The IT slowdown

[gobbledonk]

Guys,

 

Any thoughts on how much longer this is going to last ? The stockmarket here in Oz is sitting on its hands, waiting to see what happens in Iraq, and I get the feeling that a large number of businesses are doing the same ....

 

I can live with the fact that we need to revise our salary expectations (not that they were ever sky-high in BrisVegas ..), but surely the train has to leave the station re new projects sooner or later ? My last employer has gone into a 'holding pattern' : the remaining developers are expected to do nothing but patches and doco for the remainder of the year. Talk about an admission of defeat on the part of the sales team - I dont know how they can continue to accept their paychecks in any conscience.

[Tiger Moth]

I work for a firm that does IT consulting, application outsourcing and so on. I recently read a state of the industry for firms like mine and it was rather negative. The indication, consistent with your scenario, was that there would be less business for firms like mine than the resources available to handle it.

 

Living in the US, I am really under the impression that the high potential for a war with Saddam/IRAQ has put the damper on the economy for the last few months and continues to do so. I think people deal better with almost any circumstance than they do with waiting around for something to happen. I don't expect circumstances to improve until Saddam/IRAQ is invaded and the situation is under control and looking good (my assumption is that events will not occur so that an invasion does not take place - although I wish they would). Naturally, all sorts of terrible things could happen after an invasion and the potential for terrible things is what seems to keep people, corporations and the economy down.

 

All in all, I guess I am "down" with regards to current circumstances, like most everyone else.

[gobbledonk]

TM,

 

At the risk of repeating a story that some members are all too familiar with, I pulled this from The Australian :

 

No experience please, this is IT

Simon Hayes

January 28, 2003

 

TWO demoralising years of job hunting in a difficult market have led Phil Brown to conclude a surplus of age and experience is putting him at a disadvantage.

 

With 25 years in IT sales, Mr Brown resigned from his position two years ago at a major systems integrator and found it "extremely difficult to get back in".

 

Part of a growing - but often unrecognised - line-up of experienced IT people who have been unable to re-enter the business, Mr Brown has dedicated himself to training and skills improvement as he seeks work.

 

Anecdotally, it seems older IT workers are finding the bleak employment climate more difficult than younger people with fresher skills.

 

There are stories of people who have sent out hundreds of CVs, and even one who has gone overseas to work as a ski instructor after failing to find work in Australia.

 

 

I concluded after 90 applications that having grey hair makes it difficult," said Mr Brown, who has turned to working nights and weekends at a market research firm to support himself. "It's amazing how long it takes to feed yourself these days."

 

Mr Brown said inflexible attitudes of employers and recruiters meant older workers who had seen it all were not having their experience recognised.

 

"I go to a company with years of experience, and they say this technology is all new," he said. "It's just stuff that has been around for a long time, in a new form."

 

The generalist backgrounds of many older workers also put them at a disadvantage.

 

"The old guard are seen as useless because they're generalists," he said.

 

Some are intensely bitter towards recruitment companies.

 

"I wish we could get rid of the recruitment industry - they are nothing but parasites," said Steve Hughes, an 18-year programming veteran. "I kept getting told by these rotten little kids in their early 20s that I didn't have enough experience."

 

Mr Hughes packed his bags and left Australia after reading about job opportunities in Ireland. Within weeks he was offered an "absolutely brilliant" $80,000 a year job in the north-west county of Donegal.

 

"Languages didn't matter - it is the experience they are after," said Mr Hughes of Irish recruiters. "I have an absolutely brilliant job chucking data across the Atlantic, using technology those idiot recruiters in Sydney told me I couldn't use because I didn't have enough experience."

 

Mr Hughes' wife and daughter have stayed behind in Sydney, and he wants to return home, but he faces difficulties.

 

"One recruiter told me the client was transitioning VSAM to MVS," he said. "She didn't know what the acronyms meant, and then she said I had no experience."

 

Olivier Recruitment Group managing director Robert Olivier has heard it all before, and defends the recruiters from their critics.

 

Many employers preferred younger staff because they were cheaper and had fresher skills, he said.

 

Whilst I acknowledge that the media zero in on the extremes, I dont think its too far off the mark. I particularly relate to the frustration with recruiters, and the woman who didnt know the meaning of VSAM (a file access method) and MVS (IBM's flagship mainframe operating system) is a classic. If they are going to make a living recruiting IT people (the vast majority specialise in IT recruitment, a legacy of the 90's boom), shouldnt they have some understanding of the jargon ?

 

I was surprised to read that one of these guys found a good job in Ireland - my impression was that the boom had ended there and their IT industry had come to the same dead calm as it has in the rest of the world.

[Guest]

The stockmarket here in Oz is sitting on its hands, waiting to see what happens in Iraq

 

I've heard this argument for pretty much everywhere, but guess what? The Iraq resolution, whatever it may be is not going to be a quick fix. Before people were waiting to see what happened in Afganistan and in the future people will be sitting on their hands waiting to see what happens in N Korea. There is going to be global uncertainty and it is going to take time for people to get used to the collisions taking place much like they had to get used to the cold war. I kind of view what's happening as "the meek will inherit the earth, but let's see how meek they are once they get it".

 

I think the biggest impact on the IT space is going to be cheap labor abroad. First, the factories moved to the developing world. Now you are seeing such attractive IT pricing from places like Russia and India that they will be getting a lot of the business and driving prices down. You can say the quality may not be as high, but that hasn't stopped any other industry from moving to cheaper countries and the modern countries IT quality iis not that good (often not even a priority) anyway.

 

[gobbledonk]

ER,

 

I hate to say it, but I agree with you on both counts. The world is becoming more chaotic, not less so, and software development has become a commodity, subject to many of the same market forces as other industries. I disagree re the importance of quality, but I have to admit that we dont have a sensational record in that area .... When things started to go bad at my last job, the first person shown the door was the Quality Manager.

 

The commonly held vision for the future (present?) is that the high-level design will be done by the hotshots back at head office, and the grunt work farmed out to the lowest bidder in whatever country has the slackest labour laws, ala the garment industry. Anyone who has ever coded from a tech spec knows that it is rarely that simple : there is always something which has to be clarified and even altered if it is to actually work. This is where the Indians have an advantage - their English is very good, on the whole. All is not roses for the outsourcers, however - there have been rumblings of discontent from many of the Indian workers for a few years now : they arent happy about being paid 1/4 of the salary of the guy they replaced back at HQ. And so it goes ...

 

The sad thing about software devt in Oz is that we had the opportunity to be globally competitive in IT by virtue of our favourable exchange rate, but consecutive pollies just cant come to grips with the fact that you dont have to rip

something out of the ground to make export dollars. About the only thing we export in this area is our best and brightest computer scientists : they become part of someone else's think tank.

 

Development is only one part of the IT picture, but it does tend to drive the other jobs : sales, support, business analysis etc. Lets hope things pick up at some stage in the coming year.

 

 

[steffi]

I'm currently in in the UK and I'm in IT too. Well not these days it seems. Things are stagnant over here too. Time to really investigate possibilities outside of the IT. I may be heading to Melbourne soon if things don't work out here or perhaps Thailand (my wife is there) but otherwise won't be hanging around the UK much longer.

[gobbledonk]

Hi Steffi,

 

I dont know that things are really any better in either Melkbourne or Thailand. Do you have any anecdotal evidence re IT in Ireland at the moment ?

[Guest]

It sounds like the IT industry needs to run another Y2K scam to get the gravy train running again

[Guest]

The year 2038 will be a big one because the unix date format breaks down. Even some Windows apps are susceptible as it comes from a standard part of the C language. Unix guys know about this and before were downplaying it as "we've got 40 years to come up with a solution". It will probably get a lot of attention in 2008 as 30 year mortgage projections start running into it.

 

I don't think IT is all doom and gloom though. I'll bet it is creating more jobs than most other industries and there's plenty of opportunity to earn a good living from it. I expect lots of board members are doing just that.

 

[Nervous_Dog]

Ireland is in slow down, mates laid off there as well.

 

Move to a lateral field, get into software support for broadband, my area, we are still looking for people, in Thailand of course we want thais, but thats still a growth area.

 

Segments of teh software industry will still grow, and are growing, but its only a few bright spots.

 

Companies that sold hardware and Maintanance agreements now looking for new areas to move into.