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What is the Tech Jobs Situation in Late 2004?
CareerConfused asks: "Today I came across an ad in the NY Times, put out by Microsoft, Micron, Level 3 (among others) that claimed that the H-1B visa quota for FY2005 has already expired (it claims the quota expired the first day of FY2005, which started just about a month back). OK. On the one hand, we have
stories of techies not finding jobs; and on the other, we have stories from businesses which claim that lack of H1s is killing their business, as well as public advocacy (like that ad in NYT). So, what is it? Are we in another boom, with jobs going a-begging and companies requiring more H1s to fill them? How come I haven't noticed this in the form of a fatter paycheck (or an Aeron chair, or a fooseball table in the cubicle)?" What have you experienced in your searches for technology-based jobs? Is it still hard to sell your hard-earned skills or are things looking up?
While its one thing to claim that the lack of H1Bs is killing your business because Americans don't want to move to Fort Wayne, Indiana. It's quite another to say that you can't find a job in Silicon Valley. What's needed is an overall view of how tech jobs are doing across the country. What areas are in desperate need of technical skills and what areas are suffering from a shortage of jobs?
i couldn't find much in Houston, TX of all places, very tech orientated city, ended up joining the military for a real tech job. 2E251: Computer, Network, Cryptographic, and Switching Systems :) hell yea.
President Bush Supporter
Houston market stinks. Maybe still holdover from enron, I don't know.
My company has been seeing a lot of turnover (both incoming and outgoing) lately. People leave because of better jobs and people come in because this place is better than where they were. I'm not sure if that means the market is better or worse, but it's certainly a little more mobile than I remember.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
Moved here, and had a great paying job as a Data Analyst in NYC within a week.
If I can do it... either you're spending all of your time just looking online (which is doomed for failure) or you just don't know how to properly search/interview for a job.
An employment councillor can help you with either problem.
In the Bay Area, at least, the three datapoints I have are: :) ); :)
1. Google's still screaming for people to join them (well, OK, they then axe highly-competent people during their interview process, but I'm sure it's for the best
2. When I was looking for a job in late August, I ended up in a competitive bidding situation between two companies;
3. The company for which I work now (which has a fabulous environment, IMHO), is looking to hire people, so far with no great success. Of course, we're also looking for pretty decent people
It's getting better, I think.
I've spent about two and a half years now in a fairly stable job at a big company. I work with people I either like or don't mind, the work is sufficiantly satisfying even considering that I have to occassionally deal with big company political bullshit, the hours are reasonable and I (obviously) still have time to do some light /.'ing. All of this is a significant improvement over the
two startup jobs I had back in 2001 where the hours were insane, the
people were nutjobs and I was very, very unhappy.
OTOH, I've been more or less in limbo in terms of pay. Despite adding considerably to my skillset, I've gotten extremely modest raises that have more or less kept up with inflation if you don't count in gas prices.
Aside from that: Items like Aeron chairs and foosball tables and game systems in the break room and people keeping excessively odd hours can stay gone. I never liked those -- maybe I'm an exception, but I'm at work to *work*, I want to get my work done and leave. I'm working so I can afford to have a life outside of work, not because I really get off on plugging away on my TPS reports. The absolute worst part about all of those "perks" were that they slowed down the whole works and as a side effect created an expectation that you should live at work more than the 8-9 hours a day God intended. "Where's Bob? I need him to look over something." "Oh, he's playing in the Wednesday Tekken Tourney, he'll be out in an hour or two"...
Back to the subject at hand, though: The environment now is such that I could probably go make more money someplace else, but to be honest I am *extremely* hesitant to stick my head back out there after getting bitchslapped so badly last time.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I'm pretty sure the submitter gets it, but doesn't want to admit it. Yes, there is a demand for qualified techies coming in on H1-B's. Yes, a good number of domestic techies are having hard times finding employment. However, these two items are not mutually exclusive.
See, managers wised up. They found out that you can either hire a domestic techie for 50-80k/yr or hire an imported techie for 25-35k/yr. As an added bonus, the imported techie will be thankful for the opportunity he has, and do everything he can to appease the management that hired him.
I'd _love_ to see a tariff on 'imported' labor. However, I'm not an economist.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
You will now. Why'd you tell everyone, stupid?
One change I've noticed is that XML and related technologies are getting bigger and bigger, and it's redefining what it means to be a web application developer. I feel like my skill set is being spread thinner than pâte.
Other than that, it's the same old situation:
1. Employers seeking ridiculously diverse skill sets. What do you want, a software developer with ten years experience, or a GIS specialist with database skills? Pick ONE!
2. Employers requiring experience or expertise in obscure software, but who are unwilling to train. (We're smart; we can learn your industry-specific database front-end for god's sake!)
3. Shops with a depressing preference for Microsoft and IBM languages and software. LAMP jobs and their ilk are comparitively scarce, and therefore highly competitive.
4. HR people who don't know what they want/need. The other day someone posted a "need" for a C# developer with more than five years experience.
So employers are feeling a crunch from the H1 issue. Fine, I'll take that underpaid position! Where is it? We've talked about this before, and I understand that employers are trying to thin the pool by posting stringent (or ideal) requirements, but I think it's getting out of hand and alienating worthy applicants in the process.
As for the relocation bit, I don't buy it. I would welcome the change to relocate almost anywhere in the world for a decent job. I would appreciate a system that makes it easier for employers willing to hire from a remote job pool to find job seekers who are serious about relocating. Monster's system is just too limited.
I posted an ad for a help desk position for my small company on craigslist.
I received sixty resumes in four days. And probably 20% were well-to-over-qualified.
Now I'll only comment quickly that the job is mediocre on a good day and Cincinnati blows. The mid-west it seems is teaming with tech jobs though. That doesn't mean I'll stay here but apparently there are co-op jobs a plenty out here that go un filled while I spent last summer mowing lawns for lack of a co-op position.
From my experience techs jobs are mostly only available in certain areas which are cheaper to operate a business in. People my age don't want to move to the mid west though (I'm moving back [someone give me a job in the Boston area]) and older people have already put down roots somewhere else.
AFAIK most people are not really looking for jobs because they think there aren't any out there. This would lead companies to think there is a short supply of people. If you'd like to jump ship, get looking for something else - don't listen to what people think the situation is. After you're gone, your previous employer will be looking for your replacement. To some extent, the job market is what people perceive it to be.
Back in the 90's eveyone was hearing on the news and from campuses that the best (read as: highest paying) jobs were in the computer sector. They flooded the market. Now over the past 3-5 years the new students have been hearing "don't go into that people are losing their jobs to overseas" so they choose a different field. Thus eventually creating a need for more workers. So in turn when the salaries increase again and the overall need for workers increase once again there will be a surplus of workers and not enough jobs. Hopefully the students in the colleges now are in their fields because they want to do it and not because it will make them 100K a year after graduation. This way you get the person who loves what they do.
A bunch of Tech Stuff
it's a red herring. he actually lives in Denver.
Back in the 1970's, there was a big push towards automated coding. The idea was machines would be given a set of parameters and write their own applications, thus killing the demand for skilled technical workers throughout the United States. Fear and hysteria reigned, and I know a lot of people who left technology careers as a result.
Fast forward to 1997, when I was graduating college. For years I had worked as an intern / volunteer / gopher in various computer labs and become familiar with the major issues in computer science. For one thing, information technology jobs had not gone away, they had just changed to the point where they no longer looked like they did when I was a kid. On the other hand, some of the scientific coders were having to learn how to code HTML and produce graphics, which was really a strange thing to ask them to do based on their last 20 years of experience.
IT doesn't go away, it intensifies, and so to do IT professionals. My company, www.trellon.com, is almost unable to find qualified people to work on our projects. This is not because their is such high demand for workers we cannot compete, this is because it is tough to find professionals with the right mix of technology and other disciplines in their background. For every 20 people I meet, 16 of them get disqualified based on a lack of subject matter expertise outside of coding. (3 of the rest turn out to be exaggerating on their resume, and the 1 truly qualified applicant seems to always have some issue that keeps us from wanting to make him an offer).
I guess what I see is that there is still demand in IT, sometimes it just doesn't look like the work you used to do. GIS is big right now, I still get calls from recruiters offering insane salaries. OSS programmers are big right now, lots of people are looking for data warehousing solutions that do not depend on Oracle and SQL Server. Flash is big right now, and I regularly receive RFPs for companies willing to build RIAs.
Threads like this irk me a little bit because it always looks like people are waiting too long to ask the right questions. There should be some place where people can just ask what technology is in big demand and hook up with the resources to learn so they can provide a more valuable service. But fretting about the state of the IT industry is like worrying about automated coding back in the 70s - it's here right now, but all we know about IT is that innovation is forever.
M
A friend of mine came back from an eight-month backpacking romp through Europe recently. While that sounds like a lot of fun (and is, if you have the time and money to spend on it), it's not the best move for your career when your career is in the ever-changing world of tech. Despite being a talented interface designer, she came back home to find that the software and methods she was using was no longer the standard - new techniques had been developed and better ways of managing content had presented themselves. Basically she came home to find the tech playing field had moved on without her, and was unable to find a job as nice as the one she left.
Solution: retrain! She went out to some temp agencies and farmed her resume around, then taught herself Visio when a client requested it. She spent the last few weeks down in the District building contacts and making money while working on a Post Office project. If you want jobs, you can find jobs - just don't expect people to throw money into your lap as per the bubble-days of the 90s.
For those not in the know, a security clearance is a pre-punched meal-ticket - and you don't have to be in DC or Virginia. If you're able to find work with someone who's willing to sponsor your security clearance process, and you've no particular qualms about working for The Man, take it. A Secret clearance will keep you employed anywhere in the nation. A Top Secret brings a higher salary and even more options to choose from, though laying hands on one is sometimes more a matter of fate than desire.
Well, if other places are like where I work, people are looking for jobs because they are tired of VPs who got fat bonuses this year telling them "you don't get a raise this year, and you are lucky you even have a job." They are willing to treat their employees like crap because the market will bear it. You can only take that for so long before you start looking. Because I work for a very large company, if the market picks up it would be a year or two before I would see any benefits from it (like a raise). Therefore, my best option is to get out as soon as possible. It may take longer to accomplish this because of the market, but that is what I am working towards.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
> "So, what is it? Are we in another boom"
You're not in a boom, or in a bust. You're in a plutocracy. So Americans lose jobs and companies hire foreigners for less money to help pay for those multi-million-dollar executive bonuses. You realize your annual salary is probably a fraction of what your CEO's office furniture is worth, don't you? In the grand scheme of things, your worth (my worth) is slightly below that of a desk and chair. Welcome to the new economy.
As noted in a footnote to the article), U.S. employers *must* pay foreign workers the prevailing wage for their job fields and show that qualified U.S. workers are not being passed over.
In my experience the BCIS (formerly INS) has pretty stringent about these requirements and as a result companies end up paying H1 workers the *same* amount as they would pay a domestic worker. Please do the research or atleast RTFA.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Aside from that: Items like Aeron chairs and foosball tables and game systems in the break room and people keeping excessively odd hours can stay gone. I never liked those...
I was going to post more or less the same thing but you beat me to the punch. I wanted to smack the submitter when I read him whinning about not seeing foosball tables making a return. All that shit was complete waste. Those days are gone, my friends. Here at slashdot we like to laugh at how stupid management is. But they are smart enough not to get burned twice on buying a lot of pointless shit like that.
I think it's time for programmers to stop waxing nostalgic about crap and start worrying more about how to make programming in the US (as opposed to outsourcing it) a valuable commodity. Time to start worrying about saving up enough money that you might actually get a chance to retire when Social Security collapses. Time to start paying more attention to whether a prospective employer has a solid medical plan rather than counting the number of foosball tables or arcade games they have in the break room. In short, it's time to grow up.
GMD
watch this
Keep in mind that when companies whine about "not being able to find enough tech people", they are only telling you 1/2 the story.
What they are really saying is that "We can't find enough tech people willing to work at the wage we want to pay them (usually low) with the benefits that we want to give them (usually poor) in the location that we want to employ them (usually low rent for the company, but high rent for the employee - unless he likes commuting an hour one way)."
From my viewpoint jobs are few and salaries are dropping. Where I'm at now is trying to centralize SysAdmin work to Ohio to save on salaries, and layoff SA's in the data centers around the country. The positions they are replacing SA's with is a combo desktop/server support tech. In other words just eyes and hands to do reboots if necessary. Even server builds are being centralized and a traveling install teams to do the racking and cabling. My company isn't the only one I hear trying to work this way. The last place I worked did a similar move, they left SA's in the data centers and let go all SA in remote sites. Desktop support were the eyes and hands in remote sites.
So if your job doesn't end up going overseas, they may just centrallize it to a city with a low cost of living and just have generic techs in all other sites.
I can complie a Linux kernal, but don't know how to write a device driver. Willing to learn. Can you post the URL to the opening? I think many companies are unwilling to train employees (cost of doing business?). Also, companies are looking to narrowly in skills. They expect the whole to be filled completely. That's why they rely on interns and college grads. Interns are paid poorly to train up, then they get hired as a grad with the skills learned as an intern. Do companies ask potential hires if they are willing to take a pay cut while learning the required skills?
At least in the Bay Area it seems like a lot of places are hiring now. Everyone I know that's actually good at their job is employed and most of their companies are hiring. It's hard to get a job but except for a couple years in the late '90s it's always been hard. The industry is competitive and you need some way to stand out. I spent a long time trying to package myself as a jack of all trades as far as design goes and got very little interest. If you think the programming market is flooded with unqualified people you have no idea, in 2002 I spoke with a recruiter who was getting 1200+ resumes for every design position she posted. It was only when I focused my resume and portfolio on exactly what I wanted to do that I got the job I wanted.
The times of being able to post "OH HAY GUYS I CODE AND STUFF" on craigslist and having recruiters trying to beat your door down so you could make 90k to write text parsing code were a fluke.
I work at a company that IS in fact in dire need of H1B workers. We are a Symbian company, a fairly well known one at that. However, finding an American with Symbian experience AND the fairly heavy C++ skills we demand is rare at best. We've been in touch with several engineers overseas (primarily in Europe), bu t we're finding that it's extremely difficult to get them into the country.
This isn't a case where we want to outsource jobs, and I can promise you that what we're paying our foreign workers is FAR above our regional average. We simply have a problem finding the relevant experience we need, it's that simple.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
I've been helping on hiring at two different companies during the past 20 months or so. I do the tech screens.
The sad fact is that there just isn't that many good candidates out there. In the first company especially - they were located in a not-so-desirable geographical area - we could not find good candidates, who were permanent residents or US citizens, at all. We had a bunch of really great H1-B candidates, but due to all kinds of hassles related to hiring H1-Bs we couldn't hire but one of them (there were half a dozen positions open). This REALLY hurt the company.
I see the same situation in my current job, though I suspect since we're located in a little bit of a better geographical area, we're seeing a few more qualified candidates who are permanent residents or US citizens. However, once again, the best candidates were H1-B visa holders, and we couldn't hire them either. This delayed hiring a new developer by about 6 months.
I'm not sure what the problem is, but there just doesn't appear to be enough GOOD candidates out there.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I probably won't sleep for days, now.
Yeah, right.
Put your hyperlink where your mouth is, and point to the jobs. That can be either on your company website careers section (don't expect people to find it via google for quite a while), or the listings at your preferred online job site if you do that kind of thing. Otherwise we'll assume you're just blowing smoke like most of the corporate executives are doing.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What the tech companies are saying is that there is a shortage of programmers with 10 years experience in Java, 10 years experience in e-Commerce, and 10 years experience is Oracle willing to work for $25K a year.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Dude, you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. How you got modded up to a 5 is beyond my imagination.
If you're gonna shoot out numbers at least endeaver to make them remotely accurate. The visa caps varied over the last six years:
1998 65000
1999 115000
2000 195000
2001 195000
2002 195000
2003 65000
2004 65000
This gives us a total of 895,000 total H1Bs over the last six years. I'll be generous and use your figure that only 60% were IT specific, which gives us: 537,000. Now, you idiotically compared your total figure to the number of people in this country to come to the conclusion that your 270k number (which I've already proven is completely wrong) is statistically insignificant. Your comparison is retarded. That 300 million includes people who don't even try to work, like INFANTS for example.
Why don't you compare it to the number of IT workers in the country? Here, let me do it for you: there are roughly 3.3 million IT workers and 537,000 H1Bs which gives us a percentage of (537k/3.3m * 100) 16.2%. Hmmm...16.2 percent doesn't seem insignificant to me. For example, if I told you not to go into a specific bar because you had a 16.2% chance of having your head blown off, would you? Didn't think so.
Oh, and before you tell me that these people are out in 3 years, think again. It costs them all of about $500 to have a lawyer get them a 3 year extension.
Anyway, just wanted to say STFU about shit you know nothing about. Oh, and the moderators should be ashamed for modding this idiot up.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Here's how things have changed over the past couple of years, at least for one Silicon Valley company that I used to work for...
Two years ago, the company laid off a few programmers, then six months later, gave everyone a 7% paycut so that they didn't have to lay off more programmers. People took the paycuts in stride.
A year ago, many of the people who took paycuts, left the company. The company hired people to replace them. Lots of qualified candidates applied for the open positions, but the company actually had to pay the new people more than the people who had left the company. It took about two weeks to fill the positions.
This past year, the company saw a huge upswing in business and needed to hire more people. The were two hiring phases, one in the spring and one in the fall. In the spring, there were lots of candidates again, but few qualified ones. The ones that were hired demanded a salary that was ~10% greater than people hired for the same position a year before. It took about six weeks to fill the positions. In the fall hiring, there were far fewer candidates and very few qualified ones. Salaries were still about 10% higher than the previous year. Not all positions have been filled after eight weeks.
Except for some minor exceptions, the overall job outlook (tech jobs included) in upstate NY isn't good. Locally (Rochester) the unemployment rate has officially gone below 5%, but that has to be taken in light of significantly fewer jobs and an overall declining population. The number of people who've simply given up is not known, of course.
My company, one of the major local employers, is slowly abandoning engineering and manufacturing for a strategy of purchased products and service offerings. The number of engineering openings in the company these days is roughly about 1/10 of the total. The rest are sales and marketing, particularly for acquired products.
Goverment wants more tax, corporations want cheaper labor. Government wants non-refundable social security tax, corporations want disposable labor that can work long hours on the same cheap pay. Let me explain what I think is going on here, I have been a H1 visa holder for 5 years now, so there is some credibility to this. And to put it mildy H1-B visas are a legal documents for indentured servitude, a modern day legalized slavery. Slavery by Govt and Corporations. As far as tax is concerned Govt makes more money on H1-B visa holders than on GC or US Citizens. Let me explain how, 2 persons earning 45K each pay more tax (approx >= 15%) than a single person earning 90K (which is what you usually get by the time you get your Green Card(GC) or if citizen with 3-4 years of experience). Plus for citizen of China and India, they cannot claim their social security tax after their 6 year H1-B period ends and they are asked to leave USA (if GC has not been acquired by then). From the corporate perspective it is easier to control and pay cheap alien workers than it is to deal with GC and citizens. Plus most alien workers due the fear, of H1 cancellation at the whim of the employer, are always genuflecting, bending over and working long hours. Corporates want more control over their work force and they get it through H1, because for H1 holders changing permanent jobs is tougher compared to GC and citizens. A case in point is George Bush's latest move to legalize illegal mexican by granting them a three year (H1-B) work permit, now this H1 quota is separate from the current 65000. The aim is to put the employer in the driver seat and tax these mexicans. And I can vouch that for the majority of the cases US citizens are smart and efficient software developer then H1-B counter parts. These kinds (citizens) might be less in number but I sincerely doubt that. H1-B guys are mostly hard workers but not neccessarily smart and efficient, most of them including me tend to gain software knowledge through job pressures. So why are H1-B guys here in the first place. Well Duh!!! its the Benjamins, the value of US dollor. It won't be an exaggeration if I said that more than 80% of the current H1-B lot will go back their home countries if they get paid 60% of what they are paid here.
I live outside Boston, and from where I sit the situation is not good at all. It seems that local tech companies are still laying off people, and there's a glut of talent (or at least resumes) out there. I've been developing software since 1980 (multiple languages, multiple OS's, multiple environments), I'm pretty good at it, I've got two headhunters working with/for me and I *STILL* am basically retired. Most of my friends who still have tech jobs hate them, but are afraid to leave because they fear they won't be able to find something else. And most of my friends who HAD tech jobs are either working in another field or have left the area. Supposedly the job market has picked up in this area, but from what I've seen I'm not convinced.
Yeah, you can laugh all you want. But being a union worker, I get paid more money than I did working on a computer, and the benefits are all there. Yeah, it smells kind of bad and shit, but who cares. It's easy money. Then, I go home and work out my complex investing problems using Mathematica and I make more money by investing in all kinds of instruments. It works pretty well.