The other thing is regarding the argument that “if you simply raise pay” more people would be doing it, since there is no labor shortage.
I’m not sure I agree with that. Whether people want to admit it or not, there are certain jobs with skillsets that people will not do even if pay is raised, simply because they can’t do it. Whether they lack the skill, or lack the ability or lack both, “spoon fed training” won’t close that gap, even if pay is good.
If that were the case, everyone would end up being a doctor or lawyer, and we would have even fewer engineers 🙂 I mean, here we have two cases when the pay is REALLY REALLY good. These two professions don’t have any sort of H1-B “problem”…Why aren’t more people flocking to be a doctor or lawyer if they are so discontent with being an IT worker?
Same could be said about engineering. Again, i think it’s one of the things that frankly not many people can do (or can do well, at least). If Qualcomm right now paid embedded software architects/engineers $300k, how many people really would have the skillset and ability to do that job right now? Not many. A few of us have the ability to self -retrain and retool. But many people, simply don’t have the aptitude for this kind of work of flipping bits and bytes… In as much as some other people don’t have the aptitude to do other kinds of work like for example a lot of the trade jobs too. And those people won’t have the aptitude simply to pick up and self-training and catch up with people with that aptitude. In as much as I couldn’t simply pick up a textbook on human anatomy and be trained to be a doctor within the next few years. It just doesn’t work that way. This isn’t simply a job in which you need to turn a bolt, or fasten a trim where you can be easily taught. There’s an entire aspect of mental capacity (whether it’s nature ability or trained through decades of education) that I think people are way over simplifying and glossing over.
Time after time again, we’ve seen a few IT workers here on piggington ask “what’s the hottest job, that pays the most”… because they are disgruntled with their current job/career ….to which some of us have said Mobile Software and/or SAP and/or something else”….And a few months later, the same people ask the same question, re-echoing that they are still doing what they were doing, perhaps still unhappy with their current job/profession/lone of work and not retrained after any of the new opportunities…If this was so easy to do in practice (higher pay, more people flock to those jobs), we wouldn’t have situations like this.
High pay in a profession wouldn’t immediately solve this problem because I don’t think you can’t fix a skills gap that requires decades of education/mental training that some people simply opted out of all this time. All the people that decided not to take STEM education seriously ever since grade school and/or have no interest in STEM. What it would do is influence parents and kids to perhaps revisit whether they should take a STEM career path more seriously. This would take, imho, one generation to fix. It would benefit a few of us that are already in the business, we would get paid for essentially doing the same work without any more need to do more….Personally, I wouldn’t mind…But that would also probably mean consumers would be paying a lot more for things. Afterall, someone would have to be paying for it so that I could then be maintaining a new porsche instead of a miata….lol….But the number of people that never have done this work and simply self-train and suddenly can do this work? Not many..
