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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."
I have a friend who works in Google India. And when I asked about this new phenomenon, he said that there is no shortage of applicants, but there is a shortage of "qualified" applicants. For every software engineering position they anounce, thousands of resumes are received, but none of them meet their requirements. So this shortage is not some random IT position but very specific skilled positions that the Indian tech populace is unable to fill.
Actually there is one field where the is an actual shortage. That is in Nursing. You see when a shortage in any other field occurs two things happen. The first is that people have to be paid more. The second is that because of the first less people are hired. So the company does a little less business because it doesn't have as many people to provide the service or make the product. But in healthcare you don't have the choice of doing less business. Your business is defined by an acute need of the public at large that has nothing to do with your ability to meet the need. In addition healthcare is not elastic. If prices rise, people still need care so you can't just raise prices to drive down demand. So in the field of Nursing there really is a shortage. How does that affect things? Well more and more nurses are prepared on the community college level with an associates degree. Also, nurses get stuck with a higher patient count then they should be. Both of these things lead to shitty care. So the Nursing shortage is real and it affects everyone.
Yes there is a shortage if IT workers. I started my consulting company two years after graduation (2004) make $200/hrs. The thing that I am most great full for are the compiler design, the distributed systems, the graph theory classes that I took in college. One has to understand computer science in depth. If you learn to use Windows server you skills will be obsolete in few years, if you learn how servers are built, you will be ready no matter what comes along.
.net crap. But understand you are setting yourself to become obsolete in few years. There is a difference between a mechanical engineers and auto repair guy. Don't complain about engineering schools when all you want to become is a mechanic. Dont expect an engineer's salary when you are repairing cars.
My biggest gripe is people think they are know IT, after learning to type on a keyboard. Yes you can program by drag and drop, yes you can install a web server and create applications with that
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.
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.
Sadly, it's a double-edged sword.
I have worked for half a dozen companies over the last 18 years or so. In my experience, I've seen a great number of entry-level positions made available to people in IT. Generally, they involve support desk / help desk type work. This is typical. In that help desk role, you learn about the company. You learn about the environment. You learn the systems that you eventually hope to help develop. There's not course that will teach you about the specifics of company X.
You learn what the company does, and you learn how the company does it. ONLY THEN can you develop an understanding of what you could do to help the company to do it better. This is the reason that many large organizations with in-house IT departments hire at tier one and promote from within. They are showing faith in you, by paying you to learn what they do and how they do it.
When they discover that they require a new skill set that they haven't had any experience with (thus no tier to promote from) they must go outside to fill that role. THAT is the point at which they say "we need someone with experience". They don't have a progression in place for that skill set, so you need to be able to hit the ground running and introduce that skillset to the team.
Unfortunately, if you continue to hold out for the "perfect" job (sometimes without realizing that you DON'T have the skills required for it) eventually companies are going to suspect that there is a reason that you have no experience. After all, why wouldn't you have a job? As a prospective employer, I'd rather hear you say, "I'm currently working in a support environment, brushing up on my "insert favorite technology here". It's a good job, but I'd be happier and more productive working for your company in this role". It sounds better than "I don't have a job because the perfect role didn't land in my lap".
Know what I mean?