Why IT Jobs Are Never Coming Back
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
One is "we need more developers and engineers", usually said by top-tier companies such as Apple, Intel, Google, MS. They really do need well-educated graduates to push the envelope.
The other is "there are many unemployed IT people". These were individuals who worked where IT is a cost center, developing CRUD and maintaining in-house systems. Hum-drum, but it pays the bills. Their jobs are being outsourced.
Now, when deciding on a course of study, if you don't know, for certain, that you are top-notch, have a passion for development, and upon graduation will be desired by startups and established concerns alike, will you want to risk time and money studying cs/sw? Especially if you are smart enough to recognize that that situation exists.
If the hum-drum jobs are gone, you have fewer fall back positions available. It becomes akin to working hard on your football skills in high school, going to university on an athletic scholarship and hoping to be picked up by the NFL. There are no hum-drum, non-NFL jobs available; miss the NFL draft and you're just another communications major on monster.com.
This negative feedback cannot be good. We want to encourage brains into STEM, but if there's no fall back position those smart people are going to stay away and study to work in FIRE, or, if we're lucky, medicine.
I have no solution to this problem; it is a massive multi-player prisoners' dilemma and everybody is snitching.
Sure IT support is being outsourced. When the employee doesn't need to actually know anything you might as well pay them as little as possible.
Outsourcing is and has been a reality. Instead of complaining injustices, the market is always right; you just have to adapt.
Please. Your assumption that if you are a software engineer you are probably just doing some CRUD app, is flatly wrong.
And I agree with Locke1689, anybody that equals IT with actual software (or system) engineering is ignorant of the space.
Anytime you start doing something novel, you are no longer a software engineer; you are a computational biologist, quant, game designer or computer scientist. It's not about splitting hair but having the domain knowledge in addition to coding skills. (Because let's not kid ourselves, programming is easy) If people insist on elevating themselves, then it's their prerogative. But since the market is right and is programming skills are becoming a commodity, I would rather be rich than popular.
It's not about splitting hair but having the domain knowledge in addition to coding skills.
That one I would have to say is pretty spot on, domain knowledge adds a lot of value to a developer.
As for the it's all CRUD, I think that is a oversimplification at best. Software development can be rolled up into patterns and best practices but to oversimplify it down to it's all CRUD is a little beyond the reality of the duties of the role.
Edit: Actually, there are no CRUD jobs in kernel development. There aren't CRUD jobs in a lot of fields. There aren't any CRUD jobs in database design and development. There aren't any CRUD jobs in compiler design. Any argument to the contrary betrays a fundamental ignorance of what CRUD means[1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete
A baker does CRUD with bread, a surgeon does CRUD with people's organs, a dentist does CRUD with teeth, and a physicist simply does low-level CRUD at an atomic level.
By stating it this way it sounds simple, but you know, the devil is always in the details...
IT is a very broad term that can potentially cover most anything primarily related to computing. Rather than arguing what it does or doesn't mean, it's generally preferable to recognize the relevant meaning of the term in context.
Though in this case, he's right, it appears the authors are ignorant about much of the industry and are using the term "IT" to mean traditional corporate "IT departments" responsible for internal infrastructure (pc/email/network)
My point was that if you don't actually know how to do anything you probably won't have a job. This is true of both of the examples you put out but not true of the people I'm talking about.
The latter is usually the exact opposite of this.
Disclosure: I am in the former group and really want to be part of the latter group.
There's not a global shortage of IT Support people.
a) there has never been a "perfect market" left to its own devices.
b) there can never be one in any pragmatic way.
c) Who measured it scientifically, or proved it abstractly that it is "always right"?
It's more like: "we are used to working and bending to the market, so, we won't question it. Oh, and those other folks in USSR had a terrible fate when they fought the market, so we wont try anything stupid".
Why does it have to?
First of all, the article talks specifically about "IT jobs", not "upper level development/software engineer" and it says so in its title.
Thus, your complain amounts to: "The article is pathetic. It gets out to discuss the loss of IT jobs, and it indeed discuses the loss of 95% of IT jobs, just not the higher-end developer jobs I had in mind". WTF?
Second, generic IT jobs are always orders of magnitude more numerous than "upper-level developer" jobs. Hence, the loss of generic IT jobs has much more impact and is more important for way more of readers.
"""Sure IT support is being outsourced. When the employee doesn't need to actually know anything you might as well pay them as little as possible."""
And who said that "paying as little as possible" does not also hold true when the employee has to know "a lot"?
If physical presence is not needed (i.e in all cases where telecommuting could be used), what makes you think that the highest level of jobs cannot be outsourced somewhere else, where the employer will pay "as little as possible"?
You seriously believe USA has the best engineers --or the best by a margin that matters to most projects, anyway? Perhaps that could be argued in the past, but this is the 21st century. Oh, and 20th century called, he wants his prejudices back.
Having worked on several distributed or offshore software development teams before, this statement strikes me as more than a little bit optimistic.
What is even more surprising is that it views better software and the resulting automation as a great way of reducing (labour) costs while systematically ignoring the processes and people that created the better software in the first place. It seems the same article could have been written by the same people forty years ago lamenting the decline of jobs for punch-card clerks because keyboards were allowing programmers to enter their own programs faster and still ignoring the improvements that would come from this.
The entrepreneurial startups create jobs, but mostly in one-off fashion, in contrast to the bulk of positions (and "IT" is not the sole category for such a metamorphisis) that big corporate Fortune 500 style companies had on the payroll (or funneling of funds to domestic consulting firms).
Yes, the world changes, and it is incumbent for knowledge workers to reequip, refresh and retool their skill set.
My state is allegedly planning to transfer all state IT personnel (including the ones working for the universities) to the state capitol within the next four years. I can't say that I blame them. In addition to the wastefulness that I've seen, state IT workers are sometimes worse than DMV employees when it comes to customer service.
The USA should loose the "they took our jobs" syndrome and make it easy for foreign people to work there, because then the they would receive tax, currently they receive nothing.
This is pretty general, but applies well to the IT issue.