IT Labor Shortage Is Just a Myth 619
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.""
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.
Been perpetuating the myth since the 90's (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:No myth here (Score:-1, Interesting)
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.
Re:No myth here (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not pay more? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's A Fact (Score:3, Interesting)
* Your company work environment could suck and frighten off people.
* You could be Microsoft or SCO, with a history of intellectual property deceit, and no one competent wants to work there.
* Your pay scale could be too low.
* Your location could be too far away from where such technical personnel like to live: this makes recruitying very hard.
* Your advertisement could have been poorly written.
* Your recruiters could have been one of those off-shore call cents.
* You could have failed to fund your staff publishing their tools or attending conferences and seminars, where they could network with their peers and make contacts for you.
* Your concept for J2EE could be so ill-conceived that no one competent wants their name on it.
* Your HR department could be so slow that any candidates disappear by the the time you're ready to interview them.
* You could be insisting on too much experience and not willing to pay for training.
Etc., etc., etc., etc.
I've seen all of these happen. A burgeoning number of out-of-work IT professionals would halp with these, but you can only unemploy or underemploy so many before the competent people go to other fields.
Re:SHORTAGE (Score:3, Interesting)
I've no "theory of Computing - The Valve years" computing degree or MS "Our way or no way" brainwashing. I got a D in Computer Science at college. I work bottom-rung tech support changing print toners for a school because nobody wants an Sys or Network Admin without a degree.
THAT'S where your shortage is; managers who can look past the letters "BSc" after someone's name.
Re:Cheap IT labor is a myth (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's a quote from the article:
I get lots of offers to work in NYC (and other places like Iowa, Kansas, etc.) in IT but at the wages I was making 20-30 years ago. If businesses are going to expect first-world expertise (50+ years of Java coding) but pay third-world wages (you can get by fine on $40/hr in NYC doing senior level coding), well....they have their labor shortage.
One of the best indicators I found for how desirable a field is for workers is to look at the percentage of college-educated workers that are female. Sad fact is that the IT field has very few female IT coders...they've moved into BA roles or PM roles because those jobs won't get outsourced to cheaper labor pools and these other jobs have some career paths defined. Women do tend to take a longer view of work than men, especially at the career level.
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.
Experienced, Cheap, Available (Score:4, Interesting)
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...)
Butts in the Seats (Score:-1, Interesting)
Sure, there are plenty of human beings to go around, but the problem is finding skilled individuals. "Code monkeys" are a dime-a-dozen, but are largely useless without the appropriate human infrastructure to manage them, which costs substantially more than having a team of select elite people.
My company has been trying to hire a couple of developers at various levels for the past two years with little success. We don't demand geniuses, just people capable of thinking. We consider the resume only so far as to ensure that the applicant has cursory understanding of the underlying technologies. We don't demand that an applicant have an insane number of years in any particular set of technologies. We don't even demand that the applicant have a degree, as some of the brightest minds we've seen often barely graduate highschool. Our interview process is not demanding. We look for people with genuine interest and passion. We don't care what they know off of the top of their head.
Our compensation packages are well into the six figures. We're willing to and have relocated people. Some of the developers are even permitted to telecommute from their state of residence.
I don't get it. We don't want butts in the seats. We want intelligent and creative people who want to have input into the design and implementation of projects. We want engineers. These people are ridiculously difficult to find.
To give you an example, last year we tried to fill a junior position in our custom development division, which deals mostly with custom B2B ETI. The technical exam involved fixing a program to work correctly. The program was only 12 lines of code and simply ran a database query and spun the results into a flat file. The program compiled and executed just fine. The applicant was handed a piece of paper that contained 6 complaints from the point of view of the consumer of the resultant file which described how the file needed to be formatted. The complaints were similar to, "the date needs to be formatted as YYYYMMDD," and, "the transaction amount should not have a decimal point." The applicant was permitted to use the help files and the Internet to research anything they wanted. The applicant had a full hour to resolve the problems.
We went through seven applicants before we found a suitable hire. One of the applicants who failed literally broke down in tears in the middle of the exam. The person who got the job finished the entire task in under a minute. He was immediately hired and proved to be an exceptional developer, despite only having a certificate from a vocational college and one year working experience.
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.
Re:The way HR writes job ads is often the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
And during the start of this decade (2001-2002), just when the dom-com bubble burst, employers were sending out the same job vacancy to every possible recruiter they could find, thus creating a mirage of job vacancies, each of which would be described slightly differently, but the location was identical. The most deceitful was the advert where the agency would advertise "We are looking for a software engineer with 10-15 years experience
When you see job descriptions that are so specific down to the qualifications, API's, hardware, and software experience required that is a dead giveaway that they already know the person that they want.
Otherwise if the job sounds too good to be true, they are probably phishing for new ideas, or just sending out general job descriptions and not real vacancies.
Re:The way HR writes job ads is often the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
I received a response from the agency rep stating that they were concerned because I did not have any experience with an RDBMS. These are people who staff IT positions everyday.
It's these kind of clueless workers who, unfortunately, are usually in the position of determining which applicants are qualified for a job. I'm certain they, at least in some small part, contribute to the perceived shortage.
A shortage of GOOD workers? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why is that? I'm really asking because I don't know. Why are the majority of practicioners of our profession bad? This doesn't happen with other professions does it? (doctor, lawyer, etc.)
I have a couple of theories:
1) Working in IT requires constant learning and keeping up on the latest technologies. People who already work 60 hours a week and have families just don't have time to keep their skills current. They trust their companies to keep them trained, and the companies let them down.
2) There is no consistent college preparation and certification like there is for every other professional field. I'm a software developer who has a Computer Science degree, but most other developers have MIS degrees, Math degrees, Engineering degrees, no degree, etc. Lots of people who are clever "coders" are actually poor overall software developers.
Anyone have other clues?
Re:No myth here (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The way HR writes job ads is often the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
So HR departments have become very shrewd in phrasing positions to ensure no-one could possibly meet the requirements, so that they can hire a foreign worker for peanuts.
And really, that's what this Labor Shortage myth is all about. There's no shortage of labor. There's just a shortage of well-qualified labor willing to work for peanuts.
Re:No myth here (Score:4, Interesting)
Cut a long story short and I bollocks up my degreee because I've spent all my time fiddling with computers. Yet somehow I get an IT job and end up writing a crappy PHP-based job management system. I then find myself as a sysadmin for a financial startup. Startup gets bought and I'm transferred across to a Big Fat Sysadmin job and am told at the beginning that I'll have to switch to helpdesk because, frankly, this company doesn't employ people like me and I'm only here because it's illegal to sack me.
2 months later and my line manager is telling me I know more about how windows works than most of the MCSE's, and more about Linux that the RHCT's and the DBA's put together. Given that the old -> new company migration is still happening, I get my Big Fat Sysadmin role. Almost all the MCSE's are afraid of the command line and call me "Linux boy" yet mysteriously within a week the backups on their 12-node ESX cluster are working reliably again and there's a security policy in place to stop everyone logging in as root (3hrs VM downtime in my first week from people running the wrong command as root).
Moral of the story? If the circumstances are right, you can get by just fine without any qualifications, and IMHO my job is more interesting because I took the path less trodden and learnt computers from the CPU upwards (still can't figure out Excel to save my life). When you do get qualifications, alot of them are meaningless when compared to actual experience doing things (and most employers are aware of this - if you have experience, make a BIG thing of it) - I've sat through my MCSA, and precious little of that is about what the computer is actually doing (how can you talk about AD without understanding DNS, LDAP and Kerberos? Without that crucial understanding, how can you comprehend at what the data looks like, what paths the data is taking, how it is stored and transmitted, and how a failure at any of these different points will manifest itself?), it's about what buttons to press. Ambiguous questions usually result in "Use and/or buy Microsoft $software" answers being the right ones. Alot of employers are only looking for people who know which $software to buy, and how to use it The Microsoft Way. Others are looking for people to solve problems. MCS* typically help with the former, but (with the right sort of person) help with the latter too.
Summary fo the moral: interviewers, I hope to god you actually read those CV's and don't just blindly grep for MCSA or MCSE because, if you do, some desperate company going through the dregs of monster.com is going to be pilfering a colossal asset to the company from under your nose.
Sincerely,
Hugely obstinate and arrogant sysadmin
Re:In my experience... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No myth here (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the point GP was trying to make is that there aren't many single OS shops left anymore. Add to that the fact that most positions above entry level (in regard to IT) usually require a more diverse experience set. If a company is so locked in to one strategy/platform I find it hard to believe the IT management has done their due diligence.
Having said all of that, I hold an MCSE but I am mostly a Linux admin. My experience set makes me more valuable to my employer because I can assess situations based on a problem/solution equation rather than a problem/(my vendors best attempt at a solution) equation.
Re:Got a labor shortage? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let labor be free. I can compete with that and, to be honest, would really enjoy a year or two working in Dublin or Tel Aviv or Bangalore while I'm still young.
Re:No myth here (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, whatever. (Score:5, Interesting)
I did the interviews, the people is just not there. As for myself I will take a few months off because I know there will be a job for me once I am rested and have done a few things I have in the back burner.
The situation in the US is not the way you are portraying it. Foreign workers are well paid (by definition, given the kind of visa they need to enter the country) so they are not driving salaries down, and most importantly pay taxes and spend money in the local economy, which benefits without having invested a dime in the education of these individuals.
The people driving salaries down are the ones working remotely and that never set foot in the country they are serving, very often using the infrastructure in that country, which was originally built to benefit the local population. That is what happened to me. I have no problem with this, I will have to take a lower salary most likely, but this is just natural given the savage competition to which we are being confronted (people in India are forced to work insane hours for a quarter of what we earn in the West, but fret no, salaries are going up and it is a matter of 3 or 4 years before they are comparable to Western standards, the turnover rate over there is atrocious, because techie people over there are not stupid: as soon as they get a better skill set they move on. In my experience this is at the very least 40% a year of attrition rate, so you always have a half competent group of people, half of which will leave very soon. Some companies are waking up to this fact, but some others are going ahead like a blinded lemming with suicidal thoughts).
Techies in developed countries should be writing to politicians about why they are allowing people working remotely in machines based locally, offering services locally. If they are affecting the economy in such way, they should be taxed as if they were working locally, people working remotely get all the money but pay no taxes locally, while the other way around is nigh to impossible to set up shop.
Or we should get free access to Indian and Chinese markets in order to compete in a fair basis. But our politicians are too busy wasting billions of dollars killing innocent people instead of investing in the future of our respective countries.
Re:Got a labor shortage? (Score:3, Interesting)
Teleport my Job [teleportmyjob.com]
Tecoloco [tecoloco.com] the weather is better in Central America.
Re:There's always a shortage (Score:3, Interesting)
Just like in education . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
The best part of these numbers is that the public routinely buys the mantra that we need mathematics teachers, and the reason that we have such bad outcomes is that few are qualified to teach mathematics. Oh, did I mention that the adjuncts at my school are required to have advanced degrees in mathematics?
Yes, IT often explains away their incompetence as a result of not enough qualified people. Funny, but I think most of the IT staff at my school are low paid part-timers, with a small cadre of well paid people at the top. I hope you see the similarities.
Re:Yeah, whatever. (Score:3, Interesting)
Democracy in action: if it were not for a more politically active population at that time those labour reforms still would not have materialised. Which is why modern corporations work so hard to disenfranchise the majority via mass media, you know all the corrupt stuff, you only have 1 vote it doesn't count so why bother, there is no point in voting because all political parties are the same, why vote for any candidate when they are all as corrupt as each other (all this while they prod a motivate their pet ignorant electorate to vote for the politician that will tell the religiously motivated what they want to hear while robbing them blind and as it turns out killing their children).
So yeah IT labour shortage is all about squeezing down on wages and working conditions, basically out sourcing is proving to be somewhat unreliable, and the process tends to mean you give away all your trade secrets to a future potential competitor but, those wages and labour conditions are still desirable so they are looking to import them by what ever means necessary. True the still will be the odd shortages in specific select areas of the market when a required level of experience and expertise is needed but they are few and far between.