| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| Aeolienne |
IT skills shortage, what skills shortage?"There has been a great deal of hype about the 'IT skills shortage' for many years, but for the most part this is a myth encouraged by recruitment agencies and especially by large outsourcing consultancies."IT prospects not so great |
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| jema |
Very true. I have not been hearing good news on the IT employment front for years. But the ads continue to con people that you can take some short course and end up in a plum IT job 
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| jocorless |
Sounds about right - My former company went bang a couple of weeks ago making 100 people redundant - those who lost their jobs are having a really bad time trying to find another post - All are well qualified, hard working IT professionals around Manchester where the main IT companies are based in the North West | ||||
| JB |
Sort of right. The article comments ...
which may be true at the short term contract end of the market but as soon as we look for permament staff with skills we immediately run into a skills shortage problem. We've tried contract but they usually scarper after three months with a hefty pay cheque and leaving noone to understand what they did which is usually to the letter of the specification and not one iota more. We have also tried outsourcing but found that just as bad as it lead to long distance micromanagement. What is a problem is the number of people we see who have run up a few web pages in frontpage and a forumla in excel and then turn up as applicants for developer roles. From a potential employee position the problem is that every company is willing to make redundancies rather than invest in training, of course those companies then expect someone highly qualified with exactly their requirements to walk through the door and accept a low salary. (been on both sides of that fence) |
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| orangepippin |
Yes, that is a very accurate description of the downside of outsourcing. |
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| jocorless |
Having managed a group of developers over in India - That is exactly the problem - they don't or rather won't think for themselves (and on their salary I wouldn't either!) so what happens is that you end up end up designing for them to such a detailed level that you might as well have written the code in the first place It is difficult but lots of companies don't understand that just because you are experienced in Java and not in C# for instance doesn't mean you can't do the job - it just means you have to pick up another language and good programmers can do that fairly quickly I've been working at my new job for 7 weeks now - I already know more about Coldfusion, the application layers that will work with it and what it can do when mixed with frameworks and persistance layers like Hibernate and Spring than my boss who wrote all the original apps! That's not because I'm super clever - far from it - its because I've had 9 years of working within a programming environment - First with C/C++, then with ASP, then Java, J2EE and JSP/JSF through 3 tortuous years of UIX/Java development and on now to Coldfusion/Flex & I've picked up a few things on the way |
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| vegplot |
We had enormous problems recruiting IT bods recently not one response to the adverts we placed. I lie there was one but he wanted 45k for the junior role.
In the end we employed students who we can nurture and hopefully provide full time employment when they've finished their degrees. |
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| JB |
What sort of position were you trying to fill? and what kind of experience was he offering? |
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| vegplot |
Overly qualified and overly high expectation for the role being offered. Realism wasn't one of his prime strengths. |
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| jema |
£45,000 
I will confess I have done better than that full time in IT. But it strikes me that those days are gone unless you are really lucky. Mind you there is I expect still a ten fold productivity gap between top class and mediocre programmers, so such salaries can be justified for some. |