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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.
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*)
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.
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.
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.
"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
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!!!
Google is something of a special case, though. People actually want to work for them, so they have a bit of leeway. The trick will be seeing how long they think they can get away with it.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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.'
Maybe in some places, but that's not always the case. To illustrate with an example: Last year I was working for a small software company in Cary, NC, specializing in telecom software. We were trying to hire a couple of senior software engineers, so we put out the word to several area recruiting companies and got a deluge of resumes... and the candidates we got were largely downright laughable, at least for a senior level position. And we weren't using some esoteric language, we were a Java shop... and our requirements weren't out in the stratosphere either... we just wanted knowledgeable senior engineers who could handle concurrent programming and network programming (our product was basically a fancy proxy server).
It took forever to find one guy who was clearly qualified, and he took another position before we even had a chance to make him an offer. So yeah, we definitely experienced the situation where there was a "lack of qualified candidates" despite having plenty of candidates in general. But really sharp people who actually know what they're doing proved to be fairly scarce, at least for us.
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...
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
All you "experienced Java programmers" are in luck!
What?
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.
If you don't mind me asking, where do you shop for food? Where do you buy your tires? Clothes? Computers and related?
If you've ever gone to someplace that's a little further away but cheaper than the corner market, should get over your slave owner mentality and start paying local merchants fairly for their work.
Because it's the same exact thing.
"But.. but.... ! " you cry, as if that mattered. See, given the need for N, anybody and everybody is going to try to find the best combination of price and convenience to meet N. It doesn't matter if your a working stiff buying potatoes for your wife and kids, or a multi-millionaire CEO trying to find a good location for a manufacturing plant.
It's always the same. They're people, just like you. They do the same thing, just like you. Get over it. If you don't like it, become a boss! Start your own enterprise if you like! Hire and fire people, and see the look in their eyes as they realize that the reason you wanted to talk to them wasn't a good reason. (for them)
In my experience, the only difference between the idiots at the top and the idiots at the bottom of any organization is that the idiots at the top are in charge!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
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.
Good analogy. Our local news had a story the other month that for every nurse working in the state there is something like two or three who are trained but are doing something else because the hours, pay and benefits are crap as a nurse. I would guess this story is similar with business bitching that Chad hasn't developed an infrastructure for $10/day IT jobs (yet).
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.
You must have read about it here:
r _it_companys_biggest_enemy.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/02/you
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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
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.
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!!!
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
How do you stop a running thread?
In Java you don't... If you're lucky enough to be in the thread in question, you can stop by "simply" exiting the run() method. (Good luck if you're umpteen levels deep in cruft at the moment.) Otherwise, you're pretty much SOL.
who couldn't explain what a deadlock is or how to fix it.
A deadlock occurs when one or more seperate threads (or even processes) are waiting on something that will never happen. Once in a great while, this is as simple as two threads each waiting on the other before doing what they are being waited on for (kind of like employees waiting to get experience and employeers waiting for experienced employees). The only sure way to fix(1) a deadlock is restart the application/reboot the machine. You could try simply killing a victim and hoping for the best, but that gets unpredictable fast, and if you're talking about Java thread-lock refer to my previous answer.
Of course, if you answer questions this way in an actual job interview (by telling the truth) you'll never get hired anyways so no worries.
(1)Note: If you'd asked how to *avoid* deadlocks, you might have gotten a lot more useful answer...