Shortage of IT staff?

everdead.ie wrote: »

After the .COM bust in 01 the numbers joining IT plumetted

The dotCom bubble saw a huge number of people entering IT, many of whom were ultimately ill suited to it, but demand was so high that the market took them anyway. With the bust, I remember all but a fraction were able to find any work and many retrained and moved into other industries (ironically many in construction related jobs).

It was a difficult year or two; more difficult than now, I suspect, as the recession there was centred on IT. Thank God for B2G work, at the time, is all I'd say.

It is cyclical and it means that there is a shortage of Graduates coming out right now but in the next 2/3 years it will be significantly better.

You tend to find people enter courses geared towards a particular industry when that industry is already in a boom. This can often mean that by the time they graduate, the boom is over - which is what I saw with people graduating in 2001 and suspect is the case with those graduating in the last few years.

The problem, other than people entering industries for financial rather than vocational reasons, is that they don't think ahead when they enter a four year undergraduate course. At 18, this is forgiveable, but you'd think that their parents or career guidance teachers might be a little bit more copped on.

The problem with people doing post grads is they are one year courses to learn stuff others learnt in four years experience is definetly better than a post grad imo there is stuff you can't learn in aclass room.

Having come from a non-CS background originally and having done a CS postgrad much, much later, I have come to the conclusion that both are important. Experience is in practical terms probably more important overall from a commercial point of view, however you often don't learn much of the underlying theory behind CS on the job, or why certain things are done in a certain way rather than another.

Formal education does this and also teaches a lot of best practices that you may not pick up on the job (or may not be followed in many companies).

Given this, over the years, I'd probably have to say that the best developers I've worked with have almost never started out as such. Typically they will have tended to be university educated, but in other fields, such as geology or even English literature and only subsequently went into IT and studied CS at a postgrad level.

OwenM wrote: »

It doesn't state the skills gap is in IT graduates. My take is that 49% graduates have a skills gap in IT - e.g. - business/arts graduates cannot use powerpoint - map a network drive - configure an email client.

Which is why things like the ECDL are so important (although I don't think it goes beyond the basics). There's a huge percentage of the population who literally have only rudimentary computer skills; they can only use a few applications and their understanding of maintenance is limited to rebooting and defragging their machine. They're the ones who play MS Solitaire on Windows.

It's not that they're our parent's or grandparent's generation either; I've seen people much younger than me like this, but it's not an IT industry problem as a more overarching societal issue.

BostonB wrote: »

Over the years most of the people I've worked in IT, did not do CS as their primary degree. They would have degrees in other areas. As such most of them wouldn't get past the minimum requirements filter from agency despite decades of experience.

I don't think HR departments in the English-speaking World are that blinkered, TBH. Certainly they can be in countries such as Germany or Italy, but Anglophone nations are a lot more flexible. Even in countries that are less flexible though, any primary degree with a CS postgrad (MSc, PgDip or even a cert from a good school) will easily be accepted.

srsly78 wrote: »

Hey now... my boss (experienced developer) likes to play Solitaire while stuff is building

It's a work, rather than personal machine though

By that I meant people who's IT skills are so limited that they literally cannot download and install something new, limiting them to whatever has already been installed on the machine.

On another point, most of the people I work with don't have CS degrees. They do however have physics/maths degrees! Clearly not the same as business degree holders.

You'll get a lot of people from the other sciences going into IT - geology is one field that I've seen a few developers coming from originally, for example. You'll also see some coming from the humanities or finance, but they're fewer in number.

IT isn't unusual in this regard; I've lost count of how many management consultants I've known who originally did degrees in engineering or lawyers who have degrees in philosophy or history.

dazberry wrote: »

I've seen a few burnouts in my time (a road I suspect I'm well on the way down now ), and I'd suggest the opposite - put "interested" people in jobs that suppress/frustrate those "interests" and that's where the problems begin. The guys that are in it for the money just do their 9 to 5, and don't give a sh1t as to what they deliver...

D.

Plus eleventy billion!

As a natural born problem solver, give me a problem that can not be solved within the scope of the environment(as in killing everyone you work with is not an option), and smoke will soon be coming from my ears. When this happens continually everyday its no wonder so many IT people burnout.