Offshoring is not making UK computer scientists largest unemployed group | Hacker News Reader

Offshoring is not making UK computer scientists largest unemployed group

computerweekly.com

19 pointsbartwe27 comments

I know very well from trying to hire decent comp-sci graduates in the UK that it's very difficult right now. They're either very poor candidates, or they're being snapped up on very high salaries. If you're a good comp-sci graduate right now I would say that things are looking great.

Sorry, I am just going to reply to myself with a slightly contrarian viewpoint - as the article points out, low skilled jobs are being outsourced. This might make it more likely that it's graduate jobs being replaced with offshore/outsourcing, in which case we'll be left with the classic "foot on the ladder" problem.

Saying that, it's not my experience that this is having a noticeable impact, for what personal experience is worth.

The cold hard truth is that the rest of the UK gets the developers unwilling or unable to work for organizations that pay what the City pays.

While that may be unfortunate for other, equally worthwhile industries, it's hard for me to say that that's a bad thing for the individuals concerned.

To my mind this is the key quote:

"If you have a low skilled job there is a higher chance of your job being outsourced but if you are a software developer developing complex software you are very much in demand."

The fact is that most new CS graduates are "low skilled" as real-world, industrial programmers. A CS education can realistically only provide them a grounding in the core theory of the field; it can't, and shouldn't, be teaching them how to work within the context of massive, old, crufty programs that are the norm in the real world. This is the responsibility of employers, and IMO when employers complain about a lack of "good" CS graduates it just shows that they have abdicated their responsibility to train their employers in their own industry niche and somehow expect cheap programmers who are subject matter experts with years of experience in a dozen hyper-specific tools to drop from the sky.

But of course the outsourcing shops are perfectly happy to peddle the lie that their own people are programming geniuses who are also subject matter experts--and look at all the money you'll save! The IT managers get suckered into hiring boatloads of consultants or sending everything offshore, their own good employees, if they had any to begin with, get fired or jump ship, and the cycle accelerates.

Sure I'm cynical, but I've seen it happen often enough, and heard the same from friends who've experienced the same, to justify it.

I disagree, I've been at a company where we had ~1500-2000 applications for graduate developer roles, so we had access to a substantial percentage of CS graduates. About 20% got through CV screening (which is basically have anything on your CV to show you're competent - good uni, an internship, challenging uni projects, open source projects, etc).

Of that 20% most of them failed to be able to handle fairly basic CS questions (implement a linked list, describe how hash-maps work, reverse a string, basic algorithm questions, fizzbuzz, basic language questions on a language the candidate claimed to know). About 5% were able to pass this stage, and of that 5% we made offers to most of them.

We weren't expecting people with a deep grounding in practical programming, we were expecting a decent knowledge of CS and some basic ability to actually produce code. There just aren't enough competent CS graduates on the market.

Funny, I have a software development with AI degree, and I can't get anything - not even tech support. Why do they come out with these stupid stories?

Why? Because despite surface appearances, the BCS is a lobbying group for employers. They want talent to be a commodity. That means "cheap" and "interchangeable". And it doesn't matter if engineer A isn't any good from that point of view; what matters is that engineer B is a 1-for-1 replacement.

I saw this as well when I was doing Mech Eng at college: time and time again, we were told, by the IMechE, our supposed professional body, that there was a huge shortage of mechanical (and other) engineers. I gather from physicists and chemists that they are told, there is a huge shortage of scientists. But any fule kno, the laws of supply and demand apply. I still get contacted by recruiters in engineering, offering me in some cases less than half of my present salary to go back...

I'm sure professional bodies also like to see as many members as possible to increase their revenues and influence.

I have cancelled my BCS membership after one year. My membership wasn't even marginally useful for me in any way, their magazine constantly reminds me that they have absolutely no idea what's really going on in technology and they keep spamming me with their stuff I don't care about.

Lawyers and doctors professional organizations are more like guilds. But the IMechE, the BCS et al actively work against the best interests of their individual members! The IMechE at least has the basic function of granting CEng to those that need it; there is no reason for anyone to be a BCS member at all.

Actually one of the magazines I got from the BCS (circa 2005) was saying how great outsourcing is. I wasn't so enthusiastic and didn't agree with the article.

Ah, just a name drop: I met the President of the BCS (at the time) Wendy Hall at the Hypertext 2003 conference. I told her I was working with Ted Nelson (without whom she wouldn't have got so far) and she looked confused, as if not working for grants/funding was an unusual thing.

If you look at something like this: http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.8710 - they're selling to IT management, they are very far from being an organization to represent the rank-and-file.

Doubtless - that old British classism rearing its head - they would say that the managers are the "professionals" and the actual practitioners are mere labourers, like miners.

Do you believe this to be, solely or in part, due to outsourcing?

I put it down to my pre-degree qualifications being poor (when the degree is a 2:2), and a lack of work experience in the field.

Right, so probably nothing to do with outsourcing or this article.

I believe the normal advice is to go get some of your work out there, contribute to open source projects or something. Make yourself more attractive to employers (or maybe even try and be your own boss)

You would seem to be an outlier then. Good developers are nearly impossible to find, and don't stay on the market for long.

I'd bet that if you dropped a few links to projects you've done in your spare time during your job hunt, you'd have people here asking for your resume. (assuming, of course, that you've been building projects in your spare time and that they're good.)

+1. I've actually gotten a handful (3 or 4) of people here encourage me to apply various places.

Hi,

I reserve the right to think that nobody will be bothered, but here it is anyway:

http://www.sanfransys.com/pretext/ [Software to rip text from colour images and return a new image with text in 8-bit grayscale]

I've done recruitment of graduate developers in the UK before, and there aren't anywhere enough decent developers graduating. Many companies can't even fill their quotas for how many graduates they want to hire.

If you're a competent developer and you're not getting interviews then I'm guessing it's probably your CV that's letting you down.

edit: if you want someone to review your CV feel free to email me.

So if it isn't outsourcing then presumably it's because we are educating too many people with CS degrees? That should be easy to fix....

The article quotes people who claim that there is a shortage of CS graduates.

I read it that they are complaining about a shortage of good CS graduates. Which is hardly surprising given the way that the numbers in higher education have increased in recent years and the extreme variations in course content.

Oh no, as someone who regularly interviews CS graduates in the UK, there's no shortage of graduates. There's a shortage of very good graduates, which is incidentally exactly the same type of graduates I would like to hire. Personally, I blame university admissions for that.

The original source quotes 17% unemployment for IT degrees not CS degrees.

What are examples of low skilled software development jobs?

The article talks about low skilled IT jobs (desktop management, support, etc.) rather than dev jobs, but low skilled developer jobs could be consider things like standard CMS customization, db migration scripts, web-scraping, simple psd2html work. Basically legwork stuff that's pretty mechanical but still needs a human to do it.

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