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.'"
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).
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!