Slashdot Mirror
Dismantling the Myth of IT Being a Dead-End Career
Lam1969 writes "Robert Mitchell says CIOs and other IT managers continue to bemoan what they claim is a shortage of good technologists. He suggests beefing up salaries and convincing young people that IT is a viable long-term career path would help to change this sentiment. Mitchell also says the threat of offshoring is overstated; rather, the problem is industry and the media have been 'complicit in propagating the myth that IT is a dead end.' From the story: 'First, the dot-com crash shattered the illusion that those in high-tech jobs would always emerge from economic turbulence unscathed. Now, students are hearing that a four-year degree in programming or engineering doesn't matter because all of those jobs will eventually go offshore to foreign workers at very low wages. A generation has been dissuaded from pursuing what is in reality a very promising career choice.'"
But it's a different story today. I bill a lot of hours fixing "Bangladore Spaghetti" code, in one case costing more than a clean build would have cost. Even when the work was acceptable, and that was the minority, the language barrier was a constant complaint. While that was going on college students were bailing out of IT programs when the economy was in an expansion mode.
It's a different story out there today. The bonuses are back, the perks are back. It's not quite as insane as the late 90's but not bad. And the best part to me is that there's a bonus for people who can work in either Linux or Windows environments.
And to all you project managers who thought you were SO smart outsourcing those expensive projects and the companies that thought they could replace their IT director with a bean counter...NEENER, NEENER, NEENER! LOOOOO-HOO-HOOOOOSSSSERRRRRRS!!!!! (/., raising the level of dialogue in IT)
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
oddly enough NOT lowering the average IT wage is precisely why these jobs are being offshored.
I think you got your causal relation all messed-up:
Outsourcing happens because companies want to lower costs.
There are several ways to lower costs, which mostly fall into two groups:
- Lower the costs of your inputs
- Increase the efficiency of your productive process
In the software development process input costs are mostly employee salaries
Efficiency on the other way can be increased in two ways:
- Capital investment - beter hardware, beter tools
- Process optimization - improve the structure and flow of your process so that resources are busy with productive tasks most of their available time (note: in my definition a productive task is one in which a feature of the software is being created/extended - thus bugfixing is NOT a productive task) and maximizing the match between resource-provided skills and task-required skills.
Most companies have already done the reasonable capital investments (note: giving developers workstations with the latest most powerfull CPUs or whatever instead of the second tier ones is rarelly a reasonable capital investment since the cost is 2+ times as much while the increase in productivity is a low percentage value)
The process optimization part requires very competent managers which either understand the software development process well enough to do the process optimization or can find the right person to do it for them.
Finding a competent IT manager and/or someone that can optimize a software development process is neither easy nor cheap.
Also most companies don't have IT as their core business so investing in process optimization is not a high priority for them.
So companies go for reducing input costs: employee salaries.
Guess what happens if a company goes puts adverts out for senior software developers offering 1/5th or 1/10th of the average salary in that geographical area?
Nobody comes.
Why?
The average salary level for a position in an area is derived from a number of factors:
- Cost of living.
- Average salary level in the same area for other ocupations requiring lower levels of expertise.
- Ratio of open vacanties to job seekers which could take those vacanties.
Which is why people do not take a salary cut of 80-90% (and get indian level salaries):
- They can't afford living in that area with that salary
- Lower qualified jobs pay beter
- There are open vacancies for similiar or lower qualified jobs paying beter
To put things in perspective:
- If somehow all open vacancies for sofware development positions were paying 20% of the average salary, job seekers would just start filling in all open lower expertise positions that pay beter than that, all the way down to flipping burgers.
The only way to go around it to user workers in geographical areas where:
- Cost of living is lower
- All other jobs for lower qualified people pay proportionaly less
- The ratio of open vacanties to job seekers is not so high that salaries for that type of position are very high.
In other words: Outsourcing
To wrap up my argument:
- Companies outsource because the want to reduce costs while not being willing/able to invest in process improvement. Their input costs are mostly employee salaries and they cannot reduce those salaries locally because in the local market salaries are subjected the market pressures that other companies are offering beter salaries for equally or lower qualified positions and that if the offered salaries do not suffice to cover the cost of living in that area people will move out in search of lower cost of living/beter salaries.
People won't take lower salaries because they either can't (cost of living) or do not need to (they can find another jobs for more money).
Milton, greetings from a fellow Paddy... I live in St. Louis, about as mid-west as you can get. The market here is very hot right now, and though there was pain during the dot-bomb days, it was never as severe as it was on the left and right coasts. Starting salary for a good person with a masters in CS or EE would be around $50K to $60K. My wife began working in IT after retraining from her previous career in business development four years ago, with a mere Associate Degree (much like an Irish National Certificate from CIT or whereever), began at $37K, now makes $65K. I just accepted a job offer for $90K, with overtime payable... but I have 18 years experience, the past 8 being spent in the world of Java, EAI, J2EE and large distributed systems.
Don't believe the hype! IT is *still* a rewarding and highly lucrative career for those who are good at what they do and who enjoy what they do.
My experience has been that between 1.5 and 4 years doesn't raise significant flags for employers. There is a catch though. If you've been in the same position for 2 or more years without a change in responsibilities or pay then you've become stuck and should move on ASAP.
Some employers are worse for this than others. Strangely, those tend to be either small employers or very large ones . Small employers since they generally have nowhere for you to move up. Large since it makes their lives easier to have someone who's willing to stick in one place forever.
Personally I found the slow-moving pace of most companies painful and switched to contracting. This means that pretty much anything over 3 months is fine on my resume. As an added bonus I get exposed to new technologies and renegotiate my salary on a regular basis.
Wait a minute. This guy was not writing his senior year political science thesis, it was just a post to Slashdot. Asking for references is okay, but saying that his post is incomplete just because he didnt cite his sources is wrong. If everyone did that, my 30" monitor wouldnt be enough to see 2 posts on the same screen.
"The government does not intervene when there is a labor surplus"
Why not? Does it need to? What suggestions do you have?
He answered all of your questions in his post. He said that a free market corrects itself without intervention. He said that the government doesnt have to do anything except for to foster the free market system. It is okay to ask him to elaborate or give proof, but it was not an incomplete post. He couldnt possibly cover every single angle of the issue in one Slashdot post.
You can respond and ask questions without attacking his logical reasoning skills.
politicians attempt to damage"
Again, use of emotional 'damage' without any reasoning behind why it's 'damaging' and not, say, 'fixing'.
The reason he used the word "damage" instead of "fixing" is because he does not believe that it is fixing the problem. He believes that it is damaging our economy. And he has given reasoning for why, it is because it floods our workforce with extra workers that the workforce did not need. Which then increases unemployment or at least lowers wages.
You can say that he is wrong, but at least give examples of why. You attack him for not explaining himself, but you do not even try to explain yourself. You are simply attacking him with no basis for your arguments.
Sounds alot like the pot calling the kettle black.
--
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
That's a trick question, as "SQL" doesn't stand for anything.
It kind of does stand for Structured Query Language though.
May the Maths Be with you!