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A New Reality For IT: the 18-Month Org Chart
StewBeans writes: Finding and keeping IT talent is getting increasingly competitive and expensive. A recruiter for Bay Area and Seattle tech companies said in a recent New York Times article about the cloud computing skill gap. "Someone working deep inside Amazon is getting five to 20 recruiting offers a day. Compensation has doubled in five years." Beyond steep salary and benefits packages, the resources to train new IT talent is wasted if they jump ship for the next best offer. That's why some IT executives are focusing talent management inward and investing in their current employees who are loyal and eager to learn, adapt, and grow with their company. Curt Carver, CIO for the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said that this approach led him to do away with the 10-year IT org chart and remain more agile as technology needs change. He argues that 18-month org charts and constant training are the new reality for IT, providing this example: "If you go back a couple of years ago, we were heavily involved in the storage business. Now I can buy unlimited storage from the cloud. I don't need a lot of people doing storage. In fact, I may only need one. Everybody else, I'm willing to retrain you, but you're going to be doing mobile, or you're going to be doing business intelligence, or you're going to be helping our organizations do gap analysis."
Depending on which bit of it you're in depends on how in demand you currently are. All the Kool Kids doing the latest new shiny will probably have job offers being thrown at them. But in 5-10 years time their skills will be borderline irrelevant (Ruby On Rails anyone?) so its retrain time again. And again. And again.
Meanwhile those of us plodding along doing old style boring backend coding in (supposedly according to the Kool Kids) grandpa languages like C/C++/Java or even COBOL might not have recruiters kicking down the door to get us to an interview but we're unlikely to be out of work for the forseable future or need retraining other than to learn some new library now and then so long as our skills are good to start with.
Many businesses do not have cloud computing at their heart, and people who happen to be in IT do not necessarily have the skills for the Cloud computing world.
Don't get me wrong, Cloud computing is not particularly hard, but it does require you to become up to date on the tools and mindset.
It took me weeks, even months to find people for our positions. Now, it is important to point out that I'm in an area where there is very high demand, so that doesn't mean that they aren't out there. They're just not *here*. Or rather, they're somewhere around here, but already gainfully employed.
However, in the midst of all of those interviews, I got plenty of candidates. The problem is that they had left or been laid off from $100k+ jobs where the government or some big company paid them to sit there and write policies or run some script that some "architect" wrote for them. In a smaller business, people like that are not needed and certainly not for that pricetag. I can run scripts myself, or use cron. Thanks.
I'll pay someone good money if they have the skills and the interest in continuing to learn. I will not spend that sort of money for people who I have to write out a step by step process for everything they do.
I am totally okay with someone branding themselves a "Cloud" or "DevOps" person if they can demonstrate their knowledge of the tools and the methodology, as well as showing that they are able to take the reins and not expect someone else to teach them. I don't care if you have a fancy CS degree, or even a college degree at all. I studied CS in college and I have worked with people who didn't spend a day in a CS class. I don't need a CS degree holder for everything. What I do need are people who can keep their skills up and know what they're there to interview for. The people who just want to point at some certificate or put jargon on their resume are welcome to go talk to the government. I hear they pay pretty well, if you can avoid committing suicide from the institutionalization.
Are people leaving the industry? Maybe. However, I think there is a certain number of people who have left the industry before they even lost their jobs. The industry had already moved on, they were just continuing to collect a paycheck and hold on to their red stapler. And I totally understand how that can happen. I have to constantly overcome my curmudgeonly desire to not change what works for me right now. I looked at Cloud computing when it first came out as an interesting toy, but I watched it closely and realized that it stopped being a toy and soon the buzzwords were the reality. Someday, "the Cloud" will either be so obvious that no one pays top dollar for it anymore, or we'll have moved to the next buzzword. If you want to stay in IT forever, that is the price you pay.
What is this "training" of which you speak? I have never seen any.
There are many employers out there who make a certain amount of training per year mandatory. But the training never seems to have anything to do with anyone's actual job. So for two weeks a year, you go downstairs or drive across town or squat in a conference room, sit way too close to your classmates, and learn something completely irrelevant. It's like taking an extra vacation, only you have to spend it in a hot crowded box watching Powerpoints, and neither you nor your employer derives any benefit or enjoyment from it.
The most insightful thing Curt Carver says is at the very beginning of his article:
Candidly, the people that have been loyal to the organization, that are active employees, that are eager and hungry to learn – those are the ones that I’m willing to invest in to keep.
What he doesn't get is that Silicon Valley is the antithesis of that. There was a time where Silicon Valley didn't exist, and IBM and Bell Labs were king. According to this PBS Documentary, the culture at that time was that talent was nurtured, not bought. You got your desk, you were a pencil pusher, and if you had ambition, you climbed the ladder, but you remained loyal to the company that provided for you. Then William Shockley broke away from Bell Labs, ventured out to California to make them a reality, and formed Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories. In a twist of irony, the very people he recruited to break ranks from Bell Labs (The "Traitorous Eight" as they came to be called, quit to form their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor. (And exactly 18 months later, interestingly.)
Silicon Valley has always been about venturists who seek opportunity wherever they can find it. If that's Silicon Valley's own undoing, so be it. Let the snake consume its own tail.
Technology doesn't make your job easier, it makes it harder. What it does is takes those mind-numbing jobs, away. And replace them with harder jobs, that requires creative thought, and out of the box problem solving.
Our education system fails to stress this new type of thinking. So many people are caught off guard as technology replaces their work.
Even if you are in technology, you need to keep an eye on what is happening for your job, if you find what you are doing is repetitive with a canned solution to a planned event, that means you are probably getting out of date, and will need to work on training for a change in your job.
In IT you can't expect to be doing the same job in your career.
I have seen a lot of jobs replaced by automation. I started work with 5 secretaries for a group of 120 people. There was one 5 years later. Because computers replaced things like scheduling meetings, sending information, email replaced notes sent to your desk inbox.
I think the next great automation/outsourcing should be management. There is really no need for all these overpaid MBA types, when there are plenty of H1B eligible people with the same degrees who will work for pennies on the dollar. All the managers need to do is train their replacements. Shouldn't take long at all, and think of the immediate financial gratification of the shareholders.
If I'm understanding TFA correctly, we've come full cycle. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. In the nineties, the thing was to hire bright individuals and grow them. Later, the paradigm changed to "IT is plug and play" so hire the talent you need at the time and lay off the people with training you didn't need anymore. Now we're back to the more healthy paradigm of growing your current employees to meet new challenges. This is a good thing. I wonder how long it'll last.
I also wonder what this will do of the paradigm of laying off locals and substituting green cards.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The thing is, if they took the salary from those 5 secretaries and REINVESTED IT into the base of 120 people, they wouldn't be in the predicament they are today. Where did that money go instead? They probably chose to allocate it to show greater profits instead of using it as an investment in their employee base, and now they are reaping what they sowed.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.