

Why IT Jobs Are Never Coming Back - woan
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9200604/Why_IT_Jobs_Are_Never_Coming_Back

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M8R-jt5iq1
There are two conflicting stories in the job market.

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.

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Locke1689
What a pathetic article. I guess even the tech press doesn't recognize the
difference between generic "IT" and upper-level developer/software engineer.

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.

~~~
noname123
The former is full of grounded-folks who went back for school to get
MCSE/Oracle MCSE and dutifully do their work everyday and the latter is full
of self-entitled jerks who think their CRUD applications are somehow original
because it's in Python/Ruby?

Outsourcing is and has been a reality. Instead of complaining injustices, the
market is always right; you just have to adapt.

~~~
ardit33
dude, there are many people that are doing things that are not web related, or
simple crud, or a simple iphone app and are more interesting and complex.

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.

~~~
noname123
I disagree; Most software engineering is CRUD. Bioinformatics is CRUD with
Biology. Trading systems is CRUD with FIX. High performance computing is CRUD
across clusters. Game programming is CRUD with DirectX/OpenGL. Even compiler
design and Linux kernel is CRUD, except low-level CRUD with assembly or
device-drivers.

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.

~~~
lawfulfalafel
It's funny how defensive your comment makes me feel. Probably because there is
a bit more truth to it than I would like.

~~~
Locke1689
Huh, I don't really feel defensive at all. I simply don't feel the need to
justify computer science as a discipline or software development as a
profession. I originally came into college as a physics major and am doing
theoretical computer science (math) as a depth focus in my major. These are
generally thought of as the "hard" fields -- but I don't find any of them
harder than computer science. Computer science just doesn't strike me as a
field that needs defending. If it were easy there wouldn't be so few good
practicing it.

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bguthrie
> There's no need to be local today. You can work on anyone's problems from
> anywhere.

Having worked on several distributed or offshore software development teams
before, this statement strikes me as more than a little bit optimistic.

~~~
zmmmmm
Yeah, this was the rhetoric of 2000-2001. To me the whole article seems like a
time capsule from that period. Not that there aren't plenty of true
observations in there, but if anything I think the last 5 years has seen a
revival in a recognition of the value of local on the ground talent.

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smackay
The article seems oriented towards services related companies that supply warm
bodies to big companies - hardly surprising given the target audience of
Computerworld. What is rather surprising is that it seems to take everybody
who makes a computer do something for a living and groups them all together -
as if there is no differentiation between the skillsets of data-entry
personnel and the folks who wrote Hadoop for example.

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.

~~~
pauljonas
But those were lots of "warm bodies" that paid good wages and consulting
rates. Within an hour drive of my home, in previous employment gigs alone, I
can tally __thousands __of application developer jobs outsourced or staffed
now by imported non-immigrant visa workers. Sure, lots were COBOL (yes, is
still a lot of COBOL and old school DBMS like DB2 and _gasp_ IMS running on
the backend of major functions like reservations, claims adjudication, utility
company billing and metering, charge card transactions and billing, etc.…)
positions but a lot of Java and new fangled client/web application too.

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.

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nathanlrivera
Yet it is still very hard to find and hire good developers and system admins.

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noblethrasher
The article talks about losing IT jobs to other countries but for many of the
reasons mentioned in the article, several states in this country are beginning
to consolidate their IT operations as well:
[http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2007/05/08/state-
it...](http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2007/05/08/state-it-
consolidation-can-succeed.aspx)

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.

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ronnier
Single readable page:
[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.computerworld.com...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9200604/Why_IT_Jobs_Are_Never_Coming_Back%3FtaxonomyName%3DManagement%2Band%2BCareers%26taxonomyId%3D14)

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forkqueue
Interested to compare to [http://www.cio.co.uk/news/3252277/demand-for-tech-
staff-high...](http://www.cio.co.uk/news/3252277/demand-for-tech-staff-high-
says-pwc/?olo=TechBriefing&cmpid=TB1New3&no1x1) which suggests that the number
of IT jobs in the UK is growing, and that growth will accelerate over the next
year.

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DjDarkman
Well if the US makes it hard for people to go to the US then what should they
expect?

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.

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richcollins
I wonder if IT is being replaced more by 3rd party software than by
outsourcing and offshoring as claimed by the author.

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faragon
IT jobs will be where the skill is. Countries should enforce their education
systems in order to avoid losing/forgetting their capabilites.

