Canada saw an intake of over 30,000 foreign tech workers within the last year, according to a new report from the Technology Councils of North America and Canada’s Tech Network.
Canada saw an intake of over 30,000 foreign tech workers within the last year, according to a new report from the Technology Councils of North America and Canada’s Tech Network.
If they’re like most places, they’re going to front-line support and/or front-line development.
Banks and other institutions with a massive legacy codebase and/or infrastructure are keenly aware of how much it costs them to maintain, COBOL code on zSeries. They’d very much like to replace the currently-irreplaceable mainframe wizards with interchangeable “full stack developers” that they can outsource or subcontract to.
There’s a lot of Gen-X and Millenial managers that really struggle with having whole chunks of their infrastructure that they can’t commodify (source: am a Gen-X IT manager). Part of this is a legit concern: COBOL+zSeries or RPG+iSeries devs are not exactly common, and they take a long time to train up. Senior architects are even rarer, and most of them are a heartbeat away from their, ahem, last promotion, so it makes sense to try and move that you can to something that you can more easily support.
The other part of this is that there is a type of insecure douchebag manager that hates having indispensable employees, and there’s nothing as indispensable as the greybeard who knows the COBOL code that your billion-dollar company runs on.
Agreed, we can make assumptions, but it would be cool to have accurate stats.
It would be interesting to know if these employees helping improve Canadian productivity by building new products and services that being money in, it are they support that has little to no positive impact, while discouraging innovation?
(I suspect you’re right, btw)