IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth

buzzardsbay writes "For the past few years, we've heard a number of analysts and high-profile IT industry executives, Bill Gates and Craig Barrett among them, promoting the idea that there's an ever-present shortage of skilled IT workers to fill the industry's demand. But now there's growing evidence suggesting the "shortage" is simply a self-serving myth. "It seems like every three years you've got one group or another saying, the world is going to come to an end there is going to be a shortage and so on," says Vivek Wadhwa, a professor for Duke University's Master of Engineering Management Program and a former technology CEO himself. "This whole concept of shortages is bogus, it shows a lack of understanding of the labor pool in the USA.""

Comments

It's A Fact

[CowboyBob500]

Over the course of last year I needed to hire 10 experienced J2EE developers. I literally interviewed hundreds, but was only able to find 6 suitable candidates. While it is true that there isn't a shortage of applicants, there is most certainly a shortage of people who can actually perform the advertised job.

Bob

Re:MS Licensing

[bmajik]

I'm a QA guy at MS and beleive me, I understand your frustration. People like me have no say in how things get licensed. I've got friends that ask me licensing questions for their particular business problem and I've honestly got no idea. All i can do is forward the questions into people internally and hope somebody has a lucid response.

Every time I do this, i remind "whoever" is listening: every time a customer has to think about this, they move some deltaE closer to saying "fuck you guys" and jumping to F/OSS, where if nothing else, licensing is certainly _perceptually_ less confusing.

Anytime a business makes it hard for customers to give it money, they're doing something wrong.

Expecting customers to keep track of licenses (with paper and a filing cabinet, in some cases!) and all kinds of other stuff is completely ridiculous. A big part of the problem is that internally, we're for the most part completely insulated from it. We do ok at responding to pain that we know about and have exposure to, and pretty badly at pain we don't understand or know about.

I'm sorry for how lame your licensing experience has been and wish I could offer some help. I'm also interested in knowing more about your virtual test lab.. one of my last projects in Redmond was working on the automation system that ran all of Visual Studio's tens of thousands of automated tests across thousands of PCs. The feedback I get is that very few companies are doing automated software testing, so I'm interested in what you're working on.

Re:Apprenticeships and lock-in

[rnturn]

``The solution is apprenticeships - a variant on "I wouldn't start from here", I admit, but the only workable solution nonetheless. Start the recruitment process two years in advance, and train up the monkeys to become experts.

That's not too far from what used to be fairly common at a lot of companies, especially those that hired lots of engineers. It wasn't really an apprenticeship but it sort of felt that way in that newly hired engineers would float around between different departments learning different parts of the business for maybe a year before they settled in within a more permanent spot. That seemed to be changing, though, not long after I joined a large midwestern engineering firm. The newer guys were being hired directly into a group and expected to stay there for a long time. I preferred the older way of acclimating new hires. You got a better idea of the rest of the company and the various departments. Nowadays its more of a "hire a hit man" mentality when bringing in new people. It's no wonder they tend to not stick around very long. After they've been hired to fill an immediate niche need, they know the company won't really have any great desire to keep them around.