Tech jobs increase in June

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US Corporations better get ready to rethink what IT means to them...

Like Ive said many times here at ZDNET, United States Information Technology Professionals and the "professionalism" they bring to IT is currently being undermined by ignormant, golf-club wielding, budget-cutting upper level managers and CIO's in this country, who have lost all knowledge of IT practices and what it takes to build much less maintain solid US tech innovation in their companies and keep their once highly trained US technology teams happy.

They have been bombarding us techies with all this propaganda - written by technology ignorant online analyst groups - about offshoring IT to India and China and automation and how by 2010 30% or 3.4 million IT jobs will be permanently moved overseas.....thats not quite what I see unfolding. Nor is the Inoformation Technology profession so simple you can completely commoditize it into another industry, like business processing or enterprise level integration. Thats what we've been told will be happening the next few years, but its looking less and less like that, isnt it, with each passing day?

The fact of the matter is we will see a HUGE demand for IT as the years go by here in the US as businesses of all types continue to use technology as both the supporting and profiting "edge" to their companies. That technology, despite all the tools and automation predictions, will still require lots of IT people and talent to customize and integrate and build into the corproate framework. We are not talking about problems that can be easily solved and cheaply by simple programming tasks or call center people like as done by some 21 year old Indian student hopping from cubicle to cubicle looking for the next best job opportunity...we are talking a big demand for permanent committed, expensive, highly trained, innovative US IT talent with high skill levels in-house or in US IT service firms who know their stuff and can be onsite as needed! Who is going to do that? Who has the skills anymore in the US or even abroad to do tthis level of service?

In the mean time, we see US corporations have scared away all our kids from entering the profession. University enrollmnet is sharply down and young people frown on IT as a skill these days. Not only are more baby boomers with very high experience levels in IT software and management leaving the profession but allot of the INNOVATION people - that only the US tech field can generate - are being scared away into other professions where their creative talents are better utilized. What this is starting to show on job boards across this country is a a growing bottleneck for the upper skill sets, yet not enough demand for the tech "pups" or young guys who used to land the lower entry level positions, needed to gain the experience to meet future demand. What we are creating is a "bottle-necked" market place for IT where soon (when US CEO's wake up from their cost-cutting dreams) there will be a limited IT pool available in the US, but demand for all levels will be high. With limits on H1B's and less students graduating with computer degrees, and yet all entry level jobs continually shifting overseas, US companies will soon be paying and fighting over the few US technology professional left with the "goods" to do this type of work and salaries will certainly go up. India and China and other countries will be moving into those arenas but the level of demand for IT professionalism and innovation will be strong enough world-wide, I predict, that it wont be long before once again the US software engineer and infrastructure guys will be hot commodities once again. I read that in some cases Indian companies may even be looking here in the US for talent! At some point Inida will get smart and start setting up shop here and sell their IT service directly, bypassing EDS and IBM, and those companies will be undercut. At that point the desire to build US teams in that industry to compete for the talent here will be even sharper, I predict. By then it will be too late....

You can throw the automation equation and offshoring dream on the table and convince your CEO one more time that the best strategies lie with streamilining IT services in your company and laying off your next batch of in-house knowledge workers one last time this year....but eventually it will catch up to you. I work in IT and have been to allot of corproate boardrooms and its blantantly obvious how ignorant the CEO/CIO and business management world is as regards IT in their own companies and as well the rate of growth in dependence they are having as regards the practice of IT. They just cannot comprehend that despite automation and the tools, there is a huge cry in their companies for rampant customization and quality IT services that show some kind of ROI. They think they can shop and get it cheap, and that equates to quality. Instead they continue to undercut the very people and services needed to excel in that aspect of their business and as many are still learning, project-level failures in IT will continue to cost them dearly as they search for the quick fixes in India and China. By the time they come home looking to rebuild that here in the US it will be too late, and the price will be paid. And the few techies left in my field with the skills and quality-of-service attitudes and professionalism left carry the torch here in the states will certainly be making the big bucks and getting the respect they should have never lost...I say fire all the business people and lets place techies on the top of the management pile and when our world is swimming in data and IT services 50 years from now, lets compare those companies and their technology leaders with the pencil pushers of today...

Posted by: wildranger   Posted on: 07/08/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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