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Short of IT Workers At Home, Israeli Startups Recruit Elsewhere (reuters.com)
New submitter Alex Wilson shares a Reuters report: Driven by startups, Israel's technology industry is the fastest growing part of the economy. It accounts for 14 percent of economic output and 50 percent of exports. But a shortage of workers means its position at the cutting edge of global technology is at risk, with consequences for the economy and employment. When Alexey Chalimov founded software design firm Eastern Peak in Israel four years ago he knew he would not find the developers he needed at home. He went to Ukraine and hired 120 people to develop mobile apps and web platforms for international clients and smaller Israeli startups. "I worked for years in the Israeli market and I knew what the costs were in Israel and I knew there was a shortage of workers," he told Reuters.
The government's Innovation Authority forecasts a shortage of 10,000 engineers and programmers over the next decade in a market that employs 140,000. Israel has dropped six spots in three years to 17th in the World Economic Forum's ranking of the ease of finding skilled technology employees. In the meantime, many Israeli startups are looking abroad.
The government's Innovation Authority forecasts a shortage of 10,000 engineers and programmers over the next decade in a market that employs 140,000. Israel has dropped six spots in three years to 17th in the World Economic Forum's ranking of the ease of finding skilled technology employees. In the meantime, many Israeli startups are looking abroad.
The market is crying for more graduates in STEM fields. Mostly snapped up as soon as graduated, if not sooner
Do they need miracle workers? ;)
.... I bet salary is skyrocketing, right? :-)
For most tech jobs you can actually pull any person off the street and train them to do the job that is required (I apologize for hurting the feelings of Slashdot readers). However a professional job, requires professional pay. Many companies just don't want to deal with that. So they outsource to cheaper countries, where they pick up their guys off the street and train them to work for less in their counties.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Just kidding..
That missed the word "of" when first reading the headline?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
So I'm sitting here trying to figure out where you want to rank in the "World Economic Forum's ranking of the ease of finding skilled technology employees". If you rank first, then there are no jobs and skilled talent goes wasting. If you rank last, it can be because there are zillions of job opportunities sucking up all the talent or, maybe, your country hasn't gotten reliable electricity and certainly no infrastructure to support the creation of technical companies. Maybe dropping 3 spots to 17th is a good thing. I don't know. But neither first nor last is optimal.
I've worked in a few places that did this. Pay was excellent for everyone. The problem is that not everyone is technically inclined, even those with degrees in technical fields and it places an extra burden on those who are. Fixing mistakes is often more difficult and takes longer than doing things right the first time. I worked with one guy who had difficulties with the concept of folders and directories even after years on the job and he had a degree in CS (I don't). You end up doing your job and theirs. He is the most egregious example, but I've experienced many others....eg., "Well what do you do if the computer does not do what it's programmed to do?" as in take the wrong branch on a conditional?" That's was an actual questioned posed once.
... uh huh. Shortage of those who will work cheap, you mean.
Trolls are pro-Trump....not against.
In one of the most notoriously difficult countries to immigrate to for non-Jews, I find it deliciously ironic that they're having problems with a worker shortage. The question is, will they ease immigration requirements for non-Jews? I highly doubt it.
I've spent the last half-decade deep in the bowels of a product that is the result of an Israeli code from the early 00's being supported and maintained largely by Ukrainians for the latter half of it's lifetime. So, personal experience here.
It's almost impossible to work with Israeli companies when it comes to actual production stuff. There's such a massive difference when it comes to their logic. They assume they are *always* right. And I have yet to see Israeli code that has error correction built into it anywhere - why would the code fail, it worked when we wrote it? Israeli start-up Environments combines the worst parts SV mentality with a national culture that is difficult to work with at the best of times - better hope you don't have a production outage on Friday!
My Israeli coworkers are mostly great people, and we've had a lot of fun, and I respect them quite a bit. But give me one of the non-Israeli guys any day of the week if something is broken and needs to be fixed correctly, and not just patched until it breaks again. Start-ups are great for starting up, but when your 20 year old company is still running in start-up mode, no thank you.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
From around 2005 to 2006 I worked for an embedded software company on a gaming (think casino "gaming") system that was used to create video slots and poker games for American casinos. Before you ask, no the Russians didn't hack the system to give themselves jackpots. They get certified in a different way and often by the casinos themselves. That kind of crap gets you killed, and being in the Ukraine wouldn't save you (ahh, the stories I could tell).
Nonetheless, when I started it was because they'd had the folks over there coding for about 14 months. The code was terrible and filled with errors. Their design was also awful and rejected by 100% of our clients. So, they brought in myself and another guy to help clean it up. We couldn't clean it up because it was total garbage. We ended up simply learning from the mistakes we'd observed and starting over with a clean slate.
It took us only two months to reach all their milestones and beat their game engine performance by about 10x.
I also observed an offshore project at Oracle which ran for two years. Then took a year to fail in the client's face (big consulting gig for Oracle). The client actually requested to "stop using Indians". Then it came back to the USA, started from scratch, and now actually runs for the client steady-state for about 3 years so far.
Then there is what happened when HP tried to offshore the continued development of OpenVMS. Fucking disaster. They got nothing done and only jacked up subsequent versions of the OS so bad that HP management was disgusted enough to let a domestic company takeover development instead (that's VSI).
Coding is subtle and often difficult. Experience and skill matter greatly. Rich guys don't hire idiots to work on their exotic sports cars. Why do they want to hire inexperienced and poorly trained foreign wokers? Others have already hit the nail on the head: they don't want to pay the prevailing wage. Here's me all sad for the suit-weasels who can't get coders cheap enough. Boo hoo.
Did you not get the news? There's been an economic crisis going on. Many of people got laid off. Hire them, they are qualified.
He's just trollin. Ignore him.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There are Jews of all races. Israel is based on Judaism the religion, not on sephardic and hasidic races. So they have all races of Jews, and have all the racial & ethnic diversity that they need. Only thing to check - whether they have the thought diversity that's needed to produce the talent that they need
Let me ask you something, if a private person wants to build an application and resell it should he want to pay more to develop it or should he save the money wherever possible? Also if he has a budget should he spend it on higher salaries or on more people?
Just want to hear your ideas on how to run a business, you must be a successful business person, knowing how things should really be done.
You can't handle the truth.
Unlike you whose only skills are skimming off of productive people and feeling entitled to lecture us about how big a welfare check is enough for you.
Unless you're some kind of crazy zionist, any halfway-intelligent person is not going to want to move to Israel. Aside from being a theocracy and giving different rights to people based on their religion, they've also elected disgusting conservative governments for countless years now. This is all without even going into the atrocities and human rights violations. Israel needs to be written off the map. If they really want to be secular, as so many claim, they need to deliver. Change the name, unite with their occupied Palestinian territories under a completely secular government, pay back reparations to the people they have oppressed for so many years, and finally stop building settlements and giving special rights to Jews. It's pretty damn simple. But no, Israelis would never go for something that civilised, because the majority are just as disgusting as deplorables in the US.
Whenever talk of "shortage" hits a certain pace, a recession pops up. We are almost due. Recessions have hit roughly around the end of the decade for roughly 40 years, and even longer back if you ignore the Vietnam spending bubble.
Table-ized A.I.
Well with the porn industry going towards fembots, even there you'll need a degree.
Yes, because the Palestinians don't support Hamas or Hezbollah. They aren't murdering Israeli's, or shooting rockets daily into Israel. The Palestinians also don't have a government which pays family members money if they kill Israelis or suicide bomb Israelis. /s
Israel is not perfect, but this ridiculous notion that they are evil incarnate committing war crimes and atrocities every second of every day is just ridiculous. They are surrounded on 3 sides by people who believe they do not have a right to exist and want to literally nuke them out of existence. Israel has repeatedly tried to have peace with Palestine, only to have their cease fires violated immediately by Palestinians. It takes 2 people for peace, and without Palestinians willing to come to the table then it will continue to fail. The Palestinian government is just as culpable in all the problems as Israel is.
Clearly you've never been to the country and are spouting nonsense based on what you heard 3rd-hand.
Please, come visit and judge for yourself.
For starters, "race" is pretty arbitrary in its definition when classifying people. It's not like "species" which has real defined limits to what consists of a species. And "hasidic" is not at all a race, it's merely a stream of observance of Judaism. Sephardic describes where a person's family lived during the time that they spent outside of Israel (though not all Jewish families were exiled by the Romans and there was always a Jewish presence in Israel, a fact that was lost upon the European crusaders who not only killed Muslims, but also Jews and quite possibly fellow Christians in their attempts to take control of Israel in the middle ages). There is at least one rare genetic condition that occurs in the Ashkenazi communities (which is a similar type of definition as the term "sephardic"): Tay-Sachs. And then you have the Jews of Ethiopea as well as the descendants of the lost community of Kai Feng, China...
Nah, perhaps what you really should say is "Jews come in all sizes, shapes, and colors". They're still Jews, and still have very similar cultural and ethnic similarities to any other Jew on the planet.
You forgot to mention that the GP also doesn't seem to understand what constitutes a "theocracy" and why Israel is not a "theocracy".
You don't really understand the Mid-East, its Peoples, and their Grievances. The grievances are as old as the people. Were every Jew dead tomorrow, the Arabs would be pissed because they had not been the ones to kill them out of revenge.
There would be peace tomorrow if the Palestinians laid down their weapons. if the Israelis did, there would be no Israel. Put that in your pipe and smoke it...
The summary is very confusing.
First, they claim a shortage of IT workers.
Then they go on to talk about developers, engineers, and programmers, instead of IT workers.
Then they go back and talk about IT workers: "skilled technology employees".
I can understand that they might also have a shortage of those other things as well as IT workers, but what do developers, engineers, and programmers have to do with answering the phone at the help desk, pulling cat 5/cat 6 cable, using puppet to configure systems, or swapping out disks on raid arrays (aka the stuff that "IT workers" do)?
Israel needs to be written off the map.
Suppose everything you say about Israel is correct, here's the list of "theocratic" countries that also needs to be "written off the map" by your standards:
- Andorra
- Iran
- The Vatican city
Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_system_of_government#Theocracies
Until you ask for them to be "written off the map", you're just another anti-semite.
Immigration to Isreal is easy if you can make the cut.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
One market is saturated with work, so capital migrates to look for markets that are not. Anon approves.
How does a troll get such a low ID? Did the owner died and the family sold you the password? Inquisitive minds need to know!
I tend to agree. I don't have any first- hand knowledge of the job situation in Israel, but it sounds parallel to what I see all the time in America, really.
People come up with all of these startup business concepts that (of course) require custom code to be written to build the software that will run on phones, tablets or computers to make it all happen. But they view the code building process a lot like hiring people to build a new shed in their yard or to do landscaping work.
Basically, they want cheap labor, and aren't opposed to using foreigners if that saves a lot of money on the project's cost.
Just this afternoon, I was attending a "lunch and learn" type of I.T. event and overheard the head of a cloud service provider talking about his past and background. He said he started out learning to code and worked as a software developer for 5 or 6 years. But eventually, he realized it was the type of career where you could spend 8 hour days sitting in front of a PC at your own house and not even socializing with anybody you work for. Perhaps, you'd have a meeting for an hour or two, once a week. But otherwise, you were forgotten about except as another "line item" on people's project management plan. "Check on progress of code for XYZ." That's why he started his own company on the service side of things, and never looked back.
And generally, I'd say that's gotten worse in recent years. Now, you're just disposable in many cases. Code up what you're asked to build, and then they might get rid of you if they don't have any new software project plans in the works. Code maintenance and fixes? Meh... outsource those to some OTHER 3rd. party who comes in as the low bidder.
I never took much interest in the coding part of computing either. (Well, I wrote a bulletin board system in BASIC back in the 80's -- but that's the extent of it for me.) I think if you really care about it though, it should be treated like a craft that you keep working to improve, year after year -- probably while building applications you can sell for yourself. Otherwise, you're liable to get short-changed.
While I have not worked there I do keep current about what is going on. The level of age discrimination is off the charts. Worst than in the US. If you are over 45 and loose you job in IT, good luck! The interviews there are also pretty tough because for a long time there was oversupply of labor. As in the US, paying more and reducing age discrimination will reduce most real or imaginary shortages, however companies are trying to change the laws so they can bring cheap "skilled" labor into the country and the media is complicit in the same kind of song and dance as in the US.
Instead of bringing them in on an H-1B it'll be an Oy-1Vey.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Normally a private person would have to learn how to code it themselves. Or bring on people who are willing to take the risk to invest their time in helping you out, in return they will be able to get a share profit from the success.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why is that? As a private person I incorporated (that's for tax purposes) and hired people to do what I needed them to do, I paid out of my savings, why should somebody be forced to work for free?
So what you are saying is that: working for free is fine as long as you don't hire somebody from any other place other than where you live for money? Hiring somebody that you can afford to hire for money is not good, only having free workforce is good?????
You can't handle the truth.
They are not working for free. They are working in partnership with you, for the share of the profit. Because you are taking a risk on your business to reap rewards, if you expect someone else to share the risk they should share the rewards.
They ARE NOT FORCED. The choose to take the risk to work in partnership. For some people/a lot of people will not choose this agreement. However if your idea has merit then they just might.
Hiring a person, paying them less then a living wage for a product that may not succeed. Is just bad business. If the person is willing the take the risks they need the reward too. Otherwise you are just abusing your staff.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.