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Businesses IT

The IT Talent Gap is Still Growing (venturebeat.com) 109

IT executives see the talent shortage as the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies, according to a new Gartner survey. From a report: Across compute infrastructure and platform services, network, security, digital workplace, IT automation, and storage and database, respondents cited a lack of qualified candidates as a leading factor impeding tech deployment at their companies. "The ongoing push toward remote work and the acceleration of hiring plans in 2021 has exacerbated IT talent scarcity, especially for sourcing skills that enable cloud and edge, automation, and continuous delivery," Gartner research VP Yinuo Geng said in a press release.

"As one example, of all the IT automation technologies profiled in the survey, only 20% of them have moved ahead in the adoption cycle since 2020. The issue of talent is to blame here." The talent gaps are particularly acute for IT automation and digital workplace solutions, according to the executives surveyed -- a reflection of the demand for these technologies. According to McKinsey, nearly half of executives say their embrace of automation has accelerated, while digital and technology adoption is taking place about 25 times faster than before the pandemic. For example, Brain Corp reported that the use of robots to clean retail stores in the U.S. rose 24% in Q2 2020 year-over-year, and IBM has seen a surge in new users of its AI-driven customer service platform Watson Assistant.

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The IT Talent Gap is Still Growing

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  • With that being said, I have a hard time believing that 64% of current IT techs are incapable of doing RDP, or Vsphere, or BigFix with minimal training. I can believe a large majority of them are clueless when it comes to CLI stuff, but then you got guys like me who makes nifty WPF gui's for powershell for them. At work I made a stupidly simple frontend for Robocopy for doing this.

    • Friday I (security guy) had a conversation with one of our database devs regarding how we're going to handle certain security issues on databases with millions of records. Basically we need to shuffle and alter 10 million records in real time, not spending hours on millions of disk accesses. Which requires kinda knowing what you're doing.

      You said you're pretty sure they can learn to RDP.
      Um yeah - being able to log in doesn't make you a data architect, or a security engineer.

      Or maybe your point was that you'

      • "Cloud computing", previously known as "utility grade computing", previously known as someone else's computer ala IBM.
        People are empowering corporations like Amazon and Microsoft with all their data and they don't expect them to bite them in the ass.
        Frankly I trusted IBM more.

        • Yeah, I'm always thinking about what if the vendor tries screw you, raising prices sharply, dropping support, or whatever. It surprises me how many people don't think about that. To me, that's probably the main advantage of open source - you aren't dependent on a particular vendor.

          Building stuff actually cloud native can offset that risk in one way. Particularly vs the old IBM SaaS stuff you're talking about. Cloud native means you don't CARE which hardware or even software runs your database. Your applic

          • Precisely. Unfortunately too many people make hard dependencies on vendor specific stuff like Amazon's proprietary crap.

    • "Cloud", English, noun, neutrum, pretty fluffy intangible thing.

      Homophone to "klaut!", German, verb, imperative plural to "steal!"

      (yes, it could also be the 3rd person singular present active indicative, "he/she/it steals", but I think the imperative makes a better joke)

      • "Cloud", English, noun, neutrum, pretty fluffy intangible thing.

        Homophone to "klaut!", German, verb, imperative plural to "steal!"

        (yes, it could also be the 3rd person singular present active indicative, "he/she/it steals", but I think the imperative makes a better joke)

        Wait! Is there going to be a test on that? 8^)

    • Too often the people do the hiring only look at the present certs you have and don't realize a good IT person can learn new tools. I remember applying for a job and being told I did not have the latest cert from Microsoft. Which was a strange way to evaluate my skill since I had used all the earlier version for the last two decades. Also as a computer tech before that it was normal to go into a customer's site where they were having software problems, and figure out the solution that they the users have b
      • by Ocker3 ( 1232550 )
        Yup, far too many HR people just ticking boxes instead of doing practical problem solving to see someone's process
        • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
          As much as it is fun to hate on sometimes utterly useless HR droids, we might need tio consider why they are so useless. Maybe just maybe they are so usless because the tools upper management gives them are utterly useless. So either they are bad at communicating what they need to do their job well, a thing you think should interreset the higher ups as getting the right people can differently affect your bottom line in a positive manner, or the higher ups don't care as long as they get ther yerly bonus and
      • by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

        Also as a computer tech before that it was normal to go into a customer's site where they were having software problems, and figure out the solution that they the users have been using the software for months even years yet I could figure out software I had never seen before that day and solve the problem in an hour or two.

        This is the most infuriating part of IT work--person that pushes an application around for two thousand hours per year for a decade can't make head nor tails of a problem that person who has seen the application twice in their life solves in thirty minutes.

        Keeps food on the table, I guess.

    • Still spend most my time using âvimâ(TM), âscreenâ(TM), and ssh. I am a little spoiled using âvimâ(TM), I like my arrow keys and the code recognition for colors is really helpful.
    • True, but "someone else's computer" is not the real benefit of "cloud" services. The real benefit is using SAAS, where you get a database server, or web server, or other type of service, without having to install and maintain the server software itself. Further, with SAAS you are better protected against malware, because if YOU don't have access to the underlying hardware, neither does malware.

      So yes, it is "on someone else's computer," but more importantly, someone else maintains it.

      • with SAAS you are better protected against malware, because if YOU don't have access to the underlying hardware, neither does malware.

        The rest of your post is spot on, but this statement is flat out wrong. In some situations it can even make you more vulnerable.

        • Hypothetically, of course. But practically speaking, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have far more money to spend on security than your "little" corporation does. And security is the very lifeblood of cloud services. If I'm going to bet on Microsoft's security team vs. my own company's security guy, I'll go with the well-funded team every time.

          • LMAO.
            And this is why we don't have more top level people. This is the attitude that outsourced / offshored entry level jobs then complained there was no one high level so lets bring in more H1B.

            Yes Microsoft, Amazon, Google have far more money. But why do you think they would spend it on security to protect you?
            Direct break in and hijack their kit, sure.
            Attacking your hosted stuff and owning you and all of your data.... That would be your security person's problem and not theirs.

      • The real benefit is using SAAS, where you get a database server, or web server, or other type of service, without having to install and maintain the server software itself.

        No, that's just outsourcing your system administration. The real benefit to cloud computing, and the reason it was developed as something other than merely "someone else's computer", is for highly variable resource utilization. If you get a sudden spike in traffic to your web site, you can launch new VMs to handle the load a lot faster than you can order a new server. You can even automate monitoring resource utilization and launching VMs. And when traffic goes back down, you aren't stuck with a bunch of id

        • Yes, auto-scaling is another great feature of cloud computing. But that doesn't negate the importance of barring yourself from access to your own OSes. Just as developers shouldn't have (write) access to production databases, they shouldn't have write access to the hard drives of production machines. Nor should IT itself.

          Have you every worked for a company with an IT department that is REALLY GREAT at managing security? If so, you are lucky. Most companies don't want to spend the money it takes to do securi

  • by KindMind ( 897865 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @03:54PM (#61793143)

    This is the same language used to justify increasing H-1B visas. I see the next step in this parade as being the lobbyists begging for an increase in the H-1B cap to alleviate the "talent shortage". "There are just not enough American workers!" they cry.

    Hmph. Put me down as "skeptical" :)

    • by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:12PM (#61793199)

      I'd love to hire someone competent, I don't have the budget.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Ever notice how there's always enough money for the "best and the brightest" executives? Think about it.... The same people that drove sears roebuck into the ground were among the best and the brightest. Ditto for Boeing management. etc.etc.

        • Ever notice how there's always enough money for "barely competent" executives?

          FTFY

          • I guess my sarcasm, or my point, was too subtle. But yes, that is exactly what I meant.

          • by jbengt ( 874751 )

            The same people that drove sears roebuck into the ground were among the best and the brightest.

            The person [usatoday.com] that drove Sears into the ground profited highly by selling off Sears' real estate assets to a company he owned and leasing it back to Sears, made a lot of money off Sears' spin-offs of companies like Land's End, and shielded himself from a lot of downside liability through loans.
            So maybe he wasn't as "barely competent" as you all think.

            • The same people that drove sears roebuck into the ground were among the best and the brightest.

              The person [usatoday.com] that drove Sears into the ground profited highly by selling off Sears' real estate assets to a company he owned and leasing it back to Sears, made a lot of money off Sears' spin-offs of companies like Land's End, and shielded himself from a lot of downside liability through loans. So maybe he wasn't as "barely competent" as you all think.

              If you define competence as grifting, I suppose -

              And putting entire companies and a lot of people out of work as competence too.

              By that definition, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos was for a time, just about the most competent person on earth.

      • by khchung ( 462899 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @07:49PM (#61793895) Journal

        I'd love to hire someone competent, I don't have the budget.

        But they surely have the money in the budget to pay for the bonuses of their executives. And the money to pay the rent for the office that nobody uses now.

        • For reasons, our office never shutdown, we've used it every single day (yes we run on weekends too). The real issue is that IT is pretty much straight overhead. Its easier to find money to hire someone that does billable work.

      • I'd love to hire someone competent, I don't have the budget.

        Thanks for proving the point there.

    • by RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:46PM (#61793351)

      I don't really understand this argument. If there are X candidates and Y jobs, the ratio of X to Y determines salary. Are you suggesting IT professionals are just sitting on the sidelines refusing to work because the wages are too low? Are they instead working at McDonald's? I really can't imagine how you imagine this scenario of yours to be working.

      Now, I do agree that raising wages will pull more people in from other fields in the long term but IT work has always been relatively high wage compared to other more difficult or dangerous fields, so I don't really think there's all that much wiggle room.

      • by laktech ( 998064 )
        it may also be the case that there are talented people doing mindless work, that they've been doing for 5+ years and companies with these new initiatives can't pay enough to incite these folks to switch.
      • Stack Flak (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @07:50PM (#61793903) Journal

        A big issue I see with visa workers is that corporations don't want to wait for on-the-the-job training for their particular stack combination: they want instant plug-and-play employees. If you can search all over the world for that, you are more likely to find an exact stack experience fit.

        This results in US citizens being skipped because the US population is only a fraction of the candidate pool.

        Corporations then claim that US citizens are "not educated enough" to justify this practice. But we can't predict every stack combination ahead of time in order to educate ourselves for a single company. Thus, it's often really a shortage of patience.

        I've also seen H1B's abused in various ways because if they complain they likely will be sent home. They are a form of indentured servants. In one case they paid the visa workers only once every 6 months (it was still the full amount). I should have ratted on the damned biz.

      • I don't really understand this argument. If there are X candidates and Y jobs, the ratio of X to Y determines salary. Are you suggesting IT professionals are just sitting on the sidelines refusing to work because the wages are too low? Are they instead working at McDonald's?

        The good ones are taking the better paying careers. Pretty much a supply and demand situation.

        Now, I do agree that raising wages will pull more people in from other fields in the long term but IT work has always been relatively high wage compared to other more difficult or dangerous fields, so I don't really think there's all that much wiggle room.

        I'm pretty convinced that the supply and demand situation has the people at the top trying to increase that supply so they can pay less.

        Remember the push to get young ladies into STEM careers? While some might argue underrepresentation of the ladies, the cynic in me can interpret this as raising the number of potential employees, expanding the supply, and bringing wages down.

        The really odd thing about this pu

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        A lot of IT people I know have moved to contracting. It's more lucrative than salaried positions but less stable, so not ideal for younger people who are looking to take on a mortgage, for example.

        Sometimes they can be tempted back to salaried positions, but they tend to want much higher pay and better conditions.

        The pandemic has also changed the job market, a lot of people are now expecting to work 99% from home (which they were doing anyway as contractors) and that means that local wage levels are out the

    • Ive developed such a bad attitude lately. McDonalds has literally started putting job application forms in their to-go bags. I went and grabbed a bunch of forms and put them in my car. Now when I see these people standing at intersections with their little card board signs asking for handouts, I give them one of those applications. Theres no shortage of people capable of doing just about any job. It boils down to 1) do they want to work 2) does the job pay a fair rate and not try to milk the soul of their e
      • I[']ve developed such a bad attitude lately.

        When I read your response, I used Bill Burr as my reading voice. It fit perfectly, up until the shortage of people capable of doing just about any job. Then I needed a new reading voice. Unfortunately, Bill's voice scared off the rest; so I had to finish as myself.

  • by Valkyre ( 101907 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @03:57PM (#61793151) Journal

    Asking for X years of experience in most techs is just laughable. Active Directory administration? Postgresql? OK, those have probably been static enough where a decade of experience means something (although I would never impose such a ridiculous requirement). Kubernetes? Ceph? Lamba? What's going on now is barely recognizable compared to what was going on years ago. Sure, there are people who spend 15 years working on exactly one product, and that product might even still be in use in some recognizable form, but those in that category that I have run into generally fail to keep up with modern techniques and procedures.

    If employers would stop treating IT like a static enterprise and more like the dynamic, constantly-shifting environment that must be constantly re-learned, they might have better luck. Just about anyone worth their game in IT that I work with could be given something completely foreign that they've never worked on before and be proficient enough to administer it through most scenarios in a matter of weeks, if not days. That's not some superpower, that's just how IT IS.

    • by t0qer ( 230538 )

      I'd disagree on AD stuff being static. Granted Powershell has been around for a minute, but it seems like most of the AD admins don't use it, or ISSO's fear it. Most are happy to use AD users and groups, which is painful for me.

      Good example using the RSAT cmdlets I did just 10 minutes ago. Had to change the manager on a bunch of users as the old manager changed regions.

      get-aduser -filter 'manager -eq"cn name of old manager" -and samaccountname -like"regionalconvention*"' | set-aduser -manager newmanagers

      • by Valkyre ( 101907 )

        The words were 'static enough', although I agree that's possibly not the best way to describe what I had intended. I am aware AD has been extended and the way it is managed in the modern era is quite a bit different, I was more trying to imply that experience gained on 10 years ago isn't totally obsolete, and may actually prove useful in the modern environment, whereas some other techs have changed so completely that same experience of ten years ago would be useless, if not counterproductive. A sort of back

      • by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        I'll admit, it's been a long time since I did any AD so this question might not make any sense. Shuldnt that manager problem be solved with a role insted of pinting directly to a user. Ie managed by (or what ever the attribute is called on the individual user ponting to say "Sales manager North east role" instead of pointing to "Bob Manager" and rather have the said role assigned Bob? That way when bob quits/get replaced etc you only need tioo re assign the role and not change users, or did I miss read y
    • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:32PM (#61793285)

      Allow me to explain where the "10 years experience in a technology that only existed for 2" comes from. Because I do occasionally do some hiring consulting jobs (yes, that's a thing now... don't ask, it's as dumb as it sounds) and it's always the same shit.

      You have a middle manager who finally gets a job position approved. Since he is responsible for 50+ people by now because with "agile" development low level management positions that actually knew what the teams are doing have been eliminated and the engineers have to do their own management now (yeah, that works great every time... but a different topic), he has no idea what this particular team is actually doing. So let's assume for a moment and is sane enough to not assume he knows everything anyway and thus asks one of the people in the team that should get a new member.

      Assuming now further that the team member is honest (that's usually the part that actually works), he will tell his manager the candidate of his dreams. He should know this tech, because we others struggle with that, so someone who knows this would be great. He should know that one, because that's our core technology, so that's pretty much non-negotiable. Oh, it would be awesome if he knew that new upcoming stuff, too, because we'll soon need someone who knows this and we don't have time to learn it... and so on.

      Since manager has no idea what these funny abbreviations and tech names mean, all he basically does with it is create a bullet point list of it. If you're lucky, he stresses the ones where the tech said they are MUST HAVE skills. Here also the "years of experience" get added. Usually with 1-2 years for "should have" stuff and 3-5 years with "must have at all cost" stuff.

      And should he forget or omit something, don't you worry. HR, who are the epitome of wisdom when it comes to knowing what kind of skills engineers need, will fill in the blanks with very useful and important skills. Especially soft skills.

      • No. These requirements typically come from HR, seldom, or maybe never from an actual team member.

        • The requirement often come from team members, at least when their manager has half a clue. The insane "years required" are either management or HR.

          • by Hodr ( 219920 )

            Exactly. Engineer/Supervisor says "Must be an expert in X" and HR translates expert to 5 (or however) many years experience based on some chart. Certain fields do translate this way, 1-3 years may be an apprentice, 4-6 a journeyman, and 7-10 or more an expert, but that's an entire field (like welding). You shouldn't judge individual skills within this domain by the same metrics.

    • Exactly. Take a hint from Elon Musk and hire for talent, attitude, and enthusiasm. Specific skills are something you can train. And experience counts for a lot, even if it’s not in the exact niche that you are looking for. A veteran IT guy of 50 will outperform a young guy just out of college, in the long run.

      Also, those “X years experience in Y” requirements often come from HR; it’s something easily quantifiable and they can filter candidates with it, making their jobs a whole lo
    • Maybe 10yrs in IT not specifically doing that very specific task. 25 yrs experience doing WAN doesnt make you a master journeyman like some skilled professions. Yes I remember carving out DLCIs on high density serial ports that connected to an adtran csu/dsu for frame-relay service. If there was someone so bass-ackwards they still used frame-relay and were not willing to hire someone green to get up to speed, they deserve to pay $200,000yr for an IT person to 'support' it. But having seen the evol
    • Asking for X years of experience in most techs is just laughable.

      Apparently so [9cache.com]. Meanwhile, I couldn't find the one I really wanted, but it was along the lines of an ad saying you needed three years of X programming language. The guy commenting about the ad only wrote the language the year before which meant he couldn't apply for the job.

    • "Sure, there are people who spend 15 years working on exactly one product, and that product might even still be in use in some recognizable form, but those in that category that I have run into generally fail to keep up with modern techniques and procedures."

      This is ageism - you're literally generalizing about people with experience based on a very limited data-set. It's just as bad as insisting on X years of experience, which discriminates against the young.

      "Just about anyone worth their game in IT tha

      • by Valkyre ( 101907 )

        "This is ageism - you're literally generalizing about people with experience based on a very limited data-set. It's just as bad as insisting on X years of experience, which discriminates against the young."

        So the specific person I had in mind on this was a Cisco certified something or other installing switches, who not only insisted that unencrypted telnet was still appropriate for managing the switches because 'it was on a management VLAN' (this installation was at a public high school with multiple trunk

    • I would not want to hire the kind of person who does the same thing for 15 years for a job in a fast-changing landscape.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • If employers would stop treating IT like a static enterprise and more like the dynamic, constantly-shifting environment that must be constantly re-learned, they might have better luck.

      This. Really, asking for more than 3-5 years of experience with any particular technology or language is silly. I've used more than 20 languages, of wildly different types. If I had to pick up a new one, it would take me a couple of weeks to get comfortable with the syntax, and a couple of months to get comfortable with whatever libraries it comes with. To be a genuine "expert" might take another several months of continuous usage. After that, it's just another tool in the toolbox.

      In other words: you want

  • No apprenticeship (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ebh ( 116526 ) <ed&horch,org> on Monday September 13, 2021 @03:58PM (#61793157) Journal

    All the entry- and junior-level work has been sent overseas. That's the equivalent of apprenticeship, and is necessary for producing more senior engineers. Too bad if you're trying to start out anywhere other than low-wage countries.

    • Yup, if you don't grown home based intro talent you won't get home based expert talent.
      I suspect soon that if now we need to find out experts from India, because that's where we trained up the apprentices, that companies will not decide that juniors are too expensive so let's outsource that to China with prisoner labor, or Afghanistan because suddenly everything is very cheap there, or to El Salvador, or...

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      In my experience it's the opposite. Companies like to hire for low level graduate positions, because that person's wage increases are unlikely to keep up with their ever increasing experience, and inertia will prevent them leaving. Throw in a few low cost benefits like free coffee and they may get a very cheap engineer out of it.

    • Very true. If IT was unionized like the trades are, they wouldn't be having this problem. Because one thing the unions provide, is formal training. As well as a formalized code of conduct, and formalized schedule of benefits for a given performance level/seniority.

      But the only thing the businesses see, is an expensive loss of control. They would rather micro-manage everything and go down in flames, than cede anything to labor.

      In historical context, the Elites are winning. They wanted this, they wanted no ta

  • by timholman ( 71886 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:00PM (#61793163)

    Another decade rolls by, and the same headlines appear once again.

    Whenever you see industry complaints about a "talent gap", you can immediately translate it as "an incredible shortage of talented programmers who are willing to work 60 hours a week for $40k a year".

    • by Morpeth ( 577066 )

      I'd mod you up if I had the points.

    • I tend to call that a "wage gap".

    • Well, there might be a little more to that than high hours and low salary. For example, the work can sometimes be very frustrating, very tedious, and impinge on weekend/evening/holiday hours that people usually reserve as personal time. On top of all that, the tech moves quickly so people need to keep re-educating themselves to stay on top of it (which, of course, costs even more time).

      Such an environment will naturally drive talent away. Some of these concerns are addressable (such as company-sponsored

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Pretty much. Always the same crap from these people.

  • by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:02PM (#61793171) Homepage

    Translation from CEO speak

    We cannot find people with the skills we need who will work for minimum wage and without any benefits

    It is almost as if IT workers need an organization that will protect their rights. I heard rumours of such a thing, but I think that was tall stories.

    • We have that. It's called corporations who need a lot of them.

      You pay what I want. Because else I leave. And you don't want that.

      It's scary that this actually works in security...

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      We cannot find people with the skills we need who will work for minimum wage and without any benefits

      It's not minimum wage. They do offer fairly nice salaries. They just don't understand that with the market being as it is, "fairly nice" doesn't do it. Supply and demand, bitches, supply and demand.

  • Here's a theory (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter@@@tedata...net...eg> on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:05PM (#61793181) Journal

    Perhaps the IT Talent Gap is growing, because companies are neglecting their IT staff. IT staff aren't just born with IT Talent. It needs to be nurtured and grown at companies that invest in developing talent.

    Instead, companies are outsourcing IT staff or replacing them with poorly developed and overly marketed AI solutions. Additionally, proclaiming to the public that there's a lack of IT staff is a way to artificially stimulate the supply of IT staff, which consequentially allows companies to keep salaries low.

  • by lionchild ( 581331 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:17PM (#61793219) Journal

    US companies have proven time and time again, they are generally unwilling to invest in the talent pool. They're unwilling to look ahead and build a stable of talent inside their own company, but instead, seek to find Just-In-Time skills and labor, which doesn't really exist in their area, or if it does, demands a higher salary than they are willing to pay. Thus they complain that there isn't enough talent and so they beg for more and more H1-B visas, in order to import the talent.

    This really must stop.

    As long as companies are allowed to import overseas talent, or simply offshore the work, then the talent pool will continue to get smaller and smaller and smaller. In the same way that the US has effectively moved it's manufacturing overseas, this will continue to follow in the IT world.

  • Go train some! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:18PM (#61793227)

    Yes, there's a shortage. A huge one. We found a solution: We train our own. Yes, believe it or not, it's possible. There is a huge, HUGE shortage of security personnel. Looking for a security person with 10 years experience? Don't bother. Companies are paying 5 figures for headhunters and still can't get any.

    Our solution? We build our own. Yes, we do expect some experience with networking, operating systems and preferably databases, but if you got that, welcome. I'm fairly sure we pay more than you got as a network admin, OS admin or database programmer, but be prepped to go through 6 months of hell while we stuff that security garbage into your brains.

    Afterwards, we end up either with someone who we find out didn't have it, but we then have a pretty security conscious network/os admin or DB guy, which also makes our job in security HEAPS easier because I just gotta say "Found unsanitized input exploit, get it fixed!" instead of having to explain why and how and what. Or we have a new security person for our team.

    So no, I have no security shortage in our team anymore. I have a pretty good security team now. And it's fairly cheap, too, since it's mostly juniors, with the relevant pay scheme, capable nearly on par with seniors.

    Yes, it's also 6 months of hell for us, because we not only have to do our work but also guide them in. But it's MUCH more enjoyable afterwards when you have a lot more shoulders to carry the workload.

    • by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      Similar here. I work in the ERP space, and talent for that is pretty hard to come by as well. The last two recruits to our team were non-technical people from the business side of things. It's worked out swimmingly, they know the application inside and out. As long as they are willing to learn, you can teach them how to write an SQL query.
    • by Tom ( 822 )

      We train our own. Yes, believe it or not, it's possible

      You can get rich fast by making training courses for top managers telling them this most obvious truth.

      I've been trying to convince people here that me and the other senior would be much better used to train and oversee an army of juniors than working on customer projects directly - but the sweet daily rates people are ready to pay for us are blinding management to the future that has already arrived where they desperately need more people and can't get them.

      Good job doing the right thing. I'm absolutely su

      • You can get rich fast by making training courses for top managers telling them this most obvious truth.

        I know. I'm also a consultant. I tell the same idiots the same crap I told them back when I was still employed by them, but since I now cost ten times as much and ain't on their payroll, suddenly what was brushed aside 15 years ago as the ramblings of a nerd is gospel and the one true wisdom.

        And yes, it pays off with interest. Because, as I said, security is in short supply and security consulting twice so, I can still charge those rates, just multiplied by my new staff. And it's self perpetuating because i

        • by Tom ( 822 )

          Not every management sees that. Too many focus on the short-term impact (fewer billable hours by the expensive seniors).

  • Pay Better (Score:5, Insightful)

    by luis_a_espinal ( 1810296 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:19PM (#61793229)
    Pay better, and offer direct employment with benefits, then you'll see the IT gap disappear in real time.
  • by big-giant-head ( 148077 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @04:29PM (#61793271)

    It's because their HR dept keeps posting job openings that require 8+ years of Kubernetes and minimum 10+ years of Red hat openshift.

  • Well, in the previous job as a Sr Platforms Engineer, I couldn’t get cloud training even though I asked for it for several years. Even as I was departing, management was begging me to say, “we are moving towards AWS”, but with no budget for training and past experience with management (several different ones), I declined. I also pushed hard for automation and basically got one-off ansible scripts to accomplish a task and no access to the servers to improve the scripts or to the VMware infr

  • with taxpayer dollars like we did pre 2000? No. Still gonna have people take on massive debt for a degree they may or may not be able to finish?

    I don't think we talk about that enough. You don't get a lot of chances in college. Especially today. You can usually retake 1, maybe 2 classes in your 4 years, but doing so causes all sorts of problems. Most scholarships & grants require you to follow the program, many require at least a B average, so losing your funding is easy. And good luck if you need t
  • by erp_consultant ( 2614861 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @05:06PM (#61793423)

    it's a loyalty gap. Many employers don't want to train their staff any longer. They want to parachute in people with the "right" skills that can "hit the ground running". In other words, they want somebody else to train for the needed skills. Meanwhile they hand out piddly 3% raises with no promotion path and expect loyalty.

    Employers have created a generation of job hoppers. At one time there was a stigma attached to job hopping. Now the opposite is true - if you stay in one place for too long you are seen as dead wood, untrainable and lazy. Two years seems to be about the sweet spot. By then you should have figured out if there is any promotion path and what to expect in the way of raises. If the promotion path is not apparent to you then there isn't one and you are in a dead end job.

    So the next time I hear about some executive moaning about IT skills gap I'm going to suggest they take a look in the mirror. You are the author of you own destiny.

    • That's sadly true. The big sales changes in my career came when I moved on.

      It's now good practice to move on every 5-7 years. Managers even start to see you as "lesser important" if you don't, basically as someone they'll have anyway and who won't move on, so why bother increasing a salary?

      So my goal is to train people quickly, get them up and running in 3-6 months and be able to benefit from their training for 3-5 years. If you've been here for 5 years, your chances to get any more training are vanishing q

    • My recent job search went something like this:
      For $60k, it's not worth my trouble
      For $80k, I'll take the job but keep looking
      For $100k, I'll stick it out while I finish my Masters
      For $120k, I'll try it for a few years and hopefully it's exciting
      For $150k+, you might get to abuse the work/life balance a little, but I'll hunker down to make the money and then move on.

      Ideally it's the $150k with exciting work. Currently I'm in the stick it out while I finish my Masters stage. The work isn't bad, and the work/l

    • by taustin ( 171655 )

      They want to parachute in people with the "right" skills that can "hit the ground running".

      If you require every employee to be a unicorn, you'd be start raising your own herd.

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      This

      The simple concept of hiring someone and then training them to do what you need seems to be beyond managers these days. They'd rather spend $50k trying to find the perfect person that may or may not exist than $20k on training the almost right person that's already working for them.

      • To me it's a simple formula. Find someone with a good aptitude, demonstrated through either educational merits or prior job experience. Then evaluate if they have a good attitude. Can they work well with others? Solicit the opinions of the people that would actually work with that person on a day to day basis. If you can tick both those boxes you have a viable candidate.

        If they haven't got every single skill you are looking for then fine. Now you have identified the gaps so come up with a plan to address it

  • by PPH ( 736903 )

    Now maybe Microsoft will stop moving shit around in their UI.

  • by TJHook3r ( 4699685 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @05:33PM (#61793501)
    I can't believe that people don't want to invest their precious free time in learning esoteric new skills in unproven new technologies so that companies can hoover up their knowledge without investing a dime in old-fashioned concepts like 'training' or 'R&D'!
  • Just a thought (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zkiwi34 ( 974563 ) on Monday September 13, 2021 @06:04PM (#61793585)
    The whining of industry might be assuaged a bit if they STEPPED UP and offered to train people in these areas. But no, they still want/expect freshly minted and cheap from some country somewhere else.
  • The IT Technical Gap is directly proportional to the increase in IT Non Technical roles used to run IT Departments and Companies like accounting firms, with a larger focus on reducing costs instead of a Technology Department or Companies primary focus being about Technology, IT is now just cost based race to to bottom where IT requires individuals to be jack's of all trades and specialize in Programming, Networking, Database Admin, Infrastructure, Storage and Security for an entry level salary and inhumane
  • I love this. It just means my pay keeps going up and up and up. My issue is - if I want more money, I HAVE to jump ship. You want me to get those qualifications to do that - then get me the training and give me the pay increase when I get it. Only give me one? Fine, I will jump ship and go somewhere that will get me the other. Either way - I get both and I get better paid. Keeping in mind, I would LOVE to stay at a single company. But pay is too low, and if you want me to get all these qualifications, it c
  • This problem can easily be solved by hiring more trans engineers.

  • by whitroth ( 9367 ) <whitroth@5-cent . u s> on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @12:16PM (#61796227) Homepage

    Really? So, you can't find someone taking just-out-of-school wages to do the work? H1-B's are getting more expensive?

    But you'd rather due that, than hire someone with experience, and have YOUR COMPANY pay for the training?

    Oh, noes, money spent on training is a waste of ROI!!!

    Note: my last company, in ten years of work, I had one (count 'em) day of teamwork training, and nothing else. Online training - oh that was the federally-mandated, and charge it to the client.

  • Everyone seems to understand the concept of supply and demand until it comes time to pay people more for their labor. Every one of these articles should begin by asking executives how much they have increased salaries to alleviate their labor shortage. If it's anything at or below cost-of-living inflation, they should be told to fuck off!

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