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.'"
It's not nearly difficult enough to get a good tech job yet.
This article brought to you by ITT Technical Institute.
Is this their final decision?
Or will they have changed their minds by the end of next week, or what?
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!
Whew, good thing we have India!
Simple: Let it happen. This should drive salaries up, then more students will want to take up Computer Science.
I am a student in college majoring in the IT field but I am seriously considering changing my major due to the outsourcing and job instability that plagues the IT industry as a whole. So I guess you can count me as another statistic.
Smart people are becoming IP lawyers. That's were the big bucks is.
This trend is not exclusive for America. I remember reading about something very similar for Denmark three months ago. It is possible that people are scared off these educations because of out-sourcing. I remember reading about more and more IT work being outsourced to India several times here on Slashdot. So what are you to believe?
...why computer science and computer engineering is the most impacted major at the University I attend. Seems to me there's an over abundance of them, especially with the decreasing starting pay I've heard about from some friends (although I suppose that could be more regional than anything else).
We'll just raise a clone army.
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.
Translation: We need an excuse to ship the remaining IT and R&D jobs overseas and bring in some more H1 Visas.
>decreasing supply of computer science students
What does that mean? The real worry is not the lack of IT professionals, but rather the lack of keen, young, fresh and still clueless recently graduated computer science graduates to hire for peanuts and milk for all they're worth.
Nobody wants someone with 10 years of experience and a family to support, those people expect benefits and regular working hours! The nerve!
---- Take the Space Quiz!
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.
It makes one ponder just what the full scale adoption of interpretive languages has done. Yeah yeah Java compiles sure sure... its just like XML, its about as extensible or cross platform as Eddie Murphy is to an albino.
Looking at post-secondary curriculum I see nothing but Java being taught, and I think this is a pretty big mistake. Who cares if its easy, if you don't undersstand the fundamentals of how computer hardware and operating systems interact, you don't stand a chance at either staying interested or actually writing anything not crappy.
The biggest problem is that the IT industry was flooded with fucking asshats interested in it only for the money. I recall quite clearly a former friend who was a landscaper. I didn't see him for a couple of years and then ran into him downtown where he told me he was learning C++ and Java, at which point I suddenly felt the urge to vommit.
How on earth I can reference anything insightful when slashdot signatures are limited to 120 characters?!
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
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.
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
Every industry will be critically short of workers in 5-10 years. My company has estimated we may lose as much as 30% of our staff due to babyboomers retiring.
We need to fix it, or there's not going to be a U.S. work force in computer sciences.'"
Since India can provide all America's clueless graduate needs at only $5 a day and no healthcare.
"As a writer / novelist you might want to spellcheck your sig.
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.
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!
If IBM were so concerned about the number of IT workers, maybe it should become a better employer first.
You see, IBM for the past several years has been on a hiring binge, but with very rare exception, every new hire is brought in as a "supplemental". A supplemental, by IBM's definition, is a temporary position that CAN NOT continue past 18 months. Once your supplemental service is over, you are blacklisted by IBM for another 6 months - no rehire possible.
When I left IBM (near the end of my supplemental "tour of duty"), IBM was in a hiring freeze, there was no way to become a full-time employee, regardless of demand. Oh, and as a supplemental for IBM, the ONLY benefit you are eligible for is the employee stock purchase plan. That's right, no insurance, no 401k or pension, no education assistance, nothing else!
If IBM needs more employees, then they need to stop chewing through their existing stock (and spitting them out) so rapidly.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Our diploma mills produce tens of thousands of IT grads each year. They know all their Microsoft ABCs! Di pa kami mabantot!
Yesterday (still on the bottom of the front page) :
:
Technology Paradise Lost
[...] many believe that the sector will regain its past glory and blistering growth rates. [...] it's not going to happen. [...]
Today
Critical Shortage of IT Workers in Coming Years
[...] worried about the increasing demand for IT professionals [...]
If there's no sector growth, is there really increasing IT workers demand ?
Aren't these mutually exclusive points of view ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Doh! Maybe that because they have enough sense to see the trend of sending their prespective jobs to India or even giving people from India work visas to come and to take the jobs here at lower wages. Damn right the smart people are not training for programming jobs.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Without IT professionals, who will build our clone army?
You might want to look at the 10K people you just laid off...
And they all have communications skills roughly on par with yours. Fab!
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
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.
OF COURSE there are less people interested in pursuing a career in IT. Heck, even I am thinking to switch boat, by taking college again. IT workers are being treated like shit, more and more. Yeah, let's outsource them to the lowest bidder - it's a crap job anyway, right? That's the mentality, let's not gloss over it.
Sure, someone will say that the most experienced programmers, designers etc. will always have high salaries and a good carreer. The truth is, however, that the circle of the elite ITs is shrinking inexorably.
So, IBM et al, do not shed your chrocodile tears, no one cares.
Sigged!
I thought there was always a massive shortage? Isn't that why congress allowed for massive amounts of additional H1Bs almost a decade ago and why we're offshoring everything?
Farm the work out to the cheapest sources you can find, reducing the salary and benefit levels of the industry, making it less enticing to future students entering the workforce. And then wonder why you have a shortage?
Trust me, there are plenty of young people who want a career in computers. However, they don't want to live ten deep in a studio apartment, take the bus to work and worry if their job is going to be outsourced at any time.
People go where the good pay and benefits are. No matter how "fun" a job is, there is a level below which the compensation for that job does not justify it. Students today are not stupid.
I'm a UK graduate in Comp Sci. and I'm finding theres lots of jobs in IT, but nothing thats useful for a graduate - all asking too much.
I've been applying now since November to find a graduate job starting in July.
Tim (http://tim.igoe.me.uk)
Computers are like Air-con, open windows and they stop working!
I've been working in various aspects of IT for 20 years, and i've ab't had it. Too much change for change's sake, development of deadlines before requirements, and ongoing threats of layoffs. It's no fun anymore. Time for me to go do something different. In a year or two, i plan to go back to graduate school to study geography and cartography. Maybe i'll still be working with computers, but i'll be concentrating on the subject, and not the tool...
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
Try this one :)a ining/
http://www.media.mcdonalds.com/secured/company/tr
Actually, there are tons of new graduates looking for work. The companies are lying about not finding IT workers... they just can't find cheap IT workers who are experienced so they offshore.
Meh.
I've recently gone to work in IT for an airline, a good one, and there is no way they can outsource IT. Things just move too fast, the industry is too competitive, and survival depends on how fast you can roll out new features, from web booking engine upgrades to CRM techniques to internal business intelligence systems. This company went from $4 million to $300 million in website ticket sales over the past three years due to technology alone, and made the company ridiculously profitable for the first time since deregulation in '78. On the flip side, we lost $500,000 last week b/c our hosted website booking engine went down. Further, almost all new market opportunities are best exploited these days via technology, and whoever rolls out the tech first has a bankable advantage. When you make $1 million per day, that advantage translates into real money. Outsourcing to the other side of the world would introduce an intolerable inefficiency into the system, making outsourcing less likely than in other areas of IT. The competition and sense of urgency really make the job fun too. So my advice to IT pro's looking to stay in their field but concerned about getting outsourced is to identify industries like the airline industry where outsourcing is difficult or impossible, and go to work there. ymmv.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
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.
The companies complaining about this "shortage" are the same ones that were cutting Comp Sci majors off at the knees when the companies overextended themselves during the "bubble" years. Those same companies then ran out and auctioned off their development to the lowest bidders in India/China/Eastern Europe...only to find out that the hourly wage wasn't a very good predictor of overall cost. So now they want to come back "home" and wonder why there's a lack of trust in the future or salability of a Comp Sci degree. Gee, what an ungrateful lot we are... 8-) Cheers,
I pwn u!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
It's all a scam.
Big computer, defense, and, to a lesser extent, manufacturing companies pay shills in academia and "think tanks" to gin up these kinds of studies every couple of years so Congress has some political cover when they increase the H1-B cap. It's not true, and it never has been. The only shortage that ever materialized in those two decades happened during the boom, and that was caused by a huge spike in demand.
The goal here is to make sure there's plenty of hungry technical people around so they don't have to pay them too much.
... what happened during the boom times of the late '90s and the early '00s. There were plenty of Comp Sci students, but many of them were there only for the money - and it showed. I've never met so many half-@$$ed developers, analysts, etc. in my life!
So maybe this time around, Comp Sci departments should focus their attention on improving the numbers of students who will benefit the field in the long term.
Five Dolla Moddy-Moddy?
I wonder what percentage of IT workers even has a CS degree is.
I think this is a great opportunity for skilled(people who care & actually know what theyre doing) people, colleges are churning out absolute shit these days(im speaking from an irish view, i dont know about the rest of the world), im the only capable person in my entire year who's good at it & who's interested in I.T.
They teach the standard stuff there, Java, XML, Win32 but im not interested, why? because i dont want to be like all the rest
http://my.telegraph.co.uk/dublinclontarf
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.
That's why they're pushing so hard for these laws, it's the very basis of the new economy.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
There are two things that many /.ers here are missing when they knee-jerk "blablabla India blablabla $5 bux an hour bla no benefits."
Pretty soon companies that are flocking to the third world will run out of qualified IT workers there too. Then the salaries will start rising. How long before they reach equilibrium? I'll bet not very long.
Too, I haven't read TFA yet (running out the door to my non-outsourced IT job) but I will bet that it didn't make mention of the huge proportion of workers (and not just IT workers) that are getting close to retirement age. We could see a spike in demand the likes of which nobody has seen, and one that even a third-world supply of workers won't be able to fill; all to replace current positions, to say nothing of economic expansion. (Business 2.0 had a recent article about it called "The Coming Job Boom.")
I'm 45 and I work in IT. I'm not worried. In a few years it'll be raining soup. Grab a bucket.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
they're saying, basically, that since "people aren't signing up to our education programs on the subject of computer science, there won't be any more computer science".
don't you think thats just a little bit ignorant? i mean, people not being interested in computer science through education does not mean that people are not interested in computer science.
maybe one of the reasons people don't go through school to learn computer science is because its not the only way to learn computer science. maybe the reason fewer people are signing up for so-called 'comp-sci programs' at schools is because, in fact, all of these programs are crap compared to the commercial reality that one must never stopy studying in computer science, ever, even out of school and in the workplace...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Who cares about MSCEs? Stop getting certificates and start earning computer science graduate degrees at accredited universities. You'll be okay.
Could it be that the curriculum is rendered obsolete by the fast moving technology sector?
And while we're on the subject, please explain why I need(ed) Calculus 3 to program or administrate computers.
Maybe if they offered REAL skills that translate into the workforce more people would sign up. As it is, just like with most degrees, all it says is that you are willing to put up with a lot of crap and look more at the long term than short.
I understand and appreciate the need for a broad education, but I don't see a need to run students through the extreme science grinder unnesessarily.
(No, I did not graduate, yes I have a job.)
Part of the problem causing the low wages that causes this in the first place is a hugh number of operations that had a very sloppy technology view. I can't tell you how many places were just a half-step from catastrophe and the attitude was, 'if it isn't on fire, it isn't broken'. I've seen this at hospitals, government agencies, small businesses, etc.
You don't have to look far to see what happens with this: ChoicePoint, Lexus-Nexus, etc. Even where the data was just stolen by walking out the door with a computer with data, a competent IT person should have said 'the data shouldn't be on this machine'!
When screwing up with computers start to hurt (dollar wise), qualified technical people will become valuable again. HIPAA should draw in a fair amount of technical people when the whip starts cracking (and fines are levied).
eric
... but in Spain, being an IT is the worst thing you can be. Here the money is in everything related to economics and commercial issues. You deal with money, you get money. You deal with computers, you eat shit. Although IT is usually what boost companies, they treat IT staff like dogs. No doubt people is starting to get sick and saying... "You want IT, do it yourself, moron... I want my bucks" Thank God the new generations are not so naïve as mine was.
Seeing as how real CS, the science of computers and programming (which, I might add is even different than software engineering) has almost nothing to do with IT, which is help desk, sysadmining, etc.
I find the attempt to tie the two together in some meaningful way somewhat disingenuous.
What is humor if not pain tempered by time?
Lets face it, by the time this becomes a problem, our IT "careers" will be over anyway.
Anyone aiming for an IT career is mad.It is only second to a career based on success in American/Australian/British/? Idol.
In Australia, it is more lucrative to become a plumber with a massive shortage breaking out.
hey industry! id be more than happy to major in computer science. whos buyin?
Didn't we talk about this a few weeks ago? The computer industry trots out this garbage every few years so that Congress will continue to grow the H1B program, at the expense of American tech workers.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Now, for a dose of reality, check out this opinion piece over at Ars Technica. It points to a study by a UC Davis professor (who wrote this op-ed piece over at News.com) found out that there was, in fact, no studies showing a shortage of IT workers. Why would both academics and indistry go off on such a chicken-little hissy fit? Money, of course.
What IBM and other tech companies really want is dirt cheap labor, not just sufficient labor. Hence their push to get H1B visas while there is still a fairly high unemployment rate among computer professionals (personally, I know of a *lot* of former colleagues who have left the industry because they couldn't find work). H1B workers have their hands tied, since the second they are no longer employed in the US, they get kicked out. That is a huge stick for a company to be able to use against an employee.
And how does academia benefit from the doom and gloom? Easy. More research grants. More money pumped into computer science departments to "attract new stidents." More territory for people who are more bureacratic empire builders than they are actual educators.
IMHO, Eddie Murphy does one of the best jobs of protraying a white guy as I've ever seen. If you want to see this as good proof, get a copy of "Coming to America", where in addition to his title role as the African prince, he also plays a Jewish Barber. I couldn't even tell until I read the end credits and had to rewatch the movie to make sure it really was Eddie Murphy.
I think he does such a good job as a white guy (especially as a parody) in part because he is on the outside looking at just what white people take for granted. BTW, his Saturday Night Live skits as a white guy are just as funny.
What shortage? I know of too many programmers that are considereing leaving the field because the lack of good jobs(or moving to India).
and then maybe students will change their minds!!!
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.
As an Indian grad student here in the US, I have found many of my US classmates to be way ahead of majority of my peers back in India when it comes to algorithmic ability.
Perhaps its got to do with the current job situation where only the people who are truly interested in Computer Science, major in it. So you have students of much higher quality.
Judging from the total disregard for the job market shown by some of my US friends shows that the US still has a very bright future in Computer Science as long as these "anomalies" are around.
These companies have vested interest in outsourcing cheap labour. Don't believe what they say. They just wanna keep salaries low and their bottomlines high. The anomalies are more common than they would have you believe!
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.)
What do you wanna bet that the ITAA or some similar coalition of IT industry companies bought this little bit of propaganda, simply to help manufacture consent for raising the cap on h1b visas and retaining L1 visas?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Perhaps this is because those who would otherwise be interested in going into IT are watching the news and seeing how many of those IT jobs are being outsources overseas and how many IT professionals are currently out of work, and are making the (IMO correct) decision to consider other professions.
That was long and run-on, but you get my meaning.
H.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
I can only agree with you, when I ask my co-workers why they work in IT, 95% say because of the good salaries it provided a couple of years ago. One of them had studies as interior decorator and was doing PERL!!. The people, after some years of working in IT, get depressed as they do something they really come to hate, and the only thing you hear in the company is people complaining and saying how soon they're going to to quit this job, but no one ever does because they cannot find a similar salary nowadays. So at the end you get an army of uninterested, unmotivated, public worker clones who do not give a shit about their jobs or its quality. This applies to any Job, if you do it for the money -ALONE- then you'll get tired of it pretty soon. My 2c: Do what you really would like to do, even if pays are lame.
Paul Graham has a different idea. He thinks that some kids should consider the educational advantage you'd get from starting a business instead of going to college. Especially kids with interest in technology. It sounds like Paul was making a suggestion, but I wonder if he's actually describing something that's already happening.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Very reminiscent of the perennial teacher's shortage. "Great jobs! Wondeful pay! Excellent working conditions! Fast-track advancement! Sure to be multiple job offers bidding for your skills when you graduate! So spend a few years and tens of thousands of dollars investing in this very special opportunity!" How many times has that news flash been printed?
Back to reality, didn't I read last year that India is seeing competition from places like South Africa and Brazil?
Why would someone take the kind of chance that is required to be an IT professional. I have been a programmer for around 10 years now and have just recently got a stable job with the government, but right before that I spent a year working little small minimum wage jobs trying to find work to feed my family. During the years that I was making good money things were great, but they didn't last too long before things took a nose dive. Why would anyone want a career doing something that is so unstable. Not to mention the fact that you have to constantly grow or you will die. There is no way that you can be stagnant in the IT field and still expect to work somewhere else later. Not to mention the constant attention that offshoring is getting and how our jobs are being lost everyday to that. Why the hell would ANYONE want to work IT with that type of worry.
The Technomancer
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."-
...I want to point out (as one of the hundreds if not thousands of former airline IT pros that were let go in the months after 9/11) that the airline industry is still not in particularly good health, and that one should be very careful where one goes, at least if one is expecting to stay in a single position for a while.
:-(
Layoffs are not fun, especially if one has over a decade invested in a particular group and it still isn't enough seniority to ward off the axe.
That said, it's an absolutely fascinating industry to work for! That's why I'm still in it, at least on the periphery...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
The chinese set their exchange rate, it doesn't (really) float on the markets. They set the rate so that chinese people are very very cheap. World businesses flood in to China.
In the meantime, the dollar decreases in value as the trade deficit increases, China buys dollars to keep the exchange rate the same driving exports to the US, increasing the deficit this further depresses the dollar making Americans cheaper on the world market. To the detriment of Europe and the UK BTW.
It's an unstable situation which cannot continue forever. It *will* change sooner rather than later. The yuan will be allowed to move more freely, chinese people will become more expensive as their economy modernises and the trade deficits will sort themselves out.
e.g.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4560371.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4521969.stm
http://www.dawn.com/2005/05/06/ebr8.htm
Of course, on the down side there are still 800 million chinese who are going to need jobs as their agriculture is modernised.
Deleted
I've been in IT for 11 years and never have we had enough staff to get the job done without really wearing people thin.
99% of that time was in public companies that shrank even more and cut spending merely to reach promised numbers.
Corprorate America is so stuck on profit and EPS that they have forgotten HOW to get the job done and what people resources really are.
As for private companies, i'm not sure what the problem is. For me I didn't like making a mediocre salary at a private company while the owner had a fishing boat, 3 houses, 2 cars, 3 hour lunches, 1 month vacations and such and we couldn't hire any help?? Yeah, if you become that successfull more pwoer to you, but that doesn't mean you can't soundly run your business in an honest to goodness fashion.
I guess it goes back to "me me me" syndrome and the fact America doesn't care as now that i'm thinking about it ALL TYPES of career paths constantly preach there isn't enough supply yet we have tons of people working in jobs they hate and tons of people WHO AREN'T WORKING.
You have tripped over a very large kernel of truth. The biggest problem with IT is not the technology itself, nor it's potential. The problem is that most of corporate managers do not know what to do with this technology.
It's called lack of imagination. It's called lack of communication. These are the people who fill country clubs and live on high management salaries these days. They talk about silly management fads to each other --but they don't have a clue about who or what they might be managing.
The bottom line: If companies can't communicate with or manage a home-grown IT staff, what on earth makes them think they could do better with someone else's staff from overseas?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
...there's always Indian IT Professionals :) Smart, hard-working and cheap. They even work over-time.
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?
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).
The U.S. defense industry will have a hard time hiring foreign workers. Do they really want to outsource missile guidance subsystems to Indian programmers?
IMHO the 'Age of Specialization' is passing. Why not be a plumber and a programmer? This has kept me afloat (sort of) through various booms and busts.
Either the culture of the US changes the way we value labor or we're in for a harsh decline toward the rest of the worlds minimum wage.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
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!
I agree on that.
It went through the news/press that IBM plans fire 10k to 13k people in Europe, 2700 in Germany. You were able read, that there are current activities already taking place in Germany by closing Locations Hanover and Schweinfourt (600 People). On the other hand they indeed create new Jobs in Eastern Europe and China.
Many of the best coders I ever met did *NOT* go to school for CS... lets see, a nurse, construction management, Horticulture, even myself (International Studies).. They were hobbyists who had the strong desire to learn the trade, and because of that they tended to read a lot of the current literature and had an inbuilt desire to solve the problem by researching how others did it online, instead of saying "Oh, here's how we did that in school".
meh
See the thing is this:
Quality doesn't matter
There is no loyalty
Deep education is worthless
You are a pair of hands
A monkey could probably do it good enough for us
Our bankers want to oursource
We all have smocks and we all work for a company that's more like Walmart with pocketprotectors than anything else.
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.
This is just one more chapter of the .com bust. It's finally caught up to the academics, and they are not going to like it. We still have a lot of oversupply.
The most recent Talbee survey shows fully 66% decline in CS enrollments at the *top* institutions. There are two effect, one of which is the tightening up if INS regulations for foreign studends. This affects graduate schools geneally. The other effect is word of mouth. If "Uncle Bob" was a programmer who's been out of work for awhile, it doen't send a good message to his freshman nephew looking for a major. I've seen this first hand since 2001.
This means that there is a tremendous oversupply of *faculty* at the second-tier instutions (at which I happend to be an adjunct, until recently. Gee, I wonder why?) This article is just some academic bigwigs bemoaning their situation with their industry friends. They're looking for cover.
It's not over till the fat lady sings. In this case, it's going to be massive layoffs in the academic community corresponding to the .com bust. It takes time, but the wonders of the capitalism will be felt by all. "I'm happy you lost your job." That's what happens with oversupply. We'll be better for it.
Until 2003 (for over 30 years) we've got unprecedented growth in academic CS. Some of these academic guys have never known what it means to see a decline. Tenure doesn't mean jack when the program is downsized. Expect more squeeling as the sausge is made.
Yea, the correction continues.
Will be? Plumber, carpenter and automechanic are already good jobs now! Especially with the increasing sophistication of tech in car engines and the diagnostic equipment, and the shortage of qualified mechanics, automotive technology looks promising, and a lot more stable
What do we make in North America again? Can anyone remind me, because all I see is consumers, we dont make anything anymore, and if you make more than $5.00 USD an hour doing something other than yard work, they are dying to send that job overseas.
Now the only 'good' part of this is that it's equalizing the worlds wealth, but we (North Americans) are about to be largely poor... Which sucks...
I wanted to be a computer programmer for many years now, until recently. Both my parents graduated from U. of Waterloo and have been programming a long time now (my mom is a senior programmer for ScotiaBank, going on 30 years with them). They work her like a dog, she is at work more then she is at home. It's a stressful environment. On the plus side, she is paid well, making just over $100K Canadian a year (this year her income tax was $47,000, so she gets to keep half pretty much, good ol' Canada). As for me, I already suffer from alot of stress and anxiety, and I don't think it would be in my best interest to enter a field which would be even more detrimental to my health, even though I love programming.
All the shit thats been going on in the last 5 years with the programming industry has totally turned me off wanting to get a career as a programmer. I rather get into some other computer field that isn't as demanding and stressful. I had a nervous breakdown when I was about to start college for computer programming, and I haven't been able to go back since. This is why I don't want to be a programmer anymore, I'm already severely stressed, I don't need the added stress.
Until companies can provide a good working environment, I rather work in another field. I talked to guys that did the patio in my backyard and they were all computer graduates, working as renovators/builders/etc.. because the computer field is so dry. One of them was extremely intelligent, and he was reduced to laying bricks, it's a sad state and i'm perplexed as too which computer field I want to enter, if at all.
I'm interested in network security and system administration aside from programming, but I just don't know what I want to do anymore.
The problem is that the morons outsourcing gifted people's jobs need to be shown the door. We can outsource their jobs and save companies millions at the cost of one person of out work versus the thousands of unemployed it takes to get the savings they want. It also helps the economy, as one person without a job is far better than thousands out of work. It's simple math, but even that seems beyond the executive capacity to fathom. Save the bottom line, outsource the CEOs to the mailroom guys and save the companies, the economy and our future.
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
That is good, so then it should be easier to get a job and we should be able to make more $$$. I don't see this as a bad thing. Strange thing is, I do not see this crisis right now in the industry. There where not many computer science majors when I graduated from college in '94 either (pre Windows 95). This better not be another attempt by our employers to justify offshoring of jobs and allow more HB1 visas, which is what it sounds like to me.
As companies are outsourcing all their IT work to India then why does the US need any computer graduates anyway ?
They created the damn situation. Prospective students saw what generally happened to graduates and, like anyone with half a brain would, decided to do something where they wouldn't be underpaid and overworked.
It will take a couple of years before they get a clue. They will try outsourcing first. It will take a number of expensive lessons where they have to deal with crap Indian software.The bottom line is, the free lunch is over for employers. Start behaving decently or go out of business. Nobody is going to see the pathetic hand wringing and decide upon personal sacrifice so that a bunch of greedy executives can get paid another couple of million a year.
An MBA is half the work and twice the pay as a CS degree and later work. Why the heck should someone stick with CS?
For starters, I have a BFA in Graphic Design. However, I am a Senior Java Specialist now, my design skills only come into play when I'm coding GUIs. Half the folks I work with don't have CS degrees and they tend to be more competent than those that do. In my experience, I have found "Most" (meaning not all) folks with CS degrees have a lot of knowledge but aren't great problem solvers. Those that got degrees in something else and are now developers, tend to come up with more creative solutions to big problems.
This is the same IBM that's in the process of laying off 13,000 employees, right?
Cry me a river!
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Wake me up when I can get a JRE for the PIC16F877A for which I'm writing C code right now. Do you have any idea of how many micro-controllers are sold for each CPU that supports Java? The future job-market for software developers isn't in desktop applications, it's in embedded systems.
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
Infoworld CTO Chad Dickerson has a good take on these "critical shortage of CS students" reports that have been coming out lately.
Want to know how hot that CPU is going to get? You'll probably have to do more than simple algebra.
That's called a tech college - but when the gadget you are trained in is retired you have to learn how to use the next one. That's the downfall of specialised training without teaching background knowlege.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.
You are right.
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
I am studying to enter the medical field, and plan on leaving my Java programming job far, far behind. I believe it will be nigh impossible (4 kids, mortgage, aged 34) but it will ultimately be more rewarding and more valuable to me, to my family and hopefully to society. Let someone else sling code! Pass me the scalpel! Let the shortage come!
Well, I suppose this is good news for all us lifers in the IT business, since this means we'll probably do better over the next five years or so, but I think that in the longer term we'll come to see this phenomenon as part of a regular economic cycle, just as in every other profession. However, as opposed to, say, dentists, I think it's safe to say that our profession will always be more dependent upon, or in sync with, the general economic cycle.
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.
Bah. KLocs ("Thousands of Lines of Code" for those of you who aren't familiar with the term) have been in use as a metric of productivity since at least 1988 when I was a cooperative education employee at IBM's Application Systems Development lab in Cary, NC.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Let me add: music and poly-sci were the b.a. majors of two of my highly respected group peers. And as someone else pointed out, these cycles are neither new nor restricted to programming. I'll be a lot of the Russian COBOL geeks who came out of the woodwork for y2K work are now doing ASP.NET very well.
I agree with you, it's not hard to find a reasonably interesting geek job and hang on to it until you get bored after a few years. I left school when I was 15 and worked as a labourer until I was 27 (1987). I had played with an old apple II as a hobby for several years and decided to get a CS degree to get my "foot in the door". I had a wife and two kids at school and drove taxis for pocket money while at uni.
I left with a degree in 1991 (peak of recession here in Australia), it took me 3months to get a job and 5yrs later my take home pay had risen 600% and managers were kissing geeks arses. The bubble burst and I went on a six month "vacation". I am currently on my 4th year of a 3 month contract. Since 1991 I have not failed to put in a tax return that is well above the national average and most people I know in IT are the same.
I am not trying to brag about my pay pack nor put my self up as cinderella. In fact I think my interest in computers and making a good living out of it are unrelated, it's just luck that people are eager to pay for something I like to do. (I also love sitting on the beach but nobody will pay me for that). I do however belive my working life has given me some perspective when it comes to employment and working conditions. Having spent about 15yrs as an engineeer and another 15yrs as a semi-skilled labourer, I would rather be an unemployed engineer (not entitled to welfare) than an unemployed labourer(entitled to welfare).
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
A little advice to any IT student out there: change to Law or Accountantcy NOW.
You will thank me for this advice one day.
threadeds blog
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
Good choice, shows a lot of insight. As cars become more complicated the electronics in them become more specialized and fewer people are able to do their own service. Not only that but as mining operations become more automated, that's more job security for you, the guy keeping the machines running.
I hardly know anyone in IT these days who doesn't have a fall back career or is at least thinking of one. Toyed with the idea of going to BMW's repair school, but they don't take old guys. Would've been interesting, though.
This is what happens when you outsource people. They abandon the field. So when Abdula's code starts getting sloppy because his company is taking on more outsource work than he can keep up with and starts getting a worse product to start with from the junior programmers, the customer here starts getting a crap product. Then they need someone here to fix it. But you've driven everyone out of the field and end up paying twice what you would have had you kept the work here in the first place.
And all those of us in the field can say is HA-HA!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
Don't worry! They'll be back after we improve the Social Security system.
W
Never said Kloc counting was new. It has just become part of the corp religion. We are ridiculously short staffed, yet they take people off projects and get them to count kloc deltas from Four releases ago...
To write 1 Kloc, I probably have to write/review 6 documents, 3 different levels of testplans X 3 levels of approvals, and take about 4 months doing it?
My thoughts right now for anyone is unless you are a stellar talent and think you have what it takes to work for a google. Stay far far away from CompSci.
This is so far from the problem solving that got me interested in software engineering, that I now dread every day of work.
Throw in the outsourcing and who could possibly recommend working for Big Corp Software (or should I say accounting) sweatshop.
There was a premium on these skills back in the 1990s, and salaries were high. Back then schools were packed. It's not like that got spontaneously forgotten and the economy has to "re-learn" it. The economic situation changed. Kids just understand the writing on the wall.
The supply of domestic graduates is adjusting to the demand for them. (And yeah, the threat is that this job sector won't survive in the US. Welcome to the conversation about outsourcing and multinationals, college professors.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Just a thought, if everything is so-oooo bad for our chosen profession then why does everyone here spend good money for broadband access and multiple computers (usually the latest and greatest). The most considerate and productive among us will always find good work whereas the complainers (you know who you are!) are never satisfied. Slackers are everywhere...quit posting and get bizzy.
.02 cents
my
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
We should blame college advisors and professors. For the most part every professor I have had the joy of learning from as well as advisors all state that most IT jobs will be going offshore. I remember one advisor tell me that I should start thinking about business because in 5 years time all entry to mid level IT jobs will all be worked overseas. This led me to believe working in IT might be futile. If the only way you have to work to the top is to start at the bottom, but at the same time all the grunt and bottom level jobs are already sold to India and the Philipenes then how in the world will I get higher level jobs if there is no where to start from. This makes me wonder if the only way is if you have already been in the industry for 10 years and you are already halfway there. The worst part about all this offshore worker stuff is that most companies end up spending more on the work because a lot of the time they miss deadlines and give halfed assed work back to the company. Usually this means they have to spend more on time and wages getting the applications developed properly. I'm not done with this yet - I just have a meeting to goto.
I think that folks should focus more on the hands-on sides of IT. In some having an actual warm body in the office is irreplaceable. Granted you can outsource application development to a bunch of foreign drones (which I think will wreak havoc on our economy by becoming more dependant upon foreign interests) but you won't likely see that multipurpose sysadmin/helpdesk/programmer/dba guy hurting for work. Smaller operations often need someone who can wear a lot of hats and fill the niches where COTS is too expensive. Even more so the IT administrative folks are very valueable here on US soil too. IP Project management, tech writing, security, can't be effectively outsourced in my opinion, because they work best with eye-to-eye interaction.
It's interesting to hear that so many people see no future in IT in the USA because I've been fighting tooth and nail to get into the industry in the past 2 years. I graduated college with a degree in US History a few years ago, saw that many of my peers were ending up in dead-end paper-sorting office jobs, and decided to teach myself some programming languages. I learned perl, got a contract to build a perl CMS, got another short gig, and then I landed a job as the Director of IT at a small, failing company (just quit that job and I'll be looking for other work).
If you think there's no future in IT in the USA, look at all the people graduating from liberal arts colleges with degrees in psychology, philosophy, anthropology, history, english...
I agree 100% that IT isn't worth it. In order to be competitive, I've spent ALL my free time in the past 2 years studying maybe 7 or 8 different computer languages and practicing *nix sysadmin and DBA stuff on old throwaway hardware. Now I'm finally starting to work on a couple free software projects, and I like it -- otherwise I'd be out.
And while I think it's definitely not worth it economically because for the same effort I could get a law degree, earn more money, and have more job stability, aside from getting a law degree going the MBA path, where are the opportunities in the USA? I have an engineer friend who has been laid off maybe 4 or 5 times in 3 years working as a process engineer in auto plants (finally landed a job for a Japanese auto maker in the USA and now he has SOME job stability).
The USA trade and budget deficits continue to grow. The 3rd world is developing infrastructure and human resources, and increasing productivity in the USA economy mean that companies can generate the same or more revenue with fewer workers.
Sure, IBM, Microsoft and other companies making these pitches about a shortage of workers in IT are just trying to get cheaper labor by increasing labor supply. However, if IT is a dead-end path as I'm hearing from a lot of you, WHERE is there opportunity in the mid-term future of the American market economy?
my psycho ex-boyfriend is out of work, and nobody wants to hire him due to a surplus of IT workers. There seems to be no shortage of IT workers from India. Why get into IT when all the good IT jobs are being offshored?
It's an offtopic question and I do apologize for posting it here.
Can someone explain why there is no UNION for IT workers in US? I think there is some law from forming such union for IT workers. I think there is great need for UNION for an IT!!! Because there are unrealistic amount of works being thrown on IT staff's plate at this moment!!! Can someone help to explain? We as IT workers should learn from manual labor workers UNION and form one because we need it!!!
()()
(@@)
oktokie
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/04/232 254&tid=136&tid=218
What a bunch of corporate crap. Fire 13000 professionals, then complain how it might get difficult to find new people? To me this translates to: "it is getting more and more difficult to replace our older and more expensive employees, with highly motivated young people straight from college who are willing to work 60 hours/week for peanuts".
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 used to be a programmer, but switched to Project Management. It's a transition filled with irony.
First, I can only do my job (IT PMing) because of ten years of computer experience. Where future PMs will come from in a declining IT population is a good question.
Secondly, as much as it goes against the grain of popular thought, not just any idiot can do management, just many try. If you're going to do actual work, it requires tactics, experience, communication, and broad knowledge. It's not for everyone.
My figuring is that no matter what happens, I can build the contacts and the skillsets to coordinate and implement tactics. Because right now while everyone is playing shift-the-programmer no one is actually thinking long-term and getting things done.
So, oddly, part of my career choice is based on the idea that people are making terrible decisions that I will then be paid well to deal with.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
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
but america is becoming the land of the litigation. our economy is built on sueing.
I know one thing - at least in the community I live lawyer are admired, worshipped, and just plain respected. Everyone here would rather have their kid become a lawyer than a computer person.
Computer people here in my community are basically the blunt of jokes and called geeks. So if you were in college which profession would you choose.
But this may be just where I live here in the states.
Also if you become a lawyer you can start your own personal law practice if you want and have the energy/drive - with computers you could start your own software business with little resources except with all the software patents you run the risk of being sued and loosing your business.
And then if you work for company as a software programmer and stay with them and do your job and come to work everyday you eventually get laid off because you are now earning too much and there are outsourcing companies that can do your job at a less cost - you know salary (which you worked all these years to build up) benefits, vacation etc.
I usually never hear any mass layoffs of lawyers for these companies or the lawyers are getting outsourced.
One last one is I know at least for me it just isn't fun to program in windows and that is what all these corporations are shoving down people's throats - and for me my job has to be fun. Where I work the corporate desktop is windows and everything is developed on the intranet for ie6 - how much fun is that? At least I am programing for our external sites and NONE of our external sites use windows - coporate security won't allow it. That says something I guess. And at least I can get exceptions because I am programming for all platforms (external sites) so I can work basically with anything/everything.
These are just a few of the drawbacks of but I am sure there are more.
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.
H1B = Indentured Servitude. The program is pure evil. Corporate America loves it for the same reason everyone who has indentured servants loves them: cheep easy to control labor.
I'm not saying companies shouldn't be able to bring in useful talent from other countries. If someone has such unique talents important to our economy absolutely let them work here, however, those people should be welcome to stay as long as they like and work for whomever they like without having "Work harder for less or I'll deport you" hung over their heads.
Companies also use H1B to hire unskilled labor. That is simply wrong. Those people are ripe for all kinds of exploitation.
H1B is an abomination, an assault on everything that has made America great and it needs to go.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
simply put, the US does not respect the IT worker and there's no future in this field. it WILL all be outsourced, all the non-managerial jobs, anyway.
if you want to manage people and projects that are halfway around the world, good for you. the rest of us are SOL.
I just hope the folks who are outsourcing get a taste of what we are sowing. the pain is always felt bottom-up - and its so hard being told 'we can't pay normal salaries - there is some guy who will work for 1/3 of your pay, sorry. and we don't have to pay him benefits, either."
otoh, college kids are smarter than we may think. the fact that comp-sci enrollments is down IS A GOOD THING. it might - just might - balance things out in a decade or two.
problem is, can many of us wait that long for the scales to tip back again? will they ever?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I find it odd that so far everyone has been discussing this from an economic perspective, but no one has really considered what this will do to technological progress. Money isn't everything!
I can't speak for the US but there's definitely a shortage in Australia and the Netherlands in particular skill areas (even those not particularly specialised). I've been in the industry since glory days just before the bust and I can say that there's no surprise that the workforce is declining. Companies still operate inefficiently, don't really care about the quality of the IT systems and don't want to step into the 21st century; the work that's out there is uninteresting; the industry really hasn't escaped the "geek in a basement" view of programmers; salaries haven't really changed in about 5 years but unpaid overtime is still expected; recruiters have no idea how to properly match people with positions; and don't get me started on gender imbalance! Those who are in the industry are leaving because they want something better (more stable or more rewarding or easier to focus on) and there are less IT grads because the industry doesn't really have much to offer any more.
Bull Shit
You can be an atheist and still not want to succumb to some weird cross-over sheep disease -- AC
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.
Students smart enough to be computer science majors are smart enough to see that the most interesting programming & I.T. jobs are going out of the country.
This sucks for us, the academics as it threatens the justification for our position as educators.
This also sucks for us, the American I.T. corporations who decided to send those jobs overseas. We can't send them all and we still need some Americans to do our shit work and do it cheaply, like fresh young graduates would. Maybe by promoting articles like this we can instill a sense of promise/panic about the future of American I.T. careers
Let us hope that American students who are smart enough to be potential computer science majors are not smart enough to see this. Please don't tell them.
This doesnt seem to cover all the IT people out there who decided not to goto college.. or dropped out cuz the curriculum sucked.. or it just wanted the way they wanted to learn. There are plenty of highly paid very intelligent IT people out there who didnt get a Comp Sci degree. Infact, the decrease in the number of Comp Sci majors may be due to Computer Science becoming more of self-taught trade then a college learned thing.
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".
Wow, for a university these people are pretty damn fucking stupid. Why would you go to college for CS when you can't get a job in the US in CS? What a PHD not enough to figure this shit out?
I taught at a technical college and was close to my students (I only taught 1 year) and many of them I still correspond with. 2 of them have jobs after graduating. The other 60+ are in non-CS related fields. I'm lucky that I have a niche but out of my friends I've met contracting, I'm the only one working.
Good to see out major universities still can't put 1 and 1 together...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
CEOs are laying off thousands to make the company look temporarily more profitable. A CEO can run a company into the ground, get fired and still go home with millions in severance pay.
No wonder people don't want computer related degrees. Those are the first to be laid off.
How about kicking the current crop of CEOs and investing a good chunk of that money in the people who actually produce something. Save money by not retraining the staff every 18 months. Having increased productivity because the people working for the company know each others capabilities and the task at hand.
While the stock market is all that matters, the job situation will not improve.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
Every time they run short, companies start talking about the coming shortage and then lobby for more h1b visa's which makes everyone decide it would be stupid to enter the field.
Vicious cycle as long as they can import skilled developers.
There is no reason to enter IT yet-- they do not want to pay you what you are worth, they have no loyalty and will fire you.. er "reallocate you to the curb" at a heartbeat's notice, and they will fire you and refused to hire you once you get to 55 years old (50 if you look old).
It wouldn't annoy me so much, except I know how much the executives make and if just one at each company was making reasonable salaries (say about 1 million dollars), then they could afford to retain 30 to 100 employees with full benefits.
It is not reasonable to pay 1 person so much money- it unbalances things and they can only buy one washer, one big TV, and one car. If the same money was going to 30-100 other people they would put it right back in the economy.
So save the "boo hoo" games corporations- your lack of loyalty and greed is causing the shortage.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
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)
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!"
Point Taken. :-)
So why should anyone waste 4 years of university to become a Janitor? I was suckered. I certainly don't recommend others follow this path.
After reading Paul Graham's article Submarine I have to ask myself who gains by this belief being believed by the mainstream.
A: The I.T. worker paid $160K for a college degree.
From an economic standpoint, students opting out of comp. sci. majors looks pretty rational.
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.
I think it might be instructive to reframe the assumptions around this report.
If we place tech workers in the same box as all other workers, we find that while the real requirements for getting an entry-level job are increasing, the real pay and paid time off has been decreasing. I'm not making this stuff up. I'm too bored to Google for it myself, so do that if you need the facts.
We've place a premium on a university (or college in the U.S.) education, and in doing so have conflated computer science with computer industry jobs. There are plenty of good reasons to get a comp. sci. degree. The promise of a basic programming or tech job is not one of them.
University is intended to give individuals a broad education and introduction to life-long learning. In short, the best university education should teach one how to develop a solid set of learning and critical thinking skills.
It may possibly pave the way for intense specializations at the Masters or Doctorate level. You may even be able to get a decent tech job with a university degree of any sort. Many employers look for degrees simply because they hope that it is a good indication that someone has the skills to figure things out even if they do not have the immediate expertise. This is especially so for entry-level positions (which this report seems to be focusing on.)
However, many tech employers are also looking for other things. They are looking for that specific expertise. That particular skill. Some specific technology that can be explained in a series of acronyms.
Tech jobs (which may even turn into a career) do not require a computer science degree. A typical computer science degree does not adequately prepare most people for a career working for Dilbert Inc. as a coder. This is ok because this is not really what a comp. sci. degree was intended to do.
Note that I'm not saying a smart university graduate cannot get a good tech job and succeed at it. I'm saying that the skillset and job requirements in todays technical job market does not quite match what a typical computer science degree gives you. This can be quite a shock after several years of blood, sweat and tears that represents your largest personal debt.
I'm suggesting we start looking at many tech jobs as just that: jobs. Jobs are often done by tradespeople, and coding should be often viewed as a trade. By all means, if you want to get deep into the science of computing, go ahead and get a computer science degree. As an employer (and I am in a position where I could interview you right now!) an expensive university degree is no guarantee you can actually solve problems and code worth a damn. So many fresh graduates can't read other people's code, or debug a problem, or work with other people to solve a problem. So companies often have to spend the money waiting for the good ones to come up to speed.
My point is that all this hand-wringing about the lack of computer science graduates is misplaced. The majority of the jobs these guys are talking about can be handled nicely by smart people who have a 2-year certificate or diploma from a decent technical college.
These people will have the interest and immediate paying skills to fill positions now. A good technical college will stress learning a variety of languages, and PCs (or Xterms) are not necessarily the only computers they will find in the real world. Tech colleges will offer real-world skills that employers want now, and skills that can be continually maintained.
Heck, many careers offer the chance of funded university anyway, so you can always go back to school.
Computer science is a good thing, and we need smart people developing the tools and techniques of the future. We also need tradespeople using those tools and techniques to solve customer problems and get things done.
-- clvrmnky (Long time employed journeyman coder with a certificate in programming from night school.)-- clvrmnky
Then they should stop sending all the jobs over seas. Why would anyone want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education only to turn around and find that they can't have a stable job because every time they turn around they're outsourced to India or wherever.
If it wasn't for the fact that I'm doing what I love, I wouldn't be doing it at all. I've done more than enough things in my life that I can find a job in other feilds easily enough. I make less than most IT pros because I'm a small business owner, but to be prefectly honest, I would probably walk away in a heartbeat if it wasn't for the fact that I'm my own boss and don't have to worry about outsourcing.
They'll get no sympathy except from Congress, who will raise the H1B limits to help IBM out with their "problem".
So tell me, how many MIPS boxes does Java run on, exactly? Or, for that matter, all the other CPU's which make up the vast majority of systems in the world. I'm talking embedded here, not servers and clients. Wake me up when you move out of the x86/sparc space into the real world.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
As a Management Information Systems major going into my senior year, and a Master's degree, it's good news to hear that there will be a shortage. That means more jobs than prospective employees. More money and better jobs for us. And just when everyone was saying the IT job market was all dried up, we get this wonderful piece of news!
HP?
You can't handle the truth.
And I am not a marketer but...
If you are a bright highschool senior or a college freshman, what do you know about economics? I suspect the choices one makes about career oriented education come down to impressions and perceived incentives as much as to any hard numbers on wage trends. What is the image, the publicity, that computer engineering and programming and IT currently have? Outsourcing and layoffs are the only IT related news that don't go under reported in the MSM. The general impression of CS as preparation for employment is also still haunted by the economic downturn that we rather sloppily label "dot com bust": it is an unreliable, unpredictable career path.
Another deterent, not a matter of marketing exactly, may be that the most talented potential software engineers are already "working" in the OSS and pirate underground...many are contributing to OS projects because they don't need a degree or a boss to exercise their interest in software. And a few have developed a level of skill in cracking license keys that would easily land you a job at Computer Associates or Microsoft but the interests it takes to develop such skills do not correlate with the inclination to be a happy worker for a big corporation.
What other incentives are there to go into CS? You're not gonna be a rock star of software, a Serge Brin, unless you start a company. Why? Because only a corporation has the resources to protect its financial interests in the software innovations it cooks up. So you need to study business more than you need to learn C or Unix internals. If I wrote a killer app in my spare time, it'd just get ripped off...why learn a skill that leaves me that vulnerable? Post 9/11, and in the aftermath of the dot com bust, fewer of us are willing or have the confidence to take risks.
As a software engineer, the only way I can consistently get paid is to work as a contractor and flit from company to company as their moment in the sun comes and goes. I think that aspect of the market IS economics: though its ironic that the way to steady pay is not through looking for permanent employment at a big company. And to snag contracting gigs, you DO need the right degree. Try to explain to your high school senior: "Well, you like the gypsy life, don't mind learning an Asian language, don't have any need to own what you produce? Have I got a career for you!..."
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
an interesting idea.
As this thread shows, you can't even utter the names like 'Union' of sacred cows without being labelled "semi-brainwashed"
How, then, do we set about considering where we are, where we should go, and reasonable compromises to navigate the difference?
Thanks, SHiFTY1000.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
note: this is just an opinion I have, watching markets for a few decades now.
Reality today is the line between business and labor has blurred considerable, as most people past middle/middle class try to develop a quite extensive portfolio. On the one hand, they like that the business they invested in might save a ton by outsourcing labor, but then they might lose their own personal job, more or less completely negating any potential benefits from their stock ownership potential improvement.
Massive short term outsourcing (one generation time frame), in critically important industries is basically not a good idea. It has short term benefits in some cheaper products, longer term detriments in that the people supposed to be buying those now-cheaper products wind up losing real purchasing power, going into massive debt (double mortgages and maxed CC, etc), or even bankruptcy. There's a reason the US passed the new bankruptcy law recently, because this "magic beans something for nothing" economic system they have pushed combined with newsaganda brainwashing will *cause* a lot of bankruptcies. Currently now, private and governmental debt is the highest it's ever been. Personal bankruptices were running close. Savings have dropped to about nil. Home ownership is now a perpetual debt note never paid off. Those are generalities but mostly true.
I also think that initially there were some quite unreasonable expectations of what "white collar" jobs would be worth. Way over priced to begin with if you compared it to the productivity gains that business was supposed to be getting from the high tech revolution in the 90s. It was closer in retrospect to being akin to a skilled tradesman in actual worth, but got hyped out of proportion, now it's settling back down as companies and individuals are forced to reconsider what their "products" are actually worth.
That and economic reality based on what overall production costs are with respect to energy prices. All the previous decent gains in various economies histoprically were closely tied to *incredibly cheap* energy. That is no longer the case and the world is seeing the results of that. No matter how many meetings or PP shows a business runs, energy still rules the worlds economies. There is no way to maintain robust economies based on industrilization if the overlying energy costs go astronomical on you in relatively short time frames.
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
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.
to go into Comp Sci / IT. There are just far too many people out of work already, with the jobless rate in IT running at about 20%. You don't need to spend 3 to 4 years studying to flip burgers.
Oh well, what the hell...
Yes high wages are respent, but the more money "spent" well that leads to inflation. Inflation lowers the spending power of those "high" wages and you are left with less real money. Regarding unions, in the United States trade unions are no less evil than the corporations they are fighting. Each faction is out for their own short term benefit, corporations exist solely to make money for shareholders and decision makers, while unions exist solely to make money for union leadership and then union members. This is because of a basoc human drive - greed. What reform can correct that?
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
Let's see.
:) If ya don't look good in a swimsuit, don't come a-knockin'.
US companies followed the lead of every other free-range corporation and went overseas to find five-buck an hour coders. They got 'em.
They canned permanent workers and replaced them with temps and contract workers, all without benefits. Wow, what incentive.
They scorn workplace rules won decades ago by workers and use loopholes to make employees work 40-90 hour weeks. No laws need apply.
They flooded the market with H1B workers who can't quit and can't complain about overwork because they'd get booted home. And they want MORE H1B's.
They, and the entire coding industry including the currently employed, will not accept anyone starting out in the business who is not 22 years old. If you are over 35 and not going into management, say goodbye as well. This is a serious point. Their is an age floor AND ceiling that keeps perfectly good people out. Why get into an industry if you can only get decent work from age 18-35? It's engraved into the heart of the culture.
If you do enter the workforce, you become a nomad, bouncing from job to job, city to city. Spouse and family? You're kidding, right? And I'm a guy; why would a woman want to work in a career that demands she will go through hell raising kids?
I'm sure others can think of more points.
A lot of you will say, "You don't like it? Do something else, we don't need you."
Exactly. But it turns out that you all really do need us old expensive farts with actual lives after all.
But you won't accept it. Goodbye, coding base.
write-only programs?
Someimes the most creative solution may not be the most maintainable solution.
There may be something to what you refer to though. In the rush to fill the demands in the 80's and 90's, every college up to the technical institutes on the back of matchbooks were offering CS degress. Unfortunately, many only taught programming and not the mathematics, logics, and problem solving skills that you alluded to. Thus, the quality of CS graduaates varied greatly depending on the school.
The fact is there will always be a need for smart people in any field. If you are smart, you will succeed in whatever you do.
The funny thing about that is that people who are stupid still believe that they are smart.
Life is harsh sometimes.
Good luck!
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
This claim of a lack of engineers has been around since the late 1950's and has never been true.
When every qualified software engineer who wants a job has one, we can start talking about shortages.
"I certainly don't recommend others follow this path."
Would that be mainly because you don't want to compete with them?
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
I thought someone said outsourcing would kill the IT industry in USA? And that the unemployment rate in the field was higher than ever? Now this article is saying there isn't enough professionals? What gives?
How do you get a job cracking license keys?
Without doing the illegal (having companies pay you for cracked keys) or the unethical (working on making the keys more secure)?
Make up your minds! First we don't have enough CI students, then we have a glut of computer techs, now we won't have enough again. Is anybody else feeling dizzy?
We don't write compilers or compute very large primes --We just support everyday applications like payroll and and collaboration software. We write tools (scripts usually) to make our jobs easier and generally try to make things work as advertised. We communicate with users and try to help them do their jobs as well.
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
"1. Baby boomers are retiring in mass and the number of retirements will only increase => shrinking experienced labor supply"
Today the age range for Baby boomers is between 41 and 59. Perhaps you're confusing retirement with layoffs.
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
the patents run out
Not if Rep. Mary Bono (R-CA) has anything to do with it. Look at what she did to copyrights in the name of her late husband, and then ask yourself whether she wouldn't be willing to do the same thing to patents.
Seeing as I still know swarms of talented developers in the 30-40 year range looking for work, I find this article kind of offensive.
So dot com filled the industry with 6 week tech school grads. Just looking at all the managers above me in the oil company I'm in... one in twenty has a comp-sci degree. The rest are all accountants, geologists, political scientists, and engineers. So, arguably, not one of them has training in computer science or software engineering.
The article really should say a lack of cheap labour trained with the latest buzzology. A couple years back I went in as a high priced consultant to fix an huge project that was handed over to 'students'...
Its a crock.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
You know what? I think that the free market will provide the appropriate incentives to provide a supply of skills that are actually in demand.
Yes, lower the compensation for your C*O's and watch them fly to other companies.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
This is purely a rationale for importing labor or exporting jobs. I have a BS/CS magna cum laude with graduate credit and plenty of work experience, and I can't find a job. When I can even FIND A FREAKING JOB LISTED SOMEWHERE much less get hired, maybe I'll change my tune.
And no, 2 month mercenary contracts on monster.com don't count as jobs. Such contract jobs are an excuse not to hire people full-time, since the H1Bs will be arriving shortly (they hope).
When asking about I.T. opportunities at various small local banks and hospitals (the majority of attendees) I tended to get similiar canned answers from all.
On the one hand almost every accredited institution in WV (shoeless hillbilly stereotypes aside) has a Computer Science or similar program. On the other hand there are little or no opportunities unless they are in a galaxy far, far away. I am not opposed to relocation, but why hire me when you can hire someone local, from the unemployed I.T. pool?
Back to my point...
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
While some of my colleagues(at one of those firms) were being readied for head count reduction, at the very same time newbies were being hired in the same department/s.
Newbies(CS grads) who had a hard time tieing their shoelaces.
Newbies who were dumber than a crackerjack toy.
So who do you believe? No one in CorpAmerica!
There was a huge bloodletting of incredibly talented IT folks back then. Way way off the scale.
Now we hear whining and gnashing of teeth?
Let them eat Ding Dongs.
They live by the big lie. The newsies play right into their gameplan.
What does the number of CS degrees have to do with the supply of IT workers? CS is important work, but most of the people who can do it would be wasted running cables or sloshing the latest version of Office onto a flock of PCs.
What most employers are looking for is not computer science. Wal*Mart doesn't need hundreds of people who can analyze algorithms or invent new data structures. They probably don't even need hundreds of people who can write decent code. That's not even 5% of IT.
The Japanese still beat us in pizza delivery. I moved back to the US from Japan in 1994, but even back then, I'd order a pizza and it would always always be at my place in under 30 minutes, and the pizza delivery scooters they use had heated compartments on the back, so the pizzas were always warm & fresh.
Back here in the states, it took me a while to get used to hearing "About an hour.." for delivery, drivers that couldn't find my house (or read a map) and lukewarm pizza.
The Japanese beat our asses when it comes to pizza delivery. Although, the pizza company? Dominos. Shakey's. Pizza Hut. I can't really remember any Japanese pizza *chains* at all...
Young College Graduates Are Struggling. Guess One (Unmentionable) Reason
This spring, thousands of young Americans are graduating from college. They and their tuition-strapped parents regard the degree as a good investment--a ticket to financial independence and a better life. Unfortunately, the labor market no longer seems to share this view.
The real wages of young college graduates (ages 25 to 35) fell in 2004 for the third consecutive year. According to figures complied by the Economic Policy Institute, "Young College Graduates Face Weak Labor Market," Job Watch, May 6, 2005.] Between 2001 and 2004, the real wages of young college graduates dropped from $23.04 per hour to $22.41 per hour.
Employment is finally turning around, but not fast enough to soak up the influx of new college grads. Thus the employment rate of young graduates in 2004 was 85.2 percent, down from 87.4 percent in 2000. It has been 20 years since the fraction of young college graduates with jobs has been as low as it was in 2003 and 2004.
It's trendy to blame the declining economic fortunes of the college-educated on outsourcing or the post-bubble collapse of high-tech. But immigration may be, as usual, the factor that dare not speak its name.
Immigrants represent a rapidly growing share of the college educated workforce--and an even larger fraction of the educated unemployed. (Table 1.)
From 2000 to 2003 (the latest year of available data):
The growth rate of college-educated immigrants was three-times that of college-educated natives.
This occurred despite the post 911 slowdown in student visa processing. This also occurred despite a doubling of the unemployment rate of college-educated foreigners.
Economists call this a "supply-shock" --a situation where excess labor causes wages to fall.
The role of college-educated foreigners in depressing wages of U.S. natives is brought home by Harvard economist (and Cuban immigrant) George Borjas. In his seminal Quarterly Journal of Economics paper [The Labor Demand Curve Is Downward Sloping: ] Borjas concludes that immigration 1980-2000 reduced wages of the average U.S.-born worker by 3.2 percent in 2000.
The reduction varied dramatically among education levels. Native high-school dropouts suffered an 8.9 percent wage reduction. But even college-educated natives suffered an above-average reduction of 4.9 percent.
The impact was greatest on college graduates with 11-15 years of work experience - i.e., most likely to have
Seastead this.
I'm a couple of years out of college and working for a largish tech company.
I had a recruiter at a smaller company ask me if i'd be prepared to work for $18k less than i'm making now AND add an extra hour to my commute. Does anybody accept that kind of offer?
According to this topic we are going to have a shortage of IT workers. On the other hand, we've seen plenty of topic saying that all the IT jobs are going overseas. So which is it? Are we running out of jobs or employees?
With every other article now a days being about outsourcing and how there won't be any computer jobs in 20 years plus the fact that unemployment amoung software developers now is higher than the natioanl average for everyone else, is this any surprise?? I mean I know quite a few folks that went back and got nursing degrees, after the nuclear winter of 9/11 and are now making 35$ 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.
Anyone claiming to be an architect should be able to name a design pattern for me and then describe what it does and why to use it. Notice I did not say, "Please describe the 'flyweight' pattern for me and tell me 5 times when you used it." Well, nobody fucking uses the flyweight pattern anyhow, so why would I ask such an obscure question? Instead, I ask the interviewee to pick a pattern. Any goddamn pattern. I don't care what it is. Throw me a bone here!
If you don't speak the language of software architecture (design patterns), then don't claim to be a software architect. Go apply at mcdonalds and quit wasting my time.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
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".
Here are the facts guys.... 1. In the recent past (last 5 years) there have been lots of layoffs and lots of lost jobs in IT 2. That HAS turned away allot of people from IT, so its true numbers of people pursing upper level degrees in scienec is dropping 3. "Offshoring" of IT to India and now China has and will affect IT jobs in the US, but the numbers Im seeing are maybe 5% of US jobs directly affected by this...its not as bad as you think 4. According to article on zdnet.com and here, its turning out with each passing day INDIAN PROGRAMMERS ARE CREATING SLOPPY WORK AND MANAGED IT PROJECTS DONT HAVE ROI's inline with cost savings as expecetd (actually cost more!), and a number of companies are turning back to the US and other sources for outsourced IT, as the offshore model in India appears to not work as most companies thought. This return is currently unfolding when you see all the current US outsourcing startups inside the US now that recruit US IT people, albiet with smaller salaries. If you dont believe me, check out some recent Gartner studies that show Indian outsourced projects have cost more, have lower quality, and there is a HUGE backlash thats unfolding against phone support from India. Check out DELL's current stance on this as well. 5. US programmers INNOVATE, and that will never change...thats something OUR COUNTRY nurtures, and its NOT tied completely to education systems. It will take time for US companies to see this and its beginning to unfold, such that more companies are hiring techies in-house 6. Good software "talent", no matter in the US or India or China, is a limited commodity, and thats what Bill Gates recently mentioned...and what this article is really saying. There is a decreasing number of "techies" with both the talent, AND the skills. Thats further inflamed by loss of educated, retrained techies now. Since the world is from here forward a tech world, you will see salaries go up radically, I believe for the "talent". You need to prove you have that edge if you are a US IT person and want the big bucks which will be coming back.... 7. I Agree....we will see a HUGE number of jobs and upper level skill sets (c#.NET, DBM's, etc.) that will be in huge demand but not available in the US. Jobs ARE coming back. Go to dice.com and do a search for .NET jobs. There are a HUGE number already that are not being filled. In a few years that will increase. Bill Gates is right.
8. FACT: Even if you are in IT and cant find work now, you need to get retrained in the newest technology, or YOU WILL BE COMPETING SALAREY-WISE against foreigners who also can do your job. BUT, because offshoring is currently NOT working so well, expect soon, many high paying jobs in nearly ALL LEVELS OF IT. Thats my prediction
9. Now for the unknown: Its true software programmers such as myself DONT seem to be showing job increases currently in big numbers but service/business hybrid jobs are growing like crazy!...this because there are allot of software jobs being replaced by offshoring and software that currenlty solves busienss process problems. That will continue UNTIL BUSINESS REALIZES THAT just because you program has NOTHING to do with quality OR innovation. Those are two things that make compoanies cometitive, so I feel will require time for US companies to teach their CIO's to nurture again the original IT model of highly skilled US programmers paid well to innovate the core software that creates value for the company....that WILL return. I predict very soon a huge diversification of the software programming field as well that should be inclusive of more and more people, all obver the globe. Software now is both the support and the income-producing edge to all companies. No company can afford to undervalue that by hiring grunts. Doesnnt matter how talented your project managers. You cant replace innovative US programming!
U.S. PROGRAMMERS = INNOVATION
Properly-run unions won't arbitrarily require wages, costing half their workers their jobs. They will work with the corporations to ensure that both their members' wages and jobs remain intact. Where they become beneficial is when corporations get workers "over a barrel" and use low wages to reap high profits. The union's purpose is not to destroy their own financial viability, but rather to attempt to reign in corporate profiteering.
Synergy is your friend
High wages are good for the economy.
... like the one we're in now. (If I were you, I'd set about ditching any bank stocks or bonds I had, since they have run out of competitive margin and must now go back to due diligence and managed risks ... tossing millions out of the credit system, and causing bank income to crash.)
You mean the CONSUMER economy. But the consumer economy can be SIMULATED with a large enough credit bubble
With a consumer economy simulated through massive grants of credit, you can then drop wages. Who needs to pull in more money when your bank can always figure out a way to squeeze another tiny but perpetual payment out of you?
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Since it costs about $40,000 to get a new person hired
Huh? Source, please! (and subject to what constraints?)
-a
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...
As sad as this is, we've been looking for a Java developer and actually did get a resume that had college spelled "collage"; I joked to my boss that maybe an IT degree from there meant that you could take a sledgehammer to a PC and make pretty art with the results...
(By the way, know any good java people who'd be interested in working in midtown Manhattan for a soulless conglomerate implementing all sorts of buzzword-compliant stuff for the financial industry? Extra bonus points if you are comfortable making subversion do all sorts of entertaining things.)
I think the point was that the people who figure that out on their own likely have the ability to develop skills required for high-level programming jobs.
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.
"Would that be mainly because you don't want to compete with them?"
hahahaha! Hell no. I give advice generally only to a small insignificant fraction of the population and it is to help them. I have no effect on the masses who would "compete" with me.
I gave more detailed advice below in another reply, where I said don't do this unless you have stellar talent, such that you can work for a google.
Working as a corporate Software Cog that has to spend an hour in meetings/documentation for each line of code written is something I would only wish on my worse enemy.
I would also advise, that even if you are still interested to major in another technical dicipline and only a minor Computer Science, you will end up with more opportunities. If you are good you can still get the pure Software jobs if that is what you want.
Before I landed on CS as a major, I was in a liberal-arts major that made me take intro macroeconomics.
In that college class we learned that if demand exceeds supply, the price for the good or service is supposed to go up (because higher price will reduce demand and increase availability of supply).
But it hasn't. In fact, it's done the opposite. And that's the problem.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Well, while we're dealing in gross stereotypes, why don't I reverse it?
Engineers try to solve problems with real world solutions that are robust and efficient. Computer Science is about solving problems through various ideal elegant solutions. I don't know the number of times I've seen or heard of Comp Sci. PhD's entering the realy world and not thinking to add in things like caching or buffering.
You have engaged in circular reasoning. Your comment is hereby striken from the record.
Good Day!
I can think of a hundred correct answers to the question "What is the difference between Java and C++?". He could have talked about virtual machines, bytecode, and platform independence. He could have talked about memory management and garbage collection. Bonus points if he mentions multiple inheritance and templates.
But, nooooo. What do I get from this dickhead? "Java is a dumbed-down C++". Can you imagine how much business I'd lose if I put him in front of a client? And even if he never saw a client, I don't want someone working for me who obviously doesn't want to be there. If he hates Java so much, then he shouldn't be applying for a J2EE architect position.
As for design patterns, I don't really care if you can design an implement an idea if you can't communicate it with your peers. Design patterns are the language of software architecture. Notice I do not ask applicants to recite GoF for me. I ask them to pick a pattern, any pattern. I couldn't care less what it is. Just pick something and tell me what it is and why to use it.
If you don't know anything about any design pattern, then you cannot have a useful discussion with your peers about software architecture. You'll spend all day explaining your design to an architect and at the end he'll go, "Oh! You meant a Session Facade! I get it now!" Well, that's not acceptable.
Design patterns are actually in use and it makes software development and maintenance more efficient. I'm not asking that architects be able to recite a textbook for me, but I am asking them to be able to communicate their designs and use common solutions to common problems. If you can't do that, your loss.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
In 20 or 30 years, we will have supercomputers writing code. Code generating code, which can generate new code, all by quantifying the requests.
I won't even dignify this with a response. Be honest or quit wasting my time.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
No, I just said that compensation should be directly proportional to their worth.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Sounds like a Dilbert cartoon where the PHB's make a resoundingly successful suggestion to the effect of:
"Let's save money by firing all of our internal staff and replacing them with contractors, then, we'll replace our contractors with outsourced staff, then, we'll save even more money by hiring employees!"
Seriously, the reason why people are avoiding CS like the plague is because of outsourcing, horror stories of the dot-com bust, stories from people in the field who complain about constant stress and long work hours, pager duty, etc.
CS -> IT is a career move with uncertainties. There are people graduating now who are wondering where the heck they are going to get a job. The market is cluttered with people who had been laid off and can't find work. Companies are being extry picky about who they want to hire(multiple degrees AND years of work experience... but not the people who got laid off recently, because they are burned out...)
Is it any wonder that people are avoiding the computer science fields?
Before, people swarmed into CS because it was a career choice with possibilities and options. Now, it is viewed as a path to despair and a limited future.
Winged Power Photography
Quite Simply because the libertarians of today forget than Ann Rand was assuming that all people in the society are super-human. Assumes that they will make the best choices based on informed decisions that ultimately benefit everyone. They forget that we are all really more in the sub to barely-human range making decisions for all the wrong reasons.
Red herring! Most people I've worked with in the IT world don't have an IT degree. Yes, most have a degree in something, but not IT.
To claim that an IT shortage can only be solved by people taking college classes sounds like something only a college professer would say.
-Mr Logic
They'll just outsource the work
/. reader has been alive. I've seen ups, I've seen downs - but I'll tell you this - I've already told my daughter, and I'll tell my son when he gets older "Get a job that works with physical infrastructure, or the government" The first can't be outsourced, the second is always a growth industry, because the politicians KNOW that buy hiring more workers where THEY control the budget, they get to BUY votes
I've been a computing professional for longer than the median
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
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In today's episode representatives from the IT Business Consortium (IBC) visit the Talented and Gifted class in a highshcool in suburbia, USA.
IBC Drone:"... and so that's why we would like some of you to consider a career in IT. Any questions?"
Gifted Student: "Isn't it true that the kinds of careers you are asking us to consider have jobs which are among the easiest to outsource to third world countries where labor rates are 1/10 to 1/4 what they are here in the USA due to much lower overall standards of living in those countries?"
IBC Drone: "Well, er, ummm... there will always be work in this field. We need lots of IT workers."
Talented Student: "Perhaps, but we'll have to migrate to Mumbai to get a job. Many of the companies in your consortium are hiring primarily in places like India and China and only doing minor hiring of contractors and temporary workers in the US."
IBC Drone: "Well, when business conditions improve we'll need more people in the USA too..."
Articulate Student: "Forget that crap, It seems to me that if you want any kind of job stability without having to move to a third world sweat shop you'd better stay as far away from IT and Computer Science as you can. Me, I'm going into patent law; plenty of money to be made and great job stability!"
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I wonder what would happen if we stopped outsourcing the smart people (technologists) and started outsourcing the business and marketing people. You can reduce what those guys do to a few bullet-pointed scripts, so it'd be easy enough for a Bangalorian outsourcing firms to replicate the jobs.
Hmmmmm.
Imagine the money a company could make if it didn't have to pay MBA salaries and bonuses.
Hmmmmm.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
you want the workforce smaller.
That means they will make more money, and the government gets more taxes.
everytime an American company(who gets tax breaks) replaces a US worker with an overseas worker the US gets less money, but still has to supply basic sevices to the person who was fired.
Companies want to hire overseas? fine, no tax breaks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The thing is, that there are a lot of equally talented, intelligent people out there that DO have a degree.
By the way, Have you gotten a GED yet? From there you should be able to go on to college, but it will take a lot of dedication.
There's also the seriously hard problem of connecting good employers to good potential employees, which leads both sides to think that the other side doesn't exist.
As we've been recently going through the process of trying to hire someone, I have arrived at the conclusion that there's so much crap out there that the people who eventually are hired are hired because: 1) they were lucky and their resume was randomly picked out of the pile, and 2) they weren't obviously unqualified in any of the initial or screening interviews. Note that being extraordinarily well qualified as opposed to merely qualified is not an actual advantage to getting a job. It may affect the salary offer, but not as much as you might think. (Want a bigger salary? Ask for a bigger one initially. You'll have to then prove that you're worth it, but no one is going to notice that you're worth more and offer more without being asked.) The situation may seem slightly different at small start-ups, but only because the initial cut-off for "qualified" is often higher; it's still a case where there's no advantage in terms of getting hired beyond the "good enough" cutoff.
Seriously; we've had people come in for a job with java, dealing heavily with SQL, who couldn't write a simple query involving a "group by" aggregate. We've had people who couldn't write code that accessed an element of a two-dimensional array. It's not as though the language of the position was hidden from them - they were told well in advance of the interview that they'd be asked to write some java and SQL during the interview. More commonly than that, we've had people who appeared to have trouble working out how to structure a relatively simple algorithm that involved two nested for loops - not syntactic stuff, now, but basic thinking of the type a programmer needs to do dozens of times a day.
Those interviews are painful. Probably they're also stressful for the candidate, but they're painful for us too. Each one of them pulls us away from the real work we have to be doing, of which there's already way too much (which is why we're hiring in the first place). With that crap to wade through, we're so grateful to get an interview candidate that is a halfway decent programmer that we jump at the first chance; and unless we're hiring more people we just drop the rest of the resumes in the trash. Why would we want to subject ourselves to more of the pain of discovering more unqualified candidates? We have better things to be doing.
Now, if we had significantly lower standards for candidates, the interview process would be much less painful on both sides. We might even be able to hire people over the phone after a quick reference and background check, with no need for multi-person several-hour interviews. Of course, the pay would be considerably less, and our end products would probably reflect that. On the other hand, we'd get back to more people who submit their resumes, and the chances of a candidate being offered some job at all would go up.
This leads to the following state of affairs:
The programmer hiring process royally sucks, on both sides. On the programmer side, it appears that well over half the places he sends his resumes to are black holes, and those that do get back are the businesses that make hiring large numbers of people for cheap a priority. (Or the scammers; they'll get back to you too) On the employer side, you either have to put up with hiring low-skilled employees or put up with the pain of wading through the mass of unqualified applicants until you stumble upon someone who can in fact code their way out of a wet paper bag.
(By the way, anyone not totally repulsed by the above description of finding a job in the industry and who would like a job as a java programmer (with moderate use of SQL) in midtown Manhattan is welcome to contact me. Willingness to work as part of a small team for a soulless conglomerate serving the financial industry a plus)
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...
The fact is that CompSci has nothing to do with IT. IT is about supporting and deploying systems and applications, compsci is about inventing and researching new things. You don't need a compsci degree to be a system admin, and *those* are the jobs that will be growing.
Every company needs staff to support thier computer infrastructure, but hardly any need programmers. There will still be new development work for programmers, but as applications become more capable, the need for programmers diminishes and the need for support staff rises.
That there are fewer people enrolling in compsci programs is irrelevant because that's the wrong thing to be looking at.
As an Indian grad student here in the US, I have found many of my US classmates to be way ahead of majority of my peers back in India when it comes to algorithmic ability.
Hirohito: You are American?!
Owner: Yes!
Hirohito: Oh! You must have very big penis!
Owner: Excuse me?! I was just asking you what you're up to with these toys!
Hirohito: Nothing! We are very simple people with very small penis! Mr. Hosek's penis is especially small!
Hosek: He he he! So small!
Hirohito: We cannot achieve much with so small penis! But, you Americans! Wow! Penis so big! SO BIG PENIS!
Owner: Well, I-I guess it is a pretty good size.
Hosek: Menasa! Kit`e! Kit`e! (A bunch of Japaneese women enter) This man has a very big penis! (Women applaud while the Toy Store Owner smiles in pride.) Ho, ho! What an enorm-immense penis!
Owner: Well, it certainly was nice meeting you folk! I just wanted to bring that little malfunction to your attention! Bye, bye!
Hirohio: Goodbye! Thank you for stopping by with your gargantuan penis!
Owner: (Still smilling in pride) Hm, Hmmm! (leaves)
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.
http://news.com.com/Johnny+can+so+program/2010-100 7_3-5700858.html?tag=nefd.ac
No reform can correct that. Greed is part of human nature due to evolutionary reasons. While capitolism isn't perfect, it's the best system that exploits human nature to the benefit of everyone.
Untill human nature changes, the utopian idea of communism/socialism will never be the ideal solution.
Life is not for the lazy.
Third world skills, third world wages. Stay in school, kids, or lose out to kids in India who did.
Washington DC. Any of them willing to relocate? What is their experience?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
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..
Parent is hilarious.
Tweet, tweet.
There's a big difference. A medical specialty is not likely to go away. The doctor who trains as a cardiologist will be able to spend his/her whole career treating heart patients.
OTOH, I used to specialize in writing word-processors. Now I specialize in writing EDA compilers. Ten years from now, I might have to specialize in something else. And the question is, will anyone hire me then (because I'll be pretty old).
Well then, we just have to take this union thing on a world tour. You know...Workers of the world, unite!
What?
More government to fix government? What if the reforms end up not working or getting ignored? Do we fund a police to police the police who are policing us?
Is it a coincidence that unionised fields got savaged first? I know it's no coincidence that most of us highly paid, economically mobile, unemployed IT people don't want unions because we've found value in our individuality, even though it sometimes burns us. We know the next six months might be tight, but it sure beats going back to the factory (which, by the way, closed down long before the dotcom bust)
But then again, I don't know what kind of questions are being asked. I used to follow the ANSI C++ committee, read "C++ Report", read books from people like Scott Meyes, Stan Lipman, etc. Let's just say I know C++ much better than pretty much everyone around me. I was never arrogant about it nor used interviewing as a soapbox to gloat.
During the interview process I would ask people to rate themselves and would qualify the upper tiers of the scale (1-10). Per my "scale" which was very arbitrary mind you (as all are) I would say "If you rate yourself an 8 you should be able to tell me off the top of your head why you would want to write a copy constructor." I would then qualify 9 and 10.
Either people weren't listening (likely) or they severely overestimated their C++ coding abilities (just as likely, probably more so). I would hear "8" an awful lot. Guess what the first question was? Few people got this question right.
Mediocrity ruled my C++ interviews. I met maybe 5 people who truly knew C++ well. The scary part is I spent 2-1/2 years in Microsoft and twice I had people on a team I was on want to rewrite code I had written since they did not understand contemporary C++. That was 1997. I pretty much gave up on C++ and software development. I have not done any C++ software development since then nor am I inclined to change that fact.
Mediocrity truly rules software development... unless you're talking about people who code out from a point of passion, in particular, open source projects (it sure ain't the money).
But then some of this is necessary. You see, if everyone had stellar C++ class design skills (as a function of their knowledge of the C++ language) no one would want to do the grunt work. However, this type of person is very common and thus you wind up with lots of difficult to maintain code.
In closing, YES I can believe they have a hard time finding good C++ people.
-M
PS: Trying hard to make money in other ways nowadays.
Actually you're right.
His boss is the brain force and is quite smart at what is doing which is:
Please stockholders (deceive stockholders), Get bonus, Retire early.
Meanwhile the poor code monkies will suffer layoffs and in the end the entire company will fold in 10-20 years leaving the stockholders with zilch. (Average lifespan of company is 5-10 years if you have happend to ever study economics).
Which leads me to my assertion that the most successful companies are ones that either are:
A.) Not listed on the stock market.
B.) Listed but owned mostly by a person or small group of person which care little minor stock performance gains/losses. (see Bill Gates)
or
C.) Ruled by an authority figure that doesn't give a flip about the stock holders desire to make money, but wants his company to take over the world (see Steve Jobs)
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Argentina is a great place to live. There are some places with serious security issues
Yeah, well that's what you get for giving protection to those 'dead' Axis leaders after WWII. Wouldn't want to be anywhere near the families of those guys:)
Damn, you could have a twisted form of European royalty hidden away inside your country... Hitler's great granddaughter marries Mussolini's great great nephew at the society wedding of the year.
Argentinian 'Hello' magazine features photos of Tojo's family at the wedding, happily chatting away with the Goerings
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
When even the shoe shine boy is telling you to get out of the market, it's a sure signal that it's time to buy.
Paul Graham's article was great, but from the looks of it he's not preaching to the Slashdot crowd. He's talking to relatively ambitious people who would do well regardless.
I'm sorry to say, but I see little of that on Slashdot. Most of what I see here is a working-for-the-man, postal worker attitude toward life. Actually it's kind of depressing.
It's terrifying how many good developers are unemployed right now. I don't mean some fresh out of school punk with only 5 years on the job experience (no offense punks,) I mean top senior engineering people.
The only reason you hear the 'lack of people' refrain being repeated over and over is employers don't want to pay an IT salary. It's comical to see people complain about paying a programmer even as much as a plumber ($60/hr.) I'd like to see the plumber who has the equivalent of the _4 feet_ of books & manuals I had to master just for the skills needed for the last 3 years.
If doing challenging work doesn't pay, screw it, I'm going to lay pipe for 6 hours a day and have time to drink beer, scratch my ass and watch football.
STOP LAYING PEOPLE OFF!
"First you have to excel in high school to get into college in the first place"
I found junior-high and high-school to not be a learning experience, or college prepatory experience, but child storage -- nothing more or less. I think I went to particularly stupid schools. Highest math I was allowed to take was geometry. Does that mean that I get punished financially the rest of my life for my high school grades? That is total bullshit.
I would go home from school to program my Apple II with BASIC and assembly, and other techie things we all did at that age.
Screw you for throwing my resume in the trash. If my lack of formalized education makes you not wanna read about me in my resume, you can read about me in the technology section of various papers and magazines.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
'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.'
Well, maybe if a decent CS education and degree didn't cost upwards of $20,000 and the curriculum weren't 10x more demanding than your typical liberal arts major then we wouldn't have so few people able to sign up and complete the courses.
Face it folks, the supply/demand issue with officially trained and degreed computer professionals is headed the same way it has already gone with doctors and nurses. Doctors and nurses are in short supply relative to demand because very few people can afford the schooling or endure the unbelievably long and intense curriculum.
To get my ECE (Electrical & Computer Engineering) degree, I had to take a bunch of stuff only remotely tangentially related to the field, such as mechanical engineering and chemistry. If they had cut all the unnecessary bullshit from the curriculum and widdled it down to what was actually needed to be a competent computer hardware/software professional, I could have gotten out in about half the time and half the cost.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Actually, job security is something that Boomers's parents had.
They called it the "Great Depression".
Screw 'em. I still won't tell my kid to go into IT.
Not that I'm BITTER or anything... :(
I agree with many that a shortage is exactly what's needed. The only people it's bad for are the schools, IMO; less people == less money for them. It could be argued that its bad for employers too but IT jobs are already underpaid and I believe they're(the employers) getting more than their money's worth already. Getting a CS job out of college is very hard, I graduated in 12-03 and had to pull teeth to work small programming jobs into my shitty tech support job. Once I had could claim experience from that for a year, I started the resume process and only applied to jobs which required US citizens. Yes, that's right people, the only place for a programmer that has protection against outsourcing is the DEFENSE INDUSTRY. Flame all you want, but I love my job and I'm paid well. Muah!
netkev.com
This is just a ploy to get more HB-1 visas, so they can import cheaper workers. Honestly, I find it insane that during the mass layoffs following the .com bust, the same organizations that were laying off IT pros were lobbying congress for more HB-1 visas to fill positions of people they were laying off!! I think we need to start lobbying congress for more HB-1 visas to fill the positions of CEOs and COOs....
you are trying to say that companies should be more democratic (publicly traded ones are democratic but nevermind that). i was thinking that governments should be more tyrannical. clearly a dictator is bad when the dictator is bad. but i think a good dictator is better than a good democracy any day. when the dictator knows what he is doing and has good solutions and good advisors and listens and isn't abusive and doesn't beat anyone (who doesn't deserve a beating), etc.
problems with democracy:
- is that it always a huge nasty beaurocracy. everyone has to vote on everything all the time. decision making is slow, clumsy, complex, and retarded (for example: the tax code is like 10,000,000 pages).
- uneducated irresponsible greedy bad overweight perverted wife beating donkey loving criminals with mental problems who are high on cocaine get to vote. experts aren't making the decisions.
- oppression of the minority (for example the very very rich are oppressed in this country because this group of the smallest top best producers have to pay way more into the government than anyone else does and they get way less back in the form of benefits).
good things about a well run tyranny:
- no beaurocracy. very efficient. easy to get things done.
- only knowledgeable people are making decisions -- by definition since this is a well run tyranny.
(this is the big problem of course with a tyranny as i will get to in a second.)
- note that a tyranny/company will not necessarily suppress minority viewpoints under the following conditions: (a.) you can leave a tyranny/company and go join another tyranny/company, (b.) you can go start your own tyranny/company
the nice thing about lots of different companies/tyrannies is that you can always choose a different tyranny/company if you don't like the one where you are at currently. or you could start your own tyranny/company and run it how you want.
now the problem is picking good dictators/ceos who will make the right decisions and not beat you (unless you deserve to be beaten). in the case of corporations, the market picks the most talented ones. so the ceos/dictators who survive are by definition those who are making decisions which are good for their organization and the people they represent. in the case of nations there is no such nice easy well behaved mechanism for finding good dictators. thus we have to retreat the inferior system of democracy.
but we should wish for a benevolent dictatorship.
The article here is CORRECT! Technology is returning and so are the jobs for programmers in the US, but there wont be enough gradates and workers to fill the demand. Microsoft and IBM and these companies are correct, no matter what anyone says in this blog. Those jobs are coming back and there is and will be a shortage!
That may seem strange to most of you who may have lost jobs, but seems perfectly logical to me. Ive kept my software job the past 6 years, so I know.
Look at the history of other new innovative technologies like the railroad, electricity and any technology. The internet and current IT trends are following the SAME PATH. The railroad in England was a huge speculative industry inthe 1840's and 50's. Even poor people had stocks in it and when it bubbled and crashed, by the 1850's, allot of people lost money and jobs. There were all these people that bailed out of the technology. Then it came back and came back with a vengeance all over the world and it remained strong for the next 75 years as the technology blossomed and it enabled all kinds of other industries. Thats what technology is doing now...we are on the edge of the rebound and its all uphill from here for techies, I believe. You just have to retrain and stay on top of the changes. Old skills are NOT in demand. True, new self-programming software technologies and enabling software building tools will continue to be built that enable more non-software type jobs. But I think the armies of smart science people required to build these types of programs for all kinds of indistries, then customize and manage those apps will increase the next 10 to 50 years and require lots of computer people, especially talenetd software programmers here in the US. So, any drops in science recruiting now will be felt by business later. How that translates into better salaries for current programmers is up in the air, but I think likely, as this unfolds the next couple of years. Think about it...how can the demand for IT people not grow, with the internet and business and even public systems all migrating to a data-driven systems now. Data everywhere, and tons of people needed to manage and analyze it!
Lastly, another reason we have fewer science people graduating is our society looks down on intellectualism and looks up to athletics and entertainers. Thats pathetic! Smart people are considered geeks and nerds and dumb, drug-using athletes are worshipped by our children....go figure?!? A recent study showed yound men want to be a sports star now over even doctors! Thats bad....we need to reverse this fascination with womanizing athletes which contribute NOTHING to our society and teach our kids to cherish and look up to intellectuals and artists. Thats the challenge for our society....and a difficult one, if we want to graduate more engineers and scientists!
U.S. PROGRAMMERS = INNOVATION
This line of reasoning about computer science grads reminds me of expanding the major leagues in baseball in the 90s. We did not see more talented starting pitching as the result of more openings for pitchers through adding 3 or 4 new teams. And the minor leagues did not suddenly attract more talent. The mix stayed about the same (most players wash out, some make the majors on fundamentals as role players, and a few are significantly talented players). The computer field seems about the same. If there is demand for skills that can be taught, like LAN troubleshooting, people will come and go to fill the demand. The net total of the talented technical people who write OSes, dream up new software, and stuff like that (i.e. create new value) will be about the same. Not because of supply and demand, but because there are a finite quantity of people who will dream up innovative OSes, new programming paradigms and new software. These people will always be in demand somewhere because they add true value to an enterprise. It's the next tier, the role players, who come and go. In the late 90s, everyone learned HTML and hung out a shingle as a web site designer and coder, and now demand has evaporated, and they are gone. But how many people ever learned how to implement dynamic content systems based on relational databases, with security, for a real web site? Aren't they still in demand? And Oracle DBA demand comes and goes, but is there any slacking of demand for people to create innovative new apps that run on databases? You may be shorthanded with healthy pitchers, need to call someone up, and make room by releasing a utility infielder who has struck out in his last five pinch-hit appearances; but you'll keep a 40-home-run hitter on the roster. I think the baseball analogy is much closer to the computer field than the college one.
We are led by short sighted morons.
Short-sighted - yes. Morons - definitely not.
You see, the company won't be wiped out for quite a few years. Sure, it eventually will tank, but stock will go up before it goes down.
So, stock goes up, CEO sells stock. Stock goes down, CEO gets "fired" with a $10,000,000 severance package. CEO is crying all the way to the bank.
The problem is that companies have been transformed into short-sighted entities. Shareholders only care about the next few years - the only people who actually care about having jobs in 3 decades are the employees, who are the one class of people who have no say in corporate governance.
OK. Almost nobody was in the workforce during the great depression.
I meant that most of the parents of Boomers had not lost their jobs because of the depression because they hadn't entered the workforce yet.
if you don't want to "labor for someone else's profits and grand visions" then start your own company.
and if you don't want to work then go sit on the couch and be poor and hungry. i'm not going to work for you.
what could be more noble than working? what could be more noble than producing something of value? if you aren't sustaining yourself, then you either mooching off others or taking your wealth by force. an honest person is one who doesn't consume more than they have produced.
With the productivity gains that the U.S. loves to brag about, you'd think at least some of that extra productivity could've gone to decreasing the work week from 40 to say 37. Thats what Denmark did.
http://www.web.net/32hours/denmark.htm
Well the Engineers programs are neither robust or efficent. They just get the job done. I have seen many engineers code and compared to Computer Sciencetist. It gets the job done, but in the most aquaward and inefficent. I have seen things done that are orders of maginitude slow (a concept taught in upper level CS and not in Engineering) So an engineer will say his program runs twice as fast the other guy a computer science will say it works in a order of maginitude faster then the other guy. I havent yet seen an engineer without at least a minor in CS make a search routiene that didn't start at the begining and go at least untill it found its data point. And concepts like indexing and unique keys are compleatly forgen.
I've seen or heard of Comp Sci. PhD's entering the realy world and not thinking to add in things like caching or buffering. Um in what? A lot of programming for normal applications the OS takes care of Caching and buffering on its own.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
One thing that is really needed is management who have both some technical ability and good management skills. In my experience the management in major US high-tech firms do not allow analysis and design to take place. We end up with ALL the people in the department being techs. Given this dumbing down of computer science in US firms, there is no need for a formal education. Most of what I learned for my CS degree I have been expressly banned from practicing.
I'd agree that we need to get rid of tenured professors. Why should professors get this rediculous level of job security when no one else in the market does? Its the teachers union buying off congress at the expense of taxpayers and students.
But the real problem with university expenses is that the cost of going to college is enormously subsidized by the government. When the government is giving loans and grants out to the tune of 10 or 20,000 dollars, the universities can charge that much more. Basically we are gradually nationalizing higher education. That means lower quality for a higher price. It also means the poor can go to school via government subsidy and the rich can go to school because they are rich, but the middle class gets screwed because they can't afford college and they get to pay for the poor people's tuition. why bother working? might as well be poor and let someone else take care of me.
Incentives matter.
*dragon claps hands til they hurt*
I have had similar experiences to you.
Whenever my company tries to hire J2EE technical leads, it takes us seemingly forever to find a single workable candidate. People pad the shit out of their resume, read books, and think that's enough to get hired. But as soon as you get them in the door, they can't even tell you how a delegate pattern would be used or why it's desireable.
I guess I should take heart from this because I feel like I could hop into a new job whenever I need to, but it's still frustrating to see so many manhours thrown away whenever we want to hire -- which is seemingly *always*!
So, in many ways, there really does seem to be a shortage of J2EE architects/programmers who know wtf they are doing, or can at least speak intelligently in an interview situation.
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.
IBM and other large corporations, along with the congressman and senators in their pockets are the ones pushing this lie. There are plenty of very capable American IT workers that are out of work. There isn't a shortage of skilled U.S. labor to fill IT jobs but I guess making up statistics in "studies" makes it easier to justify paying an unnecessary H1-B Visa applicant $8 an hour to do a job in the U.S. where we have a "shortage".
Why should anyone bright enought to make a decent programmer chose to become one? Enjoying the activity isn't enough reason to make it a career, there also need to be SOME career prospects.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I don't fucking swear this much at work, either. ;)
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I find it interesting that both IBM and "Educators" feel the solution is to increase the supply rather then reducing demand.
If I.T. professionals are going to be hard to get in the future, why not reduce the need for them?
Buy computers that have track records of requiring less maintenance.
Press for standards, and refuse to buy software that doesn't adhere to them.
-- Should you believe authority without question?
I'd suggest you read it, it's great material that still applies today. Of course, there are many other patterns books out now, but that is a great one.
Patterns are common solutions to common problems. They give designers a vocabulary with which to communicate their designs. If you want to reinvent the wheel every time you solve a problem, be my guest. But you won't be doing that while working for me, thanks.
My guess is you already know more patterns than you think. Factory, Singleton, Iterator, etc. We're talking basic stuff here.
Actually, what really scares me about your post is that you've gone 23 years without reading a book on design patterns. Do you read any technical books? Or do you just know it all already?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
That theory makes a lot of sense except I don't really see an explanation of the why. What do cheap-labour conservatives who aren't the elite hope to gain from cheap-labour? Or is it just that the elite have brainwashed all the middle and lower class cheap-labour conservatives?
When I went back to school to get my degree in computers, everyone wanted to know why? I used to be a teacher... but I was too non-traditional and I hated dealing with Admin and some parents... (I loved the kids, though...)
But computers have always been my passion, from my very first Timex computer which attached to a TV Screen, to my new as of last September degree in Programming.
Everyone said I wouldn't get a job.. the day after my graduation date I started my new job, which I totally love. (But I had to miss my graduation ceremony...)
The central US is grabbing us up like flies to honey! (Perhaps lower pay, but cost of living is also lower).
It's happening. Maybe not everywhere, but I certainly see it happening now. A co-worker put his resume on Monster and has been inundated ever since. He will be starting his new job next week, at 3X his current pay. (we won't go there)
We only had 3 decent applicants to take his position... and straight out of college (just like me) and we've been looking for additional help since early January.
Oh yes, I certainly do see the winds changing (and not just the winds in Kansas -- and no, never met Dorothy or Toto...
Remember when Windows were washed, mice were trapped and UNIX guarded the harem?
Internships? Jobs? What have you worked on?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
What is this thing (tilts head) retirement?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
England, UK.
I chose Earth Sciences at Uni even though I love I.T and that kind of thing.
I felt I was going for the safe option but I wasn't listening to my heart. I don't like being stuck in one place and I felt that I.T meant I'd be stuck behind a screen indoors.
I still can't find something that feels right.
A blog I run for the wealth
I think we are in need of clarification of the word "IT" as it used (or overused) when talking about the supposed shortage. Usually I see "shortage of IT professionals" followed immediately by "Computer Science Degree". What about the help desk? What about the computer technicians? What about the systems administrators? Aren't these all part of IT and indeed the bulk of the people who comprise IT. It seems like all we're talking about here are engineers and I'm not sure if IT Professional is the right descriptor for this rather small subset of people who loosely fall under rubric of IT. Small relative to all of the Help Desk, Technicians, and Sys Admins in the pool. Thoughts?
What I do find it funny that everybody picks MVC, and nobody can tell me what it is. :)
Also, interviewing is a skill. You can learn to interview well. When I graduated college, I gave the worst interviews imaginable. But I got some feedback and learned what I was doing wrong. If you want, you can learn to interview well.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Thanks for the thoughtful response, though!
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
When someone lacks a favorite. Indeed, I don't think that I have a favorite design pattern. When that happens, I simply ask the applicant to pick a design pattern at random.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
As a former CS major, it's pretty obvious why smart people aren't bothering to major in CS. At most universities these days, the required parts of the CS curriculum amount to little more than a Java vocational training course... lots of higher math that you'll never use, lots of object-oriented design indoctrination, how to draw pretty little UML diagrams, and Java Java Java everywhere. That's been my experience at two major North American universities so far (names withheld to protect the guilty). What's missing is any element of creativity, anything that might appeal to the kinds of people who were drawn to computers because they love hacking. Nobody encourages students to play with computers, to discover new technologies or to learn anything outside the dreary shit that they're expected to need in the workplace. Thank God I got out of that trap. Right now I'm a Classical Studies major who hacks Lisp stuff in his spare time, and I have been SO much happier since I switched. Ironically, I'm taking a minor in CS now, because it turns out that I can take a handful of interesting classes I want without having to do the Java-OO-UML vocational training courses.
Agreed. Engineers generally are real-world problem solvers. Comp Sci - pi in sky.
Um in what? A lot of programming for normal applications the OS takes care of Caching and buffering on its own.
Well, that's just it. Com Sci people don't think about caching and buffering, and memory utilization, and it often bytes them in tha ass. Several years ago there was this project at the company I was working for that involved generating programs to transfer data between databases. The C.S. idiot didn't know enough to take into consideration that maybe he shouldn't be trying to read an entire fucking database into memory at once. And this was after I'd hinted to him that he probably could expect memory problems with his design.
I hope I'm not generalizing too much. There are engineers who are bad at coding, and those who are good at coding, just the same as with com sci grads.
just that simple.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"Either people weren't listening (likely) or they severely overestimated their C++ coding abilities (just as likely, probably more so). I would hear "8" an awful lot."
Is that really surprising? I mean, if someone came into an interview and said they were average or below average would they expect to have a chance in hell of getting the job? Resumes and interviews are more a marketing vehicle than a way to determine quality. Heck, you are basically told to NEVER put yourself in a negative light during this process. So why expect otherwise?
People may also not have a good idea of their skills compared to other people. Or to what is needed in your job. The second is ENTIRELY the companies fault. If they want an entry level person, hire an entry level person. Post an accurate description of what is wanted/needed. Or don't complain. I rarely see useful or accurate job descriptions.
Finally, if you want to hire known quantities, then you have to use interns/co-ops. They will know you, you will know them. Because in the end, a one page resume and even extensive interviews are fairly worthless....
Are you claiming there's no unemployment or underemployment in non-Western countries?
Why would low wages "keep business profitable" and "help the economy grow" more than high wages? Are you assuming prices don't decline when wages do?
What keeps business profitable and the economy growing is wages that reflect the market demand for labor, and that will differ both between countries and between industries.
I play Nerd-Folk!
And no, I would not like fries with that, thanks.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
It doesn't really matter to me if there is a shortage because reguardless I will do my job better then most people could -- I will improve where others will stagnate -- I will learn new tricks as others get complacent.
The problem with the US is that we as a people want things to be given to us, and as I see it now that isn't happening for IT anymore. Yes, the easy jobs are going overseas, and the people who don't actually know anything can't get jobs. It is unsuprising that the large bodies of Americans who could go to any major choose the path of least resistance -- not IT, not CS -- where they can continue to work minimally and be paid well. Good for them for being smart, I hope they make it.
But for us this isn't the end of days, this is a chance to prove yourself again and again. For those of us with work ethics, I doubt we have anything to fear.
"I now interview candidates weekly, and I am completely underwhelmed with the quality of interview candidates we have been getting the last few years."
Do you ever consider one of the reasons for the poor quality of candidates may be staring you in the mirror? I don't mean you personally, but perhaps the company. Or perhaps you have a different viewpoint than you did years ago (more knowledge, maturity, etc). Remember the one constant in this process is the company doing the hiring. Are you doing everything you can to get the best candidates and just not the ones that get past the gatekeepers?
"The best candidates we seem to get are coming from other companies and already have experience..."
You know, I think you just solved your problem. You obviously don't want inexperienced employees. Your company isn't set up to deal with them for whatever reason. So why waste your time interviewing them?
A copy constructor is an "8" question? That's ridiculous. Maybe a "3" or so; I mean, it's a basic concept, isn't it?
One writes a copy constructor because objects are referred to by reference variables, so if you assign an existing object to a new variable, you're still pointing at the same area of memory with both vars. So you write a copy constructor to take the existing object and make an actual copy of it, in a new area of memory. Now you actually have two objects, not just two names pointing at one object.
People didn't know that one? You're fibbing, surely... Be honest. Hell, I knew that one and I haven't done any C++ since 1998...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Major US corporations can't ship all their entry-level science and technology gigs off to Bangalore and expect Americans to spend tens of thousands of dollars to get degrees in fields, find that the top 5% get hired and the other 95% get to start their new careers at McDonald's or Walmart with tens of thousands of dollars in debt their co-workers don't have.
If American corporations want to hire Americans for tech positions, all it would take is for a group of them to get together as a group and say to high school students, "Sign up with our group, keep a GPA of x.xx or better in one of these degree fields, and you'll have a job waiting from one of us when you've got a degree, and your agreement with us will be an enforceable contract".
The sysadmins running the server hosting the website signup would wish they'd only gotten slashdotted. (An OC-48 bandwidth pipe would be a good start...)
To get kids to get involved with science and tech programs, that's also about what it'll take. Even high school kids know that vague promises of a great future for kids who go into sci-tech fields from CEOs mean exactly nothing, and it's they who in general are going to have to pay for their educations.
If America's CEOs aren't ready to do this, they can stop their whining.
If they really want Americans to go into science and technical fields, they can damned well put their own money into hiring some.
The advice I have for kids who have a true bent for science and technology? Start country shopping NOW, and as soon as you've decided, look into getting your education there, look into internship programs in that country, and of course, learn the language of the country of your choice, and good luck.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Your comments reminded me of a person I heard talking on NPR last month. He had a new book describing how the world is becomming more and more flat.
To elaborate. People and businesses are able to communicate and exchange goods and services with ease and are no long tied down by geographical or (for the most part) geopolitical seperation.
It is the way of the future. I'm not sure quite how to embrace it here in the US, but other countries have realized it while we are still fighting the change. I truley think this is a political issue that needs to be solved, but as with most political descisions, it won't happen until it is too late to do anything meaningful.
What they _did_ have was an economy that was nowhere near as full of conglomerates. What I remember growing up in the 70's and 80's was that my parents and nearly all of the parents of those around me, rich and poor alike, were small business owners--and they fed off each other. The demise of my own family business was directly caused by the rapid conglomeration of the healthcare industry. Within five years, a market that was primarily local in scope was well over 80% acquired by national management companies, effectively shutting out all but the largest players from becoming service providers.
It seems to me that a large part of the "security" the "boomers" had was this broader small business economy and that one could just hang out the proverbial shingle. Local laws have been rewritten to make that even harder. I went to put my ducks in a row to do some petty consulting and was shocked that my city explictly forbade, for instance, accountants from operating out of their homes. I'd love to do a broader analysis of the changing laws in that respect to find out when that sort of nonsense began and how widespread it is, because without allowing people to reasonably start businesses in their homes, the bar is raised to high for people to enter the market, conglomerate domination or not. I mean, sure, you can still "fudge" on things like this, but it is pretty telling when it has been made ILLEGAL to perform someone else's bookkeeping on your kitchen table, as if having an executive suite is somehow required for something that requires little more than paper and a pen.
I seem to have overstated the need to excel in high school. I just looked up some statistics, and one source claims that over 70% of U.S. high school graduates go on to some form of college. So being "excellent" in high school is clearly not a requirement.
It doesn't matter what kind of high school you went to. That will not disturb any interviewer. We all know that it is more or less impossible to choose what kind of secondary education you happen to get.
What is much more damning to interviewers is that you gave up on formal education based on your (incomplete) high school experience. If you so desired, you could have obtained a G.E.D and escaped your high school's problems. I know several people who did this at age 16 and spent 2 years working for tuition and attending community college (taking all sorts of intro-level college classes) before going off to a 4-year school for a degree.
So it *is* possible for you to have gotten a degree. Telling yourself otherwise, or trying to convince people that it was impossible because of your personal background or your high school's incompetence, is disingenous. If I were interviewing you, I would be much more concerned about your series of excuses rather than your lack of a degree.
If you really don't think a degree is worthwhile, then just say so openly: "I don't value a college education enough to waste my time on it: I have better things to do with my time." That is at least an honest statement of your stance on the value of a degree and why you have not pursued one. But I don't think you will have much success converting established companies to your point of view, especially for engineering positions. (If a company could save money by hiring all of the non-degreed engineers out there, they certainly would.)
It is oft-cited that Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard after 1 year. The huge differences between his situation and yours are that he was heavily supported by his relatively wealthy family, he was starting a business for himself and therefore did not need to impress others with credentials, and the state of the microcomputer industry at the time was such that credentials were essentially nonexistent anyway. And I bet that even Bill Gates, had he not succeeded in his business ventures, would have gone back to school to increase his chances in the corporate world.
You may be one of the brightest candidates in the world, despite your lack of a degree. And it is true that college degrees do not imply intelligence or even (sadly) competence anymore. But the system still values accredited degrees, and therefore I would recommend that you do too if you want to increase your chances in the market.
If you don't care about the job market, on the other hand, or just want to be self-employed, then more power to you.
When you move all the jobs out of the country, why the fuck would you expect anyone to want one?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
It means that those who apply *want* and *love* CompSci (hopefully). It means you have fewer applicants but those applications are hopefully better.
I don't think that we *need* millions of CompSci students to maintain our global competitiveness. Most IT jobs can be done by someone who loves to learn and has hands on experience but no formal training. OTOH, those jobs that *need* such a degree *need* such a degree. I.e. don't hire me to help modify Linux to run on a Cray.... Don't ask me to help make Linux replace AIX either.... At the same time, if you need line of business tools or software support (including administration) I can do this at least as well as any CompSci major I have ever met in person.
What we do need, however, are the same number of (or more) *extremely good* software and hardware engineers, who genuinely love their field. I.e. if someone went into CompSci with the idea that it was going to make them more money, this is not the person who will help you become more competitive. Instead you need people who do this because *they love it.*
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Big biz has proven that they will claim "IT shortage" no matter what the hell happens. Carly was trimmin' back at HP fairly recently and signed a letter for lobbyist ITAA claiming there was a skills shortage. Big biz has NO credibility when it comes to "labor shortage". Ignore IBM, ignore MS, and ignore HP on IT labor claims.
Table-ized A.I.
I don't think it's that simple. There are certain basic concepts that you expect someone applying for a C++ development position to have, whether they are coming right out of school or whether they have been working in such a position for a few years. Not advanced concepts that only a practitioner would comprehend, but basic concepts that anyone who had ever coded anything substantive would understand implicitly.
For example, I expect a C/C++ programmer to understand C-style pointers inherently. I interview far too many candidates who think they are "magic" that return values via some kind of compiler trick. These people are completely unable to code up a simple function that allocates a string and returns the string via a pointer parameter. They inevitably write something like this:
void allocIdString(int nThreeDigitId, char * pszId ) { }which of course just leaks the allocated string and returns nothing back to the caller. Amazingly, I'd say about 2/3 of the college candidates I interview get this horribly wrong, and are completely unable to step through what happens when the pointer parameter is passed into the function to diagnose the problem. Some of them have actually argued with me, telling me that declaring a pointer parameter is all that is necessary here; the compiler "takes care of the rest." Failing this kind of very basic C interview question tanks any C programming candidate in my book.
Anyway, that is just one example in C. I have many more egregious examples of C++ errors made by "C++ expert" interview candidates that belie a complete lack of understanding of what is going on "behind the scenes" with C++ data types. If a candidate doesn't know what a vtable is and doesn't know what methods are generated for free by the compiler, that candidate is NOT a "C++ expert."
You are correct that unions may reduce total jobs in that specialty, but at least it reduces the impact/pain of change. Newbies steer into a different field and the older people don't have to start over from scratch. It is better to hand the change impact to younger people than to older people, partly because the young don't yet have houses, families, etc. They are more adaptable. And they are more likely to get hired in new fields due to age discrimination.
You have to factor human suffering into economic equations, not just raw quantities. This is part of what is missing from many economic models; they are using a narrow bean-counter mentality on a large-scale.
Table-ized A.I.
IBM and university officals are worried about the increasing demand for IT professionals and the decreasing supply of computer science students.
IBM is worried? How can this be when they laying off thousands?
FalconShould there be a Law?
Also there is the problem of handing your companies IP over to individual in foriegn countries that are effectively beyond the reach of any US copyright law.
Jobs making websites are probably gone for good, but software jobs were domain experience and specialized skills are required are proving to be difficult to ship out of country.
Of course CS enrollment has fallen through the floor because all these companies were saying they were gonna outsource all the IT jobs. Hiring Osama doesn't look nearly as good as it did in 2000. Also, a new era of protectionism may just be around the corner.
Becoming a contractor or working freelance isn't for most people. These types of work conditions, in most any field, requires different talents or other things that aren't easy to find in one person. Such things as being a good accountant, business person, and salesperson. The only way around it is to have partners. Though I'd rather work for myself I admit I'm one of those people, I could probably scare the devil away trying to make a sale. Thankfully though I've got some tyme to work on it as I'm still in school and it'll be a few years before I finish.
FalconShould there be a Law?
An A/C said: " Level 4 is what is the difference between a reference and a pointer."
If you're suggesting that I don't know the difference between a reference and a pointer, let's try for level 4:
A reference (I assume you're using this in the context of "reference counting"?) is a variable that still "holds" an object (or other data type that is allocated on the heap instead of the stack), thereby preventing the object from being garbage collected. Even though the whole idea of reference is really just an abstraction simplifying "a pointer to an object of type foo". Because that's what's actually IN that reference variable -- a pointer to its contents on the heap. We just don't have to worry about that because the system takes care of it for us.
A pointer is a variable that holds the address of a chunk of memory of a certain type, say, a pointer to int. Pointers to data structures were the old C way of doing what in C++, people do with objects. The REAL difference between pointers and references is, pointers are a pain in the ass -- you have to allocate, deallocate, dereference, etc, all manually. With references, it's done for you (mostly).
The issue is the same for both, though. You can't just assign one variable to another, because they'll both end up pointing at the same object in memory. In OOP, you deal with this by creating a copy constructor. In C, you have to go through all kinds of BS, allocating some new memory, pointing at it with the new variable, copying the contents, yadda, yadda.
So? Did I pass?
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
My degree is in Music Education.
Actually I read somewhere last year where musicians made the best programmers. Ah, here's a related article from CNN though it's a few years old:
Why musicians may make the best tech workers
July 31, 1998
by Kathleen Melymuka
(IDG) -- Jane Austen, Sigmund Freud, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Noah apply for two programming positions at your company. Each has left a successful career and recently graduated from a good programming course. whom do you hire?
According to technical trainers, Mozart and Noah are your best bets.
The aptitudes that draw a person to technology, they say, are often the same ones that led him to a previous career that, on the surface at least, couldn't be more different.
"Many people could have gone into computer science, but their teachers told them they were really talented in music," says Alan McNabb, director of the Arts and Science Placement Office at Indiana University's career development center in Bloomington. "If they had been told they could go far in computer science, they could have been there."
Orchestrating success
It seems that musical aptitude is one of the strongest predictors of success in a technical position. "The highest scores on the admissions test and best performers have been people with a background in music," says Terry Skwarek, director of the Institute for Professional Development in the School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems at DePaul University in Chicago.
Others who deal with career changers agree. "I've had the same experience," McNabb says. He says he finds that students who begin in the performing arts program frequently migrate to computer science.
In the trenches, the correlation is equally strong.
But why?
"The common thread probably is that both are very structured environments," says Galen H. Graham, president of DeVry Institute of Technology in Columbus, Ohio.
"There seems to be a high correlation between musical ability and reasoning skills," Skwarek says. "It has to do with recognizing and manipulating patterns. That happens in music and in programming."
Time and space
Some say the real correlation has less to do with discrete aptitudes than with the way technical people think: They favor spatial/temporal reasoning, or the ability to visualize. Mozart, who composed entire symphonies in his head, clearly excelled at that skill. And Albert Einstein, who was known to think about time and space, was also known to favor the violin.
The ability to do spatial/temporal reasoning is important in a lot of areas, says Gordon L. Shaw, professor emeritus of physics at the University of California at Irvine and co-discoverer of the "Mozart Effect," which demonstrates that exposure to classical music enhances reasoning ability.
"It makes sense that if you're good at one of these higher brain functions that involve the spatial/temporal aspect, you're going to be good at the others," Shaw says. "To construct a good program, you want to be able to see the consequences in your head, not just do line by line of the code. You have to be able to totally visualize it."
Howard Rosenbaum, assistant professor at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, tells of a professional bass player who became fascinated with computers. "He told me that sometimes when he sits down at a computer, he can visualize what he's doing as if it were a piece of music," he says.
From ark to object orientation
That's where Noah comes in. He was able to visualize a highly complex construction project based on pretty scant numerical data.
That skill, too, works in information technology. Rosenbaum has another student who was a construction foreman.
"He has an interesting ability to visualize a project Ñ where it all fits in a blueprint he ca
Should there be a Law?
As badly flamed as I'm going to be for saying this, it'd be nice if some of these silly networking certifications were actually seen as a substitute for on-the-job training, but ultimately you just see "CCxx/MCxx preferred" tacked on to the half-decade of previous work experience expected.
That's a problem I see coming at me like a full freight train, lack of experience. At least I'm not getting a degree in CS though, I'm working on something like aa Individually Designed Interdepartmental Major with EE or IT as a basis with maybe international business, communications, and/or another area as well. Then while I have two years of course work left to get a degree I can only take classes parttime so it may be three or four years before I compleat the requirements. I also plan on spending one of those years studying abroad in Brazil.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
ADDENDUM:
Fuck. I just dug out my old C++ book. Yeah, ya got me. There's a "reference variable" that becomes an alias to another variable, something I'd completely forgotten about because I haven't used anything like it in years.
Color MY face red.
You weren't talking about classes, or objects, you were actually talking about an actual reference variable, LITERALLY. Like &something.
This here is my dish of crow. Munch, munch.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
BUT,
:)
What I said about objects and copy constructors was still correct. So I'm not ALL wet.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Suppose you were a toothpaste company. You make toothpaste that needs to be shipped across the country, and you need to truck driver to ship it for you. Now here's the question: does that driver need to have prior experience in shipping toothpaste? Or, perhaps, would a background in shipping toilet paper, books, and oranges suffice?
You seem to be looking for something with a very particular background with J2EE. But programming isn't about J2EE -- it's about figuring out what the problems are, figuring out how to deal with those problems, and finally translating your solutions into actual code. In short, it's almost as if you're trying to find someone who explicitly has toothpaste-shipping experience, rather than generic shipping experience.
If someone is a great C++ programmer for their work and likes to program in ML in their spare time, chances are pretty damn good that they can get up to speed with J2EE in a couple of months at the most.
Languages and toolkits are a dime a dozen, and while prior experience with them is nice, it should certainly not be considered more important than "general purpose" competence in programming which can be filled by any reasonably similar language.
1. No employer loyalty.
I've worked for several companies, and of those, I've only worked for one company who gave a damn about my career, let alone what I require as an employee. Employers are in the business of using people up and trading in the buying and selling of souls. "I need you to come in on Saturday for no overtime and no extra compensation" or "We need you to put your vacation on hold for a month because we screwed up and need your help, yes we know your tickets are non-refundable, but we don't care"
Compounded by the fact that your job may be outsourced to India at any time, all so the company's stock can go up a 1/4 of a point.
2. Younger people aren't signing up for IT programs because they've heard the horror stories their older siblings have told them. The IT field sucks, it's not cool.
3. IT professionals are tired of arguing with department heads why they need larger budgets, updated equipment, and more help. Most executives see the IT department as a one-time expendeture. IT is a living breathing entity that requires maintenance, and needs constant upkeep. Equipment needs to be upgraded and replaced, IT workers don't need to be harranged why we need it, just shut up and sign the check.
4. Superiors who have absolutely no concept of what working in the IT field entails, yet they're feel the need to micromanage every facet of our jobs.
5. Calling us on our vacation to report a problem caused by someone else, begging us to cut our vacation short and return to work. (I've literally had to hide my cell phone, and not tell anyone where I was going.)
6. stress, stress, more stress.
7. More often than not, when you work in the IT field you're married to your job, fat chance finding a social life.
8. IT people are generally not suckups. They're not chipper marketing people. They're do not have the patience to hold the same person's hand on a daily basis and teach them how to read their email everyday. (asuming they can read.) Let alone explain to them (the users) for the 15th time why they can't install "bert and ernie's alphabet playtime" on the company computer to entertain their kid when they come into the office on the weekend.
In 1999, I retired from the IT field at 28. I'll NEVER work in the field again. In fact, I have a rather successful farm, (probably one of the few privately owned farms with broadband in the milk barn.) It's a "gnu herd"...meaning that I've got linux running everywhere.
The IT field only have themselves to blame for their work shortage, a lot of us have moved on to better things.
Who cares about the ozone layer?...thanks to CFC's I can write my name......IN CHEESE!!!
I agree that greed is a part of human nature, and what allowed us to hoard resources whne times were lean in th every early stages of man. Communism is indeed a utopian solution, as well. But what do you think motivates altruistic actions.For example there is absolutely no good reason for me to give money to my college's alumni fund every year, but I feel like I "should". What about gifts to charitable organizations? Now, some people are "charitable" just to get their name out and to appear "better" than everyone. But what about the anonymous donor, they are acting out of the spirit that would allow utopia. If we understood that impluse, we could create systmes that function better.
The impact of change hurts young people just as much as old people. Except young people don't have any money/houses (but by the time they are out of college they usually have a small family). And I'm sure they love how they are fresh out of college, but still can't get a job because the industry is unionized. My point there is young people need jobs too. Young people are struggling to get on their feet. But conversely your point about the older generation is true. But I don't think the real problem here is unionization.
The real problem here is the fact that we can trade between societies that have different costs for labor without any kind of taxes by our government to offset these cost differences. If our government is to tax anything it should be a labor cost difference tax. Make it something like e^(supply of foreign workers in field)/e^(supply of local workers in field)-1. Or something like that.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Also, if that equation was inforced it would force countries to not overproduce workers as that would decrease their foreign viability.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Well, the reason for declining enrollments is NOT a lack of interest, it is due to falling salaries and excessive use of L-1 and H1-B programs.
Think about it: While tens of thousands of well educated, highly qualified and experienced technical workers that are U.S. citizens cannot buy a job after the dot com bust, the companies continue to pressure Washington to get more "guest workers" imported to fill IT slots. The workers brought over are good people, but no more so than those seeking jobs here. They ARE indentured servants, however, and easily intimidated. This make them "more pliable", and less likely to turn down a patently ridiculously work schedule or demand. Don't bother to tell me this is not the case, because I have spent more than a year working in such a place. I don't know about other cultures, but Indians tend to hire Indians (here), and they like to hire from the same state in India, say Andra Pradesh.
As the cost of education contines to climb, even though salaries continue to decline, how can one justify running up a $50,000 or $100,000 college debt when it simply does not pay?
Of course, this is leading to a situation where more technology and jobs will be transferred out of the U.S. Take my word for it (because I write Congress and get replies), they are NOT listening to the work force, but they are listening to the CEOs, CFOs, and investment bankers -- and they will break our back.
Is it just me, or do I hear the folks on Wall Street and the board rooms laughing all the way to the bank?
Get off your tutu's and write your Senators and Representatives and tell them if they don't stop helping corporations do this, they will be replaced. In the House, you can replace them every two years, in the Senate every six, but it takes effort on OUR part, and lots of us. Right now, lots of ex-IT people are disenchananted and grumpy about the situation, but they don't write.
You often hear it said that Americans don't have a right to a job, but that sword cuts both ways: Corporations have no right to import guest workers for the benefit of their "shareholders" either. The shareholders they're referring to are their board members and VC investors, not the average stock holder!
It's your choice, but if sit quietly, you may find yourself a second-rate citizen in your own country.
My assignment: convert it to web, using Java. The issue: the code part is no problem. The issue is that &*@#$ Database, being non-normalized. Someone needs to find the original guy (calling him a "DBA" would be insulting...to DBAs) and break a boot off in his arse for his liberal use of composite keys, lack of proper indexing, his storing dates as strings (in as many different formats as you care to name IN THE SAME COLUMN), composite columns (multiple data in the same column), and the many, many tables that contain duplicate data.
Yeah, right.
It's arbitrary. I was just trying to give people a frame of reference and to see if they understand a critical aspect of C++ class design.
And as I said, most people did NOT answer that question.
On another note, the number of times I asked people to write "strcpy" when they had C emblazoned on their resume and they couldn't do it, well, I lost track.
-M
PS: You might have known that, but most people I interviewed with C++ all over their resume didn't.
Dude, you missed the point completely. You've gone onto a touchy feely topic.
Knowing when to write a copy constructor in C++ is considered "basic" by people who truly know the language.
I had lots of people claim lots of experience and could not answer a "basic" question.
Leading into why I wrote that piece in the first place, as a reply to how hard it is to find good C++ developers.
Yes, I hear what you're saying, my point is, irrespective of WHATEVER channel you take, FINDING GOOD C++ PEOPLE IS *HARD*.
-M
Computer Science is hard to learn. Most people working in "IT" don't do "computer science". People who were attracted to CS are increasingly finding themselves with fewer job opportunities to use their skill set.
It doesn't take a CS degree to manage a server farm, write web pages or create flash/dreamweaver projects. Excellent programming skills are no longer required nor desired. Today's processors are generally forgiving of slow algorithms and chunky code.
Bugs are expected as a natural part of software development now. This wasn't always the case, nor was it desirable/acceptable. Early on in my career, there were some managers that wanted to be able to measure number of bugs/lines of code written by a particular programmer as an evaluation criteria.
Today, with support contracts being major revenue streams, wasting time writing efficient code or doing thorough unit or stress testing is a waste of company time -- not only a waste, but it hurts profit in the "support division" where they make money off of bug fixes. Think of Microsoft's Support policies and how much it costs to get have them support one of their products. Remember how we laughed at the idea of MS offering security services for their own OS. They were far from the first.
There just aren't as many jobs that require a specialty degree in Computer Science. It's just that, for the most part, "users of IT" don't need to be Computer Science experts because CS people have (and still are) automating themselves out of a job. But that's the point of computers -- to automate tasks and make them simpler. But Computer Science? That's applicable to special applications like OS's, compilers, maybe embedded/RT apps or where one needs 99.9999% reliability vs. 99.9%.
Now, make software subject to the same consumer laws as other consumer products in regards to warantee's and liability -- then you'll see the industry come to a screeching halt from the lack of qualified people. But
that's not likely to happen anytime soon.
And I'm sure they love how they are fresh out of college, but still can't get a job because the industry is unionized.
They would generally know that *before* they start college, and pick something less subject to the global cannons.
Table-ized A.I.
You really need to stop arguing with yourself...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Man,that's so sad; the field's falling apart. I'm telling you, you should make a computer science degree from an institution you actually have heard of a prerequisite, and ask them to bring transcripts with them. That'd be pretty hard to fake... :)
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I've tried, believe me, but I really get on my nerves. I tried for a divorce, but I just didn't have the heart to follow through with it... My friends say I should set my bed on fire and claim I was abusing myself, but I'm afraid they'll make a really bad movie about me...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
An A/C replied "It would be best not to talk about something you haven't worked with in 7 years. C++ != Java. If you don't write a copy constructor, your object still gets copied."
:)
It seems you're right; I just looked it up. Sorry about that; fair enough. I'm getting used to this crow; tastes like chicken.
Anyway, it's Slashdot. If we didn't screw up from time to time, people would get confused and wander, lost in the wilderness, all sense of meaning lost. It's a public service.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I didn't say anyone else was not talented. Why do you read that into what I said? I probably should have said "enthusiastic misfits" instead of "talented" but I happen to find a correlation between talent and enthusiasm. I'm not sure which contest you are refering to. The one that people usually have in mind if they are hoping to hold on to their American job is a contest with offshore, lower paid, programmers but that is a sloppy characterization. The contest is really between two economies that used to have natural barriers between them and no longer do.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Thank you, yes that was basically my point. Such people /could/ go straight, a' la Mitnick but companies prefer to hire folks with clean backgrounds when they have a choice.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.