The Information Technology Professional Shortage: Path to Wealth for Webmasters?

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Did the Web Cause the IT Professional Shortage?

Although CERN design documents go back to the 1980s, the Web explosion began in 1993 with NCSA Mosaic. It was 1994 before important institutions and businesses began to discover the Web, testing the waters with brochure-style sites. As the Web explosion approaches its fifth anniversary, many major Web sites have moved from brochure boilerplate into serious information delivery:

• Mail-order catalog companies such as Hello Direct put their entire catalogs online.
• In a quieter revolution, wholesale companies built Web-based mechanisms for supplying their upstream retail customers.
• Newspapers put up complete daily editions. Some put up searchable archives; some delved into the business of continuous updating of their online editions.
• A variety of database vendors, from University Microfilms to Dialog to Lexis-Nexis, have or will have Web front-ends to their data.
• A number of new players appeared with Web-only information offerings, from Switchboard to Mapquest to WebReference.com.

A large percentage of help-wanted ads mention Web skills, from basic HTML to graphics design to server administration to CGI scripting to Web-database integration. My favorites are the ads that demand five years of experience as a Webmaster. Not many people can honestly claim to have begun Web work before Mosaic was announced! (It's also amusing to see ads asking for Java programmers with more years of experience than the short history of that language.)

Every programmer who is working on a Web project is by definition not doing something else in the IT field. In June 1996, I attended the first JavaOne conference along with several thousand others. There appeared to be more techies than suits. I sat in a general session with a sea of programmers who were converting to the new religion of Java. "What the heck were all these people doing a year ago, before Java existed?" I wondered. An informal survey found people who'd previously been writing Smalltalk and C++ applications. Many had worked on custom client-server projects.

A number of recent college graduates in computer or information science have grown up with the Web, and can honestly say that the Web is an integral part of their career plans. And therein lies the germ of one of the answers to the putative crisis.