another story).
from the link...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
No you don't.
I'm also an Aussie on a 9-5 job but in IT. I have no qualifications (missed the exams for my A-Levels in the UK), I passed 85k on my 24th birthday (which happens to coincide with the salary review period) and am currently at 130 at 30. My lowest earning (non IT) Male friend earns 90k and one just reached 200, So while 85k is certainly an OK salary, it's well below 'senior'.
Arrogant as this post reads, I'm not having a go, just pointing out that 85 is pretty average.
My 'senior IT' boss is on 300k.
Advice to kids - get smart and into IT. Hands on work won't get you 'up there'.
Only big ligs use sigs.
Why should kids go into it, like, say, my son, when he sees me unemployed for a good part of the four-year-long Bush Depression - and that's with my having a BS CIS and 20 years experience?
What's the current unemployment rate - 12%? 15% more? among IT people?
And then there's HR morons, two-thirds of whom have no idea of what the job they're supposed to be hiring for actually requires, and want a laundry list that is mostly unnecessary.... (Like the people I ran into recently who seem to think that shell scripting under AIX is Different than other Unix shell scripting).
mark, Unix/Linux software development,
systems administration,
configuration/release management
(resume available upon request)
Remember kids, Networking is shit work with very little respect. But its vitally important to communications and commerce, and it pays accordingly.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Engineers are not good programmers. They know how to program but more often then not they are not good programmers. Even if the customer knows what they need and you have a good project manager to keep them on tasks. There are things that popup that are unexpected It may be more then just follow these calucations and you get the answer. It is the problem how do you make the computer follow these calculations. Most computer languages don't come with a solve algrebra function or integrate operator. And many times the way we would do a calucation is not like how a computer would do the calculation. Many times the engineers aproach is costly in computer terms even with our high speed computers, because an engineers goal is to solve the problem. While the Computer Science is to different ways to solve goals.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
the layoffs provide managers with an opportunity to dump their deadwood.
Oh, I should mention that this is a good thing, because IBM is so afraid of ex-employee lawsuits that it's damned near imposible to get fired for cause.
I know two people who got fired.
The first one took a position as CEO of a client, without quitting his job at IBM first. He was drawing both paychecks for about a four-month period, and working within IBM to sabotage our efforts to get the client in question to pay a large outstanding invoice. He was fired, but he was also given a large cash settlement in exchange for a promise never to sue IBM -- which absolutely amazed me given that he was scamming IBM.
The second one was a project manager who wanted to tell a services client that they needed to pay us an extra $200K on a $500K project. The project was over budget due to mismanagement and he wanted to tell the customer "Sorry, we already spent an extra thousand hours, you'll have to pay this bill for those hours. Sorry we didn't tell you about it and let you make the decision as the contract specified. Pay up". This PM was specifically ordered by his boss not to do this very, very stupid thing, and then did it anyway. In addition to that, the guy had a long history of backstabbing co-workers in an effort to build his own little empire. That is normal in some corporate cultures but anathema in IBM's.
He was also fired, although the process took six months, resulted in a board of inquiry that examined his boss and his boss's motivations. Though the firing was fully justified and the boss was exonerated, it was long an painful.
Given how hard it is to fire anyone at IBM, it should be no surprise that IBM managers have a strong preference for trying people out via supplemental and contractor relationships prior to hiring them full-time. It should also be no surprise that there are layoffs after hiring binges, because that's the only way to get rid of the lousy employees who slipped in.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Governments want full employment, thereby increasing tax revenues and lowering social costs. As for the actual amount of the wages, that's none of the government's business, participants in the market will settle on the right rate. Full employment is not zero unemployment, as there's always new entrants to the market and folks seeking work because of a career switch or staff reduction.
:-) Wages and benefits, in porportion to prices (notwithstanding some of the isolated, bubblish real-estate markets), are quite high, even once you subtract out the tax burden. This can happen because the capital stock behind EU/US employees is huge, resulting in much higher productivity.
>> all Western countries there is always a steady number of unemployed people
Structural unemployment (this is what I think you're referring to) is largely affected by employment costs and regulation. Some contries have very rigid, regulated labor markets (think Germany, Sweeden) and as a result suffer from larger structural unemployment than less regulated markets (Singapore, India). In fact, if you do a bit of digging, you'll find that even if the unemployed number 10%, it's not the _same_ 10% year after year. Furthermore, in heavily-regulated markets, a lot of employment happens off the books to avoid taxes and regulation, so somebody counted as unemployed is actually working for income.
>>Sucks I know. Welcome to the West.
Hardly.
FP is no troll, he/she has made a valid point.
The ever misguided UK Labour Government backing IT offshoring & IT economic migrants coupled with a shaky post 9/11 economy did indeed cause the UK IT jobs market to crash due to oversaturation.
From what I've read the effect in the US was generally just as bad if not worse.
Out of work IT staff where willing to settle for less pay than they would have had in 2000, many just changed careers due to the lack of work available.
As a consultant at the time, I spent over 12 months out of work and I'm still stuggling to break even to this day because of it despite now being in regular work.
Now, the jobs are coming back but the offered rates for the majority of admin, web dev & support workers have stayed low across most UK sectors, about half of what they 4 years ago.
It's no wonder the now volatile IT industry has lost it's appeal in the eyes of budding students.
CN=poolmeister.OU=lurkers.CN=slashdot
With every other article now a days being about outsourcing and how there won't be any computer jobs in 20 years plus the fact that unemployment amoung software developers now is higher than the natioanl average for everyone else, is this any surprise?? I mean I know quite a few folks that went back and got nursing degrees, after the nuclear winter of 9/11 and are now making 35$ to 40$ hr ( to start for an rn ). Is it any wonder?
The Bushies want a free market, well welcome to it. You try and squeeze everyone out of a job and send the work overseas they go where there is a demand for workers, in this case Health Care.
Another example of the stupid short sightedness of American companies.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
If the shortage appears, IBM can just hire some of the 13,000 they http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=29C F3CCF-B6F4-4CEF-BEAD-66F544590BC8just sacked.
Say what you want about the president, but Alan Greenspan is the chairman of the federal reserve, and he served under Clinton, too. His job is to oversee the operation of the federal reserve banks and to set interest rates for borrowing (usually overnight) activities between banks. Sure, he guides interest rates that are fundamental to the very basic underlying economics of business and investment, but to say that he's responsible for people losing their jobs is a bit of a stretch.
If you're just looking at how he makes rate adjustments, he's actually got a very soft touch. If you disagree with his reasons for periodically adjusting the federal funds rate in one direction or the other, you have to admit that he's been able to control inflation very very well during his tenure, and aid in increasing the supply of cheap capital that individuals and businesses use to create jobs rather than destroy them.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
Well, India has the added factor of being a country with myriad native languages. English acts as a "link" language between people who otherwise wouldn't be able to communicate with each other. China, on the other hand, has basically 2 languages to deal with and there is already a pretty developed system in place to communicate between the two. While the Chinese are very interested in learning English, there is less of a pressing need there.
Btw, the U.S. really has to get its act together and push Chinese language education if it wants a fighting chance to keep its economic dominance in the future.