2CPU.com » News » November 2006 » Bill Gates Says West Not Supplying Enough IT Talent

The IT market have been making a come back as of recent times in U.S. after a long drought from the early turn of the boom. (2000)

Since I personally work in this market and most of the 2Cpu staff as well as other members of the site and forum. We know how very hard it has been to actually find work in the last couple years. Especially when people have been laid off from a market that they majored in.

However, The Chairman of Microsoft, Bill Gates seems to have a different point of view.

"Worldwide, a lot of the developed countries are not graduating as many IT students as they were in the past, which is kind of ironic as it does mean it does increase the opportunities," Gates said.

Could it be that; The market is already flooded with IT talent that can barely find work as it is? (Too much competition) Or, Could it be that market has already outsourced most of its work at the cost of cheaper labor rates? (Hello, India?)

There are a lot variables I can point out. But, I choose not to blog on this one. We'll save that for the comments section below.

Interesting reading here.

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MultimediaMan S3n10R D3s!gN 3ng!n33r Posts: 1490 Joined: 2000-05-12

#39395 Posted on: 11/09/2006 12:36 PM OK, I'll bite: I would agree that the Western World's market is flooded with IT Professionals. The real question is what kind of IT Professionals are in demand right now. Programmers are a dime a dozen: Web developers and coders are easy to come by (and damn useful to have). Database administrators are fairly easy to come by (and also useful to have), network engineers are out there, but not as easy to find (and are indispensable). Gone are the days of a one-size-fits-all IT geek. The Industry has specialized, and just like lawyers, doctors, and yes, even test pilots and astronauts, the industry has also gone the way of specialization. Two areas that have suffered as a result though are the Technical and Service sectors: these are the grunts of the IT world (and actually are responsible for doing the hands-on part of the work). Unfortunately, with the improvement of IT systems and the processes associated with it (comprehensive failure analysis, Six Sigma, etc...) this (expensive) part of the business is suffering huge cutbacks and outsourcing. Why? Because the IT Service sector is people intensive, it tends to be expensive. Because people are associated with it, it also tends to be error-prone. So quite a few architects are moving toward minimizing the impact of the service sector by A: Identifying issues and tracing them to root (or at least common) cause, thus eliminating them; Or B: building their infrastructure in such a way that it is not prone or possible for that failure mode to occur. This has turned the IT industry into a group of sharks circling around each other (IT Budgeting and Architectural departments), waiting for one to start bleeding (Bleeding money) - we all know what happens when sharks smell blood. The market is growing (capacity-wise), but it is actually shrinking (infrastructure maintenance-wise). Two words for you: Blade Servers. Look at all the ads on TV for Dell, IBM and HP Blade systems: these guys are not talking about machine capacity or performance anymore - any fool can get that anywhere. What they are hawking is ease of deployment and maintenance. HP even makes a Blade Systems consisting of Desktop-class machines (3U high with 24 PCs per chassis), designed specifically to be accessed via Thin Clients. This may seem odd to some, but to an Architect this really is an attractive solution on many levels - access, maintenance, support can all be minimized because the machine facing the customers are all solid state (no moving parts at all, except for the keyboards). Meanwhile, the PCs themselves are safe and secure behind locked doors in a controlled environment, with the service department only a few yards away... Hardware upgrades are simple: replaqce the blade. Onsite imaging can be done without a walk-up; things that used to be people-intensive such as a critical BIOS upgrade can be fully automated. The market is tight because we are so smart: we are working ourselves out of a job. Thus far, you have been adrift within the sheltered harbor of my patience. Heat All of my heatware comes from Transactions on this board. 2CPU.com is the only board I trade on. I can provide references from other board members on request.

slarson Registered User Posts: 101 Joined: 2006-07-05

#39396 Posted on: 11/10/2006 02:00 AM "There is a shortage of IT skills on a worldwide basis. Anybody who can get those skills here now will have a lot of opportunity," Gates said. BS. If you believe that, pick up your Sunday paper and compare the "Computer / Info Systems" (or whatever your publication calls it) section to ANY other one. Though I still work in IT for now, I'm glad I was only a CS major for one semester.

ianken SMP Newbie Posts: 8 Joined: 2005-05-27

#39398 Posted on: 11/10/2006 10:38 AM Programmers are a dime a dozen? That needs to be rephrased: "foofie script monkeys are a dime a dozen." Skilled coders who can deal with hardware, kernel level debugging and have solid theory to back it up are getting harder and harder to find as more and more students mistake slapping script on a web page with software engineering. For a company like MSFT (or Oracle, Sun, IBM, Apple, Intel, nVidia, ATI, etc...) that needs people with these types of skills filling positions with folks who can pass the interview process is getting very difficult. I've had alledged "C++ expert"s choke on simple questions about trees and linked lists. That's the kind of folks we're churning out nowadays. It's pathetic. If you are a kick-ass coder (sorry boys, jscript and vb doesn't count)you can get a job in an afternoon with minimal effort.

joekam Registered User Posts: 352 Joined: 2004-06-11

#39399 Posted on: 11/10/2006 03:49 PM He did say world wide, I guess he wants to outsource some more. :cool: K7D Master L MP + 2600 Computers I am addicted. Though I need none I have 3. Is there an AA version for us?

scythe Quad nutty Posts: 555 Joined: 2002-09-25

#39403 Posted on: 11/14/2006 12:30 AM You and I may not think that programmers are a dime a dozen or that good solid Infrastructure people are easy to come by but to the lay person anyone who says, "Yeah I can do computers." or "Yeah I build websites." is immediately considered an IT person. I don't know how many times I've been told that I must not be a very good at IT because I can't build a website. To the outside world IT is still a very infantile job field. Nobody before the upcoming generations understands that, much like doctors or surgeons, tech's don't all have the same skill sets or knowledge. Add to that the plethora of morons out there who say they can do what the customer wants and yet really don't know what they're talking about and you not only have an overabundance of "IT Talent" but it's very poor "IT Talent". I wish there was some kind of way we could regulate this industry, such as the BAR exam for lawyers, so we could weed out the true unprofessional and inexperienced asshats. Of course then some of us would lose an excellent source of advertisement. Our competition... - Q6600 @ 3.0ghz (333x9) - 4x1gb DDR2 800 - HD4890 - Asus Maximus Formula X38 - 150GB RaptorX - Antec P180v2 w/ 550w Real Power Pro -

2CPU.com » News » November 2006 » Bill Gates Says West Not Supplying Enough IT Talent