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July 21, 2005
Industry's mood swings
A friend of mine sent me a link to a Seattle Times story about a "mismatch" between industry's hiring needs and the unemployed people who are out there looking for work. The article says that there are 70,000 job openings in Washington state, but that at the same time, there are 180,500 people out of work. What's going on here?
The article quotes Bill Gates as saying that Microsoft is struggling to find "qualified" college graduates, while at the same time, several thousand local Microsoft jobs go unfilled.
The problem is that employers, having been burned by their own hiring mistakes during the Internet bubble of the late '90s, are now being so picky that they won't hire anyone.
Over the past 15-20 years, I've found it amusing how the technology industry swings back and forth between hiring in-house staff and using consultants instead. Pick up a trade publication like Computerworld, and you'll read it week after week. "We're going to have to rightsize our headcount and hire more consultants," executives will say. "Consultants have the skills to hit the ground running, saving us thousands of dollars in training costs." But just like the phases of the moon, you can count on a flip-flop a short time later -- stories will appear in the same trade publications, quoting the same executives: "We're going to have to wean ourselves off these consultants -- they're too expensive. We can save a lot of money by going with in-house staff."
I think the same phenomenon is at work with the tech execs' lament about "lack of skilled workers." They've become obsessed with resume buzzwords and forgotten that it's not all about what software tools you know -- it's about how well you can think and solve problems. Gates et al. use the perceived "lack of skills" as an excuse to move more jobs offshore -- until they find that the foreign shops don't have people with the communication and cultural skills needed to make good software products for the domestic market. At that point, the industry will have another mood swing and announce, "We need to wean ourselves off these foreign workers. They're not getting the job done."
Executives need to understand that running a technology business is not all about finding workers with the right buzzwords on their resumes and the willingness to work for $3.00 an hour. It's about hiring smart people who know how to solve problems. Technology companies still remember their hiring mistakes of the '90s -- but their mood has swung too far the other way. Will they ever learn?
Posted by Urbie at July 21, 2005 07:30 AM