Shortage of IT staff?

Brussels Sprout wrote: »

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.

It may be that I am only new to the industry (graduated a year ago) but I am quite happy in the industry and find it very satisfying when you get new features out and you can see all your hard work in the hands of a user.

I'm actually very surprised at all the problems people seem to have with the IT industry, but as I haven't had to work with legacy systems and get to develop new applications maybe I have been lucky in what I have been exposed to so far...

BostonB wrote: »

I remember companies like Ford, Intel all head hunting large swathes of students, having recruitment nights with free drink and food those classes.

I would wonder if it was because the colleges were training people more in line with what the companies wanted? Now, a lot of courses are produced with no input from companies, so the grads will still need to be trained when they enter the company.

the_syco wrote: »

I would wonder if it was because the colleges were training people more in line with what the companies wanted? Now, a lot of courses are produced with no input from companies, so the grads will still need to be trained when they enter the company.

If anything I think colleges were more focused on the more academic aspects of the industry (even those courses that labeled themselves as being "applied"), and aimed to product more rounded individuals (anyone here do the likes of organisational behavior or marketing as part of your IT degree??). I think that in general the industry understood that graduates had some level of competence but where for all intent and purpose - blank slates.

What seems to have happened is that a lot more industry specific technologies now are thought (e.g. no Pascal or Modula 2 etc.), and from what I've seen the industry has got it into its head that it wants grads to now have very specific skillsets that they can use immediately, and I'm guessing those expectations are now not being met?

While there may have always been a limited supply, if the industry isn't being fed form the bottom (and/or horizontally from the likes of cross-training / up/re skilling etc) then what do they expect????

D.

My thoughts on the "IT" skill shortage

-IT is too broad a term to describe where the shortage is exactly, its definitely more acute at the developer side than it is on the tech support side from my experience.

-I would favor skill development over more money, there are going to be alot more people getting into IT (as its the new place where "the jobs are", just as construction was when I was in college), you'll need something to distinguish yourself.

-Be careful in specializing, if the software you know inside out for the past 5 years is only at one company for a 100 miles, you may find yourself with a nice salary, but have a big problem when you eventually part ways.

-Becoming an absolute pro just doing 9-5 is impossible, I find having being an enthusiast since my early teens has given me a massive edge, not just in knowledge (sadly much of it not relevant anyway, overclocking a CPU by changing crystal oscillator anybody?) but in the way I think. I always try to find a smart way to do something, which usually makes me slower in the short term. In the long term though it has massive benefits.

imitation wrote: »

My thoughts on the "IT" skill shortage

-IT is too broad a term to describe where the shortage is exactly, its definitely more acute at the developer side than it is on the tech support side from my experience.

Exactly, when I was looking for work in 2011 my family would be contacting me with jobs that had very tenuous links to actual developlment, like all the clerical jobs in Facebook and Google. I think we can all agree that most of the big job announcement from these companies are non-tech roles with all the fun stuff done back in California or wherever. And of course, any real dev jobs in Google Dublin only take the best of the best.

imitation wrote: »

-Becoming an absolute pro just doing 9-5 is impossible, I find having being an enthusiast since my early teens has given me a massive edge, not just in knowledge (sadly much of it not relevant anyway, overclocking a CPU by changing crystal oscillator anybody?) but in the way I think. I always try to find a smart way to do something, which usually makes me slower in the short term. In the long term though it has massive benefits.

Can't agree more. I'm a self employed Android and Magento developer and I can barely keep up with these two very different and very fast-moving systems. And I'd be clocking in 70 hour weeks in front of the computer according to RescueTime. Of course, I'd be arsing about on Boards and Reddit and chatting to friends for alot of that.

I don't mind the long hours though as I love it. But I just can't see how 9-5'ers in a company could keep up especially with the pointless meetings they often have to attend.

Regarding the thread topic, I think it is hard out there. I went for 11 interviews in 2011 and got none of them. Where are all these jobs listed? I was searching on irishjobs.ie, LinkedIn and technicaljobs.ie for nearly the whole year before my contract business took off.

Though I only have a Commerce degree and have never had a 'real job' so I think a lot of companies thought I was a bluffer.

Clanket wrote: »

Informative thread. Here was me thinking I'd do my computing degree (part time) and walk into a programming job on 80k+
I'm only 1 year in but I'm hoping by the end of it I have a good idea how to create decent sized programmes. Am I kidding myself?

I've seen so many graduates giving about salary, usually talking about some other person whos graduated and managed to come straight into a 40-50k job. I don't think its too likely unless your lucky or specialized.

What any graduate really needs to IT concern themselves with is getting into a job that gives relevant experience and training. If you work at it for 4-5 years and get a good skill set you be on the path to one day (maybe) earning 80k.

If you want to be able to make decent sized programs, you should start now, try and think up of a project or maybe find somebody in need of software and get stuck in . College is mostly piecemeal work and you may find any projects to be not what you really want. In a real project you could be working for months on something. That being said, there's nothing wrong with waiting until you start into work to do it, but it will definitely give you an edge to have some experience.

imitation wrote: »

What any graduate really needs to IT concern themselves with is getting into a job that gives relevant experience and training. If you work at it for 4-5 years and get a good skill set you be on the path to one day (maybe) earning 80k.

As a student I see this as being the key thing when I hit the jobs market, I'm pretty sure I will need to get about 30k quickly enough due to my financial situation and age. I'm willing to work my arse off for that 30k but after that if the further opportunity for career advancement, upskilling and eventually increased pay are going to be key.

It would kill me to get a job paying lets say 35k but just end up sitting still and going nowhere. It would be completely ignoring the aspects of IT that got me interested in the first place. I always imagined, and some of my main motivation is the fact that I could be at the forefront.. New technology, new solutions, innovating and generally having some input in the systems that make the world work.

Am I kidding myself?

Clanket wrote: »

I'm loving programming and web design but to be honest, I've no intention of getting a job in programming. I want to start my own company designing and building software. Hopefully I can begin developing my first idea by the end of year 2. That is, begin programming in a meaningful way. Year 2 is all about databases and without that I can't really do shít.

Databases are not that important a subject. Certainly not important enough to merit a whole college year.

Ok, in one way, they are extremely important, and you could spend your whole career learning about them - but how much you need to know about databases specifically, before you can start hacking on a first product, is pretty minimal.
Dont think you have to wait until you've done a course in databases before you can start making stuff.

Clanket wrote: »

In the meantime I'm going to spend the time mapping out exactly how it will look and (hopefully) work.

Don't do this, from a technical point of view.


Start iterating your designs, if you want, but you'll make more technical progress by instead trying to build less ambitious full projects.

Are you skilled enough to build a really simple game (pong? snake? space invaders? asteroids? mario?)
If so, make it, finish it, polish it. Just keep building the next project, in terms of complexity, until you can build what you want.

Clanket wrote: »

I hope I'm not being unrealistic and will actually be able to do it. But this thread has definitely made me question whether a grad will be able to do anything until they get 3-4 years hands on work experience.

A good grad should be able to do a lot, if they've used their time well.

The experience will certainly help. With experience you can learn to make things better, and make better things. But its not unreasonable to expect to be able to create valuable products (especially small ones) out of college. Especially if you use your time well, get internships in the summers etc.

I think its important to look at my comments in their totality.

Here they are:

Databases are not that important a subject. Certainly not important enough to merit a whole college year.

Ok, in one way, they are extremely important, and you could spend your whole career learning about them - but how much you need to know about databases specifically, before you can start hacking on a first product, is pretty minimal.
Dont think you have to wait until you've done a course in databases before you can start making stuff.

Caseywhale wrote: »

I would argue that databases are the single most important thing in development.

I would be interested in reading that.

Here's where I'm coming from:

Caseywhale wrote: »

You wont get far without knowing a lot about databases if you intend to go contracting.

When I think back to contracting, I actually remember fairly few projects where I needed to interact with a database in any level of detail.

Even a smaller subset of these projects required me to know more than the basics of SQL queries, and the basics of how a database worked. Most projects needed the kind of knowledge that you'd pick up in a couple of weeks, not a whole years worth. Its pretty straightforward.

Fewer projects still required a detailed knowledge of the internals of how a database operates. Typically, a DB specialist was on hand for these.


Actually, I'd argue that very few developers actually have a detailed knowledge of how databases work, at a fundamental level.
Anyone ever implemented a transaction scheduler? I haven't. (Think people have to do a simple one as a college project in UCD, actually, but I mean in the real world...)


I would go even further, and argue that this is a core point of having standardised databases - the fact that it encapsulates and abstracts a lot of knowledge and technology that would otherwise be required to manage data, and makes it pretty simple to use.


Sure, its a leaky abstraction; all abstractions are; but 'spend two weeks' leaky, not 'spend a year' leaky, unless this is your specific area of expertise, no? When you want to high performance this changes, as we've said.


To put the question back in its context:
A student is wondering whether they need to know a years worth of database studies, before they start hacking on their product.
(Now, it probably won't be a whole year; second year should really have a lot of other stuff, algorithms, data structures, elementary software engineer, more math, blah blah.)

I'm just saying 'no, thats really not necessary'. The conceptual knowledge you probably need, to be able to use databases, really is pretty compact.


I remember learning this, during second year, for a summer project (our first database course wasn't until third year). It took a couple of weeks part time.
I wasn't a DB ninja, couldn't optimise queries, or database indicies, or find the right balance between performance and cleanliness or whatever, but I would have happily hacked together a project with a DB in it.

These days, you could be making an app with activerecord, or with google app engine, and really need to know next to nothing about your database at all, until you already have 100k users, and can then learn, or - more likely - pay someone on a specialist DB career track.

As I remember, anyway, in my third year course, what there actually was, was a lot of material on DB normalisation, and a lot of strict rules about how to normalise your database; which are broken all the time, anyway, for performance reasons.

Its also possible that the person in question just wants to make an iPhone app. Or maybe a video game. Not every developer is doing CRUD stuff.

So, thats where I'm coming from - databases are really important in some ways; but not so important, in others, and there are many roles and projects where nothing more than a cursory knowledge is ever needed.

Trojan wrote: »

Errr, when I said "toys", I mean "toys", not ergonomic keyboards.

I was gonna post an idea but I think I might keep it to myself for now...

I'm a dev, my work is good, that's all down to professionalism. In my experience the business do think of us as a cost and also provide little scope for growth. Why then should I not treat them the same way? The business htend to think of themselves as a customer rather than a college.

It's a fact that in IT you have to move on to make money. An employer will only pay you as much as they think you're worth. What is that? Well a senior dev with 5 to 7 years experience in Java /.NET and SQL should be looking for 65K + perks.

Anyone who isn't making this should move the hell on. You should make that much just for taking the muddled half baked ideas of middle management and making something of them, sometimes I wonder if all non IT people are part insane because their minds are minefields of half baked crap.

moycullen14 wrote: »

My definition of a shortage is that your phone would be hopping off the hook with offers (assuming you had the skills!).

I'm sort of looking for contract Java work at the moment and am a bit horrified at the response - especially from agents - calls not returned, no follow up, usually stuff. The first - indeed only - question seems to 'What's your rate?' To which the only answer is 'As much as possible:)'.

I'm not complaining about the difficulty in getting work - it just doesn't seem consistent with the '000's of unfilled vacancies' mantra that I hear in the media.

Maybe I shouldn't believe all that I hear on the radio? Doh!

I see what you mean, though java isn't my strong point but I am willing for any kind of contract, temporary or permanent or an internship but at the same time I am limited to what Programming skills I have and good at, better at web programming. So don't intend to follow the java road despite a lot of programming jobs requiring java.

It is very much a race at the moment for graduates trying to get into an IT role no matter what it is. Even if you have the skills whether limited or a range of them still not enough for them unless you have the experience to back it up!

I very much agree they are saying there is a skills shortage in IT but really they are saying there aren't enough people with the right IT skills and experience to match their perfect or more than perfect job spec and looking for than those who meet it if they go beyond it the competition between candidates to stand out is more fierce. Yet HR say its a guide but IT professionals see that a candidate must tick all the boxes not just meet the buzz words that HR see the pin on that and think they are the beesknees but IT professionals who are hiring don't see that and require something more definite so conflict of interest between HR and IT professionals in my opinion, no wonder there are specific IT Recruitment agents! You have to really stand out to land any kind of job in IT!?

I cannot understand they are creating a load of jobs in the IT industry yet its making it harder to find work in it despite the range of IT jobs but limited in some aspects depending what field of IT it is, skill sets and experience you have.

I think its pure media hype when these so called IT jobs/IT companies are created here!

MagicRon wrote: »

My company took on four people in the last two weeks - three of them graduates straight out of college.
There were no graduates racing to our door - we had to go out and look to the colleges for them.

I mentioned here on boards that our company was looking for graduates and I posted to LinkedIn groups and not one person got in touch ... so I don't see where this race is at?!

Have you read
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/item/27455-tech-job-announcements-this/

Its kind of the impression I get too. I sent a mail to 20 masters grads who did computer science a few years back and I didn't get one response back. I was told by one guy in the class, some people were scared off when they saw databases mentioned ! This was despite the fact it was clearly labelled as a graduate job

Recalling my graduate days too, I think in some people there is a mixture of lack of confidence, not having links to industry, not knowing where to look and maybe wanting to enjoy the last of the student life. I guess there also an element of ships in the night when it comes to thing.

Yes, having links in industry can improve rapport between graduates and employers and industry.

I can see why some graduates be scared of Databases its not too bad except for when it comes to VBA otherwise straight forward enough when it comes to MYSQL and setting up a database on a website for instance.

You have two options, learn the stuff they list, or just apply anyway. The stuff usually listed is stuff you would be expected to learn if you didn't know, most companies just have a laundry list of stuff they put down, they don't expect you to know much about them. Google them if you don't know just so you have an idea. Apply anyway.