http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/business/ict-firms-face-worker-shortage-118898619.html

I wonder if the firms who think the government should increase immigration of foreign ICT workers to Canada are the same firms who are out-sourcing ICT jobs to India, etc. now?

Do we have any investigative reporters in Canada?

Outsider wrote:I wonder if the firms who think the government should increase immigration of foreign ICT workers to Canada are the same firms who are out-sourcing ICT jobs to India, etc. now?

Possibly. It's a competitive marketplace out there. Play devils advocate.

Company A is competing against company B to develop a new software program. Company A is Winnipeg based. Company B is Mumbai based. Both do outstanding work.

Company B gets the contract because they pay their engineers less than A does. Business 101.

What do we do as a nation to combat this?

Outsider wrote:

I wonder if the firms who think the government should increase immigration of foreign ICT workers to Canada are the same firms who are out-sourcing ICT jobs to India, etc. now?

Probably.

If they cannot get qualified people here, they have to out-source....hence the need for trained immigrants. It's actually a straight line of logic.

well number 1 is this article starts out with a lie in its very first sentence

"WINNIPEG has never really become a hotbed of information technology firms -"

BULLSHIAT!

we have the worlds number 1 financial software company, number 1 oncology software company, number 1 electronic bingo company, several other companies in the number 1 and number 2 spots WORLD WIDE.


just because unlike some places we dont need 1000s of employees to do this, does not mean we are not a hotbed of firms.

Good post Deank. It's like Outsider said: "Do we have any investigative reporters in Canada?"

If Martin Cash did his job he'd know that and REPORT that.

I reckon it really depends on your interpretation of what a hotbed means. Is it a hotbed for joibs? Is it a hotbed for awards?

not sure what you mean by awards?


But Number 1 is not an award its a designation as in the most sales, the most companies using a product.

Unless he means "hotbed" by the most jobs even if they are crap for fly by night companies that come and go so rapidly its ridiculous.

A friend moved from Winnipeg to Calgary ( moving back closer to wife's family) in 2007. Since then he has worked for 6 different IT companies. 5 of which have simply disappeared from the landscape. So sure... more jobs and more companies in Calgary but stability? not so much.

LOL.. and someone gave me a thumbs down for that comment

"WINNIPEG has never really become a hotbed of information technology
firms -- and that may have helped Chuck Loewen grow the company he
started here 25 years ago."

Well thats a lie. We have the worlds
number 1 financial management software company, we have the worlds
number 1 oncology software companies (and several other number 1 and 2
healthcare software companies), the worlds number 1 electronic BINGO
company, the list goes on and on as to the level of quality that
Winnipeg produces for software. Our numbers of workers may not be as
high as some people like, but that is very vastly overshadowed by the
quality and superiority of work we turn out."

Ya might have blown it with the worlds number 1 electronic BINGO
company thingy.

I dont understand? what do you mean?

hell we even have a couple of the worlds number 1 scatchy ticket companies

JTF wrote:

Outsider wrote:

I wonder if the firms who think the government should increase immigration of foreign ICT workers to Canada are the same firms who are out-sourcing ICT jobs to India, etc. now?

Probably.

If they cannot get qualified people here, they have to out-source....hence the need for trained immigrants. It's actually a straight line of logic.

You mean a straight line to the profit column on the financial statements.
I have a feeling the real problem is the cost of out-sourcing is starting to catch up to the cost of doing the work in-house.
Unfortunately new IT workers are not being trained because the jobs were being sent off shore.
Now these short-sighted companies want the government to import trained workers.
In the mean time Canadians who could have been trained in IT are working at minimum wage jobs to eat.

And I am NOT an investigative reporter.

Short sighted?

You prefer these companies simply go out of business? What is more short sighted?

grumpy old man wrote:Short sighted?

You prefer these companies simply go out of business? What is more short sighted?

Short-sighted is not training your own staff and building employee loyalty in the name of short-term profits and long term pain.

You are missing the point. Business cannot afford to KEEP the staff they have because they cannot compete with India and China and Bangladesh.

It's got nothing to do with training staff and even less to do with employee loyalty.

Winnipeg based company A has to outsource their work to compete with company B. If company A can't afford to hire locally and they don't outsource maybe (probably) they close the doors.

People are to easy to tell business how much profit (or pain) they should endure. If I approached you Outsider and told you I can only afford to pay you $5 an hour in the name of short-term profits and long term pain what would you do?

Now take it one step further. Assume I've no idea how long I need you to keep working for a pittance. How long you willing to do this?

GOM, your logic just highlights the "race for the bottom": that has been created by globalization. Who wins in your scenerio if Company A is better able to compete with Company B in Mumbai? There is really little benefit to the local economy from Company A performing well aside from the corporate taxes they pay (which are ever decreasing). They provide few or no jobs, and do nothing to create future opportunities for workers in their home country. Why exactly should we care how well they are able to compete if they give almost nothing back (besides mandatory taxes)?

We need more companies that create jobs in the country they are based in, not more companies that can only compete in their market by outsourcing the majority of their labour to Mumbai or Manilla.

If these Loewen guys are so hard up for staff why don't they apply for a training grant from the Fed's to offset the cost of training local workers and actually hire people from here? Is it because they know full well that local employees would expect compensation that is fair and offers a reasonable standard of living, while an immigrant worker may be willing to settle for substantially less just for the opportunity to come to Canada?

These guys just sound like the typical mind set that is becoming increasingly typical in the business world, short term profits first ahead of everything else and a complete lack of corporate citizenship.

Here is my very first post on the topic: http://kwdc.forumn.net/t7148-ict-worker-shortage#137290

What I want to do is discuss HOW we can combat globalization. I merely describe one scenario that might explain the dynamics some companies face. Obviously not every company is in the same boat.

You say "We need more companies that create jobs in the country they are based in...". Totally agree. How do we do that then in the scenario I painted while playing devils advocate?

grumpy old man wrote:You are missing the point. Business cannot afford to KEEP the staff they have because they cannot compete with India and China and Bangladesh.

It's got nothing to do with training staff and even less to do with employee loyalty.

Winnipeg based company A has to outsource their work to compete with company B. If company A can't afford to hire locally and they don't outsource maybe (probably) they close the doors.

1. And yet these companies who are outsourcing the jobs to China, India, or wherever are still expecting the now under-employed Canadians to buy their products.
2. It has everything to do with cutting training expenses . I can understand out-sourcing the job if the job is labor intensive for 3 or 4 months, the product is installed, and then the product never changes. IE: There are not enough changes for the trained in-house IT expert to keep up his training maintaining the product.
3. And then when the trained foreign workers are as expensive or even more expensive than Canadians they want the government to import trained workers.

grumpyrom wrote:
If these Loewen guys are so hard up for staff why don't they apply for a training grant from the Fed's to offset the cost of training local workers and actually hire people from here?

I do not know if they are getting the Feds to subsidize training.
But at least it looks like they are hiring locally.

From the article I got the impression they are just warning what can happen if companies continue to send their IT work oversea.