July 9, 2015 at 9:15 am
IceDread (7/9/2015)
Last report in Sweden is that we need more IT-staff, developers of all sorts. In the coming few years there is a report that the banks will need ~30% more IT employees.I think there will be a need for more programmers of different types of skills for many years to come and it also looks like IT-jobs are becoming one of the largest areas for employment. Maybe one day it will shrink but I can not see that on the horizon.
A government or industry report may state a "need" for 30% more IT workers, but whether they'll be willing to pay their salaries are two different things. For example, when reponding to a survey by a domestic workers union, half of all households may report they need a live-in nanny to help with the chores and children, but only a small percentage would be able or willing to actually pay for one.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
July 9, 2015 at 9:16 am
In my area, I work in the digital marketing industry. I focus primarily on analytics and reporting.
In this area, data is insanely valuable. How it's acquired, managed and scales are all areas that are becoming outsourced or put into the vague terminology we refer to as the Cloud. IT support is shrinking in one area, but I feel growing in another area because the work isn't going away, it's just switching hands from one to another.
I'm a young guy. I have no formal education. I had to learn on my own or in practice in the prior industries I've worked in. As we move forward, especially with SQL Server, new technologies are threatening to value of others who are not able to keep up.
For example, SQL Server 2016 is going to incorporate both the cloud and NoSQL. Stretch databases, Polybase and more are going to have to become a reality at some point for someone, especially for those that can move in that direction versus the mass majority who can't (or won't).
Either way, I hear a lot of older vets who say to specialize in something till you become a master. Yet, with so many changing technologies and the speed of change in general, it makes it insanely hard not to continue learning new skills for tomorrow.
My goal as of now is to learn as much as I can in the area of data engineering, data science and all the technologies surrounding it.
July 9, 2015 at 9:24 am
SSC Veteran, I think what you point out is that SQL Server is not a version, but a wave. Being a great DBA is like surfing. There are certain skills that apply to every wave, certain abilities that make it easy to adapt to new waves and a certain flexibility and nimbleness that allows you to continue to ride.
We may be moving towards the subject of what is successful migration and why do we migrate?
It also sounds like you agree that the jobs are not leaving, those of us who are sticking around are simply migrating to other bases of employ.
July 9, 2015 at 9:59 am
Eric M Russell (7/9/2015)
IceDread (7/9/2015)
Last report in Sweden is that we need more IT-staff, developers of all sorts. In the coming few years there is a report that the banks will need ~30% more IT employees.I think there will be a need for more programmers of different types of skills for many years to come and it also looks like IT-jobs are becoming one of the largest areas for employment. Maybe one day it will shrink but I can not see that on the horizon.
A government or industry report may state a "need" for 30% more IT workers, but whether they'll be willing to pay their salaries are two different things. For example, when reponding to a survey by a domestic workers union, half of all households may report they need a live-in nanny to help with the chores and children, but only a small percentage would be able or willing to actually pay for one.
To some degree I agree, companies always wants more people to choose from to keep the salaries down. And if you are not willing to take on negotiations about salary or chaining job if you have to then you wont get it up. However, over the last years you can see that the amount of IT related jobs has increase in all areas and not decreed.
Thus we are in big demand and the more experience you have the more sought after you will be.
July 9, 2015 at 10:04 am
I'll add in that some hiring managers get it and some don't. There's always unrealistic expectations.
I'd wager we're about six months from jobs that require 5 years experience on SQL Server 2016
July 9, 2015 at 11:56 am
Carole, where did you get your degree from? I got my BS in CIS from ASU in 2009 when the economy was horrible, but their career resources made it easy to find jobs. I was hardly qualified for anything with almost no IT experience (I was an admin dabbling in misc IT projects, much like you do now), but they had so many opportunities that I was able to take my pick. I would recommend going back through the school you graduated from to look for IT work. I don't think we're going to see a loss of IT jobs in the future. Just more specialization and a need for educated people like yourself.
July 9, 2015 at 12:28 pm
If the IT workforce does shrink, it will be the button pushers who get phased out. Any IT function that doesn't require some degree of analysis or improvization can be automated.
You can be a specialist, but what you specialize in needs to change every three years or so. The risk for a specialist is choosing the right technology to specialize on and having to seek work in smaller niche markets.
You can also be a generalist, if you also bring years of experience, business domain knowledge, and analysis skills to the table. That's less risky, because you can pick from a broader range of organizations and projects to work for, and you have the luxery of waiting to see which new technologies pan out.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
July 9, 2015 at 12:35 pm
I judge everyone on an individual basis, but my suspicion is that most of these IT workers who are mass produced from government sponsored training programs are essentially button pushers. The industry may need X million more IT professionals, but you just can't spin them up like virtual servers over night. If you could, then the industry would simply use virtual servers rather than actual people.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
July 9, 2015 at 3:20 pm
If you go down the as a service route the skills balance changes to those whose speciality is software integration.
If you outsource then you will need project management and tech lead skills.
The thing is where are the next generation technical leaders going to come from?
Let's suppose that we go down the DBaaS route. You no
Longer need DBAs because you are buying a utility. But where will the DB utility company recruit from? At the !moment SQL Server has a vast community. What happens if you only have a few DBAs in a limited number of companies? If you are one of those DBAs then your salary will be sky high.
I see IT fashions come and go. Today's great idea ends up being. Tomorrow's lunacy. The Gartner hype cycle is remarkably accurate in predicting technology attitudes.
Some ideas just have their time. Merit doesn't come into it.
July 9, 2015 at 8:46 pm
David.Poole (7/9/2015)
If you go down the as a service route the skills balance changes to those whose speciality is software integration.If you outsource then you will need project management and tech lead skills.
The thing is where are the next generation technical leaders going to come from?
Let's suppose that we go down the DBaaS route. You no
Longer need DBAs because you are buying a utility. But where will the DB utility company recruit from? At the !moment SQL Server has a vast community. What happens if you only have a few DBAs in a limited number of companies? If you are one of those DBAs then your salary will be sky high.
I see IT fashions come and go. Today's great idea ends up being. Tomorrow's lunacy. The Gartner hype cycle is remarkably accurate in predicting technology attitudes.
Some ideas just have their time. Merit doesn't come into it.
Gartner doesn't so much predict attitudes as create them. The buzzwords come out, get hyped by Gartner, leading to the gather-ons orgs jumping on the bandwagon, etc....
That said - you have a lot of great points. Those in our industry that have the longest useful life tend to be those who see the repeating patterns, identify that the new buzzwords is really a rehash of something we tried 20 years ago, and now how to bring the old lessons learned back into the "new" hype icon of the moment.
As to the original topic - I think we may be at the end of the first golden age for IT. We're in a stabilization phase, waiting for the next truly disruptive technology. There are still plenty of things to improve on, we just have to find the next big one. 3-D data storage anyone?
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
July 12, 2015 at 10:09 am
It's important to have a feel for what businesses will be willing to pay for and and when. Distributed computing became popular with newly formed small businesses (Start ups) because the acquisition costs were not beyond what they could afford. Established businesses are seeking to lower operation costs by seeking to acquire distributed computing while reducing operations cost. Established businesses will need to pay for services that help keep operational expenses within acceptable limits.
Competing requires a generalist with the ability to specialize when necessary. The fear off job loss stems from the lack of general skills and the unwillingness to acquire general or specialized skills when necessary. Change is something that everyone in the IT community should embrace. Distributed computing is making it possible to experiment with an enormous amount of new technology fro as little as $5- $10 a month. Let's get excited about the ability to focus on delivering solutions and not spending unnecessary amounts of time and money on mass produced services and products.
July 12, 2015 at 11:26 am
emmchild (7/12/2015)
Competing requires a generalist with the ability to specialize when necessary. The fear off job loss stems from the lack of general skills and the unwillingness to acquire general or specialized skills when necessary.
Very true. One of the big problems in IT generally is (and has been for about 35 years) is overspecialisation. There are many people who don't want to learn anything outside their very narrow field, in case they turn out not to be as good at that "anything" as they are at their special thing, and that causes both unwillingness to acquire general skills and unwillingness to learn new general skills.
One effect of this is that there are vast numbers of people with experience in the current "IN" fields, and a shortage of people with experience in fields seen as in some sense opposed to the "IN" fields, which leads to companies being unwilling to use anything but the IN fields for fear of recruiting problems. So IN-ness is self-reinforcing, and the only changes that are acceptable are those that don't change required skill-sets (changing the names of ths skills is allowed of course, hence "extreme programming" and "agile" and other dressed-up versions of rapid prototyping which are presented as something new and wonderful despite being nothing new.
Kkills at organising and innovating and automating things will continue to be valuable, and probably people whose employment is based on those skills won't see any decrease in opportunities. But skills in the IN fields may well become less valuable, because companies are going to look at farming out as much as possible of IT and the companies which take it on will be trying to exploit the organising/innovating/automating to reduce the number of people needed in the IN fields - after all, if you've done innovation that enables you to organise/innovate a server farm so that you can make it highly reliable with only 5% of the number of people it used to take, that elimainates maybe 80% of the jobs for sysadmins with immense experience and knowledge of operating system configuraton and management but only limited organisation/innovation/automation skills and 90% of the jobs for run-of-the-mill sysadmins, and similar things apply to DBAs and to developers. So the IT Golden Age for people with organising, innovating and automating skills is not over.
Also, there is so much utterly bad software out there (written in SQL, C, C++, C#, VB, JavaScript, Java, and so on) that people who are expert in fixing things that have gone badly wrong are probably safe for exployent for quite a long time. And I suspect (judging by the questions that people ask) that a lot of extremely bad new software is being written. So the Golden Age for people with real problem fixing skills is far from over.
Tom
July 13, 2015 at 8:33 am
mitchellcstein (7/9/2015)
SSC Veteran, I think what you point out is that SQL Server is not a version, but a wave. Being a great DBA is like surfing. There are certain skills that apply to every wave, certain abilities that make it easy to adapt to new waves and a certain flexibility and nimbleness that allows you to continue to ride.We may be moving towards the subject of what is successful migration and why do we migrate?
It also sounds like you agree that the jobs are not leaving, those of us who are sticking around are simply migrating to other bases of employ.
Great analogy. I like this. We are riding a wave, and many of my skills from v4.2 still apply today. Others I've had to learn.
July 13, 2015 at 8:33 am
Eric M Russell (7/9/2015)
IceDread (7/9/2015)
Last report in Sweden is that we need more IT-staff, developers of all sorts. In the coming few years there is a report that the banks will need ~30% more IT employees.I think there will be a need for more programmers of different types of skills for many years to come and it also looks like IT-jobs are becoming one of the largest areas for employment. Maybe one day it will shrink but I can not see that on the horizon.
A government or industry report may state a "need" for 30% more IT workers, but whether they'll be willing to pay their salaries are two different things. For example, when reponding to a survey by a domestic workers union, half of all households may report they need a live-in nanny to help with the chores and children, but only a small percentage would be able or willing to actually pay for one.
I think this is very true, and we have to be careful with this. Even CEOs say they need 50 new people, but they know they'll never get budget for that.
February 8, 2017 at 10:26 am
Two years later on and I feel that we are still looking at that mass employment changes wave coming. I do think that there has been a shift away from the churn of young newbies in many enterprises. Somewhat guiltily, I benefited from this when I was young, ambitious and driven. Now I find that whilst I am just a bit ambitious and still driven, I do not feel the age discrimination that many of my current age probably suffered years ago.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
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