Working in the IT field has gotten much more difficult thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. I work alongside my father at 6abc in their IT department and things have been very difficult in the field due to the global shortage of microchips.
With everyone working from home, there has been a large surge in demand for computer parts. This has lead to a shortage of the pieces needed to assemble various computer hardware. This shortage is affecting everything from cars to gaming consoles, and the future does not look bright for it to get better soon.
Unlike toys or other consumer products, microchips can only be produced in very specialized factories. Any speck of dust, temperature spike, or static electricity can ruin a batch of microchips so the factories that produce them have very strict procedures to ensure that nothing can harm the chips while they are undergoing production.
Building more factories would cost billions of dollars and can take up to two years to build, so simply building more plants is not an option to fix the issue in the short term.
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down much of the global economy last year, it was expected that people would not be spending as much money. This lead to tech companies ordering too few microchips for their components.
In reality, the computer market saw a massive explosion in customers with millions of people being forced to work and learn from home. Suddenly, people wanted new TVs, new laptops, new cars and even building their own PCs.
Electronics manufacturers found themselves with massive demands for their products and nowhere near the amount of stock to meet this demand. The most notorious product for being in very short supply right now is NVIDIA graphics cards. It is nearly impossible to find one stock at any retailer.
If you can find one online, you are likely going to be paying triple what it’s worth.
These shortages have not only hurt the general consumer market but have also hit the professional markets hard as well. We are currently on a two-month waiting list for laptops we need to give to employees so they can continue to do their jobs remotely.
Despite being such a large company and even being under the massive Disney umbrella, we are still stuck waiting and hoping we happen to find what we need in stock on any given day. There are many projects that have had to be put on hold because we cannot get one or more parts needed to complete them.
We have been lucky that we order our workstations in bulk so we have a large inventory of pre-built computers that we are able to use in the interim till new parts can be ordered. We were just able to finish up an upgrade to our network switches in the building because the ones that just got replaced have been there since the building was built 12 years ago. Just recently I was able to finally finish a project I’ve been waiting for parts to complete for three months. we have a number of Virtual Machines that we use to shrink the size of our data center and we’ve needed a RAM upgrade for a while now. the system is built by Cisco and so, in turn, only supports ram you buy from them so I called them and they told me it would take three months, so I waited and finally here we are just now don’t the project. It was just as simple as putting in the ram and off we go off course. I had one system refuse to boot back up and another that still refuses to register two new sticks of RAM.
We were also able to build a new set before the COVID-19 pandemic, which would not have been possible with all of the product shortages we are seeing now. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an end in sight for this shortage. With the recent events in the Suez Canal disrupting global trade, even more, things look as though they will be getting worse for a while before they can get better.
