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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.
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...
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