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A New Reality For IT: the 18-Month Org Chart

Posted by timothy on from the what's-your-horizon dept.

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."

7 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. I've got a gap you can analyze by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The gap between the expectation that technology would lead to a leisure society, and the realization that it just leads to a feudal, totalitarian regime where the billionaire beggars just take, take, take.

    1. Re:I've got a gap you can analyze by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  2. Let's just nip this in the bud right now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "The cloud computing skill gap" "Finding and keeping IT talent is getting increasingly competitive and expensive"

    Juxtaposed with "mass IT layoffs across the industry"

    I think it's pretty clear what we're seeing here. People are leaving the industry or the West Coast, whichever you prefer.

  3. Or maybe... by ilsaloving · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or maybe if companies showed the same loyalty to their employees that they demand from them, this wouldn't be a problem.

  4. Training? by plopez · · Score: 5, Funny

    What is this "training" of which you speak? I have never seen any.

    --
    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  5. This guy gets it, but he doesn't by Pollux · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:The reality of loyalty by RabidReindeer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Believe it or not, at one time, companies didn't lay people off at the drop of a hat. Because hiring them back again is expensive and hiring new people means that you not only have to train them to do the job the way your company needs it done, but they also have to learn where to go in the company to get things done.

    When 110% efficiency and rapidly gaining short-term share price was not the expectation, people would be reassigned, furloughed or sent off for training if their primary skills weren't required.

    That doesn't mean that people didn't get laid off. Just that the norm was that layoffs were a measure of last resort, not the first thing you did to boost quarterly profits. There was a certain noblesse oblige there. The company took care of you and you took care of the company. You worked until you retired, they gave you a gold watch and a pension. You were invested emotionally in the company and in the happiness of its customers. Or, if not, you got canned, but not because you weren't the perfect fit for the moment.

    Then they invented "perma-temping"...