Critiquing Claims of an Open Source Jobs Boom 134
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder examines what appears to be an open source job market boom, as evidenced by a recent O'Reilly Report. According to the study, 5 to 15 percent of all IT openings call for open source software skills, and with overall IT job cuts expected for 2009, 'the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software,' Snyder writes. But are enterprises truly shifting to open source, or are they simply seeking to augment the work of staff already steeped in proprietary software? The study's methodology leaves too much room for interpretation, Savio Rodrigues retorts. 'That's why the 5% to 15% really doesn't sit well with me,' Rodrigues writes. 'I suspect that larger companies are looking for developers with a mix of experience with proprietary and open source products, tools and frameworks,' as opposed to those who would work with open source for 90 percent of the work day."
The cheapest code... (Score:5, Interesting)
...is the one you didn't have to write in the first place. Developers with some knowledge of BSD/LGPL code that could be used for rapidly creating complex apps without reinventing the wheel is probably in demand.
This Is True (Score:3, Interesting)
More on the front end than the back end (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:As a 17 year IT consultant... (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, the rest of the company uses Microsoft products, but when I need something quick and I don't want to bother with expense reports, OpenOffice goes on the test machines to open the word docs as needed, and other free and/or open source tools get used. Partimage Is Not Ghost, Copy Handler, GIMP, notepad++, 7-zip, and Foxit Reader are just a few of the products I use to fly under the radar with tools I need/like to use. Of course, this was posted while using Firefox, but Opera is good too.
Ummm... Yah (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:As a 17 year IT consultant... (Score:4, Interesting)
That brings up a study I'd really like to see done: What is the correlation (positive or negative), if any, between prevalence of Open Source in a shop and the salaries they offer? Do most of them use open source so they can spend more on quality people, or do they do it because they're cheap and don't want to spend money on anything, people included?
I don't have enough data in my personal work history to make an intelligent guess, although the size of the company involved may have a lot to do with the answer. However, I think it would be valuable information to have. After all, specializing in a given technology because you hear there are lots of jobs asking for it is not a wise move if all of those jobs max out at 8 bucks an hour (exaggeration to illustrate the point, not what I really think Open Source admins make).
Re: IT degree = waste of time (Score:3, Interesting)
(ITDegree || ComputerScienceDegree) Programmer
An IT degree can be any number of things... program management, Quality Assurance, etc. And Computer Science isn't programming either... it's really applied mathmathmatics and logic. My IT degree focused on Program Managment, and I have never used it because I'm not in software, but there are tons of well paying positions for software lifecycle management and similar jobs.
I agree that it's a waste of time to teach business programming anymore... those who are good at it will pursue it on the side anyway... but most schools don't go much deeper than basic logic and structure now anyways. CS majors look at things differently, many are into robotics, embedded systems, and places where one must work in low level languages or where the applications are extremely complex and not easy to outsource.
Finally, the only reason either of these jobs have lost their prestiege is that so many people who have no business in the field said "I like computers" to their college advisors... a person who truely knows, loves, and understands computers and programming will not hurt for work. It just takes patience to wait while employers weed out all of the mediocrity.
Dead on. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the article is dead on in questioning the study.
Perfect example: the last two places I contracted at were looking to hire C# developers who had also been exposed to Subversion. Is it fair to look at a place like that and say they're now all about Open Source? Not really, no.
Open Source is getting somewhere in the business world to be sure, but the FOSS Rapture isn't quite upon us just yet.
Re:As a 17 year IT consultant... (Score:5, Interesting)
I use open source solutions often at my work, and its not because of the cost. (I don't mind paying for the right tool for the job) It has much more to do with the tracking.. If I go purchase SQL server and windows server, I have to keep track of licenses, versions, (are they enterprise, standard, etc) Are they CAL based, and do I have enough CAL's a few months later, are they processor based (and if so, did I move the app to a server with more processors). With virtualization, its an even bigger push for me, as its very, very easy to quickly deploy a new virtual OS. It takes much, much longer to ensure licensing compliance, and go through the approval and purchasing process if needed..
It Doesn't Cost Less (Score:5, Interesting)
Another fun thing we are experiencing is the total lack of knowledge closed source solution professionals have. We're finding the people to be very silo'ed without knowledge of what goes on around them. So when you are trying to implement something, you get very concerned with cross-technical area issues.
You ask an SAP basis person to come look at a screen and they'll say "Not Functional..." and wave their hands wildly with their palms facing you. Ask the Abaper and they'll shrug without a clue.
Hell, the Abaper is supposed to be a programmer you think, but they can't even teach you the basic parts of a program; you'll be lucky enough if they even know how to do proper error handling.
You see these types of people and they frighten the crap out of you. You just stare out the window and wonder why people are willing to pay 80 or 100 dollars an hour for these.... idiots!
I can go out into a University, pay a fresh graduate 40 dollars an hour and teach them everything they need to know... knowing that they'll leave after the project and still be better off than getting consultants.
Compare that with a professional in open source technologies. They need to know how things work together, because that's all they do. They can't learn just 1 technology, they need to know multiples, and how to fit them together. As they grow in their career, they know the big picture, and that is completely different than the closed source alternative.
Re:budgets (Score:3, Interesting)
Depends on how you spin it. We use CruiseControl.Net where I work. When I had to justify it as opposed to a "superior" (not really superior technologically, but in a "we're paying for it so it must be better" sense) proprietary technology, I pointed out that since I have access to the source code I can debug issues with our build system without needing vendor support. And I have several times. Of course, people like the cost, but managers also understand "we don't have to depend on a single source if things go to hell." Well, some of them do.
Re:Startup = Open Source Only! (Score:3, Interesting)
"So the assumption is that someone who has worked with proprietary technologies is incapable of working with OSS technologies?"
I don't think so.
I think the parent poster is more on the line that if the candidate has not experience on the open source world, its ability to manage it is still to be seen. If there're candidates that won't have such uncertainty it's just reasonable to stick with them.
"Because I'd say thats pretty much completely contrary to my experience."
That's your experience. Mine is that even at the code monkey level there's people that just don't grasp the open source "thingie" as there is people that is heavily uncomfortable using closed source software.
"I would say that putting that kind of arbitrary restriction on your hiring process may be cutting you off from some valid talent."
Quite true, the point being "arbitrary". It's arbitrary to only hire blond people for a java developer position; it's not arbitrary to hire someone SQL fluent for a DBA, and I don't think it's arbitrary to hire people with open source experience on a shop pushing open source "philosophy" (it *might* be arbitrary to push "the open source philosohpy", though, but that's out of scope).
Re:The cheapest code... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's also never going to work. Execution will start at the top, with the H of Hello; I forget what that opcode translates to, but it can't be what you expected it to be.
This might work better:
main: mov dx, offset msg
mov ah, 9
int 21h
int 20h
msg: db 'Hello World!',13,10,34
Sure, it's larger. But it works.
You can do a RET from a COM file because Dos pushes a zero onto the stack at exec time. CS:0 contains an INT 20. This is so translated CPM programs could use RET to get back to the OS.
That saves you ONE BYTE. Down to 8 bytes of code
cs:0100 BA0801 MOV DX,0108
cs:0103 B409 MOV AH,09
cs:0105 CD21 INT 21
cs:0107 C3 RET
and 14 bytes of data.