Shortage of IT staff?

moycullen14 · 30-04-2012 9:14am

Irishwolff wrote: »

I apllied for a job at Sean O Sullivans company but was told that they dont take graduates because they said the graduates would only stay for a year or 2 and then leave. So for his own company not to have a graduate programme says a lot about his philosophy.

Jeez, that's appalling. If they said they need people with more experience because they have to work with minimal or no supervision then that would be something but to say 'We don't want graduates because they'll leave' says a lot about the company and the philosophy therein. If the graduates leave after two years it's because there are better opportunities elsewhere. That's the companies problem, not the graduates.

moycullen14 · 30-04-2012 9:22am

Caseywhale wrote: »

I wouldn't say this is for grads only.
There is a huge difference between what you make in the uk and Ireland in any it job.

I do have a wife and young family. I find it very easy. I go to the uk on Sunday night and come back Friday afternoon. I can work more during the week and take a half
Day Friday. You can do this for 6 months. Make 1 or 2 years Irish salary in that 6 months and take 6 months off when you come home to spend with the family.
Most of the time after 6 months you can make a deal with the company and work in Ireland for uk rates after the initial 6 months is up. Sometimes even 3 months.
It's either take the lube in Ireland or do something about it for yourself. Sometimes it's hard to get yourself out of a comfort zone to make a change to your life.

What your speciality? I did exactly the with much the same results during the DotCom boom about 10-12 years ago. The key to being able to dictate terms and conditions (much more important than pay, IMO) is to have a skills that are in demand. The longer term problem with a career in IT is that experience is not seen to be cumulative. A 40 year old does not have 20 years of experience, he has 10 sets of 2 years experience. Technology changes, more importantly, demand for technology changes. This means that a lot of your skills become redundant in the market very quickly.

I'm interested to see if your experience that working in the UK is better than Ireland is shared by others?

djpbarry · 30-04-2012 9:29am

Caseywhale wrote: »

I wouldn't say this is for grads only.
There is a huge difference between what you make in the uk and Ireland in any it job.

Funny. I know people based in the UK who contract in Ireland.

And there’s absolutely no way a graduate with no experience is going to make massive money doing contract work in the UK. An entry-level position for a graduate developer will pay maybe £25-30k in London.

srsly78 · 30-04-2012 9:32am

London does pay slightly better than Dublin and the rest of UK, aside from that not much difference. Rent in London more than cancels any advantage out

BostonB · 30-04-2012 9:39am

moycullen14 wrote: »

... The longer term problem with a career in IT is that experience is not seen to be cumulative. A 40 year old does not have 20 years of experience, he has 10 sets of 2 years experience. Technology changes, more importantly, demand for technology changes. This means that a lot of your skills become redundant in the market very quickly...

Very true. However there are non technical soft skills that you get with working in IT for a long time. I certainly got contracts where that kind of experience was as important, if not more important than to the client. But to get good rates, you need the skillset thats in demand.

moycullen14 · 30-04-2012 10:35am

BostonB wrote: »

Very true. However there are non technical soft skills that you get with working in IT for a long time. I certainly got contracts where that kind of experience was as important, if not more important than to the client. But to get good rates, you need the skillset thats in demand.

Not saying that these things are unimportant, just that the market doesn't value them.

Experience & perspective are really valuable and only come with time. With a good grounding in and experience of the basics of software design & implementation, picking up most modern web technologies should be very easy. What is not so easy is determining how well someone will react working on - or even how would you recognise - a failing project, how they deal with unreasonable - or just plain wrong - requests. How you cope with a colleague who can't write code, etc, etc.

Never in all my years has anyone asked me these questions in an interview. They seem far more concerned about fast sorting algorithms and how may grains of rice can fit in a cup (2,456 if you're interested).

k.p.h · 30-04-2012 11:54am

moycullen14 wrote: »

Not saying that these things are unimportant, just that the market doesn't value them.

Experience & perspective are really valuable and only come with time. With a good grounding in and experience of the basics of software design & implementation, picking up most modern web technologies should be very easy. What is not so easy is determining how well someone will react working on - or even how would you recognise - a failing project, how they deal with unreasonable - or just plain wrong - requests. How you cope with a colleague who can't write code, etc, etc.

Never in all my years has anyone asked me these questions in an interview. They seem far more concerned about fast sorting algorithms and how may grains of rice can fit in a cup (2,456 if you're interested).

This particular I would find quite unnerving, sure the money and the all the different aspects of getting a job and accumulating experience are important but one of the main motivational factors for me perusing a career in the industry is avoiding this type of random business/HR/whatever babble like above.

I just presumed that in a technical industry you would get hired/fired and paid according to your technical ability.. Nothing else..

I suppose I was completely ignoring the many different market factors but all the same if I was getting asked dumb unrelated questions in an interview warning flags would be set.

Sparks · 30-04-2012 12:03pm

k.p.h wrote: »

I just presumed that in a technical industry you would get hired/fired and paid according to your technical ability.. Nothing else..

Aside from the niggly question of how you would judge that technical ability, there is the point that most hiring decisions are not made by engineers, but by managers and HR, who may have no detailed understanding of the technical challanges of the job or the abilities of the employees. At which point your pay becomes a function of unrelated things, from the odd-but-verified-by-studies (eg. your gender, your looks, your hair, your height and so on), to the mundane (eg. your ability to negotiate, how desperate the company is to fill the vacancy, and so on).

There is also the point that technical ability might not be the best metric for deciding on pay; eg. is the genius engineer worth more than the junior developer who came up with the idea that earned the company 10% of its net profits this year?

Basicly, no, in a technical industry your pay is not determined by a simple algorithm, and there's reasonable arguments that it should not be...

dazberry · 30-04-2012 12:54pm

moycullen14 wrote: »

The key to being able to dictate terms and conditions (much more important than pay, IMO) is to have a skills that are in demand. The longer term problem with a career in IT is that experience is not seen to be cumulative. A 40 year old does not have 20 years of experience, he has 10 sets of 2 years experience. Technology changes, more importantly, demand for technology changes. This means that a lot of your skills become redundant in the market very quickly.

In 2005 I tried to move over to c# dotnet development (did the FAS sponsored MCPD training, ate, drink and slept the stuff) - but 9 to 5 was using a 2002 version of a 90s RAD tool which jobs wise had pretty much ran out of steam, any c# was outsourced, regardless of the crap that frequently came back.

In this old RAD tool I constructed the application framework, using techniques like dependency injection, wrote a persistence layer and ORM framework, made extensive use of RTTI (aka reflection) by the controller to bind the model to the view, used design patterns etc., all of which would have been generally uncommon in the tool-stack as by default it promoted a component based approach to development.

Regardless, it all stood for nothing, my experience (since 1994 commercially, was cutting 8 bit code in the 80s) stood for nothing, the 9 to 5 RAD tool stood for nothing, my out of hours c# stood for nothing. The last 3 1/2 years in the place was on a Londonesque

rate (in Dublin), but was otherwise effectively unemployable. I can't tell you the number of times I was told to my face I had NO EXPERIENCE. There were times I offered to work for nothing, but I won't recant any specific experiences or name any companies as I'll just end up ranting...

In 2011 almost 6 years later, I managed to get a C# contract. I love cutting code and being part of the process, it's the best job in the world, but I f**king hate this industry...

D.

The Corinthian · 30-04-2012 1:16pm

k.p.h wrote: »

Dose the IT industry have any unions ..?

I made an attempt to start one, more correctly an association, about 10 years ago. There was some interest, but in the end this actually came more from SME owners who were more interested in setting up in something more akin to a business association, rather than a professional one for those who work in IT.

During the dotcom, and other booms, there has been little appetite for such an organization. When you can literally double your salary every six months consistently for two years (alas, that was the dotcom), unions are not a priority. Meanwhile, during the lean times, you're not going to have much success setting one up - most are too busy keeping their heads down, avoiding the next round of 'reorganization'.

IT is unfortunately plagued by a very short term mindset. It's understandable, as many of the technology skills you have today will be useless in a decade, and odds are that the SME that you're working for today won't be around in five years time. However, it's also led a lot of people in the IT sector to make choices based upon the short, rather than the longer term.

DublinWriter wrote: »

One major factor I've seen for the reason so many IT people company hop is down to very poor management in the IT function itself.

I don't know if that is completely true. Poor management is certainly a factor, but so is the fear of your skill set becoming stale and, of course, money. Even in recessions, it has never ceased to amaze me the sheer size of salary increases that one can get for moving jobs.

Again, much of it is as a result of short term thinking.

BostonB wrote: »

Out of curiosity what % would have this?

A lot more than you would think.

It's not simply blogging, mind you; many get deep into open source projects, or their own software (mobile apps being a case in point). Others, such as myself, will end up writing for developer journals or books (both print and, increasingly, online).

Certainly if I were to think of ten developers who have been in the business for longer than seven years or so, I think perhaps only two are not 'moonlighting' in this fashion.

Sparks · 30-04-2012 1:38pm

Caseywhale wrote: »

I do have a wife and young family. I find it very easy. I go to the uk on Sunday night and come back Friday afternoon.

My father did that when I was young, and speaking from the other side of the line, "very easy" is not how I would describe that process even in the gentlest of lights. I'm not saying it scars children for life, but I will say I wouldn't do it myself if there was any other choice available. Even if I only had to do it for six months at a stretch, well, six months is a long time with young families.

Caseywhale · 01-05-2012 8:20am

Sparks wrote: »

Caseywhale wrote: »

I do have a wife and young family. I find it very easy. I go to the uk on Sunday night and come back Friday afternoon.

My father did that when I was young, and speaking from the other side of the line, "very easy" is not how I would describe that process even in the gentlest of lights. I'm not saying it scars children for life, but I will say I wouldn't do it myself if there was any other choice available. Even if I only had to do it for six months at a stretch, well, six months is a long time with young families.

My dad used to do it too. But instead of being away 4 nights a week he was away 6 months at a time without a visit home.
If u work in the uk you only need to take 4 nights away every week. And these days video conferencing is simple.

The 6 months I take off is far far more valuable to me though. But the contract work enables this.

it's not for everyone. Just putting some option out there for people who want to be paid what they are worth. And If I was a grad I would certainly be looking for perm paid work in the uk instead of being raped here.

conor.hogan.2 · 01-05-2012 8:35am

What is the going graduate rate in the UK? Also you have to factor in moving/uprooting expenses etc

Some companies pay quite well in Ireland btw.

djpbarry · 01-05-2012 9:04am

Caseywhale wrote: »

And If I was a grad I would certainly be looking for perm paid work in the uk instead of being raped here.

I'd love to know this magical UK location that pays graduates multiples of what they'd earn in Ireland? Because from where I'm sitting, entry-level salaries in Dublin are very competitive with London, especially when you compare net salaries rather than gross.

The Corinthian · 01-05-2012 9:39am

djpbarry wrote: »

I'd love to know this magical UK location that pays graduates multiples of what they'd earn in Ireland? Because from where I'm sitting, entry-level salaries in Dublin are very competitive with London, especially when you compare net salaries rather than gross.

If you take the cost of living, in particular somewhere like London, into account, there really is not a lot of difference between the UK and Ireland where it comes to permanent salaries.

Contract and consultancy rates certainly were much higher, but I can't say how they compare now, not having worked in either for a few years.

mathperson · 01-05-2012 9:58am

So what's the deal with IT development jobs in Ireland then? What I seem to be picking up from the thread is that it's quite hard to a job in the first place, then when you do the wages are pretty crap, and as technology is fast moving your skills have a limited lifespan so there is not much in the way of progression up a ladder to better wages.

So is the case that there is basically feck all cash to be made in IT?

djpbarry · 01-05-2012 10:16am

mathperson wrote: »

What I seem to be picking up from the thread is that it's quite hard to a job in the first place, then when you do the wages are pretty crap, and as technology is fast moving your skills have a limited lifespan so there is not much in the way of progression up a ladder to better wages.

It's not necessarily difficult to find a job - it's pretty easy if you have the right skills. And, it can pay very well. The problem is the last part - what's in demand changes all the funking time. People invent new programming languages (for example) every other day and what's in vogue changes with the weather. It's pretty difficult to keep up, but of course what the higher-ups often don't understand is that an ability to programme well transcends individual languages.

Sparks · 01-05-2012 10:26am

djpbarry wrote: »

The problem is the last part - what's in demand changes all the funking time.

To be honest, I don't think that applies to the whole IT sector in Ireland. The web startups certainly change like things were going out of fashion, but the codebase I'm working on is older than most of today's graduates. C and C++ aren't timeless, but they're fairly close for our purposes. You might not get the "sexy" jobs, I'll grant you...

djpbarry · 01-05-2012 11:23am

Sparks wrote: »

To be honest, I don't think that applies to the whole IT sector in Ireland. The web startups certainly change like things were going out of fashion, but the codebase I'm working on is older than most of today's graduates. C and C++ aren't timeless, but they're fairly close for our purposes. You might not get the "sexy" jobs, I'll grant you...

Fair point - C is certainly going to be usable for the foreseeable future. I suppose I should clarify that I'm speaking largely from personal experience and I work on the fringes of software development in academia, so things are almost certainly a little different to elsewhere. A lot of what I (think I) know about the industry trends is based on what I read in the likes of IEEE Spectrum and Computer, which are a bit US-centric.

Sparks · 01-05-2012 11:45am

That's rather a specialised niche djp (and I say that from having spent time there)

The bulk of the work in the sector though (and note that I'm not saying "in the real world" because having been here and having been in academia, that phrase has become a hollow joke), tends to be on legacy code. It's not sexy, but it's stable and it pays bills (which is important enough

) and on top of that, working with legacy code is a fairly vital skill. Being able to mash up a web app using dojo is cool, but the nuclear power plant's controllers don't run a LAMP stack

Caseywhale · 01-05-2012 11:45am

djpbarry wrote: »

Caseywhale wrote: »

And If I was a grad I would certainly be looking for perm paid work in the uk instead of being raped here.

I'd love to know this magical UK location that pays graduates multiples of what they'd earn in Ireland? Because from where I'm sitting, entry-level salaries in Dublin are very competitive with London, especially when you compare net salaries rather than gross.

And yet here we are with a tread full of
Grads who can't get work in Ireland.

Sparks · 01-05-2012 11:55am

Caseywhale wrote: »

And yet here we are with a tread full of
Grads who can't get work in Ireland.

The two concepts are not mutually exclusive you know...

djpbarry · 01-05-2012 12:07pm

Sparks wrote: »

That's rather a specialised niche djp..

Yeah, I’m pretty special.

Caseywhale wrote: »

And yet here we are with a tread full of Grads who can't get work in Ireland.

That doesn’t answer my question?

Caseywhale · 01-05-2012 12:24pm

Sparks wrote: »

Caseywhale wrote: »

And yet here we are with a tread full of
Grads who can't get work in Ireland.

The two concepts are not mutually exclusive you know...

Grad can't get a Job in Ireland.
Lots of jobs in the uk.
Grad goes to uk. Grad gets job.
Grad stays in Ireland. Grad goes on the dole and post on boards that he can't get a job.

Seems straightforward enough to me.
I don't get the attitudes here. I'm saying go work where you can get work first off. And then go earn more where your skills are valued more.
It's not that hard to do. Start with recruitment websites. I already posted an excellent one.

Caseywhale · 01-05-2012 12:25pm

Sparks wrote: »

Caseywhale wrote: »

And yet here we are with a tread full of
Grads who can't get work in Ireland.

The two concepts are not mutually exclusive you know...

Grad can't get a Job in Ireland.
Lots of jobs in the uk.
Grad goes to uk. Grad gets job.
Grad stays in Ireland. Grad goes on the dole and post on boards that he can't get a job.

Seems straightforward enough to me.
I don't get the attitudes here. I'm saying go work where you can get work first off. And then go earn more where your skills are valued more.
It's not that hard to do. Start with recruitment websites. I already posted an excellent one.

Giblet · 01-05-2012 12:30pm

Except it seems these elusive graduates don't exist. My PM box and email accounts have tumbleweeds blowing through them. Any college I've contacted directly has said all their graduating classes HAVE jobs already! Crazy stuff!

kayos · 01-05-2012 12:41pm

You know what reading this reminds me of a quote from transformers 3 (sad I know).

"The only thing stopping you getting the job you want is this job now." or something along those lines.

Sorry but to the grads out there... take the crap money, work your ass off and get the experience and move on in the world. If the job is paying the same or more than the dole its better to be worked to the bone and get experience than waiting around for the job you think you deserve. After all if that job comes along while your in the crap money job you can always apply.

Two people with the exact same degree and results. One has been on the dole for the 12 months after college, the other has been in a job getting experience (paid in peanuts and worked hard). Who's gonna get the next job they both apply for?

MagicRon · 01-05-2012 12:46pm

Giblet wrote:

Except it seems these elusive graduates don't exist. My PM box and email accounts have tumbleweeds blowing through them. Any college I've contacted directly has said all their graduating classes HAVE jobs already! Crazy stuff!

Caseywhale wrote: »

Grad can't get a Job in Ireland....
....Seems straightforward enough to me.

Caseywhale, I have had the same experience as Giblet.
Find me one graduate, with OK to decent grades, who can't find a job in Ireland, and I'll believe you.
This person must be actively trying to find a job and not just someone who is sitting at home believing there is no point in looking because there is nothing out there for him/her ... a terrible attitude for anyone to have!

After months (and more months) of searching (searching, not choosing or sifting through CVs), our company has finally hired a number of graduates.

Did you have trouble finding a job in Ireland Caseywhale or what leads you to believe there are no jobs here?

MagicRon · 01-05-2012 12:49pm

kayos wrote: »

Sorry but to the grads out there... take the crap money, work your ass off and get the experience and move on in the world. If the job is paying the same or more than the dole its better to be worked to the bone and get experience than waiting around for the job you think you deserve. After all if that job comes along while your in the crap money job you can always apply.

Two people with the exact same degree and results. One has been on the dole for the 12 months after college, the other has been in a job getting experience (paid in peanuts and worked hard). Who's gonna get the next job they both apply for?

No. Just No. Terrible advice!
No IT graduate should take a job paying dole money.

What was the degree and what were the results?

djpbarry · 01-05-2012 12:50pm

Caseywhale wrote: »

Start with recruitment websites.

Any job site I look at is listing quite a few IT/software development jobs in both the UK and Ireland? What's more, I'm not seeing the massive pay differential you've been talking about?

djpbarry · 01-05-2012 12:52pm

MagicRon wrote: »

No. Just No. Terrible advice!
No IT graduate should take a job paying dole money.

Even if (hypothetically speaking) there are no other jobs available?

MagicRon · 01-05-2012 12:56pm

djpbarry wrote: »

Even if (hypothetically speaking) there are no other jobs available?

There are other jobs available. Loads of them.

I have never been in that position but if a job was only going to pay me dole money, I think I'd rather take the dole and work on my own projects!

djpbarry · 01-05-2012 12:58pm

MagicRon wrote: »

There are other jobs available. Loads of them.

Suppose there were not?

MagicRon wrote: »

I have never been in that position but if a job was only going to pay me dole money, I think I'd rather take the dole and work on my own projects!

Fair enough, but a graduate needs workplace experience at some point.

The Corinthian · 01-05-2012 1:05pm

kayos wrote: »

Sorry but to the grads out there... take the crap money, work your ass off and get the experience and move on in the world. If the job is paying the same or more than the dole its better to be worked to the bone and get experience than waiting around for the job you think you deserve. After all if that job comes along while your in the crap money job you can always apply.

A long time ago (pre-Celtic Tiger), coming to the end of your degree, you'd attend a series of company presentations known as the milk round. Anything less than a 2.1 and you simply weren't in the running. If you managed to get a job, much of the time you would likely be starting on about £12k p.a. - which considering that the Dole, with rent allowance and all the other benefit would probably come to about £9k, wasn't a terribly attractive prospect for what would often be a 60+ hour week.

However, within a few years of cutting your teeth, your salary would increase dramatically.

But that only works for the bluechip firms. If you start at a low salary in an SME, within a few years of cutting your teeth, your salary will not increase all that much unless you know how to play hard-ball in negotiations.

This has unfortunately engendered much of the job hopping, which is not very good for the industry, as well as a propensity for IT firms to hire yellow pack workers, leading to much of the cowboy coding that Ireland is famous for.

So, I don't know if I would agree entirely with you. If you're a graduate you should take the job with the crap pay, but only if it benefits your career path - many IT jobs simply don't; they specialize in often non-transferable, proprietary skills and the quality of experience in some firms is also questionable to say the least.

And in the longer term, I just don't think it's all that good for the industry as a whole.

run_Forrest_run · 01-05-2012 1:24pm

the place where I work we are constantly having problems finding suitable people for software development. And it's not as if we are using some obscure technology, Java (SWT, Eclipse Plugin development, EMF etc)...nothing too mad!

Out of the last 10 people hired, there's been only 1 who is Irish, the rest are from Italy, India and Portugal.

Sparks · 01-05-2012 1:25pm

Caseywhale wrote: »

Lots of jobs in the uk.

I think that's the line that highlights the assumption in the argument. Are there lots of jobs for new graduates in the UK?

I don't get the attitudes here.

They're based on a decade or more of Ireland being sold as a high-tech IT-based economy, with major multinationals basing their EMEA offices in Ireland, and then new graduates finding that suitable jobs are not as easy to find as the advertising suggested, after ploughing years of their life into qualifying for those jobs (and now we're seeing people retraining away from industries that are dying on their feet and they're finding it even tougher going).

Phrases like "It's not that hard to do", by the way, are almost dickish, given the context...

Duggys Housemate · 01-05-2012 1:44pm

It does seem to be harder in Ireland, my anecdotal evidence is that - living in England - I posted a CV to monster.ie and got about 15 calls from England ( from my address I supposed, even though I say Ireland on the CV) and one from Ireland.

BostonB · 01-05-2012 1:49pm

dazberry wrote: »

...Regardless, it all stood for nothing, my experience (since 1994 commercially, was cutting 8 bit code in the 80s) stood for nothing, the 9 to 5 RAD tool stood for nothing, my out of hours c# stood for nothing. The last 3 1/2 years in the place was on a Londonesque rate (in Dublin), but was otherwise effectively unemployable. I can't tell you the number of times I was told to my face I had NO EXPERIENCE. There were times I offered to work for nothing, but I won't recant any specific experiences or name any companies as I'll just end up ranting...

In 2011 almost 6 years later, I managed to get a C# contract. I love cutting code and being part of the process, it's the best job in the world, but I f**king hate this industry...

D.

All that is sellable experience. But not at the coder level. You need to move into a different role like project management, technical pre-sales, business analyst or similar roles to leverage previous experience and not be entirely at the whim of the latest technologies changes.

If you want to stay a coder you'll have to keep up with the latest technologies. Being a contractor makes this painfully obvious. They are really only interested in your current active skills, and the roles you've had in the last two years.

Sparks · 01-05-2012 2:03pm

BostonB wrote: »

If you want to stay a coder you'll have to keep up with the latest technologies.

OR, work with legacy systems. Which is the rather large and not-talked-about sector of our industry. Which is funny really, you'd think that banks and hospitals and emergency services and large (I mean *large*) companies were all out there rewriting the software that lets them operate, in a new language, using new programming paradigms, on a monthly basis.

Hell, half the underlying assumptions of the cutting edge crowd's techniques just don't apply to a lot of legacy code work. And the love of the "latest technologies" runs in to problems in the majority of the IT sector, with the conversation following the same general trend: "is it broken? No? Then why do you want to spend six person-months rewriting it? How much money will we make from the new features? What do you mean, no new features and an untested codebase? Who let this guy in the room?"

Don't get me wrong, if you want to do things with erlang (actually, quick question - when the hell did erlang become fashionable? I was teaching that in 1997 for feck's sake, and it was old then...) or ruby or whatever, then good for you and you probably can make a good and fun living doing it; I'm just saying that the constant churn at the bleeding edge is not a valid representation of the entire IT sector. It's a small, noisy, fun, highly visible facet of that sector, but it is not the largest or the most important facet.

the_syco · 01-05-2012 3:03pm

ixoy wrote: »

The idea that IT is full of empty roles is a bit of a false one - certain areas requiring certain skills sets have lots of demand for roles. It's almost impossible for me to get into these gaps now because in order to get the requisite experience you need the requisite experience...

I think the definition of "IT" is so loose, that it covers anything vaguely IT. I'd nearly wonder if a landscaper that needed knowledge of Excel would be classed as an "IT job"?

questiontime2 wrote: »

I get the impression that these "recruitment" agencies are employed to play tech buzzword soup while harvesting your details

Agreed.

Duggys Housemate · 01-05-2012 3:03pm

BostonB wrote: »

All that is sellable experience. But not at the coder level. You need to move into a different role like project management, technical pre-sales, business analyst or similar roles to leverage previous experience and not be entirely at the whim of the latest technologies changes.

The only way for him to do that is on the job, as he cant turn up at an interview with no experience in those things. In any case some people want to learn specific experience and code, like some people want to be doctors not managing them.

moycullen14 · 01-05-2012 5:14pm

Our friends over on politics.ie are having the same debate....

http://www.politics.ie/forum/economy/187357-open-ireland-wants-issue-75000-new-work-visas-per-annum-tech-grads-18.html

Seems the consensus there is that this is a bit of a conspiracy to reduce costs....

dazberry · 01-05-2012 5:58pm

Sparks wrote: »

"is it broken? No? Then why do you want to spend six person-months rewriting it? How much money will we make from the new features? What do you mean, no new features and an untested codebase? Who let this guy in the room?"

That makes perfect sense in an IT world, move that rationale into a bank and a completely different set of political factors take hold. Most likely the "guy in the room" is your pointy headed boss!!! :rolleyes:. Quite often I felt that problems were being specifically created so the creator could then officiate the fix and hence being someone who is of value to the organisation... /sigh/ ...

Broken is also a very variable term. I've seen very broken software released into production because it was politically beneficial to do so. At the same time (as someone who often ended up having to pick up the pieces after the fact), I had huge trouble getting sign off of on fixing broken code as there was no credit to be gleamed from me delivering it.

D.

BostonB · 01-05-2012 6:04pm

Duggys Housemate wrote: »

The only way for him to do that is on the job, as he cant turn up at an interview with no experience in those things. In any case some people want to learn specific experience and code, like some people want to be doctors not managing them.

I think my point is there no point being a turkey and voting for xmas. If you want to stay with coding you're going to have to accept the technology churn.

Sparks wrote: »

OR, work with legacy systems. Which is the rather large and not-talked-about sector of our industry. ...

or work with legacy stuff. Fair point.

You'd wonder how I missed that since I log on to a VAX at least once a day.

Duggys Housemate · 02-05-2012 12:11pm

moycullen14 wrote: »

Our friends over on politics.ie are having the same debate....

http://www.politics.ie/forum/economy/187357-open-ireland-wants-issue-75000-new-work-visas-per-annum-tech-grads-18.html

Seems the consensus there is that this is a bit of a conspiracy to reduce costs....

The numbers he wants are ludicrous. Ireland at 4 million strong needs 75,000 tech grads per year? Thats like calling for the immigration of 5.6 million tech workers per year in the US, or 1.125 million tech workers a year to the UK. This despite the fact the 400 million people - relative to the population an enormous number - can emigrate and work to Ireland.

Sparks · 02-05-2012 12:43pm

Sounds like the policy FF had a while back of producing thousands of new PhD students.
Which works... until they get their PhDs and suddenly you have thousands of new post-docs looking for work and there just aren't enough roles to go round, and now the people you've invested years and thousands of euros training are forced to leave the country for foreign universities. So short term, great PR soundbite for a TD; long term, it's paying money to destroy a sector of the high-tech economy (the sector that produces the workers for the rest of the economy).

BostonB · 02-05-2012 2:28pm

Last time I heard about the shortage of IT people was primarily the colleges and the agencies. Not from companies. Companies were simply looking for better experience and skilled people. They didn't want grads, and what ever they were offering wasn't attracting better skilled people from inside the EU to Ireland. It would suggest the salaries do not reflect the report demand.

Compare that with say the early 90's where companies would recruit directly in colleges for engineering students before they'd even graduated, I remember companies like Ford, Intel all head hunting large swathes of students, having recruitment nights with free drink and food those classes. Most of them would be recruiting for jobs outside of Ireland too.

Also many industries get employees to commit to a contract of a few years in exchange for training and professional skills transfer. If you want to break your contract you have to pay back the training etc. Theres nothing like this in IT.

Which suggest that IT has a problem with training its own industry, and reseeding the skills pool.

Brussels Sprout · 02-05-2012 7:08pm

mathperson wrote: »

So what's the deal with IT development jobs in Ireland then? What I seem to be picking up from the thread is that it's quite hard to a job in the first place, then when you do the wages are pretty crap, and as technology is fast moving your skills have a limited lifespan so there is not much in the way of progression up a ladder to better wages.

I just read through this entire thread and that was the same basic synopsis I was getting from it. Are people actually happy in this industry because what I've been reading here has been really demoralising.

conor.hogan.2 · 02-05-2012 7:10pm

Brussels Sprout wrote: »

Are people actually happy in this industry because what I've been reading here has been really demoralising.

In a lot of cases Boards.ie is not representative of Ireland in general.

Duggys Housemate · 02-05-2012 7:23pm

conor.hogan.2 wrote: »

In a lot of cases Boards.ie is not representative of Ireland in general.

It's got more IT people.

Shortage of IT staff?

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