[ILUG] [OT] Government Promises

[John P. Looney (Kate)]

On Tue, Jun 20, 2000 at 11:30:21AM +0100, Mark Fallon mentioned:
> So today's topic of discussion, and something that will affect 
> everyone in the computer industry in this country, is: Will we become
> victims of our own success, we will price ourselves out of the 
> market and is the government making promises regarding the availability
> of a skilled workforce? A promise they have no real chance of
> keeping.

 Certainly. I did some work for Dell in Bray and Limerick last year. At
the time, they had a five strong "unix" team, that looked after about 30
million quids' work of Sun Hardware, that ran a lot of their mission
critical stuff. They were overworked, so took me on as a contractor, to
look after some systems.

 When I left, another was leaving too, for greener pa$ture$. By the time
the contractor that was drafted in to replace me left after three months,
the rest of the team handed in their notice. They had no skilled admins,
but had the finance to get contractors from Sun in.

 Many multinationals won't take that. They came here with great big tax
breaks etc. expecting cheap labour. Useful IT wages are running around 25%
inflation, with non-useful at about 15% a year. At the same time, less and
less people are leaving college or school with useful skills.

 There is a crunch coming. And I'd like to be a contractor when that
happens. I can see by next year, decent unix people being able to command
£500 a day (it's about £350 a day now), with specialists considerably
higher (security/SAP people bring in around £1800 a day).

 And there is only one thing more expensive than good systems people. Bad
systems people. You may pay them less, but it doesn't take too much
downtime on an expensive system to hurt a company...

Kate

-- 
The words of the unwary are apt to cause needless pain and bloody violence.
                                                        - Zen Master Greg