IT Worker Shortages Everywhere

Vicissidude writes with news from the IT front in India: "The software industry body Nasscom has warned that India faces a shortfall of half a million skilled workers by 2010. The country will need 350,000 engineers a year, but no more than 150,000 of the most highly skilled engineers will be available each year." This shortfall is fueling a new development, the exporting of Indian tech jobs to the US. But will there be workers in the US to do those jobs? Reader Jadeite2 writes with a word from Bill Gates, speaking to a business forum in Moscow, who said: "There is a shortage of IT skills on a worldwide basis. Anybody who can get those skills here now will have a lot of opportunity."

Those of us who supported outsourcing...

[geoffrobinson (109879)]

or at least the freedom to outsource were confident that, ultimately, outsourcing would be a net benefit for everyone. For India and for America.

This seems to be confirmation of that.

Re:Those of us who supported outsourcing...

[rovingeyes (575063)]

I have a friend who works in Google India. And when I asked about this new phenomenon, he said that there is no shortage of applicants, but there is a shortage of "qualified" applicants. For every software engineering position they anounce, thousands of resumes are received, but none of them meet their requirements. So this shortage is not some random IT position but very specific skilled positions that the Indian tech populace is unable to fill.

Define qualified

[plopez (54068)]

In the US the phrase 'lack of qualified applicants' came to mean 'lack of qualified applicants who were willing to work for what we were willing to pay.'

Large difference.

Re:Define qualified

[heinousjay (683506)]

Considering some of the wildly inflated salary demands I've heard from people in relation to their actual deomonstrated ability, I'd say adjustments need to be made on both sides.

Re:

[Panaflex (13191)]

Google has a strange hiring practice - they purposfully set the bar higher than the position may actually require - and that's going to be more expensive overall.

They require many interviews to prove your capacity - and honestly a lot of professionals with many years of experience aren't going to go for that if there are other good paying jobs available. Me included.

OT: your sig

[Anthracks (532185)]

Completely off-topic, but I wholeheartedly agree with your signature. When was the last time you saw a story whose tag set didn't have at least 2 of these memes: "fud notfud, yes no maybe, itsatrap, tubes"? It's become the new Beowulf / ??? Profit / Natalie Portman craze.

Re:

[Joey Vegetables (686525)]

That will happen, because no one will knowingly pay workers more than they have to. That's basic economics. From a macroeconomic standpoint, labor is a commodity like any other, although it does have some unusual properties (it is less mobile than most others, and highly capital-intensive in that it does not generate much value unless highly skilled, trained, and experienced).

Re:Define qualified

[psykocrime (61037)]

In the US the phrase 'lack of qualified applicants' came to mean 'lack of qualified applicants who were willing to work for what we were willing to pay.'

Maybe in some places, but that's not always the case. To illustrate with an example: Last year I was working for a small software company in Cary, NC, specializing in telecom software. We were trying to hire a couple of senior software engineers, so we put out the word to several area recruiting companies and got a deluge of resumes... and the candidates we got were largely downright laughable, at least for a senior level position. And we weren't using some esoteric language, we were a Java shop... and our requirements weren't out in the stratosphere either... we just wanted knowledgeable senior engineers who could handle concurrent programming and network programming (our product was basically a fancy proxy server).

It took forever to find one guy who was clearly qualified, and he took another position before we even had a chance to make him an offer. So yeah, we definitely experienced the situation where there was a "lack of qualified candidates" despite having plenty of candidates in general. But really sharp people who actually know what they're doing proved to be fairly scarce, at least for us.

I will say this though: some of the folks that came through were clearly very smart, but just lacked the experience we were looking for. We needed somebody that could step in and contribute right away, and we didn't have any budget for hiring junior level people and grooming them. That would
have been a good thing to do, if we could have gotten the money approved. But that issue is somewhat orthogonal to the original point anyway...

Re:Define qualified

[Grishnakh (216268)]

I will say this though: some of the folks that came through were clearly very smart, but just lacked the experience we were looking for. We needed somebody that could step in and contribute right away, and we didn't have any budget for hiring junior level people and grooming them.

Yep, this is exactly what every other company wants too: someone who's already an expert in whatever little niche they're working in. Then they wonder why no one's qualified for the job, yet there's plenty of people looking. WAKE UP! If someone is already an expert in whatever you're doing, then they probably already have a job, and aren't looking for a change. If you want someone to come work for you, get over yourself and be prepared to train them. Otherwise, stop complaining so much about a "lack" of qualified candidates.

Re:

[cthrall (19889)]

Being able to competently engineer concurrent network software is not, IMHO, a niche. Any experienced senior engineer should theoretically be able to handle threads and multiple requests being concurrently serviced.

Re:Define qualified

[wtansill (576643)]

Yep, this is exactly what every other company wants too: someone who's already an expert in whatever little niche they're working in. Then they wonder why no one's qualified for the job, yet there's plenty of people looking. WAKE UP! If someone is already an expert in whatever you're doing, then they probably already have a job, and aren't looking for a change. If you want someone to come work for you, get over yourself and be prepared to train them. Otherwise, stop complaining so much about a "lack" of qualified candidates.

Absolutly, 100% correct. And where do "experts" come from? From years of moving up from more junior levels. That's one of the arguments I have about doing so much outsourcing. I've heard the argument that "We're only outsourcing the low-skill positions". Yes, but where will the next generation of experts come from if you lay waste to the training grounds that breed them? Farmers have an expression: "Eating your seed corn." The PHB's are only looking to the next quarter though, so it's hard to think a season or two ahead...

Re:Define qualified

[Mattintosh (758112)]

It's an American problem at all levels of society. We're overextended. We're in debt. We can't afford our houses if anything unexpected breaks the budget. We can't afford to do business if an otherwise-qualified job candidate needs training. We need everything handed to us in prepared, processed, usable form, or it's too costly to even bother.

Now for the tricky question: Why? Because we've quarterly-growthed ourselves into a corner. If we miss profit estimates, making a little less profit than we expected, we lose tons of money because investors are fickle and stupid. That leads to lay-offs. That leads to missed house payments. That leads to homeless people and more companies missing profit estimates. Which starts the next wave of collapse.

It's a sign of a system that needs to break and cause huge destruction and poverty before it can heal. Brace yourselves. The rabbit hole is deep.

Re:

[avronius (689343)]

Sadly, it's a double-edged sword.

I have worked for half a dozen companies over the last 18 years or so. In my experience, I've seen a great number of entry-level positions made available to people in IT. Generally, they involve support desk / help desk type work. This is typical. In that help desk role, you learn about the company. You learn about the environment. You learn the systems that you eventually hope to help develop. There's not course that will teach you about the specifics of company X.

You learn

Re:Define qualified

[Courageous (228506)]

And a large number answered the question "How do you stop a running thread?" by saying "call Thread.stop()" which is totally wrong.

Interesting stuff. I have two patents in network related material (for two things written in java), have written a lot of java, but just haven't lately. My answer would have been, "check the JDK docs and google." I've even written a specialized thread scheduler to handles tens of thousands of threads. All the programming languages vary so much... easy to lose track. At most I would have been able to say to you, "you have to be very careful with stuff like that when you need and expect deterministic behavior."

*shrug*

Superficially, it seems that this interview question isn't quite right. Give them the tools they say they're expert with. That would INCLUDE the JDK, and google, too. Have them give them the answer to you in 15 minutes. Maybe you should go look up the "programmer archaeologists" article that was on slash two or three days back. It really is getting that way, you know.

C//

Re:Define qualified

[MarcoAtWork (28889)]

I will say this though: some of the folks that came through were clearly very smart, but just lacked the experience we were looking for. We needed somebody that could step in and contribute right away, and we didn't have any budget for hiring junior level people and grooming them.

I see this short-sightedness so much in the industry it drives me nuts: YOU ARE NOT HIRING A SKILLSET, YOU ARE HIRING A PERSON, if your candidate is very smart, personable and obviously would be a good fit, well, what are you waiting for? Hire them at a senior salary level and give them a few months to pick up whatever it is that you are doing.

We developers are not little interchangeable cogs in the machine (as much as people in finance, sales and sometimes management seem to think), you can't find a candidate with exactly the skills you need, the experience you want AND out of a job too!

After somebody has been developing for 5-10 years, if they are smart and sharp it's fairly straightforward to pick up a new programming language or paradigm: I am glad that not all companies are like yours, but it does sadden me that the vast majority are, where somebody pulls out a wishlist from the sky and unless a candidate can put a checkmark in every box they won't be given the time of day.

Re:Define qualified

[prockcore (543967)]

After somebody has been developing for 5-10 years, if they are smart and sharp it's fairly straightforward to pick up a new programming language or paradigm

Then why haven't they? 95% of the people we get applying for jobs only know Java. They haven't even tried learning anything else. They teach java at the Univeristy, and java is all they think they need to know.

I'm not going to hire anyone who isn't curious enough to learn a few languages on their own.. just to see what's out there.

Hire and train now or perish later...

[Cid Highwind (9258)]

This is what happens after a sufficiently long period without sufficient opportunity for entry and mid-level IT workers. People leave the sector to tend bar or build houses or drive trucks because it pays better and drains the soul less than being a helpdesk tech or an asp monkey. Fewer new people stay long enough to develop the skills required to be senior engineers.

I realize it's hard to make a business case for hiring locally for a job that could be outsourced to China or continuously training your people in new languages and technologies instead of firing one batch of contractors as soon as their project is done and replacing them with new ones, but it has to be done. There's no self-study guide or college degree that can give a newbie the equivalent of real experience, so if the IT industry isn't creating the people it will need 5 or 10 or 20 years down the line right now it isn't going to have those people. Good luck getting upper managers who can't see past the end of next quarter to understand that, though.

Re: "Qualified" applicants

[greyparrot (895758)]

Because employers (not just in India) have no long-term commitment to the employees, and thus the employees have no reason for loyalty, the employer searches for a fully mature and qualified employee, able to perform instantly (in the current quarter) to satisfy the current requirement.

This used to require a consultant. But no, consultants are too expensive. Besides, with the falling apart of the markets, consultants have gone into other lines of work.

What's left? Dragging a net through the pool of recent graduates who studied CS, fewer every year as their older siblings tell them it's a lousy market out there.

My heart cries for you!

The problem is overprecise requirements...

[Richard Steiner (1585)]

...and a complete unwillingness on the part of employers to train, not a lack of skilled labor.

Hey!

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

Most IT workers aren't short all over. They're only short where it counts...

Shortfall?

[Mydron (456525)]

Lets be clear, no market, including the labour market, suffers a "shortfall". When industry types parade around the notion of a "shortfall" what they really mean is that they anticipate having to pay higher prices (or wages in this case). They do this to drum up support for government policy which will effectively suppress prices/wages.

I welcome such a shortfall.

Re:Shortfall?

[EatHam (597465)]

How to fix that issue: pass a law

If by "fix" you mean "create a giant clusterfuck", then yes, that would fix things nicely.

Hopelessly naive solution

[Kombat (93720)]

How to fix that issue: pass a law that you have to pay any employee or contracted employee a sum that is at least the prevailing wage for the area in which the company is located, and national laws also must apply.

I'm not sure if you realize this or not, so don't take offense, but I want to make sure you realize that US laws don't apply in other countries. Hopefully, you understand that the country "passing the law" that you're suggesting would have to be the "poor" country being outsource to, since any la

Solution: hire the botnet spammer guys

[fudgefactor7 (581449)]

(See previous story). What this will do is (A) give those spammers a legit job, and (B) take the operators of the spam-bots out of the mix, and (C) keep them busy with other things so they can't be bothered to spamminate the 'Net, and (D) solves the problem of the shortage in that particular area.

India needs to outsource...

[i_want_you_to_throw_ (559379)]

to Vietnam or China. Always seems to work that way in outsourcing. Outsource to a place that's cheap and then they outsource to a cheaper place.

Might be a few years before you see an IT industry in Niger though.

Re:

[Apocalypse111 (597674)]

Yeah, the only people who have any IT skills in Nigeria are all trying to get help moving their vast fortunes to the US, and only need a little help from some willing citizens (who will be handsomely rewarded) to do it.

Then why can't I find a friggin job?!!?!

[ArcherB (796902)]

I have a BSIT degree with a 3.5 GPA, but without real world experience in an IT department, it's impossible for me to find anything in IT that pays above tech support!

I'm tired of the chicken-egg thing. If I don't have experience I can't get the job. If I can't get the job, how am I supposed to get experience? /rant off

Re:

[grasshoppa (657393)]

I have a BSIT degree with a 3.5 GPA, but without real world experience in an IT department, it's impossible for me to find anything in IT that pays above tech support!

Too good for tech support eh?

Re:

[ArcherB (796902)]

Too good for tech support eh?

Yes and no.
Yes: I've done TS for over 10 years so I feel it's time to move on. With 10+ years experience and a degree, I feel I'm too good to TS. When I started, TS was a way to get your foot in the door to an IT job. That ended shortly after I started.

No: With my experience, TS jobs pay quite well, but not as good as mid-level IT. With a new baby at home and a wife who is no longer working, I can't afford the pay cut it would take to be entry level IT. So, I'm not too go

Re:Then why can't I find a friggin job?!!?!

[cLive ;-) (132299)]

"I've done TS for over 10 years so I feel it's time to move on. With 10+ years experience and a degree, I feel I'm too good to TS."

And there is your problem. From that sentence alone, you say you feel entitled, yet you've not done anything about it. TS is only an entry to other positions if you push the envelope. One of our best sysadmins came from tech support. He was hungry to learn. Every night he'd stay after work for an hour or two to play with Linux/FreeBSD/Qmail etc. If I got your resume, I'd be looking at anything that shows you have a passion for the work - Open Source involvement, tech communities (hell, I link my Perlmonks node from my resume, warts and all - same username as /.). If your resume just says "Tech Support", you've dug your own hole. Get passionate about your work and the money will follow.

I personally spent 5 years teaching myself and setting up my own business (I failed at that) before I started earning anything near a respectable salary. For the first 2yrs, I was on around $100 a week, living in my girlfriend's mother's house.

Incidentally, out of the 6 devs here, only one has a CS degree. To me (though not my boss, note), degrees mean Jack Shit in the real world - especially ten years later. I did a Pure Math degree and I can't remember any of it (except the odd gem).

Don't "dabble" at home. Actually build and release something useful. Commit to where you want to be and start climbing. It's not going to just come and drop in your lap.

Re:

[Phisbut (761268)]

I have a BSIT degree with a 3.5 GPA, but without real world experience in an IT department, it's impossible for me to find anything in IT that pays above tech support!

Then get an IT job with a tech support pay, get experience, then renegociate the pay. A degree is useless without experience, and an IT graduate without experience is not worth more than tech support pay, no matter the GPA.

I'm tired of the chicken-egg thing. If I don't have experience I can't get the job. If I can't get the job, how am I s

Re:Then why can't I find a friggin job?!!?!

[Lumpy (12016)]

That's funny. I know guys without the degree but 20+ years as advanced IT, sysadmin, etc.. they can outright smoke any college edu-ma-cated kid on the PC, DBA, etc... yet they have trouble finding jobs because most places are asking for ridiculous things like MASTERS in CS and 5+ years experience willing to take $35,000.00US a year. These places want $100+K quality for newbie salaries.....

It sucks in IT and CS kid.... you picked the one career that is in the most turmoil right now. best bet is to start consulting on your own, you can count that as experience on your resume.

Should have gone to a better school

[haplo21112 (184264)]

Should have gone to a school with internships and/or work study as part of the course work. We recently hired a college grad here and he was looked on favorably due to the industry expirence that he got while in school. He has proved a valuable addition to the team. I pushed for his hire over another canidate due to his prior work on his work study/internships. He has been very valuable to me as I know only do the work of two people instead of 3! He probably makes 1/3 of what I do, but thats more than

Re:

[businessnerd (1009815)]

First off, if you see a listing that says x - x+2 years experience and you have none, apply anyway. "Experience" does not always mean "I have been out in the working world with a 9-5 job doing X for Y years. Sometimes it means that you have been using the technology (paid or unpaid) for that number of years.

Next, if all you do in College is get your degree with good grades, it will not do you any good. People all say "just get the piece of paper, that's all that matters", but that is complete BS. If

Re:

[raddan (519638)]

You have to do what every other network engineer/sysadmin on the planet did: work as tech support until you have the experience. As shitty as tech support can get, trust me, it's valuable experience when you become an engineer. Mostly because of all the years of having to deal with frustrated users, you've slowly accumulated the knowledge that end-users are fscking idiots ;^)

But in all seriousness, that experience does put your decisions into perspective. You know EXACTLY how much pain just yanking th

Shortage smortage

[J.R. Random (801334)]

A "shortgage" of labor simply means that businessmen have to pay people more than they would prefer. There is always a wage at which any "shortage" disappears, but that is not the fix prefered by the business class (importing more cheap labor or outsourcing is). You never hear about a CEO shortage even when they make millions a year.

Re:Shortage smortage

[Bryansix (761547)]

Actually there is one field where the is an actual shortage. That is in Nursing. You see when a shortage in any other field occurs two things happen. The first is that people have to be paid more. The second is that because of the first less people are hired. So the company does a little less business because it doesn't have as many people to provide the service or make the product. But in healthcare you don't have the choice of doing less business. Your business is defined by an acute need of the public at large that has nothing to do with your ability to meet the need. In addition healthcare is not elastic. If prices rise, people still need care so you can't just raise prices to drive down demand. So in the field of Nursing there really is a shortage. How does that affect things? Well more and more nurses are prepared on the community college level with an associates degree. Also, nurses get stuck with a higher patient count then they should be. Both of these things lead to shitty care. So the Nursing shortage is real and it affects everyone.

Maybe business might have to pay IT people

[Black Art (3335)]

The reason that IT jobs were exported to India in the first place is that US employers did not want to pay US wages. It is the same reason the want exemptions to import workers. So they can pay them sub-standard wages and deport them if they get uppity.

Until employers get over the slave owner mentality and start paying people fairly for their work, they are going to have a hard time finding good people.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Until employers get over the slave owner mentality and start paying people fairly for their work, they are going to have a hard time finding good people.

I have your answer.... small business. I dropped my career at a major telcom company and went for less pay at a really small shop and never been happier.

Bosses treat you well, you get paid decently, get fringe benefits like living 15 minutes from home, able to telecommute 1 day a week, free donut fridays, etc....

you are not going to get the $150K sysadmin

Re:

[mcrbids (148650)]

Until employers get over the slave owner mentality and start paying people fairly for their work, they are going to have a hard time finding good people.

If you don't mind me asking, where do you shop for food? Where do you buy your tires? Clothes? Computers and related?

If you've ever gone to someplace that's a little further away but cheaper than the corner market, should get over your slave owner mentality and start paying local merchants fairly for their work.

Because it's the same exact thing.

"But.. but..

Not a shortage of IT workers....

[sharkb8 (723587)]

There's not a shortage of IT workers in the U.S., there's a shortage of IT workers who will work for $25K a year in the U.S. Want a native English speaker with .Net programming skills, it'll cost more than that.

Besides most universities don't teach practical IT skills. Rarely did I ever see a class in Visual C++ or in .Net. Want to learn compiler design theory or advanced data structures? no problem. Want to learn how to set up a WIndows server? that's where ITT Tech comes in. And tech schools in the U.S. have a stigma attached to them where most who are qualified to go to a 4 year university would attend a tech school. I got my EE degree, but learned command-line Pascal in an elective. I had to learn Delphi, .Net, C++ and PHP on my own. The people who are motivated to learn on their own have some drive and expect to be promoted at some point, not to get 4% raises every two years for the rest of their lives.

Gates needs to be a good little capitalist and pay the market rate.

Re:

[Ungrounded Lightning (62228)]

There's not a shortage of IT workers in the U.S., there's a shortage of IT workers who will work for $25K a year in the U.S.

AND have a degree from one of a set of (non-State) universities you can count on one hand with fingers left over.

AND are white or oriental.

AND are male.

AND have straight teeth and a blue-state big-city upper-class accent.

There are PLENTY of intelligent, qualified, competent, and dedicated people available to companies that are willing to hire only on capabilities and ignore irrelivant-

Re:

[Grishnakh (216268)]

Most of the CS classes were geared towards pure theory. That's great, but if you want to do something besides blue sky research, you're going to need practical skills.

You don't go to a university to learn practical skills. You go to learn theory and foundations so that you can have a true mastery of a subject. You can learn practical skills on your own if you have the talent to earn a university degree.

If you just want practical skills, go to a trade school. You don't get a mechanical engineering degree

Outsource where now? Angola? Vietnam?

[gelfling (6534)]

What that means is that India is experiencing its own outsourcing dilemma. Rates are actually too high for India. So they are looking to outsource their development to even less developed countries such as Vietnam, Angola, Malaysia. Even Africa. Those jobs are NEVER coming to America. NEVER. If they can't afford rates in Mumbai they certainly can't afford Research Triangle Park, NC or even Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Not surprising...

[creimer (824291)]

I went back to school part-time and started earning my certifications over the last five years when the handwriting was on the wall and everyone was stampeding out of I.T. into health care field instead. Southeast Asia will never supply all the I.T. workers in the world when their economies start booming and they have their own internal needs. With the all the baby boomers retiring over the next 30 years, there's going to be a lot of U.S. jobs but not enough people. I'm looking forward for a long and rewarding career.

Please also say WHAT is in short supply

[Opportunist (166417)]

What's really rare these days is someone with 10+ years of experience in C++, Java, C#, SQL, can show experience with libraries for Windows, Linux, PalmOS and Symbian, has experience as a team leader, is able to speak 3 languages fluently, is willing to relocate to the other end of the world, is "flexible" (read: Doesn't mind 60+ hours a week) and expects less than 2000 a month.

Yes, those people get fewer and fewer every day. But they're in demand, I tell you, you only gotta read the job ads!

Low tech != High tech

[MCTFB (863774)]

People keep saying that once the salary of high-tech jobs gets too high in India, then those jobs will then be moved to Vietnam or China, or some other place with a whole lot of poor uneducated people who are willing to work for a roof over their head and a bowl of rice a day.

That may be true for low-tech jobs, but certainly not for high-tech jobs like software engineering, because one good high-tech worker is worth an infinite number of mediocre high-tech workers. You either have the skills and desire to do a high-tech job competently, or else you are a liability. It is really that simple.

In modern militaries, the same trend is happening and is most evident in China's modernization where they are trying to scale down the manpower of their military, while increasing its numbers of elite troops and weaponry (in other words, make their armed forces more like the professional army of the United States). If you are in the special forces, you either have the ability to get the job done, or else you are a liability to your team. Most high-tech jobs, including software engineering (my personal profession) is the same way.

Now, a high-tech military machine or a high-tech business will inevitably have to pay a premium for labor and tools to do their job, so if your war plans or your business plan cannot adequately utilize that expensive high-tech labor and scale it to meet your objectives, then the problem is not with the high-tech soldiers or workers, but the problem is with your war plan or your business plan.

The cry by CEO's like Bill Gates that there is not enough high-tech talent out there is really just their myopic view of the business world in that being the fat, dumb, and happy titans of industry that they are, they lack the kind of entrepreneurial creativity necessary to exploit expensive high-tech talent to its full profit making potential. They treat their existing employees like trained monkeys and assume that they are smart enough to write code all day long, yet are not smart enough to demand fair compensation for their profitable work, and then wonder why they have problems attracting qualified candidates at half the going market rate for high-tech talent.

So really, the problem is not that there is not enough high-tech talent out there, rather it is the slow lumbering industry giants like Microsoft have business models that are simply not profitable for the kind of premium in salaries that smart motivated people in high-tech generally command.

Re:

[Grishnakh (216268)]

Maybe the American companies will outsource work to Indian companies due to lack of staff, then the Indian companies will outsource this same work to other American companies due to lack of staff, and these American companies will then outsource the work to other Indian companies due to lack of staff, which will then outsource the work to other American companies...

Forget about working in IT. Set up a company to take on IT work and outsource it! We'll all get rich in an endless loop of outsourcing!

Re:

[smchris (464899)]

We've had a "nursing shortage" for about 60 years now. Funny thing is, when they raise nurses wages, more people get trained to be a nurse and more people find the time to put in nurses hours. Funny thing about wage incentives.

Good analogy. Our local news had a story the other month that for every nurse working in the state there is something like two or three who are trained but are doing something else because the hours, pay and benefits are crap as a nurse. I would guess this story is similar with busi

Re:

[denis-The-menace (471988)]

You must have read about it here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/02/your _it_companys_biggest_enemy.html [oreillynet.com]