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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."
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.
1. Quit.
2. ???
3. Get re-hired.
4. Profit!
Woohoo!
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
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.
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+
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!
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
...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.
Maybe the American companies will outsource work to Indian companies due to lack of staff, then the Indian companies will outsource this same work to other American companies due to lack of staff, and these American companies will then outsource the work to other Indian companies due to lack of staff, which will then outsource the work to other American companies...
Forget about working in IT. Set up a company to take on IT work and outsource it! We'll all get rich in an endless loop of outsourcing!
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.
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.
Most of the CS classes were geared towards pure theory. That's great, but if you want to do something besides blue sky research, you're going to need practical skills.
.Net programmer with a BS (or worse, MS) degree is just like a Chevy dealership wanting a mechanic with a mechanical engineering degree or a construction company wanting an electrician with an electrical engineering degree.
You don't go to a university to learn practical skills. You go to learn theory and foundations so that you can have a true mastery of a subject. You can learn practical skills on your own if you have the talent to earn a university degree.
If you just want practical skills, go to a trade school. You don't get a mechanical engineering degree to become an auto mechanic and work at your local Chevy dealership. Why would you get a Computer Science degree to write applications in C++/C#?
The problem with today's employment world is that employers want candidates with already-developed practical skills, but demand high-level university degrees as well when there's absolutely no reason for it. An IT employer wanting a
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
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.
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.
If I was a mechanic - working in a large car repairer shop, is it my responsibility or my bosses to make sure that I am kept up with the latest brake technology? Don't the manufactures provide free courses on how to best repair their vehicles (particularly for dealer repair shops).
It is interesting that when your customer is external to the company, there always seems to be a financial incentive for the company to keep it's workers skills up to date. Where you only provide to internal customers, that incentive seems to be lost. In house IT is almost invariably the ones who let their (workers) skills fall behind.
Theoretically, the foreign companies should easily out-compete the American-run companies because they probably don't pay their executives tens of millions of dollars in compensation like the idiotic American companies do.
Hmm, this sounds familiar. I can't quite... oh right, cars!
That right there is the future of IT in the US, and quite possibly many other job sectors as well.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
...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.
This came out while we were watching "Catch Me If You Can". It used to be that you didn't have FICO scores to go off of if you were a loan officer. You actually had to judge a person just based on how they came to you. You had to be a good judge of character and risk. You couldn't just be a trained monkey applying a formula (like now).
The same thing happened to HR. No one has any real people skills anymore.
It's sad when an IT geek with severe personality disorders can say that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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