IT crisis, depending on your perspective..

[mathemajician]

According to this article, in the UK,
"... in the past four years demand for IT and computer graduates has doubled while at the same time the number of students studying the subject has declined by a third."
I've also heard similar things from the US in recent weeks. Even India is supposed to be having a skills crisis according to a few articles I'

Comments

[celestialweasel]

The demand is, I suspect, as ever, for 18 year olds with 10 years experience in technologies that have been round for 3 years who will work for peanuts.

[mathemajician]

Everybody I know in IT seems to make pretty good money. Indeed in many cases it's rather more than just "pretty good". I take it you don't. Why?

[celestialweasel]

Well, I do, personally. But I am skeptical of this news story for 3 primary reasons

[mathemajician]

Thanks. That's interesting information for me, and another data point for my collection ;-) The impression I'm getting from people is similar to what you say, namely that the market is buoyant at the moment but not over-heated.

In this case, the BBC article, and the others I've read recently, should be right. I mean, if the job market is already buoyant and is expected to keep on growing over the coming years, while at the same time the number of people going into IT training in universities is actually falling... clearly a market imbalance is on the way. And it's not just in the UK, I've also heard from people in the US and talked to professors in CS university departments in New Zealand and they all tell me the same thing — falling enrollments in CS departments.

[celestialweasel]

You might want to read this
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/23/letters_from_sub-america/

Clearly we are in anecdote territory here, but the writers do not seem completely delusional to me.

[mathemajician]

Interesting. I hear similar things coming from people in the US and I've seen something similar in New Zealand when I used to work in IT there. I think the problem is that not enough differentiation is made in people's minds between the top quartile IT staff, and bottom quartile. Friends of mine are all top quartile workers (because at university I hung out with the highly motivated nerds!). After they graduated they managed to get fairly low paying IT jobs as better than average companies. After 5 years however they have progressed up (which often meant taking risks like leaving the company to go overseas for a while etc.) and now are making very good money (back in NZ).

At any rate, I'm currently thinking of trying to apply my math and machine learning background to finance, perhaps at a hedge fund. A straight IT career isn't appealing much to me, not just because of the pay but also because I'd prefer something more intellectually diverse.