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No More Suits; IT Worker Shortage Will End Soon
I was up at Andover Corporate HQ Tuesday. It's 400 miles from my home office, so I don't get there often. This time, for no particular reason, I happened to notice that while Andover has plenty of administrative and marketing and other suit-type people floating around the office doing whatever those people do, none of them wear suits to work any more!
But there was still a clothing division between the execs and the workers: ironing. The programmers, artists, writers, and hardware wranglers wore basic, simple, unpressed t-shirts and jeans or other working-type pants, while the biggies over in admin-land all looked like they spent significant time and energy getting their casual outfits to look "just right" before they came to work.
After I realized what was happening at Andover, fashion-wise, I called some friends who work in other new media and tech companies and asked them if the same thing was going on in their offices. To a man and women, they said it was. Nowadays, there are no suits in tech companies unless network TV cameras are there and rolling, and often not even then.
From now on, in the interests of journalistic accuracy and linguistic precision, I am going to refer to the executives formerly known as suits as "Its," an acronym for "Ironed T-Shirts."
"Yeah, I had a great idea but the Its were too clueless to figure it out!" is an example of how you might use Its in a normal workday sentence. Feel free to do so. I have not copyrighted the word. It's now yours as much as mine to mess up, mispell, or whatever else you like to do to words in your spare time.
The IT Worker "Shortage" Will End. Soon.
Once upon a time, back when the world was young and "engineer" was a word used to describe hairy-eared men who designed real, physical things and programmers were looked down upon as glorified typists, the U.S. had an "engineering shortage." All through the late 60s and early 70s publications like the Wall Street Journal ran article after article about how America's potential economic growth was being stifled by a shortage of engineers and technicians. Business-owned politicians loosened visa restrictions for engineers and technicians from other countries because of this supposed shortage, engineering salaries shot up, and suits (which is what Its were called back then) constantly whined about the impossibility of managing their arrogant techies, all of whom knew they could find other jobs in seconds and, therefore, demanded all kinds of perqs, up to and including free coffee and sodas, in-house gyms, flextime hours, and so on.
You could take any of those 60s or 70s WSJ stories about the "engineering shortage," change a few words in them, and run them today as panic pieces about how it's impossible to find competent programmers and sysadmins at reasonable salaries, and how when you do scare up a few of these rare beasts, they won't hew to the corporate line and respect corporate authority and salute their MBA bosses like good little workers. Indeed, the WSJ may actually be changing words in those old stories and rerunning them. Who would know?
But those of you beyond a certain age will recall that, one day, all those formerly high-rolling engineers were suddenly seeking exciting new careers in convenience stores, service stations, and fast food outlets that didn't pay enough to cover the mortgages on their nice suburban houses, which suddenly became hard to sell because there weren't enough other engineers with good jobs available to buy them. The economies in places like the Boston suburbs and Silicon Valley and other "high-tech capitals" tanked. Life was rough, and a lot of people (including me) got burned hard and ended up with scars that they/we carry to this day.
All good things come to an end. Right now, yes, it's good to be the king (or at least the Network Administrator). But remember what happened to Louis XVI when the rabble got fed up with paying for his high living and decided to take him down a peg.
And does anyone here remember the oil crisis of 1973? I sure do. The U.S. seemed to be spending all of its money importing Arab oil, which climbed to nearly $50 per barrel at one point when OPEC [the Organization of Petrolem-Exporting Countries] got especially feisty. If this trend went on, economic pundits said, the Arabs would own America (and most of Europe) outright within a decade or two. By extrapolating then-current trends and drawing them as lines on colorful charts, this thesis was easy to display on TV shows, on newspaper front pages and in slideshows at business conferences so that everyone could get nice and worried about it.
But last I looked, OPEC was just about dead and oil was selling in the $10 - $20 per barrel range. The danger of predictions made through extrapolations is that something always seems to come along that messes them up. In the case of oil, it was a major change in consumption patterns. Oil got too expensive, so we (the oil-importing countries) simply stopped using so much of it. The most visible example of this change: what we call a "full-sized American car" today wouldn't be a pimple on the bumper of, say, a 1970 Buick Electra.
Believe me, somewhere in a secret cavern beneath the Wharton School of Business (which is to finance as Stanford is to Computer Science) or someplace similar, teams of fiery-eyed MBA candidates are plotting to take down today's computer professionals as hard as OPEC, engineers, and Louis XVI all got slammed in their respective days.
So enjoy the ride while it lasts. It's great fun. But don't take out a 30-year mortgage based on it. Something - it could be genetic algorithms or some other new, less labor-intensive programming methodology or it could be an overall economic downturn that ripples through the high-tech industries and brings Internet growth to halt the same way the construction-driven economic boom in Austin, TX in the early 80s collapsed in on itself when a comparatively small number of construction workers lost their jobs and couldn't afford to buy houses, which led to even less housing demand, and so on all the way down - will throw a lot of high-tech workers out in the street. I have no more idea than anyone else of what the proximate cause of the next tech-industry recession will be, but I guarantee that it will come. One always does.
Indeed, if this thoughtful article from Linux Journal has any truth to it, today's shortage of computer professionals may be as false as many people thought the 70s oil shortage was, so it may already be time for IT workers to start doing a little financial hunkering-down, especially if they're over 30 and unwilling to work slave-length workweeks.
Is Slashdot a Magazine?
I have always considered Slashdot an online magazine. And I have always respected the American Society of Magazine Editors [ASME] and believe their stringent code of ethics should apply as much to online publications as to those printed on paper. So I decided to join. $225 a year, and Andover'll pay for it anyway, so why not?
But guess what? This august body still only accepts members from print magazines. As a purely online editor, I'm apparently not worthy. Which means, by extension, that you, as an online reader, are not as worthy as a print magazine reader. No big deal. I find it more amusing than alarming - for you and me, at least. But this is sad for the ASME; it is freezing out the most vital, highest-growth part of the periodical news business when, instead, traditional publishers' and editors' organizations should be courting us online people in order to assure their own future survival.
Here is the last paragraph of my e-mail response to the turndown I sent to arhodes@MAGAZINE.ORG:
Depending on your reckoning, the 21st century starts in either ~3 or ~15 months. If ASME decides to enter it at some point, please let me know. I'll be there, waiting for you to catch up. ;)- Robin "roblimo" Miller
Elkridge, Maryland, USA
10 October 1999, noon EDT
Working in the ecommerce industry, focused on Java/Corba/Unix, I can say competent developers are indeed hard to find. You can't hire them, you can't find them and they do charge a high hourly rate.
I charge a high hourly rate and I still get 3 contacts a week wanting me to fly to Kansas City, Seatle or Montreal to do Java/Corba development.
The problem I find is that most of us high paid consultants is that we stir up some sort of jealousy in the corporate converted crew. These converts are COBOL/Mainframe or VB/VC++ guys 'retrained' in the ways of distributed computing. They still think procedurally and structure their OO applications as such. They have a hard time understanding multi-threaded issues and are still scared to move forward into new technologies (such as XML or using COS service like Naming, Trading or Properties).
Or there is the young crowd with no direct experience developing large scale systems that make snap judgements and write a new service to handle some new fucntionality. Forget logical partitioning of the application or requirements. Forget real knowledege even, they can talk the talk so they must be bright and know what they are talking about. Bullshit! They are inexperienced, so get their noses out of your asses management!
This coupled with incompetent recruiters makes things even more complicated for us competent consultants. I get a call, 'Hey, you know Java right?' me: yes I do. recruiter: Well, I have this great JavaScript position me: click.
It is generally thought that Indians, or other foreigners are generally brigther than their american conterparts. Obvisouly this is flawed. Just because one is an Indian doesn't mean they can walk the walk. They are like the rest of us. Some idiots, some extremely competent. The real difference is that I'll charge you for overtime, because it is the law that I get paid for what I work, while they don't, in general. (I'm not singling out Indians in this case, and, yes, I have Indian friends - I also know a couple of idiot Indians).
Another point is is that management inforces incompetence. The Its allow for underperformers to continue under performing. 'Hell, we are a big corporation, he/she is a nice person, let them ride the system' Forget they can't tell you what requirements are met by their code, they can't tell you a damn thing about their code except that it works (sometimes) and they sit on their ass soaking up the $.
Once the corporation (pick one) gets a hold of me, I tend to work my ass off (60 hour weeks) and get more and more responsibilities because I'm the only one in the whole freaking group that can do it. Finally I get burnt out (generally 6 months) and terminate my contract.
You better pay me for what I'm worth or I just won't work for you. I don't give a damn if I make more that your CEO, I'm making you money, giving you what you want, not sitting on my ass surfing the net every 30 seconds, or talkin in the hall, or in the cube next door. I'm producing, I am the critical path for all of your assignments because your people can't do the work. Your success depends on me. Pay me what I'm worth or I'll go to your competition.
First of all, there is nothing any less "precise" in the term "suits" than in the word "tawdry". Not too many people buy their baubles at fetes of St. Audrey any more, bu the word remains, partly because it is aberrations like this that give human language its vibrancy. In several contexts "suits" has ceased to have any relevance to the dress of the referent. This is a good thing, even if you're not an etymologist. The phenomonon goes by several names, but in honor of the educational board of Kansas, let's call it "evolved terminology". When we try to stop the natural flow of language, we come up with abominations such as Roblimo's "its". I wonder whether Roblimo would junk the term "its" if the referents stopped wearing T-shirts.
On to more serious matters: it is pretty odd to paint engineers as a bunch of whimpering, over-privileged prima donnas (look another evolved term!), especially when you're putting MBAs on the other side of the fence. The immense bonuses and stock-options that are thrust at even mediocre businessmen in this economy is far more of a distortion than the perks of engineers. But, at least if you take the viewpoint of that august journal _The Economist_, both trends will continue as long as America continues along its asset-price inflation. When this bubble bursts, it will affect everyone: some over-privileged engineers and managers alike will find themselves pumping gas, and many unfortunale members of society will find themselves yanked under the poverty line.
This is pretty basic stuff, and it has nothing to do with the real or supposed shortage of engineers as much as it does with the distortions of the present economy: a lens that affects workers at all levels.
Of course, The Economist might be wrong and there might be a true miracle in productivity afoot. But in this case, Roblimo would _still_ be wrong (and more so because of his comparison to the mid-century recessions).
And as for the very idea of genetic algorithms replacing programmers. Please park this futuristic nonsense. GAs are a very deterministic way of harnessing implicit paralellism inheret in certain problem-spaces. They are not some form of dark voodoo. There is nothing in them that will make them sudden arbitrary problem-solvers.
I really don't like being so harsh, but it's the same issue that came up when Jon Katz started writing features. On a forum such as /., with so many picky specialists, it's probably better to be encouraging features from specialists rather than journalists. I don't consider /. to be a main-stream medium. Yes, I know it might be a bit hypocritical of me to say so when I haven't submitted a feature myself. I might just find the time to correct this.
--
Uche
"What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross" -- E.P.
I do not believe that the shortage of highly-qualified, high-skilled, programmers will end anytime soon.
Sure, there'll be plenty of people whose eyes glaze over while reading the classifieds and seeing the salaries and rates of computer programmers. They'll turn around, and say to their drinking buddy: "Hey, Zeke! Look how much computer programmers are being paid these days (burp)! I think I'm going to go and become a computer programmer!!! (hic)".
So, they'll go to some diploma mill, go through the motions, and, presto! New! From Spishak! It's "The Programmer In A Box!!!!!!" Instant ASP! Instant Perl! Instant C++!!
So, the great unwashed will be hired en masse by clueless companies who will think that they'll save a bundle by hiring these new programmers at entry-level salaries or rates. They'll tinker around, for a little while, and things will seem to be fine for some time. Then, everything starts to crash and burn, the environment at work starts to get a bit tense because all the problems, so the new programmers will split, and the companies will be left holding the bag.
Who do you think the companies will turn to, now?
Yup, meanwhile, the Programmer In A Box[tm] is busy running the scam at another clueless company.
I did not go to college and sign up for the comp-sci major because I wanted to make big bucks. In fact, when I was in school, programmers didn't really make that much money. They made a good buck, or two, but not that much. I became a programmer because that's what I really wanted to do.
Predictions that IT worker shortage will end soon are generally based upon the alleged scores of students signing up for computer science majors or computer schools, nationwide. My opinion is that the main attraction for most of these people is only the high salaries and rates that are being paid to highly qualified and skilled programmers.
Except that just the desire to earn big bucks will not make you a good programmer. There's a very good reason why good programmers make good money. Computer programming is a very mentally intensive job. To be a good computer programmer you not only have to know the computer language of choice. It also requires a certain mental discipline, I'd even say that it requires a certain way of thinking. Just knowing how to write printf("Hello world.\n"); is not going to help you much when you've been given a core dump, the source code, no way to reproduce the problem, and were told to figure out what happened, and to fix it.
I believe that very few of these people, who are looking in to cash in on the supposed IT worker shortage, are really prepared for the job. And I wish them luck. I really do. The more they screw up, the more money the rest of us will make, cleaning up their mess.
And even if I'm completely wrong, the bottom line is that we'll always have 10, 15, or more years of experience more than they will do. That cannot possibly ever change, so no matter how many bodies you'll throw into a computer science major, the number of people who already have decades of experience will never change.
... Man... /. needs a good spell checker and grammar checker.
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Many of the comments I've read seem to be taking away the wrong point. *Of course* programming is difficult. *Of course* you can weed out the good programmers from the bad. But guess what? Engineering is difficult too! And some people are good at it while others aren't, just as with programming.
And that could be precisely the engine behind what Rob describes. Did the engineering profession disappear recently? Of course not. And programming won't go anywhere either. But there are probably fewer engineers out there today than there were then, and the ones that remain are probably the more skilled among them. (I have no numbers to support this, only anecdotes). There isn't as much money sloshing around for the reamaining engineers to grab either. What's to say that the bulk of today's coders won't be driven out as well, with only the very best remaining -- if even them?
I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume that IT will go down the same way. Consider that much of the growth behind IT is the move to get businesses onto the internet, and to build the infrastructure to get people on at home at better speeds. In other words, we're in a building phase, much like countries went through when they joined the industrial revolution. But just as with that period, it will end. Eventually, there weren't as many new factories to build, the telegraph lines had been laid, the rivers all had steamboats, and while these things persisted, they slacked off. So it may be here. Eventually, the fiber optic lines and satellites will all be in place; the companies will have their E-Commerce(tm) departments up and running; and the opportunities for new entry will, not disappear, but diminish.
If you think this can't happen, you're delusional. Nothing lasts forever. We've got it good now, but something -- who knows what, who knows when or how soon -- will bring it all to an end. Plan for it. If you are not absolutely top notch, plan on a second career.
One of my professors got his undergrad degree in aerospace engineering -- he worked on the Apollo program and helped send people to the moon. In his domain, he was great -- but one day we stopped sending people to the moon, and he had to find a new job. For a while, he bought a bar & lived as a bartender. Now he's a professor. But he'll probably never send people to the moon again.
It's not pessimism guys, it's reality. Plan for it or get burned. Consider yourselves warned.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
While I agree that there is not a lack of IT workers out there, I would have to say that the percentage of *skilled* IT workers is very small. I can't tell you how many times that I've talked to a highly-paid consultant about how I made some algorithm faster, get into big-O notation, and see his/her eyes start to glaze over. Unfortunately for someone like myself, who cares about the efficiency of their algorithms, the huge advances in processor speed have rendered such details unnecessary in most business applications. 90% of the code I review nowadays is just total cr*p, and it's due to the attitude that everything can be fixed by throwing more hardware at the problem. I'm beginning to feel like an old man (remember the old days...) and I'm only 29...