Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
and a good part of the rest of the world..
For better or worse, that's where it's headed too.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Simple: Let it happen. This should drive salaries up, then more students will want to take up Computer Science.
Smart people are becoming IP lawyers. That's were the big bucks is.
No industry has enough people all time. They go through phases of having too many and too much. When there are too many, the people who can't find jobs look to other fields. When there are too few, the opposite happens.
The fact that there were too few people for the jobs was why I was able to break in to the sysadmin / programming world without any credentials back in 1990.
They finally noticed that there was a problem. The pipeline been dry for four years now since the dot com went bust and computers are not the guaranteed money tree as it was before. Of course, with all the outsourcing to other countries for cheap talent, it's easy to forget the pipeline here. I wonder when these companies are going to realize that they can't have their cake and eat it at the same time.
right on brother. About time these fucking corporations start facing the fact that people are sick and tired of being ripped off.
They are the ones that screwed most of the IT sector with outsourcing everything they possibly could.
they are also the ones that horribly inflated the It job market in the late 90's by offering unrealistic salaries (Sorry, no IT worker is worth 150K+ realistic pay is the $39K->89K depending on skillset and experience as well as position)
So I say screw em. I hope there is a HUGE IT shortage and it bites companies in the arse hard.
these fuckers in the boardroom happily made a large number of people jobless yet refused to take a cut in pay themselves.
WAH, boo fucking hoo corperate america. You so deserve this it is not even funny. Most people will not spend 6 years in college for a ~$70K a year job, so IT is skipped for other fields that pay better and are not affected by the whims of a idiot in corperate board room or the worthless Certifications that are marketed as worthwhile. (No a MCSE is 100% worthless to a company it does not even signify any level of competence other that you can test and learn incorrect termonology. that microsoft likes to use so that real IT pros can not simply pass the test without buying the coursework.... no matter WHAT MS says you boot from the boot partition and run from the system partition, just because they like to name shit back-asswards does NOT make it right.)
so to finalize my tirade....
FUCK OFF CORPERATE AMERICA. as a spokesperson for many of the IT pro's here that were employed 6 years ago we all flip you a giant middle finger.
Notice the use of the acro 'IT'. That's part of the problem - do you want technical support people filling out the ranks or do you want software developers?
One of my major gripes about 'the industry' as it stands is the lack of distinction between what is considered 'IT' work and what is programming 'and ecetera and ecetera'.
Saying 'well, we need more CS grads' is straight depressing. What they should be saying is 'we need more software developers (computer science grads) or we need more System administrators (computer information system grads)'.
When I was in school it seemed that people wanting to do CIS work were getting CS degrees and visa versa. This discredits to both areas of work.
All too often I've noticed jobs that require a computer science degree when that should be slated under computer system information management. Or a requirement for a computer engineer when in fact, the work is computer science related.
Come on folks - let's get our terminology right! I work a job that required a computer science degree and any CIS major could work this job in a heart beat.
I guess getting the point across regarding what is IT would probably require a weekend feel good seminar for the clinically lost.
Agree, Considering IBM just laid of about 10,000 highly paid workers in their Global Consulting Services field.
One would expect something a bit smarter from a university. It is not without reason that fewer people are signing up, it might be related to a lack of prospects or something...
If they really care about the sector as a whole, they should point at the cycles of supply and demand and how they cause the peaks in demand(high salaries, growing bubble) and supply(low salaries).
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
And in the same time they fire lots of people to boost there shares.
http://forbes.com/markets/2005/05/05/0505automark
FTA : Yeah I sooo want to work in that business, they have so much respect for there workers.
Congress could allow for more H1B visas, permitting high-quality IT professionals to be brought into the USA where skills are lacking.
To be honest, most skilled American IT employees are gainfully employed now (with some exceptions in some areas). Some will look at H1Bs as just a way to hire cheap overseas labor to replace current "living wage" American jobs, but in reality there is a real need despite the coincidental labor cost differences.
Americans should realize that they need to compete in this new world economy by either working for fewer wages and benefits, or by offering much higher skills and capabilities. Or both. Congress realizes this, and should take action to support American business, the economy, and people.
Become a plumber, auto mechanic or such. After all the tech jobs and manufacturing are sent overseas, those will be the good jobs.
Tell you what, if you walked into an interview with me with that sort of attitude theres is not a snowballs chance in fucking hell of you getting hired.
This 'coding is a destiny' and cant be learned crap is just a self comforting excuse for saddos who dont have the requisite skillset to actually get a job or compete in the job market.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Completely true ... at times I think these companies truly don't understand the skills that only experience can teach. Raw knowledge is great but without any experience it is basically all theory.
... if music be fruit of love, play on
WHAT? java is slow? and not cross-platform? WHY DID NO-ONE MENTION THIS ON SLASHDOT BEFORE?
please, wake me up when you've got a new cliche to peddle. as a java developer who develops on windows and linux and deploys to solaris I really don't know what you're on about. it takes more effort or a great deal of stupidity to write non cross-platform java. and as for it being just like XML... thanks for that. at least I don't have to go to the trouble of exposing your ignorance.
I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but I'm having a bad day.
The cynical bugger in me sees that:
- the guy is young
- 10 years in the field say that it's the guy's first "real" job
- if the guy feels threatened by someone "more qualified", CV and application will end-up in the bin
- his is the only email on the offer, nobody else to CC to
I don't know what to do, really... this is france we're talking about but anyone else got themselves in a similar situation?It is possible that people are scared off these educations because of out-sourcing.
For me it would have more to do with the threat of software patents than the threat of outsourcing. At least with outsourcing you know what you are up against. With the software patent mess you could be doing just fine until suddenty $GREEDYCORP comes and pulls the plug just because they had the resources to buy a patent when they though of the same idea that you also thought of.
(sorry for being a bit offtopic, but for me its a much bigger reason)
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
There is no real shortage of IT-people, only a shortage of people that are willing to work for almost nothing.
The industry's wet dream is for IT-workers to become completely disposable and low paid.
We really should not let this happen, and most could use a history lesson to figure out what happens when we get into this situation.
There once was a seriously real need for labour unions folks, and that time could easily come again. Maybe it is already here.
Wow, kids look at the long hours, fear of off-shoring, deminishing pay scales, being crapped on and say to themselves, "That may not be for me." Big surprise.
I think a general population of students (not country limited) has a lot in common with a lightening bolt. It will take the path of least resistance.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
The thing is, when some of those "coding is a destiny types" actually get a job they pretty quickly become the workforce of whole departments, who actually get work done.
If you only hire people who look good on the jobmarket, who sell themselves well, you either get bogus posers who don't get anything done, or if they are really good (yes, sometimes looking good and being good coincides), they pretty soon find a better job, since the others notice too.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
I've told him that computer science in important but only secondary to the actual profession he will choose in college and grad school so he will have the necessary tools to work with in his chosen field.
Why choose IT when our arrogant US govt rewards corporations for outsourcing and keeps increasing the number of foreign student and work visas for the fewer jobs here instead of rebuilding and expanding our educational systems.
No need for IT grants here or money for research projects or support for local education funding when we can get it done in China or India. We would rather spend our money on wars, and since we have a monopoply on the OS anyway, who cares.
So son, become a doctor or an architect or a marine scientist or something you enjoy first, then get the tools to do the jobs yourself, and oh yes, learn Mandarin along with your Spanish.
Corporations that live for this Quarters profits can't seem to manage a simple extrapolation of the resut of outsourcing and destroying their local brainforce.
I work for a tech corp that has laid of 60 000 people (or about 60% of the brainforce). Those that remain are in hell for a few reasons:
1: We are expected to get double the work done.
2: We spend most days interacting with Indian Contractors. Makes #1 harder.
3:Coding we used to enjoy has be replaced by draconian productivity sapping process. We metric our coders to death. Klocs is the new religion. I am in the invite list for several doc reviews and code reviews per day. Makes #1 harder.
I really wonder when the have outsourced most of this where they think the next generation of tech leaders will come from. It is not hard to imagine that India/China will stop serving our interests and instead compete with us. Already happening in my industry (telecom).
We are led by short sighted morons.
I am not an economist, but it seems rational that any (capitalist) government would want a labour force larger than the number of jobs available, so that supply exceeds demand, and the jobs market becomes a buyers' market, thus keeping labour costs (i.e. wages) low in order to keep business profitable, and to help to economy grow. This, BTW, is why in all Western countries there is always a steady number of unemployed people: these are the victims of the government's need for cheap labour for business. IT is no different, and to support the growing numbers of technology businesses it is neccesary to have low-paid tech workers. Sucks I know. Welcome to the West.
(BTW, you're absolutely right about "good" tech jobs being hard to find - as long as supply exceeds demand, there will be a downward trend towards the lower end of the wage scale.)
For a few years. Then some of the more resourceful grunt workers will set up shop for themselves, hire away the best of the rest, and start producing, and patenting, their own IO, and licensing it back to you. Or more likely, licensing it to the manufacturers in East Asia. In 20 years the US's IP exports will be sitcoms and action movies, though these are being offshored too. The 20th Century was the American Cnetury, it's over.
Agreed.
:
.au wage). :-)
From an Australian point of view
I was considering a career in computers when I finished school in 1990. I decided to become an auto electrician instead. So now what do I do?
- I now work on heavy mining equipment.
- It's not a physically demanding job, but it keeps me relatively fit.
- I work a roster of 4 12-hour days on and 4 days off.
- I get paid 85KAUD (more than twice the average
- I get six weeks annual leave and a heap of misc perks.
- I have a strong (not quite "aggressive" these days) union behind me keeping things safe and sane.
- I work on equipment that has computers and electronics out the wazoo, and is (relatively) clean
- I get the satisfaction of changing about 20 million dollars worth of equipment from "broken" to "fixed!" status every day.
- I get roughly the equivalent of an senior-level IT wage, from a four year apprenticeship that , frankly, any monkey can struggle through.
- I can also fix my car at home
Maybe in 10 years time IT will be the big earner again, but by then I'll be a million bucks ahead of that poor post-grad flipping burgers at McD's.
My advice to kids? Stick with the hands on work, keep computers as a sideline.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
I don't know why, but this strikes me as a move similar to funding Bin Laden to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, or being friendly with Saddam. They probably seemed a good idea, but turned round to bite the US on the ass later.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Salaries are declining thanks to outsourcing and the career basically stinks. I teach Java part-time at a local college. My course has been cancelled twice due to inadequate enrollment. The kids are getting a clue that all the hard work to obtain a degree in the sciences is not worth it. CEO's are "C" students at best who excel in lying and bullying. The U.S. will let this one slip, we will mint more lawyers and someday we will be so screwed. My B.S. is in engineering and I work for a Mortgage Company. They pay better and they don't go out of business after a year. My M.S. is in C.S. and that I believe was a waste of my time. Pity isn't it?
Yeah, this is why I'm doing Desktop support and Network Administration.
You may laugh and say I'm the bottom of the barrel in the IT world, but - regardless of how many programming jobs are being outsourced, there are not less end user computers being purchased, and they will always need someone to clean spyware. And there are always more small businesses who need a simple file server or an exchange calendar, and they'll need someone to consult, sell, implement, and support that.
And that has to all be hands on. You want job security? Lower your standards and do a job where it is impossible for someone from india to do it.
~Will
sig?
Judging by most of the job adverts I'm reading at the moment (I'm in the process of closing down an IT company I've been running for more than a decade and will need an alternative source of income) don't require IT "professionals", they require IT "tradesmen" with specific and transient skills to nurse equipment from a small number of vendors.
When I graduated, back in the days when punched cards and paper tape were still common, there was no single vendor dominance of vast swathes of the IT industry and it was therefore important to teach people the principles of Computer Science - algorithms, algorithmic complexity, computational methods, principles of machine operations, operating system design, relational database design - rather than turning out people familiar with Windows, C++ and Oracle knowledge.
People with those fundamental skills have much greater adaptability and potential career longevity - after all, very little has changed in the fundamentals in the last 25 years although superficial things have changed considerably. I can quite happily pick up a book and start programming in C# or Java if I need to; on the other hand, the graduates I've had in recently for interview can competently operate Visual Studio but seem rather hazy about balanced trees, queues or the performance implications of changing privilege modes on the average CPU. And perhaps they don't need to - some library or "wizard" will hide the difficult bits in some way no-one will quite understand, but probably won't break until the original coder has moved on.
It seems employers don't want people with "fundamental" skills who can adapt to changing technologies, they want an MSIE/CNAA/xyz who can deal with a specific problem at a specific point in time and whom they can replace later on with someone with a different "qualification" when their needs change.
Unforunately, universities seem to have commoditised their graduate programmes to churn out tradesmen in contemporarily fashionable skills to supply the job market as it exists rather than fulfilling their traditional roles of providing the foundations for lifelong professional development.
It's no wonder that people aren't going in for these kind of courses, knowing their career lifetimes are likely to be relatively short and tied to the waxing and waning fortunes of manufacturers.
If you want to work in a trade, you can earn considerably more being a plumber or electrician than working in IT. I'm seriously considering it.
If you want to be an "IT professional", the opportunities to do so are few and far between. You're probably better advised to find a nice Open Source Software project to work on in your spare time...
In the mid 1970s, when the space race slowed down, there was an entire generation of aerospace engineers who lost their jobs all over the country.
Space was supposed to have been the future. But it didn't turn out that way. The number of engineering students in universities dropped precipitously. After all, why go in to a job like that with little or no future, where your industry could evaporate overnight at the whim of a few "business leaders."
Later in the Early 1990s, I witnessed something similar when half of my class at the university disappeared because all the major defense contractors were laying off.
Engineers and other technology workers are well paid in good times. However, you need to keep a reserve and a backup career just in case the industry you're working in goes in to the toilet.
In the scheme of industries which have suffered, you folks in IT have little to complain about. Ask an engineer from the 1970's what life was like after the Apollo missions ceased.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Every job or position is just as hard as every other. Say that to yourself over and over, because you're obviously a snob who needs to get over an assinine, overinflated sense of your own importance.
A car salesman needs to know about sales technique, trends in the industry, demographics, and the technical details of how cars work. A grocery store manager has 10,000 items to remember, including watching their popularity and knowing their proper use, so that when a customer asks him he can give a ready answer. And a landscaper needs to know which plants are best for which soil, shade, and design criteria.
Not everyone finds their calling in high school. Some people know their calling, but don't get the breaks to get there.
I knew when I was 14 that I wanted to program computers when I grew up. That's what I do now, almost 30 years later, but it took me the first 10 years or so to arrange it.
Before that I was a
If you asked one of the people who knew me in one of those other roles, they might tell you I'd be a landscaper by now.
I gotta tell you, some days I consider it.
By the way, that former friend of yours probably would make an excellent contact for you the next time you're downsized or simply fired for being a jerk.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
I'm tired of being unable to have a career because there are 8 million idiots with a pile of certifications and a bunch of bad ideas clogging up the job mills.
Canthros
Given your obsession with German Scheisse video this can only be a good thing.
If you seriously make decisions based on slashdot user comments you are crazy. Most of the comments reguarding outsourcing are so uninformed its hilararious. Of course on slashdot uninformed outsourcing comments get modded to +5 informative rather than -1 dead wrong. I think that this is becuase there is no "dead wrong" moderation option. Anyway, this site is a perfect example of the blind leading the blind.
Though frankly if your main concern in your career path is your salery I don't really care if you change majors. If you aren't really passionate about the field you may end up having a tough time getting a job. Put simply a degree won't cut it. You actually have to be good to get a job, and often the best people would do this even if the salaries weren't as great as they are.
Universities could cut their costs drastically if allowed to fire expensive tenured professors (like Prof Owen Astrachan), and bring in excellent but far cheaper educators on H1B visas from India and other countries. This would allow them to remain competitive and thrive in todays global education market.
Prof Owen Astrachan and his ilk might selfishly object to this proposal, but they have to understand that the world doesn't owe them an overpaid living, and after lifestyle adjustments, I'm sure he'll be able to pick up work teaching at the local Ace TechTrain! franchise.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
None of the labor shortages predicted during the past 30 years has come to pass.
Some pundits, politicians and industry leaders seem to think that if the market is flooded with more technical degreed graduates, industry will be attracted. In other woirds, build it and they will come. That's putting the cart before the horse.
Enrollments have risen and fallen in direct proportion to the demand for graduates of the curriculum. For the past 5 years companies have been shedding workers in the US. Consequently, enrollments in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering have fallen dramatically. Should this trend continue, these curricula may be discontinued or scaled back at many of the 2nd and 3rd tier engineering schools.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
We've been hearing this for years, while most of us have been applying for 1 tech job opening that gets 2000 or so applicants.
Where is the shortage? It's crap.
I think this is what big business keeps saying so they can convince the US gov't to let them bring in more H1B's who'll work for a bag of peanuts every week.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
If there's a dramatic decline in people willing to take even introductory comp. sci. courses, where are they going instead, and why? Accounting or business majors, because that's where the money is?
If you have a big drop in the percentage of top people going the computer science or IT route, then they must be a corresponding increase in the people taking other courses. Either a big jump in specific areas, or else it's dispersed across disciplines. The former indicates that there's a specific discipline that is now seen as a hot item. The latter indicates that computer science/IT is now seen as a cold item. So, which is it? And, if the former, is it just our path, or are there other disciplines similarly affected? All the sciences, for example?
Once you know what the real reasons are behind the figures, then maybe you can do something to intelligently address the problem.
In spite of the fact that there are more jobs available, companies are still only willing to pay salaries in line with the Dot Com Bust era. In other words, I get calls almost every day (and frequently multiple calls) from recruiters who are representing clients that want to pay 35% less than what I was making as a full-time employee in 2002 and 25% less than I'm making now as a 1099 consultant now.
The ones who are willing to pay the higher salaries (read: Wall St.) expect skillsets that are so specific that they will not talk to you if you do not have every one of them. In my opinion, they are asking for trouble because the technologies in use there are used very rarely outside of those sectors. When the IT staff they have in place now decide to move on, they will be hard-pressed to find trained people to replace them.
I actually had an HR employee at a company who was interested in me as a potential employee tell me that their guideline for translating 1099 to full-time salary was to subtract 30%. I asked her how they arrived at that figure and her response was that it took into consideration benefits, vacation time, sick days and retirement plans.
Color me stupid but benefits these days are not what they used to be from the perspective of the amount the company contributes. I pay less than double than others at full time companies do, but I'm paying 100% of the cost. This isn't your father's IBM where the company paid for nearly everything and you had an amazing medical, dental, vision, etc. plan.
Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of people do not take a lot of sick days each year and you have me scratching my head and wondering what drugs that HR person was on when she told me 30% and expected me to accept it like it was a given.
Am I living in a pipe dream?
of Syrinx...
Yes, the Industrial Revolution marks out the ditch on the right.
On the left, you'll notice a bureaucratic one, featuring:
a "saftety net", in which we can all get tangled, that ensures that the bureucracy continues to grow at a rate that makes a virulent cancer look static
wage escalation pricing native labor out of the market
protectionist trade policies ensuring crappy native products, and the fat politicians taking kickbacks to support them, far outlive their usefulness
arguments about "right to choose" that neglect the real issues of people treating sexuality responsibly, not like a video game, cluttering social dialogue
Unions (a mutiny awaiting its moment, for this old squid) picking your pocket and trying to set themselves up as a parallel government (or mafia, if you will) driving up wage costs and them blaming everyone but themselves for the fact that the worker is over a barrel
You left out entrepreneurialism, so that, when your eyes grow dry from whining about victimization, you can go start a business. Oh, wait, the Union will organize against you. Never mind.
Bigotry perpetuated by the groups who draw their power therefrom.
So, in between this brace of ditches, there may be some ground for a future. I hope.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I hate to tell you this, but our music sux, and our movies aren't much better! That leaves us with one.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I graduated from college in 2003 with a general IT degree (no, not compsci, but better than MIS). This meant that I started college a bit before the dot com bust happened, which means so did all of my classmates. So when we entered college, the money was looking damn good with no end in sight.
Guess what? About 90% of the people in my major had 0 interest in technology. They couldn't troubleshoot the most simplistic problems. HTML was a very confusing and difficult concept to a lot of them (as evidenced by the fact that we had to create an entire semester class devoted to it). A majority of them were there because they thought it would make them rich overnight, that they could go out and say "I have a degree in this computer stuff!" and be snapped up for 6-figure salaries right out of college.
Now, those same people are moaning and bitching about the field they're in. They don't like the work, never did really, but now they realize that the money sucks too. Already I've talked to several who are moving towards business centric jobs, away from technology. Several have said they wouldn't have majored in anything computer related if they knew the jobs weren't going to be there like they thought.
In my mind, the downturn was a good thing. Yes, it was a complete pain in the arse to get a job after college, but I eventually managed it. Sure the pay isn't what they were advertising a few years ago, but it's still money that keeps me fed and with a roof over my head. But I'm still working with technology, which I love.
That's the big thing... I enjoy the whole IT thing, have since I was little. I think those that stick with it through the downturn, those that major in it DESPITE knowing the market is in the crapper, those are the people I want in this industry. I don't want someone who runs in when there's money but jumps ship when things look dicey. I want to work with people who want to work in the field because they love the work, not because they hope to get rich quick.
IT and CS/E programs would benefit immensely if they were able to get rid of all the students who are only in it for the money. Imagine your college classes, think about what they would have been like if they were filled with people who were interested in the material and actually wanted to learn it? Think about your job today and imagine everyone around you being that dedicated to tech (some of you are fortunate enough to work places like that... I'm not).
The slump is a bear to deal with in the short-term, but those who stick it out I think will definitely benefit in the long run. We'll be the ones with experience when the pendulum swings the other way.
But the problem is that it's only going to work as long as the rest of the world plays along, and is prepared to both introduce and enforce the draconian IP legislation that the US is pushing for on all fronts.
Right now, perhaps it looks promising (from this perspective). Under the threat of trade sanctions, China is agreeing to take measures to reduce piracy of music, films, and software. Thanks to massive US-led lobbying in Brussels, the European Union may be on the brink of legalizing software patents, that will make it illegal to treat email addresses as objects or send video over a network without paying royalties to a US company.
If you look at the US as a single entity (and ignore the question of how the wealth will be distributed inside the US society), you may get the impression that pieces are falling into place, and that the strategy will be successful. This would then mean that the US could continue to run its massive trade defecit with the rest of the world, and make up the difference by collecting what would in effect be a global "IP tax".
But would a situation like that be sustainable? I think not.
If a small country on its own tries to defy the US over IP matters, it will be hit hard by trade sanctions and - utimately - the threat of military intervention.
But suppose Europe, China, India, and Brazil, and anybody else who cares to join the alliance, were to abolish the excesses in IP legislation once they realize that it only benefits a few US multinational companies. What could the US do about it?
The military option just wouldn't be an option in a scenario like that. Although it's not entirely unthinkable that the US has the military capacity to actually conquer the rest of the world, there's simply no way to sustain the necessary occupation forces indefinitely.
And trade santions wouldn't work either, since the rest of the world is much bigger than the US in economic terms. That would just be like the classic line "fog over the Channel, Europe isolated".
Which, incidentally, is a quote that stems from the days when the British Empire was the undisputed no 1, but was already on the decline, even if nobody had noticed it yet.
Which probably isn't just a coincidence.
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
With the influx of morons and idiots into the IT world during the dotbomb bubble who thought they could code, things have gotten dismal in IT. We have a ton of useless wannabees who barely made it through college (or worse) some of the more useless certifications out there. This is why I have to deal with two apps where I work that just suck ass in so many ways. People got "better ideas" and took systems that worked, ripped them out, and implemented new stuff just because it was cool. Then when people in the industry stand back and take a real good look, we see IT overflowing with crap software written by people who don't even understand what structured or object-oriented programming is other than some cool sounding buzzwords.
We have VB "programmers" and Flash "programmers" filling up teh intarwebs with more useless and poorly written "apps". We have people replacing perfectly good and efficient text interfaces with point and click GUIs where such a thing is NOT beneficial. Case in point... where I work we had a decent text menu based system but it got replaced with a poorly designed GUI. The users all complain about how what they used to do in just a few seconds now takes minutes. And they're right. Now this company is going to implement this monstrosity in Java. Can you believe it? JAVA for god's sake!!! They can't even write a proper app in their hodgepodge of C and they plan to do this in Java?
The drop off in people going for computer related degrees can only mean one thing: the wannabees have left the building because the party is over. This means that the only people signing up are people who (gasp!!) LIKE to PROGRAM. People who CAN PROGRAM! Making money with computers is OK, but unless you love these machines, you shouldn't bother. All the "get rich quick" types ruined the business during the 90s but now those fair weather friends aren't so hot to get into IT because now there's work to be done...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Yourdon has chronicled this same phenominon from the early 90's in an interesting manner his first book Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, Yourdon/Prentice Hall 1993 was followed by his admission that he was a fool, see Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer, Yourdon/Prentice Hall 1996.
The lack of communication skills and the poor quality of the product from overseas will only increase the worth of American programmers.
This will not the last time businesses will make bad decisions in an effort to save money.
~~ "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." --Donald Knuth, March 22, 1977
I seriously doubt this. "Job Security" is something the Boomers had, and that puppy is dead in the basket. It doesn't matter how much you think you're in demand, if the bean counters decide that one department is spending too much, they'll cut the tech budget and you'll be gone. This very thing happened at Shell, and BP just two years ago, despite the increased profits that Oil & Gas are now experiencing.
I don't think you're paying attention. The *old way* was for someone to start on help desk, then the good ones would work up to desktop grunt, etc. That pipe is broken, because most (large) businesses outsource their helpdesks to Bangladesh/Malaysia.
Finally, just because you have a CS, it doesn't make you a good tech/programmer/whatever. I've known many good techs who didn't have a degree at all, just as I've known techs who had a CS degree and who couldn't tech their way out of a wet paper bag.
Yeah, right.
I don't think that this is a serious expression of concern on the part of IBM management. They are in the process of executing thousands of their employees in Europe at this moment. IBM still has a significant presence in the Raleigh-Durham area, and it's typical to "show the flag" at grad time - every company would of course like to have the cream of the crop in any field that pertains to them.
People have gotten the message that our corporate and government 'leaders' have been sending in the most unequivocal way - money. I.E. that it's a dog-eat-dog world, the cheapest way to make the most profit will be primarily funneled to those who are at the top of the pyramid. These are not CS or EE grads. A few managed to rise to the top in the past at tech firms, but that is very 70s-80s thinking. Now, it is strictly those who come from the marketing and finance side, and the most purely profitable industries we have in the U.S. now are in fact financial corporations that produce nothing tangible.
Only a fool would pursue a technical career for the money. It's a vocation, not a profession. Soon it will be something like being a humanities major - something all the relatives will roll their eyes about when they hear what Johnny is studying at university.
BRAINFORCE?
Hahahahahahahaha. This is the funniest thing I've read all day.
I think we "IT Guys" need to come to grips with how important our jobs really are to the companies we serve. The boss decided that your steps 1, 2, and 3 are adequate and provide shareholders with short-term gains. Who are YOU to question him? Do you have a business degree? No? Economics?
We're pretty much the janitors of the computer world. We are expendable and interchangable. We are not saviors of the world, and we are certainly not the company's "brainforce".
Has anybody noticed that for the last five years, somebody publishes an article with the exact same argument about six months?
And that the article is thoroughly debunked here on slashdot, in the exact same manner?
*sigh* Okay one more time:
1) To work as a lawyer/doctor/nurse/chemical engineer, you must have a degree like JD/MD/RNBS/BSCE. IT has never been like that, and still isn't. A CCIE or CISSP will earn you more than BSCS. Very few IT jobs require a degree of any kind, and the few IT jobs that do require a degree, will typically accept any technical degree.
2) How many IT workers can actually be called "Computer Scientists" ? There are all sorts of IT related degrees today: network engineering, software engineering, information science, etc. Most of these degrees seem much closely related to an actual IT job roles than "computer science."
3) The IT is glutted as it is. Where is the crises in a lack new BSCSs? Especially when that degree was never in high demand, even when there was a shortage of IT pros.
4) IT jobs are sent overseas as fast the major companies can ship them. Why train for a field that is already glutted, and likely to get worse?
5) I suspect that employers will never be satisfied with the pool of IT workers; and that colleges are finding it difficult to find people to sign up for the nearly worthless BSCS (especially women). So we see these bogus articles about the the bogus shortage of BSCSs. College comp sci departments, and employers are looking out for their interests - not yours.
IBM and university officals are worried about the increasing demand for IT professionals and the decreasing supply of computer science students.
The old adage "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice. Shame on me." applies here. IBM and other companies obviously want to increase the number of H1-B's and universities want to increase the number of students. So many IT people were burned when the dot com bubble burst that they are rightly not interested in going back or into the field. And to add insult to injury what few jobs were left were filled by the H1-B's, essentially company serfs with the govt's blessing.
I only recently after almost four and a half years got a REAL job in the IT field again. Three of those years were spent in call center hell. Bottom line: Choose a field you are going to love, come thick or thin. Not based on where the demand is, real or imagined.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Why is this semi-brainwashed post moderated Insightful?
High wages are good for the economy. The more people get paid, the more they spend. A single dollar spent increases GDP by $7. Competing on low wages is a race to poverty, and no first world country should be trying to do this.
I think trade has always led to stronger economies, and will do so- but rampant, unregulated free trade is wrecking the planet, and the uncertain nature of the beast is causing serious pain to many, in both first and third world countries.
I am sorry that you think your unions and government are so corrupt- but libertarian free trade is not the solution, reform of government is.
And regarding your comment about unions driving up wages, well its no coincidence that non-unionised fields like IT get savaged, if workers don't stand up for themselves no one else will...
Although the benefits from big companies these days are not what they used to be, I think a 25-30% difference is very reasonable. Years ago, when companies were more generous, the loaded cost for a professional employee was double the stated salary (+100%). This includes: payroll taxes (~8%), unemployment insurance, benefits, and other admin. overhead.
While there is usually no legal obligation to keep full time employee any more than there is to keep consultants (unless you have a union), companies tend to look at full time employees as a lont term investment. That is because there is an acquisition cost to hiring an employee. Too much turnover is costly (unless you're Walmart and pay below poverty level wages). In contrast, consultants are hired to do specific projects only. Since consultants are likely to have down time between contracts, they reasonably mark up their fees to cover the fallow period. This also accounts for a difference between a full time wage vs a consultant fee levels.
If your're happy being a consultant - go for it. You might even find a better paying full time job, but that is likely to involve more responsibilities so it would be like a promotion. For a lateral move to full time work, you SHOULD expect a drop a direct pay, all else being equal.
Basically, if you look at the way they're running things, and the way they're headed, all the grunt work will be done offshore, including programming, but the IP will be owned here in the US.
Agree with you in the short term.
How can one develop IP if one doesn't have educated people around to develop it? What I really enjoy are companies that try to "keep the software architecture and design in the US and farm out the grunt work to India." Ummm... how do people become architects and designers without ever having done the grunt work themselves? Works for now... but weep for the future.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
Music and movies are completely subjective to the audience. Posters above have claimed that other areas produce "better" of whatever, but that's just a matter of taste.
For example, I think anyone can make it in European Pop as long as they have a Casio BeatMaster and a 4 word catch phrase that they can say repeat until even they are sick of it.
Movies are even more subjective than that. Other than so called "artsy" films, most popular films abroad are no different than ones made in the USA in that some movie makers have found a format/storyline that appeals to lots of their market and 90% of the movies are just rehashes of that plot.
Basically, the whole world is dumbing down, IMO. There's very little creativity anymore - almost all entertainment is just cookie cutter now. Just change the shape of the cutter to reflect your region's tastes.
You have no idea how comforting this is to hear.
:)
Or do you?
<humor>
Wait, are you a memetic agent of the evil ITAA, trying to lull us into a sense of complacency??
</humor>
OK, all you dumbasses who are confused about what a union actually does listen up. Workers get mad because they are getting lower wages because the people over seas can do their jobs cheaper. They form a union to stabilize their income. The business they work for no longer have any financial incentives to go with the local labor as opposed to over seas. Thusly, labor is outsourced over seas proportionally so as they are at most spending as much as they were before in this area of labor.
So before you had 9 locals making $100/ea (900 local dollars), the boss reduces salary to $50/ea (450 local dollars), a union forms forcing wages back to $100/ea (900 local dollars), in order to offset the costs the boss outsources until he is only paying out what he wants $100/local $25/outsourced to meet his total expenditures of $450 he only keeps 3 local and hires 6 outsourced (300 local dollars 150 outsourced dollars). In other words, there is a net loss in employment, and there is a net loss for the economy as a whole. Unions help a couple people keep their jobs, themselves and whatever proportion of people meet the ratio. Thats capitalism for ya. Now work out a better system, and post it here on slashdot.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
I have needs come up all the time, and I have a hell of a time filling them. I can tell you right know I don't give a fuck how old you are, and 99% of the open needs pay 6 figures, so if that's being a cheapskate, I'm not sure what to tell you. As far as the skillsets, well if you don't have the skills then why are you applying for the job? My clients know what they want, they are willing to pay for it, but the folks just aren't out there! They're all taken!
Oh, sure, I'll post a need and get 100 resumes in a day. But all of them turn out to be what I like to call "fucking morons".
I love when I ask for an expert J2EE architect and I ask, "What's your favorite J2EE design pattern?" The answer is always MVC (if they can even come up with one at all), which I guess could pass as J2EE, so I ask them to describe it for me.
Or, here's my personal favorite. A guy said he was an expert in Java and an expert in C/C++ (it always makes me nervous when people group C/C++ like that, since while C and C++ share some syntax, they are very fucking different animals!): HELLO! Where do these people come from and why are they interviewing with me for 6 figures instead of the local McDonalds for $6/hr?Frustrating!
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
It is definitely bad for the people of the USA, there is no doubt about that. Whether we get a slumping as the mass of IT patents begin to expire or if there is a secession of countries from the patent laws before that remains to be seen. If the US loses its ability to intimidate other countries then the latter may well happen. Aside from the huge debt the USA has, bear in mind that it's not easy to threaten those you depend on. By outsourcing to the other countries, the US loses power over them. Contrary to common perception, the power resides not in the employer but in the worker.
Exploring what might happen a little further though, it's wrong to analyse this solely in terms of nations. Taking that view indicates an acceptance of the subtle propaganda of nationalism. By this I'm just pointing out that the wealthy stock-holders of the corporations that do this are not synonymous with the people of the USA. Nor are the wealthy of China. As modern governments seem willing to open any doors for the wealthy, we get an effective class of people that are tied to no nation. The people in the USA who are monopolizing ideas and pushing for more patent laws have their counterparts in China and India and elsewhere. When the USA begins to suffer from the collapsing of the trade imbalance, we may find that those who brought it about in the US have long since invested their money in Chinese and Indian companies, or wherever else the power has gone. The result will be a perpetuation of the IP paradigm and an increasing poverty of the non-IP owning majority.
While the USA is in a dominant position, it should be creating a fair system designed at increasing the size of the cake, not just grabbing more of what is there. They should do this while other countries want to rise to their position and are willing to help. US power has already passed it's zenith however, and the opportunity is sliding away. The result will be reaping exactly what has been sown in years to come.
I would like to see more concilliation from the USA, but instead it just seems to be tightening its grip which is always a sign of fear. As Shakespeare said: "'Tis better playing with a Lion's whelp, than with an old one, dying."
Yes, I'm being dramatic. However, I think a debt of US$7,782,816,000,000 deserves a little rhetoric.
Me? I'm campaigning against European Software Patents over here and learning a couple more languages just in case.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
of us "old" IT guys in our 30's and 40's (many of us unemployed or underemployed) who can be retrained inexpensively compared to putting new students through the four-year universities.
Stop the age discrimination, corporate America!!!
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Universities that sign up can let students download WebSphere Studio, DB2 Universal Database, WebSphere Application Server, Rational XDE and Lotus Domino. You don't even get the boxed product. It's IBM's answer to MSDN, with a big tilt towards web-oriented middleware.
This is not "computer science". This is vocational training. This is material IBM used to teach new hires in-house. Now they're dumping their product-specific training requirements on universities.
And then they whine that they're not getting "the best and the brightest".
Anyway, things worked OK for me (I'm a tenure track faculty member now), but these reports of how few people are in different areas are completely bogus.
If there's a single are in which there are no such reports and where the professional associations act as cartels to keep their own salaries at astronomical levels is in medicine. Come on! Everywhere else in the world medicine is affordable and of reasonable quality and medical doctors make a decent living. The US has by far the worst medical system I've ever experienced (having lived in 5 countries already...). Doctors are overpaid and pedantic, preventive medicine is nonexistent, and 1/3 of the population has no real access to it... Go figure...
If you dropped out of high school, then you screwed yourself out of a degree. It had nothing to do with your socioeconomic background. Don't try to pull out that tired sob story.
I, like many thousands before me, went to a top-10 national college without my parents spending a dime. My roommate grew up in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina, and he could barely afford the meal plan without work-study. Without grants, scholarships, and loans, neither of us would have been at that school. Sure, we've been paying back loans for 5 years now and will be for another 5 years more, but we both have a BSEE degrees and it's made all the difference in the world.
Going all the way through college and earning a degree is hard work, and takes discipline. First you have to excel in high school to get into college in the first place, no matter whether your high school offers computer classes or not. Then once you get in school you have to succeed not only in your major area of study but also in mandatory distribution areas that you wouldn't otherwise choose.
But that's the point! A degree represents the capability to learn and succeed even when faced with a challenge you don't necessarily want to face. Degrees imply perseverance and accomplishment in the face of adversity. Sure, it's *possible* to learn 90% of what you learn in college all by yourself if you're incredibly self-disciplined and well-motivated. But it's incredibly easy to miss very important lessons when you don't have experienced teachers (i.e. professors) guiding your learning experiences.
I have to agree a lot with the parent poster. I now interview candidates weekly, and I am completely underwhelmed with the quality of interview candidates we have been getting the last few years. The best candidates we seem to get are coming from other companies and already have experience; our college interviews (which are already dumbed down quite a bit) have gone so poorly lately that we're not hiring any young blood at all.
So who knows, maybe you're right after all. Maybe college is becoming a waste of time. It wasn't a waste of time for me, but for some of the college interview candidates I've gotten recently it certainly seems to have been...
While your categories are reasonable, you've left out whole classes of systems (for example communications-related software, and OO/RDBMS) which can range between Business and Technical programming because of performance constraints (perform multiple lookups against a 10-100 GB database within 100 ms per lookup, with volumes of millions of queries per minute), and new business processes spawned by competition (think Walmart). New processes generate demand for new applications like data mining that are enabled by new advances in hardware and algorithms. So it's naive to say that "the underlying programming problems were all solved 40 years ago". The theory may have been worked out, but actual implementation depends as much on local system requirements and constraints as the existence of a well-defined algorithm.
Also, even if 90% of developers on a Business programming team have no CS or engineering experience, you need at least a few people with a software engineering background to avoid the stupid mistakes that run-of-the-mill programmers just don't think of. In other words, to make people aware of the underlying programming problems that actually were solved 40 years ago. A couple of examples: 1) so that people understand what the hell change control is, and why its needed. And 2) understanding why this nifty Java program that was written for a small workgroup didn't scale when it was ported to a corporate Linux server and 10,000 users were added.
Of course all this is irrelevant anyway. We don't need any CS or SW engineering majors in the US because hardly any new IT jobs are going to be created in the US for the next 15 years or more. Either that or they will be at $15,000/year.
We are the 198 proof..
Screw 'em. I still won't tell my kid to go into IT.
Not that I'm BITTER or anything... :(
So, in other words, you are admitting to the biggest mistake any professional can possibly make. You stopped learning. Here's an interesting bit of information. In most professional occupations, good employees never stop learning. They read the literature related to their field. They go to refresher courses, trade shows, whatever is necessary to stay on top.
If you were a heart surgeon, and didn't keep up with the latest surgery techniques, you wouldn't be hired, period. If you were educated in 1960, and never learned anything new, you would not be a desirable surgeon.
The same situation applies to CS, only CS, due to it's relative "newness", moves a lot faster than most other industries. The simple fact is this: If you don't keep up with your education, don't complain when you become undesirable.
Guys, I sympathize with all your complaints about tech jobs and not finding work. I also was a victim of downsizing and layoffs myslef in 2000. But I went back to school and have been working as a programmer for the last 4 years and seeing lots of work out there in this industry and opportunity for all. Its not like the boom years but there is work to be done. Most of the web stuff is getting so competitive that its not in demand but its out there. But .NET and high level web development is growing. Every business out there Ive met with is slowly moving everything online or into thin-client apps now.
Also, the push and pulls of IT supply and demand right now are confusing are diverse. From offshoring to more competition for IT services globally to more players to more trained IT people in India to less in the US, etc. etc. But when the smoke clears I cannot imagine with everything and everyone moving to digital, thatthere will npot be a HUGE demand for programmers and IT people in all forms to manage and build it. So, its a very good field and like someone says, supply and rising salaries will eventually drive more people back to the field.
Its obvious that so many of you are so bitter abotu your experienec with companies, and thats whats hurting the whole perspective.
I dont care how ignorant or dumb CIO's and project managers, CEO's, and senior business people are towards IT right now. It is and will eventually bite them in the rear when they realize they have to go back to the original model and pay and worship the US IT person as a legitimate and valued asset in their organization. That is slowly happening now, I believe. Despite the tools and offshoring replacing some of that, the field is expanding and diversifying so much that there is allot of work out there finally here in 2005....and more to come.
Read about unhappiness in outsourcing in India and new IT jobs in rural America growing:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-5685170.html http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5562732.html
U.S. PROGRAMMERS = INNOVATION
A US centric reply:
A post with centralized control will become corrupt. Often the first holder of the post will be well intentioned, and efficient. This is no guarantee as to what his n-th successor will be.
The design of a system lies in the flow of control, not in the words that "justify and define" it. We still have the same constitution, but because the flows of control have shifted, we live in a very different kind of state than did the people of 1950, or 1940. In 1940 we lived in something much nearer to a democracy than we do today.
One of the major shifts in the flows of control took place in the late 1960-early 1970's when the FCC decided that commercial stations didn't need to carry balanced coverage by all the political parties...but could carry only paid ads, and shows that were paid for. This vastly increased the ability of an election to be legally bought. And that made both media stations and wealthy entities much more powerful politically. It also became a way of virtually eliminating any third voice without overt suppression. Before that time third parties had a very difficult time legally registering. Now it's easy to register, but impossible to get a significant portion of the vote. If you can't get anyone to hear you, nobody will pay attention to you. (Of course this is encouraged by our means of counting the votes. If you vote for a minor party, that means that you consider both of the major party candidates so bad [or so nearly equal] that chosing between them is a waste of time.)
But with only two candidates, the VERY wealthy can buy BOTH of them.
Similarly, managers in charge of corporations tend to become corrupt. They don't all start out that way, and many never become corrupt. But there's effectively no way to get rid of them when they do become corrupt. So they use the power of the corporation that they have been entrusted with guiding to their own ends. Sometimes this is also beneficial to the corporation and the stockholders, but one certainly can't count on that. And there's no particular reason to presume that it will be beneficial to society, either. Generally if greatly in the other direction. But the flows of control leave the power centralized in one pair of hands.
I can imagine the government being cleansed of corruption...but even if it were, for it to stay that way would require a minor miracle, and for it to stay that way without a thorough redesign of the systems of control would require a major miracle... on the order of all the gas atoms in a room ending up on one side...not technically impossible, but so vastly unlikely that one would not expect it to happen for as long as one micro-second during the entire existence of the universe.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So, in other words, you are admitting to the biggest mistake any professional can possibly make. You stopped learning.
I believe this man said he did not stop learning, referencing a book on his to-read list. Unfortunately, telling an HR rep "I don't have 6-years doing development in J2EE, but I've developed 200k-line programs in seven other languages in three different architectures, two of which I designed myself with interactive flowcharts and API diagrams." simply means "I don't have 6-years doing J2EE development."
These days, it seems like HR could have a reincarnation of Einstein sitting in front of them, and as soon as they found out he only had four years direct experience with theoretical high-energy gluons as related to string theory interaction phasing, he'd be rejected. Why the hell does any job requirement need to be that specific? Why does anyone need to have mastered X-languge of the week if they already have experience with six others?
But hey, have fun hiring people who simply regurgitate textbooks. Good luck with that.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove