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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.
>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!
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.
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
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.
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!
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.)
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!
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