Companies More Likely To Outsource Than Train IT Employees 235
snydeq writes "IT pros feeling the pressure to boost tech skills should expect little support from their current employers, according to a recent report on IT skills. '9 in 10 business managers see gaps in workers' skill sets, yet organizations are more likely to outsource a task or hire someone new than invest in training an existing staff. Perhaps worse, a significant amount of training received by IT doesn't translate to skills they actually use on the job.'"
This just in! (Score:3, Insightful)
Guys, seriously. Nobody wants to spend money on an employee they aren't likely to have around in a year or two anyway; and even if they did, it's easier just to phone HR and say "Hey, I need a dozen people with xyzzy skill." "derp derp derp" "Okay then! I'll see them on monday." The idea of the company taking care of you died in about, er... the 1950s. Deal with it.
Re:This just in! (Score:5, Informative)
I've been at this long enough that I know it matters NOT what the economy is like whether they do this or not. It's about time we stop blaming the economy for things. This crap happens in the best of times and the worst. It's because sales, marketing and other non-tech people (who are usually in charge of the purse) see no real value in tech people unless shit is broken. They see IT/Eng folks as a dime a dozen that are easily replaced by some outsourced solution. WHICH the later regret in most cases.
So don't act like this is a new thing. It isn't.
Re:This just in! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes even in the booming 90s companies kept demanding more Visas so they could hire outside help, rather use existing unemployed U.S. engineers.
I've been a contractor 10+ years now because they'd rather hire temps than permanents. Also there's an age bias towards younger workers (under 40) who have no family and don't mind working unpaid overtime.
Re:Lazy employees are lazy (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue isn't that companies have some sort of moral obligation to train their employees. They are free to train, outsource, hire, whatever.
The point is that it usually ends up more expensive to not invest in your workforce. It's one of those save a penny today. lose a pound tomorrow.
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I'm not sure about your other programming skills, but you've definitely mastered println() function.
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This is bullshit. The companies don't want IT people that trained themselves. They want IT people some other company trained AND have X years of experience.
Re:Lazy employees are lazy (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't get the skill on your own, because they want to hire someone with X years of experience. That means you need to have been working with that skill, professionally, for X years, to meet their requirement. So basically they want someone else to train you, or for you to train yourself and then work somewhere else at it for a while, and then get tired of your job there and quit so you can work for this new cheap-ass company.
If they just wanted you to have the skill, without the "X years of experience" bit, that'd be one thing and perfectly understandable. But the fact that they want you to be experienced, meaning having worked somewhere else, means that they want someone who's already an expert at it, and don't want to get any of their existing employees up to speed on that skill. Then, when they can't find that expert-level person (because their salaries are too cheap, or they want you to move out to bumblefuck and then give you a shitty salary because "the cost of living is low!" (nevermind that you'll have to move cross-country if this doesn't job doesn't work out), then they run around bitching and complaining that there's not enough skilled workers out there and that the government needs to do something about it.
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I agree completely. That's why when my boss sends me travelling I insist on paying for the flights and hotels myself. They tried to give me a computer to use for work, but I wouldn't put up with that sort of nonsense and bought my own instead.
Heck, I don't even turn on the lights in my office lest my kind and generous employer have to bear that expense in the course of my humble service to them.
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Why should any company meet you on the halfway mark?
When you gain the skill, it's yours to keep
When you leave the company you take away those skills with you
I don't know if you do not see the benefit in making yourself better, or if you just do not WANT to see
Making yourself better means you get a better chance of landing a better job, within the SAME company or with other companies
All I see in this thread and many others is that there are just too many whiners in Slashdot - whining about everything while a
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Re:Lazy employees are lazy (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are not willing to move on and get another job, don't whine to everyone else about it.
Non-compete clauses prevent that for many people. The system is rigged in favor of the employers.
Re:Lazy employees are lazy (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are not willing to move on and get another job, don't whine to everyone else about it.
Non-compete clauses prevent that for many people who don't know that they're usually non-enforceable. The system is rigged in favor of the employers but people should find out what their options are regardless.
FTFY
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You are clearly a square peg trying to fit into a round entitlement-filled /. hole. A response such as this, suggesting people take personal responsibility for their career growth, is clearly never going to fly around here. Don't you realize the company/government OWES you free training?
LOL !!
Thanks for the reminder
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I'm curious, are you physically unable to use a period?
Re:This just in! (Score:4, Insightful)
I maintain a DB and recently had our marketing department get sent to me to quote syncing this DB with some software they have. They had apparently gotten quotes from outside vendors and the VPs caught wind of the price tag and said "No way in hell" So I meet with these people with the novel question of: "What is this software? What does it do? Who is maintaining it? Because it sure as hell isn't IS." It ended up that the director of marketing was the "Technical lead" for the product. So I asked her what kind of backend DB it used... what API did it have... did we have a support contract with the vendor... She had no idea. In fact, they weren't sure where their contract was. I got the joy of asking her if we were pirating the software. "Whats that mean?" It was a rather hilarious meeting.
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The idea of the company taking care of you died in about, er... the 1950s. Deal with it.
Right. That's because the companies taking care of themselves drove the others out of the market or forced them to adapt. Now we're seeing more of the same.
And that maximizes profit and that's what the shareholders want, so I don't see that changing until... ever.
Re:This just in! (Score:4, Insightful)
Then they shouldn't should whine when no one can afford what they product. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. Which is why the banks should have never been bailed out and the auto industry should never had bailouts or loans. If we are in a true capitalist society .. and these "corporations" make bad decisions .. fuck them .. let them die and new companies take their place. Why should society prop them up if as an entity they care about nothing but profits. *shrug*
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One day, pehaps soon, we'll figure out some system of government that isn't controlled by corporations - but clearly "more regulation" isn't the answer to that (bringing government and corporations closer together is the opposite of what we need - damn bailouts!), and I'm not sure what is.
But technology makes products cheaper precisely because it takes fewer jobs to make them. And we know that's a net win, eventually. It's the transitions that are rough.
Re:This just in! (Score:4, Insightful)
So, serious question: why aren't you a shareholder then? Anyone with a professional salary can join the 1% with 20 or so years of savings, if that's a priority.
Ultimately the purpose of a producer is to produce a product that people want, at a price that people want to pay, not to give you a job. As technology marches on it takes fewer and fewr jobs to produce any given thing (that's basically the definition of technology). And yet standards of living are vastly higher than 150 years ago - because, of course, technology makes products cheaper.
The world won't be arranged for your convenience - you have to actually do work that people want done, after all - so either compete in a global market, or do service work that can't be outsourced. To repeat the GPP - deal with it.
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What makes you think the standards of living are that much better. The expectations are driven higher, and people are further behind those expectations than ever before. There is a much wider gap between economic levels than ever before. As products get cheaper and cheaper, people at the lower end can afford less and less of them.
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Not really...
In fact, if you saved $3,000 each and every month for 20 years and got an annual 4.75% tax free or after tax return, you'd end up with 1,165,520 dollars
This will produce between 30,000 (low risk) and 60,000 (high risk) and 80,000+ (very high risk).
Meanwhile,
http://www.ctj.org/html/gwb0602.htm [ctj.org]
top 1% Average income $1,495,000 per year
I.e., they earn more in ONE year than you can save in 20 years with a good return in the stock market on a professional salary.
20 years of savings(with good returns)
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2. China.
I swap KO and PEP stock routinely.
Working for someone else is the most efficient way to be poor your whole life.
You pays your money and you makes your choice...
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Don't forget how the ass-backwards health care paradigm in this country forces people to keep working for someone else in a big company because they can't afford the non-subsidized cost of health insurance.
Once we separate health care from employment, you'll see a wave of innovation and independent thinking that will revolutionize the economy. But we won't see that until we realize that the money our employers spend on health care (mine currently spends about $1000/month on mine) could be instead used to e
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It'll change, don't worry. Not exactly sure when or what the end result will look like, but it will change. What we're seeing is the Achilles' Heel of capitalism, and the method of its destruction. What we might end up with is a new democratic socialist government (or governments, if the US breaks apart) where companies aren't beholden to shareholders and maximizing profit. What we'll probably end up with is an unelected, dictatorial government much like China's, or perhaps a world that looks like that
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The idea of the company taking care of you died in about, er... the 1950s. Deal with it.
Right. That's because the companies taking care of themselves drove the others out of the market or forced them to adapt. Now we're seeing more of the same.
And that maximizes profit and that's what the shareholders want, so I don't see that changing until... ever.
You seem to be suggesting that there were (are) no successful (profitable) companies that respected and valued their employees.
You need to take another look.
Re:This just in! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This just in! (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't matter what you do. There is no profit incentive to "loyalty" in many jobs. Your labor is worth what someone will pay you for it.
Re:This just in! (Score:5, Informative)
After I had been at my first tech job for a couple of years, I pointed out an interesting fact to a senior tech. An old phone listing I had received when I first got there had numerous people that had come and gone in the last two years, and the company liked to tell us that it had invested about $20,000 in training each of us before we had become profitable for them. It was to motivate us to work hard, I guess. Taking their talking point, I figured $20,000 for each person on the list that had left the company, and another $20,000 for the people that had replaced them.
This company had an effective policy of screwing their employees, and replacing them with new kids. When the senior tech decided it was his turn to go, his exit interview was with senior management, and he took the employee phone list. He informed them that over the last two years that they had thrown away $1.8 million by letting their techs walk out the door. Their jaws hit the floor. Apparently none of them had ever considered that money invested in "people" had real value.
The story ended happily though... the idiot senior management were all let go by the bank when the company went into receivership, and the new management has actually started building employee morale. I think that they're from Canada. Go Canucks!
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Actually, it doesn't work that way. No employee can jump in and be immediately productive - there's always a ramp up time. It could be simple things like where's where your office is, bathroom is here, etc. all the way to here's how you check out source code, what code review process you have, where to install the software you need, etc.
It usually takes a few
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The summary also makes the point that staff are receiving training that isn't relevant to their job. This seems like the biggest issue - waste money on fluffy business/management crap (that the managers should be doing rather than delegating down to their tech staff) rather than spending money on useful training that the staff would actually use to be more productive.
Of course, the department that came up with the idea of making the rest of the staff do the fluffy business/management crap as well as their o
college / CS is not relevant to the job. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that the Traditional College system is not the best fit for lot’s of jobs and there are better ways to learn and to show that you have skills.
Harvard Study: Too Much Emphasis On College Education?
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0202/Does-everyone-need-a-college-degree-Maybe-not-says-Harvard-study [csmonitor.com] [CC] [MD] [GC]
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/02/harvard-study-hey-maybe-were-placing-too-much-emphasis-on-a-college-education/ [hotair.com] [CC] [MD] [GC]
“It would be fine if we had an alternative system [for students who don’t get college degrees], but we’re virtually unique among industrialized countries in terms of not having another system and relying so heavily on higher education,” says Robert Schwartz, who heads the Pathways to Prosperity project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Emphasizing college as the only path may actually cause some students – who are bored in class but could enjoy learning that’s more entwined with the workplace – to drop out, he adds. “If the image [of college] is more years of just sitting in classrooms, that’s not very persuasive.”
The United States can learn from other countries, particularly in northern Europe, Professor Schwartz says. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, for instance, between 40 and 70 percent of high-schoolers opt for programs that combine classroom and workplace learning, many of them involving apprenticeships. These pathways result in a “qualification” that has real currency in the labor market”
“It would be fine if we had an alternative system [for students who don’t get college degrees], but we’re virtually unique among industrialized countries in terms of not having another system and relying so heavily on higher education,” says Robert Schwartz, who heads the Pathways to Prosperity project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
Emphasizing college as the only path may actually cause some students – who are bored in class but could enjoy learning that’s more entwined with the workplace – to drop out, he adds. “If the image [of college] is more years of just sitting in classrooms, that’s not very persuasive.”
The United States can learn from other countries, particularly in northern Europe, Professor Schwartz says. In Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, for instance, between 40 and 70 percent of high-schoolers opt for programs that combine classroom and workplace learning, many of them involving apprenticeships. These pathways result in a “qualification” that has real currency in the labor market”
Wrong! The reason is something different.. (Score:2)
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Add to that that high level education in many countries (such Argentina) is completely free and as a result you have very cheap skilled teams.
By "free" you mean paid for by taxes, right? Taxes on those same college graduates over the course of their working lives? Nothing's free.
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Yep! It's called "investing in society", and it's a huge part of why countries like Argentina and Brazil are doing so well right now—and it's something we used to do here in the US. It can't possibly be helpful to our country to have so many people take on crushing debt simply to qualify for a career.
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Ok then it's about time that companies quit demanding that employees give their lives/prove their 'loyalty'/work excessive hours/sacrifice work/life balance/hand over all intellectual property in contracts etc.
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Companies regard programmers as a generic resource.
They do not think there is any value in knowledge of the business rules.
Off shore contractors turn over faster than onshore employees in my direct experience.
Employees who have been on the job 5 or more years can do the work more effectively, more accurately, more quickly, and manage customer relationships better.
In our experience, HR is terrible at successfully providing candidates.
In our experience, Indian contracting companies are much worse at providing
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"This just in: Companies in a recessionary economy are cheap.
Guys, seriously. Nobody wants to spend money on an employee they aren't likely to have around in a year or two anyway; and even if they did, it's easier just to phone HR and say 'Hey, I need a dozen people with xyzzy skill.' 'derp derp derp' 'Okay then! I'll see them on monday.'
I fail to see how this got labeled "insightful". We know WHY they do it. The question is: "Is it smart to do this?" And in the majority of cases, the answer is: "No".
Of course there are some companies -- either small companies on a low budget or larger companies that have fallen on hard times and are struggling for capital -- that have little choice.
BUT... the majority of the companies who are doing this are companies that have fallen into the post-60s-or-so pattern of valuing short-term profits over
Re:This just in! (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course a company who offered me training that improved my skillset could keep me as an employee pretty easily - just offer me more money since I am now worth more money. Smart companies would give me some incentive to stay.
Most companies seem to rely on finding people who are stupid/desperate enough to take the more qualified position at a pay rate that is lower than it deserves.
There used to be a solution to this: unions. But those are dying out under continuous pressure from Big Business/Right Wing politicians (same thing). Unions of course did themselves no favors by demanding ridiculous requests at the height of their power.
The Right is winning and employees are mostly disposable and easily replaced these days. This is good for the rich and bad for the rest of the nation.
I would like to see a complete end to visas for importing foreigners to do local jobs - then companies might be forced to hire people and train them to do their jobs the way things used to be done.
Re:This just in! (Score:4, Insightful)
Hate to break it to you, but 'unions' are not the solution any more. If they were, they wouldn't be dying off. There's a reason, and it's not because we're all too stupid to realize how great they are.
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The situation with respect to training has been deteriorating for many years and there's one underlying reason. Employees have a habit of taking the training, then moving elsewhere to a better paid job, because they can.
And because the employees understand quite well that their employer has no loyalty to them. This is especially true in the IT world, where once a project is nearing completion (as if that ever actually happens ;-), managers don't see any more need for those geeky IT types, and lay them off. This is a great way to make sure that your employees have no loyalty to the company, and just go with whoever pays them well for an interesting next project.
And, of course, it's usually the most talented/smartest e
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No, the reason employees take training and jump ship is because companies never give out raises above cost-of-living adjustments any more. It's in an employee's best interest to change jobs every 2-3 years or else he'll be stuck with a terribly low salary. Maybe if companies actually gave raises for a change, they wouldn't have this problem.
Tying employment to anything is a bad idea; you're trying to bring back indentured servitude. We'd have companies forcing employees into completely BS training, eithe
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No. There was a time when the company loyalty thing went both ways.
These days, though, it seems not so much. You are expected to give your all, to open up your private life, to work more for less and never ever to expect pensions or well funded 401K plans, but they are not expected to have any loyalty at all back to you.
A sign of buisness culture failure (Score:5, Insightful)
A manager is insulated from the real costs of hiring a new employee, whereas costs for training for an existing employee show up nice and neatly on his budget.
Why? HR. HR ensures it's own existence by hiding the costs of new hires. Managers are happy to take advantage of this.
Re:A sign of buisness culture failure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A sign of business culture failure (Score:3, Insightful)
Try the opposite side of things. I am in what I thought is a good position. I am highly skilled both technically and in the soft skills. Yet all I see is hesitant businesses testing the waters. They pull the pin then pull back. Extremely frustrating. I would like to have a good full time job right now but the proper opportunity has not presented itself. It seems like barriers have been thrown up by business/HR to prevent normal discourse.
True, companies are not mentoring like they used to. This mean
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Around here (Perth, Australia) I see ads for "junior" positions where they want 1-2 years experience in ASP.NET or J2EE or Oracle or whatever it is and so far its proving impossible for someone like me with no experience to get a job in software development.
And then they're more likely to hire me to fix it. (Score:2)
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Most of what I do, is come in after the outsourced contract workers are done and make things work.
Most of what I do (as a contractor) is come in and do the work existing employees are afraid to touch or can't do in the first place.
Then, despite succeeding in the task, I seldom hear from them again. And it takes damned near forever for clients to bite the bullet and call someone in to handle the raging fire.
Employees think they have it so difficult with low pay, lousy hours, HR, yada, yada. Try contracting.
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I see both sides of this.
Employees ONLY see one environment.
A contractor sees dozens.
I prefer to use employees (who know the business) but call in contractors at least annually for auditing for best practices. I also prefer to pull in a contractor when we have something unusual. Why waste 30 days of an employee's time and then fail when a contractor can fix it in 2 weeks and be out the door.
However, my company has tried to replace employees with hordes of contractors (i.e. not high quality experts but jus
No training?! (Score:5, Funny)
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Not just training - College Hire Problem Too (Score:2)
A lot of public companies decimated their college hire programs over the last decade. Usually the focus has become MIS grads groomed for middle management of offshore resources. Basically it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. "We use off shore because we can't find people." Yeah and you can't find people because you refuse to put money into college hires.
College hires are more likely to get involved with start ups and small consulting companies. Both are fine, but neither prepare one for corporate wor
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Absolutely. It's almost impossible to get anything but a helpdesk or (if you're very lucky) an entry level programming job at a small organization anymore.
And no, you can't "work your way up" to an administrator or "developer", unless it's truly a very small shop. There are no gradients, because everything between "able to speak english and put things under desks" or "someone who can speak english and debug things who won't progress" because everything between those and "senior admin" or "lead developer" ha
"More likely" not what the article says (Score:2)
FTA:
As it stands, 57 percent of respondents said training or retraining staff would be their strategy to closing the skills gap. 38 percents said they would go with outsourcing or contractors; 28 percent said they would hire new employees.
Yea, that adds up to over 100%. Whatever.
Message here is that if you consider yourself a skilled employee, you (not your employer) are responsible for keeping your skills up to date. Companies don't train Luddites.
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Doesn't have to add up to 100%. There's overlap. 57% want to train, 28% would hire new employees. Assuming that NONE of the 38% who would outsource would also train or hire, THEN we know 5% of those who would hire new employees would only do so and that the remainder would do both that AND train.
A skilled employee has WHAT time to keep their skills up-to-date? The unhealthy obsession with "work ethic" (yes, unhealthy, it causes the majority of heart attacks in the US, more than the food) results in bugger a
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Of source I understand that it doesn't have to add up to 100%, duh. But if you don't have 3 to 5 hours a month to keep your skills up to date you need to find a new job.
And regarding the 30 hour work week? I'd love to have that, and a sabbatical every few years. But your claim that it would be cost effective is nonsense. You think a college education is so cheap in the US because professors have those benefits?
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And regarding the 30 hour work week? I'd love to have that, and a sabbatical every few years. But your claim that it would be cost effective is nonsense. You think a college education is so cheap in the US because professors have those benefits?
So your argument is that college is expensive in the US because college professors don't work 40+ hours a week, 50 weeks a year, and do all of their ongoing training on their own time, outside of that?
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College education is so expensive in the US because they can get away with it. Britain's universities get maybe a third as much but have comparable (sometimes superior) rankings on every metric.
3-5 hours a month? You've seen the turnover of software on Freshmeat/Freecode, right? Do you know how many new features are added to critical software in a single WEEK?! You also need to remember that a rusty skill cannot be used in the future. ALL your skills have to be kept active and fresh, not just the ones that
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College education went thru the roof when two things happened.
a) The government started giving grant money to everyone, not just veterans
b) The government passed laws saying college debt was uniquely unforgivable (despite having only a 1% default rate when the laws were passed- lower than most other credit default rates). This meant banks were willing to loan $40k because they knew they owned your ass forever. And free money mean universities raised tuitions.
Make college debt subject to bankruptcy and lim
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So police, fire, military personnel are suppling their own training and at their own expense?
What part of "IT professionals" is confusing you?
By the way, my job title is Senior Java Developer; before that it was Senior Database Developer, so I've been there done that. I still prefer the database end of it and generally work in that arena though. Most Java developers can't write even the simplest SQL query.
Re:"More likely" not what the article says (Score:4, Insightful)
Those generalisations work both ways: I wouldn't want most SQL developers to go near real programming languages. To be fair, I probably wouldn't want them to go near the SQL queries either, though.
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You can't, though. The companies want verifiable professional experience, not skills you claim you have from working on stuff on the side. Except, of course, when they hire an outsourcing firm or bring in a visa worker... then they'll (pretend to) believe that the outsourced worker or visa worker has 5-10 years of experience in everything, even when all they really h
The summary touches on the problem (Score:3)
In my experience, the summary touches on the chief cause of this problem: If an organization can't train in-house then they have to look to 3rd parties to provide the training, and all too often those 3rd parties lack the skills and/or knowledge to effectively educate the employees in anything practical. And in most cases they're never held to account for their lack.
So at that point it simply becomes cheaper to outsource the job to someone who has to get the job done in order to be paid, rather than pay employees to learn worthless skills.
Cost of IT (Score:2)
Easy (Score:2)
Learn it yourself (Score:2)
Here's your opportunity. Learn it yourself and be more valuable to your company.
Or don't, and whine, and be the next guy laid off.
I can't stand "training" (Score:2)
The last time I received any kind of IT training was when my company was in the process of switching from Quark to InDesign for publication layout. My role would involve checking articles in and out of the collaboration system and making a few minor text edits while they were in the system; nothing more. The "training" we were scheduled for involved something like four consecutive days of three-hour group training sessions. Needless to say, I said, "Thanks, I think I've got it..." and walked out during the
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Where do these employees expect their companies to go to find training that isn't a total waste of time and money?
I don't know, but in your case, it sounds as if your management didn't know InDesign from a hole in the wall, and just bought the off-the-shelf "new client" package. As they didn't know the product, they also didn't know what your job entailed, so they failed to match skills requirements to the training.
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My last employer, a UK civil service dept, sent me (and various colleagues) to Exeter University and Oxford University for data-mining / statistics / pattern recognition courses. They sent me on Oracle University courses. They sent me to conferences. They sent me on high quality developer courses hosted on the premises by skilled professionals, with other similarly minded candidates - I learnt a lot.
While Quark->InDesign training might have been offered to publishers internally, it certainly wouldn't hav
I've never had any company training (Score:2)
I'm working in a Java shop and the PHB sent out a group email looking for volunteers with
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LoB
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I got a 12 week gig (with paid overtime!) and all the latest Microsoft buzzwords to add to my resume.
Ouch. How's that going? Has your doctor been able to cure you yet? ;-)
Experience is valued. Training is not. (Score:3)
If they train an existing employee that only get someone who "knows" the material. If they outsource or hire someone new that can get someone who actually done it before. As anyone who has tried to get hired on the strength of a newly learned skill can tell you, companies only value skills that have already been applied at other companies.
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Outsource to Local IT Firms (Score:3)
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But the moment the SME starts wanting to have something a little more demanding — perhaps their own web server, or some vertical-market applications software — the local IT services company may not to be able to handle
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big surprise - give prog X to replace Y = big cry (Score:2)
As a software developer, I have seen contractors brought in to get the team up and running on ne
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Sounds like your friend was on a team of developers that weren't very good.
My company does this (Score:2)
I thought all companies were like this?
If my company needs a specific technical skill, like if they need someone to use .Net to program our Sharepoint site, or they need someone to develop an iPhone app, if they don't already have someone with that experienc ein-house, their choices are to pay someone to learn the skill and "learn on the job" as they become proficient at the skill...Or they can send the task outside and let someone (or some company) who's already experienced in that skill do the work.
Howev
Most companies are not in the IT business (Score:2)
This is likely to be an unpopular opinion on slashdot, but the fact is most companies are not in the IT business. That means their primary service/product is not IT. If a company is selling shoes for example, they're not exactly going to be innovators in the IT world. In fact they'd much rather hire an external IT agency to handle their IT requirements because let's face it, there isn't much tie in with IT for their shoe selling business.
You can replace shoes with nearly anything. Now if your company's bu
Existing employees are too busy for training (Score:3)
If not, they would have been laid off!
Depends on IT Needs (Score:2)
That usually doesn't happen in sub Fortune-1000
All the training in the world can't beat Google (Score:2)
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Research and Learning Part of IT (Score:2)
My personal experience is in very small business, so maybe I'm missing something here. But I find the ability to research and adabt to any required technology to be a core part IT. Something I expect any competant IT employee to be able to do themselves on an as needed basis (and in the case of people with aptititude for the work, something they would do even if not needed.)
If IT workers need to be lead by the hand to a training course, that's probably a job that would be better outsourced anyhow. IT is
Ummm. (Score:2)
Legislation can fix this. (Score:2)
The only way this will get fixed is if the outsourcing/guest worker/temp worker option is legislatively taken off the table, along with forcing companies to do the right thing.
Make temporary work cost more for each level of indirection or difference from full-benefit FTE. Short work that would normally dodge costs, would end up costing everyone down the chain a ton except for the worker. Long-term work that takes in people of all skill levels, especially the the long-term unemployed, and produces more val
Places that use open source (Score:3)
This is why I prefer working at companies that use open source software for the core of their systems. You are able to teach yourself and stay up to date on what is going on, and maybe even give back. All of that documentation is out there just for you to learn. And you can set up any number of scenarios in your labs without having to buy licenses for things that likely won't work for you anyway. Let's not forget that we no longer have to deal with constant harrassment from sales droids, instead focusing on growing our own skillset while benefiting the company.
'Training" is for "consultants" working for places like the DoD. I've never met a group more dedicated to striving for mediocrity, including government employees and contractors alike. Your value is seen as what you've been trained in. The majority of those folks simply don't know how to think, only how to regurgitate feature sets of commercial products that the government is overpaying for.
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It may also be that people don't seem to get a lot of value for their training dollars, so don't want to invest in it. If you pay to train someone you may be paying them to leave (sad reality), and if you send someone to a course on networking they may come back without any more idea how to do whatever planning/redundancy/programming networking related problem you have to actually solve.
Most practical IT is a matter of learning to do background research. Find how this problem is solved, and do that. In
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It may also be that people don't seem to get a lot of value for their training dollars
Russ Roberts/Econtalk recently did an interview with adam davidson [econtalk.org]. He looked at a manufacturing company (car parts). This company tried training their workers previously, and about half of the workers did not make it through the training (for various reasons).
Now these are unskilled workers, so maybe you think it wouldn't apply to IT workers. But IT is a very broad topic. If you're great at kernel programming, that doesn't tell me you would be great at game programming, for example. Or even that you would
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You miss out the key fact that they need people with the skills that the training would provide. This means they either need to recruit them, outsource, or do a bodge job. The latter two options seem to be the preference.
Outsourcing is an attempt at managing costs which nearly always increases overall cost to the business - have a look at the John Seddon "Rethinking IT" talk for a reasoned rant about this.
Bodging is the only other option. The IT industry (in this I include IT, software development, networki
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But of course they have to be paid more now that they work more efficiently and provide more skills to the company.
The proper solution would be a kind of subsidized loan on the training - send them to study, raise the pay and then recover the training costs from the wages.
Want to jump ship? Return the loan. Gonna stay with us after the loan ends? Great, enjoy your raised pay.