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Hot Tech Skills For 2006?
linumax writes "Computerworld is running a 3 page story on what tech skills will be in demand for the coming year. They suggest developers, security experts and project managers are in demand. It also comes up with some good news. FTA: 'Despite the notion that hordes of U.S. IT jobs are being sent offshore, in reality, less than 5% of the 10 million people who make up the U.S. IT job market had been displaced by foreign workers through 2004, says Scot Melland, president and CEO of Dice Inc., a New York-based online jobs service. The numbers of jobs posted on Dice.com from January through September for developers, project managers and help desk technicians rose 40%, 47% and 45%, respectively, compared with the same period in 2004, says Melland.'"
It's been mentioned before but the US government (not just the NSA) employs many IT/IS professionals and many of the positions require security clearance which can only be granted to US citizens. These jobs cover the gamut from weapons to environmental. Much of the US government tech market was unaffected by the dot.com draw down. Nobody gets rich but it's a living.
Nevermind the fact that all your employees are probably frustrated that you are busy trying see how much work you can squeeze out of them for how little money. You don't sound like the kind of person I would work very hard for.
[FromTheMorning]
Interesting comment. I have two follow-ups:
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It is obvious from reading your post, and a quick look through your blog, that you have not worked in the IT field, and thus -- do not know what you're talking about.
Really? I started my first IT business almost 17 years ago. It has been in business all that time, grown every year, and has performed work on some of the largest commercial ventures in the Chicagoland area. I'm tired and have no desire to stay in the business more than another 3 years. Blogging is a new direction for me (I wrote paper newsletters for years that were successes and failures). Considering my company refused to go dotcom and continued to grow duing the dotbomb, I think I do know what I am talking about.
Me working for peanuts is not good for me, and I can't imagine how a low-wage earner of any career is good for the economy (except for banks).
Really? My employees that earn peanuts for a salary make a ton of money in bonuses. Some projects bonus out over 66% of the profit of the project. One of my top employees only works about 15 hours a week and he owns his condo, car and all his assets without loans. He's not even close to 30 years old.
Also, I've noticed that when I reduce my rate, people not hire me, even if I'm starving. Crank the rate back up, and I find myself consistantly employed.
This is VERY true. When I said I lowered my rate, I didn't mean going from $160 per hour to $40, I meant going from $160 per hour to $145 or so. Consider it a discount for past contracts, but it helped 75% of the time I presented it.
I don't like being treated like a slave laborer, either.
Only someone not willing to increase their abilities and offer their customers profits would be a slave. If you have value, you'll never be a slave, except to the State.
Do YOU work for minimum wage?
Yes. I pay myself minimum wage every month (I think I make about US$600 take home salary a month). I bonus myself a dividend at year's end and maybe at the half year as well. My employees all work exactly the same way, although I pay the bonuses at project end, not year's end.
You're right, you wouldn't hire me, because I wouldn't work for minimum wage.
So you'd rather say "I am worth US$80,000 per year" and be done with it. That's fine. My employees want more. They want to learn about business (all my accounting books are completely open to even the newest employee). They want to learn about collections and input costs. They want to learn how to manage crises. They want to get a piece of the action based on the profitability of their project (we're talking up to 66% profit sharing, not 3%). They want to work hard, knowing in a few years they could own their own business -- that I helped them finance.
I hate the term employees. I love the term future competition.
For the last two months I have been searching for two people to fill two clearly defined (and very fillable) positions with my company. We have used MOnster.com (Which has outrageous pricing) as well as craiglist, and have really only received crap.
We have two IT Positions available, one for Web Developer -- PHP interfacing with PostGreSQL, and another for Software Engineer -- Designing Spec Docs and then Coding (and eventually managing other coders) that spec doc.
Our technology bases arent the newest around (PHP, PostGreSQL, Perl/C) but we consistently get the following types of resumes:
1 - Foreigners who want to work in the US. Sorry, I cant and dont want to sponsor you. We are a small company.
2 - Foreigners who want to consult with companies in the US, but not move or be an employee. Sorry, not happening with us.
3 - Highly underqualified people applying for a position. For example -- We have recieved a number of applicants who have 1 year programming experience, and no specific experience in our tech's, and who attended less-then-ideal educational institutions (Ivy Tech anyone?).
I think that for every capable IT person, there are probably 15 cert jockies, and 25 idiots.
Moreover, we have had people apply for the position who then asked what our company did. They could have spend 30 seconds looking at our website before dropping off or emailing their resume and found out. This type of laziness is horrible.
B
Nothing like seeing 95% of the "250,000 jobs TODAY!" just cut-and-paste dupes of fifteen agencies selling the same job. I've had so many headhunters call me for Dice/Monster jobs in swarms, like ten calls on the same day, for the same job from people (using the term loosely) 10,000 miles apart. Then there are the duplicates of those duplicates that they post every week to bump their position up for "jobs" that arguably do not exist for any purpose but bait for resume banking.
I figure, any number touted by Dice or Monster can be made more accurate by moving the decimal one position to the left and dividing by two.
It has been my experience jobs posted on Dice and Monster don't even scratch the surface of what's out there. Doubtful companies that need a unique individual are going to waste their time looking for job board trolls... likely they will fill the post throught their own efforts or a specialized recruiter. Using Dice to measure market demand would be the last measurement I would accept. Job boards don't have a clue was it going on in the real world. And who would trust a proclamation of accuracy with a name like Dice.
I don't think many of the people writing in this thread understand what Dada's doing.
He's underpaying workers until the project ends. Then he gives them a bonus based on profitability. This enables him to bid fixed-price contracts because buyers love them.
I'm going to throw out some numbers. I hope he's listening because he can confirm or deny that his pay scale works as I say.
He has a project which he bills out at $145 an hour. He pays his people $6 an hour. However, he doesn't really charge $145 an hour. Instead, he says the project is 100 hours @ $145 an hour, or $14,500. Let's say 20 of those hours are his supervision and he has one person working 80 hours. He pockets the $145 an hour x 20 and gives the worker $6 an hour x 80, or $480. This is a total of $3,380. He has a gross profit of $11,120 remaining. Then he gives the worker a bonus, splitting the remaining revenue 50/50, meaning he gets $2900 + $5560 and the worker gets $480 + $5560.
In the end, this means the worker got paid approximately $75 an hour. This is substantially more than he would normally get paid in a more typical work environment, maybe more like $60 an hour. So the worker loves this system.
But it gets better - if the project can be done in 80% of the time, the worker still makes $5560 but divided by fewer hours. In fact, he would make about $86 an hour.
The downside of this is that if the project is estimated poorly, the worker will get paid less. Let's say the project goves over by 50%. The worker's paid a bit more than $5560 because his minimum wage pay goes up. But his bonus goes down. I'm too lazy to do a detailed calculation, but he's down to about $46 an hour.
What this system does is align the incentives of the owner and worker. If the worker can get the work done more rapidly, his bonus is enormous and he's motivated to do even better. If he does dismally (say he takes four weeks to do this two week job), his pay is down enormously and he might even want to leave the company.
If you compare this with a typical contractor who might pay $60 an hour and bill at $175 an hour, you can see how the bonus formula I've described above is actually a better arrangement as long as you work diligently and at about the proper estimated time.
Personally, I would have loved to have worked as a contractor under that system. It's fair and transparent.
Hope that helps.
D
Let's say 20 of those hours are his supervision ... He pockets the $145 an hour x 20 ...
So, the person who does almost zero actual work gets a huge salary, and the peon doing all the hard work gets shit. This, as you describe it, is bordering very closely on accounting and tax fraud. The employee's benefits and other employment factors are set by the base pay/hourly (minimum) wage. That "bonus" isn't taxed the same as his/her base pay. And absent any specifics in a contract, there's no certainty of the existance of any bonus much less what cut goes in which pockets.
There's a reason technology workers don't work on commision... the work is almost always non-deterministic. They aren't installing an electrical outlet or paving a driveway -- things that can be accurately estimated quickly and easily with one walk-through (how big is the drive? how far am I from the breaker box? etc.) Most IT jobs aren't as immediately simple... how long does it take to install/setup Exchange for a company? The answer involves hundreds of questions that won't necessarily lead you to an accurate timetable.
When you pin your company's profits on over estimating contracts and "finishing early", all you're doing is lying to your clients and screwing them out of their money.
I don't doubt that the number of jobs offshored is relatively small - in fact, I would have expected it to be less than 5%, which is quite a lot of jobs.
.com boom, but salaries have been successfully contained.
The point - at least initially - is not to shut down operations and move them overseas (which is often not really cost effective.) The point is that you can threaten people with outsourcing/offshoring/whatever in order to lower their wages.
Large corporations - Caterpillar is a very famous case, type "caterpillar strike breaking" into google if you want detail on that - are very well served in having excess capacity overseas for this purpose. Technical workers do not generally form unions, let alone go on strike, but they still engage in negotiation for higher wages, and the *threat* of offshoring can be a powerful instrument in those negotiations, even if it is usually a bluff.
This is especially important in that the thrust of the article remains true - demand for these skills is actually higher than it was at the peak of the
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.