

Is There a U.S. IT Worker Shortage? - vonmoltke
http://spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/computing/it/is-there-a-us-it-worker-shortage

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debacle
Salaries for developers in most parts of the country have been flat for the
last several years. More teams are trying to do without development managers
and with fewer project managers.

Network operations salaries, from what I have seen, are actually lower now
than they were when I was in college. Network architects and engineers still
command pretty good salaries, probably because there are so many legacy
networks out there that need to be replaced.

In general, salaries in product oriented positions are going up, and salaries
in service oriented positions are going down.

IT has one of the highest unemployment percentages of any industry (14.9%,
last I read).

While I don't believe there is an actual, honest to goodness shortage, I do
believe that there are three critical problems in the industry right now:

1\. Hiring - Companies can't hire the right people, good people can't get past
HR, companies are afraid that they're going to hire the wrong person, and in
general there are no professional organizations that are making this any
easier. This has resulted in ridiculous salaries (in both directions) because
companies don't know what they're paying for when they first hire someone, and
are desperate not to lose the people who they have hired that know what
they're doing. In addition, positions stay open for an inordinate amount of
time because of the difficulty of hiring, and overall employee mobility is
reduced because the interview process is slowly moving from a multi-day
process to a multi-week process. I got my first programming job on a phone
screen and a lunch break interview. That would be ludicrous today.

2\. Training - Companies don't want to hire people who have 85% of the
skillset they're looking for, because they don't believe that training for the
extra 15% is going to pay off. I think this is partially because the value
proposition of a new graduate with six months of solid experience is probably
double of the same graduate before their experience. I think this is something
not strictly limited to IT at the moment, but I'm seeing it more in IT than in
any other engineering discipline.

3\. Placement - In short, people aren't getting positions that are most suited
to their abilities. Unskilled, first-time "CIO"s are running startups into the
ground, and former "CIO"s with plenty of experience are consulting because
consulting, right now, actually seems more low-risk than being an employee. I
see more and more of my friends moving over to consulting not because of the
money, but because they were switching employers so much before they started
consulting that it doesn't make sense not to go that route.

Keep in mind that I am providing minimal evidence - although I know that the
14.9% employment rate is recently accurate, within a few weeks, but in general
I'm seeing these trends everywhere and it's worrying as someone whose job it
is to make systems function well simply because there is so much waste.

~~~
rogerbinns
You can also include that mobility is hard. The high housing prices that some
seem to think is a good thing makes it harder for people to move. Similarly
the idiotic health system also makes changing employers or locations harder.
The public school system is also contributory. Dual income households are the
norm also hindering mobility. The networking infrastructure is also pretty
terrible in most places (little choice, low speeds) which makes remote working
less feasible.

That contributes to making it harder for supply of people and the demand of
positions to be matched when not collocated.

~~~
debacle
Our (US) healthcare system alone is probably the biggest deterrent to
entrepreneurialism in the country today.

------
microarchitect
Some thoughts on this issue. Some of these have been expressed by others like
pg already.

1\. Workers are not a commodity and not interchangeable. You can't a take a
network-layer programmer who got laid-off from Cisco and ask that person to
work on big data and reasonably expect success.

2\. I suspect a lot of tech workers are not motivated by money as long as it's
above a threshold. I know for a fact that I've taken jobs that paid me as much
as 25% less because I got to work on "cooler" stuff. This also fits in with
the stories of Google's early days when they actually paid less in dollar
terms than MS but were able to lure workers away from MS because they had
better "perks" and more interesting technology.

2a. If progammers were optimizing for money, most of us would be working for
wall Street, and we'd all be contracting in our free time instead of building
open source apps. Clearly this isn't happening.

3\. Anecdotally, I know for a fact there is _huge_ demand for competent
programmers/engineers because I have standing offers from multiple employers.
The reason for this is that a good programmer is orders of magnitude more
productive than an average programmer so good managers will move heaven and
earth to get their hire. On top of this, an average programmer in a good team
will have effective negative productivity. So restricting your supply pool
even a little bit can leave you with a drastically less productive team.

~~~
debacle
> an average programmer in a good team will have effective negative
> productivity.

I have a qualm with that statement, I think. Do you have anything to back that
up? It doesn't make logical sense to say that "If I have four programmers and
they give me nine megawarbles of productivity, and I add a fifth programmer
who can only create one megawarble of productivity, I will have a team that
only generates eight megawarbles of productivity."

Too often, programmers are drawn into this romantic idea of being a 10x
programmer, but I can honestly say that, in my experience, there are more 10x
programmers out there than there are 10x programming problems. The IT world
needs more data janitors than it needs data scientists.

~~~
clueless123
A couple of points on negative productivity

0\. There is a cost on the communications between team members, if the team is
larger the cost is larger 1\. There are costs on integrating (in some cases
re-working) sub-par code that does not fit with the rest of the team

If the programer is just average, the impact is not that terrible but it
exists, but if the programer is actually bad, I can tell you from personal
experience that the costs will be _very_ significant.

------
skylan_q
This keeps coming up and I have to keep asking, what is a shortage?

If we double the amount of IT workers available, do we still have a shortage?
How do we determine what a shortage is?

I think it's all perspective. From the manager/business owner who is looking
for the lowest cost and highest-payout labor, there is a shortage. To the
actual laborer who is competing with other laborers, there is an oversupply.
So this talk about there being a shortage like it's an objective fact really
strikes me as bizarre.

------
gaius
It is easy to tell if there is a shortage of ANY commodity, including workers,
from the price. This is one of the most basic principles of capitalism.
Similarly it is easy to tell if there is an oversupply, the price goes down...
Which matches the observations of the state of the industry (allowing for
inflation)?

~~~
AnIrishDuck
This is not true. There are many different types of information encoded in a
market clearing price (supply of inputs, the supply of inputs to their inputs,
utility of the output, economies of scale, etc).

You can't say that e.g. a rise in the price of pencils means it's "easy to
tell" there's a shortage of pencils. It could mean that:

1) more people are getting better utility from pencils.

2) pencils are getting harder to produce at the current scale.

3) an input supply to pencil construction is rising in price

Applying these lessons back to the market for developers, it's pretty easy to
see parallels to ALL three of the above scenarios. Which explains the rising
price.

Unless you're using the word "shortage" to mean "you can't get what you want
at the price you want", in which case the statement is almost tautologically
true.

~~~
gaius
That is the way it is being used in this context, as in companies saying "I
can't get an experienced developer for the price of a new graduate".

------
Irene
2011 Report by McKinsey predicted a 50-60% shortage of "big data" talent in
the US by 2018. Later Gartner projected 2/3 talent shortage. But as
productivity is increasing, the gap between supply and demand is easily
filled. As Forbes Adam Ozimek said, there is no shortage just “a large demand
for more workers at current market clearing wages but not a penny more”

~~~
debacle
I think "Big Data" demand is going to continue to spike for a while now, but a
lot of the big data projects I see these days seem somewhat aimless: "We're
going to aggregate and analyze a ton of data, and then somehow that's going to
provide a revelation that we're going to act on and make/save a ton of money."

We already know what happens when companies do this kind of introspection -
obvious problems are confirmed, and in most instances are either too difficult
to fix, or any change wouldn't be cost effective.

In my opinion, the "Big Data" demand is simply being driven by modern business
managers who have an unhealthy lust for statistics. While I can't deny that
there are some amazing applications of "Big Data" out there, a lot of what I'm
seeing makes me say to myself "You wouldn't know what to do with that
information, even if you had it."

