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

Got a labor shortage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Raise your wages, the workers will come.

The market will fix the problem. No need for special legislation or guest workers.

Re:Got a labor shortage?

[ATMAvatar]

Why raise wages, when you can convince Congress there is a desperate shortage of labor, so that you can import labor from overseas and bully your workers over wages by tying a work visa to a stick and holding it in front of them?

People need to read the statement for what it is. "There is a labor shortage [at the wage we are willing to pay]."

Re:Got a labor shortage?

[GPierce]

Your response bothers me. It's what happens when people put ideology ahead of common sense and facts.

Abusing foreign workers is the POINT of the whole thing. Those who are lucky enough to get an H1-B visa are then owned by their sponsor.

This is not a free market. If it were, we would just throw the doors open and invite any foreign IT worker to "come on down". We set up the rules so they have to have a sponsor or go home.

In general, they are paid less than a US Citizen - and there is not a lot of incentive to give them fair raises. They can't quit and look for a new job unless they can find a new sponsor.

This is a generality. Like most generalities it does not apply to every foreign worker. And it's part of a larger employment situation where IT workers in their twenties are preferred. If you do not yet have a life you don't mind 14 hour days.

And in the mean time, very few have noticed that one of Microsoft's published future plans is to dumb down IT to the point where any idiot can do it with the right software support. This may or may not be a major threat, but once they figure out how to build an operating system that actually works, you had better watch out.

Re:Got a labor shortage?

[SnapShot]

I'll bite. You're right, a free market works both ways. Let the competition come in an compete on a level playing field. No indentured servitude H1-B visas. No guest worker passes. No passports held under lock and key in the HR office. No two-tier benefits package. Just pure "at will" employment where the employee can switch jobs at the drop of a hat no matter their citizenship.

Let labor be free. I can compete with that and, to be honest, would really enjoy a year or two working in Dublin or Tel Aviv or Bangalore while I'm still young.

Re:Got a labor shortage?

[Blkdeath]

Indeed, the amount of "paper MSCE" employees grows daily, while the amount of people that actually know what they're doing seems to diwndle at nearly the same rate.

I actually left IT because I couldn't compete with the number of letters people waved around all the time. While they were off in their diploma mill classroom environments I was working for a living, gaining critical knowledge and problem solving skills. By the time I got around to college to formalize my education I was in possession of more knowledge than most of my professors. The courses were pure review. I dropped out a year into the program. My cohort moved on primarily to help desk and other menial IT positions. About 5% wound up with skilled IT jobs.

Prior to my college fiasco however I was in a shop that specialized in consumer and small business IT needs. I really enjoyed how my high school dropout boss who taught me more about IT than all my professors combined used to treat these paper MCSEs who'd walk through the door. I'll never forget the guy who came in right out of the clear blue and proclaimed that he would accept a position at a salary of $100k/year. My boss asked him what experience and/or qualifications he had, he responded "I've just completed my MCSE certification."

My boss said something about toilet paper and I was already in tears. My ears stopped working I was laughing so hard. I wonder if he found his dream job. :)

Then there's the guy who phoned in to the store asking for clarification of Windows 98's routing capabilities as he was constructing a network consisting of roughly a dozen computers, two NICs apiece running CAT-5 crossover cables between each computer to form some kind of, well, I guess modern token-ring setup of some kind. My boss offered to sell him a switch but was told that was excessive hardware purchase (as if the extra dozen NICs were just included with the PCs or something) and that he was an MCSE and he knows what he is doing! Now will you help me or not?

Yep. Told the guy he should become a garbage man because he's too damned stupid to work on computers. The guy came down to the store to continue the conversation in person. My boss apologized; said he was out of line. Said he was too stupid to be a garbage man. Never heard from Mr. MCSE again. Never did sell him that switch.

No myth here

[jay-za]

I can't speak for the US, but I can state that in South Africa we have a fair number of IT workers, a handful of which are actually worth anything, but on the whole not a shortage. The area of the market that DOES have a shortage, however, and a really massive one at that, is the Tester and Test Analyst side. We are struggling to get even halfway decent people.

And even with this shortage, the IT academies and schools out there are churning out MCSE's by the truckfull - rather than getting useful skills, they are giving some poor schmuck a certification that means really little in the real world, and which doesn't really have a descent career path anymore..

Testers, on the other hand, have a great job, good money, and a really flexible career. They also develop a lot of really useful business skills to augment their technical skills, and have no problems finding work.

Re:No myth here

[MightyMartian]

And even with this shortage, the IT academies and schools out there are churning out MCSE's by the truckfull - rather than getting useful skills, they are giving some poor schmuck a certification that means really little in the real world, and which doesn't really have a descent career path anymore..

MCSEs represent something far worse than that. They represent a severe compartmentalization of skills. After twenty years in the IT profession, I'm pretty much going to be forced to take my MCSE mainly because you just can't get a job. For some reason, management believes that this frivolous piece of paper means that a guy is some sort of uber-tech. Well, I've seen these uber-techs melt when they had to deal with a Bind server, or anything particularly weird or challenging.

The real irony here is the most expertise I've seen out of the Microsoft side of things is the guys that can understand Redmond's insane licensing system.

Re:No myth here

[moderatorrater]

I can speak of my experience for the western US (but east of california) and say that it can sometimes take months to get a good candidate to apply. There are a lot of mediocre or bad programmers out there, most of them with degrees. I'm very suspicious of the claims in this report; they've looked at graduation rates (worthless, since most of the programmers I work with don't have a degree or have a degree in something other than CS) and they've asked HR about applications and overall satisfaction of the people that were hired. At the large shops I've worked at, there are a lot of mediocre programmers that aren't great, but they're good enough to not get fired. If you're someone like Google and you have stricter standards, I could easily see a shortage of good programmers.

So, to sum up, I see no shortage of programmers, just a shortage of good programmers.

Re:No myth here

[TheRealFixer]

The real irony here is the most expertise I've seen out of the Microsoft side of things is the guys that can understand Redmond's insane licensing system.

That's intentional. A good deal of MCSE training/testing has to do with licensing. MCSE's aren't intended to be technical geniuses. They're meant to be clones, indoctrinated to look at things the way Microsoft wants you to look at them. That's why the key to any Microsoft test, if you get stuck on a question that seems to have more than one correct answer, is to look at it from the perspective of what would make Microsoft the most money. That will almost always be the "right" one.

Not to say all MS training is bad. If you get a decent instructor who has experience with other vendors and solutions, who can cut through all the crap and extract the meat of what you actually need to know to succeed in the field, you can actually learn something useful. There's not many instructors like that, though.

Re:No myth here

[Lijemo]

I can't speak for the US, but I can state that in South Africa... The area of the market that DOES have a shortage, however, and a really massive one at that, is the Tester and Test Analyst side. We are struggling to get even halfway decent people.

Being a really good Tester or Test Analyst requires all of the skill of other IT positions, with (at least in the U.S., in my experience) half of the pay, and none of the respect. Very few of the people capable of being excellent Test Analysts have much motivation to do so.

(Back when I was in Test Analysis, I had a boss tell me straight up that while my performance was excellent, since Testing was not a "revenue generating" position, he saw no need to pay me anything near what the "revenue-generating" IT positions at the company were paid. I'm no longer at that company, and since then, I've had a strong bias towards making sure I'm in a "revenue generating" position. Things work much better for me this way. And companies wonder why it's hard to find quality Test people...)

Re:No myth here

[stinerman]

I've taken to writing a statement as to why I don't have any certs and including it with my resume. I've had places turn me down for not having an A+ cert, even though I have 8+ years experience in the industry.

You're right on the other count, too. Throw a bash prompt in front of an MCSE and watch them look at you like your dog does when you tell him a joke.

Re:No myth here

[mcmonkey]

Throw a bash prompt in front of an MCSE and watch them look at you like your dog does when you tell him a joke.

Maybe your jokes just aren't that funny.

Re:No myth here

[cHiphead]

Actually that just shows you spent a lot of time clicking the mouse and yelling "WHY THE FUCK ISNT IT WORKING?" instead of typing on the keyboard and yelling "WHY THE FUCK ISNT IT WORKING?".

Cheers.

Re:No myth here

[bjourne]

Programming is hard. In fact, so hard that merely three or four years at university won't make you more than decent at it. The best programmers are the ones who love doing it, who got their C64 at 10 and then spent years learning about computers in their spare time. Understandably that is the kind of programmers your company wants. Programmers who have learnt so much by themselves that it would amount to 10+ years in university for someone new in the field. Programmers that are really good, that are better than average. Does your company pay them a fair salary in comparision to their education and skill? Or does it pay average salaries for very much above average skilled personell? If it is the latter, then it's no wonder that you have trouble recruiting people. So, to sum up, companies that are to cheap to pay decent salaries or to offer training programs for their mediocre programmers have nothing but themselves to blame.

Re:No myth here

[computational super]

I've taken to writing a statement as to why I don't have any certs and including it with my resume.

Ok, flame-resistant suit on here, but - what, exactly does that statement say? In other words, why *don't* you have any certs? You say you've been turned down for a job for not having the A+ cert. You and I both know that it's a trivial cert to get, right?

Either the test is trivially simple for you, so you can pick up a quick "A+ certification for dummies" book, skim it on the train over to the testing site (or even walk in with no preparation at all), pass the cert with flying colors, and be out $100 (if you can't get your current employer to cover the cost of the test, which you usually can) and an hour of your life, and not be turned down for a job again for something so trivial.

Or - the test is difficult, it takes some preparation and experience to get through - in which case having one actually *does* say something (much to yours and my surprise) about your knowledge, determination, and commitment.

I was required (strongly asked) to get a couple of Java certifications by my then-employer back in '01. By then I'd been doing Java for a couple of years, so I figured I'd blow through the test with flying colors. Oops - turns out there were quite a few things I didn't know. Turns out that I actually learned some things studying for the test, things that actually turned out to be actually useful.

Contrary to /., taking a test doesn't make you stupider. Passing it doesn't mean you're smart, but it does mean you're at the very least smarter than somebody who can't even pass the test.

Re:No myth here

[schiefaw]

Probably the best impact that a certification has on the industry is that it indicates a certain base level of core competence. Unfortunately software development is one area where someone can make something "mostly" work. In any given language you can probably make something that takes the required input and generates the desired output. The key is to make an application that is stable, efficient, and flexible. It is very difficult for non-programmers to know when an application has met those standards, so someone could have been in the industry for 15 years and still be a complete idiot. Their employers may not have realized that the guy needed to be fired.

For example: I had to rework part of an application that purged files from a Windows directory when an account had been closed for a certain period of time. The application was set to run at night because it could take between three to six hours to run. When I looked at the code, the developer was comparing every account to be purged against every directory in the repository. When he found a match he would delete the directory and continue comparing against the rest of the directories (thousands of directories). So, he had two problems; he wasn't exiting the loop after finding the match and more importantly he didn't realize that he could just attempt to delete the directory without searching since he knew the path. When I reworked the app it would finish in three minutes. The guy who wrote it was the technical lead who had hired me.

BTW, I have no certifications (other than a BSCS).

Re:No myth here

[plopez]

why *don't* you have any certs?
because it can cost you huge amounts of money to get one unless your employer actually agrees to pay for it?

I've looked at certs and paying for them out of my own pocket. But $10k or so for something that will be obsolete in a few years isn't cost effective for me.

It's all the wording for HR

[techpawn]

there's an ever-present shortage of skilled IT workers to fill the industry's demand

The key there is SKILLED. Most of the skilled IT people are already at work for a company or for themselves. What you have left in the pool is a bunch of low level first year grads who haven't seen the environments that these companies offer.

So, yes it's a myth that there are not enough people to fill IT positions, there are lots of code monkeys willing to pound keys for their banana but what are the skilled IT people that these larger companies are looking for out of the box and where will we find them right now?

Re:It's all the wording for HR

[SatanicPuppy]

Shrug. We've all been fresh out of school at some point...A lot of the time I'd rather have a recent grad who's willing to learn than a guy with 10 years experience who thinks he doesn't have to learn anymore.

I seriously get tired of people who expect high-end experts to explode out of the ground whenever they want one. Lot of the time you're going to have to settle for some people who are bright, young, and inexperienced. Mix them up with some more experienced workers, and they'll do okay.

Lot of people say, "I don't want to train someone, knowing that he's going to leave as soon as he gets a better offer." The English translation of that is: "I did this guy a favor by hiring him, and piling crap work on him, and I can't figure out why he'd be so disloyal." Make your company a good place to work, and you won't have such high turnover.

Re:It's all the wording for HR

[wtansill]

The key there is SKILLED. Most of the skilled IT people are already at work for a company or for themselves. What you have left in the pool is a bunch of low level first year grads who haven't seen the environments that these companies offer.

Which is why I walk around with my shorts in a knot most days.

Where do you get these "skilled" people? It takes years of experience. When companies say that they are "only outsourcing low-level jobs", I call bullshit -- they are, as the farmers say, eating their seed corn. If you don't take in new people and allow them to mature on the "low level" stuff, where the hell does management think that the highly skilled people will come from? You don't normally step out of school with 20 years seniority and experience already under your belt...

Re:It's all the wording for HR

[penguin_dance]

How about someone who's been around for a while but does want to learn, who likes to learn new things, who wants to get their hands dirty and likes to solve problems? Would you hire someone like that?

Ditto. I have been working contract for over 5 years now (some of these contracts lasted 9 months to a year so I haven't been looking consistently during those periods.) My previous contract job was supposed to go perm. My supervisor loved me--we even had tickets to travel to the home office in the UK the next month. It was my dream job. But then, her boss nixed the deal making the excuse that he wanted someone with supervisory experience (there was no one to supervise). After offering the job to two others, who turned it down flat because it didn't pay enough, he then re-arranged the job and dropped the salary by 10-12K and hired a fresh-out. Personally I never thought it had to do with managerial or supervisor experience (that was never requested)--he probably decided he didn't want to pay a fee to the employment agency that I had been sent through. He just wanted something cheaper.

After that I tried for the full six months (and even prior to leaving the previous job) to get a full-time job. I did get several interviews and even some second interviews. I'm now working another contract job. The people love me. I would love to get on steady, but the problem is (as usual) I don't work for the guy that could make it happen. He lives in another state although he travels here frequently. It will depend on how much clout the people working for him have.

I had NEVER previously had this much trouble finding full-time work. I dress appropriately, am well-spoken and my salary requests are certainly in-line. My only take on all this is age discrimination is rampant. Which is why the IT shortage is a myth. There are plenty of skilled workers, but they don't WANT the good, but experienced ones. They rather have the young and CHEAP ones.

Most of the time you can forget looking at Monster or other job boards. HR who doesn't understand a bit from a byte, writes up these things like you're ordering a pizza. And if you don't have the matching skills, you're resume is going no where. Which means you'd have to lie to get through HR and find what qualities they REALLY need (risky) or you better know someone on the inside that has the ability to request your resume be sent through. The other problem is when you interview with people who are probably 15-20 years your junior. You can see the look on their face when you walk in.

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

SHORTAGE

[COMON$]

skilled IT

And I will second that, I am sure in other parts of the country, skilled IT are a dime a dozen. But where I am at (Midwest) actual skilled IT people are hard to find. Sure you can find the guy/girl who was promoted to IT from accounting back in the 90s but that doesn't make them a skilled pro. Show me a cross reference of IT folks who actually know what they are doing, have a passion for it, and I bet that subset is really small. I have no need for joe basement dweller who runs his guild website and knows how to install a video card. I also dont have any need for dilbert principle folks who are in waaaay over their heads and cannot configure a server without serious handholding or an in depth checklist.

Re:Isn't it obvious?

[Grimbleton]

Bingo. They don't want the guys who want 95-120k a year, they want to guys who'll be happy with 25-35k a year and work 12 hour days.

Cheap IT labor is a myth

[Black Art]

When they talk about an "IT labor shortage", they are talking about how many people are willing to work for low wages and yet have a large pool of skills, talent and education.

There are plenty of people who have the skill sets they need, they just don't want to pay the kind of wages it takes to get them and keep them.

I am not talking about kids just out of college expecting a high paying job. I am talking about companies that want people with 10+ years worth of experience and want to pay them like a kid out of college.

It has been true for a very long time that the only way you can get a real pay increase in IT it to move somewhere else. Until companies start looking at their employees as a resource and not an expense and pay them accordingly, the situation will not improve.

All these cries to let them import labor is to allow them to rent temporary employees who can be deported at the first sign of "getting uppity" for demanding a living wage.

Okay-- joke done.. now reality at a big corp

[Maxo-Texas]

We use some H1B's (and try to get them green cards).

We pay a "decent" salary-- my buds at HP earn roughly 10% more-- those in the oil field earn about 20% more (but have a history of frequent layoffs). We have solid benefits that exceed those of the oil field and HP.

The reality is- we are about to lose positions because we cannot even get under-qualified people to apply for them. Now part of it is that we require people with at least a couple other jobs experience under their belt. Part of it is that being a big corp, our bureaucracy is pretty harsh. I have a friend who was sucked into Schluberje (sp) recently and there you literally have to take a driving class (as a frikkin programmer???) as part of your job duties. Bureaucracy gone mad. I'm sure many of you have seen office space--- we are 3x office space. It really takes a special person to fit in a large corporation. Jobs that would take 2 hours at a small company (and be very satisfying) may take three months. I even know of one project that was finished a year ago and it is still stuck waiting to be prioritized for release.

Sarbanes Oxley takes all the joy out of being a programmer. It just sucks the life out of it. Coders like to code 32 hours a week-- not 32 hours per quarter. You can't even maintain your coding skills at those levels.

I think the IT Worker crunch IS coming- and it is going to be wicked nasty starting in about 2012.

Completely disagree

[pavera]

Sure there may not be a shortage of IT resumes on monster... But there sure is a shortage of people who can back up their resumes with actual demonstrated work/skill.

We are offering market wage, and we are hiring entry level people, maybe 1 in 30 of the people we interview actually demonstrates the minimum of critical thinking and problem solving skills needed to be a decent software developer. Our interviews are not concentrated on any one platform, we have stuff in foxpro, java, python, php, c++ and c#... So our interviews are focused on critical thinking and problem solving. We have a couple basic problem solving questions and 2 algorithm questions which we routinely ask.. This is stuff I learned in high school, or my 2nd year algorithms class in college. People who are professing CS degrees and 0-5 years experience are routinely getting these questions wrong.

Even the few people we have hired over the last 3-6 months have been disappointing in their ability to a) learn new languages, b) learn and follow best practices, c) demonstrate real troubleshooting/bug fixing skills. C is probably my biggest pet peeve, as a manager I don't know how many times in the last 6 months I've had to go to a programmers system when they say "I'm getting this error and I don't know what it means" and the error message very clearly lays out the problem, the line it is occurring on, etc...

Either CS degrees are seriously lacking in rigor since I participated ~ 8 years ago, or they are just rubber stamping people that shouldn't be passing the classes.

Re:Completely disagree

[LuisAnaya]

Also...

C is not longer an important language to learn in College. If you want to get a good C programmer, you're looking for somebody of the ages of 38 to 52 years of age. If you're stuck keeping up with legacy systems, that's what you're going to find out.

Now programmers learn Java in fancy IDE's. Never having to learn a pointer or a pointer re-direction. Make sure that you're not maintaining PL/1, COBOL or Assembly... if you have someone decent maintaining that code, make sure that he/she is happy.

You have to keep in mind that a lot of those folks come out of 2 year colleges or with the liberalism in today's universities, many of them spent their time taking macrame or latin literature as part of their CS degree.

My 2 cents...

Re:It's A Fact - NOT!

[hax4bux]

I am a "highly experienced J2EE person" and as a contractor I sit for interviews once a year or so.

I am not disagreeing w/your experience, simply because I wasn't there.

My point is most hiring managers don't know how to interview and frequently don't even know what skills are relevant.

My interviews routinely turn into some sort of geek dick size war (and the candidate must be polite) or a beauty pagent (where did you go to university, my professors are more glamorous than yours) or some other stupid diversion rather than the job at hand.

My least favorite is: are you kewl enough to work in our clubhouse? It's just a job, I get all the love I want at home.

It doesn't help that most jobs are using API's they barely understand. So when someone asks me an obscure question about XML bindings or hibernate, they frequently don't recognize the answer.

Anyway, I'm a little tired of hearing about "the shortage" when in fact there is none. The "shortage" (IMO) is manufactured.

It really is bogus and here's why..

[jskline]

I had not read through all of these today but having survived 5+ years now of business only hiring temps and "independent contractors", I have a fair amount of knowledge in the area. Because of this "outsourcing" that many of us went through, our jobs were cut by moves in business to cut IT costs and improve profits for the shareholders, et al. This really is nothing more than devaluating the duties and tasks that we do to that of a high schooler working at a local Mickey-D's.

The real "shortage" comes about because business is NOT able to find someone willing to come in and be an all-purpose IT person, network guru, server admin., etc. and accept pay to the tune of $11 per hour. Thats the real shortage issue. So they will further outsource the jobs and bring in foreigners on H1B's to do those jobs at substantially reduced rates. IBM and a handful of other international companies are notorious for this.

Really what it will come down to is let these large companies hire the kids for $11. You really do get what you paid for. Eventually when things begin to collapse for many of these companies, they will be force to bring in people with knowledge and experience, and best of all; pay them what they're worth.

Remember that: "What goes around; comes around"

The way HR writes job ads is often the problem

[Panaqqa]

Many times in a 30 year IT career, I have seen Human Resources people who are clueless about technology writing ads that have qualifications that nobody could meet. Examples: 5 months after the introduction of the JDK 1.0, there were ads asking for 3-5 years of Java experience. There are ads currently out there asking for 3-5 years of ActionScript 3 (introduced I think June of 2006). Requiring a bachelors degree for an entry level help desk position doesn't add up to a healthy pool of qualified applicants either.

Job ads often have a huge list of "requirements" as well, and an applicant missing even one of them might well be screened out. An example of this? Seasoned web developers might not bother listing FTP on their resume. In their view, requiring a web developer to have FTP experience is like requiring a carpenter to know how to use a saw. But that failure to list FTP on the resume might well mean the application is automatically trashed. I have seen HR screen out applicants for a web developer position because they neglected to list HTTP, DHTML, and Photoshop on their resume. And don't get me started about HR's lack of understanding of the difference between a web developer and a web designer.

If HR departments are the source of some of the statistical and anecdotal evidence being trotted forth in support of the existence of this "shortage", I am not surprised the picture looks grim.

Apprenticeships and lock-in

[evilandi]

where will we find them right now

There's yer problem, right there, guv.

The problem is that the IT industry, like many industries, expects to find a pool of skilled and experienced available staff, at the drop of a hat, without the company putting in any effort themselves.

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. Another benefit is that apprenticeships, unlike university degrees, have no fixed syllabus and can quickly flex to meet new skill demand trends.

The problem with apprenticeships is that various governments have regulations against locking-in staff for long periods. Companies who invest in apprenticeships see their newly-trained staff bugger off to a better-paying competitor, who can afford to pay more since they haven't invested in apprenticeships, the moment they qualify. Governments need to relax regulations on locking-in apprentices to their sponsoring employer. Governments also need to give companies better ability to fire apprentices who fail to meet expected grades on time.

Cheap, experienced, immediately available - pick any two.

Of course testers are well payed

[Nursie]

But who the hell would want to do that for a job? Honestly....

I found out our testers are payed on a par with or more than software developers the other day. At first I was a little angry, because I get angry whenever anyone is paid more than software developers because "we make your fscking products!".

Then I thought "What would it take to get me into that job?" and I realised they were welcome to the money.

Re:Isn't it obvious?

[MrMarket]

MOD PARENT UP.

This is what we are facing in our organization. About 66% of our openings are technical, but our HR director is clueless -- not only in writing effective job descriptions and requirements, but also when it comes to setting compensation packages that attract good candidates. Our business analysts (which are a dime dozen) make as much or more than our application engineers.

It's almost a conspiracy: inability to hire good application engineers, limits our ability to automate business analytic processes, and increases the demand for spread sheet jockeys. Good times.

Why should I put up with IT?

[BlueZombie]

Off the cuff estimate, roughly 90% of the best and brightest IT minds I personally know and including myself, the ones that git-er-done, have given up on long days, fixed pay, lousy conditions, incompetent management, threat of outsourcing, and mental cruelty. A lot of your "skilled" people bail out. We're smart, so we take jobs in lower paying, but more secure and laid back not-for-profits, or find a new second career. We've been in the industry for 10-20 years and want to do things like have families, and see our friends once in a while. I was personally told repeatedly by my management that they could hire 2 college grads or 4 foreign workers for the price of me and if I didn't like 80hr weeks I was welcome to leave. So I did.

Yeah, whatever.

[jotaeleemeese]

As somebody that has just being replaced by people working in India (hello chaps!) I can categorically tell you there are labour shortages in Western countries.

I did the interviews, the people is just not there. As for myself I will take a few months off because I know there will be a job for me once I am rested and have done a few things I have in the back burner.

The situation in the US is not the way you are portraying it. Foreign workers are well paid (by definition, given the kind of visa they need to enter the country) so they are not driving salaries down, and most importantly pay taxes and spend money in the local economy, which benefits without having invested a dime in the education of these individuals.

The people driving salaries down are the ones working remotely and that never set foot in the country they are serving, very often using the infrastructure in that country, which was originally built to benefit the local population. That is what happened to me. I have no problem with this, I will have to take a lower salary most likely, but this is just natural given the savage competition to which we are being confronted (people in India are forced to work insane hours for a quarter of what we earn in the West, but fret no, salaries are going up and it is a matter of 3 or 4 years before they are comparable to Western standards, the turnover rate over there is atrocious, because techie people over there are not stupid: as soon as they get a better skill set they move on. In my experience this is at the very least 40% a year of attrition rate, so you always have a half competent group of people, half of which will leave very soon. Some companies are waking up to this fact, but some others are going ahead like a blinded lemming with suicidal thoughts).

Techies in developed countries should be writing to politicians about why they are allowing people working remotely in machines based locally, offering services locally. If they are affecting the economy in such way, they should be taxed as if they were working locally, people working remotely get all the money but pay no taxes locally, while the other way around is nigh to impossible to set up shop.

Or we should get free access to Indian and Chinese markets in order to compete in a fair basis. But our politicians are too busy wasting billions of dollars killing innocent people instead of investing in the future of our respective countries.