We have all seen the headlines lately regarding the H1-B visas, with lobbyists testifying at Congressional hearings about the need to expand the number of H-1B visas and thus the number of qualified workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. One of the leading proponents of expanding the program is Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, who testified to Congress about the need for more “innovation” in the United States.

“While America’s innovation heritage is unparalleled, the evidence is mounting that we are failing to make the investments in our young people, our workers, our scientific research infrastructure, and our economy that will enable us to retain our global innovation leadership,” said Gates. “If the United States truly wants to secure its global leadership in technology innovation, we must, as a nation, commit to a strategy for innovation excellence – a set of initiatives and policies that will provide the foundation for American competitive strength in the years ahead.”

Top on his list was strengthening educational opportunities for US school children. But next was “Revamping immigration rules for highly skilled workers, so that U.S. companies can attract and retain the world’s best scientific talent.”
However, Norman Matloff, professor of computer science at University of California – Davis, disagrees with the notion that foreign workers provide “innovation” to the United States. He recently published a study, H-1Bs: Still Not the Best and the Brightest, arguing that foreign workers are “are people of just ordinary talent, doing ordinary work. They are not the innovators the industry lobbyists portray them to be.”

Other controversies surrounding the H-1B issue include fraud assessment, which has been spearheaded by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). In 2007, Grassley partnered with Senator Dick Durbin (R-Ill.) on a bill to overhaul the H-1B visa program.

This controversy has been in the news for months, but what does this mean to you? Are you an IT professional who is having a hard time finding a good paying job, or are you a recruiter having difficulty filling positions? Do you think this is just anti-immigrant hype? Please share your thoughts.

The people I speak with about virtualization projects always list the same reasons for going virtual; they don’t have enough space in their data center to add more physical servers, they can’t afford power and cooling bills, they want to consolidate physical machines, and they want to consolidate physical people.

That’s right; the majority of people I speak with - employers and employees alike - say nonchalantly that they deploy virtual machines to avoid deploying more IT staff. While this is great for corporations, it doesn’t sound so good for IT job seekers.

A few examples; I went to a VMware Inc. User Group meeting in Boston on March 27, and one user gave a presentation about the virtualization project he oversaw at the paper manufacturing company called SAPPi in Maine.

“One reason we wanted to virtualize is we needed to lower our IT headcount. We needed to get rid of high end support and just keep desktop support,” the systems engineer/presenter said.

Similarly, at the growing law firm Owen Bird Law Corp. in Vancouver, British Columbia, Stephen Bakerman, the sole IT staffer, went with Virtual Iron virtualization to avoid adding more physical servers and having to hire more staff to help him manage it all.

“The cost savings is probably $100,000, and the time savings for me are incredible. Once everything is virtualized, I can run everything from my desktop remotely from my office or at home. I don’t have to hire someone else, and I would have if we kept adding servers,” Bakerman said.

Another company called QualComm Inc virtualized 60% of its data center environment and saw a similar side effect. At the VMware Virtualization Seminar Series in Providence, RI Feb 26, VMware presented a case study of the wireless technology company showing how it started with 1,200 servers and consolidated down to 100 (12:1 ratio) physical servers, increasing data center space and cutting back on power and cooling. That’s great. And the cherry on top? They have not had to increase their IT staff at all in 2.5 years.

Sure, I get how cool virtualization is, and the benefits it brings from a savings and management stand-point, but is anyone else concerned those IT college kids who dream of days spent engineering systems won’t be able to find a job? or is anyone worried about those system administrators who might get consolidated from many to few along with their servers?

I’m interested in hearing from IT folks; is virtualization leading to a virtual job market?

It’s not often we see malevolent, movie-type plots played out in IT departments, so check this out: Reuters reported that a computer systems administrator was sentenced to 30 months in prison Jan. 8 for trying to sabotage his company’s servers out of fear he was about to lose his job — the longest ever federal prison term for a criminal attempt to damage a computer system.

The former sysadmin was also ordered to pay $81,200 in restitution to his former employer, pharmacy benefit manager Medco Health Solutions Inc.

According to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, Medco administered prescription benefit plans and maintained customer healthcare information on databases using an HP-Unix computer 2 system comprised of approximately 70 servers. The servers also included corporate financials, pharmacy maintenance tracking, web and pharmacy statistics reporting, and the employee payroll input.

As a system administrator, Lin had access to the Medco servers to perform maintenance and run applications.

The 51-year-old Unix pro admitted he modified computer codes and added code to create a “logic bomb” designed to wipe out servers on Medco’s network in October 2003, reports said.

At the time, Medco was restructuring and Lin reportedly feared he might be affected by layoffs.

A vindictive Lin modified and inserted code into pre-existing scripts on the Medco Servers designed to to delete nearly all of the information on those servers. The “Destructive Code” was designed to delete information including databases identifying subscribers, plan coverage, prescription administration, and billing data on his birthday, April 23, 2004.

But on October 6, 2003, Medco laid off four system administrators in the Unix group, but — get this — Lin was not one of them.

But he didn’t let a little good news get in the way of his plot. He left it in place, but the code failed to deploy as planned, so he edited it to go off on his birthday the following year, 2005.

Lucky for Medco, the unauthorized code was discovered by another computer administrator in January 2005.

All joking aside, this is really disturbing, not only because Lin took advantage of his power, but because clearly he didn’t consider all of Medco’s patients whose prescription information would be lost, and the potential harm he was doing not only to “the corporate machine” but to actual people.

Reports show that employee misconduct and unintentional actions like errors and omissions are the greatest cause of data security breaches, so I hope companies like Medco do some serious screenings for criminal minds before hiring people who will have access to our personal data.

In a follow-up to a System i Network story about women in IT, blogger Chris Maxcer asked the audience if they would recommend information technology as a profession. The large majority of people said they would advise against it. One in particular said they would probably suggest that a young person get into plumbing rather than computing:

Recommend an IT career? No way!! I was in 3rd grade back in 1981. Back then everyone was saying that computers were the future. If you could learn computers, you would be in great demand and be rich rich rich!!

Hmmm, who would have known that plumbing would have been a better choice. I know that a plumber makes more per hour than I do. I have been continually learning new technologies for 20 years. It’s either learn or die in this field. A plumber learns his trade and nothings changed too much over the last 1000 years of plumbing.

What about you, our readers? What profession would you recommend to your children today over IT? Or if you would recommend IT, why?

A couple recent threads on the IBM mainframe listserv have me thinking that being in IT isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.

First there’s this thread, which mentions a New York Post story about a former IBM exec tired of the corporate life who decided to make a career change and sell waffles on a SoHo street corner instead. From the story:

DeGeest began selling his flavorful fare in October - and said though he’s not matching his former salary, he is making a living off the treats while bringing joy to the masses.

“A waffle makes people smile,” he said. “I basically sell smiles.”

While the original poster wondered whether the career change was prompted by the upsurge in outsourcing, some had other ideas. One said, “Yeah but I bet he’s a happier man and doesn’t get hauled out of bed at 0200 to make a waffle!” while another quipped, “actually I think this is just someone who decided he’d enjoy selling waffles a lot more than the day-to-day grind if IT, and it appears he’s doing great at it.”

In the second thread, a member posts a job listing for a software support specialist. The kicker is that the pay is $20/hour, a salary that one poster deemed “starvation wages.” Again the issue circled around to outsourcing, as one poster said: “But you see, they have no intention of filling these jobs with one of us: this will go to a foreign worker on an H1B visa or simply be outsourced to the third world. They are just fulfilling the legal requirement to advertise the positions before hiring foreigners.”

In a trend reversal that first emerged in late 2000, salaries for noncertified IT workers now average more than pay for workers with IT certifications, according to Foote Partners’ quarterly IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index, which monitors salaries of 74,000 IT professionals in the U.S. and Canada.

“The corner has officially been turned for IT professionals who choose to market the diversity of their talents, not just their technical skills,” said the 23-page report by Foote Partners, a Vero Beach, Fla.-based IT workforce research firm.

“IT jobs have changed substantially in eight years. In another few decades, the IT organization as we know it today will be hard to find, and so will entire segments of IT jobs. The hurt that has been put on the marketplace reputation of skill certifications is only a drop in the pond of fundamental changes that will reform or destroy dozens of long-held IT industry conventions, beliefs and rituals,” said the firm’s co-founder, CEO and Chief Research Officer David Foote in a statement.

On a more extreme note, I recently wrote about an analyst who said IT department jobs may one day be obsolete because users are becoming more self-reliant.

While I don’t agree with this prediction, it is clear that the scope of IT careers is changing. It seems the biggest issue now is whether students who earn degrees in computer science are learning skills that translate into real-world data center jobs.

For instance, 29-year-old Aaron Sawchuk, CTO of Marlborough, Mass.-based ColoSpace explained how he went to Middlebury College in Vermont with the intention of earning a degree in computer science but switched his major to economics because his studies didn’t pertain to relevant technologies. The IT skills he needed to found ColoSpace he learned on his own.

According to a report from the American Electronics Association (AeA), 118,500 jobs were added to the U.S. high-tech industry between January and June of 2007, bringing the total to 5.94 million jobs. Even so, there is a clear shortage of skilled IT workers to fill those openings.

I am interested in hearing from IT staffers about computer science education. Are today’s college courses relevant to the technologies actually used in today’s data center, or did you feel like a deer in the headlights at your first data center job? If you didn’t go to school to learn your trade, how did you learn? What advice would you give a young person considering a career in IT? Leave a comment here, or send me an email.

I recently wrote a story about the state of high-tech jobs, which was based on a study by the high-tech industry lobbying group AeA. In this article, questions about how to advance the high-tech job market (in effect, the high-tech industry) were raised. Some experts argue that there is a skills shortage and that is at least one of the reasons the U.S. high-tech industry isn’t as good as it could be. SearchDataCenter.com readers were kind enough to send us some feedback about this article and share their insights. As always, let us know what you think by commenting on this blog, or send me an email to have your say.

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I liked your article but you should make clear the bias of your sources. The title makes it sound like there is a high tech skills shortage, which is a canard circulated by lobbying groups such as the AeA. The AeA mission statement says they are dedicated to the bottom line of their member companies, not to any kind of truth in journalism. Take your pick.The reality is: there is only a shortage of skilled workers willing to work long hours for peanuts and no benefits. There are millions of highly trained workers who will gladly work for a middle class salary and benefits.

You could improve your reporting by saying something like “Lobbying group claims skilled worker shortage” and possibly explain to your readers that although studies have shown there is no skilled worker shortage, hi-tech employers would like to replace their expensive American workers with cheaper foreign workers.

Sincerely,

J.M.

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Adam, please take a quick look at this blog, BLS-OES and NSF educational data — easy read about 1 1/2 pages.Post: Myth: Labor Shortage in Computer and Math

Link: http://immigration-weaver.blogspot.com/2007/10/myth-labor-shortage-in-computer-and.html

Regards,

S.K.

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A.’Archey believes that, at least for the moment, authorizing more non-citizens to fill high-tech positions would be a step in the right direction. “Policy makers currently need to reform U.S. high-skilled visa policy. We should be attracting, not shunning, the best and brightest talent from around the world, either through temporary H-1B visas or permanent employment-based green cards. Instead, the United States places arbitrary caps on H-1Bs and imposes a time-consuming, bureaucratic process on obtaining green cards.”‘

We have been saying that for 40 years now. At some point you have to realize that giving a heroin addict more heroin is not a reasonable stopgap solution.

B.

The implication that the H-1B program attracts “the best and brightest\talent from around the world” is laughable: http://www.cis.org/articles/2007/back407.html.

The data for Green cards is not much better. Still to be published.

jmm

The Press Release Newswire recently released details about a new mainframe job site, BestMainframeJobs.com, garnering attention for its usability and searcher/poster friendly interface. According to the article, the job site “uses AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to maximize the functionality and usability of the website.”

But there is one drawback so far – there aren’t very many jobs posted. Furthermore, the few that are posted appear to be in the Lansing, Mich. area. To be fair, though, the site just launched and it will take a little while for it to build critical mass. Also in their defense, the interface is pretty cool – there is no refreshing, just point and click to find what you’re looking for.

But still, check out the jobs posted:

Job title	Employer	Location	Date posted
Mainframe Systems - Intermediate	v2soft	Auburn Hills, Michigan	09/20/07
Mainframe Senior - application system	V2soft	Auburn Hills, Michigan	09/18/07
Mainframe (SR)	V2soft	Auburn Hills, Michigan	09/13/07
Mainframe Programmer	N/A	Lansing, Michigan	09/03/07
Senior Life Insurance Mainframe Programmers	N/A	Lansing, Michigan	09/03/07
Mainframe with java	V2soft	Farmington Hills, Michigan	08/27/07
Mainframe position	v2soft	Auburn Hills, Michigan	08/22/07

Those are all of them as of the posting of this blog. But I’m more will be on the way - BestMainframeJobs.com is offering a 50% discount on employers’ first post through October 31. Just use code JOBS07 when posting.

Without doubt, mainframers have been in need for a resource other than the job boards at Monster.com or Careerbuilder.com. I did a little perusing on Google for mainframe jobs and was only able to find a few articles. But a search on Yahoo proved to be a bit more productive.

First, there is JustMainframeJobs.com. This site has a simple Careebuilder-style interface and seems to adhere to the conventional tools for job searching - by location, by date, by keywords, etc. I did the default search, i.e. without the keyword or location fields populated and the date set to jobs posted in the last 90 days. The site brought back 15 pages worth of postings (291 posts) from diverse locations across the U.S.

Granted, as with most job boards, there are a lot of miscategorized posts and ads for jobs that you probably just don’t want. Another thing to keep in mind is that employers turn to job boards as a last line of defense, so consultant and IT career author Matt Moran told me in a recent IT jobs interview.

At any rate, to make a somewhat fair comparison between JustMainframeJobs.com and BestMainframeJobs.com, I set the JMJ.com filter to search for jobs from the last 14 days. This site returned over 50 posts - and from a salary standpoint, they didn’t look bad (at least compared to a tech journalist’s salary).

But I couldn’t stop there. More mainframe job board searching brought me to Dice, publishers of The Official Dice Technology Job Search Guide. Dice is not technically a mainframe-specific job search agent, but for all intensive purposes, I tried their services out to see how it worked. Their default search from the last 30 days brought up over 2600 posts. Again, discount maybe a third of those, but you still have a lot of organizations that need people. This (very unscientific) research adds fuel to once side of the debate about IT careers in general and to the mainframe job market in particular: one could induce that the evidence suggests a skills shortage, particularly on the mainframe.

However, without knowing how many mainframers are out there looking for work who are willing to relocate for the sake of their mainframe careers, it’s difficult to draw even a remotely solid conclusion. When SearchDataCenter.com runs its data center job survey sometime soon (word on the street is that it’s coming in the next 6 months) we might have a better idea. As an aside, I decided to test the writer/editor job market for something to gage the mainframe job market against. It turns out I went to school for the wrong thing.

With all of this said, what are your thoughts on the IT job market and job boards? How do you find new opportunities? Have you tried the ones mentioned in this post? If so, what are your experiences?

SAN DIEGO — Panelists from five colleges and universities started Tuesday morning at the Share user group conference by talking about their mainframe course curriculum.

The panelists — from North Carolina Central University, Estrella Mountain Community College, Illinois State University, Widener University, andMarist College — are all part of the IBM Academic Initiative, which encourages universities to teach mainframe skills to students.

The panelists were just five of 325 schools on the IBM Academic Initiative list that are either investigating or currently teaching mainframe-related courses. That’s 325. That’s a lot. Do you think there are that many mainframe job vacancies out there? Not everyone thinks the mainframe skills shortage is as dire as some make it out to be.

From the discussion that ensued during the panel session, it seems like the skills shortage is in information technology overall, not just the mainframe. There were a series of actions and consequences over the last seven years that led to meager computer technology programs in colleges and universities: the technology bubble burst, which caused jobs to dry up, which caused enrollment drops in computer-related college majors, which caused a dearth of courses and course literature.

But it also seemed like the schools were starting to build their curriculum back up again. The panelists were a good example of that.

One thing that was interesting was the structural differences between the mainframe curricula from school to school. Some have certificate programs, others have mainframe course tracks that are rolled into existing computer technology degrees.

Cameron Seay from the North Carolina Central University, for example, explained how its mainframe courses are really just a subset of business classes but that they’re looking “forward to expanding in the future.”

“We’re in the School of Business and don’t have as many technology courses as I’d like,” he said.

Gene Kim, founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc. and co-founder of the IT Process Institute, answers questions about what he believes are the most valuable skills in the data center job market.

Can the mainframe still drive a career?

Kim: Holy cow, yes! One of the best IT practitioners I know recently made the observation that his mainframes which had been providing him the most reliable and stable service were suddenly causing him the worst problems. When he started looking into why, he discovered that most of the experienced mainframe administrators had retired, and that the mainframes were now being administered by staff who had managed Microsoft Windows systems. As a result, the mainframes were treated like just another Windows workstation, to the extent that problems were being resolved by rebooting.

Many critical applications still run just fine on mainframes. We need people who are not only technically savvy, but who fully appreciate the consequences of what can go wrong in a complex and mission-critical systems.

What would you consider an emerging data center skill set?

Kim: I wish someone had told me ten years ago to spend two years working in internal or external auditing. 50% of the leaders of high performing IT organizations that I’ve studied have come from an audit background. It’s because auditors gain mastery over the most complex business processes in an organization, such as revenue to cash and supply chain processes.

Most IT folks never see these processes, yet these are transactions that must be processed reliably and correctly, or the business comes to a complete halt. Anyone who spends time working in these processes can’t help but gain an appreciation of how businesses run, and see how IT often makes them all tick.

I can’t seem to get myself excited about IT processes and controls. From a professional development perspective, why should I pay attention?

Kim: I used to say the same thing. Processes and controls — how boring! That is, until I started researching the differences between exceptional and mediocre IT organizations. What differentiates the best performers from all the others has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with processes and controls.

For example, according to a 2005 IT Process Institute survey, IT organizations with effective controls and processes are able to implement 8 times more projects; deliver and support 4.5 times more IT services to the business; support 6.6 times more applications and software; have 5.4 times higher server/sysadmin ratios; and authorize and perform 14 times more changes.

Individuals who can help guide the organization to figure out how to make processes and controls work for them to achieve business goals will be the leaders of tomorrow. Unlike technology trends that come and go like yesterday’s fashion, practitioners can build a career based on the certain universal truths about IT processes and controls that are sustainable. Black belt process practitioners will have the most exciting career opportunities ahead of them.