I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Posted by Rod in TechBiz at 8:22 am on Friday, 19 October 2007
Interesting report from Microsoft and IDC.
11,000 more IT industry jobs by 2011
Just for fun, how many new jobs has your ICT company created in NZ in the last 12 months? Be interesting see what the total is.
I’ll go first.
Xero : 40
blog
Tomizone - 12
Telecom / Gen-i = about 600.
Paul, yeah but jobs in Fiji and the Phillipines don’t count
Innaworks: 4
not nice dermott - gen-i employs here too - let’s not be uncharitable
PlanHQ = 5
Mediacrab: 4
Rod, your question - “Just for fun, how many new jobs has your ICT company created in NZ in the last 12 months?” has no relevance to the article quoted, unless you are talking about “new” businesses that did not exist before and “new” IT employees who have not worked in IT before. The article is not talking about shuffling existing IT workers from company A to company B it is talking about 11,000 extra IT jobs.
I find these interesting forecasts given the shortage of people doing computer science degrees at university (not that for one moment do I think this is the only way into IT). And also given comments by outgoing MS MD Helen Robinson at the recent MS Partner Conference I find the predictions maybe not based on a lot of reality.
Then again what is the studies definition of an IT worker.
Certainly high tech workers can help increase NZ’s wealth as they have in countries like Finland. I see very little push by government or National to encourage students to go into degree courses in areas that help the country.
I apologise in advance for the following statement which is bound to offend some group.
So rather than encourage degrees in the arts, or law (do we really need more politicians?) or accountancy how about deals where if you do electrical engineering, or medicine or biotechnology etc etc, your student loan fees are cancelled by 50% and you are bonded to work in NZ for 5 years.
Because at the moment we really are scrapping the bottom of the barrel to get qualified people (who speak passable English) in many disciplines.
James Heyward,
You might find the following PDF document (freely downloadable) interesting for MediaCrab’s product development:
An Automated Video Object Extraction System Based on Spatiotemporal Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Multi-scale Segmentation
I have no experience in multimedia development, however there are many algorithms applied in this area, that I am very well familiar with, such as the ICA and wavelet described in the above document.
Why is it important?
Well, you can take your development to next level by automating the indexing & retrieval of multi-media data, such as you don’t need to see a video or a multi-media file in order to correctly classify its category. The algorithms (or the system) does the looking on the behalf of the human (somehow, the computer sees and understand the content of the file - ie, pattern classification) and categorize it. This means that you can also query the database based on the multimedia data (content search) rather than searching the annotated-text that tags multimedia files. Eg, given a video clip (query), retrieve from the database all video clips that are similar to the query. I am aware that Google is working on something similar to be deployed at YouTube. Microsoft does have a number of researchers that do R&D in this area as well. You can also explore ontology for possible application in your system, since I have seen in the literatures of its application in multimedia classification system. See the following page:
Multi-Media Indexing and Searching Environment
If you want more informal dialog, then I can send you more info (published papers on Multi-Media Indexing and Searching). I did make contact with your company last year (2006) by pointing out some useful links about the subject of content-based Multi-Media Indexing and Searching, but I am not sure whether your development team followed up on it.
Here are some useful contacts, that perhaps you may want to get in touch with, if you believe that content-based retrieval is of interest to your future product development.
- Dr. Vojislav Kecman (University of Auckland)
- Professor Nikola K. Kasabov (AUT)
- Professor Ian Witten (Waikato University)
These individual researchers and their R&D team can implement the multimedia retrieval capability described in this message for your company.
Dermott, I can’t speak for the other companies, but all four jobs I counted at Innaworks did not previously exist and have been taken by people who have never been employed in IT before (new grads).
And I don’t see the relevance of your comment anyway, unless you think there are a significant number of companies downsizing their IT workforce. If someone goes from company A to a job that didn’t previously exist at company B, and is replaced at company A then that is no net change at company A, and one new job at company B, for a net of one new job.
Bruce, well done on employing new grads. Historically this is what we have always tried to do.
The relevance of my comment is this.
There are problems in ICT in NZ. We don’t have enough people taking computer science degrees. It is also a world wide trend which happened after the dot com bust, students stopped doing IT in huge numbers.
My comments are before we start congratulating ourselves on how well we are doing lets get some basic honesty on whether we are shuffling jobs or really creating new ones. Thats my point. We may create another 11,000 new jobs in the next 4 years but I doubt it. We will not do it will Chinese students doing IT who can hardly speak or write English. This view has not been arrived at from some middle class dinner table conversation but from being an employer in NZ for 20 years in IT and struggling at times to find competent and capable staff.
We’ve made 21 placements at Provoke in the last 12 months (across Akl and Wgtn) which is a combination of newly established roles and existing roles.
We have added more than 30 new jobs at Intergen in the last 12 months. We have filled these with a combination of new graduates, people returning from overseas, some people on short-term (two year) work visas and the enevidable few from other companies.
We, like many others do find it challenging to find the quantity of good people we need. We were particularly disappointed with the quality of the graduates we interviewed this year. Rather than employ a certian number of graduates, we only employ those that meet our standard. For the past 3 or 4 years we have ended up with about half the number we wanted. This is despite having applications from well over 100 candidates each year.
When we talk about attracting more poeple to study for IT degrees we have to ensure we attract the right kinds of people. IT is much more mainstream now and maybe lacking some of the sex appeal it once had that attracted the brightest students. We need to focus on making IT more attractive and accessable to a wider range of people.
Tony, interesting comments on hiring people.
Maybe we need to have apprenticeships for IT staff because from comments I have heard from my staff in the past, some feel they never start learning until they get a job, and the degree just dets you the interview.
Well it looks like we’re hitting the long tail pretty soon; it will certainly take a record-breaking number of comments here for us to even hit 1000, much less 11,000.
The “fact” from the source article that struck me was that Microsoft felt for every $1 it spent, the “microsoft industry” around it would sell $13 worth of their related products. I’m sure the MS staff recieving the report would have had a glass of nice wine to that (Which reminds me, I was drinking Matua when in Seattle two months ago. But I digress)
The problem with finding 11,000 staff in my opinion, would be that, in spite of any drought or monsoon of IT students, they will all be new. With us hiring several positions this year, its really shown you need a balance of experienced workers and virgins.
Secondly, when I was in San Fran, there was a far louder cry for great programmers and related IT folk there. Offering finder fees even. That doesn’t seem to have created too much of a city-wide problem (for that would create a global problem). New Zealand should use this as an opportunity to draw talented new and experienced people into professions, for worker-demands suggests you can offer people challenging roles, good perks, and lots of responsibility aka satisfaction.
Dermott,
I have a lot of confidence in these 11,000 new jobs in the next 4 years. But the point I want to make is your last comment is very offensive, at least I feel that way.
I don’t know how you got the impression that “Chinese students doing IT” can hardly speak or write English and I wonder why Chinese. As far as I know, most Chinese IT students are doing great at universities and they keep doing well in the industry. You cannot ignore the fact that once they get out of school with computer science degree, they have already got the best proof of being able to communicate at certain level. I agree Chinese students’ spoken English is not as good as locals, but that’s the same as everyone who comes from a non English spoken background. New Zealand is an open country that welcomes people from all over the world. People come to this country with a dream of making a better life. Given the opportunity, they can achieve beyond their dream.
We have recruited 3 Chinese grads over the last 6 months. They are fantastic coders and most importantly they speak good English too.
Sonic Mobile = 4
Nathan, my comments were based on first hand experience, plus speaking to lecturers at a university that has thousands of Chinese students. Don’t get all PC and take it personally, it was a non person specific comment. IT is a communication business. It was a general comment not a broadbrush everyone is like this comment.
Hi guys, just to try and get a comment record…
Isn’t the problem with getting grads, or good grads, is that our industry just isn’t sexy enough?
I’ve generally been really positive when describing the IT industry to students. But… for every 40 jobs created in Xero, there are probably 400 in government type, big corporate type heavy on the process, basically pretty dull jobs.
Those 11,000 jobs are going to be in big industry, doing enterprise level stuff, which is … just not the sexiest stuff in the world. And, honestly, we can’t sell it that way.
So, how do we get more Xeros, more dynamism, and away from Enterprise Service Buses, XML tedium and Vendor stack overengineering?
(apologies to anyone who is really into this stuff!)