The war on talents

In the past five months, there was something that had not happen for quite awhile in Silicon Valley (San Jose): Companies are competing for skilled software engineers with significant high salaries and large incentive bonuses. Big companies like Apple and Google are now have to compete with the fast-growing Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These newcomers are offering the thrill of creating something new that will change the world and also with big salaries. That kind of notion excited a lot of technology workers and graduating students.

As the U.S economy began to recover few months ago, the hiring of information technology workers that began in San Jose is now expanding to Seattle, Boston, and Texas. The “War” for skilled people between large companies and start-ups began as Google lost several top people to Facebook and had to offer significant raise in salary to all employees to prevent another exodus. Even with the successes of IPhone and IPad, Apple is also facing significant competitions from Google and Microsoft in the “Mobile war” as people with these talents are rare. Overall, software job listings are up over 50% in the past 6 months in the U.S but jumped over 68 percent in Silicon Valley. The most desirable jobs are: Network engineers, Network security specialists, Cloud computing specialists, Mobile technology specialists, Information System managers, and Database administration. The starting salaries is about $ 85,000 to $110,000. Both Apple, Google and Cisco are planning to hire 2,000 to 5,000 people in the next few months but many people do not believe that they can accomplish it because of strong competition with many start-ups in the area.

While the hiring frenzy has created a highly competitive market for top talents but it also left several technical workers out. The reality is that many of them do NOT have the skills these companies are looking for. Many of them are programmers and testers with minimum qualifications. They were hired due to the shortage of skilled workers before the outsourcing trends began to take place. Today, these lower level support positions are being outsourced to India and China as most companies require more advance software knowledge than just purely coding skills. According to the San Jose Mercury newspaper: "California does not have enough software engineers, software developers as all qualified people are all working."

The high demands in information technology also have created another trend of people returning to schools. Most universities are reporting that enrollments have increased significantly, especially in the technology fields. There are so many business and finance students transferring into software engineering and information system management that universities have to create qualification tests before allow them to transfer. The shortage is also a good news for outsourcing companies. A spokesman for an Indian company announced that his company is ready for more business, especially in the needed area as they are preparing to train massive number of their people in these skills.

According to the latest U.S government report, the demand on information technology will need several million workers in the next five to ten years. Regardless of high number of students enrolling today, the U.S will still face a critical shortage of these skilled workers.

Sources

  • Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University

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