Slashdot Mirror
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.