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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.'"
Surely this is no different from any other career? I.e. if you're good, then you'll do well - if you're no good, it's a dead end.
Oh, and first post!
You have to ask yourself - is the job you're doing/going to do - does it require your actual physical presence? If not, then it can be offshored.
The trouble is, in IT, all the jobs that require your physical presence are generally 'IT technician' jobs - pulling cat5 through walls, swapping out hard disks in PCs and that kind of thing - the lower paid end of the IT spectrum (although there are higher paid network engineering types of jobs). All the high paid jobs that do NOT require physical presence to be possible to do are things like software development - which CAN be offshored. It's the very jobs that need a 4+ year degree which are the ones that can be offshored. The jobs that someone could leave school at 16 and be trained to do by their employer tend to be the ones that can't be offshored.
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On the other hand this is a good thing for the computer science departments of universities, for less students means that they can do less job training and more actual computer science. If you aren't convinced that real progress in computer science isn't being made any more I encourage you to watch this video. In it you can see all the aspects of the modern computers that we know and love being demonstated oh so long ago, only with less polish. Sadly research hasn't proceeded much beyond this in terms of software. The problem is that the typical student in a computer science course doesn't want to learn computer science, they just want to learn some Java/hot language of the momement and get out into the workforce. This is where bad programmers and bugs galore come from. However if those who simply want a job leave then a computer science degree will once again have meaning, and better software will be produced. Trust me on this one, I'm surrounded by CS majors who think Java is the best language ever, and are unable to program in anything else.
Philosophy.
Whilst much of industry looks to hire youthful IT staff rather than older workers, it has the ironic effect of putting people off a career in IT. As not many people want to work in an industry where finding a job when you are past forty is difficult.
Encouraging older workers will also encourage new young workers. BTW. I fall somewhere between these two groups.
I've heard it all before. Managers scream 'skills shortage' whilst lots of good IT workers sit on unemployment queues.
There is no shortage. Never has been. It's because managers want to define the exact skillset... '20 years Java version 1.4.1.13 service pack 2, and preferably 17 years Visual Studio 2005' they refuse to believe that people can actually learn new stuff (and their requirements are sometimes completely ludicrous - I actually left an interview when someone said I didn't have enough java experience.. they wanted 8 years - in 2000. That manager is proabably still screaming 'skills shortage' today).
Now I'm involved in hiring I've found completely the opposite... the market is *full* of good people... if you factor in a few weeks for them to get up to speed they're fine (that's just training budget - remember when companies had those?).
all the jobs that require your physical presence are generally 'IT technician' jobs - pulling cat5 through walls, swapping out hard disks in PCs and that kind of thing - the lower paid end of the IT spectrum (although there are higher paid network engineering types of jobs).
There are still a lot of companies which value face to face communications. If you think that any IT job can be offshored, try getting a web programming job at a local community college on the other side of the US. Chances are, they'll want you to be onsite. Maybe that job will be offshored eventually, but for small and medium sized businesses, they want SOMEONE to physically show up at the office, eat lunch with their coworkers, etc. Maybe this desire is irrational, but there are some costs in terms of poorer communication which makes some offshoring more expensive.
Besides, very few good paying jobs of any kind technically require a person's presence. Look on the dark side of things. Why not have a doctor's office with a few nurses, a video setup, and some nice Philippine doctors on the other end. Samples can be sent off to foriegn labs. Same with teachers, as long as there's someone in the room to make sure people behave. Or do we only offshore those things where customers won't be immediately aware that the job is offshored? IT is not particularly less safe than most other jobs, if you want to take outsourcing to an extreme. The difference is that it tends to be more cutting edge than other fields, and the most exposed to innovation and change.
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
(Applies to Italy, but maybe to other countries too).
I'm near my Bachelor's degree in CS, and I'm as glad to enter IT as to enter a pool full of hungry sharks. If I'm able to, I'll take some other job; journalism, for example, or become a teacher. Why?
Of course, money isn't the problem: you earn quite well, at least compared to the standard factory workman. Rather, it's because IT (at least, here in Italy) don't do anything related to my fields of interest. Most of them offer consulting via new technologies (but that is a lot far from being IT), some web application development, a little bit of Java here and there, and no real challenge. Mostly, they deploy pre-made systems (often Microsoft or IBM products), and just stand there watching other - foreign, mostly US - companies steer the wheel at their leasure.
I mean: a lot of engineers are glad to become DBAs, or to do remunerative jobs programming cell phones applications with J2ME. Most of us CS students, however, have an interest in software engineering, for example, or algorithmic complexity, in compilers, operating systems, networks and so on.
Sadly, innovation in the IT field is almost as stone dead, here in Italy.
We need some spark of interest to enter IT, not just building boring systems to manage a warehouse. Bring in the innovation!
So: IT *is* a dead-end. Doing paperwork and SQL for the rest of my life? Writing Java applets or Flash actionscripts? Are you kidding? It's not work, but slavery.
As many, many others born in the first half of the '80, I remember writing BASIC games like Snake on lonely Saturday evenings, when a child. Playing with LEGOs and reading a lot. All this is lost for the new generations... both due to increased complexity (when the model you grow up with is Final Fantasy two-thousand-fifty, who's going to program a Tris game in console?) and changes in our society (general disinterest, maybe because scared by a too complex world).
42.
After 25 years in IT, I was let go a few months ago because they "didn't need my position anymore", and was "replaced" by someone earning about half of what I was getting. This, after helping the company grow from 10 people to 85, and from sales of $100K to over $20 million a year. After creating a serverfarm which increased the capacity of our systems from 5 trnasactoins/second to over 20,000 transactions a second. I joined as Director of IT. In the beginning it was very hands-on. But management never listend to my requests for help, so I was stuck helping people via phone all over the world, maintaining and building the server farm, doing all the support on the PCs, etc. When I finally got help, it was help intended to replace me, which it eventually did. They then hired someone to "assist" my replacement. I've spent three months looking for a new job. So many of them have extremely specific requirements, so specific that there is no way I could even be considered. So now I've left the field. I spent the last 20 years not really liking my jobs and not realizing it. Having left, I finally realized that I wasn't happy before, because of the non-recognition of IT by the rest of the company.
The other is to accept the facts and surrender to the new reality. Move up in the chain. Learn another language, so that you can communicate better with THEM in their language, and can still manage the project. Keep them still dependent on you, instead of THEM learning your language instead *and* your skills and eliminating you from the equation completely.
So what are we to become? Nations of Project managers? There is a limit to what you can outsource, and if you have any kind of sense there is also a limit to what you should want to outsource for all sorts of resons ranging from security to limiting knowledge transfer to potential future competitors. Of course greed has a way of disabling people's Common Sense Processing Unit, especially in managers. Low end tech jobs and certainly also some high end ones are going to be outsourced, there is a certain advantage (Mesured in money of course) to being able to contract consultants and let them go, sort of like the 'Just In Time' logistics principle preaches, rather than having, say a Sysadmin or an Oracle DBA permanently on staff. Businesses are going to spend some time finding out the painful way just how much staff to keep on permanent call and how much to outsource. The suggestion that you can run a business in the USA using entirely IT staff based in some IT-sweatshop in India for every single conceivable IT function that needs to be performed is idiotic, you will need a mix. Workers her in the west are going to have to get used to the fact that there will be no such thing as a secure job for life (yes, there are still people who believe in that myth), they will spend the rest of their life obsessing about where to go next and keeping their skillset marketable and that if necessity demands they will have to be willing to move clear accross the country or even to another country if that's where the jobs are. This is also the reason why the subject of 'Economic and Job market reform' is causing such panic in places like Germany and France where there are still people who believe the 'job for life', with the same corporation, in a calm static jobmarket is a practical proposition for the majority of the population. The thought of a job market in total flux scares the shit out of them and I won't say I enjoy the place myself but I have adapted to what is happening now and am not banging my head against a wall of memories of how things used to be.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow