Study: Not all entry-level IT work headed offshore

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if you were an employer which person would you pick...

...would you hire someone that can dive in with a specific skill and talent right now, with the track record, who can solve your problem and make their customers happy today, or someone with degrees in many different fields with mediocre skills in many areas.

I mean, if I needed a c#.net senior software developer, am I going to hire a guy with a business degree who has some part-time exposure to .net languages, or a guy who focuses every waking hour fine-tuning and building enterprise level applications the past 5 years using that skill everyday on the job?

I agree completely, degrees matter and you have to have that to get in the door...no doubt. I also agree you have to be a generalist...absolutely, in some minor form. At our company we have to do hard core development, do sales and meet with corporate clients in boardrooms, have some management skills to manage projects and budgets, have copyright skills and write spec docs and modelled project charts, have business skills and use and evaluate new CRM technologies and implement those for clients and teams in-house. We have to network engineers and manage servers and DNS and implementation practices for third party products. We ahve to know XML and XHTML and c#, and older ASP and JAVA compilers, and Microsoft Office sutomizations and web parts. And tools and sub lanbguages like Flash and Actionscript 2 and streaming media encoding. We do all that. But as that diversifies everyday, we now leave the clients to the sales team, the business solutions to those guys that know how to install and implement and sell financial software and business services, and the hard core development of half million dollar apps to the hard core developers in our team. We all dip into each other "honey-pot" from time to time, but no one but our CEO has to know a little of all that. We have a young guy who has a marketing degree with a technology minor. He is so busy doing sales work and focusing on one small element of the IT industry that he never does development, dopesnt kinow the new technologies our app guys know, and can at best talk in generalities in selling that stuff. We also have a Powerbuilder programmer turned Implementation/Project manager. He used to be a great manager and programmer but hes now almost exclusively project/client manager and if you ask him about taking time off to build something, not knowing .NET he is no help to development.

Despite this dream of distilling Information Technology down to a single business person with IT skills and an army of Indians overseas, that will never happen. We will need more "specialists" in this field who are great one a core feild, and a minor in several others. All the other stuff you will pick up on the job as the need arises. If your passion is software, learn software tools and languages...noone Ive ever met knows all that and is great at all...specialize in one and learn the others to support that. I know about 12 languages, but I use maybe 4 everyday, and only the others when my clients call me. Thats reality!

If you love business, go into sales, marketing and get an MBA with a technology minor, but dont come to work thinking you will be a part of the JAVA or .NET fraternity...because you wont!

If you love networking, become an engineer and learn security practices and protocols inside and out...but dont expect to join the sales team on the side. You can love working with getting deals signed and assisting clients with the latest upgrades to their networks, but you better better be available at your network operating system when the new firewall is installed or your clients call when the Citrix server goes down because of a DOS.

You cant do it all....and frankly, dont want to! Thats the reality of Information Technoloy today folks!

Posted by: wildranger   Posted on: 07/16/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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