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Shortage of IT staff?

moycullen14

I-Sean O'Sullivan of Dragon's Den fame was on Morning Ireland saying we should allow unrestricted access to IT workers (suitably qualified) as a help to boosting the economy.

Now I know we are constantly been told that there is a shortage of IT workers but is this scheme going to help or is it that there is only a shortage of cheap IT workers?

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Joneser

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

I don't get why people are shocked about spending time at the bottom rung of the ladder. Its typical of a lot of industries, career paths. That said some people can get lucky (and/or make smarter chpices) and avoid doing things they don't like. Personally I love mucking around with IT. But like any industry you get people who have no interest in it, and so its simply a job to them.

the_syco

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.

kayos

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.

There are those that went into IT because they love it, the majority of those people enjoy their work. Then there are those that went into IT because "its where the jobs are", they would be more likely not to enjoy their time in the industry.

dazberry

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.

Sparks

dazberry wrote: »

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?

Worse, people started to believe that because colleges didn't produce those grads, colleges were doing it wrong. And worse yet, colleges started buying into that.

That's why you can now - without much effort - find grads with good grades from computer science and computer engineering courses who have never used a command line, or who don't fully grok how you go from source code in an editor window to voltage levels on silicon (and while the last step in that chain might only be of academic interest to most, it's the lack of knowledge of the preceding links in that chain that lead to things like minimum specs for IDEs being 2Gb of RAM...).

Simple fact is that a college graduate shouldn't have spent their final year learning the latest and greatest tech as part of their courses. As extracurricular learning, cool, and it'd stand to them because it seperates them from the others; but if you try to roll in the latest language into a four-year academic course, you will fail the students for several reasons:

You may guess wrong about what the latest tech is,
The latest tech you choose may only apply to a small part of the IT sector - so you satisfy one company and the other 219 grads find they're not so qualified for jobs elsewhere,
The demonstrators and technicians running the labs, and the lecturer teaching the course, won't have as deep a knowledge of the tech as they might if you didn't have so much churn in the curriculum,
You'll be spending time and effort learning a new language that you could have spent learning something else - either learning an existing language or paradigm better, or learning a new paradigm (rather than a new language), or learning something else that's more general and more useful in the long haul.

Personally, I think that college grads shouldn't be taught the latest fashion, or even industrial languages like Java and C# (which are not designed for teaching principles, but are designed to get the job done quickly, and those goals are almost mutually exclusive). If you want to teach the procedural language paradigm, I still think Pascal is the better language, even though C and C++ are the more common languages used in industry for that paradigm. Likewise, C++ is *not* the language to use to teach OO programming, even though it and Java are the most common OO languages used in industry. This whole drive to use industrial tools in colleges just ignores the point that college has a different goal to industry (and a different client to meet that goal for). Industry wants products and sales this quarter for the company's profit margins and the shareholder's returns; college is meant to provide its graduates with skills for the rest of their professional careers, which means teaching the fundamentals well.

BostonB

Problem isn't the colleges, its the industry. They don't want to take on the fact they have to train up staff to get the skills they want.

Sacred_git

carveone wrote: »

I think IT is not viewed as an engineering skillset.

Wow. What are they paying? Sod all I guess in comparison with any other discipline like engineering or financials. I know guys with Oracle/DB2/SQl/C#/.NET/VB/PHP etc experience for 10 years+ but unable to secure anything better than 40k on 3-6 month contract only.

Young people going into college seem to be smarter than I was and see where the limits lie. It's like the 2000s where the smartest engineers could go into Engineering and get 25k or go into finance in the US and get 250k. No brainer really.

If we'd all charged legal rates per hour for formatting a floppy disk back when you had to type "format a: /F:1440 /U /S" then we'd be much better off now

Your talking complete crap here, I and colleagues command top rates on contracts with said skills listed above, yes the rates have dropped but we easily command circa 80k contracting
Young people aren't smarter, if anything they are oblivious to the fact they are now being thought just the basics(development) which in turn makes them enter into the workforce thinking they are good developers potentially anyway when in fact they are muck and have a long hard road ahead to get up to acceptable level

imitation

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.

Sparks

Sacred_git wrote: »

Your talking complete crap here, I and colleagues command top rates on contracts with said skills listed above, yes the rates have dropped but we easily command circa 80k contracting
Young people aren't smarter, if anything they are oblivious to the fact they are now being thought just the basics(development) which in turn makes them enter into the workforce thinking they are good developers potentially anyway when in fact they are muck and have a long hard road ahead to get up to acceptable level

You're talking complete crap...
it's "said skills" or "the skills listed above", not both...
now being taught just the basics...

And I'm not being a smartarse to be pissy here, I'm being a smartarse because if you're going to be rude, you might take five seconds to be sure you're spelling the words right.

Caseywhale

Sacred_git wrote: »

Your talking complete crap here, I and colleagues command top rates on contracts with said skills listed above, yes the rates have dropped but we easily command circa 80k contracting
Young people aren't smarter, if anything they are oblivious to the fact they are now being thought just the basics(development) which in turn makes them enter into the workforce thinking they are good developers potentially anyway when in fact they are muck and have a long hard road ahead to get up to acceptable level

I would agree with you there. 80k would be the lower end for people with the skills mentioned. If they want to stop paying properly in Ireland, then they need to be prepared to lose the people who can command those salaries and more just by hopping on a plane for a short flight.

Having survived in IT for 20 years contracting and perm in both management and just contract developer roles, I can safely say that the best people are he ones who can convey at an interview.

- that nobody can or does know everything.
- a good fit for the vacancy is one who is able to adapt to whatever is the technology used in your company quickly. You will never get anyone who is a perfect fit on day one.

Therefore the very best people, and the ones you should be looking for, are those who are good at adapting. Those who can learn quickly and not just bull**** you at an interview. Any good developer should be easily able to pick up new skills that are being used at their new job. Thats the reason they are a good developer.

But sure what do I know. I'm old compared to the people coming through now. Funny, I said the same about older people myself after I graduated. And my mind was changed after a few years in the industry.

The only thing you can be sure of as a grad is that you know NOTHING compared to people with a few years under them. But thats not a reason to work for nothing when there are perfectly good paying jobs that you can just walk into, if you are prepared to spread your wings.

Joneser

Caseywhale wrote: »

The only thing you can be sure of as a grad is that you know NOTHING compared to people with a few years under them. But thats not a reason to work for nothing when there are perfectly good paying jobs that you can just walk into, if you are prepared to spread your wings.

This is definitely true, when i was finishing up in college I felt like I would be able to code up anything, how wrong I was, after a week in my new job I felt like I knew nothing, which turns out is a good thing.

It pushes you to learn for yourself and after being in industry for nearly a year now I feel like I'm 10 times better at producing effective code than I was before. And I gotta say, it's never felt so good to realise how little I know

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

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.

Trojan

Great thread. Couple of random points as a self-employed/SME owner/interviewer/coder/project manager:

An exceptional programmer can create exponentially more value for a company than a "merely good" programmer. You may need to pay 1.5-2x salary for 20-50+ times value. There's very few other industries with this level of return on investment in people.

You don't need to pay amazing amounts to keep tech people happy. If you can't afford to give them an inflation+X% increase, buy them a toy (a gadget of some kind) and give them some time to play with it during work hours (you might even end up with the next Gmail/killer app).

A lot of what they call IT jobs are really call-centre jobs. Fsck that. If you need to take one of those to pay the bills, no problem, but do something interesting, challenging on the side.

You are responsible for your own career. Even if you work for a multinational with HR staff who give you a hug every couple of months and your manager sends you on whatever training course happens to be scheduled every 18 months. Your career is your own responsibility. If you get pigeonholed, it's your responsibility to up-skill yourself out of that hole.

What Sparks said about blogging/open-source projects. Take initiative. Brand yourself.

As an employer I don't give a damn about the piece of paper. It's the knowledge. Can you do the job? Do you have good communication & social skills? If so, hired.

Read this book, and implement everything:

Clanket

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?

Sparks

Clanket wrote: »

Am I kidding myself?

About the salary? Probably yes (overwhelmingly probably yes).

About the decency of the code? Well, possibly not. I've seen pretty good code from some grads. And some abhorrent messes from others. Decency of code from grads seems to be a lot more about the grad than anything else.

About the size of the project? Yes. Utterly, completely, yes. No grad I've ever known, met or taught has any clue as to the size of a large project. It's not their fault; you can't really teach this in college, even if you wanted to. Largest codebase you work on in college is going to be a few thousand lines of code in most cases. In industry, you can walk in on the first day and face into tens of millions of lines of code written over the course of several professional careers.

All that said, and all of what's in the posts above said, if this sort of thing is your sort of thing, yes, you'll like this career. You might not like all your jobs, but the career will be fun.

imitation

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.

Clanket

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

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.

k.p.h

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?

imitation

k.p.h wrote: »

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.

Am I kidding myself?

I have seen people start off at 30k, although its rarer now. I think its pretty achievable provided you have decent employers and are doing the right job (i.e something quite technical)

The Corinthian

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.

Get a job in a development company first for a few years first. Other than the experience you'll get in the technical side of things that will make you a more proficient, and thus efficient, developer, you'll also learn a lot about how such companies are run and operate.

Caseywhale

The Corinthian wrote: »

Get a job in a development company first for a few years first. Other than the experience you'll get in the technical side of things that will make you a more proficient, and thus efficient, developer, you'll also learn a lot about how such companies are run and operate.

And after a few years in the biz you will also learn that they all, without exception, think that they operate better than they actually do.

The Corinthian

Caseywhale wrote: »

And after a few years in the biz you will also learn that they all, without exception, think that they operate better than they actually do.

Actually, in my experience, many pretend that they operate better than they actually do. Either they want to underplay their mistakes and/or keep moral higher than if they told the truth about how precarious things are in reality. This is important too for potential clients, as no one wants to give the impression that you may not be around to finish the project that you've just pitched from them or that you may in reality be too small to take on their project.

One very well known Web dev company that I once worked for, a long time ago, used to routinely exaggerate how big we were; when we had 30 employees we would claim we had 60, when we had 60 we would claim we had 100. All so we could pitch for contracts that we simply did not have the manpower, or often the skills, to do.

Ironically, this kind of backfired when we got a knock on our door about the number of software licences were were using...

The IT industry in Ireland has a bit of a cowboy culture, although perhaps not quite as much as during the dotcom.

everdead.ie

From what I have seen there is a shortage of skilled IT people in the country but most of the open jobs appear to be for those with several years experience in one of the major Languages(C#,Java,C++) and an awful lot also seek people with good project Management skills.

There does seem to be a very limited number of positions for those coming out of college and thus it is harder to get people with several years experience as it is hard to get off the ground here.

Salary wise, given the shortage of skilled people in the IT industry I am very surprised that wages aren't higher here in the IT industry.

Just out of curiosity do most people get a bonus large or small? (Just wondering RE if this would change the size of your salary if it were included?)

BostonB

everdead.ie wrote: »

...Salary wise, given the shortage of skilled people in the IT industry I am very surprised that wages aren't higher here in the IT industry....

You'd think IT workers would be living like the builders, developers and tradesmen did in the boom.

DublinWriter

Trojan wrote: »

You don't need to pay amazing amounts to keep tech people happy. If you can't afford to give them an inflation+X% increase, buy them a toy (a gadget of some kind) and give them some time to play with it during work hours (you might even end up with the next Gmail/killer app).

Very very true. If you read most of the standard MBA texts on motivation you'll realise that money actually comes way down the list of principal motivators, yet most people still use it as a flawed yardstick to measure their own careers.

BostonB

Its still a good indicator of demand.

Sparks

DublinWriter wrote: »

Very very true. If you read most of the standard MBA texts on motivation you'll realise that money actually comes way down the list of principal motivators, yet most people still use it as a flawed yardstick to measure their own careers.

I kindof think it's a method that's dependent on knowing what's a fun toy and what's not. Extra monitors? More memory, faster hard drives, faster processors, these things aren't toys, they're the tools we use every day, but I've seen them pushed as such even though you'd never think of a carpenter's tools as toys for a carpenter. I've also seen ergonomic keyboards pushed as toys, but that's an even more incorrect view of things.

And there's the point that some in this industry can actually do math, and if you buy them a toy that's worth two days salary, they're not going to think it's the equivalent of a 1% raise (and no, I don't agree that your salary is a flawed yardstick, it's a communications channel which provides information about your position within the company).

Personally, I might be a bit cynical, but I think that the kind of things that a company can use as non-monetary compensations without causing more morale problems than they solve are things that only the company can give (ie. stuff I can't order off scan.co.uk and get to a more personally desired spec in the process). Time off, company events during company time that the company picks up the tab for, rec rooms for breakouts, certifications the company pays for, that kind of thing (and yes, all those things get done in the larger software companies). We release a new product after a lot of hard work and you give me a day off as a bonus, it's a day with my kid. That's valuable to me. You give me a new mouse, and you've just rewarded a lot of hard work with something that would have cost me an hour's salary. The former, that's something I really appreciate and value. The latter, that's something I politely accept and probably never take out of its box because my tools are fairly personal to me. It's not an insult by any means, but honestly, if that's what the company considers a beanie, I'd rather they just didn't bother and let me get on with the job.

fergalr

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.

The Corinthian

Sparks wrote: »

I kindof think it's a method that's dependent on knowing what's a fun toy and what's not. Extra monitors? More memory, faster hard drives, faster processors, these things aren't toys, they're the tools we use every day, but I've seen them pushed as such even though you'd never think of a carpenter's tools as toys for a carpenter. I've also seen ergonomic keyboards pushed as toys, but that's an even more incorrect view of things.

And there's the point that some in this industry can actually do math, and if you buy them a toy that's worth two days salary, they're not going to think it's the equivalent of a 1% raise (and no, I don't agree that your salary is a flawed yardstick, it's a communications channel which provides information about your position within the company).

That's more a HR problem than an issue specific to IT, although that's not disagreeing with you.

In small companies HR tends to be carried out by the partners or directors, who are not only not qualified for this sort of thing, but often the very qualities that make them good entrepreneurs (such as the ability to negotiate the best deal) can work against such goals.

Of HR departments in larger companies, I'll have to say my experience is that they are typically a waste of carbon matter. They're very good at inventing processes to justify their existence and farming out recruitment to consultants, but where it comes to things such as employee morale, most seem utterly clueless and/or indifferent.