Comments on: Help wanted by IT services firms

The growing services industry is hiring, but tech workers looking for a job may need to do more than brush up on their coding.

[brothe]

Tech Market Place

My company has seen a major increase in the need for more than just basic programing skills as well. Our clients want people with several disciplines and an understanding of what is happening to make a bigger impact with their client.

As for the person billing $25 an hour to do consulting, check your value against others at HotGigs.com. You'll probably see you are under the market average in your skill sets.

Brandon Rothe
HotGigs.com

some surprising points of agreement among our architects

At Oracle Technology Network, we recently ran a series titled "Middleware Architecture Series" (http://otn.oracle.com/middleware)

Our series turned up some surprising points of agreement among our architects ? and some useful strategies for you.

Some of the points brought forth in this article to resonate with our findings. If interested, please visit http://otn.oracle.com/middleware (final article: Combating Complexity: Eight Architects Tell You How)


As we sifted through the series for common themes, we kept coming back to the same strategic recommendations:

Cultivate collaboration ? as an architect dealing with complex, multi-layered applications, one of your most important tasks is bringing together people from the groups responsible for those layers and getting them to communicate and collaborate effectively.

Keep an eye on the Big Picture ?as overall system architect, you need to have the big-picture perspective ? not just of how the layers of your system fit together, but also of how your system will meet its business goals and work effectively on a human level.

Implement rigorous processes ?adhering to formal processes (for tasks such as model development, evaluation of solutions, and system maintenance) is a key strategy for focusing and simplifying your team's effort.

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Sudhakar Ramakrishnan
Oracle Corporation

Specialization Required

I tend to disagree with the concept of the story. I was in a position like the ones the story is suggesting employers are looking for. I had the highest technical expertise in my field and enough expertise in IS in general that I was a SME for most IS projects for a fortune 500 company. I believe my resume reflects this fairly accurately...yet I have been unemployed for almost a year and have only seen a handful of openings that requested this type of expertise. Instead, most are requesting specific combinations ie; MCSE with expertise in C++, MCSE with Peoplesoft, Siebel and/or SAP specific. Most job postings that I have seen are offering people with more generalized skills less than half the salary of the specialists...and I might add, if they really want an expert with the "big picture view" they are going to have to pay for it or get a rookie that will cause problems down the road.

Dennis Donahoe MCSE+I MCDBA A+