Title: Wanted: 1,000 years of IT experience!

Author: Alan Lenton

Date: 17 January 2007 20:31:41 +00:00 or Wed, 17 January 2007 20:31:41 +00:00

Summary: [16-1-2007] Is there really a shortage of IT workers in the west?

Body: The newspapers and the politicians would have us believe this is the case, as would many employers who use it as a reason to offshore work. And yet there are plenty of unemployed programmers around, many of them highly skilled, who are unable to get jobs.

Why should this be?

Well I suspect there are two reasons. One is that the phrase IT worker is fundamentally meaningless, because it covers too wide a group of people - potentially the whole working population in fact. Nowadays every one uses some IT, even if it's only a computerised till, in their work.

Even if we apply the term more rigidly there are still problems. There is, for instance, an over abundance of 'web designers', many of them self-styled, while we do have an apparent shortage of skilled programmers, to give but two examples.

But even that doesn't explain why there are good programmers who can't get jobs while employers are screaming about the lack of good programmers. The reason lies in the nature of programming skills and the failure of employers, particularly HR departments to understand these skills.

The essence of programming skills is that they are transferrable, and the problem is that adverts for jobs are much too specific. A typical advert will ask for things like three year's experience in C++, xyz variant, and experience of working with the wobbly operating system, preferably on wibbly hardware.

Any programmer worth his or her (mostly his, I'm afraid) salt who has a solid C++ knowledge could walk that job given a week or so to come up to speed on wibbly, wobbly, C++/xyz programming. But, they won't even make an interview in the current climate. As an old programmer once told me, getting a programming job is not about programming - it's about how well you can lie.

Lest you think I exaggerate, let me tell you a true story. Not all that long ago, I went for an interview as a C++ network programmer with one of the biggest games companies in the world. When I got there they gave me an written test. Half of it was about 'C' language 3-D games programming (remember this is for a network programmer job), the other half was a few trivial questions to 'test' my C++ skills. (Incidentally, a couple of the questions featured some extremely dubious programming constructs.)

I didn't get the job. And do you know why? Because I didn't have any prior experience programming the Xbox 360. At this stage the Xbox 360 had only been available for a few months. Also, as my CV made clear, over the last 20 years I've worked on nine different operating systems, and in over a dozen different languages.

Moving my skills to the Xbox 360 would probably only have taken only a few days - a couple of weeks at the most. Why do they think it's so difficult? The truth is that the people who interviewed me seemed to have little idea what skills they needed, and how my skills would fit in. At the time I thought it was just a one off, but friends and colleagues assure me it's all too common.

I'll leave you with a snippet from a job advert I once saw, which to me just sums it all up. "Wanted: C++ programmer to work for world renowned software company. Must have at least five years commercial C++ experience."

This appeared less than two years after the first commercial C++ compiler came on the market!

Notes: 

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