I don’t know which one’s the chicken and which one’s the egg. But the reality is that tenure in this business is on par with college football - it’s too risky for small companies to hire on pure potential. But successful companies still do - they hire college grads, teach them how to write software professionally, and hope to extract some value before they’re gone two years later. They also don’t fire successful engineers - it’s too expensive and time-consuming to find new ones.
Indian software cos. TCS, Wipro, Infosys, HCL etc provide usually around 4 months training (on .net, Java, SAP , bunch of other subjects, their own frameworks etc) to all fresh recruits from college. Thats good.
However they treat their employees similarly or probably worse than how they are treated in tech firms of USA.
I think just as important, if not more so, is that by the time you reach the middle school years, if you’ve had problems with math they pretty much give up on that aspect of your education. I was skipped over one year (two separate semesters) during elementary school, so I was barely 17 when I graduated HS. I didn’t mind being a year younger than everyone else, but as I’ve recently said elsewhere, I had some serious deficits in math. Why would they skip somebody ahead, unless they were good at everything? I think what you said about disinterested math teachers ties in with this.
On the other hand, there are times when I think an appreciation for math and a willingness to put in the effort to learn it may be like enjoying classical music or sushi; you can’t really instill that willingness and sense of purpose into those who don’t already have it. It’s something they have to discover for themselves.
It’s hard to appreciate Beethoven when you’ve only heard it as tinny muzak while on hold, though. And it’s sad to realize that all the math you learned after you started getting Math as a separate subject… you learned in Science classes.
My software company is happy to hire Americans (or anyone with a work permit) here in the US. We regularly have a stack of openings - but we ARE picky. We also have a development office in India - those are our employees there, and we have recently expanded it to be a sales office as well (started selling software into the India marketplace - looking forward to some good revenue there).
We are silicon valley based - so our workforce represents the population. Indian descent, Chinese descent, Anglo - all well represented across the board. Our engineering team is NOT all Indian/Chinese, and our sales team is NOT all Anglo (two standard stereotypes).
What I would kill for is a decent data scientist who can help turn numbers into business gold. That one is the toughest position to fill right now. Everyone is jumping on the Big Data trend and pricing those positions through the roof.
Because most companies are not in the JAVA app building business. They want someone to come in, build a system or application, then leave.
The problem with high tech in general is that because technology changes so rapidly, there is no incentive to grow employees. There is limited value in retraining a DB2 developer into an Oracle developer into an Apache HBase developer when you can just hiring a new one a few years out of college or get an H1B for less money.
Unlike a doctor, lawyer, saleperson or many other professional jobs where your value grows as you gain experience and contacts over time, you don’t have that increased value from accumulation of knowledge and experience in high tech.
In my observation, you are either babysitting legacy systems in a large corporation, or you are doing short-term project based work. It doesn’t matter if those projects are as an H1B, independent 1099 contractor, associate for Accenture or some other consultancy or working 100 hours trying to get a startup off the ground. Once the project ends, you have to find a new one.
It’s because there are other jobs that require science/math background and pay better than tech jobs. Most of my science nerd friends in college went on to medical school. Financial companies (investment banking, etc) recruit from science majors as well.
Also, the defense and aerospace industries hire a lot of engineers, and they mainly hire US citizens. It’s increasingly difficult for non-US citizens to be allowed to do work related to defense or space. This may be one reason why non-defense tech jobs have disproportionate numbers of foreigners.
Not my experience at all, and I’ve been doing this for quite some time. I can get stuff done very quickly since I have a large internal library of code segments I can plug in, and because I have a good fundamental understanding of architecture and data structures. If someone sees himself primarily as a Java developer or Oracle developer as opposed to a computer scientist who uses these things, then he can fall into the trap you mention. And if companies hire people who know nothing but a given application, then they are likely to not have much success in retraining.
I guess - but I’ve never done that kind of work. I suspect given what you do you see only this kind of thing.
I’ll add “lack of foresight” amongst young people. I include my younger self in that. I don’t have a “tech” degree (or any real degree), but I attended and graduated (with honors!) from one of those “business schools” with a 1-year program. I trained in accounting, and also learned the necessary, then-current computer skills (lLotus 1-2-3, WordStar, dBase, all under MS-DOS 2.1, I think, as well as how to use DOS and write batch files, simple BASIC programming, etc.).
Upon graduating, I was qualified for, as the school said, an entry-level position in the fields I’d studied.
Unfortunately, those entry-level positions, at least in my town, wanted to pay minimum wage, which was $4.25/hr at that time. Meanwhile, I had a handful of years of restaurant cooking experience under my belt already, and I could earn a whopping $5.00/hr as a line cook. Well, doggonit, when you’re 21 years old $5.00 looks a lot better than $4.25, so after some halfhearted attempts to find a “business/tech” job I just went back to cooking, because it paid better in the short-term. Had I been better at long-term thinking, I may have done things differently. As it is, I now have 30 years of professional cooking experience, and I refer to that school I attended as “my $5000 typing class”, since typing is the only skill I learned there that still sees any use.
I have a masters in engineering. I barely break 6 figures and I only make that because I got out of engineering and moved to project management.
Compare that with my friends who have BA degrees in business and are all making at least double what I make and work much fewer hours and it’s not hard to see why tech isn’t attractive.
I would be interested in what sort of jobs your friends are doing that pay $200k a year with just a BA. And then I would like to apply to them.
IMO a business degree is much more of a gamble compared to an engineering degree. Sure, you could end up quite wealthy. But there are plenty of business graduates who have trouble finding work, and take $11/hour jobs. With an engineering degree, you have less of a chance of becoming wealthy, but also less of a chance of working for peanuts.
Agree.
A business person who makes over $200K per year is a person with lots of initiative, drive, energy, and smarts. Their income has little to do with the fact that they have a business degree. They would make over $200K per year regardless of the degree they have, and would probably make that amount with no degree at all.
There are business jobs that pay that. Sales, investment banking, senior management. There are also jobs in tech that pay that. But again, you are starting to get into the sales or management side.
Heck, I know guys making over half a million or more as very senior managers or partners in technology consulting firms.
I don’t think Americans eschew tech jobs because they don’t pay well. They pay as well or better than most. I just think they view them as tedious jobs for nerdatrons requiring far more work than they want to put in.
IMO, technical degrees like engineering and comp sci are more about hard skills. People with business and liberal arts degrees are hired because they are a good “fit”. So to get hired for a tech job, you need to demonstrate an ability to actually “do” something. And that’s hard. You need to either get good grades in a well respected technical degree or actually build something. Business or liberal arts have more leeway in fucking off. In many cases, it might even be helpful.
So if you have a choice of being a gregarious jock frat guy who partied his way through college and ended up in a lucrative sales job entertaining clients or being someone who had to bust his ass getting good grades so you can be stuck behind a computer and barely tolerated as a potentially outsourcable “resource” needed to get a job done, which would you choose?
I think he may also be using “legacy system” to cover “any system already in place”, rather than “the system this project is replacing”. And he likes “help desk/guardian of the treasure trove” type jobs about as much as I do, which is not at all. But even with a system that’s already in place, there’s companies that want their help desk to guard the trove and others where some people actually work on improving it continuously, so in that way it’s one little project after another - in-company.
From my perspective as an old school, low tech, face to face type of worker, IMHO it’s not because Americans are lazy, or even because there’s a bias against tech, it’s because tech (as most people define it) turned out to be a boom-and-bust industry.
In the 1960s and 70s “computer science” people were trained to work on huge mainframe computers. Then desktop computers were invented and all those people with mainframe experience weren’t wanted anymore.
A few years later there was a big boom in networking all those desktop computers and “information technology” graduates were heavily invested in learning how to build and manage those networks, and connect them to the Internet. Then the dotcom boom blew up and those people got laid off.
When the entire economy went south in 2008, it took tech jobs with it.
When you’re going to college, particularly when you’re going to graduate school, you’re supposed to get skills that last a lifetime. The people who got marketing degrees seem to keep floating from job to job, while the technology people are told that their five-year old degrees are obsolete.
I’ll add that many companies lie about the availability of American workers in order to hire H1B workers a lot cheaper. Meanwhile my American tech worker friends complain about the high unemployement rate in the field.
The other side of that same coin is the disappearance of training and skill improvement in ALL American companies, not just IT. Companies used to hire you and then train you to do different jobs. Now they don’t want to have to bother with this and treat employees as disposable cogs.
It’s true that technology changes mean that technology skills become obsolete, but if you keep up with the latest technology, you can continue to be employed. Technology changes have changed all sorts of jobs, including marketing. It used to be about print and broadcast advertising but now is much more about online advertising. And there is a lot of highly targeted marketing going on now, using vast databases of consumers.
I agree with that in theory, but in practice hiring managers want some “official” credential, particularly in the more technical specialties.
Don’t forget the 2001 dot com crash.
The thing is, marketing theory doesn’t change that much over time. There might be new technologies and channels to connect with people and new trends, but I think basic marketing skills from 1983 are more or less relevant in 2013. You cant say the same about computer technology.
Plus certain skills are more transferable (or bullshitable) than others. My project management experience can be applied to nearly any sort of project. I can apply my knowledge of SQL Server projects (or even civil engineering projects where I learned PM skills) to managing an Apache Hadoop implementation. But to be the technician who actually implements it, I would need to actually learn the software.
Large companies still train. But what I’ve seen in the past decade is that the “training” tends to consist more of team building or culture building. Companies don’t seem to want to train for technical skills.
Then again, a lot of corporate jobs don’t seem to require any “skills” besides putting bullshit PowerPoint decks together or taking meeting minutes.