Immigration
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Immigration
Not to get into a political debate or argument, but I saw this article about a quote from Bill Gates that apparently the West isn't supplying enough IT talent. That sounds a little fishy to me since I constantly hear about how so many US jobs are being offshored to other countries.
Perhaps it's just the friction of companies not being able to match up with the right candidates because of location, skills, of something else. Or maybe it's that Bill Gates doesn't want older, expensive talent and wants more cheap computer science graduates. I know that sounds a little sinister, but I've gotten a bit jaded over the years.
Years ago during the dot com boom I got the feeling that IT personnel were becoming like sports athletes. Some of the higher profile technical people are even working with "agents" to find jobs. With signing bonuses, leased cars, and various other perks, I felt that many IT people were getting a little spoiled. After all those perks cost money, but they also create some sense of entitlement and arrogance, which ends up causing many people to not work as hard as they might otherwise. They don't feel they're "lucky" to have a job and make $100k, and they may slack off a bit and not do work they see as "beneath them."
Sports team owners often will take those older, expensive athletes, who may not perform as well as they used to, and replace them with younger, less expensive, and more hungry players. I can see the same thing happening at some IT companies. Not to imply that's what Microsoft or Bill Gates is doing, but I'm just surprised that there's this "shortage" of IT talent, especially in most Western countries.
What I think is that more companies should take advantage of those great employees that are out there, retrain them in new technologies, and support their own communities over making a few more pennies per share.
Steve Jones
PS, if you're looking for an agent, Andy and Brian are building a recruiting service in addition to providing training on SQL Server 2005. Disclosure: I'm invested in these ventures, but I'm not doing any work 🙂
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It's interesting to me that you hear about all the great talent in foreign countries. And I agree that the USA does not have a strangle hold on talent. However, if you lived in the USA I think you would find it less than easy to jump to your next great IT job.
Is there a need for better talent... Always, but my experience has been that most of the people responsible for hiring talented developers have no idea what they are doing. Even the managers of specific projects tend to look for people with "exactly" the same programming background instead of looking for successful people with experience that is close to their needs.
It reminds me of an old TV commercial where a young man is standing in a couple of feet of snow trying to catch a ride to Miami, FL. A beautiful young women stops and says "I'm only going as far as Ft. Lauderdale..." and the young man shrugs and closes the door. He waits for a better opportunity to catch a free ride on his thousand mile journey rather than risk being stranded 50 miles from his final destination...
What I'm trying to say, is that I see no lack of talent, but a lack of leadership and vision to build teams of people to accomplish the tasks at hand...
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Steve has made several key points that should be considered. Yes, when IT people became like sports stars, some of them got "fat and lazy". Those were the first to go when things went bust. Unfortunately, american management responded to a fly-swatter problem with an atom bomb. They ran wires overseas and dismissed whole IT departments. They're now finding that overseas development carries a new set of challenges and many are coming back to having people on this side of the ocean. And guess what? They worked so hard to decimate the developer pool that they succeeded! Now that they need state-side talent, it's harder to find. Who wants to prepare for a career in a field that throws people overboard every time the CIO sneezes?
I'm afraid that management is just going to have to get back to managing. That means finding good people and giving them an incentive to stick around. When technologies change (like they do what, every year and a half?) you need to retrain your staff instead of firing them and cherry-picking from other companies. And by the way american companies, find better managers. If you can't manage staff here, running wires all over the planet doesn't make things any better.
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“Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason.” -
I can personally atest to this. In my company we have over the past few years being hirring more employees in India and offloading to those employees more and more work that was previously done in the US. This is justified by managements effort to lower costs. While these people may work for a lot less, the over all cost is not necessarily going down. We are finding that it takes more time, resources (paid man hours) to get the same job done by these off shored employees then what local employees could do. While a lot of this can be attributed to communictaion problems that's not the only reason for the decreased productivity. I'm finding that these off shore employees have great difficulty with creative probelm solving. By that I mean that if there is a given solution for a given problem then they can do it without issue. However if the problem does not have a known/defined solution then they have great difficulty with working out the solution. It's almost like as if their education involved memorizing problems and their solutions and not on how to work abstractly with that knowledge.
And so while we are paying these employees far less per hour, they are often taking more time to get the same job done and so the savings gained on a per hour basis are lost on an over all project.
In addition I have but one question to ask about this off shoring 'in the name of reducing expenses' effort that so many corporations are practicing. If every company does this, hires cheapere off shore labor to reduce costs, who is going to buy the product these companies make? The new employee can't as they are paid too little to afford the companies product. And so the price must be reduced so the lower paid employees can consume the product.
I do believe in capitalism and I don't believe unions or price controls or anything of the sort is the way to address these issues. I do however believe that too often management can't see past the next quarters bottom line.
Kindest Regards,
Just say No to Facebook! -
Unlike athletes (and all kidding aside - I don't care how good an athlete you are you don't deserve to be paid millions for what you do), older IT folks (those who are good at what they do), bring a greater set of skills to the table than new graduates and a lot of foreign techs (yes I have also seen older techs who claim 20yrs experience where they are doing the same thing for 20yrs).
Although I don't agree with the superstar salaries/perks/bonuses being paid in the dot-com era, from a sysadmin perspective, I am insulted by those want ads asking for 10 years experience in Windows, Unix, Linux, every Cisco device ever made, IT Security, Web Development, database administration for all the major DBMSes out there, proj mgmt, business skills and then expect to pay something like 40K a year.
As an older IT employee, who has developed a good reputation with all companies he's worked for, I feel I have earned the right to expect a higher salary/perks for what I bring to the table.
Don't mind me the rant folks, it's been a bad couple of weeks and like all other IT folks with experience, I am feeling somewhat under appreciated and fed up of the way things are being down nowadays.
Just my 2 cents. Cheers
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We have been told that Free Trade is good, which allows the free movement of goods. We have been told that 3rd World Countries should open up their Capital markets, which allows the free movement of Capital. But alas... when it comes to Human Capital there seems to be a whole other set of rules. I believe we need to open up immigration barriers, and allow the free movement of people, especially talented people. I think that we would find that the best people in the whole world would migrate to the best companies in the whole world. It would probably knock out poorly managed companies and impoverish poorly run countries, who would have to change to survive. I know this sounds very libertarian. However, with ground rules, necessary to control abuses of the market, loosening of immigration would enrich us all. I know that my great grandparents had the cojones to come to the USA from the corrupt and decrepit Russian Empire teetering under the last Czar. The result is that I am enjoying the profits of their decision, and I think other people will do the same.
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Sadly I've seen managers, when presented with various (even various offshore) development groups be only concerned with the hourly rate. Some really bad choices were made based on that criteria.
Would you select a doctor or lawyer primarily by hourly rate?
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
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I'm finding that these off shore employees have great difficulty with creative probelm solving. By that I mean that if there is a given solution for a given problem then they can do it without issue. However if the problem does not have a known/defined solution then they have great difficulty with working out the solution. It's almost like as if their education involved memorizing problems and their solutions and not on how to work abstractly with that knowledge.
That's interesting. My officemate is from India and when she describes the education system over there it matches a lot with what you're saying. That is, memorization is a BIG part of their education. It makes sense from talking to her though since there are a billion plus people over there, competition for schools and jobs is extreme so being perfect is more desirable than being creative. A lot of times it sounds like those Olympic sports results where a winner wins by a one-tenth of a second or something, e.g. everyone who gets into a school or program scores between 98 - 100% or something on entrance exams.
I guess that's how we'll have to compete in the U.S., being creative and finding better ways to do things.
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For some reason IT is unique in rewarding those candidates that have the latest skills in the latest technologies - above experience. For some reason corporates and their project managers think that (apparently) knowing an alphabet soup of the latest technologies will render the best development.
If you had to have major heart surgery would you choose the older surgeon (provided Parkinsons hasn't set in) - say 50 years old, or the 25 year old who uses the latest technological gadgets in heart surgery? I'd take my bets on the old fogey.
Experienced IT resources should have the ability, and most do, to map what they know to what is new and current. If you had to take someone who has never used SQL Server but worked as a DBA for 10 years on Oracle and pitched him against a recent graduate using SQL Serv 2005, what would the outcome be? I reckon in the first week or two the youngster would run circles around the ex-Oracle guy but within a few weeks it would turn around. Once the Oracle knowledge is mapped to SQL the semantics are out of the way... the rest is up to experience. I have even had positive experience taking mainframe Cobol only developers and migrating them to .net - although they stayed on back-end stuff because they had no experience to map front-ends to.
The problem is that the more experienced resources are older and have higher demands to pay for the wife, kids, house, schooling and so on. So what? Experience is worth it.
Simon
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I totally diagreed with Mr. Gates comments. The education in Asia is not better than US. I am from HK. I agreed when I was 12th grade, I studied all the freshman classes. It was because I had to take exam to enter the university in HK. The competition is horrible. However most students just memorized all the stuff and took the exam. The government did a test, the kids in HK had very lower rate of creatity, solving problme skills. The university standard is behind most of the university in US (this is quoted by a college professor in HK. As a matter of fact he is sending his daughter to US to study college.)
For the IT outsourcing, don't even get me started. I had it in my previous company. Every developers working with the offshore developers complained. The work quality was horrible. If the project was delayed because of them, we got the blame. But no matter how much we complained, the upper management just cared about the GL ledger and showed how much money the company saved.
I worked with offshore developer, he sent me a query (SELECT company, product, sum(quantit) from ORDER ). Obviously he did not even test the code. I told my manager he had two options - if he wanted to get the project on time, then I had to work without the offshore developer, or the project would be late because that guy had no clue of how to write SQL.
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Western Governments have talked for some time about securing energy supplies, i wonder if it is time to start the debate in business about the security of labour supplies. Whether we choose to believe that the World is under threat of imminant destruction by terrorists in one thing but it is a guaranteed that we will face a global pandemic probably in the next 10 years and those countries we have outsourced to on the grounds of lower cost are the same countries who will be least able to protect and treat their inhabitants from the worst ravages of avian flu for example. What then for businesses who rely on labour from these countries. Outsourcing smacks of parochial short term thinking and time will tell just what "unforseen" consequences this will have.
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Hehe... I don't know about you, but for $100K, I'd do the programming AND clean the toilets! I think you're right about people not respecting what they've been given. I've worked at too many sh**-shoveling jobs to have that kind of disrespect. When people grow up with their mommies taking care of everything and then get a cushy job right out of college, they have no perspective. I complain about outsourcing, but the fact is, people in India and places like that do have that perspective.
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Since there are so many companies outsourced to India, I think the government should limit the H1 visa (working visa) for Indian people coming to work in US.
BTW, most of the customer service of almost all the companies are outsourced to India. All my friends (Actually a lot of people) are complaining because they have a hard time to understand the English.
I accidentially locked my online password of my bank so I called customer service. It took half an hour and it was not going anywhere. I asked to talk to the supervisor, the person hang up my phone. I was furious. I called again and somehow I got an American answering my call, it took 5 min and everything is all set. I sent an email to the bank and told them if it happened one more time that someone hang up my phone, I will take my business to somewhere else. Actually it happened to my friend too, whenever asking to talk to supervisor, they hang up the phone !!!!!!
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I think anyone who owns a business in this world needs to read this book called Raving Fans:
http://www.kenblanchard.com/solutions/organizational/ravingfans/
There is a serious problem with service and it has nothing to do with who is giving it... it has a little bit to do with who's getting it. We, as consumers, are not demanding better service... we're being trained to accept crappy service. We should not accept that.
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I was at a job fair a few years ago and while I was awaiting my turn to talk to a company's rep, this occurred.
A young man, wearing slacks and a 'polo' shirt (in other words, no tie, no suit), was ahead of me. He handed his one-page resume to the rep. As the rep asked the young man questions, I found out:
1. he had just graduated with a Bachelor's degree (4-year degree) in computers
2. he had no experience
3. he would not accept anything less than $125,000 a year.
He felt that he should be paid that much because:
1. that's the 'rate' in the area for people with 4 years experience (he honestly felt his 4 year degree should be counted as experience).
2. he had a student loan (yes, he really felt that it was the company's responsibility to help pay off the loan.)
And people wonder why jobs are outsourced. I wish I could say that was a rare case, but it wasn't. While it was one of the worst I've seen while at job fairs, it wasn't an uncommon experience. I even saw one person who had been in a sales job for over 10 years, expect that to count towards his experience in his new IT field (he only had 2 years experience).
-SQLBill
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