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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.
Most IT workers aren't short all over. They're only short where it counts...
This guy's the limit!
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.
(See previous story). What this will do is (A) give those spammers a legit job, and (B) take the operators of the spam-bots out of the mix, and (C) keep them busy with other things so they can't be bothered to spamminate the 'Net, and (D) solves the problem of the shortage in that particular area.
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+
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Should have gone to a school with internships and/or work study as part of the course work. We recently hired a college grad here and he was looked on favorably due to the industry expirence that he got while in school. He has proved a valuable addition to the team. I pushed for his hire over another canidate due to his prior work on his work study/internships. He has been very valuable to me as I know only do the work of two people instead of 3! He probably makes 1/3 of what I do, but thats more than the Tech support guys are making most likely.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
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.
"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
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)
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!!!
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
All you "experienced Java programmers" are in luck!
What?
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.
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 $10/day IT jobs (yet).
I didn't know you were also an ignorant racist. You have no clue at all what India or the people who live there are like, do you?
No, I'm not familiar with the hundreds of nations that live on the sub continent. God might be. My bigotry must have been apparent when I said that I wanted them all to have a decent standard of living or berated my greedy fellow citizens who would rape them instead.
Regardless of my ignorance about India, I can speak from painful personal experience about the love of corporate America. I got laid off from a Fortune 100 company four years ago and spent two years looking for work before giving up and going back to school for a job in a non transferable industry, medicine. They don't give a shit. I'm lucky enough to have had savings to make it through.
Now fuck off, you hateful, little troll.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
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
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
Randy: (thick southern drawl) This here's Srijan Technologies, can we help y'all?
Ranjeet: (prim British Accent) I am having a problem with your SMTP server's configuration, can you help me diagnose the problem?
Randy: Shoot! We'll tree that possum in no time!
Ranjeet: What? A possum?
Randy: I'm sayin' it's a cakewalk son! A no-brainer! We specialize in them-thar' SMTP whatchacallits.
Ranjeet: Are you speaking English? Do you have someone else I can talk to?
Randy: I reckon' so. HEY BUBBA!! PICK UP ON LINE ONE!!!
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
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.
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.
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
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