- May 29, 2003
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No, The Tech Skills Shortage Doesn't Exist
- Thread starter lokiju
- Start date
Duddy
Diamond Member
- Jul 22, 2002
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I do believe there is a shortage in specialized tech fields.
The "help and support" crowd is uber large for sure.
But there is a shortage of people who have useful tech skills, like VBscripting for example. You would be surprised how many IT people have no idea how to script. Also, MS Exchange specialists are in high demand in nearly EVERY corporation.
EDIT: And the web and graphics design crowd doesn't count for anything, because any 14 year old with a mac can master either or both of those fields.
The "help and support" crowd is uber large for sure.
But there is a shortage of people who have useful tech skills, like VBscripting for example. You would be surprised how many IT people have no idea how to script. Also, MS Exchange specialists are in high demand in nearly EVERY corporation.
EDIT: And the web and graphics design crowd doesn't count for anything, because any 14 year old with a mac can master either or both of those fields.
I don't agree. There is a severe glut in skilled tech and IT workers. The ones with the skills are still payed a pretty penny because they know they are difficult to find. It can take an employer 6-9 months to find a highly skilled worker and when they do they are going to pay for them.
The reason the help and support crowd is huge is because we're a service economy and on-site labor is needed to fix things. After car design and manufacturing are long gone from the US, mechanics will still be needed. After programming is done overseas, desktop support people will be needed onsite to support them. After computer hardware is made overseas, you'll still need people here to repair/replace stuff when things go wrong.
A guy in India can make the program your company wants. A factory in China can make the computer your company buys. But they won't be able to walk up to someone's desk in Philly and install it.
I'd rather hire someone young and train them with the proper skills than to pay big money for someone who think they're the shiz and sit around all day doing nothing.
Problem is large companies don't have time to babysit young workers who lack experience. My company rarely hires Engineers right out of College or University, as they prefer to get people in who have a minimum experience level and require less hand holding.
I want to print this out and make copies to hand out every time a relative or family friend tells me I should go into computers instead of film since there's a shortage of employees.
Where I work, we've had multiple positions open for about a year because the right fit has not been found.
ultimatebob
Lifer
- Jul 1, 2001
- 25,134
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I'm glad that Information Week has finally figured out how to do "IT Manager BS to English" translations!
For example: "We cannot find enough skilled IT workers in the US" really means "We cannot find enough skilled IT workers in the US who are willing to work for peanuts, so we're using that as excuse to hire more low cost workers in India and China"
For example: "We cannot find enough skilled IT workers in the US" really means "We cannot find enough skilled IT workers in the US who are willing to work for peanuts, so we're using that as excuse to hire more low cost workers in India and China"
I agree with Spidey. There is a shortage of good IT (networking specifically) people around who are available to be hired.
Saying there's a shortage or surplus of IT workers is like saying the same about tradesmen. There might be too many specialized in some of the more mainstream skill areas, but it's not a blanket statement covering all of information technology. I dunno, I worked with business intelligence systems before I started as a law clerk last year and I still get a lot of phone calls and emails asking if I'm interested in various BI consulting gigs. I'd go out on a limb and say there might not be enough BI (ha, i just got the joke) folks to meet demand.
Are we relegating specialized IT talent to scripting?! If that were all that was needed in IT, we'd all be in trouble.
That's a misrepresentation of the actual facts.
The scare about India (Russia, China and all the other countries that accept outsourcing software work; even Indian companies outsource their own work to these countries in some cases) is practically a myth.
It's taken over a decade for companies to understand how to truly employ offshore talent, and most still don't get it right. Software has never been the manufacturing equivalent of a specification that can be built in isolation; it's an evolving product that unfortunately requires a vast number of iterations and complex interactions before it can be delivered. There are some very limited exceptions, but this is the truth for the vast majority, and it's why so many offshore efforts have failed miserably.
What companies are learning is that offshore talent helps adjunct onshore efforts, and it's the shortage of talent to facilitate this onshore-offshore interaction that leads to increased demand for two types of people: One, H1B workers to get them onshore; two, onshore workers to liaise between business and tech. The latter group has been in shortage for some time now.
Correct, but you're speaking from a simple break-fix standpoint. Software is obviously much more layered than simply having someone on the ground for break-fix.
ArmchairAthlete
Diamond Member
- Dec 3, 2002
- 3,763
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As far as developers go, I considered the place I co-oped at a good place to work. Yet I could see the difficulty in finding good devs.
Duddy
Diamond Member
- Jul 22, 2002
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That's the main problem with the tech industry.
You can't get a job without prior experience. You can't get prior experience without a job.
Even smaller companies want you to have atleast 2-3 years in your field. But then you can never actually get INTO the field.
You would think the term you get what you pay for would apply here. But it's quite the opposite. You will end up paying more for hiring someone on the cheap and end up paying in other ways. Time is money. So you hire someone young and train them properly. They got all the skills they need to get better pay, what do you think they will do next? They will either ask for better pay where they are, or they will get better pay somewhere else now that they have the skills.
Apply, wash and rinse.
fleshconsumed
Diamond Member
- Feb 21, 2002
- 6,486
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Have you considered that your company had multiple positions open for a year because they can't find the right fit at the price they're willing to pay?
Out of curiosity, can you post positions and the salary your company is offering?
Not always, no. Companies often have structures that are contingent upon formal promotion than any accumulation of responsibility. It also goes the other way; someone that was promoted might not necessarily follow the same responsibilities as someone above or below them on an org chart.
So, associating compensation with responsibility is almost meaningless in IT. You're compensated more for what you can do rather than you actually do.
You'll find in IT that many that have flourished did so through non-traditional ways. There are few that seemed to go from school->good company->good experience and repeat at the next company that wants to take advantage of your prior experience. This means that you often have to start out very, very small relative to the level of education or knowledge one has acquired. Experience is king in IT.
The largest exceptions to this are if you excel at certain schools (MIT being an obvious example, but even that's no guarantee) and use that to get into the ground floor. The easiest way to break in is to extend your social network as much as possible and use that as your leverage. Out of all the people I know, I honestly can't think of a single one that got their current position through traditional application methods.
That's just one example. There are plenty more, but the point is that IT is simply not a traditional industry and so following traditional paths is almost always going to cut you short.
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