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Critical Shortage of IT Workers in Coming Years
Juzzam writes "The Herald Sun reports that IBM and university officals are worried about the increasing demand for IT professionals and the decreasing supply of computer science students. From the article:
'The slope shows an unbelievable decline in computer science majors,' Astrachan said. 'There are smart people no longer even signing up to take our introductory courses. We need to fix it, or there's not going to be a U.S. work force in computer sciences.'"
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.
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
http://www.mcdonalds.com/corp/career/hamburger_uni versity.html/
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.
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.
Which is very nearly a fine definition of the word "extortion".
Saying that we need to cut our own throats to statisfy THEIR needs -- or they'll simply be "forced" to turn to third-world dirt-hut coders -- amounts to the same thing. And before anyone gives me a lecture on "global economies" and other politically correct bullshit, I'll remind you that I'm only responding to their supposed concern about a lack of US talent.
If they're so fucking worried about losing in-country talent, then they'd better simply buckle down and pay what it costs to get it. That position is NO DIFFERENT than the position they take when they claim we're too expensive. I counter-claim THEY are too cheap. I further counter-claim that any hand-wringing a US company does about losing US talent is simply a campaign to improve their image, and to suck up to Congress before joining the corporate outcry to allow more H1Bs and to avoid offshoring penalties.
So ["Insert Corporation Entity Here"] needs to shave a few million to keep stockholders happy? I'd say CEO salaries are a fine place to start, rather than whacking hard-working, often highly skilled people with house and car payments and a family to feed.
Yeah, same old story.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
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.
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.
What was that number in the news a while back? North American corporate officers receive something like 400 times the salaries of their European counterparts? It's ridiculous.
Easily as stupid as paying an athlete 90 million dollars to wear sneakers.
Judging by most of the job adverts I'm reading at the moment (I'm in the process of closing down an IT company I've been running for more than a decade and will need an alternative source of income) don't require IT "professionals", they require IT "tradesmen" with specific and transient skills to nurse equipment from a small number of vendors.
When I graduated, back in the days when punched cards and paper tape were still common, there was no single vendor dominance of vast swathes of the IT industry and it was therefore important to teach people the principles of Computer Science - algorithms, algorithmic complexity, computational methods, principles of machine operations, operating system design, relational database design - rather than turning out people familiar with Windows, C++ and Oracle knowledge.
People with those fundamental skills have much greater adaptability and potential career longevity - after all, very little has changed in the fundamentals in the last 25 years although superficial things have changed considerably. I can quite happily pick up a book and start programming in C# or Java if I need to; on the other hand, the graduates I've had in recently for interview can competently operate Visual Studio but seem rather hazy about balanced trees, queues or the performance implications of changing privilege modes on the average CPU. And perhaps they don't need to - some library or "wizard" will hide the difficult bits in some way no-one will quite understand, but probably won't break until the original coder has moved on.
It seems employers don't want people with "fundamental" skills who can adapt to changing technologies, they want an MSIE/CNAA/xyz who can deal with a specific problem at a specific point in time and whom they can replace later on with someone with a different "qualification" when their needs change.
Unforunately, universities seem to have commoditised their graduate programmes to churn out tradesmen in contemporarily fashionable skills to supply the job market as it exists rather than fulfilling their traditional roles of providing the foundations for lifelong professional development.
It's no wonder that people aren't going in for these kind of courses, knowing their career lifetimes are likely to be relatively short and tied to the waxing and waning fortunes of manufacturers.
If you want to work in a trade, you can earn considerably more being a plumber or electrician than working in IT. I'm seriously considering it.
If you want to be an "IT professional", the opportunities to do so are few and far between. You're probably better advised to find a nice Open Source Software project to work on in your spare time...
In the mid 1970s, when the space race slowed down, there was an entire generation of aerospace engineers who lost their jobs all over the country.
Space was supposed to have been the future. But it didn't turn out that way. The number of engineering students in universities dropped precipitously. After all, why go in to a job like that with little or no future, where your industry could evaporate overnight at the whim of a few "business leaders."
Later in the Early 1990s, I witnessed something similar when half of my class at the university disappeared because all the major defense contractors were laying off.
Engineers and other technology workers are well paid in good times. However, you need to keep a reserve and a backup career just in case the industry you're working in goes in to the toilet.
In the scheme of industries which have suffered, you folks in IT have little to complain about. Ask an engineer from the 1970's what life was like after the Apollo missions ceased.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Every job or position is just as hard as every other. Say that to yourself over and over, because you're obviously a snob who needs to get over an assinine, overinflated sense of your own importance.
A car salesman needs to know about sales technique, trends in the industry, demographics, and the technical details of how cars work. A grocery store manager has 10,000 items to remember, including watching their popularity and knowing their proper use, so that when a customer asks him he can give a ready answer. And a landscaper needs to know which plants are best for which soil, shade, and design criteria.
Not everyone finds their calling in high school. Some people know their calling, but don't get the breaks to get there.
I knew when I was 14 that I wanted to program computers when I grew up. That's what I do now, almost 30 years later, but it took me the first 10 years or so to arrange it.
Before that I was a
If you asked one of the people who knew me in one of those other roles, they might tell you I'd be a landscaper by now.
I gotta tell you, some days I consider it.
By the way, that former friend of yours probably would make an excellent contact for you the next time you're downsized or simply fired for being a jerk.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
In spite of the fact that there are more jobs available, companies are still only willing to pay salaries in line with the Dot Com Bust era. In other words, I get calls almost every day (and frequently multiple calls) from recruiters who are representing clients that want to pay 35% less than what I was making as a full-time employee in 2002 and 25% less than I'm making now as a 1099 consultant now.
The ones who are willing to pay the higher salaries (read: Wall St.) expect skillsets that are so specific that they will not talk to you if you do not have every one of them. In my opinion, they are asking for trouble because the technologies in use there are used very rarely outside of those sectors. When the IT staff they have in place now decide to move on, they will be hard-pressed to find trained people to replace them.
I actually had an HR employee at a company who was interested in me as a potential employee tell me that their guideline for translating 1099 to full-time salary was to subtract 30%. I asked her how they arrived at that figure and her response was that it took into consideration benefits, vacation time, sick days and retirement plans.
Color me stupid but benefits these days are not what they used to be from the perspective of the amount the company contributes. I pay less than double than others at full time companies do, but I'm paying 100% of the cost. This isn't your father's IBM where the company paid for nearly everything and you had an amazing medical, dental, vision, etc. plan.
Couple that with the fact that the vast majority of people do not take a lot of sick days each year and you have me scratching my head and wondering what drugs that HR person was on when she told me 30% and expected me to accept it like it was a given.
Am I living in a pipe dream?
With the influx of morons and idiots into the IT world during the dotbomb bubble who thought they could code, things have gotten dismal in IT. We have a ton of useless wannabees who barely made it through college (or worse) some of the more useless certifications out there. This is why I have to deal with two apps where I work that just suck ass in so many ways. People got "better ideas" and took systems that worked, ripped them out, and implemented new stuff just because it was cool. Then when people in the industry stand back and take a real good look, we see IT overflowing with crap software written by people who don't even understand what structured or object-oriented programming is other than some cool sounding buzzwords.
We have VB "programmers" and Flash "programmers" filling up teh intarwebs with more useless and poorly written "apps". We have people replacing perfectly good and efficient text interfaces with point and click GUIs where such a thing is NOT beneficial. Case in point... where I work we had a decent text menu based system but it got replaced with a poorly designed GUI. The users all complain about how what they used to do in just a few seconds now takes minutes. And they're right. Now this company is going to implement this monstrosity in Java. Can you believe it? JAVA for god's sake!!! They can't even write a proper app in their hodgepodge of C and they plan to do this in Java?
The drop off in people going for computer related degrees can only mean one thing: the wannabees have left the building because the party is over. This means that the only people signing up are people who (gasp!!) LIKE to PROGRAM. People who CAN PROGRAM! Making money with computers is OK, but unless you love these machines, you shouldn't bother. All the "get rich quick" types ruined the business during the 90s but now those fair weather friends aren't so hot to get into IT because now there's work to be done...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I seriously doubt this. "Job Security" is something the Boomers had, and that puppy is dead in the basket. It doesn't matter how much you think you're in demand, if the bean counters decide that one department is spending too much, they'll cut the tech budget and you'll be gone. This very thing happened at Shell, and BP just two years ago, despite the increased profits that Oil & Gas are now experiencing.
I don't think you're paying attention. The *old way* was for someone to start on help desk, then the good ones would work up to desktop grunt, etc. That pipe is broken, because most (large) businesses outsource their helpdesks to Bangladesh/Malaysia.
Finally, just because you have a CS, it doesn't make you a good tech/programmer/whatever. I've known many good techs who didn't have a degree at all, just as I've known techs who had a CS degree and who couldn't tech their way out of a wet paper bag.
Yeah, right.
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.
As someone probably wrote. In 1738, with a feather.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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...
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