Poster Boy for Today’s Job Market
heraldsun.com: IBM, colleges: More top students needed — With offshoring to eliminate local jobs and to kill pensions and get rid of older employees, this “career” in computer science looks like a fools game. And so this shortage of interest is now a surprise? How dumb do these people think college bound kids are with the only prospect being a screw-over?
DURHAM — With a critical shortage of Information Technology workers projected in the coming years, it’s crucial that university computer science departments do all they can to attract top students to the field, a local IBM official said Tuesday.
At IBM University Day in Research Triangle Park on Tuesday, leading IBM officials and university professors from across the region gathered to discuss new ways of marketing computer careers to up-and-coming students.
In addition to hearing about the work being done at individual university departments, the event provided a chance for small groups of IBM developers and faculty to meet and discuss future research projects and allowed graduate students a chance to touch base with a potential future employer.
linked by Z. Smith
This is all just propaganda to foster the idea that we need more in/outsourcing. Well, not propaganda really. More like a scheme. First, make computer related jobs unpalatable to Americans. Second, complain that not enough Americans are getting tech degrees. Lastly, offshore as much as you can and in-source everything else.
I think there’s indeed a shortage of skilled IT workers. Cheap skilled IT workers, that is. The same way there’s a shortage of skilled plumbers, carpenters, painters, whatever. I say let’s stick with what we do best and drive the market as soon as reality sets in. It may take a year or two or three, but people will still need locals who are skilled in IT. And when there’s none around – since they all moved to India – then we’ll have our day 🙂
BTW coding HTML is no way to get a living… Why not C++? That’s more like it… Any fool can do HTML – at least that’s what’s being sold to business managers…
College students are cheaper than 25-year veterans in the field of computers.
College students are minimum wage employees with no benefits so they will fit right in with our economy as it is.
Young people coming out of high school read the papers and know that there is no future and benefits in the computer field.
Big business leveled out the playing field so they will have to recruit in India for their computer programmers.
I’ve had some experience in this market on all sides. But that doesn’t help me to think clearly. The central difficulty in this problem is that you are hiring people to automate themselves out of work.
Which is a great thing, but it takes a great deal of insight to keep the process flowing smoothly. There’s a tendency to jerkiness in self-monitored feedback systems. The infinite capacity of human beings guarantees that there will always be someone fooling around with the ‘smoothness’ control, trying to gain an advantage.
Maybe that’s the level of abstraction required to ‘solve’ this problem. But it isn’t currently a problem to India, which is developing an important industry out of our ‘mistakes.’
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ps-I’ll think some more. There has to be something that’s a problem, something that requires a solution in all this. It would be thoughtless to call it ‘growing pains,’ right?
According to today’s news, there should be a several thousand HP employees available to fill these positions in the near future. http://news.com.com/Analysts+expect+massive+HP+layoffs/2100-7341-5715548.html?part=dht&tag=ntop&tag=nl.e703
How can we have a shortage of IT workers when companies like IBM, HP/Compaq, Lucent and all the dot-com compnies did such massive layoffs over the past few years. What happened to all of these people?
I think one of the problems with many employers is unrealistic expectations. Some of the job ads I see make me laugh. They want someone who has a master’s degree, is an MCSE, A+ certified, a Unix and Linux expert, can program Java, VB, Perl, and C++, and has 7+ years of experience. I’m sorry, but you can’t be a master of all IT. I know a lot of geeks but very few could meet this list of qualifications.
In addition, IT is one of the most rapidly changing fields around. Many other disciplines don’t require the constant training and adaptation to new technologies. It gets tiresome. I get sick of learning new OS’s and applications. Especially when companies like Microsoft decide to completely change how core features function. Reading 1600 page Minasi software manuals is not most people’s idea of fun.
I think Robert has it absolutely right. There probably is a very large pool of IT workers available, but a shortage of people who have all the requisite certifications in order. I blame human resources – don’t they benefit from a constant “crisis” in finding qualified people? Aren’t they the ones who come up with ridiculous policies like shredding your resume if it is not in Arial font?(true story) Job seekers going down that whole resume submittal process would be the first to tell you how arbitrary the process is. For instance, I know control systems engineers who are hired to do embedded programming and I know computer engineers who are still out of work!
CSE programs are often products of Electrical Engineering programs, and EE enrollment has been down for over 10 years. I blame loss of manufacturing and Reagan’s Star Wars debacle, which absorbed a huge number of engineers and other scientists. When Bush the Smarter suddenly released these people back into the working, the engineering job market collapsed and has never recovered, Maybe CSE is suffering a similar collapse for similar reasons.
I think the simple fact of the matter is that there is a HUGE unwashed mass out there. I’ve interviewed about twenty people in the last two months, and I am not exaggerating in saying that a few of them are not capable of writing a “for” loop from memory.
Out of twenty, only two or three were what I would classify as qualified candidates. Meaning, I thought the interview was a worthwhile endeavor. We’ve only made one offer.
I have far more jobs than I can fill with these candidates. This has nothing to do with certs, or the font on their resume (however, note to candidates: if you have two years experience, do NOT have a six page resume of acronyms!!!).
I’m in New York City. Is the situation much better anywhere else? I doubt it.
So I am extremely skeptical of anyone that complains that their job went to India. There may be issues with enrollment, but I think there are also issues with the quality of the education being received. We shouldn’t be producing a computer science graduate who cannot write out an array declaration in front of me in an interview.
>> With offshoring to eliminate local jobs and to kill pensions
I am absolutely outraged that these big corporations burned through their workers’ retirement fund! Why aren’t they required by the government to put the money in a conservative investment “lock box” ?
It reminds me of the S&L scandal…. the government gives corporations de-regulation but with taxpayer backup!
I will never support any sort of de-regulation as long as I, as a taxpayer, an expected to pick up the tab for failure.
Dan, that does sound like a pretty extreme case. (maybe they wanted to use C-style syntax and you wanted VB or FORTRAN?) The Arial font anecdote comes from a NASA installation that will remain unnamed. They had so many thousands of applicants that they gave up trying to read them and instead used an OCR and an algorithm to profile the resumes. They dumped any not in Arial to reduce read errors. Besides, it helped thin the massive crowd. Back to you acronym complaint… the same professor that told me this anecdote advised me to pack my resume with “buzzwords” since he thought it unlikely a human would even look at it initially anyway.
P.S. I refuse to believe your situation is at all common. I’m in college now and the curriculum is rigorous. But when it comes to employment, I know a CWRU graduate in CS who can certainly perform those tasks in an interview and, after leaving 2 years of job experience, he has been looking for employment for months.
Lastly, trick question… Fortran has no “for” loop. Only “do”s that accomplish the same thing.
This crap started in the late 1970’s. We made stuff here, at least in the part of the country I live, then bingo it was all gone. Plants closed, soup kitchens and food banks opened. It got to the level that whole towns closed because they were company towns. One horse or one company towns, it’s all the same. The computer and home technology industry (PC) was just starting up. Around this time I was a golf caddy at a local country club. The rich were out on the links, we had the job of carrying their bags. They had people driving golf carts around with water, it was like 85 degrees and they had us carrying the bags and we didn’t get water. I can remember one day that I was carrying a bag for some old rich bitch and the bag must of weighed about half of what I weighed. I can remember feeling like I was going to fall over dead from the heat and the weight of the bag. Then these people, who were hacks, would hit the ball off the course and send you to look for it in the wooded area. Instead of hitting the ball with a mind on ball control, they would go for distance and slice the thing off the course. Losing a ball was a big deal. They seemed content to controlling us caddies, instead of the ball. If you couldn’t retrieve the ball, it was like the end of the world. We all quit together after a short time of catering to these people. On the day we all quit, we stood in front of the clubhouse burning newspapers while waiting for the last ride out of the country club. It just wasn’t worth the trouble. You got around six dollars on a good day for the whole day plus tips. The tips amounted to about nothing all the way up to two dollars depending on ass kissing. Finally the whole thing was exposed by Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080487/
Photo gallery http://www.bushwood.net/shack/shack1.htm
Note on programming:
A good design is made up of three elements. First of all is innovative language, then innovations in technology and production and then innovative materials. A good programmer should make stuff worth making, not just fill in space with more junk. We all have enough junk. I’m sure we can agree on that. There is a HUGE amount of junk out there and there are more than enough people programming more junk that will be used in the production of more junk. Quit making junk or keep making junk, it depends on what you want for your money. Quality pays for itself.