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IT Worker Shortages Everywhere

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the when-i-grow-up-i-wanna-write-programs dept.

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."

17 of 480 comments (clear)

  1. Shortfall? by Mydron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. India needs to outsource... by i_want_you_to_throw_ · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. Then why can't I find a friggin job?!!?! by ArcherB · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

    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? /rant off

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  4. Shortage smortage by J.R.+Random · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Maybe business might have to pay IT people by Black+Art · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."
    1. Re:Maybe business might have to pay IT people by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful


      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.

      I have your answer.... small business. I dropped my career at a major telcom company and went for less pay at a really small shop and never been happier.

      Bosses treat you well, you get paid decently, get fringe benefits like living 15 minutes from home, able to telecommute 1 day a week, free donut fridays, etc....

      you are not going to get the $150K sysadmin or IT job, but you will get treated like a human, actually like your job and the rare thing.... when you get up in the AM you want to go to work because the boss says "roll in at least before 9:30, but no hurry." you can leave at 3:30 because work is done today, or it's nice out... etc...

      Working for a big corp to get the big $$$ so I can drive 3+ hours a day in my BMW that is depreciating faster than electronics because it noew has 180K on it and was only for impressing the suits anyways is not worth it in any way shape or form.

      The good at his job IT guy will not be manager or director... only the guy with a business degree or rubs elbows with the upper managers get that position, and typically they are the most incompetent... (Hi Anil!) they dont want someone that knows what he is doing to get management jobs at corperations because it's a buddy system.

      If you like corperate life and corperate polotics.. please go that way... you get paid decently some places but get treated like crap and have no life.

      Go for the small business, live in rural towns and be happy.....

  6. Define qualified by plopez · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    1. Re:Define qualified by heinousjay · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Considering some of the wildly inflated salary demands I've heard from people in relation to their actual deomonstrated ability, I'd say adjustments need to be made on both sides.

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      Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
    2. Re:Define qualified by Grishnakh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Yep, this is exactly what every other company wants too: someone who's already an expert in whatever little niche they're working in. Then they wonder why no one's qualified for the job, yet there's plenty of people looking. WAKE UP! If someone is already an expert in whatever you're doing, then they probably already have a job, and aren't looking for a change. If you want someone to come work for you, get over yourself and be prepared to train them. Otherwise, stop complaining so much about a "lack" of qualified candidates.

    3. Re:Define qualified by Mattintosh · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's an American problem at all levels of society. We're overextended. We're in debt. We can't afford our houses if anything unexpected breaks the budget. We can't afford to do business if an otherwise-qualified job candidate needs training. We need everything handed to us in prepared, processed, usable form, or it's too costly to even bother.

      Now for the tricky question: Why? Because we've quarterly-growthed ourselves into a corner. If we miss profit estimates, making a little less profit than we expected, we lose tons of money because investors are fickle and stupid. That leads to lay-offs. That leads to missed house payments. That leads to homeless people and more companies missing profit estimates. Which starts the next wave of collapse.

      It's a sign of a system that needs to break and cause huge destruction and poverty before it can heal. Brace yourselves. The rabbit hole is deep.

    4. Re:Define qualified by MarcoAtWork · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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.


      I see this short-sightedness so much in the industry it drives me nuts: YOU ARE NOT HIRING A SKILLSET, YOU ARE HIRING A PERSON, if your candidate is very smart, personable and obviously would be a good fit, well, what are you waiting for? Hire them at a senior salary level and give them a few months to pick up whatever it is that you are doing.

      We developers are not little interchangeable cogs in the machine (as much as people in finance, sales and sometimes management seem to think), you can't find a candidate with exactly the skills you need, the experience you want AND out of a job too!

      After somebody has been developing for 5-10 years, if they are smart and sharp it's fairly straightforward to pick up a new programming language or paradigm: I am glad that not all companies are like yours, but it does sadden me that the vast majority are, where somebody pulls out a wishlist from the sky and unless a candidate can put a checkmark in every box they won't be given the time of day.
      --
      -- the cake is a lie
    5. Re:Define qualified by prockcore · · Score: 3, Insightful

      After somebody has been developing for 5-10 years, if they are smart and sharp it's fairly straightforward to pick up a new programming language or paradigm


      Then why haven't they? 95% of the people we get applying for jobs only know Java. They haven't even tried learning anything else. They teach java at the Univeristy, and java is all they think they need to know.

      I'm not going to hire anyone who isn't curious enough to learn a few languages on their own.. just to see what's out there.
    6. Re:Define qualified by wtansill · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Yep, this is exactly what every other company wants too: someone who's already an expert in whatever little niche they're working in. Then they wonder why no one's qualified for the job, yet there's plenty of people looking. WAKE UP! If someone is already an expert in whatever you're doing, then they probably already have a job, and aren't looking for a change. If you want someone to come work for you, get over yourself and be prepared to train them. Otherwise, stop complaining so much about a "lack" of qualified candidates.
      Absolutly, 100% correct. And where do "experts" come from? From years of moving up from more junior levels. That's one of the arguments I have about doing so much outsourcing. I've heard the argument that "We're only outsourcing the low-skill positions". Yes, but where will the next generation of experts come from if you lay waste to the training grounds that breed them? Farmers have an expression: "Eating your seed corn." The PHB's are only looking to the next quarter though, so it's hard to think a season or two ahead...
      --
      The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
    7. Re:Define qualified by Courageous · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And a large number answered the question "How do you stop a running thread?" by saying "call Thread.stop()" which is totally wrong.

      Interesting stuff. I have two patents in network related material (for two things written in java), have written a lot of java, but just haven't lately. My answer would have been, "check the JDK docs and google." I've even written a specialized thread scheduler to handles tens of thousands of threads. All the programming languages vary so much... easy to lose track. At most I would have been able to say to you, "you have to be very careful with stuff like that when you need and expect deterministic behavior."

      *shrug*

      Superficially, it seems that this interview question isn't quite right. Give them the tools they say they're expert with. That would INCLUDE the JDK, and google, too. Have them give them the answer to you in 15 minutes. Maybe you should go look up the "programmer archaeologists" article that was on slash two or three days back. It really is getting that way, you know.

      C//

  7. Outsource where now? Angola? Vietnam? by gelfling · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re: "Qualified" applicants by greyparrot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  9. Hire and train now or perish later... by Cid+Highwind · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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