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Tech Workers in Higher Demand
mjdroner writes "CNN has a story on an employment consulting firm report showing job cuts in the tech sector are down 40 percent." From the article: "Despite the inevitable job-cutting that typically follows mergers, the job market picture for the nation's tech workers is definitely improving. Many job seekers in high-demand fields such as storage systems administration and information security are probably finding themselves in the driver's seat when it comes to negotiating employment terms"
So this "good news" is that people are getting laid off at a slightly lower rate?
"job cuts in the tech sector are down 40 percent." Great statistic! Now what on earth does it mean for the actual amount of jobs? And job seekers?
This sort of statistic sound like it might be due to the increase in growth not slowing down as fast...
In other words; hard, useless, figures.
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How does 'decrease in job cuts' equal 'higher demand for IT workers'? That's like saying I've gone from spending £10,000 more than I earn a month to spending only £5,000 more a month so obviously my savings are getting better.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
I guess my follow-up question is this:
What's the current trend in hiring?
That's great if cuts have slowed, but I'd like to know if that means the net number of jobs is increasing
I realize thinking is not a pre-requisit to posting. However, realize that job cuts are a fact of life. Period. Even in the best of markets, some company is cutting jobs.
And even in the worst markets, some company somewhere is hiring.
Basically, this means that the hole in the bottom of the bucket is smaller. And, if you follow other news, you will realize that hiring has picked up.
So, yes, a decrease in job cuts is good news. Your market may vary.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
lol. you've never even seen a college CS curriculum, have you? i'm doubting if you even went to a US college if you expect people to come out of them with usable job skills in IT, much less those particular skillsets. here's all the business sense i have (and which you seem to forget) compressed into five words:
"fast, good, cheap: pick 2".
if you want employees that are "good" and "cheap" from a technical perspective, you're going to have to train them on soft skills, which doesn't happen overnight. sorry. logic's a bitch...
Of course, I pay for it, too.
I'm an oldschool technie who realized he'd better figure out this business stuff, fast. We do custom embedded linux work, board-level up, MCUs, etc etc. We're booked. Solid. Yet I get stuff done with low overhead.
What did I do?
I walk the walk. I know good people are easily 100x more productive than average. I know some good people from all my days in the trenches (hi guys). When I want things done, I package it up, and send it off with a big cheque. I don't care where, when, or how.. we work online. I live in the middle of nowhere, handy an airport. That's all that's required to do business.
If one of the guys I work with is doing 10x the work - I'll actually give him 10x the pay!
It doesn't work for all business, but it is working, and I am growing clients and profit.
Something to think about if you "can't get people to relocate" - my advice - make teleconf and virtual offices work for you. Hire the best people available no matter where they are. Reap the rewards.
..don't panic
...the emphasis on "skill sets" and not on whether you can think and learn.
"Does your skill set include J2EE? No, just Java?"
Click. Phone goes dead, you never hear from that recruiter again.
"Does your skill set include XYZ?"
I'm so sick of this nonsense. The problem, as I see it, is several-fold:
- Recruiters who want the immediate "sell" to get their finder's fee: they only want that person with experience in the exact buzzword they see in front of them
- Employers who don't want to give an intelligent, experienced, agile person the couple of months to learn the new technology flavor-of-the-month
- Employers who think coders are people who simply bang on the keyboard and, if they could train a cat to do the same, they would do so. They don't understand that it takes either education or experience (and likely both) to create code that is efficient, thread-safe, maintainable, etc. Cats can't do this--intelligent, experienced, educated software developers can.
- Employers who have an immediate crisis (hmm...how did they let that happen to begin with?) and want someone they can immediately drop into the meat grinder. When you hear "off to a running start" from one of these, beware.
- Recruiters and employers who don't understant that computer science concepts span languages and technologies and that someone who has grasped them in one implementation of computer science (read: technology) can apply them in another if only given a chance to learn the details (language, API, etc.)
Non-developers are too focused on buzzwords and not on software. What makes software good software goes way beyond particular languages or API's. There are far more workers who can satisfy employers' needs; for some reason they simply won't use them.
man...
.03 cents per hour labor
You have bought the capitalist line hard.
What you are ignoring is that:
1) The people you are competing against are willing to use slave labor.
2) The people you are competing against are willing to use
3) The people you are competing against are still where we were 50 years ago and are more than eager to completely destroy their lower classes with pollutionl, toxins, and mutagens.
In other words- WE ARE NOT COMPETING ON A EVEN PLAY FIELD.
i leave it to your boundless imagination as to how and why racing to the bottom against slave labor, rampant pollution, child labor, and sub-poverty wages is not a good idea.
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Seriously man- WAKE UP.
India is an example of how this can go -reasonably- well. They have democracy- they have a middle class. Here we have hard competitors- but their wages are going up because they are valuable. As a reasonable libertarian capitalist type, I'm not particularly against Indian competition (except that they engage in blatant age discrimanation and some other things we would consider illegal but it's minor compared to other countries).
I am against businesses using this cheap labor and then keeping the prices high (often by having laws passed to prohibit reimportation of products that are identical yet 50 to 80% cheaper- re - 2.45 dvd movies in china, $4 medicine in india that we pay $80 for, etc)
In many other countries, this is not the case. In many other countries including china as a large example, we are competing with -slave labor-. Where we are not competing with slave labor, we are competing with heavily exploited people surrounded by armed guards where those who cause problems mysteriously disappear at night.
Again- china is artificially holding its currency low (estimates in the WSJ are that it would double if allowed to float freely) - how fair is that?
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Are you in favor of a race to the bottom where we have a world with 'nobles' and 'serfs' again? Is that what you want? Because that is where we are headed. In the US it takes the form of offshoring jobs- and a select class making multi-million dollar salary's while claiming hardship and foisting thousands of people off on the rest of us to support. Corporations are built to move their costs to us and to maximize their profits.
Have you so completely bought their propaganda that you can't see how you are paying high taxes so large corporations can use cheap labor and avoid paying benefits to them? How does it feel to cover Walmart's health care bill while a few top executives get to keep the profits?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.