Tech-Savvy Workers Increasingly Common in Non-IT Roles (betanews.com) 124
An anonymous reader shares an article: IT professionals are becoming an increasingly common presence outside of the traditional IT departments, new research has found. According to CompTIA, it seems executives are calling for specialized skills, faster reflexes and more teamwork in their workers. According to the report, a fifth (21 percent) of CFOs say they have a dedicated tech role in their department. Those roles include business scientists, analysts, and software developers. There are also hybrid positions -- in part technical, but also focused on the business itself. "This isn't a case of rogue IT running rampant or CIOs and their teams becoming obsolete," says Carolyn April, senior director, industry analysis, CompTIA. "Rather, it signals that a tech-savvier workforce is populating business units and job roles."
Well, yeah. (Score:4, Informative)
Computers and technology aren't the scary dark areas that they once were. "Tech" is everywhere and now that a couple generations have grown up on it, they don't know a world without it. Of course more and more non-IT people are going to be tech savvy.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
It's tougher to convince the government to not cave to lobbyists from CompTIA, and make things like Sec+ a requirement before you can lay hands on a DoD computer. The government (your tax dollars) ends up paying for many of those certs as well as the required continuing education. Someone needs to shut this shit down.
And, FWIW, I got my cert recently...worthless IMO.
Re: (Score:2)
IT department tends to be the low tech department in many companies. Seriously, there was tech outside of IT before anyone coined the acronym. IT departments formed in order to centralize management of computers (in corporation's hands instead of department's). Remember, R&D and IT are not the same thing. Even a company that uses skills and products very similar to IT still puts the R&D in a separate department.
Re: (Score:1)
That is not what it says...
IT professionals are becoming an increasingly common presence outside of the traditional IT departments,
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
E = MBA squared.
Re: (Score:2)
E = MBA squared.
E != zero x zero
Why is it always the workers that need skills? (Score:2)
When, if ever, will we reach the point where the executives themselves need specialized skills?
Re:Why is it always the workers that need skills? (Score:5, Insightful)
When will we reach the point where we don't even need executives?
Fixed that for you.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Never.
If you have ever seen how a company without strong leadership works you will realize the issues. I would take strong but incompetent leadership over a group of highly intelligent people who each have no authority (real or implied). The former MAY result in disaster but lower level employees can try to prevent disaster. The latter WILL result in disaster (or more likely a bunch of nothing happening) and the only way to advert disaster is basically for a de facto "executive" to materialize... resulti
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds like that's a job that's ripe for automation, then. You say that the requirements are even highly generalized and not domain specific. If you could only just remove the propensity of executives to put their own interests above the interests of the company, you've already got a winner. If the executive program (maybe a machine learning implementation, but probably just ceo.pl) makes fewer irrational decisions, then all the better.
And without the need to pay the CEO and upper management, you've got
Re: (Score:2)
While many CEOs are overcompensated, what a lot of folks don't realize is that they're compensated for bringing in new business. You get that by networking, having a big ego/personality, by golfing with other executives, etc., etc. That's not going to be automated anytime soon.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like to mod that up as "BRILLIANT".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Oh, that's cute. Executives don't have skills.
Many executives have proven that they in fact do not have skills, nor an understanding of the business they are in, nor the market into which they sell their products or services. That's why companies go under and get bought out by a superior competitor all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Not disputing, but...
M&A (mergers and acquisition) is intentional, and done to "grow the business". Many smaller companies are set up with the express purpose of making them buyout candidates in order to enrich the founders. We see a lot of this in the defense industry, where connected military officers retire from the service, start a company, getting preferential business as veteran/small business owned, and then sell that off to the major contractors after just a few years. This gives the larger c
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
This really begs the question, why does the executive cost $800 an hour, besides the obvious cronyism that occurs in boardrooms?
Have you seen the prices on yachts these days? It's difficult to keep up with the all the other CEOs at the yacht club.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If that $800/hr exec can land a billion dollar contract, would you not hire him? He could take that business somewhere else if you don't. Most of the basement boys here don't have a clue when it comes to winning contracts or bringing in business because they're too busy whining that others are overpaid. FWIW, I work on a lot of proposals, so I do see a bit of it. And granted, some of these execs are certainly overcompensated. You're welcome to call it cronyism, others call it networking, deal making, e
No wonder here (Score:2)
What you want?
Be bogged down in ~85k mid-to-senior dev position,
Or ~85k mid-to-senior analyst position?
On the first one, you will be doomed getting shit from MBA types for the rest of your career,
On the second, you will be giving shit to MBA types for the rest of your career
Hmm... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
In two years there will be a spike in demand for 50 year old IT workers with a certificate and no relevant work experience.
Not 2019, but 2030. Baby boomers will be retired, retirees will outnumber workers (tax base), and two-thirds of the federal budget will go to Social Security/Medicare. Taxes will have to go way up. The IT industry will have a 1.5M+ shortage of skilled workers.
Re: (Score:2)
African staffing firms will be churning out IT workers by 2030. There still won't be any jobs for Americans.
The economy is full employment (take with a grain of salt). Construction trades have a shortage of skilled workers, as older workers retire and foreign workers go home. If you want to build a house, good luck in finding workers or pay more for the privilege. That will have an immediate impact on the economy. It will get worse in the future as our population ages. Young people around the world may not want to come America when they can stay at home and build their own country.
Re: (Score:2)
A pathologically insane narcissist [...]
You're confusing me with Donald Trump. And, yes, full employment will be Trump's problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Blizzard is going to add that job class in the next update. Undead has a racial boost, too.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder where virtual ditch diggers fit in with all this?
I recently watched some show whose identity I forget which had a segment on a company developing self-driving trucks. The company had one driver. And a company developing a backhoe that trenches for you is going to need one operator. They're going to find the best operator they can find who can fit within their corporate culture, and then they're going to put the human operators out of business.
Of course, that's a complex job and we're farther away from having that than self-driving OTR trucks. But perhaps
Re: (Score:2)
You might even be allowed to carry less insurance if you use an automated trencher that checks with the utilities automatically before it starts any trench, and which does that kind of sensing to back it up since the maps are commonly wrong anyway.
You're supposed to call 811 in Northern California two days before you start digging to have the utility locate the lines for you. Of course, that's for the known stuff. My father and I were doing a construction job in Chinatown (San Francisco) in 1989 when the backhoe operator broke into a ceramic sewer pipe. Took a few days to figure out the status of that the sewer pipe. Contractor cut out ten feet of sewer pipe and pumped the opening with concrete in to seal it off.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Paid less than the janitors, still desperately holding onto their notions of themselves as vital in some way, and entirely, sadly, delusional.
Janitors make minimum wage. I make 2.5 times minimum wage. Sorry to ruin your narrative, but a sanitation engineer doesn't get paid more than me.
Re: (Score:2)
At $7.25/hour x 2.5 = $18.125/hr
$18.125 x 40 x 52 = $37700/yr (your pay)
Google says...
One reason applicants may be lining up to become a sanitation worker is the pay. The starting salary is low, $33,746, but when you factor in overtime, it averages $47,371 in the first year. And after 5½ years, the salary jumps to an average of $88,616 dollars.
Time to switch careers?
Re: (Score:2)
Time to switch careers?
No, thanks. I like the shit that I shovel now.
Painfully missing the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
--Or is that "being the oblivious"? Maybe both?
Seriously-- ever since the CTOs and other higher ups put moronic HR people in that cant tell a wall power outlet from an RJ45 receptacle, and the endless pressure those drones have had toward ever increasing levels of "FUCKING ABSURD" they demand for entry positions, (you know, that whole "perfect fit" requirement bullshit?) IT people have been leaving IT in droves, and moving into other positions.
They dont just somehow forget how to be IT people though. So, naturally, those IT skills are going to start showing up all over the damned place.
But of course, those idiots cannot put two and two together. Rather than realize, "Hey! Look at all this tech savvy that is showing up all over the board!! Maybe our strict requirements for IT related positions REALLY ARE bullshit, like our IT people have been telling us for almost a decade now! Maybe there really *ISN'T* an IT labor shortage after all!!" like a sensible person who actually pays attention to what their employees tell them would-- they instead go full retard, and give bullshit answers like this one. "Oh, it's this YOUNG generation! They are just so naturally tech savvy!! We can just abuse this to fill the BLEEDING RAGGED HOLES in our IT chains, without paying extra for it!-- Naturally, that means our policies about excluding older workers are totally correct! GENIUS!"
Even though, the very people that are causing this shift in other professional roles, ARE THE VERY IT PEOPLE THEY HAVE BEEN LIQUIDATING, JUST TRYING TO FUCKING FIND JOBS.
It never dawns on them that this thing-- People with scary IT skills showing up doing other, totally non-tech related jobs-- is directly contra-indicative of their endless sob-story about why they "Desperately NEEEED" to keep bringing in H1B visa holders from professional diploma mills in India. You know, the whole "We can't find qualified applicants!" sob story? Yeah, that one.
Because nothing quite says "Lack of qualified tech applicants" quite like "Drowning in tech savvy non-tech workers."
Re: (Score:3)
Is it a chip on my shoulder, or is it just somebody telling you like it is, bro?
Seriously, how many want ads for tech positions that demand more years experience doing that work than the technology it is based on has even existed, or wanting skill sets that are so highly specific that at most, 5 people in the world would have them-- just because they want that "perfect fit?"
I am pretty sure that it is not an embellishment on my part to say it is "more often than not."
Re: (Score:2)
Is it a chip on my shoulder, or is it just somebody telling you like it is, bro?
Looks a lot like a chip from here.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How do you walk with that massive chip on your shoulder? Do you just walk around in circles as a result?
His comment resonated with me, so I'd like you to point at the part you disagree with. It's fair to say that getting angry doesn't help, but that doesn't detract from the point. Most HR staff is worse than useless. I have known notable exceptions, but I have known more ideal examples. It also doesn't detract from the other point related to tech hiring, which is the deliberate and intentional disqualification of qualified candidates for the purpose of bypassing hiring requirements, whether they be qualifying
Re: (Score:1)
A bit, yes. I DO get mad when people are obstinate pieces of shit who live in constant denial of reality. Why, do you enjoy being one? ;)
Re: (Score:2)
If I cried about all the ways the world was unfair I would drown and not have to worry about living in it.
Accept reality and absurdity. If you recognize the issue you're already ahead of them in the game.
Also, do not proscribe to their ignorance what is more likely malice. Remember, today it's "I got mine. Fuck you."
Re:Painfully missing the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were searching for applicants in the non-IT world, they'd be asking for NASA-certified brain surgeons who can operate on farming equipment.
Re: (Score:1)
It's also the requirement that IT only deal with IT stuff. If it's not got an RJ45 on it, you can't touch it!
IT is a cost center, so it's budget must be squeezed, but that means they can't do any projects for anyone else without a big cross department committee. Best thing to do therefore is to get that guy who left IT two years ago to have a stab at it, on a purely internal budget. Sure it probably won't be pretty, but after they've hacked it together on their own while carrying on with their normal work l
Re: (Score:1)
So this is what is going on.
Old school sysadmins and programmers are brutally meritocratic people and they have to be. IT is a field where your imagination can run away with itself; there are no physical constraints to how complex a program can get except memory and CPU cycles. Since there are no physical limits like pounds of concrete in civil engineering or pounds of steel in mechanical engineering, you don't have straightfoward inputs to the design process, or outputs. Producing a cost optimal widget
Re: (Score:2)
Here, I will explain it to you.
1) Corporate is always looking for ways to pay people less money/get more done with less expense, even when this results in terrible things happening (to other people.)
2) Corporate decides that IT "Just costs too damn much." Decides to do something about it.
3) Corporate notices that there is this potential way to replace those expensive local IT people with very inexpensive foreign IT people, but it has a caveat attached-- they have to try to fill any vacancies their firings c
Re: (Score:3)
Here, I will explain it to you.
As an engineering hiring manager, I'm always going to aim for the best value when I bring someone onboard. I'm always going to hire at the lowest labor grade necessary to get the job done...why would I pay more? Now, and this happens, if we're not getting qualified candidates at the job level we've posted, we'll bump up the compensation until we get what we need. If the market is saturated with IT workers, why would we pay premium wages for them? It's not about paying crap
Re: (Score:1)
He's just upset that you arent giving him any. He takes one look at your handle and thinks of nothing but ejaculation right away. He can't help himself. Just ignore him, and move on, because nothing will piss him off more.
Re: (Score:2)
Just ignore him, and move on, because nothing will piss him off more.
I don't take this personally. At the end of the day, Slashdot is like Twitter with so many random comments.
Re: (Score:2)
You tell us heavy creamer.
I wasn't invited. That's why I'm asking.
doesn't CompTIA sell "skills" ??? (Score:2, Insightful)
a report says that more people than those IT roles need to buy what CompRTIA is selling ??? am I reading this right?
how many generations now has CompTIA created pay-to-play artificial barrier to entry in the technology industry? burn them with fire
Re: (Score:2)
Hybrid professional career was great (Score:5, Interesting)
I got an engineering degree and certification, then was tossed out of work by a major recession. I went back for a CompSci degree and managed a low-level job in the then-new field of PC support, won a promotion to IT "coordinator" (manager w/o staff, because they were all rented on a project basis from the IT department) with the Waterworks for several years.
Then Waterworks remembered my engineering degree after 100 reminders and took me in as a construction-planning engineer, but I found my IT skills were key to the engineering job. I handled the drafting and GIS systems, was a lead on the project to bring in the new work-order system, was developing small solutions (tiny web apps, fancy VBA spreadsheets, etc) practically ever day. Heck, just knowing real SQL rather than trying to coax complex reports out of Business Objects was a vital skill for construction and maintenance management. It wound up being the last 20 years of my 30-year career.
I can't recommend this career strategy enough; it's more interesting than either IT or the base profession alone, and more secure than either, too. The hardest thing in IT is getting across the real user needs to the developers - and an IT-savvy member of the customers is always going to be the guy that's either handling the IT specifications, and usually the IT project management from the user side; or just throws their hands up at the IT bureaucracy and develops the solution themselves. (Some of my "small solutions" would up taking weeks of time and growing over years into >1000 lines-of-code; hated to do it, but IT bureaucracy would have taken even longer.)
So I tell people interested in IT careers to first become a nurse, accountant, engineer, technician, even lawyer - any profession that USES a lot of IT. Then add in IT, and you are practically guaranteed an interesting and lucrative career.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
After you built the equivalent of a school computer lab [...]
The hardware compatibility lab saved the company $30K per year in what they were paying for an outside service.
[...] wired the world's greatest LAN but nobody wanted to come to your LAN party.
When we were testing UT2003 and UT2004, I always selected a female character since everyone else — including the female testers — selected male characters. Being the only female character in deathmatch made it easier for everyone to flush me out of hiding when I gain too many headshots with the sniper rifle. My coworkers were frustrated to find out that I could run with the sniper rifle
Re: (Score:3)
Amazing you didn't think to spin your narrative as, you were the only tester who thought to test the female player models, and any womyn who ever played UT2 as a female should thank you for your due diligence.
I prefer playing female characters. If a guy tries to hit up on me, I simply tell him that I'm a fat white guy, watch him go into shock, and then kill him. That routine never gets old.
Re: (Score:2)
[...] hitting on you in some game [...]
Typically in RPGs. Bad enough that the NPCs do it, but the PCs can't take a hint. So I have to kill them.
Rogue Apps [Re:Hybrid professional career...] (Score:2)
That's a common problem. "Semi" IT people "in the field" get something practical up and going, but it's a potentially huge maintenance headache down the road.
The snag is that the "central" IT office usually doesn't have the resources to "do it right" from the start. They get more requests than they can handle, in part because many requests are
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You've my professional sympathy. Troubleshooting or migrating old tools written by someone who did not believe in documentation, who believed in source code as documentation, is one of the sources of my income. Forcing them to actually review the code with me and acknowledge that their code does not, and never did, do what they thought it did is something that has to be handled gracefully or they will engage in political backstabbing and otherwise poisoning the rest of the work.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I'm sure you just happened to meet this "tech" at a meeting, and he had perfect recall of shit he did 13 years ago just to be able to fellate you in a meeting.
The original tech left 13 years prior. The PCs that I replaced were replacements from six years earlier. Most of the techs have been on the job for 8+ years, including the tech who replaced those PCs six years earlier.
Re: (Score:1)
Business complains it has no money and goes away.
Later IT gets called to fix a bodged up solution and find the business have propped up a desktop as a quasi-server, wrote some strange code, and now expect IT to turn it into a managed, reliable service.
Really? This is how you're managing a few billion dolllars worth of assets?
N
Re: (Score:2)
The sad thing about these positions is this is really something IT should be doing. But with most of the IT department outsourced overseas, they can't provide this
I'm not surprised (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
While I despise the abuse of H1-B visas, a quick google will show that there are over 5 million IT jobs in the U.S. That puts the percentage of H1-Bs pretty low among the population.
Filtering resumes (Score:2)
Tech Savvy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this what we're calling people who are security nightmares for organizations now? The script kiddie who thought it would be fun to store data in Excel/Access files outside of company control and outside of the ERP? They thought it would be cool to store vital company data in multiple spots, so none of it matched and meant that all of the reports conflicted with each other. Is that what we mean by tech savvy?
Cool. Let me know how that works out for you cause I'm done cleaning up those messes.
COO: Hey did you know that Andy has a really cool report that shows our operational KPIs?
Me: Really? How's he doing it?
COO: I don't know but it's really nice.
Me: [goes to employee] Andy, how are you getting those reports for management?
Andy: Oh, I just setup a little Excel/Access/DB over here on this site and then I copy/paste some stuff into from application ___ and then manually fill in some of the other info as I get it.
Me: Oh, so you're violating company policy by storing that data separately and even outside of company control?
Andy: Yeah, I guess so.
Me: Well, I'd like to run a consistency check on the data against our DB. Can you get me a data dump?
Andy: Sure.
Me: [runs checks against production data]
Me: Hey COO, most of the data in Andy's reports are crap. There are serious data integrity issues. You shouldn't base any decisions on those reports.
COO: what? You need to fix this.
Me: No, I already provide the reports as you have requested. Those reports are based on the actual data in the system. Not something copied half-assed by a kid with no DB experience.
Re:Tech Savvy? (Score:4, Informative)
Andy got it done (Score:2)
Andy first went to the IT dept. They said that it would need to got to the planning committee to get budget, and then to IT management to have resources allocated, then be scheduled some time in the year after next because it was of no interest to the IT department.
Then Andy just did it himself.
Re: Andy got it done (Score:2)
Except he didn't go to I.T. first.
Re: (Score:2)
I have viewed it from his PoV. There was no request ever made for "Andy" to do this project. He did it on his own. No authorization. No get out of jail free card for breaking company policy. There was no deadline. There was no hole. He wanted to play around, was careless with company data and unknowingly exposed sensitive information to people outside of the company. He should have been terminated on the spot.
Just because you can memorize a test bank (Score:2)
Flipping Burgers, Cleaning Toilets... (Score:2)
I am sure there are lots of jobs that IT people ended up taking when the bubble burst...
I knew it! (Score:1)
Every walking grannies in a suit and Facebook loving officers are really secret IT's.
They install Linux, use encryption, browse through security channel and most of all backup their files all the time!