What is in short supply is experienced, skilled developers willing to work third shift for minimum wage. These workers always will be in short supply. It's probably a waste of time pointing out that there are always enough workers if you allow wages to rise until supply meets demand.

That said, it makes me laugh (and cry) when employers cheap out and outsource to nominally low-wage countries, only to find their management and rework costs explode. When they figure out that outsourced labor won't work magic for them, and they try to rebuild their IT shop, they whine because college kids figured there's no point to a CS degree and switched to bioengineering. And surprise, the older workers remaining in the IT workforce don't want to work for entry level wages.

Oh well... As for the voracious hiring appetites of the body shops, they know some secrets that I will now share with you.

Aptitude is only a partial substitute for experience. This fact is completely lost on the young and apt, who won't realize for 15 years or so that they become more capable over time.

Experience is no substitute for aptitude either. There are a limited number of focused, analytical, abstract-thinking people in the world (thank goodness). Other folks can turn out awful code for a whole lifetime and never even realize how much they suck. We found out in 1999 that you can't retread poets and astronomers as software engineers. Even in Bangalore, there are only so many geeks. And the geeks in Bangalore know it too.

The dot com implosion was painful. I went from being the most employable person I knew to being chronically unemployed. That was scary. But the geeks are back.

The geek shall inherit the earth.

Wanna know the future of Microsoft? It is in the dirt. Why? Because they are hiring employees who can't type, don't know Windows, and can't even hook up a KVM. And, NO, they don't have any aptitude for the work, either. [excised by Reg moderator].

Productive people not only know how to write software, they also have some basic office skills. Like typing! And how to use the f***ing computer! And what do the managers do? They hire these people. Such is how companies rot and die.

Partially this is the fault of colleges, and partially this is the fault of companies. A college graduate in IT should know how to type. They should receive at least one real typing class! You have no idea how frustrating it is to assign someone a job and watch them hunt-and-peck for hours what should take a half hour to do. The managers should be requiring the candidates to have these basic skills. If the most basic of skills aren't there, then the person goes right back out the door.

Some companies do have a clue, and specify in the ads for at least 40wpm skill. What an idea! Standards!

When I get someone in to work, I expect them to be able to use the computer at the command line. I have seen too many who can hardly copy and paste! And yet managers welcome them in after some stupid interview questions. What is the point of the interview questions when they don't screen out idiots?

The purpose of the interview is to select an excellent person. Why do idiots routinely pass the interview? I can only conclude that the interviews are actually screening FOR idiots, and that the real hiring decision is based on non-professional criteria. Criteria which would normally get a company in trouble.

But, of course, those criteria DO get the company in trouble.

"We hired him because we liked him." Actual quote from a hiring manager at Microsoft.

When teams are filled with idiots, how can the goal be accomplished? Obviously the goal is either accomplished in a very poor manner or not at all. At some point somebody either goes in with a very large firing axe and clears out the deadwood, or else everything collapses.

I don't think that anyone at Microsoft is going to clear out the deadwood.

I suppose that means a rosy future for Linux.

We've all heard the funnies: 5 years experience in a language which didn't exist five years ago.

The whole jobs business seems to be full of people who forget the basics of advertising a job: where is it and what skills do you want. Maybe it's just that too much can be done by filling in a web-form, and there's no check by a human.

Yes, I know there's this thing called "Human Resources". Everyone makes mistakes.

My experience is that coders, sysadmins etc. fit into two categories. The hardcore geeks who will spend ages discussing the minutiae of some particular bit of syntax, and the more-widely-informed types who appreciate that their systems have to fit into a broader environment where regulatory compliance, authenticability and procedures are often more important than algorithmic elegance.

"What is your position on ensuring Sarbanes-Oxley compliance?" or "How would you respond to a RIPA/FOIA/DPA request?" are the sorts of quessies I ask of prospective employees. Alas too many respond with that open-mouthed stunned-circus-clown expression which guarantees they don't get the job.

Finding someone with the IT skills - but who also understands how IT is part of the greater business/operational environment - now that's the real problem. And the world will pay handsomely for those who know both the latest RFCs and the current case-law.

Keith is right to mention the agencies. Like, I assume, many others, I keep an eye on the lists in case 'the right job' should come up.

But all I seem to see are jobs that require all sorts of qualifications and many years experience - and all for the pay of a junior position straight out of college ! I look at many of them and think that surely they don't seriously expect anyone with even half of what they ask for to consider slashing their pay down to that level, so why do they do it ?

My thoughts are that too many people are, how shall I put it, 'over enthusiastic' when describing their skills etc. Consequently, I suspect the agencies respond by bloating the required skills to suit. So where does that leave an honest person, whose moral code does not allow allow them to apply for jobs that they don't have the skills for ? If you don't 'tell porkies' then there's no way you'll get past the 'has this candidate ticked all the right boxes' filtering process - so it's a waste of time to apply.

So the end result - all they'll get applying are people who can't do the job but have questionable ethics. Hence a lack of suitable candidates, and lo and behold, a 'skills shortage' is declared because they can't find the right people !

If anyone has any suggestions, please don't keep them to yourself !

I REALLY dread the idea of having to find a job. I've not had to go through the selection process for over 2 1/2 decades - in that time I've had my own business, and had two jobs thanks to someone who knows me and employed me, and later (when no longer with that company) put me in a company he had an interest in. Unfortunately that isn't going to happen again since he's passed on.

SInce I'm now (according to anecdote) well over the hill for IT, and morally disinclined to lie to get a job - I don't feel confident of finding anything else.

The skills shortage is artificially created by a concerted joined effort of the industry and the US/UK educational establishment.

The industry keeps insisting on the educational establishment delivering "practical skills" and "experience" and the educational establishment in the US/UK (it is not so elsewhere in EU) is actively accepting the message through its naso-rectal interface.

As a result CS majors graduate with pseudo skills like "rational process", "agile methodology" which an be learned in a week on the job or on a course and do not require a semester wasted on them. At the same time the CS graduates lack basic fundamental understanding of the driving principles behind the systems which they work on. The current crop of CS runts does not study optimal control or mass service theory. As a matter of fact they do not even study trivial math like probability theory and functional analysis. Essentially the UK/US educational establishment is taking bright kids and screwing their brains sideways as per industry demands.

From there on it is no longer surprising that Indian, Chinese and Continental Europeans get the jobs. They actually study all of that stuff in university as a part of their degrees and their educational establishment does not give a flying f*** about idiotic industry demands (at least for now). It is also not surprising that the highest CS achievers I have seen produced by the UK and US education system did not graduate with CS. All of them graduated with Physics, Math, engineering (different from CS) .

The only way to fix the problem in the long term is to shoot on the spot any manager insisting on hiring on "experience" (especially in the UK sense) along with invalidating any CS diploma that is not backed up by the essential mathematical curriculum. After all, experience is totally irrelevant if it is not backed by fundamentals. Without the fundamentals an otherwise bright kid is limited to a short life on the "factory floor" after which he is replaced as his skills are no longer relevant.

Replace the words "skills shortage" with "hidden agenda" and I reckon the end result would be the same. And I certainly wouldn't mind betting that the government spin machine is going strong on this one.

We have to remember that under the current regime immigration has gone completely pear-shaped. Why? Because they have been desperate to bring down wage costs whilst inventing new jobs to reduce unemployment.

As someone else remarked to me recently, show me the bog cleaners job in Rampistan being advertised for £150K per annum and I'll sign up for it. I may not be any good at cleaning loos but that won't be evident on my CV when I make my application.

The problem is that the difference between a good programmer and an average programmer is an order of magnitude in terms of productivity and yet the pay gap is unlikely to be more than 50-100%.

Lo, our employers want the demonstrably good coders and there just aren't enough to go round. We set an aptitude test that anybody competent could ace after a weekend scanning old torrented java blackbelt questions. Two thirds of applicants fail miserably, all after having claimed they've 3+ years relevant industry experience. It's pathetic really.

So yes, there is a skills shortage. But it's also a global thing. Doubtless two thirds of Indian coders are also rubbish, the difference is it might still be economic in terms of productivity to employ them.

I agree, Kurt pretty much nailed it with the first post. Give that man a Reg column.

The trouble is, unlike most Reg topics, I agree with pretty much everything everyone else has said too. Obviously a lot of it is a result of painful personal experience.

Frankly, I think that's a terrifying indictment of the state of the IT industry in the UK.

All the comments here are in my view very close to the mark.

Employers want skilled IT staff with a business perspective, but don't want to train them or pay them their worth. Time, quality, cost - pick any two, as the saying goes.

Tanuki's perspective highlights that middle management want everything from their IT people in order to cover failings elsewhere in the business. If you expect the IT person to understand the complexities of SOX, do you also expect the legal/compliance people to be able to write SOX compliant code ? No, didn't think so.

You need a business that can state its requirements (with help from IT) that can then be interpreted and implemented by an IT dept that has architects, system designers and coders, rather than an IT dept that is the scapegoat when the business can't elucidate its requirements properly and so decides to send all the jobs offshore so they can then use a commercial contract to hang their new supplier out to dry when it doesn't deliver what they thought it would.

No skill shortage, just management that are making excuses for their own failings

I agree with all the above about recruiters. As a contractor, the number of times I've had an argument with agents who played buzzword bingo with my CV and sent me job specs that were completely irrelevant to my experience just beggars belief. Having said that, there are some out there who do their job properly and either know what they're doing or don't hesitate to ask you when they're not sure. When you meet one of them, make sure you keep their details!

Another problem, even before recruitment consultants get involved, is that IT managers don't know how to write requirements so the specs they send to recruiters for staff often have little to do with what they actually need. And then those same specs get passed on to education establishments who infere that what you really require is people who are wizards on the new language 'du jour'. Hence a lot of young people who have some sort of qualification meaning that they know Java but have no idea what object oriented design mean, let alone how you do it. We work in an industry where the skills you have today will probably be irrelevant in 5 years so it doesn't matter whether you know Java, C#, PHP or Ruby, as long as you have a good grounding in language theory, maths and generic computing.

But it's not just managers and recruiters who are guilty of that. We all are at some point or other. I've just been told that a piece of work I have been doing for the past few weeks would not get approved because I shouldn't have been asked to do it, on the grounds that I am part of the application delivery side of the business, not the infrastructure delivery side of it. The fact that I could do it, had some spare time and there was nobody available from infrastructure to do it is irrelevant: it just wasn't my job so I should not have been asked, let alone have agreed to it.

So it's not so much a skill shortage as a bad use of available skills.

Yes, there is a skill shortage but it is in management. As the other replies state current management is in disarray, they should get educated. How you can require a person to have skills in SOX, SOA, ITIL, xxxML, UTMS, SaaS, security, agile, etc when you only know the buzzwords but not how and why?

My current experience is horrible, after 10+ years designing (government, NIST standards) level systems with AAA and security and talking to managers is frustrating. They (may) know about CC, FIPS, ISO, etc but their real knowledge is basically zero coming out from vendor brochures or "dog and pony" shows they have seen and written in job advertisements.

Now, I know many other developers in field who have problems to get work (or to accept work) because they know what, how and when much better than the people doing the hiring. And it is the same with AJAX, REST, SAML, SIP, etc, try and ask the hiring person to explain what those are! You would be amazed of the answers, I have been, they are so much way off that it isn't even funny. No wonder they can't find cheap workers and when they can, what are the results? A lot of bloated and "almost working" systems which will be fixed in next release 2010, maybe. My last experience was looking a contract job which was advertised as design and development.

First it did look good but when it came to questions as how would you do this they meant coding only, I did show a couple of problems in design and was told, no, it is perfect but how would you develop for that? I wouldn't because after a while the whole system would have problems going that way. OK, it didn't work and I was told that is the agile development, we just code a lot just now and think the systems / interoperability / maintainability / etc later, give me a break! Of course unit testing works, you can always make a small piece of system to work alone but try to match it later to your other products and systems, good luck! Haven't they seen the statistics how much an early correction in design saves compared to support and fixing basic design bugs when the system is in production? No, they haven't, so we are back in management eduction!

Same with shortage in mainframe developers, sorry, my 30+ years experience is that it has always been a management cry to hide their own problems. I have had and met development / software engineering managers who like to boast how they coded in Cobol, some even in in assembler, in mainframes in 80's and then "graduated" to PC's so they know everything of development! IMHO, they are the most dangerous types, they never learned whole systems, infrastructure, and they still think that threading, OO, metalanguages, etc are something new and difficult? Or, maybe it is, for them because they are still fighting to understand how PM tools work with SharePoint?

...we developed point-and-drool Web/database systems that any MBA with a third-grade intellect could use to call themselves a "recruiter". What profession would tolerate dealing (on either end) with people who don't know how to use English ("but I am being from America my life all of it!"), don't know anything about the technology (just a bunch of keywords next to checkboxes on a form/Web page), don't know anything about the business side of IT (the guy talking about SOX and other regulatory stuff was spot on)... along with being some of the least intellectually curious people I've ever met - 90% of those who've started in their line of work in the last ten years seem to be in it for the money, full stop...and the older ones who are any good don't do find-a-coder anymore; they're either working in-house for the Fortune 50 or specializing in 'senior management opportunity matching').

Of course there's ageism in IT - between offshoring to countries that have 2- and 3-year "BS" degrees with an optional 1-year MBA on top of that ("are you wanting chapati with that?") - AND - the people "working" the "recruiting agencies" weren't even born yet when I got my first job after college, yet think "3 years experience" qualifies someone for a "senior/lead developer" position, we're going to continue to go down this death spiral. Commercial and in-house projects are failing more expensively and spectacularly than ever before, and most "IT disasters" seem to be caused by people who couldn't spell IT if you spotted them the first two letters. I think the current trend towards open source development is as much a realization that successful FOSS projects remain the last true meritocracy in our line of work, where you're less likely to run into people who don't know their orifice from a hole in the ground, but who remember Back Orifice.

The funny thing is -- if you go to Bangalore or Chennai or Shenzen or St Petersburg and look at the offshoring companies, they're having the devil of a time to find - and paying ever-higher wages to keep - people who are reasonably competent in English and the computer language flavor-of-the-moment. Too bad nobody ever offshored the recruiting agencies.