"Companies still need talented systems designers and other well-trained technicians" LOL WUT?!

Great Debates
1

but… “A lot of lower-end IT work has been outsourced to India”…

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/20-Industries-Where-Jobs-Are-usnews-367106623.html?x=0

What was that?

First, let’s just put the POLITICS of pro-offshoring vs anti-offshoring aside. Let’s just talk consequences here. Pure consequences.
Okay, as an experienced IT guy who’s retired from the industry and who still does this on the side by getting small businesses off of Windows and into CentOS / RHEL (depending on their tech expertise), AND who runs an entire insurance office on CentOS, I’m calling bullshit.

How in the WORLD do you get a talented systems designer and a well-trained technician without some prior work experience doing the lower-end IT work?

How do you do that?

That sounds like asking for Journeyman plumbers when you have no job market to give beginners any work experience. How do you get to be a journeyman? I know contractors and I don’t know any who are worth their weight in salt that got to Journeyman status without some apprentice work experience. I mean, really, you practically NEED apprentice work experience under a master plumber or with a company. 144 hours in school is NOT enough.

It’s the same, practically speaking, in IT. You gotta have the real world work experience when you’re looking to be rated as a “talented” systems designer. Time in the classroom and even the computer laboratory is NOT enough.

Nobody is going to come into my office or any other competent business owner’s claiming to be a talented system designer just because they know the classroom definition of RAD, JAD and data flows, etc. You gotta come with work experience and be able to get crackalackin’ on solutions for immediate problems.

When your lower-end work is gone overseas how do you expect to get that work experience you need in order to become a talented systems designer? Experience comes from more than just a laboratory; it comes from years of DOING, as in servicing customers’ needs… for YEARS, in a competitive, do-or-die environment. A stint here and there as an intern isn’t enough.
My prediction here: these companies that want talented systems designers and well-trained technicians are going to be wanting for a VERY LONG TIME because America is no longer providing the jobs infrastructure to produce these skilled workers: they lack the low-end opportunity which is needed to…

wait for it…

TRAIN UP!!!

Can someone here explain how we as a country are going to produce this talent without access to the low-end work? Perhaps beginning IT professionals should move to India for a few years for this real-world work experience?

2

There are still plenty of low-level IT jobs around. In fact, a lot of those jobs are the hardest ones to outsource, because they involve actual hands-on work. Someone has to wheel the little cart around with the new workstations on it and install them.

3

I have been actively recruiting for a six-figured, salaried ERP and supply-chain professional for nearly 6 months. Been close to hiring a couple times, but the candidates’ switching costs (both were underwater on homes back in their current city of residence) prevented them moving.

Facts like these, though, don’t support the victim mentality of the economically uneducated left. So they get discarded.

4

The OP does have a valid point.

The term “IT” covers a lot of ground, but the OP mentions “systems designers”, which to me reads as database and application systems designers (which, Sam Stone is not typically related to the people working with infrastructure and wheeling carts around with parts).

It’s a reasonable extrapolation to say that increased off-shoring of these activities will result in fewer opportunities to gain experience locally. And it’s true that talented and well-trained practitioners take years to develop.

Whether this situation is good, bad or neutral is an entirely different discussion.

5

This is very true, when I got outsourced of my IT job, I was replaced by a guy in India, well actually a team in India. In my place they hired a tech for a buck more than minimum wage, who was in college trying to get a degree in some IT field.

When something happend, this low paid guy tried to solve it or served as the bridge to the IT team in India. And if worse came they has a MIS director, who handled the entire midwest and could be flown to anyone of the hotels overnight for something critical.

It was cheaper than having an IT guy at every hotel.

6

Dude, do you ever actually read your cites, because this one is not saying what you think it does. Here’s a better quote from your cite:

Those aren’t necessarily the same job talent pools. Not to mention the fact that “a lot” is not the same “the overwhelming majority of”. The author of that article is saying, and let me quote it again with emphasis: “This is likely to be one of the fastest-growing job markets over the next several years.”

If you have data that tells us otherwise, bring it.

7

I’ve been surprised by how many threads there are on SD that advocate protectionism (whether subtly or overtly).

The thing is, if you really can get exactly the same job done elsewhere for cheaper, it makes economic sense to do so. In the long run, countries that allow outsourcing (ok, with some regulation) will outperform countries that try to protect higher paid local workers.

It sucks, but ultimately people have to find somewhere else to apply their skills. And I’m saying that as an unemployed IT professional…

WRT America specifically, most analyses I’ve seen imply that the current very high unemployment is in large part down to twitchy markets, and won’t last.

8

How does this person acquire the skills to become a systems designer? They’ll never get rid of janitors, either, but neither job leads you to acquiring any skillset that leads to being a systems designer… a job which can also go overseas. (Can’t you design it via teleconferencing, too?)

What’s their work experience?

So how would this low paid guy learn how to become a systems analyst? By writing down the instructions from the team in India? Sounds to me like all this low-paid guy needs to do is follow the instructions from the guys overseas… doesn’t sound like there’s much room for skills improvement or advancement.

Uh, yes it is saying exactly what I indicated it does. It says we need systems designers and I asked how are today’s graduates going to get the work experience AND skills that they need to become systems designers?

Can you answer that or must you go off-topic with your tiring and ignorant denials?

What part of

“but companies still need talented systems designers and other well-trained technicians to develop customized software, keep up with new technology, and connect far-flung systems.”

do you NOT understand?

Where are we growing our talent systems designers talent at? That was my question. You don’t have jack monkey squat that shows where we’re training that talent at.

That market can grow at the speed of light with 186,000 jobs popping up per second and if no one has the lower end work experience to qualify them as a systems designer what good is it?

Then how come those same countries are now ALL in absolutely ruinous debt and the countries that get the offshored jobs aren’t?

Where is this ‘outperforming’ you keep talking about? And why are we bringing this up in a thread where I specifically said

“First, let’s just put the POLITICS of pro-offshoring vs anti-offshoring aside. Let’s just talk consequences here. Pure consequences.”

I’m asking how are people going to skill-up to become system designers in this economy?

Good deal, now I can ask you something, since you want to go off-topic (and not answer the question of how people are going to get the skills to become system designers): since you got outsourced, what job did you get to replace the one you lost?

Oh I’m sorry, I mis-read… you didn’t get a new job to apply your skills. Case in point.

9

Maybe they propose hiring people whose lower-end jobs went to India? That way you get talent at dirt-low prices.

10

Le Jacquelope,

you (thou?) doth protest too much. Nobody (who matters) minds. You need to be a competent programmer even to understand this argument, which is not common amongst the management. There are many ways in which our various ruling elites are running the country into the ground, and this just happens to be one of these that many programmers have personally encountered.

Incidentally, the requirement of a fixed minimum number of years of experience in a specific technology for hiring is in itself a fruit of managerial (or maybe HR, more specifically) stupidity. Some (smart) people grow fast. Some (not so smart) people grow slowly or not at all. Some people make up a resume with 10 years of experience in all technologies simultaneously and plenty of references (from Bangalore) to boot. You need to be an intelligent and competent guy to make sense of all this, but how many such people are in engineering HR nowadays?

11

Not exactly seeing how that’ll work when you’re looking for system designers. These lower-end people do not have the desired talent.

Bah. After playing chicken little about the subprime mess before it hit and then playing it again by predicting an economic meltdown when people said it wouldn’t end as such, I’m not at all concerned about being a chicken little now.

We’re going to have a skills shortage due to the lack of lower-end job opportunities.

They’ll mind when this so-called (one of the) fastest growing fields is lacking in qualified talent. Oh wait, they’ve been whining about a lack of qualified talent for years now, in other fields…

Systems designers require a whole universe more than just programming skills. You start with talking with customers to know what they need / want to do, you write out system architecture design docs / blueprints, create a mockup, test, etc.

Programmers in particular can really grind the entire software industry into the dirt with Open Source. The (corporate, lol) system lords are always in a race to keep capitalism ahead of innovation in the form of open source.

That much is true. While I did not exactly mention any fixed number of years I still accept that I should be more clear about this. I was upper management before I begged to be let go to retire (I hate working for someone else); I decided the rules for HR and the rules for IT was “show, not tell”. Whether it was programming, software testing or higher end IT stuff like network admin / security, you didn’t get in the door unless you had work experience AND/OR you could write out a solution to a hypothetical problem in 30 minutes.

I read me some Dilbert, man. That and I started way back as a software tester.

That’s certainly another problem to consider. You need someone who can sit down with the applicant and say “show me” and filter out the b.s. Spending an hour filtering out the real deal from the b.s. is worth the money considering what you stand to lose if you don’t.

12

Fiscal debt has only the most tenuous (and arguably temporary) link to offshore outsourcing.

Ah, sorry forgot about that. It was a long OP.

A lot of threads seem to be like this at the moment though: “Let’s just assume outsourcing is teh devil, and have a discussion on how to banish this demon”.

I would think that they should choose jobs that involve an analytical or consultancy component. Or as others have suggested, jobs which involve physically setting up networks.
I’ve also seen a lot of well-paid jobs recently in disk imaging and the like.

And what are you saying anyway? That there are systems designers jobs in the US, but they are just left unstaffed because there is no-one to do them?

I quit my last job and trained up for another industry, for which I’m currently attending interviews.

Although my decision to quit had nothing to do with outsourcing, in some ways I’m a case in point as the job I quit was as a Programmer, and the job I’ve trained for is as an IT consultant to the medical industry.

13

I’m not sure why people seem to think the economy is static or that their simplistic vision of the economic landscape is accurate. But the OP certainly seems guilty of that.

Yes, a large number of developer jobs have been sent overseas. That does not mean every single last developer job has been offshored. Companies, both large and small, need people to do custom application development and it is not always feasible, practical or cost effective to have them in Bangalore. There are still plenty of IT consulting firms that hire crops of entry level grads right out of college.

The economy is constantly changing. If for some reason there is a shortage of skilled low to mid level application developers and systems analysts, the market will typically adjust and adapt. Worst case, companies will make do with what they can find and those people will become the next wave of “skilled experts”.

I think a lot of older IT folks have a distorted view of the value and importance of their job and an overinflated sense of entitlement. Mostly thanks to the mid to late 90s dot com bubble and Y2K hysteria, IT workers of all kinds were in huge demand. Anyone with any sort of technical ability could get a job and change jobs every 6 months if they didn’t like it. It wasn’t cost effective.

And why do IT people think corporate management are all idiots? Unless you work for an IT company, your company is not in the IT business. A manager doesn’t care if a system is home grown, bought off a shelf or made in India. They just want it to perform whatever business process they need it to perform for the least amount of money possible so they can sell shoes, aircraft, ball bearings or whatever else it is they actually do.

And all this talk of “they should” do this that and the other thing. There is no “they”. They is the cumulative independent decision making of thousands of individual companies. It’s not like there is some master decision maker who pulls a lever that says “MORE PROGRAMMERS!”

If you take politics out of the equation (as the OP requested), then the only thing that should matter is the bottom line. Of course the OPs request is a little disingenuous as he is basically saying “lets put politics aside, but now hear about the consequences to MY industry and why it should be protected!” The consequences may very well be that the market for domestic system designers is much smaller.

14

From today’s San Jose Merc, front page:

Stupid, fat Google! The have lots of jobses, but nooooooo one to fill them. Makes buildings, but they will aaaaaaaaaal be empty… gollum! gollum!

Short Google now!

15

The only upside I see to this is that it is really helping the older engineers/programmers.

A lot of the entry level jobs left for American engineers are defense related. These have not been off-shored due to security concerns. That is where I started out, and I can tell you that this is a very poor environment to build experience. Basically you can make the early mistakes and learn from them almost anywhere, but the risk aversion and ass covering of government work means that there is very little cutting edge work going on there. Avionics on a jet fighter are about as complex as a cell phone handset, yet take years of development, are 1000 times bulkier and power consuming…yet the phones come out with an updated model every year or 6 months, and when you make thousands of them, you can actually determine failure rates and learn how to make them better. You just don’t build experience when project timelines cover several years, and the budget gets cut before half of them ever get completed, and the old guy that knew everything took early retirement when the last contract got canceled.

Anyway, The input to the technical pipe started getting choked in the late 80s, early 90’s. That means that those of us who were around before that and have kept up are coming into demand. At 45 years old, I was out of work in March of '08. I found my current job in October of '08. I think that is a lot better outcome than a lot of out of work 45 year olds had around then. My company actually had a layoff 6 months after I was hired, which I survived.

I got into the pipe in 1985. 25 years later, it seems like only 20% or so of those that started out are still doing technical work. Make that 10% for the women. Some went to sales or management. Some have died. Point is for every grey beard engineer you need 5-8 just out of college newbs going into the pipe. That is probably about the last generation of newbie engineers that beat the rush to off-shoring of engineering jobs.

And some saw this coming way back. In 1986 Irwin Feerst saw the writing on the wall and made a bid for Presidency of the IEEE. Feerst, remembered as a Hero by some and a crank by others scared the TPTB at IEEE so much that they changed the rules to make sure that no outsider would ever have a chance in future elections.

16

of course the market will adapt. The market will adapt by importing programmers from India or Eastern Europe who got the experience thanks to the outsourcing and these will be that “next wave”, while American young people were not able to get theirs. Then Obama and co will get on the airways and praise the “diversity” of it all. But, thankfully, those young American grads without jobs get the “change we can believe in” free ride on their parents’ health insurance until the age of 26, so that sort of evens it all out, right?

We seem to have forgotten that pragmatic politics is not supposed to be about quasi religious ideological cults. It is supposed to be about groups striving to defend their (and, inter alia, their children’s and young people’s) interests. And so it is unfortunate that nobody seems to give a damn about the long term interests of the group called American middle class.

17

Except that you just made that whole scenario up. Unless you have a cite to support it…?

18

Two words: Manned Moon Program.

Sometimes it take Government action to maintain or augment critical skill categories.

19

Yes, everyone will be unemployed. Just like all those other times market forces led to the decline of a particular job role.
What is the government doing about finding jobs for skilled lamplighters?

Of course there’s some hyperbole here: Software Engineer and the like are still roles with huge demand and far from obsolete. But sure, in the long term, if a job can be done for cheap elsewhere it’s only going to harm a nation to resist that economic fact. As always, if you want a high salary, you should learn the skills that are highly valued.

The OP is a complete non sequitur, as there’s no evidence that we’re struggling to fill Systems Designer positions.

Protectionism is as close to an ideological cult as you can get. No-one versed in economics seriously thinks it works in the long-term, but there is no end of passionate supporters.

20

Yeah, because Americans are too stupid to educate themselves in areas with great employment potential and high wages. And when they actually are too stupid, we have thousands of foreigners dying to immigrate here and fill those slots that Americans are too stupid to fill. They bring a good work ethic, and become good citizens and contributors to our society. Nothing wrong with that, and those people are just as American as you or I, all of us being descendants of immigrants, too.

That is one thing that makes Silicon Valley so great. This place is a hotbed of innovation, with people coming here from all over the globe. See my cite, above, as opposed to the plethora of hand-waving scare tactics from the Economic Creationists on this board.