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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
Become a plumber, auto mechanic or such. After all the tech jobs and manufacturing are sent overseas, those will be the good jobs.
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.
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
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.
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.
What was that number in the news a while back? North American corporate officers receive something like 400 times the salaries of their European counterparts? It's ridiculous.
Easily as stupid as paying an athlete 90 million dollars to wear sneakers.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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...
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.
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