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IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Mar 10, 2008 12:00 PM
from the also-roswell-and-jfk-and-high-fructose-corn-syrup dept.
from the also-roswell-and-jfk-and-high-fructose-corn-syrup dept.
buzzardsbay writes "For the past few years, we've heard a number of analysts and high-profile IT industry executives, Bill Gates and Craig Barrett among them, promoting the idea that there's an ever-present shortage of skilled IT workers to fill the industry's demand. But now there's growing evidence suggesting the "shortage" is simply a self-serving myth. "It seems like every three years you've got one group or another saying, the world is going to come to an end there is going to be a shortage and so on," says Vivek Wadhwa, a professor for Duke University's Master of Engineering Management Program and a former technology CEO himself. "This whole concept of shortages is bogus, it shows a lack of understanding of the labor pool in the USA.""
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Technology: Japan "Running Out of Engineers" 478 comments
bfwebster writes "A story in the New York Times reports that Japan, a country that rebuilt itself as a technological power after World War II, now faces an increasing shortage of college graduates with degrees in science and engineering. Says the article: 'By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology industry here is already short almost half a million engineers.' The article goes on to point out that the overall trend of waning interest in science and technology has been going on for 'almost two decades' and that the shortage is made worse by the traditional reluctance of Japanese companies to hire and use foreign workers. The US has had a similar trend for quite some time: 'Undergraduate engineering enrollment declined through most of the 1980s and 1990s, rose from 2000 through 2003, and declined slightly in recent years.'"
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No myth here (Score:5, Interesting)
And even with this shortage, the IT academies and schools out there are churning out MCSE's by the truckfull - rather than getting useful skills, they are giving some poor schmuck a certification that means really little in the real world, and which doesn't really have a descent career path anymore..
Testers, on the other hand, have a great job, good money, and a really flexible career. They also develop a lot of really useful business skills to augment their technical skills, and have no problems finding work.
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Insightful)
MCSEs represent something far worse than that. They represent a severe compartmentalization of skills. After twenty years in the IT profession, I'm pretty much going to be forced to take my MCSE mainly because you just can't get a job. For some reason, management believes that this frivolous piece of paper means that a guy is some sort of uber-tech. Well, I've seen these uber-techs melt when they had to deal with a Bind server, or anything particularly weird or challenging.
The real irony here is the most expertise I've seen out of the Microsoft side of things is the guys that can understand Redmond's insane licensing system.
Parent
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Interesting)
That's intentional. A good deal of MCSE training/testing has to do with licensing. MCSE's aren't intended to be technical geniuses. They're meant to be clones, indoctrinated to look at things the way Microsoft wants you to look at them. That's why the key to any Microsoft test, if you get stuck on a question that seems to have more than one correct answer, is to look at it from the perspective of what would make Microsoft the most money. That will almost always be the "right" one.
Not to say all MS training is bad. If you get a decent instructor who has experience with other vendors and solutions, who can cut through all the crap and extract the meat of what you actually need to know to succeed in the field, you can actually learn something useful. There's not many instructors like that, though.
Parent
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right on the other count, too. Throw a bash prompt in front of an MCSE and watch them look at you like your dog does when you tell him a joke.
Parent
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Funny)
Throw a bash prompt in front of an MCSE and watch them look at you like your dog does when you tell him a joke.
Maybe your jokes just aren't that funny.
Parent
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Funny)
Cheers.
Parent
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Insightful)
So, to sum up, I see no shortage of programmers, just a shortage of good programmers.
Parent
Of course testers are well payed (Score:5, Insightful)
I found out our testers are payed on a par with or more than software developers the other day. At first I was a little angry, because I get angry whenever anyone is paid more than software developers because "we make your fscking products!".
Then I thought "What would it take to get me into that job?" and I realised they were welcome to the money.
Parent
Re:No myth here (Score:5, Interesting)
Being a really good Tester or Test Analyst requires all of the skill of other IT positions, with (at least in the U.S., in my experience) half of the pay, and none of the respect. Very few of the people capable of being excellent Test Analysts have much motivation to do so.
(Back when I was in Test Analysis, I had a boss tell me straight up that while my performance was excellent, since Testing was not a "revenue generating" position, he saw no need to pay me anything near what the "revenue-generating" IT positions at the company were paid. I'm no longer at that company, and since then, I've had a strong bias towards making sure I'm in a "revenue generating" position. Things work much better for me this way. And companies wonder why it's hard to find quality Test people...)
Parent
It's all the wording for HR (Score:5, Insightful)
So, yes it's a myth that there are not enough people to fill IT positions, there are lots of code monkeys willing to pound keys for their banana but what are the skilled IT people that these larger companies are looking for out of the box and where will we find them right now?
Re:It's all the wording for HR (Score:5, Insightful)
I seriously get tired of people who expect high-end experts to explode out of the ground whenever they want one. Lot of the time you're going to have to settle for some people who are bright, young, and inexperienced. Mix them up with some more experienced workers, and they'll do okay.
Lot of people say, "I don't want to train someone, knowing that he's going to leave as soon as he gets a better offer." The English translation of that is: "I did this guy a favor by hiring him, and piling crap work on him, and I can't figure out why he'd be so disloyal." Make your company a good place to work, and you won't have such high turnover.
Parent
Re:It's all the wording for HR (Score:5, Interesting)
How about someone who's been around for a while but does want to learn, who likes to learn new things, who wants to get their hands dirty and likes to solve problems? Would you hire someone like that?
Ditto. I have been working contract for over 5 years now (some of these contracts lasted 9 months to a year so I haven't been looking consistently during those periods.) My previous contract job was supposed to go perm. My supervisor loved me--we even had tickets to travel to the home office in the UK the next month. It was my dream job. But then, her boss nixed the deal making the excuse that he wanted someone with supervisory experience (there was no one to supervise). After offering the job to two others, who turned it down flat because it didn't pay enough, he then re-arranged the job and dropped the salary by 10-12K and hired a fresh-out. Personally I never thought it had to do with managerial or supervisor experience (that was never requested)--he probably decided he didn't want to pay a fee to the employment agency that I had been sent through. He just wanted something cheaper.
After that I tried for the full six months (and even prior to leaving the previous job) to get a full-time job. I did get several interviews and even some second interviews. I'm now working another contract job. The people love me. I would love to get on steady, but the problem is (as usual) I don't work for the guy that could make it happen. He lives in another state although he travels here frequently. It will depend on how much clout the people working for him have.
I had NEVER previously had this much trouble finding full-time work. I dress appropriately, am well-spoken and my salary requests are certainly in-line. My only take on all this is age discrimination is rampant. Which is why the IT shortage is a myth. There are plenty of skilled workers, but they don't WANT the good, but experienced ones. They rather have the young and CHEAP ones.
Most of the time you can forget looking at Monster or other job boards. HR who doesn't understand a bit from a byte, writes up these things like you're ordering a pizza. And if you don't have the matching skills, you're resume is going no where. Which means you'd have to lie to get through HR and find what qualities they REALLY need (risky) or you better know someone on the inside that has the ability to request your resume be sent through. The other problem is when you interview with people who are probably 15-20 years your junior. You can see the look on their face when you walk in.
Parent
Apprenticeships and lock-in (Score:5, Insightful)
There's yer problem, right there, guv.
The problem is that the IT industry, like many industries, expects to find a pool of skilled and experienced available staff, at the drop of a hat, without the company putting in any effort themselves.
The solution is apprenticeships - a variant on "I wouldn't start from here", I admit, but the only workable solution nonetheless. Start the recruitment process two years in advance, and train up the monkeys to become experts. Another benefit is that apprenticeships, unlike university degrees, have no fixed syllabus and can quickly flex to meet new skill demand trends.
The problem with apprenticeships is that various governments have regulations against locking-in staff for long periods. Companies who invest in apprenticeships see their newly-trained staff bugger off to a better-paying competitor, who can afford to pay more since they haven't invested in apprenticeships, the moment they qualify. Governments need to relax regulations on locking-in apprentices to their sponsoring employer. Governments also need to give companies better ability to fire apprentices who fail to meet expected grades on time.
Cheap, experienced, immediately available - pick any two.
Parent
Re:It's all the wording for HR (Score:5, Insightful)
Where do you get these "skilled" people? It takes years of experience. When companies say that they are "only outsourcing low-level jobs", I call bullshit -- they are, as the farmers say, eating their seed corn. If you don't take in new people and allow them to mature on the "low level" stuff, where the hell does management think that the highly skilled people will come from? You don't normally step out of school with 20 years seniority and experience already under your belt...
Parent
It's A Fact (Score:5, Informative)
Bob
Re:It's A Fact - NOT! (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not disagreeing w/your experience, simply because I wasn't there.
My point is most hiring managers don't know how to interview and frequently don't even know what skills are relevant.
My interviews routinely turn into some sort of geek dick size war (and the candidate must be polite) or a beauty pagent (where did you go to university, my professors are more glamorous than yours) or some other stupid diversion rather than the job at hand.
My least favorite is: are you kewl enough to work in our clubhouse? It's just a job, I get all the love I want at home.
It doesn't help that most jobs are using API's they barely understand. So when someone asks me an obscure question about XML bindings or hibernate, they frequently don't recognize the answer.
Anyway, I'm a little tired of hearing about "the shortage" when in fact there is none. The "shortage" (IMO) is manufactured.
Parent
SHORTAGE (Score:5, Interesting)
And I will second that, I am sure in other parts of the country, skilled IT are a dime a dozen. But where I am at (Midwest) actual skilled IT people are hard to find. Sure you can find the guy/girl who was promoted to IT from accounting back in the 90s but that doesn't make them a skilled pro. Show me a cross reference of IT folks who actually know what they are doing, have a passion for it, and I bet that subset is really small. I have no need for joe basement dweller who runs his guild website and knows how to install a video card. I also dont have any need for dilbert principle folks who are in waaaay over their heads and cannot configure a server without serious handholding or an in depth checklist.
Cheap IT labor is a myth (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of people who have the skill sets they need, they just don't want to pay the kind of wages it takes to get them and keep them.
I am not talking about kids just out of college expecting a high paying job. I am talking about companies that want people with 10+ years worth of experience and want to pay them like a kid out of college.
It has been true for a very long time that the only way you can get a real pay increase in IT it to move somewhere else. Until companies start looking at their employees as a resource and not an expense and pay them accordingly, the situation will not improve.
All these cries to let them import labor is to allow them to rent temporary employees who can be deported at the first sign of "getting uppity" for demanding a living wage.
Okay-- joke done.. now reality at a big corp (Score:5, Interesting)
We pay a "decent" salary-- my buds at HP earn roughly 10% more-- those in the oil field earn about 20% more (but have a history of frequent layoffs). We have solid benefits that exceed those of the oil field and HP.
The reality is- we are about to lose positions because we cannot even get under-qualified people to apply for them. Now part of it is that we require people with at least a couple other jobs experience under their belt. Part of it is that being a big corp, our bureaucracy is pretty harsh. I have a friend who was sucked into Schluberje (sp) recently and there you literally have to take a driving class (as a frikkin programmer???) as part of your job duties. Bureaucracy gone mad. I'm sure many of you have seen office space--- we are 3x office space. It really takes a special person to fit in a large corporation. Jobs that would take 2 hours at a small company (and be very satisfying) may take three months. I even know of one project that was finished a year ago and it is still stuck waiting to be prioritized for release.
Sarbanes Oxley takes all the joy out of being a programmer. It just sucks the life out of it. Coders like to code 32 hours a week-- not 32 hours per quarter. You can't even maintain your coding skills at those levels.
I think the IT Worker crunch IS coming- and it is going to be wicked nasty starting in about 2012.
Completely disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
We are offering market wage, and we are hiring entry level people, maybe 1 in 30 of the people we interview actually demonstrates the minimum of critical thinking and problem solving skills needed to be a decent software developer. Our interviews are not concentrated on any one platform, we have stuff in foxpro, java, python, php, c++ and c#... So our interviews are focused on critical thinking and problem solving. We have a couple basic problem solving questions and 2 algorithm questions which we routinely ask.. This is stuff I learned in high school, or my 2nd year algorithms class in college. People who are professing CS degrees and 0-5 years experience are routinely getting these questions wrong.
Even the few people we have hired over the last 3-6 months have been disappointing in their ability to a) learn new languages, b) learn and follow best practices, c) demonstrate real troubleshooting/bug fixing skills. C is probably my biggest pet peeve, as a manager I don't know how many times in the last 6 months I've had to go to a programmers system when they say "I'm getting this error and I don't know what it means" and the error message very clearly lays out the problem, the line it is occurring on, etc...
Either CS degrees are seriously lacking in rigor since I participated ~ 8 years ago, or they are just rubber stamping people that shouldn't be passing the classes.
It really is bogus and here's why.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The real "shortage" comes about because business is NOT able to find someone willing to come in and be an all-purpose IT person, network guru, server admin., etc. and accept pay to the tune of $11 per hour. Thats the real shortage issue. So they will further outsource the jobs and bring in foreigners on H1B's to do those jobs at substantially reduced rates. IBM and a handful of other international companies are notorious for this.
Really what it will come down to is let these large companies hire the kids for $11. You really do get what you paid for. Eventually when things begin to collapse for many of these companies, they will be force to bring in people with knowledge and experience, and best of all; pay them what they're worth.
Remember that: "What goes around; comes around"
The way HR writes job ads is often the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Job ads often have a huge list of "requirements" as well, and an applicant missing even one of them might well be screened out. An example of this? Seasoned web developers might not bother listing FTP on their resume. In their view, requiring a web developer to have FTP experience is like requiring a carpenter to know how to use a saw. But that failure to list FTP on the resume might well mean the application is automatically trashed. I have seen HR screen out applicants for a web developer position because they neglected to list HTTP, DHTML, and Photoshop on their resume. And don't get me started about HR's lack of understanding of the difference between a web developer and a web designer.
If HR departments are the source of some of the statistical and anecdotal evidence being trotted forth in support of the existence of this "shortage", I am not surprised the picture looks grim.
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what we are facing in our organization. About 66% of our openings are technical, but our HR director is clueless -- not only in writing effective job descriptions and requirements, but also when it comes to setting compensation packages that attract good candidates. Our business analysts (which are a dime dozen) make as much or more than our application engineers.
It's almost a conspiracy: inability to hire good application engineers, limits our ability to automate business analytic processes, and increases the demand for spread sheet jockeys. Good times.
Parent
Re:Got a labor shortage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why raise wages, when you can convince Congress there is a desperate shortage of labor, so that you can import labor from overseas and bully your workers over wages by tying a work visa to a stick and holding it in front of them?
People need to read the statement for what it is. "There is a labor shortage [at the wage we are willing to pay]."
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