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.
and a good part of the rest of the world..
For better or worse, that's where it's headed too.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Simple: Let it happen. This should drive salaries up, then more students will want to take up Computer Science.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Tell you what, if you walked into an interview with me with that sort of attitude theres is not a snowballs chance in fucking hell of you getting hired.
This 'coding is a destiny' and cant be learned crap is just a self comforting excuse for saddos who dont have the requisite skillset to actually get a job or compete in the job market.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
WHAT? java is slow? and not cross-platform? WHY DID NO-ONE MENTION THIS ON SLASHDOT BEFORE?
please, wake me up when you've got a new cliche to peddle. as a java developer who develops on windows and linux and deploys to solaris I really don't know what you're on about. it takes more effort or a great deal of stupidity to write non cross-platform java. and as for it being just like XML... thanks for that. at least I don't have to go to the trouble of exposing your ignorance.
I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but I'm having a bad day.
It is possible that people are scared off these educations because of out-sourcing.
For me it would have more to do with the threat of software patents than the threat of outsourcing. At least with outsourcing you know what you are up against. With the software patent mess you could be doing just fine until suddenty $GREEDYCORP comes and pulls the plug just because they had the resources to buy a patent when they though of the same idea that you also thought of.
(sorry for being a bit offtopic, but for me its a much bigger reason)
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
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.
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!
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.
The thing is, when some of those "coding is a destiny types" actually get a job they pretty quickly become the workforce of whole departments, who actually get work done.
If you only hire people who look good on the jobmarket, who sell themselves well, you either get bogus posers who don't get anything done, or if they are really good (yes, sometimes looking good and being good coincides), they pretty soon find a better job, since the others notice too.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
I've told him that computer science in important but only secondary to the actual profession he will choose in college and grad school so he will have the necessary tools to work with in his chosen field.
Why choose IT when our arrogant US govt rewards corporations for outsourcing and keeps increasing the number of foreign student and work visas for the fewer jobs here instead of rebuilding and expanding our educational systems.
No need for IT grants here or money for research projects or support for local education funding when we can get it done in China or India. We would rather spend our money on wars, and since we have a monopoply on the OS anyway, who cares.
So son, become a doctor or an architect or a marine scientist or something you enjoy first, then get the tools to do the jobs yourself, and oh yes, learn Mandarin along with your Spanish.
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
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.
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?
Judging by most of the job adverts I'm reading at the moment (I'm in the process of closing down an IT company I've been running for more than a decade and will need an alternative source of income) don't require IT "professionals", they require IT "tradesmen" with specific and transient skills to nurse equipment from a small number of vendors.
When I graduated, back in the days when punched cards and paper tape were still common, there was no single vendor dominance of vast swathes of the IT industry and it was therefore important to teach people the principles of Computer Science - algorithms, algorithmic complexity, computational methods, principles of machine operations, operating system design, relational database design - rather than turning out people familiar with Windows, C++ and Oracle knowledge.
People with those fundamental skills have much greater adaptability and potential career longevity - after all, very little has changed in the fundamentals in the last 25 years although superficial things have changed considerably. I can quite happily pick up a book and start programming in C# or Java if I need to; on the other hand, the graduates I've had in recently for interview can competently operate Visual Studio but seem rather hazy about balanced trees, queues or the performance implications of changing privilege modes on the average CPU. And perhaps they don't need to - some library or "wizard" will hide the difficult bits in some way no-one will quite understand, but probably won't break until the original coder has moved on.
It seems employers don't want people with "fundamental" skills who can adapt to changing technologies, they want an MSIE/CNAA/xyz who can deal with a specific problem at a specific point in time and whom they can replace later on with someone with a different "qualification" when their needs change.
Unforunately, universities seem to have commoditised their graduate programmes to churn out tradesmen in contemporarily fashionable skills to supply the job market as it exists rather than fulfilling their traditional roles of providing the foundations for lifelong professional development.
It's no wonder that people aren't going in for these kind of courses, knowing their career lifetimes are likely to be relatively short and tied to the waxing and waning fortunes of manufacturers.
If you want to work in a trade, you can earn considerably more being a plumber or electrician than working in IT. I'm seriously considering it.
If you want to be an "IT professional", the opportunities to do so are few and far between. You're probably better advised to find a nice Open Source Software project to work on in your spare time...
In the mid 1970s, when the space race slowed down, there was an entire generation of aerospace engineers who lost their jobs all over the country.
Space was supposed to have been the future. But it didn't turn out that way. The number of engineering students in universities dropped precipitously. After all, why go in to a job like that with little or no future, where your industry could evaporate overnight at the whim of a few "business leaders."
Later in the Early 1990s, I witnessed something similar when half of my class at the university disappeared because all the major defense contractors were laying off.
Engineers and other technology workers are well paid in good times. However, you need to keep a reserve and a backup career just in case the industry you're working in goes in to the toilet.
In the scheme of industries which have suffered, you folks in IT have little to complain about. Ask an engineer from the 1970's what life was like after the Apollo missions ceased.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Every job or position is just as hard as every other. Say that to yourself over and over, because you're obviously a snob who needs to get over an assinine, overinflated sense of your own importance.
A car salesman needs to know about sales technique, trends in the industry, demographics, and the technical details of how cars work. A grocery store manager has 10,000 items to remember, including watching their popularity and knowing their proper use, so that when a customer asks him he can give a ready answer. And a landscaper needs to know which plants are best for which soil, shade, and design criteria.
Not everyone finds their calling in high school. Some people know their calling, but don't get the breaks to get there.
I knew when I was 14 that I wanted to program computers when I grew up. That's what I do now, almost 30 years later, but it took me the first 10 years or so to arrange it.
Before that I was a
If you asked one of the people who knew me in one of those other roles, they might tell you I'd be a landscaper by now.
I gotta tell you, some days I consider it.
By the way, that former friend of yours probably would make an excellent contact for you the next time you're downsized or simply fired for being a jerk.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
I think it's kind of surprising how many fewer CS students there are, though. I just got my BCS last year, and there were over 120 CS students who started at the same time as me (not sure how many graduated). Do you know how many students applied to CS at my school this year? 12.
Huh. That's going to cut down on their course options.
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.
If there's a dramatic decline in people willing to take even introductory comp. sci. courses, where are they going instead, and why? Accounting or business majors, because that's where the money is?
If you have a big drop in the percentage of top people going the computer science or IT route, then they must be a corresponding increase in the people taking other courses. Either a big jump in specific areas, or else it's dispersed across disciplines. The former indicates that there's a specific discipline that is now seen as a hot item. The latter indicates that computer science/IT is now seen as a cold item. So, which is it? And, if the former, is it just our path, or are there other disciplines similarly affected? All the sciences, for example?
Once you know what the real reasons are behind the figures, then maybe you can do something to intelligently address the problem.
In spite of the fact that there are more jobs available, companies are still only willing to pay salaries in line with the Dot Com Bust era. In other words, I get calls almost every day (and frequently multiple calls) from recruiters who are representing clients that want to pay 35% less than what I was making as a full-time employee in 2002 and 25% less than I'm making now as a 1099 consultant now.
The ones who are willing to pay the higher salaries (read: Wall St.) expect skillsets that are so specific that they will not talk to you if you do not have every one of them. In my opinion, they are asking for trouble because the technologies in use there are used very rarely outside of those sectors. When the IT staff they have in place now decide to move on, they will be hard-pressed to find trained people to replace them.
I actually had an HR employee at a company who was interested in me as a potential employee tell me that their guideline for translating 1099 to full-time salary was to subtract 30%. I asked her how they arrived at that figure and her response was that it took into consideration benefits, vacation time, sick days and retirement plans.
Color me stupid but benefits these days are not what they used to be from the perspective of the amount the company contributes. I pay less than double than others at full time companies do, but I'm paying 100% of the cost. This isn't your father's IBM where the company paid for nearly everything and you had an amazing medical, dental, vision, etc. plan.
Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of people do not take a lot of sick days each year and you have me scratching my head and wondering what drugs that HR person was on when she told me 30% and expected me to accept it like it was a given.
Am I living in a pipe dream?
No, the simple reality is that we're being treated like shit and outsourced. Companies want to reduce our ranks at every opportunity and do everything they can to reduce our salaries. In short, they want to ensure that the mathematics of the situation don't add up.
Bright people can do the math.
It's not just about "the engineering cycle".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
With the influx of morons and idiots into the IT world during the dotbomb bubble who thought they could code, things have gotten dismal in IT. We have a ton of useless wannabees who barely made it through college (or worse) some of the more useless certifications out there. This is why I have to deal with two apps where I work that just suck ass in so many ways. People got "better ideas" and took systems that worked, ripped them out, and implemented new stuff just because it was cool. Then when people in the industry stand back and take a real good look, we see IT overflowing with crap software written by people who don't even understand what structured or object-oriented programming is other than some cool sounding buzzwords.
We have VB "programmers" and Flash "programmers" filling up teh intarwebs with more useless and poorly written "apps". We have people replacing perfectly good and efficient text interfaces with point and click GUIs where such a thing is NOT beneficial. Case in point... where I work we had a decent text menu based system but it got replaced with a poorly designed GUI. The users all complain about how what they used to do in just a few seconds now takes minutes. And they're right. Now this company is going to implement this monstrosity in Java. Can you believe it? JAVA for god's sake!!! They can't even write a proper app in their hodgepodge of C and they plan to do this in Java?
The drop off in people going for computer related degrees can only mean one thing: the wannabees have left the building because the party is over. This means that the only people signing up are people who (gasp!!) LIKE to PROGRAM. People who CAN PROGRAM! Making money with computers is OK, but unless you love these machines, you shouldn't bother. All the "get rich quick" types ruined the business during the 90s but now those fair weather friends aren't so hot to get into IT because now there's work to be done...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I seriously doubt this. "Job Security" is something the Boomers had, and that puppy is dead in the basket. It doesn't matter how much you think you're in demand, if the bean counters decide that one department is spending too much, they'll cut the tech budget and you'll be gone. This very thing happened at Shell, and BP just two years ago, despite the increased profits that Oil & Gas are now experiencing.
I don't think you're paying attention. The *old way* was for someone to start on help desk, then the good ones would work up to desktop grunt, etc. That pipe is broken, because most (large) businesses outsource their helpdesks to Bangladesh/Malaysia.
Finally, just because you have a CS, it doesn't make you a good tech/programmer/whatever. I've known many good techs who didn't have a degree at all, just as I've known techs who had a CS degree and who couldn't tech their way out of a wet paper bag.
Yeah, right.
As I once said to a friend (also CS), "Students treat you like nerds throughout elementary and high school and like free tech. support through college, professors try their hardest to kill you off, and when you graduate in spite of all this, you get to work as a 'code monkey' with little job security or respect while you watch your tech-ignorant bosses, who probably make many times your salary, screw up management decisions because they couldn't be bothered to learn the stuff". As the field is now, only the most dedicated students would enter it because we are basically treated like [insert vulgarity here] from the beginning of education to retirement. I think that we will eventually start to see more respect from society... when all the jobs are gone and the full impact of a dwindling supply of tech. workers can be seen.
Has anybody noticed that for the last five years, somebody publishes an article with the exact same argument about six months?
And that the article is thoroughly debunked here on slashdot, in the exact same manner?
*sigh* Okay one more time:
1) To work as a lawyer/doctor/nurse/chemical engineer, you must have a degree like JD/MD/RNBS/BSCE. IT has never been like that, and still isn't. A CCIE or CISSP will earn you more than BSCS. Very few IT jobs require a degree of any kind, and the few IT jobs that do require a degree, will typically accept any technical degree.
2) How many IT workers can actually be called "Computer Scientists" ? There are all sorts of IT related degrees today: network engineering, software engineering, information science, etc. Most of these degrees seem much closely related to an actual IT job roles than "computer science."
3) The IT is glutted as it is. Where is the crises in a lack new BSCSs? Especially when that degree was never in high demand, even when there was a shortage of IT pros.
4) IT jobs are sent overseas as fast the major companies can ship them. Why train for a field that is already glutted, and likely to get worse?
5) I suspect that employers will never be satisfied with the pool of IT workers; and that colleges are finding it difficult to find people to sign up for the nearly worthless BSCS (especially women). So we see these bogus articles about the the bogus shortage of BSCSs. College comp sci departments, and employers are looking out for their interests - not yours.
IBM and university officals are worried about the increasing demand for IT professionals and the decreasing supply of computer science students.
The old adage "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice. Shame on me." applies here. IBM and other companies obviously want to increase the number of H1-B's and universities want to increase the number of students. So many IT people were burned when the dot com bubble burst that they are rightly not interested in going back or into the field. And to add insult to injury what few jobs were left were filled by the H1-B's, essentially company serfs with the govt's blessing.
I only recently after almost four and a half years got a REAL job in the IT field again. Three of those years were spent in call center hell. Bottom line: Choose a field you are going to love, come thick or thin. Not based on where the demand is, real or imagined.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
As someone probably wrote. In 1738, with a feather.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
wondering where the hell you're going to be in 20 years, other than stuck under the same a**hole boss whose salary is probably 4-5 times yours.
"It would be nice to have that kind of job security."
- Samir from Office Space
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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...
As the classic Hollywood line goes, "What's my motivation?" If you're going to feed, house & educate me in a safe environment, why should I bother working hard? In fact, why should I bother working at all?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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
Simple. You'd spend more time doing things you want to do instead of laboring for someone else's profits and grand visions of the world.
Insects make great drones. Humans should be able to aspire to something beyond the status of a workerbee.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
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