Why I don't think my job is going to india, just yet
There has been quite an IT shortage lately. Anecdotally, it has been hard to hire new engineers, both at hw and at my new company. I thought the reason why hw couldn't find people was because they paid low. No, it wasn't just me being paid badly. I learned (after leaving) that upper management had classified each employee by the job that they did. Comparing the salary they currently made to industry standard, hw would have to pay out 2-3 million more per year in salaries to get them up to industry standard. (I should say industry standards, since this includes sales, customer service, tech support, billing, and not just IT).
My new company has been trying to hire, and we've received a lot of interesting candidates. Most of the candidates do not have a traditional IT background, or education. Most of them started on the business end working with a lot of technical types. Gradually, they assumed a lot more technical roles (like reporting) and starting playing around with either databases and/or coding, and voila - they're looking to break into IT.
My coworkers have expressed bewilderment at the shortage. "Where are they?" someone asked. "Are they all going into business or law?"
This goes back to why don't we just send all of this extra work to India. From reading posts on blogs and slashdot, most projects offshored do not turn out well. They take too long to complete, are over budget, and are of poor quality. I think one of the reasons is that it is so hard to create good software in the first place, even if you are on site. You are designing software for someone whose job you don't do on a regular basis. By offshoring the project, you are adding several links in the chain removed from the people actually using the software. It's like playing the telephone game, but instead of saying out loud the correct sentence at the end, you need to write a piece of software. Add on to that time and language differences, and things don't often turn out well.
Right now, my boyfriend is at work (11 pm on sunday) because the consulting firm they hired to do a portion of the accounting piece of the system he is working on sucks. The people moving the project forward are business types who are not technically skilled enough. The experienced people my boyfriend met from the consulting firm at the beginning of the process have disappeared. They are in managment roles, not the actual developers or data ppl. They did have a developer from the here work on it a bit, and the rest was offshored to South Africa. They are also battling data imports from the consulting firm's canned product. The person doing the data imports is not a developer or dba, and has never done a sql query in her life. She has a business background (sigh). They cannot do it themselves tho. They need her help because the tables do not have intuitive names (i.e. an invoice table named AR_2240 or something like that). Right now, everyone at my bf's work is pretty pissed, b/c the consultants are costing a lot, but not much is getting done. They've been trying to import data for two days so they can finally start testing everything. I truly feel sorry for him, and his company. The company is paying for a gucci bag and getting a knockoff from the back of a guy's trunk.
My new company has been trying to hire, and we've received a lot of interesting candidates. Most of the candidates do not have a traditional IT background, or education. Most of them started on the business end working with a lot of technical types. Gradually, they assumed a lot more technical roles (like reporting) and starting playing around with either databases and/or coding, and voila - they're looking to break into IT.
My coworkers have expressed bewilderment at the shortage. "Where are they?" someone asked. "Are they all going into business or law?"
This goes back to why don't we just send all of this extra work to India. From reading posts on blogs and slashdot, most projects offshored do not turn out well. They take too long to complete, are over budget, and are of poor quality. I think one of the reasons is that it is so hard to create good software in the first place, even if you are on site. You are designing software for someone whose job you don't do on a regular basis. By offshoring the project, you are adding several links in the chain removed from the people actually using the software. It's like playing the telephone game, but instead of saying out loud the correct sentence at the end, you need to write a piece of software. Add on to that time and language differences, and things don't often turn out well.
Right now, my boyfriend is at work (11 pm on sunday) because the consulting firm they hired to do a portion of the accounting piece of the system he is working on sucks. The people moving the project forward are business types who are not technically skilled enough. The experienced people my boyfriend met from the consulting firm at the beginning of the process have disappeared. They are in managment roles, not the actual developers or data ppl. They did have a developer from the here work on it a bit, and the rest was offshored to South Africa. They are also battling data imports from the consulting firm's canned product. The person doing the data imports is not a developer or dba, and has never done a sql query in her life. She has a business background (sigh). They cannot do it themselves tho. They need her help because the tables do not have intuitive names (i.e. an invoice table named AR_2240 or something like that). Right now, everyone at my bf's work is pretty pissed, b/c the consultants are costing a lot, but not much is getting done. They've been trying to import data for two days so they can finally start testing everything. I truly feel sorry for him, and his company. The company is paying for a gucci bag and getting a knockoff from the back of a guy's trunk.