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How Companies Are Preparing For the IT Workforce Exodus
itwbennett writes "If you think there's a glut of contract IT workers now, just wait. 10,000 U.S. baby boomers will turn 65 every day from now until 2030, and at least some of them will want to ease into retirement. This may sound like music to the ears of IT organizations who already would rather hire temporary staff with specialized expertise — especially for working on legacy technologies. 'The contractor ratio, already high in tech, will continue to increase as companies allow retiring staff to work part-time hours or hire them for short-term projects,' says Matthew Ripaldi, senior vice president at IT staffing firm Modis."
Strokes grey beard - tell me more, young AC.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Why wait until your boss retires... why not assist him on his way to his final reward. What do you think crawl spaces are for anyway?
And what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Got an ambitious underling? There is always more room under the office.
The only downside is getting the fingers to un-stiffen enough to sign your references. You would think that the blood and putrid remains on the resume might cause questions, but real businessmen understand. Everyone has a few skeletons in their closet.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No, they'll retain their position and likely their pay, only moving to part-time work. So they still get to career-block you, but now they can do it from home. Nothing like a GS 13/14/15 who manages to never be in the office, yet still holds a slot and draws a check. We are horribly shorthanded these days due to this crap, despite being "overstaffed."
First of all, there is no glut right now of competent IT workers. I have lots of buddies (most elderly, so to speak, I'm 52) who have absolutely no shortage of work. I don't see it. I am a contract worker now - bill at a greater rate than I ever have in my life, and have more work than I know what to do with. I turn down 2 out of 3 contracts. I think that people who are not getting IT work need to hone their skills until they have jobs/contracts forced onto them.
I used to work at Microsoft - I never even *came close* to being stack ranked out. I am not saying that no one was ever incorrectly ranked at the bottom, but I never saw it. The people I saw at the bottom end of the stack rank - I could see the point that the managers were making. One dude was competent, but spent *way* too much time goofing off. And while Microsoft is mostly filled with competent people, make no doubt about it, there are plenty of semi-competent people there. There needs to be a system to get rid of the dead weight.
Now granted, I am not lazy. I am versed in OO and functional programming. I have developed many large projects in JavaScript, as well as C#. I have written books, written over 1000 blog posts, recorded over 150 screen-casts, and etc. I took a job writing a large system in JavaScript without knowing the language, then taught myself the language, including the functional programming / lamda / closure aspects in 3 weeks. I was 50 at the time. So don't whine about being old and not having the skills. If you don't have them, then get them. If you have them, then you probably have work. And if you have the skilz and don't have work, then blog / screen-cast, and you will have work in short order.
As a geezer, one of the main criticisms at my review was that I tend to overload younger staff with too much information. Because I have seen so much before, I can jump on new problems faster. And I am working at what thinks of itself as a leading edge chip design company on the newest products.The company chooses me for the bleeding edge.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Second , I hear you about contracting vs full-time. It took the .com bust combined with a down-swing in energy to force me out of a contracting for the first time since 1900. But, where I work now also doesn't keep contractors on more than a year and doesn't do business with any but a short list of large shops, all of whom want entirely too much dosh for a 1099 passthrough. So again, this guy is talking out his backside if he thinks there's suddenly going to be a sea of contracting jobs. We don't hire contractors unless we have to just because of the one year limitation. It's not enough time to teach people complex systems, get them productive and reap the benefits.
My organization wanted to lower headcount, so a couple of years ago they offered early (reduced) retirement to us oldsters. I took it.
I went back for the office Christmas party last year and found I had been replaced by 3 contractors. The organization wound up spending more money to get my work done than they saved by letting me go.
Weird and stupid, but I'm enjoying my retirement.
Yeah, I was one of those with "seen so much before"... I actually had a coworker grab me for a problem (they'd spent hours on), I hopped into it and pointed out a bunch of problems in about 30 minutes. He said he has "no idea how I figured that out", so I said I was always willing to take some time and sit down with someone and teach them some things.
His answer? "Oh, I don't want to know what you do... then they'd expect it of me."
I'm the one who just got laid off, of course... he got promoted to being in charge of another department I hear.
Well, I can maybe help you with some of your hiring practices - as an experienced IT guy who's been out of work a few times over the last few years, and have been looking to better my situation for a lot longer, I might be able to tell you why qualified applicants aren't applying.
First: Are you putting a ballpark salary in the advertisement, or is it some nonanswer like "DOE" or "Market" or "Going Rate"? Because all three of those have prevent me from submitting my resume in the past, as I'm assuming that you're just going to rape me on my paycheck. Oh, you mean I need to get a phone interview (during my workday), I need to take a day off for a face to face, and then IF I'm able to impress you enough you'll tell me that the most you'll pay me is 2/3 of going rate (but I'll get a raise in six months! pinky swear!)
Second (and speaking of pay anyway): Are you actually giving market value to your IT guy or are you underpaying him/her by 20% like most of the rest of the world? When someone is hiring me to do server work, helpdesk work, database work, managing a phone system, running backups, handling rebuilds and break/fix requests they'd better be paying more than $17/hr.
Something that companies don't seem to realize: *good* IT guys (and no, I'm not cocky enough to think that I necessarily belong to that group) are also really good at research - they HAVE to be to do their job. When I find a job opportunity one of the first things that I do is check online for the salary that I can expect to get. If that's too low, I don't apply. If I'm finding the advert somewhere like Dice or Monster, that has the ability to parse my already written resume and I'm redirected to a site that forces me to [i]manually re-enter all of my fucking information[/i] I'm also disinclined to apply for the position, [b]especially[/b] if the rate of pay is nowhere to be found. The third thing that I check is the climate of the company - do they have a lot of turnover? Are there reviews online with Glassdoor or somewhere else that can let me know *why* there's a high turnover (after all, there may be legitimate reasons...or it could be because your company has no idea how to hire competent managers)
Now, that third step is optional - if I'm unemployed and looking, that third step is nonexistent (I'd rather work *anywhere* than be unemployed. I can continue looking after getting hired, after all), but if it's a shitty company that treats its IT department like crap, you can bet your ass that two weeks after hiring me I'll be continuing to look for work. In six months I just might be out the door.
Some might be saying that I'm shooting myself in the foot by being so stubborn about this shit, but honestly, how much of my time do you need to waste just to determine whether I'm a potential fit for your company? Do you really want your time wasted by a technician that you can't afford? Do you really want to squash those excellent IT guys that just simply don't have time (by dint of being overworked and on call all of the fucking time) by making them reinvent the wheel (by manually having to enter in a resume that likely took at least a few hours to put together in the first place)? If you said yes to any of those questions then you're like most of the other companies on the planet and I've answered your question.
There's another issue that I'll mention here, although it hasn't prevented me from applying at very many jobs: Let your IT department draft the Job Posting. Having your HR department try to grok the difference between Windows and Office is painful enough, but when you have them just throwing down any buzzword that they've heard in the last two weeks you're really not going to get a very good caliber of employee.
Obama's the one who has, unilaterally and probably unconstitutionally, removed employer requirements from the bill and waived hundreds of companies
Ummm...Did you read what I was saying? WHY should health insurance be tied to employment? If I could get affordable health insurance NOT tied to my employer (and I have great health insurance through my employer) then I COULD RETIRE IN ABOUT THREE YEARS. And one of you young whippersnappers could have my job.
As it is I cannot get affordable health insurance without being employed, so I end up screwing some young person out of a job for an additional 15 years or so until Medicare kicks in. Now multiply this over the millions of others in my situation and...enjoy your un-or-underemployment, I guess.