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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.
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!
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
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.
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