IT 'Profession' devalued

I think downwards pressure on wages is inevitable as it gets easier and easier to use foreign labour (and not just in the IT industry although it does lend itself well to remote working compared to many industries). In the UK we have this idea that wages just keep going up and up and up yet logically as the barriers get broken down you'd expect wages to equalise more between nations. That is of course a two-way street and an Indian colleague of mine tells me that IT wages in India have increased dramatically over the past 10 years.
 
franco_22 said:
The problem is, those "best shoring" nations like India for example which I assume is who you're thinking of do the job better than you do. :rolleyes:
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Well that depends who you ask, and what defines better. I know most accounts I've been on that have had the work best shored to South Africa, India, Mexico, wherever. The customers themselves have complained about the service after the transition and told us how much of a better job we did, but the higher ups are happy because they think they're saving money, and usually the work ends up back with us after they've screwed things up anyway. So no I don't think they do a better job than me in most cases, the problem is we just cost too much sometimes.
 
HangTime said:
That is of course a two-way street and an Indian colleague of mine tells me that IT wages in India have increased dramatically over the past 10 years.
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Yup. Companies have already started moving further afield.

From experience by the time an individual is useful, they're usually at a cost that close to being unviable (regardless of location). Often it's down to culture and how that fits which governs outsourcing locations now.
 
mark_t50 said:
So no I don't think they do a better job than me in most cases, the problem is we just cost too much sometimes.
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I don't know what you do, but there are some very smart guys out there - smarter than me, for sure, and I'm certainly not doing badly for myself thanks (recently won a recognition award at work).

But you have to work to find them. Hire any-old-joe-best-shoring (first time I've heard that term but it's just re-badged outsourcing so fair enough) and you'll get any-old-joe-mug worker who wants to make a fast buck and move on (employee turnover in the Indian places can be scarily high). However, spend the time and money to find the right people and you can get the reward (assuming someone else hasn't beat you to them).

That's why my employer now has their own offices in Bulgaria. They took the time to find the people and it has paid off. Used to have some people in Russia too though they were more mixed (some very good, some not so much). Only problem is the wages out there have now shot up because the best have been creamed off.
 
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Theres also the fact that even those with a mind for it need to have motivation. Id fall into the more technically literate but no professional bracket, and like Sirius says, when you move beyond basics or needs, it becomes apparent just how little 75% of people care. They will get others to do stuff, even easy, really easy stuff, because they dont want/cant be bothered to know.

Even considering boot discs(premade/packed), reinstalling software, or windows repair is beyond reach.
 
It also amazes me how many people are not that good at using search engines to find out technical information, (note I work in enterprise IT and not in the Microsoft space). I know people who are intelligent, computer literate and in senior support roles who still struggle to get information they may need as they just are not good at wording their searches. And once they have searched they are not good at interpreting the results.

Offshoring is even worse (in my experience) ...
 
Castiel said:
Who cares. Most IT techie types seem to know less than the person they are supposed to be helping most of the time or reading from a prepared script over the phone
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thing is, with that experience you can only be speaking to maybe a couple of percent of people employed in the IT industry.

At our place for example, we'll have the first line support, the call loggers. They know nothing about IT really, they just read from a script and log the details and pass you onto somebody else.

This is the people you've got experience of.

Beyond that however, is 2nd line support, and beyond that, the 3rd line support that deal with the infrastructure. As well as the basic support, there are development and implementation teams, all sorts of people who do actually know what they are talking about.

But we get paid far too much to be bothered to speak to end users however :D
 
Companies exporting jobs to India because they are willing to do the job for $2 per hour hasn't helped either.

You just can't compete against that which I why I've manuvered myself in to a live support role that deals with sensitive data - that role is NEVER going to leave the UK.
 
IT is one of the top earning professions. Development is the top earning profession, higher than lawyers and doctors. I read statistics from the states, rarely get any statistics on anything in the uk. But would be interesting to see stats for the uk.

I still do think that IT is under valued, even if not in monetary terms. A lot of the professions rely heavily on computers but treat support staff like crap and have no respect for them. They expect systems to function without a hitch and they don't want to pay for it. But soon the older generations of lawyers/bankers/(insert office job) will be retiring and then they will only be generations of people that know how to do their job on computers. Then if they fail or power fails they will struggle to do their job. Try asking these young lawyers to go back to paper and telephones and see how well they do.

So if anything IT jobs are going to more valuable as time goes on as more industries depend on it. Without IT the finance sector would collapse.
 
neocon said:
Indian's can do your job for less
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I found it quite amusing that our company recently announced they are closing one of the India software factories as they are off shoring the work to Romania as it's cheaper!
 
amigafan2003 said:
I found it quite amusing that our company recently announced they are closing one of the India software factories as they are off shoring the work to Romania as it's cheaper!
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Romania and Bulgaria are actually hotspots for IT. They spent a lot of money training their guys up in 2000 / 2001 just before the Dot Com bubble burst.
The net result was lots of trained, bored, unemployed IT people.
Suffice to say the swift rise in cyber criminality had nothing to do with it.
 
oldbag said:
So.... since the development of search engines and access to vast information on the Internet, has this contributed or will in the future contribute to the devaluation of salaries in the IT industry? Will the requirement for the IT techie-type person in the future be a little bit of knowledge and good search-engine skills?
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IT itself hasn't been devalued. As stated, the wages have changed due to the amount of people working in this field now.

Skills for 1st line are devalued as you don't need much IT knowledge for this role. Some people on these forums like me, do 1st/2nd line support so alittle more knowledge is needed but not too much. Basic diagnostic tools and knowledge can assist with 2nd line support.

I wear a shirt and tie for my job and I am thought of quite highly, however due to recent job cuts in the public sector I had to take on a media role, which has devalued my position in the company. People still value me as a good person and I hope to continue this way.

The problem for me is that I am running a full site, 2 of us for media and IT and it's coming a lot to handle, however I tick along nicely.
 
Berserker said:
I don't know what you do, but there are some very smart guys out there - smarter than me, for sure, and I'm certainly not doing badly for myself thanks (recently won a recognition award at work).
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Without a doubt, I wasn't trying to make myself out to be some 'Uber' IT genius or anything, there are plenty of people who know more than me out there, I've worked with some people who amaze me with the amount of knowledge they have, I've always managed to get on in this industry by improving my knowledge and identifying those area's where I think there is some future, at least for a few years and ensuring I move myself into those roles if possible.

So when 1st/2nd line helpdesk work was moved out I got into Field Services work, when that got outsourced I moved into Wintel server support, when it became obvious that anyone could do that work after a while I moved into Active Directory infrastructure support, as that moved offshore I went into SMS/Config manager/SQL infrastructure and operational support etc.

I've been quite lucky survivng some very big staff cuts up until now, and for some reason I do seem to be quite highly thought of (At least thats what they tell me to my face ;) )

I'm certainly not having a go at the people who work in other countries either and I'm sure there are many that are just as good, if not better than myself and the team I work with, I just wish my company would employ some because every outsource we've done where I've trained people up to take on our work, well they haven't been exactly brilliant, but maybe thats just my experience.

I do feel sorry for people just starting out in IT in this country, I don't think I'd be able to get where I've managed to get if I was starting out in todays workplace.
 
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