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Skills Shortage?
I spotted this advertisement while riding the Tokyo Metro (subway):
Basically the advertisement is promoting the ready availability of skilled system engineers and programmers with COBOL experience, with a Web link to find out more about hiring them for short-term or long-term work.
Joe Clabby has some thoughts on the "skills shortage" question. Synopsis: if there are talent shortages in certain countries, those shortages are not unique to mainframe-specific disciplines.
I agree. I remember well the late 1990s, at the height of the dot-com boom in the U.S., when big city radio stations carried breathless advertisements promising skilled IT workers $100,000 signing bonuses and the like. My employer experienced record levels of employee attrition in those years. My college roommate became a paper multi-millionaire overnight. (And at least somewhat less multi a few months later, but that's another story.) I was wondering whether I should also join the attrition bandwagon, as any rational person would.
To the nearest percentage, 0% of that surge in IT salaries and benefits had anything to do with mainframe-unique skills. Yet even at that time, you could find supposedly smart people preaching doom and gloom about mainframe skills shortages, all while the prices of LAN administrators and HTML authors rose into the stratosphere.
In reality, there's never a "shortage": salaries and benefits reach an equilibrium to balance supply with demand in each discipline at any particular moment in time. So I'm not sure why so many people talk exclusively about supply-side shortages. Why don't people talk about the shortage of employers willing to pay $1M per year to their C++ programmers or network firewall administrators, for example?
As a sanity check, is your company increasing COBOL developers' salaries at rates above general wage inflation? Usually the answer to that question is an emphatic "no." Possibly the answer to that question should be "yes," particularly if those developers' productivity is improving, which is typical (and valuable).
Also, why do people think that the supply of talent is fixed? Believe it or not, many people can learn PL/I programming for example, and many comparatively quickly. IBM keeps making it easier to cross-train; as Clabby points out, the uniqueness of mainframes from a skills point of view continues to decrease. And as Clabby also points out, IT professionals in many countries are eager to learn new skills in order to enhance their marketability and career prospects.
What are you seeing? What are the salary and productivity trends in your organization? If you have a mainframe-unique skill, are you getting paid more this year?
| by Timothy Sipples | August 1, 2008 in People Permalink |
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Comments
I was a mainframe Systems Programmer who worked with VM, VSE, MVS and OS/390 for over seven years. I moved away from supporting the mainframes and have been designing solutions in the midrange arena for the past seven years. I have worked as an Infrastructure Architect because of the breadth of experience I have with Networks (LAN/WAN), Storage( SAN/NAS), Servers ( SUN, HP, IBM, DELL) and virtualisation with VMWare. I have not had hands-on experience with the z-series mainframes. z/OS I believe is not too different from OS/390 and USS. Why does a Mainframe Architect need to have worked with z-series in particular? The fundamental architetcure has not changed since the S/390 except for 64-bit addressing?
Posted by: VKW | Oct 9, 2008 3:21:12 AM
