ratan,
Ah, you've throw job shops into the mix. Good -- now we have all the players.
The average starting salary for someone out of college at a US corporation for the run-of-the-mill I/T position is actually less than $50-70,000. If this were not true, there would be mutiny among the troops. You simply cannot bring someone onto the regular payroll with less experience at higher wages. I will not contest that Corporate America has deadwood in its I/T departments, just as does management, accounting, personnel, etc. However, I must strongly disagree that the average Comp. Sci. graduate is more valuable than an experienced programmer. It's just not true, unless you consider babbling esoteric theory, lack of depth, poor communications skills, and non-existent organizational and work management skills valuable in a corporate setting.
To Corporate America, a new programmer straight out of college is more of a liability than an asset, mostly because they don't have the specific skills required to do a specific job, though they may have the general skills that corporations do find desirable. And I can assure you, with each passing day, that more and more I/T positions require very very specific skills. Specific in the underlying technology used, the business functions to which those technologies are applied, and the business knowledge required to be effective, proactive, and productive in that position.
It may not be common knowledge to the layman, but the number and complexity of I/T skills has exploded over the last several years. It used to be that all anyone used in the corporate setting was COBOL with smatterings of FORTRAN, C, and RPG. Pull the want ads from around 1990 and compare them to now. With so few skills required, there was always someone in the pool that fit the bill. These days there are considerably more options with many more opportunities and areas of specialization, with the attendant risk that, at any moment, one's specialty goes the way of the dodo. I submit that it is this explosion in technical skills required that is driving programmer wages, and pulling up established skills in its wake. The Y2K issue is having a strong effect on the demand for the older skill-sets, too.
Certain unique skills pay considerably more, but that is to be expected. Some job shops or technical consulting firms will cherry-pick someone straight out of college, promise them an above market salary, take the time and risk to train them in a strong or high demand area, and turn around and rent them out to the highest bidder. Ironically, these are the very skills of which Corporate America complains there is a shortage. Why doesn't the highest bidder do this for themselves?
Because Corporate America wants to assume neither the responsibility (these days) nor the risk (most recently). Corporate America does exactly what it has done for it's entire existence. It lets other institutions do the selection, training, and grading of it's work force for them. This used to be a prime function of America's colleges and universities, and I believe it still works OK for fields such as accounting, marketing, legal, etc. The problem is, these days, most colleges and universities do not turn out a "corporate-ready" I/T product. Far from it. In general (and these are all generalizations), the rate of change in technology is moving too fast for either the universities or the corporations to keep up. Corporations have found that their college produced "raw-material" requires months of additional training to be effective. Then, even after the training, they may find that their new recruits just "don't get it". So they use job shops or technical consulting firms instead. It provides for the ultimate in flexibility with no responsibility to the "workers" whatsoever. It also used to be a bit cheaper -- for a while!
And yes, the body (job) shops will offer somewhat more to someone straight out of school, simply because they need the bodies. After all, that's their business -- producing bodies for hire. Nonetheless, the corporations still prefer this arrangement because they've off-loaded the responsibility and risk for primary screening, selection, career development, training, and benefits (if any) to a third party. And as long as this occurs at wage rates the corporation can dictate, they are happy. The problem is, they're finding that their "dictates" are starting to fall on deaf ears. Meanwhile, their more competent I/T staffers, due to the strength of the economy, have become emboldened to seek greener pastures, leaving them with the relatively expensive, less productive, marginal worker. |
