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IT Worker Shortages Everywhere
Vicissidude writes with news from the IT front in India: "The software industry body Nasscom has warned that India faces a shortfall of half a million skilled workers by 2010. The country will need 350,000 engineers a year, but no more than 150,000 of the most highly skilled engineers will be available each year." This shortfall is fueling a new development, the exporting of Indian tech jobs to the US. But will there be workers in the US to do those jobs? Reader Jadeite2 writes with a word from Bill Gates, speaking to a business forum in Moscow, who said: "There is a shortage of IT skills on a worldwide basis. Anybody who can get those skills here now will have a lot of opportunity."
or at least the freedom to outsource were confident that, ultimately, outsourcing would be a net benefit for everyone. For India and for America.
This seems to be confirmation of that.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Most IT workers aren't short all over. They're only short where it counts...
This guy's the limit!
Maybe the companies that outsouce IT jobs to companies in India will outsource the job's due to lack of staff back to the United States.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Lets be clear, no market, including the labour market, suffers a "shortfall". When industry types parade around the notion of a "shortfall" what they really mean is that they anticipate having to pay higher prices (or wages in this case). They do this to drum up support for government policy which will effectively suppress prices/wages.
I welcome such a shortfall.
(See previous story). What this will do is (A) give those spammers a legit job, and (B) take the operators of the spam-bots out of the mix, and (C) keep them busy with other things so they can't be bothered to spamminate the 'Net, and (D) solves the problem of the shortage in that particular area.
1. Quit.
2. ???
3. Get re-hired.
4. Profit!
Woohoo!
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
But can said skills pay the bills? /farnsworth
to Vietnam or China. Always seems to work that way in outsourcing. Outsource to a place that's cheap and then they outsource to a cheaper place.
Might be a few years before you see an IT industry in Niger though.
I have a BSIT degree with a 3.5 GPA, but without real world experience in an IT department, it's impossible for me to find anything in IT that pays above tech support!
/rant off
I'm tired of the chicken-egg thing. If I don't have experience I can't get the job. If I can't get the job, how am I supposed to get experience?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
A "shortgage" of labor simply means that businessmen have to pay people more than they would prefer. There is always a wage at which any "shortage" disappears, but that is not the fix prefered by the business class (importing more cheap labor or outsourcing is). You never hear about a CEO shortage even when they make millions a year.
There's no shortage of qualified people, IMHO. There's just a "shortage" of qualified people willing to take the ridiculously low pay tech jobs offer. $12/hour is the average for tech support/hardware repair in ON, Canada, for example. As a comparison "food service" (ie: McDonald's, etc) workers earn about $10/hour.
Myself, I plan to leave tech forever for an electrician apprenticeship. (*crosses fingers*)
The reason that IT jobs were exported to India in the first place is that US employers did not want to pay US wages. It is the same reason the want exemptions to import workers. So they can pay them sub-standard wages and deport them if they get uppity.
Until employers get over the slave owner mentality and start paying people fairly for their work, they are going to have a hard time finding good people.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
In the US the phrase 'lack of qualified applicants' came to mean 'lack of qualified applicants who were willing to work for what we were willing to pay.'
Large difference.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
As an "IT" worker with experience in US, can't find a decent job in SF bay area. In interests of fairness, have to say that I declined jobs like this - hands on technical manager position that paid around 55 grand for managing 20 people. Sheesh.
I thought that had been pretty-much refuted...
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
"Hello, mhy name is Rajesh, how may I help you?"
Relax. Just laugh.
When I started college in the mid-late 90s, that was all the talk - a big need in the tech industry. Tons of jobs available! By the time I graduated 4 years later, I was amazed to see how many CIS graduates were having a hard time finding a job or having to settle for some $20,000 - $30,000/yr tech support job with long hours.
"Job Shortage" is an employer myth. All employers would love the supply of labor to go up so that wages will go down. We've had a "nursing shortage" for about 60 years now. Funny thing is, when they raise nurses wages, more people get trained to be a nurse and more people find the time to put in nurses hours. Funny thing about wage incentives.
Supply and Demand, Econ. 101, remember? Let supply/demand settle wages and numbers of workers without special targeted, non-citizen, employer holds the visa H-1B work programs. Capital mobility and citizenship track immigration will address the imbalance without subsidizing the wealthiest companies in America.
Want more tech workers? Hire them and train 'em on the job.
There's not a shortage of IT workers in the U.S., there's a shortage of IT workers who will work for $25K a year in the U.S. Want a native English speaker with .Net programming skills, it'll cost more than that.
.Net. Want to learn compiler design theory or advanced data structures? no problem. Want to learn how to set up a WIndows server? that's where ITT Tech comes in. And tech schools in the U.S. have a stigma attached to them where most who are qualified to go to a 4 year university would attend a tech school. I got my EE degree, but learned command-line Pascal in an elective. I had to learn Delphi, .Net, C++ and PHP on my own. The people who are motivated to learn on their own have some drive and expect to be promoted at some point, not to get 4% raises every two years for the rest of their lives.
Besides most universities don't teach practical IT skills. Rarely did I ever see a class in Visual C++ or in
Gates needs to be a good little capitalist and pay the market rate.
Every time we post an opening, there is a storm of resume submissions, and the quality of the top 20% is extremely good. So for each position, we get about 200-500 resumes, of which 40-100 are insanely great. And we are a non-sexy company, with ho-hum pay.
Talent shortage? I wish. If there were, I would quit and look elsewhere!
I have a BSIT degree with a 3.5 GPA, but without real world experience in an IT department, it's impossible for me to find anything in IT that pays above tech support!
Too good for tech support eh?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
As I understand it, you have to either: A: get exceptionally lucky, or B: take a job doing tech support and keep looking for something better.
Personally, I worked on F/OSS software during school, which gave me some solid experience to point to when it came time to interview.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
What that means is that India is experiencing its own outsourcing dilemma. Rates are actually too high for India. So they are looking to outsource their development to even less developed countries such as Vietnam, Angola, Malaysia. Even Africa. Those jobs are NEVER coming to America. NEVER. If they can't afford rates in Mumbai they certainly can't afford Research Triangle Park, NC or even Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
...but without real world experience
...to find anything ...that pays above tech support!
impossible
There is your answer. Get a job that pays whatever until you get the real world experience to get the salaray you want. If you can't afford that...find a new career. Welcome to adult life
Location, Location, Location?
PS: I have a login, I'm a genuine coward.
Be more realistic about their workload and what they can do. How about a little priortization? Instead of throwing more bodies at the problem, how about scaling back or being more innovative with how you implement an IT project?
I started out in tech support. Probably most of the technical people on this board started there as well. Take it. Get 1+ years experience, some good references and then move on. Perhaps consult or do some pro bono work on the side to get your chops up.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
There is never a shortage of labor at the right price
Because employers (not just in India) have no long-term commitment to the employees, and thus the employees have no reason for loyalty, the employer searches for a fully mature and qualified employee, able to perform instantly (in the current quarter) to satisfy the current requirement.
This used to require a consultant. But no, consultants are too expensive. Besides, with the falling apart of the markets, consultants have gone into other lines of work.
What's left? Dragging a net through the pool of recent graduates who studied CS, fewer every year as their older siblings tell them it's a lousy market out there.
My heart cries for you!
Here in NZ there is apparently a short fall of IT staff, which is a load of BS, employers are after people with 10 - 15 years experience, and thats where the fall is.
Most employers here see that people have the degrees/qualifications but appear to ignore it.
I had to fight for my current job as a PC tech, I have a BIT and 2 years employed experience as a sysadmin, other years were spent studing.
The only reason Im not a sysadmin an more is that the company was taken over, and disbanded.
Empolyers need to get there finger/fists out of there ASSES and employ grads. how else is one suppose to get experience?
Too good for tech support eh?
Yes and no.
Yes: I've done TS for over 10 years so I feel it's time to move on. With 10+ years experience and a degree, I feel I'm too good to TS. When I started, TS was a way to get your foot in the door to an IT job. That ended shortly after I started.
No: With my experience, TS jobs pay quite well, but not as good as mid-level IT. With a new baby at home and a wife who is no longer working, I can't afford the pay cut it would take to be entry level IT. So, I'm not too good for TS as I'm doing it now, while I dabble at home in higher technology (Linux, JSP, AD and so on).
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I went back to school part-time and started earning my certifications over the last five years when the handwriting was on the wall and everyone was stampeding out of I.T. into health care field instead. Southeast Asia will never supply all the I.T. workers in the world when their economies start booming and they have their own internal needs. With the all the baby boomers retiring over the next 30 years, there's going to be a lot of U.S. jobs but not enough people. I'm looking forward for a long and rewarding career.
Then get an IT job with a tech support pay, get experience, then renegociate the pay. A degree is useless without experience, and an IT graduate without experience is not worth more than tech support pay, no matter the GPA.
I'm tired of the chicken-egg thing. If I don't have experience I can't get the job. If I can't get the job, how am I supposed to get experience?
I'm tired of those new graduates that all go like "I have a degree, I deserve a high paying job right now even though I have no experience whatsoever". You *can* get the job, simply not at a senior-programmer salary.
I got my first experience in a lousy job (VBA... *shudders*), with a lousy pay, but that got me the required experience to prove my worth, and get a pretty good job later on. Not everybody gets to be lead programmer on a multi-million project as soon as they graduate.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Why do you expect to get a mid-level IT job with no relevant experience? Just about everybody starts at the bottom. If you're good, you won't stay there for long.
There's not a shortage of workers. There's a shortage of salaries which can provide a decent living. Been at the same job for 5 1/2 years because the modern salaries are nowhere near what they were in 2001.
But as good an analysis I've seen as to why free market forces don't apply to much of health care.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It was never about a shortage of IT workers. It was always about a shortage of cheap and stable source of labor. I'm shedding big crocidile tears right now over this so-called shortage. It's not like like I'm a disgrunted IT worker that took four years—3 of which were stuck in a call center hell—to find an IT job making half what I was during the dot-com boom. No that couldn't possibly be it.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Take an interesting job, regardless of what it pays. Stay for a while, suck up all the experience you can get, then go find a job that requires "experience".
Nobody wants an inexperienced recent grad because they're useless. The world is full of messy, poorly defined requirements that involve huge numbers of incompatible systems and people. It is not based on anything learned in college.
With my experience, TS jobs pay quite well, but not as good as mid-level IT. With a new baby at home and a wife who is no longer working, I can't afford the pay cut it would take to be entry level IT.
That is your concern, not your employers. Take the job that feeds your family and get over yourself.
That being said... are you looking in the right places? Willing to relocate? Willing to get a masters? Both will greatly increase your earning potential.
Take a job that pays peanuts, but let you learn and get real world experience, and then get a job that pays once you've proven yourself. I started out in a low paying non-profit foundation, but I got to do real programming and learned a hell of a lot. Five years later I got a job that pays twice as much.
What's really rare these days is someone with 10+ years of experience in C++, Java, C#, SQL, can show experience with libraries for Windows, Linux, PalmOS and Symbian, has experience as a team leader, is able to speak 3 languages fluently, is willing to relocate to the other end of the world, is "flexible" (read: Doesn't mind 60+ hours a week) and expects less than 2000 a month.
Yes, those people get fewer and fewer every day. But they're in demand, I tell you, you only gotta read the job ads!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As an IT worker I'm okay with this for me, but I also remember the dot com days when people like my bicycle repairman roommate suddenly became a Network Engineer. After the boom I spent most of my time fixing stuff that people like that "implemented".
Where after Vietnam, Africa, etc...
I mean, are we going to begin some type of ridiculous loop, chasing the cheapest labor around the globe with the hope of shaving a few bucks off the bottom line?
This is quickly becoming absurd.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
Your problem exists because I'm still cleaning up the mess the kid right out of college made of our network. I would have never believed a tiny 100-ish person 20 server network could be so screwed up. Get your colleges to stop graduating people who don't know what they're doing and this problem will go away.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Not going to fall for that bit again....
You're on the opposite side of the equation from me. I have 10+ years of real world IT experience but no degree or certifications so no one wants to hire me, despite the fact that I have demonstrated proficiencies in the field.
So, there's a shortage eh? well, here's a word of advice for employers:
first, stop asking for 5 years of experience even for manual testing. take time to compose job requirements, interview, and find out if the candidate can actually do the job instead of having a buzzword resume.
oh yeah, do not let the HR bimbo to screen the resumes, she lacks the intelligence to sift through them. Even better do not let the grumpy HR granny do it either.
Stop taking bribes from recruiters who 'assist' you in finding a contractor with that beefy resume and 5 years experience in XDRSVT tool (could be any random combinatin of letters). In the end all they will give you is a desperate Indian/chinese/russian guy, subcrontracted from another company for a tiny fraction of what you are paying, and whose resume has been through the middlemans creative hands. Poor guy will slog and get things done somehow, but you will do everyone some justice if you interview him directly and are reasonably open about your expectations.
Oh, treat those Indian/chinese/russian consultant as a human, not some kind of machine with no life. Stop baking 'WHAT' at them whenever they ask for some clarification. Often, your docuemnts/specs are quite muddled and reflect your inner confusion quite well. He's just being polite when he's keeping that 'what an idiot' to himself.
stop being a slave to wallstreet. IT/computing is not something that you should *only* outsource. A number of permanent techical employees whom you hire and keep happy can only add value to your company. And make it a point to hire some entry level candidates whom you allow to grow, as well.
Most TS companies have *some* level of in-house development. See if you can get assigned to that even on a part-time basis. The company should like it because they'll pay you your current (below IT) rate, while you gain the experience you need.
If you company doesn't have any development oppurtunities...well it's time to look outside and yes you may need to take a pay cut short term to do this.
And many new Mom's do go back to work, it may be that you need to rethink that part of the situation. My brother's wife has been working since about 4 months after my niece arrived. Granted my preference is Mom or Dad at home (just like I had) but it ain't always in the cards financially. So if that's your situation, then suck it up for now in your current job till she can go back to work You'll have additional income to tide you over while you get experience in the lower paying intro-IT positions.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
That's funny. I know guys without the degree but 20+ years as advanced IT, sysadmin, etc.. they can outright smoke any college edu-ma-cated kid on the PC, DBA, etc... yet they have trouble finding jobs because most places are asking for ridiculous things like MASTERS in CS and 5+ years experience willing to take $35,000.00US a year. These places want $100+K quality for newbie salaries.....
It sucks in IT and CS kid.... you picked the one career that is in the most turmoil right now. best bet is to start consulting on your own, you can count that as experience on your resume.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Mabybe I'll finally land a job.
The other side of that equation is no better. I have less education than you but 12 years real world, shipping applications architecting and development *and* I live in silicon valley. I haven't had a job since July, and the only reason I've heard why I don't get hired is because I am "not technical enough" - meaning I don't have a degree they think is apropos. (Which is reason #1 why I say Google can go fuck themselves in the ass with rusty nails). I've heard that phrase at least 4 times in as many months.
Welcome to IT in the US.
When they say skills, they really mean experience. And rather specific experience at that. Even entry level positions want at least 2 years experience in certain skillsets. This industry trade association propaganda gets really tiresome at times.
So do you have 10 years experience or no experience? You may be your own worst enemy. If you were in TS for at 10 years, you had to as least been a team leader or group manager.
If you actually do have experience, take your resume to a pro and get some career counselling. Work on interview skills that'll let target yourself to the job you want.
Should have gone to a school with internships and/or work study as part of the course work. We recently hired a college grad here and he was looked on favorably due to the industry expirence that he got while in school. He has proved a valuable addition to the team. I pushed for his hire over another canidate due to his prior work on his work study/internships. He has been very valuable to me as I know only do the work of two people instead of 3! He probably makes 1/3 of what I do, but thats more than the Tech support guys are making most likely.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Careful, with too much experience, it is also difficult to get a job. The solution: Write a creative resume...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
How to fix that issue: pass a law that you have to pay any employee or contracted employee a sum that is at least the prevailing wage for the area in which the company is located, and national laws also must apply.
I'm not sure if you realize this or not, so don't take offense, but I want to make sure you realize that US laws don't apply in other countries. Hopefully, you understand that the country "passing the law" that you're suggesting would have to be the "poor" country being outsource to, since any laws passed in the "rich" country being outsource from do not apply. The US doesn't run the world. They just act like they do.
That said, your solution has several major problems, but the most obvious one is, "why would a country that desperately needs foreign investments pass a law that would discourage companies from investing in their workers?" Why would India pass a law requiring foreign companies to pay their Indian workers outrageously high (by Indian standards) salaries, with the obvious result of said companies simply packing up and moving to a country without such laws?
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
As an American IT worker, when the last IT job is sent to India...
I'm going to move there and open a convenience store.
I was worried that the IT worker shortage was going to drag on for months, but now that it's all over I feel better. I just hope that my salary doesn't get cut, what with supply finally meeting demand and all...
Just junk food for thought...
thats because you need to move to india. didn't you read the article?
You never hear about a CEO shortage even when they make millions a year.
Actually, you DO hear about CEO shortages. Whenever somebody complains about how much CEOs get in pay and benefits. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
WTF is going on with this world? Microsoft re-selling Linux, and now this? Now how will we know what is real and what is not on April 1st?
"I've done TS for over 10 years so I feel it's time to move on. With 10+ years experience and a degree, I feel I'm too good to TS."
And there is your problem. From that sentence alone, you say you feel entitled, yet you've not done anything about it. TS is only an entry to other positions if you push the envelope. One of our best sysadmins came from tech support. He was hungry to learn. Every night he'd stay after work for an hour or two to play with Linux/FreeBSD/Qmail etc. If I got your resume, I'd be looking at anything that shows you have a passion for the work - Open Source involvement, tech communities (hell, I link my Perlmonks node from my resume, warts and all - same username as /.). If your resume just says "Tech Support", you've dug your own hole. Get passionate about your work and the money will follow.
I personally spent 5 years teaching myself and setting up my own business (I failed at that) before I started earning anything near a respectable salary. For the first 2yrs, I was on around $100 a week, living in my girlfriend's mother's house.
Incidentally, out of the 6 devs here, only one has a CS degree. To me (though not my boss, note), degrees mean Jack Shit in the real world - especially ten years later. I did a Pure Math degree and I can't remember any of it (except the odd gem).
Don't "dabble" at home. Actually build and release something useful. Commit to where you want to be and start climbing. It's not going to just come and drop in your lap.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Unless you call "shortage" a low supply of qualified people willing to work at appropriate rates for under-qualified people
I know tons of people who left the industry when the crash happened, not because they could not find jobs or did not want to work in the industry any longer but because they could not find jobs that gave adequate compensation for their skills and experience. Those people are still out there and if rates increase enough they will return
There is something very wrong with a sector when there can be jobs advertised that require 5/7 years plus experience in multiple tecnologies that offer rates equal to that of a fast food resturant manager (or even less)
take the low pay job for one year - I had to do it too - now I make 3 times that amount
Most of the HR hiring manuals need to be re-written.
There is some misunderstanding that a grad out of a 4 year college with a Computer Science degree has more knowledge then a Sys Admin with 3-5 years experience. They are smoking crack. (Not to insult those that spent or borrowed good money to get that piece of paper, but everything you learned in your first 3 years is already obsolete)
They have ignored the need for so long that they don't know what they want.
The only reason there is a shortage of IT professionals is there is a PAY shortage! Fix that and you will have more IT workers.
It's only Sr. level people that we are looking for in the U.S. I've worked for a major IT outsourcing company for 10 years now as a Sr. UNIX SA. I can say that it is rare that we ever fill an open position on the first interview. When the job description clearly states that we are looking for senior level UNIX admins and we get people that don't can't read cidr notation, don't know how to manage a cluster, don't know the difference between RAID, SAN, and NAS, etc... We get plenty of applicants that I would consider junior, or total newbs. Unless you're planning to move to India, work for 5 years, and then come back as a senior-level engineer, don't believe this article. Run Away!!!
First off, if you see a listing that says x - x+2 years experience and you have none, apply anyway. "Experience" does not always mean "I have been out in the working world with a 9-5 job doing X for Y years. Sometimes it means that you have been using the technology (paid or unpaid) for that number of years.
Next, if all you do in College is get your degree with good grades, it will not do you any good. People all say "just get the piece of paper, that's all that matters", but that is complete BS. If you get internships for one or two years of your college career, you are in good shape. You have EXPERIENCE! You have a FOOT IN THE DOOR (it's not always what you know, but who you know). Plus you have had practice with interviewing, so when it comes time for the big ones, you will be more prepared.
Finally, tech support is not the only thing out there, not by a long-shot, for the fresh out of college. The path I took was consulting, and man was that a good decision. I was MIS, graduated last spring and had a job lined up since last thanksgiving. Consulting firms have a high turnover of people, which is good for the recent grad, cause that means they want YOU! As far as money, you are very likely to be making more than 40k, but not limited to. That's actually about the lowest I have heard from fellow grads going into consulting. The best part, is most consulting companies have a clear path defined for promotion/raises, so if you are committed, you will rise up quickly.
A few caveats for consulting though. Travel- it's pretty much 100% unless you are lucky enough to have a project you can commute to. Currently I'm on such a project which is nice, but otherwise, you will be in a hotel monday through thursday/friday and home on the weekends. The hours can be crazy, but that is also dependent on the project and ALL IT jobs can be like that. Like I said earlier, the turnover in consulting is higher than other IT areas and many people get burnt out from the travel/hours and leave after maybe two years, but by that point, you have gotten exposure with a bunch of companies and gained that valuable experience you are seeking.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
wow Just a little while ago, I was feeling screwed and completely out of luck Guess I was wrong. Where's my 50k job!?
outsourcing would be a net benefit for everyone. For India and for America. This seems to be confirmation of that.
Show me an overall improvement in Indian standards of living and what percentage of that is due to IT and you might have something. Really, I'd rather see that than a hegemony of US "IP" owners picking and choosing half trained techs as "winners" from starving, divided, helpless and desperate crowds. I want everyone to have what I enjoy and think the Earth has the resources for it.
How you get success out of failure is beyond me. India, despite tremendous US corporate investment, is unable to train enough people to replace their fired US counterparts. That shows a damnable lack of planning on the part of your corporate masters and their inability to create educational opportunities for enough Indians. Neither of those things is anything to crow about but the bottom line is worse - they can't get the job done. That's a failure even if you consider the most narrow and cynical of corporate goals.
Ha, ha, serves M$, and everyone else rushing to fire their loyal employees, right.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There may be a shortage of "qualified people who can do the work at the wage we want to pay", but there is no such thing as a shortage of qualified people.
If you can't find enough qualified applicants, simply raise your offered compensation until you do. That's how markets work.
It may be that the IT job market will pick up in the US and wages will rise again. But I don't think anyone is going to bite on this until they see it actually happening. For now, I'd advise young people to stay away from tech unless they really love it and have a backup plan.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
i wouldn't want you doing anything in xml for me... your rant wasn't well formed.
seriously though, small companies will sometimes take a chance you. and you get the wonderful feeling of a big fish in a small pond. woohoo
Take risks.
I've never found a better job except after I've been squeezed out of my last job for various reasons. The longer I stay somewhere the harder it gets to take risks and move to another job.
I can imagine it just got tougher for you with a new baby. If you are offered a contract of a year with a better technology at the same pay or even less, will you go?
I know what I want to do and I can take a pay cut for it (thus posting anonymously). Its embedded design. I'll have to finish college for that but as a single guy I'd like to do that before I get married and fixed to a stable job. If I get married before it, I'll just brace for the risks and take the risk anyway.
BTW, if you can take contracts and are not asking for major paychecks, theres always something out there.
when the Republicans get done with their vision for the USA, have no fear, the wages for outsourced third world toilet jobs will be like manna from heaven here.
Do volunteer work for a charity in IT - get a letter of reference after six months, cash in.
Worked for some friends...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
There's the problem right there.
Look...DON'T put that on your resume. At least not so directly. It's ok if it gets characterized that way in by an interviewer, but you absolutely don't want to project that karma from your core, if you are looking to move up the tech job food chain. They want a signal from the candidate that says you are MORE than just a TS grunt. And wtf, you are. So make your story fit that mold. And make them know you are hungry for a chance to do something more. If they sense some enthusiasm in that department they will be hard pressed to turn you down. There are employers who see beyond past experience and pedigrees. It's happened to me, I hope it happens to you. Good luck!
All you "experienced Java programmers" are in luck!
What?
Personally, I worked on F/OSS software during school, which gave me some solid experience to point to when it came time to interview.
And (smart) employers WILL look at and consider open-source experience. There's a story I posted earlier in this discussion about trying to hire some help when I was working for a company in Cary... while there we interviewed a young lady who had done some work on Apache Geronimo... she didn't have quite the experience we were looking for, but her experience working on Geronimo - combined with her education - caused us to spend a lot of time talking about hiring her.
I actually argued for hiring her into a junior level role, but management insisted we could only hire the senior developer spots that we were specifically trying to fill, sadly. Anyway, the point isn't that we didn't ultimately hire her, as much as it is to say that yes, companies (well, at least some of them) DO take open-source experience into account.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
There's nothing about tech support that requires a degree. Why bother to spend tens of thousands of dollars and several years on formal schooling to take the same job you could have had out of high school? Yes, someone with a BS -is- too good for tech support.
Yes, but a brain-damaged chimp with a porn fixation is too good for tech support.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
You have to do what every other network engineer/sysadmin on the planet did: work as tech support until you have the experience. As shitty as tech support can get, trust me, it's valuable experience when you become an engineer. Mostly because of all the years of having to deal with frustrated users, you've slowly accumulated the knowledge that end-users are fscking idiots ;^)
But in all seriousness, that experience does put your decisions into perspective. You know EXACTLY how much pain just yanking that network cable will cause, and you know WHY it's more of a challenge to roll out Linux to your desktops than Windows. Employers want to be sure that you don't just have book knowledge. Just suck it up and be the broken-keyboard-swapper for awhile; if you're smart, you'll move to more interesting things quickly.
Part of why there is a nursing shortage is that is sucks to be a nurse. The doctors treat you like crap, they blame *you* when *they* screw up and nearly kill a patient, the hours are long, and the pay is bad for the work environment.
Now if you make the pay better, and shorten the hours, you might attract more nurses, but then then there's still the position at the bottom of the health care provider food chain.
Most nurses don't enter the field for the money. There's usually a more personal reason, and if the work environment is still sucky, then the money won't attract the staff.
The only people treated worse than nurses, in hospitals, are the hospital IT staff, because they have no medical training. Many nurses are abandoning clinical nursing for careers in healthcare IT. You get reasonable hours, decent pay, and you can crap on the IT staff, the way the doctors used to crap on you.
The nursing shortage is because the dynamics of healthcare drove the nurses away. On average, the cons far outweigh the pros.
The IT worker shortage is entirely about wage demands, coupled with managerial models that have not changed much since the industrial revolution, that have not adapted to managing an office, where work can't always be measured in discrete pieces (no matter how hard the try...and brother do they try), as opposed to a room full of sewing machines or milling machines. Also, in my opion, the majority of IT managers would not know talent if they saw it, don't know how to utilize it when they have it, and like allthe average people in the world, seek mediocrity, and because excellence eludes them personally, it frightens them whenthey do accidentaly find it.
My Heart Is A Flower
But this is, in theory, good news for those of us who are actually competent and working in the field. It means we can command higher salaries. The downside, of course, is that it's unlikely we'll have many competent people to work alongside, but rather end up delegating work to a bunch of half-brained peons and trying to shape their results into something workable.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
...and a complete unwillingness on the part of employers to train, not a lack of skilled labor.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
That's an interesting thing for Billy Boy to say. I know plenty of skilled IT guys who can't find a job in their field for the life of them. I had a devil of a time too.
Someone with 10 years of tech support experience is probably seen as overqualified for an entry-level IT position, so he'll end up losing either way.
My youngest brother was out of work for some time, and even his 4-5 years of experience was enough to get his resume tossed out as "overqualified" at many of the shops he was applying for. And he was looking to continue in tech support!
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
As an "IT" worker with experience in US, can't find a decent job in SF bay area. In interests of fairness, have to say that I declined jobs like this - hands on technical manager position that paid around 55 grand for managing 20 people. Sheesh.
I can't say I really have any sympathy for you. Turning your nose up at $55,000 (U.S. I'm assuming) and then complaining that you can't find a "decent job" seems a little silly to me.
Perhaps you overvalue your skills in the "new market". Lots of managers make under that figure.
It doesn't work that way in a large IT shop, especially those which have a lot of experienced developers. When I was at NWA, for example, we had no team leads, I was the junior programmer with almost 14 years of experience, and most of the dozen or so "grunt" programmers on the team had between 15-20 years. Our manager had about the same as most of the staff. I did take a leadership role in some projects/committees, but so did several others.
That's part of the problem. Startup companies have a VERY different culture from large corporations, and both are dumping people, resulting in a strange mix of experience/title ratios. Many of the folks I work with now have been programmers or commnuications analysts for 25 years or more. Why aren't they management? Because they like being technies, and most of them are damned good at it.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I was in that boat 3 yrs ago. There is nothing wrong with taking the 12/hr job, and thinking of it as being paid for experience and skills that no one gets in school. If you have drive, you will rise to the top. Its as simple as that.
Bottom line... Schools don't teach version control, builds, etc. They teach compiler design theory. You will need to learn practical skills on your own.
If you're experienced it doesn't matter if you don't have any degrees. Look at Jordan Hubbard - The FreeBSD project founder, BSD kernel guru and now the leader of Apple's Darwin project. That guy's got high school education. Look at Linus Torvalds. Linus programmed Linux way before he was even near to graduate in college. He could have and would have created Linux even though he wouldn't have been in college. Look at Bill Gates, he never graduated and does not have any degree. Look at Steve Jobs, he created Apple in his garage and did not have any kind of degree.
It's not the degree that will make you good. It's you. You will find many ways to become successful if you are experienced.
Ok, I understand that you're fresh out of college, so you don't understand what's happening. Hopefully we can enlighten you. First, nobody cares about your GPA. Not in the least. Second, everyone starts at the bottom.
So you might be asking yourself, why did I get that degree? Well, though everyone starts at the bottom, not everyone moves up at the same pace. If you really are smart, educated, resourceful, creative, and willing to work hard, you'll probably find opportunities open up as your resume fills out. If you're lacking in these regards, a degree won't fix it for you. Either way, you'll need experience.
There is no shortage of IT workers. What Bill Gates and every other CEO mean is that "there is plenty of shortage for minimum wage IT workers".
Yeah, they all want to pay you $6.50/hr and no benefits.
Completely off-topic, but I wholeheartedly agree with your signature. When was the last time you saw a story whose tag set didn't have at least 2 of these memes: "fud notfud, yes no maybe, itsatrap, tubes"? It's become the new Beowulf / ??? Profit / Natalie Portman craze.
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
I thought IT was tech support...
Kinda funny... corporations have a surplus of talent but don't want to pay for it so they choose to outsource to India. IT professionals, talented or not, began bailing out of the industry because competition was way to high. Students who may have leaned towards a career in IT backtracked for fear that jobs would be scarce and wages would be low.
To the managers hoping to save a buck by using cheaper labor at the expense of your fellow citizens - look what you've done to yourselves. You effectively made the problem worse for yourselves and for countless workers who became so desperate that they had to bail out of the industry.
The winners? India (obviously) and what remains of the IT workforce in areas hit hard by outsourcing. Yay nerds.
I didn't know you were also an ignorant racist. You have no clue at all what India or the people who live there are like, do you?
No, I'm not familiar with the hundreds of nations that live on the sub continent. God might be. My bigotry must have been apparent when I said that I wanted them all to have a decent standard of living or berated my greedy fellow citizens who would rape them instead.
Regardless of my ignorance about India, I can speak from painful personal experience about the love of corporate America. I got laid off from a Fortune 100 company four years ago and spent two years looking for work before giving up and going back to school for a job in a non transferable industry, medicine. They don't give a shit. I'm lucky enough to have had savings to make it through.
Now fuck off, you hateful, little troll.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Outsourcing forced US students to avoid IT like the plague, since they knew they could be outsourced in a minute, and most of those smart people went into microbiology, medicine, medical genetics, molecular biology, economics, and other fields.
What's amusing is the whining by those who promote outsourcing, and the ever expanding pool of H1B and other visas (L1, L2, etc), instead of the normal response of immigration quotas for people with a first world Ph.D. in the needed fields, as other countries do.
It's why our illegal immigration system is increasing, too. The market cares nothing for your politics, and tends to perfer Democrats (just look at actual investor returns and share price growth as two of many indicators) over the outsourcing Republicans.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
People keep saying that once the salary of high-tech jobs gets too high in India, then those jobs will then be moved to Vietnam or China, or some other place with a whole lot of poor uneducated people who are willing to work for a roof over their head and a bowl of rice a day.
That may be true for low-tech jobs, but certainly not for high-tech jobs like software engineering, because one good high-tech worker is worth an infinite number of mediocre high-tech workers. You either have the skills and desire to do a high-tech job competently, or else you are a liability. It is really that simple.
In modern militaries, the same trend is happening and is most evident in China's modernization where they are trying to scale down the manpower of their military, while increasing its numbers of elite troops and weaponry (in other words, make their armed forces more like the professional army of the United States). If you are in the special forces, you either have the ability to get the job done, or else you are a liability to your team. Most high-tech jobs, including software engineering (my personal profession) is the same way.
Now, a high-tech military machine or a high-tech business will inevitably have to pay a premium for labor and tools to do their job, so if your war plans or your business plan cannot adequately utilize that expensive high-tech labor and scale it to meet your objectives, then the problem is not with the high-tech soldiers or workers, but the problem is with your war plan or your business plan.
The cry by CEO's like Bill Gates that there is not enough high-tech talent out there is really just their myopic view of the business world in that being the fat, dumb, and happy titans of industry that they are, they lack the kind of entrepreneurial creativity necessary to exploit expensive high-tech talent to its full profit making potential. They treat their existing employees like trained monkeys and assume that they are smart enough to write code all day long, yet are not smart enough to demand fair compensation for their profitable work, and then wonder why they have problems attracting qualified candidates at half the going market rate for high-tech talent.
So really, the problem is not that there is not enough high-tech talent out there, rather it is the slow lumbering industry giants like Microsoft have business models that are simply not profitable for the kind of premium in salaries that smart motivated people in high-tech generally command.
Companies outsource the entry level positions and only direct hire senior level positions.
The problem is that without the junior level positions, you'll not increase the number of senior level workers. As technology changes, new senior level positions are created and the existing senior level people move to it. So now you have the same senior level people filling both the old jobs and the new jobs but no new senior level people being created.
No company wants to do the training, because it costs them a lot of money. They don't even save money when the employee is more experienced since they have to give them significant raises to keep them from going elsewhere. Every company thinks they can save on training by hiring away these people, but since nobody is willing to train them in the first place, they just don't exist.
Lack of qualified workers? That just means that the company is trying to skimp on training.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've been searching for 6 months and would quite happily take any job offered, but are there any offers heading my way??
Are there hell!
All of the people who could teach these students the correct way are all busy doing real job. Those who can, do. Whose who can't, teach.
will finally have to pick up a few hacking skills if the it-person shortage really happens.
That may be true for low-tech jobs, but certainly not for high-tech jobs like software engineering, because one good high-tech worker is worth an infinite number of mediocre high-tech workers. You either have the skills and desire to do a high-tech job competently, or else you are a liability. It is really that simple.
Are you suggesting that jobs in India won't be outsourced to China/Vietnam due to a lack of quality workers? The same thing has been said of workers in India over the last 5-7 years although it is not necessarily true. What is true is that despite how the American population felt about the abilities of those in lower-wage countries like India, the outsourcing still happened because the cheaper workers had the same degree of potential and a much higher degree of willingness to do the same thing at a reduced price.
Here is my guess. You said you where an experience IT person. To me that sounds like you probably have a broad skill base and no expertise. There are many long-time IT professionals that aren't worth a crap. I am an experienced Oracle DBA with an expertise in performance tuning and data warehousing. I would not describe myself as an "IT Professional". People that know "how to do *some* things are not people with a valuable skill set.
You probably need to build a stronger skill set.
Here where I work, I see 30 people doing the work of 10 and every manager is always complaining about resource (skilled people) shortage.
In part, the inefficiency is due to the staggering overhead of SDLC - much of our time is spent writing documents, going to meetings to talk about the documents, then writing up the meeting minutes and revising the documents.
This "death by documents" culture is probably due to the idea of programmers as a commodity. Yes, we also outsource extensively.
So, since programmers are interchangeable pieces of a large machine, we have to specify every detail of the design, without any interaction from seeing how our assumptions interact in actual code, and break these specs into tiny pieces. These tiny pieces are what the programmers are supposed to code from - better hope all possible questions were already thought of and answered!
Our (manager) time is then spent defining elaborate specifications and breaking them down into many tiny pieces, ensuring that those pieces are complete and none of them get lost, and managing the flow and subsequent assembly of these pieces back into an integrated system.
Interaction with the clients (users), give and take on specs, dealing with concrete examples rather than distant abstractions - ain't gonna happen, not on our watch!
Do our clients like what they end up with? We don't know, don't attempt to find out, and certainly don't care - we fulfilled the spec!
Do we know or care how much the business has changed in the year or more since we started this process? Once again, it's the ignorance and apathy response: don't know, don't care.
But I'm not bitter to be spending the years of my intellectual peak shuffling papers, oh no, not me.
Or they could pay you more and use golden nails to keep you on your seat.
Unfortunately most management don't recognise domain expertise and like to think of programmers as commoditised entities, just numbers on a spreadsheet.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I have 20 yrs in the field and a non-CS degree.
I have been constantly working the whole time (minus a week or two here and there between gigs).
I started out in programming because I joined a company originally to help them package some computer hardware.
I was a bit older than most fresh out of school guys because I had spent some time in the military.
It was a small company, and I showed I was interested, and small companies are always short of people.
They eventually let me into hardware testing, and writing some small software for the hardware tests
(so as not to bother the real programmers).
And so began my programming career. A long string of jumps from one type of programming to another.
What I can tell you from all that is that you can't easily break into new areas
(such as into programming from tech support) unless
1) your group is small and
2) you are working in something related but show some interest (and even aptitude) into the thing you want to move into
3) the thing you move into is bleeding edge and in demand
So if you are in a big department, either switch to an appropriate smaller department or a smallish company.
It is easier to look like a bigger fish in a smaller pond.
Either that, or beg your manager until he gives you a shot. (no honestly - I saw this work once, but not with me)
Oh yeah, and most important of all. Once you can say truthfully you have broken into the new area - by working on it,
it is time to apply for a job in that area - by asking for a position with responsibilities in it with a new employer.
New employers are always looking for expertise in bleeding edge stuff, and as long as your resume plausibly shows it,
and you can actually work with it, the rest doesn't really matter. They just want someone to walk them safely through the landmines.
One thing that always holds you back is your current employer - that can't forget they hired you to pack boxes
- and won't fully make room for your new area of expertise by forcing you to still work some on your old area.
So by establishing a new position with a new employer you get to erase that liability, and fully validate your new role.
You don't actually become a big fish until you get out of the pond.
(BTW, you wouldn't believe how many companies I've seen that won't promote from within,
but are willing to give someone a spot if they were already in the same spot at a smaller company)
Rinse, lather, repeat - a 3 year cycle is best.
And always keep pushing yourself into the feeding frenzy at the bleeding edge.
The bleeding edge may not always be good for your project
(even though for sure if a project doesn't have anything bleeding edge,
it won't attract any real talent, and may fail just on that)
But the bleeding edge will always be good for your career.
This is obviously coming from an Indian news site, and begins with a charged (and quite honestly offensive) statement reading "IT professionals in the US may soon stop complaining..."
Gee...gee whiz...You think this might be because we are on the eve of the "Trickle Out" Republicans being voted out of congress and India is faced with the unpleasant spectre of actually having balanced trade with America? That they won't have an American congress that gives tax breaks to corporations that ship America's jobs to their country? Gosh, Andy - could it be?
This was the third comment I modded, and I don't want to remove my earlier moderations. Parent post matched my experience. Demand seem to fluxuate randomly as well- I postponed graduating for a semester because I couldn't find a job, only to get three offers at the end of my next semester. A friend of mine who also graduated with a CS degree at the same time I did worked low-end tech support for a year, but when a position opened in my company I told him to apply and he got the job.
What I'm trying to say is you might have to look for a while, but don't get too discouraged. Demand is high, but each company is looking for slightly different things in the person they are hiring. Keep applying and maybe get a better resume.
Correct on all accounts!!
/. in days, but I'm fresh outta mod points!!
This is by far the most insightful comment I've read on
Note: the article was originally titled "IT Worker Shortages All Over".
Honestly, some days it's not worth poking your head outside the firewall...
Just junk food for thought...
I'm sorry, I must be confused here. We ship our IT work over to India because they have such a highly skilled, cheap workforce. They don't really have that many skilled workers willing to work for next to nothing so now they want to outsource the jobs we outsourced to them back to us??? And this proves that outsourcing works??? I must have skipped my meds today...
No, salaries will stubbornly be kept at the same level, and instead of hiring a 100% engineer you hire two 50% productive ones for current salaries. You may think it is stupid, that 2 crappy ones are as expensive as a good one, and that there will be inefficiencies due to the increasing amount of people. But that's what I've seen.
Besides, if you put on overtime those 50% ones and, say, increase their workday in 4h (typical 12h), then you have two programmers that will perform at 75% for a total of 150%. Once they burn out replace them with other one (after all they are cheap and easy to find)
A "career" in IT... Poor souls...
This is what happens after a sufficiently long period without sufficient opportunity for entry and mid-level IT workers. People leave the sector to tend bar or build houses or drive trucks because it pays better and drains the soul less than being a helpdesk tech or an asp monkey. Fewer new people stay long enough to develop the skills required to be senior engineers.
I realize it's hard to make a business case for hiring locally for a job that could be outsourced to China or continuously training your people in new languages and technologies instead of firing one batch of contractors as soon as their project is done and replacing them with new ones, but it has to be done. There's no self-study guide or college degree that can give a newbie the equivalent of real experience, so if the IT industry isn't creating the people it will need 5 or 10 or 20 years down the line right now it isn't going to have those people. Good luck getting upper managers who can't see past the end of next quarter to understand that, though.
0 1 - just my two bits
"Two of those have been willing to pay whatever they had to for qualified programmers and had a hard time finding 'qualified applicants'."
And how exactly would a qualified programmer know that your company was "willing to pay whatever they had to"? I'll bet you didn't even advertise a salary range. The fact is that if you can't find a qualified programmer with 3 months you probably have some other competing agenda (low salary, cultural bias, etc) that is more important than hiring someone.
The cry by CEO's like Bill Gates that there is not enough high-tech talent out there is really just their myopic view of the business world
Myopic? Bill hasn't been CEO for a while, and MS is famous for the number of millionaires it's produced. Snipe someone else.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Where companies actually hire tier 1 support techs and let them learn the business, instead of contracting a bunch of tier 1 & 2 techs and firing them en masse when the product they support is EOLed?
What are the requirements for foreign nationals to get jobs there? Do they speak English? Is there good food and beer? I'm interested! I can learn a new language if necessary!
Now I wonder if the first two companies you mentioned tried to get the project contract first and look for suitable employees then? That is a practice I sometimes hear about, and the risks should be obvious.
The third company was probably a hopeless case by the time you got there. Lacking the means (good employees) to get the job done and the money to hire said good employees, it would have taken a miracle. Does not happen often.
Finally, outsourcing has its risks too:
I see some wishful thinking here, with risks (they don't have an 8 or 9 on their team?) similar to what your first two companies went through.
Besides, the easy termination of the contract is nice but this may not be your biggest problem. You still need to find new people for the project, unless it was canceled altogether. And replacing the whole team because you just "fired" the outsourcing company may be even harder than finding one or two new people.
C - the footgun of programming languages
The thing is China at least has a lot of high quality universities that are churning out skilled software engineers. It's quite easy to find people with the skills, and increasingly with the commercial experience, to get your job done. Language is a challenge, but at the rates you can hire teams in China it's one that you can afford some overhead to take care of.
While your idea may sound good, but I would rather have two "pretty good" people who can work together versus one "excellent" person? Why? Don't put all your eggs in one basket. (redundancy) What if the excellent person wants to go on vacation to Europe for two weeks and server melts you can't get him on his cell phone for 8 hours? What if he gets hit by a bus or quits? From his side, he would probably have a nicer vacation knowing there is someone there to take care of things. You can say "well a really excellent guy would leave a backup plan that a monkey could follow", I doubt you could grab Eileen from accounting to slap a server together.
My understanding is that with job tenure at Tata, Wipro, etc. less than six months, Nasscom is really looking for low cost labor to compete with China. Regarding Bill Gates, please let me know when Bill Gates pays entry level developers at Microsoft the same as he pays entry level attorneys in his legal department.
Ken
Randy: (thick southern drawl) This here's Srijan Technologies, can we help y'all?
Ranjeet: (prim British Accent) I am having a problem with your SMTP server's configuration, can you help me diagnose the problem?
Randy: Shoot! We'll tree that possum in no time!
Ranjeet: What? A possum?
Randy: I'm sayin' it's a cakewalk son! A no-brainer! We specialize in them-thar' SMTP whatchacallits.
Ranjeet: Are you speaking English? Do you have someone else I can talk to?
Randy: I reckon' so. HEY BUBBA!! PICK UP ON LINE ONE!!!
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
Though to be fair, a lot of the people I've dealt with would seem to have been selected on the basis that they're still breathing rather than being able to demonstrate any specific skills or experience in software development.
I'm sure the graduate shortage in India won't be an issue. Companies like Wipro or HCL will be more than happy to carry on taking on anyone who's happy to pretend they can write software. Though I do sort of feel sorry for the 3 or 4 people out of 30 who can actually do the job and end up covering for their colleagues who are at best incompetent and at worst incompetent and don't care.
"shortage of skilled workers" really means "shortage of cheap workers"
As demand in India has increased, so have the rates. We saw exactly the same thing in Russia. Originally our out source was cheap. Then year after year the contract increased in value because the work force realized they could extract more.
And its not much different than the job shortage where I am... where shortage really means cheap (college) students. I know lots of older (over priced ?!) developers/designers/architects looking for work.
Not to mention the unemployed immigrant work force with skills (!??!?!)
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
What the hell are you people talking about? Where exactly are you all, in the deep south? I could become a millionaire just acting as your recruiter. If any of you are actually programmers (not that helpdesk guy, his "I'm learning advanced skills like Linux and JSP" gave him away) please contact me so that I can make $3K to $5K a head getting you $90K+ jobs (but I suspect the real programmers amongst you already get dozens of offers like that).
We can't find any real programmers. It is so desperate I was forced to recommend an interviewee who had never heard of design patterns. For god's sake, if any of you have ever used, say, the factory pattern professionally and live in the North East, please contact me. I could walk into any dev shop here with you* and walk out with a huge wad of cash that their HR dept couldn't wait to give me.
Yes, it's insane in India, but it's pretty crazy here, too.
*Not you, helpdesk guy.
Lies about crimes
.... There isn't one anymore.
showe your BSIT degree with a 3.5 GPA up your ass. It means NOTHING at all.
Experience means that you are capable to work in the team, that you know when to back up, when to press for things, actually have some understanding that working code != proper code and shipping code != quality code because of development resources != whatever methodology of the day would love to consider resources to be capable of.
Oh, and because of your BSIT degree with a 3.5 GPA you probably expect that you will be paid well, right? Stick it up baby, during last three years filtering resumes first ones to go are the ones that put their BSIT degrees with a 3.5 GPA in a bold colored font as the first line. If that's all you have and you actually believe that it matters even the slightest bit - you are an idiot.
nobody wants to work with an idiots. They usually don't deliver and just manage to make a huge mess when they are forced to discover that nobody appreciates their BSIT degree with a 3.5 GPA and expects real results instead.
I've job hopped all over, so I think I'm gonna hop one more time into a job that is inflation proof and can't be outsourced, and the sky is the limit on pay;)
Nowadays they don't even bother to call your references until they've already decided to hire you.
So what we are lacking is not "talent" but rather we are lacking "hiring talent" -- we do not have the ability to discern who can ramp up quickly into a position -- we lumber on with the dangerously flawed expectation that workers are supposed to come prefabricated for our business's needs.
Someone had to do it.
The big difference between now and yesteryear is OJT and learned-training.
Companies expect a long history of experience. Actually in most programming work, your degree counts as a secondary nice-to-have. Certifications and job history count as #1 (after the salary discussion is over and both sides accept).
That's the big difference between skilled workers now and skilled workers during WWI and WWII.
During WWII especially, there was a CRISIS of qualified men to work skilled and semi-skilled jobs.
Rosie the riveter didn't go from the kitchen to slamming hot rivets into huge plates of steel overnight. She had to learn how to do it, understand quality control, and know what was a good rivet finish vs. a bad one, or her work would lead to structure integrity failure down the road.
It wasn't until after WWII that women in engineering colleges started to pop up, and employers were willing to start hiring them.
When employers are REALLY pushed against the wall, then they will make investments in training and education.
Right now, we don't have a shortage. You'll almost never be able to walk into a company without the skill they want (say, Great Plains experience) and get that training after hire. They expect--they demand that you already have it before you even fill out the paperwork.
That to me, so no indication of a real tech worker shortage. That's just employers not willing to make an investment in their people so the tasks can be fulfilled.
There's nothing about tech support that requires a degree. Why bother to spend tens of thousands of dollars and several years on formal schooling to take the same job you could have had out of high school? Yes, someone with a BS -is- too good for tech support.
Obviously not, as the market is pointing out.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Republican War on Skilled Workers.
... Intervention in the US free market with massive foriegners.
Big Fat Liar Bill Gates!
Gates and the skilled worker industry lied in past years so they can increase H1-B Visas.
Bill Gates is a LAW-LESS sob.
Hey Republicans, FORIEGNERS DO NOT VOTE in the USA,
more reason you may lose the Congress.
Come on all you foriegn Indians, get to the US Polls and vote! LOL!
Score & Karma: SASA: Slashdot Approval Seekers Anonymous
... I will say this though: some of the folks that came through were clearly very smart, but just lacked the experience we were looking for. We needed somebody that could step in and contribute right away, and we didn't have any budget for hiring junior level people and grooming them. That would have been a good thing to do, if we could have gotten the money approved. But that issue is somewhat orthogonal to the original point anyway...
--------------
-Is it?
It used to be (in the US) that you could find people with the experience--but guess what? US companies largely stopped hiring US workers, and decided to outsource to foreign nations instead. So who is getting experience now? Not US entry-level IT workers. Unless you want to count doing 10-key data entry as "IT work".
Like it or not--US companies gave the golden goose to India--and US companies are going to be stuck dealing with Indians for a long time.
US companies (collectively) are going to have to start throwing money around and actually hiring again if they want US students to take IT majors at anywhere near the rates like they used to.
~
Its fearmongering to generate a glut of qualified applicants which allows companies to pay low salaries.
I thought it was a good idea
What kind of useless deadbeat schmuck lives off his girlfriend's MOTHER?! For TWO YEARS?!
- Companies aren't willing to pay, so they outsourced. Thinking ahead all the way to the next quarter, wow.
- IT involves life in a cube. Companies treat their IT [all workers] like shit, and fire them all before age 30 when they get lives and aren't willing to work 80 hour weeks for 40 hours of pay.
- The press portrays outsourcing as the end of all jobs. We're doomed!!!
- Outsourcing costs went up. India + overhead costs ~= US costs. Actually this was true from the start, how surprising the press got something wrong!
- People are avoiding CS majors, because of the press on outsourcing, and the idiots in charge are waging war on science and keeping our foreign students out of the country.
= "Shortage"
In summary... HA HA! Pay up biatch.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
How easy it is to land on scrap heap.
So I started my own, yet to be successful, IT company. The biggest downside is years of development before the product is ready to be put into market place. So no income. So now I do TS.
It is an excellent time to start looking for jobs!
I wish the field had been this friendly a few years ago when I was looking for one. Case in point, I just got off a phone from an interview from our friends at the Bay area and they don't seem to be slowing down the hires. It seems to be increasing more than slowing down, considering that I'm don't particularly fit the type of profile I thought they would contact out of the blue..
Hopefully this new "bubble" doesn't burst in everyone's faces this time.
[alk]
nobody wants to work with an idiots.
Ain't that the truths.
--saint
One who's now got a fucking career and doesn't feel the need to post anonymously on Slashdot maybe?
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
US$55k/yr. is subsistence if you have any dependants.
You should have done some internships while in college. It's a real good way to get a head start. If you are not good at networking and don't have any IT experience, don't expect to start off making $50,000 for an entry level position. You have to prove you can be an asset to a company. I've been able to do four IT internships while in school and already have offers coming in from employees. I only have a 3.1 GPA and went to a small private college. Bottom line, it pays to do internships. In your situation you may want to go back to school for a graduate degree or try looking for employment in a different location.
Sounds exactly like my last job!!! Funny thing is, that upper management is typically not aware of this, and suffers from the delution that their great managment abilities were the reason for the project success, not the fact that you did 120+ hours a week trying to clean up the mess from those half-brained peons!
With that kind of typical work environment, no wonder there is a shortage.
-H
When I'm recruiting (and I am right now) I don't care what your official title was at your last company. I care about what you did. So if you were mentoring junior staff, then right that down. If you were "responsible for the design and implementation of the FooBaz component" then put that down. It really doesn't matter what the company called you.
We will ask you about it in the interview, and if you bullsh!t us, then don't expect to have it work out, but you don't need permission from your employer to take on responsibility. Be proactive. Use a little initiative.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
So where da f00kin' jobs at?!
Then get a tech support job (w/ a good company) and move on up! Just because you have a degree doesn't mean you're entitled to start a few rungs up the ladder. It helps, but its not a magic promotion bullet.
:) ) churn out grads who can do a half-a$$ed job at a variety of things. Unfortunately most jobs are better served by people who can do a good job at a much more narrow scope. E.g. the department supports the IP network - why hire a CS grad who knows a bit about IP and has logged onto a few routers in test labs, vs a guy who's spent a year or two actually working with them!!! The CS grad may also know java programming, visual C, system design, database design, etc. but its all irrelvant.
Speaking as somebody who worked their way up from the helpdesk (my degree is in pol sci, go figure), I personally would hire someone w/ 2 years experience (say) over a graduate anyday. That is industry reality. Ditto for industry certs say CCNA (which is only 1 year part time) over a degree.
Unfortunatley this is not properly explained to uni entrants, not your fault I admit.
It also doesn't help that a lot of CS degrees (and I'm grossly generalising here, so no flames pls
Sorry for the rant but that's just how I see things, no offence intended. Just bite the bullet and get a tech support job in a good field (i.e. stay the ---- clear of consumer support for telcos etc., go business support) and see where u go from there,.
Last time I checked, tech support WAS IT. You do your 18mos. and then move into a real job. I am a project manager for a large IT company and we hire 50% of our new hires from our own IT department (phone support) and the other 50% from temps who have proven themseves on the job. No external resumes need be submitted.
"There is nothing to do it. But to do it." -Floyd Pepper
You're nuts! If someone is trying to get a job they're going to be busy doing that, not developing ope source projects.
And another thing: open source work actually decreases demand for IT developers and contributions to FOSS tends to drive demand downward. If all software were available tomorrow as FOSS, demand for IT developers would immediately drop to near zero levels. As a highly skilled IT person the last thing I'm going to do is develop a FOSS system. Instead I'll produce something proprietary that I can keep to myself and profit from.
To all you people complaining about your wage.. here is a thought. Quit reading slash dot and go work.
re outsourcing: heard on CNBC recently that bonuses paid to NEW YORK CITY financial brokerage houses workers (some 130,000 or so) will be over 200,000 US$. each. on average for 2006. Thats a total of $37 billion. Yea - thats correct - billion. I wonder if any of these are it or ex it people??
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
After I graduated from school I ended up getting three firm offers, each of them said that although I lacked much of a work history (1 month at a company as a developer before being laid off, as well as some contracted work that wasn't development related at all) and a fairly poor GPA (2.7) working on open source software demonstrated that I could be valuable to the company.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think one of the biggest is that code doesn't lie. Anyone can put on their resume or say in an interview that they did "X, Y and Z" - but having open source code out there gives employers a chance to see real code that you've really written.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
...one of these people that I hear about that interviews, and cannot write a function to average an array of integers. In my experience, those are the only people that do not have jobs now. One coworker of mine told me about a prospect that when asked to write such a function, ended up writing code that returns a hash containing the math exceptions returned by any integer overflows.
Seriously, campus career fairs nationwide have been exhibiting all time attendance highs by employers. That should be your category. If you cannot get a job today, something is very wrong. Its not 2002 anymore.
I've often been involved with hiring decisions at the various companies at which I've worked.
I strongly recommend that you take a programming or IT job regardless of how much it pays. Take the job even if it pays nothing at all. The first job is about getting your foot in the door, not about pay. You can negotiate salary after you've had a job for a year.
You're right to avoid tech support jobs. Tech support doesn't count as programming experience; you may just as well have been a secretary. It's very important that you have relevant experience in the field.
Remember that your BSIT degree will grow "stale" after about 10 years, at which time it will count for little. It's important that you follow your education with experience. Take a programming or IT job regardless of pay.
I am an UNIX sys admin with 6 years of experience in Canada. I have been applying to IT jobs in the US and I am not getting many replies....
Funny, and wrong on so many levels. The grandparent was saying they had no experience and wanted suggestions on how to get it if no-one will employ them. By showing they have a passion for this work, and by showing they know enough to create an application, they gain the experience that they lack.
(jaw drops to floor at sheer wrongness of this supposition). We host over 600,000 domain names almost completely on open source software - Apache, ProFTPd, Qmail, MySQL. They don't just host themselves. You have to integrate them with the billing and provisioning systems, administrate and configure them - a job most people don't want to have to do by hand. Then we layer on our own applications on top to provide a feature rich, affordable hosting solution. Our entire business is based on effectively using OSS!
If all software were available tomorrow as FOSS, demand for IT developers would immediately drop to near zero levels.
You're not Steve Ballmer by any chance? That has got to be one of the most moronic conclusions I have ever read. Who is going to support all of this at the enterprise level? Oh, and the fact that a larger number of people would be using the software would mean that there would be more support work in general. And of course there's the whole customized and bespoke installation work. Oh wait, "There'll be a program that does that". Yeah, right.
When you move out of your parents' basement and into the real world, you'll notice something about highly skilled IT people. They don't feel the need to tell people they are highly skilled - they're too busy working to troll Slashdot. You want to make money that way, go ahead. Let's just hope your business skills are a little more advanced than the evidence of your post suggests.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Then take the tech support job and work in it a short time. Prove yourself worthy of moving up, and then move up.
;).
From discussing with my graduating peers several years ago, I had the lowest salary of anyone in the class. It was barely above tech support. But I went to do something that I was really interested in and it got me enough experience to get into a large company that I really wanted to work for.
Sure, I could have gone and programmed COBOL like most of them (graduation year 1999). But I wasn't interested in that kind of work at all, so I did something else.
Still doing it. Not loving it as much, the novelty has worn off and I have a family to spend time with now, instead of computers in a data center
...have you seen the job postings? The problem is that companies are hunting for superheroes.
Typical job description: Must be a Senior Unix Admin who knows networking inside and out, Cisco certified, excellent Oracle, DB2 and MySQL required as well as 7 years of EMC and Veritas expertise. Must also be a Senior Java Developer and J2EE Architect with minimum 10 years experience and have in depth business knowledge in the healthcare and financial industries. Starting salary 50k. lol.
These are the kinds of job post I see. If you knew all that shit inside and out, you would not work for 50k in the US, that's for sure. Nobody
knows all the shit they are looking for inside and out. What they want is for you to do 5 jobs and they don't want to pay you shit.
Meanwhile, "upper management" is busy exercising their stock options and buying their 3rd vacation home on some really nice island.
Shortage my ass.
Now how exactly would extensive modula2 training have helped me back in the day? The little fortran I learned is still potentially useful - but apart from that it is the methods and not the syntax that is important.
Universities are there to teach you how to find the solutions to your problems - technical schools are there so you learn how to solve specific well known problems.
... Friend of mine is stuck down in Ole Miss for a while. He told me last Saturday that the want-ads often go a week without a single IT ad.
There is a huge shortage of skilled man power that can work for a less salary :), the software big giants here are finding tough to get the skilled cheap labor, so they are reducing there selection criteria to get as much software developers that know the domain, in which these companies are looking applicants for.
> degrees mean Jack Shit in the real world
Funny how that point of view is advocated mostly by those without academic credentials. What is even worse, the uneducated masses tend to drag down those few who earned their degrees and who don't fit the herd mentality. "Team work" seems to be the norm for this dull contemporary workforce where morons help each other from drowning in tasks way above their intellectual foundation.
Isn't this "the president presiding over the worst economic times since the depression"? The media, despite being in near-duplicate economic conditions to the Clinton Administration, yet now it's decried as horrible.
So how can there be a _shortage_ of any workers- aren't we 'a paycheck away' from being homeless and flooding the breadlines?
(No, we're not: for the people about to mark me as a troll, this is the point: we're in stellar economic circumstances, the media wants you to think otherwise.)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
> We host over 600,000 domain names almost completely on open source software - Apache, ProFTPd, Qmail, MySQL.
Isn't that the point the OP was making? Instead of paying for software you are using OSS that you got for free. So instead of providing companies with revenue to hire programmers you're doing exactly what the OP said, reducing employment for IT workers.
Only though soem warped logic could anyone possibly think that people like you who use OSS is increasing demand for IT developers.
You can't get experience nowadays, since there are no entry level jobs in IT.
Either you've coded a revolutionary new operating system for a Fortune 100 corporation or your resume goes straight in the trash. If you just graduated from college with an IT degree and you have a student loan, you'd better be prepared to work for Wal Mart and file bankruptcy unless you go for a Government job or you got a MBA or learned Hindi/Chinese to go with that tech degree.
On the flip side, as a direct consequence, there's an absolutely BOOMING market for workers willing to amass a boat load of employment references - that is, by doing boat loads of programming work for free. Unpaid internships are now proliferating faster than spam.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
When I got this management job at our data center, I was looking at network administrators being paid $52K/year to set us up. That's low as frak, but not much lower than the guy next door who was offering $55K/year. Granted, when I was starting out in 1995 the network admin pulled in $125K and I bet people think that's way overpaid, but that guy back then was 45 years old with 13 years experience with Unix. Our current top network guy is nearly 40 years old with 14 years experience and with all the certs.
$52K a year for 14 years experience for CNE/MCSE/Linux+, how do they do it?
Simple, they keep you out of work for 4 years and make you take huge salary cuts.
Cut rate pay, top rate labor. Maybe in 2010 we'll get a candidate with 20 years experience securing military computers all for minimum wage.
Yay capitalism!!!
I've never seen objective info to back these lobbyist claims. Rand Corp once did a commisioned study on tech and sci in general, and found no shortage.
Plus, IT is cyclical. If we flood the US with oversease labor, it will probably not return home fast enough to fix a downturn. Congress has proven slow-to-react in the past.
Table-ized A.I.
You can't get a job because for friggin degree is worthless. Why would a company care about a BS in information technology? You don't need some kind of academic degree to teach how to read manuals about servers, databases, and other admin stuff. You're an IT guy, not someone is inventing some new product. Engineering and computer science make sense as university degrees, but no employer would care about you going to college, when they just want someone to administer their database. You don't need to go to college to learn to RTFM.
Indeed. Microsoft has consistently rejected older candidates, picking younglings out of college. If there was a true "shortage", then they would pick far more older candidates also. They want what they want at THERE price on THERE conditions and will lie to get it.
Table-ized A.I.
Should be "their", not "there". Sorry. Long day.
Table-ized A.I.
Should I finish my degree with 2 misdemenor assaults on my record from a troubled fall from grace as I lost my A$$ in 2001? Im working on a 4 year degree but would like some feedback about how much I will be turned down after they like my degree and/or past experience then move on to the background check....
First, companies and governments spend lots of money on paying people more than they have to. They do this to deny skills to the competition, and to buy loyalty. Because they do not truly know the motivation of their workers, this will involve overpaying. This is an example of asymmetric information. Unfortunately free and transparent markets exist only in the minds of academics with tenure, who are free from having to worry about reality.
As for labo(u)r, only the basic kinds of labour are commodities (ditch digging.) The nature of a commodity is that, with a few minor scaling parameters, it is the same everywhere (I can buy wheat given only a few basic numbers like moisture content; if I have an ISO certificate of compliance I can buy, say, 316 alloy set screws anywhere in the world. These are commodities.) IT labour is not a commodity because of factors like language, culture, the difficulty of evaluating different degree courses and experience in different companies, and social skills factors. You cannot switch in 50 CS graduates from Mumbai and switch out 50 CS graduates from Imperial College London and expect anything like the same results on a given project. If IT labour was a commodity, you could do precisely that. Hence Google's recruitment system.
God preserve us from people who believe economics 101 without any real world experience.
Pining for the fjords
Offshoring has eroded the base of new workers who might be able to become qualified for the position you're advertising.
Now you're suffering because the qualified people have jobs elsewhere and all you have left are rank newbs desperately wanting to get in.
They're suffering, and now you are. You don't care about those newbs, so don't look to us for sympathy about your plight either. You made this job market bed, now lie in it like the rest of those workers who have to suffer.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
> We host over 600,000 domain names almost completely on open source software - Apache, ProFTPd, Qmail, MySQL. Isn't that the point the OP was making? Instead of paying for software you are using OSS that you got for free. So instead of providing companies with revenue to hire programmers you're doing exactly what the OP said, reducing employment for IT workers. apache is a diffused open source program, how many programmer were licensed or not assumed because of this? some that worked on IIS maybe but hundreds were assumed to make modification and personalization to it that maybe microsoft would not assume for the same modifications... and the thousands and thousands of NOT FULL TIME PROGRAMMERS but still IT tecnicians that every day are paid to install, configure, personalize, optimize, and simply run and mantain the milion of sites that use apache were all sacked? or were they assumed??
It's quite simple, really. The Chicken is volunteering for Open Source projects. The Egg is getting job offers. Most of the best people I know followed this formula. And most of us have more trouble finding vacation time than contracts.
Devon
If you're skilled, ready to move, and prepared to work for Mumbai wages, then go for it. Let us know how you get on.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
There are a shitload of entry level jobs in IT. I went to the career fair at my alma mater last September (CMU) for my current employer (who is hiring a boatload of CS graduates). The CMU career fair was the single largest that they've ever had; more employers were exhibiting there than anytime in history. Even more than 1999, in the height of the dot com boom. Technical career fairs at other universities all over the country have also been exhibiting similarly high amounts of traffic. You might have trouble finding a job if you are one of these people that looks and acts like a professional student, or has their parents managing every step of the process, but not if you are reasonably competant.
What you are saying was true in 2002 and 2003, but certainly not true now.
Encouraging...
Your hardwork was all bullshit. We wanted people who got lucky out of highschool and are totally happy oppressed corporate monkeys. Only these peoples hardwork is worth a damn.
If you expect differently "you are pompus and feel entitled" and "lazy"
>In addition healthcare is not elastic. If prices rise, people still need care so you can't just raise
>prices to drive down demand.
Why is it this? Why is it that most people don't care how much their health care costs? I submit it is because most paying customers have insurance. And to them, they don't even KNOW how much their health care really costs.
For example. I recently had a baby. The actual billed cost was about $15,000, if I recall correctly. My out-of-pocket expense was $100. So for many people they "Had a baby and it only cost $100!"
You want to see price competition in health care? Have insurance companies pay the patients and let the patient shop around and keep any savings.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Msft just wants an excuse to lobby for more H1B slave labor, and to export more US jobs.
You would be a fool to believe anything Bill Gates claims.
Skilled positions go unfilled for months at the time because no suitable candidate is found. This before start talking about money.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
IT workers have become the modern 'garment workers'. Skills required have gone by the way side. What matters is how cheaply you will work and how many hours you will put in 'off the clock'. ROI to companies means nothing. Case in point. I was working at a company with a person that was incrediblely productive. He was the answer man in our building. If you had a techie question he could answer it. Plus he had in-depth domain knowledge of the company's business processes. I commented to a manager how lucky they were to have someone like him around and I hoped he was well paid. The manager confided to me that the person in question got a fair salary but probably deserved much more. The manager said the employee had come up with so many ideas, had improved so many processes that he easily had saved the company two to three times what he was paid. The project I was working on being an example. By improvements this employee had made he ended saving over $200,000 for the company. Six months later his job had been off-shored to India and he was laid off. The India programmer was so 'green and in experienced' that he did not even know how to kill a process on UNIX or to fix a C programmer that used pointers. But the execs didn't care. He was half the price.
That article summarizes the correct way to end a thread's life and also contains a link to Sun's tutorial on thread lifecycles.
Was that so hard?
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Did you ever take Econ 101? Did you read the part about the labor market? If not, that's your assignment for today.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
This is why I advise *EVERYONE* to *INTERN*.
Companies that will happily intern you while you are a junior with no experience will turn their nose up at you after you graduate.
There are two keys to college if all you are doing is getting a bachelor's degree for a job.
1) Take your core classes first.
2) Intern.
Brains and freaks who are doing it because they completely love the work and who write compilers for fun instead of going out, probably do not need to worry about #2 so much provided they have a steller GPA.
---
As for the experience.
1) Go to www.openoffice.org.
Find a project to work on.
Work on that project and get it installed into the code.
Voila- experience.
Will you *PLEASE* put rectangular cut and paste into Openoffice? B)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Like I said before. Go find smart people and let them learn. That's the secret you've been looking for.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I'm completely NOT surprised. Growing up as a teenage coder geek (which was fun), I went on to get a CS degree (which was fun), and learned linux/perl/bash/etc.. on my own (fun). So I was digging tech, and then started taking jobs doing "unix systems administration". After 6+ yrs of working IT , I'm now out of the field, and I've learned many things since then...
Lets look at some factors for lack of IT workers -
- Most Universities dont teach IT skills.
- IT positions are often catch-all positions for technical expertise
- IT positions often require 24/7 work AND long hours
- IT can be high stress, and job performance can mean the bottom line of a company
- IT pay ususally doesnt match expectations AT ALL.
My suggestions to organizations that want to build a good IT infrastructure? HIRE MORE THAN ONE ADMIN. And I'm not just talking a "windows guy" and a "unix guy" here. Think about the roles that an IT admin could likely be required to fill -
- Architect the product/service - research/design/develop/deploy/enhance/support
- Integrating and Support legacy systems - dealing with crashes, bad processes, etc..
- Purchasing/Recommending Hardware & Software - evaluate/compare, shop around, justify, deal with vendors
- General Technologists - read journals, mailing lists, manuals - create new tasks based on these
- Security - firewalls/viruses/vulns, set security policies, (reading/patching/upgrading etc..)
- LAN/Internet/Server Room/COLO management - switches, firewalls, cabling, power, air cond., building & vendor management, etc..
- Storage and On/Offsite Backups - Tapes, vendors, capacity, business planning
- End User Support - working with customers/project managers when things arent right
- Desktop Support - Teaching basic computer skills, dirty mouse balls, listening to complaints, etc..
- Email - lists, spam, viruses, blackberries, failover SMTP relays, etc..
- Printing - repeatedly showing people how to fix paper jams, replacing toner, paper, etc.
- Executive Laptops - Lost laptops, kids install games, break IT policies
- Phone systems - VOIP, POTS, vendor management
- Monitoring/Alerting - maintain reporting systems, responding to alerts
- Work with Engineers - Understand/Explain/Refute/Fix system Platform/Performance problems
- Corp Website - hosting, updating changes to customer facing websites
- 5+ yrs experience with XXX, YYY, ZZZ specialized skill sets (applications/databases/languages)
- Ability to Self Motivate & Manage, Prioritize, Communicate, etc..
So yeah. I've done these. Concurrently. I've burned myself out at several companies after 1-2 yrs at each, and needed many months to recover. I thought I'd do better by doing consulting, instead I found myself doing all the same things, for multiple companies at a time! Maybe its the curse of being capably minded, but I've said FUCK THIS "lifestyle". I got tired of never getting a full nights sleep, commuting to the Valley, COLO's, etc. Its always VERY hard for me to leave any position. It always takes months of planning/hiring/training replacements, etc..
I thought I wanted money. I thought I might get rich. Now, I know I was missing out on living. I've got an hourly job paying the bills, and I can actually take sick days, and vacation! Thats almost unheard of in sysadmin worlds.
Computers and technology were my passion. Still are. But I wont be working in IT for a LONG time.
Just to clarify: by "junior programmer", I mean junior in relative work experience, not in title. Most of the folks on the team had five or more years of experience more than I did. My formal title was Senior Applications Analyst.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Oh, absolutely. If you can't outline your own strengths on your resume, you probably need to rewrite it -- that's what a resume is supposed to be used for. :-)
I've always taken the initiative (as you can see from the numerous examples on my now-somewhat-dates resume on my web site), and I tend to do very well in interviews. My interview-to-job-offer ratio has been very close to 2:1 over the course of my 18-year career.
The problem I had back when I was last looking for work (2002-2004) was getting past the technical keyword filters and other obstacles to actually get a phone (or face-to-face) interview. Once I got to that point, it was relatively smooth sailing.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Make that, "My formal title was Senior Applications Analyst, and that was the same as most of the folks on the team who had more experience than I did. The few I can think of who were Applications Specialists (the only title above Senior Analyst at the time) were 25- or 30-year people, and one of them had been working in the same environment at a previous airline for over 22 years before he came to NWA in 1989. In 1996 he had worked on the same set of apps for 30 years. He was good, too. Short and grumpy at times, but very good. :-)
(Er... Hi, Don!)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I've read slashdot for years, but this is my first post.
I was recently hired in an IT position at a rather prestigious boarding school. The pay is great and the opportunity that comes with the job is amazing. Though I started out in Computer Science, I graduated with a degree in education. All the posts thus far that have indicated it takes more than programming knowledge to get a position are right on point. I've learned everything I need to know about programming on the job; it was my outside knowledge that put me where I am today.
For anyone looking to begin a career in IT, I would suggest building up a skill set in another field that you are passionate about. I feel that doing so differentiates you from the rest as a well rounded person who understands the basics of IT and is willing to learn.
I have realitives that are nurses, and they make more with their two year degree than I make with eight years of college (math, comp sci, bus.) and 27 years of professional experience.
but yours also.
A healthy and robust economy, supported by a strong middle class, is a dire necessity for a capitalist society.
Without that, yes, my nest egg will go boom, but your life will also be very very very harsh...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Show me the listings where one can find entry level jobs.
... we get tens of thousands for any one Tech Tier 1 ad that we post. Tens of thousands of resume's.
I'm looking at Dice and Monster right now. Almost (if not) all the jobs call for SENIOR IT this, SENIOR web developer that. There are few tech support jobs (and even those require college degrees... for God's sake, why do you need to take Physics class to do simple tech support)?
As a manager I'm actually hiring newbs to do tech support and unlike the senior IT positions I am/was looking for, there's really no way for us to cut these resume's down
I won't even get into software testing, tech support's entry level sibling.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I've been working in software for some time now. For the last two years, I was working for the Indian arm of a small US tech company. I had a good time there, working closely with American colleagues and everyone there was highly competent and proficient in various technologies (by everyone I mean both the US and the Indian staff). This was partly due to stringent recruiting policies on either end.
Now I've changed jobs, moved to Bangalore to join one of the big outsourcing firms, to get into the security domain. The difference in atmosphere could not be more stark. People are hired like crazy with no regard to quality control-half the candidates have no knowledge of rudimentary programming concepts.
In the US (personal belief) most people in the tech sector are there because they like computers, or started programming as kids. No such situation here-99% of the people are in it solely for the money.
This further translates into an attitude of 'learn the barest minimum to get things going.' No one is interested to learn anything further. A guy may have worked on say, J2EE technology for 4 years, but he won't know anything about troubleshooting his internet connection by pinging or checking DNS. Hell, he won't know ANYTHING about networking. After all, that's the network guy's problem isn't it?
People here are rushed through so called training programs, and then sent onsite to the US or other countries to work.
I haven't been sent out yet, but looking at some of them I seriously wonder what impression they give once they're there.
How many of you in the US have had to work with such people- zero communication skills,
absolutely poor and flimsy knowledge of the required technology and shoddy work?
Others here have theorized that India may have to start reverse outsourcing due to the shortage of skilled people. That will be quite ironic- but probably good news for those of you in the US who've been losing jobs to outsourcing.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Hang in there; things will work out (they did for me).
Rishi Chopra
www.rishichopra.org