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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.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I suppose "slightly less doom" in the world is reason to celebrate too.
"Ahh.. but he's only stabbing me in *ONE* eye with an icepick now!"
meh
Shouldn't the headline read "Tech Workers in Lower lack of Demand"?
Many consulting and defense firms have been hiring tech workers non-stop for a long time now. Especially in the D.C. Metro area.
A relentless stream of "IT is great" news... yet a lot of folks I know are struggling (I'm doing okay but worry if I lost my current position).
So I just don't believe this news and I think there is some kind of agenda behind it. Perhaps the big IT companies want to head things off because they finally see a big crunch is coming and they are going to need skilled IT people again.
I would love to see things turn good again in this field but I'm not seeing it at the ground level yet (10+ years experience-- in the South).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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
saying "they're cutting medicare!!" because they are increasing spending by 7% instead of 9%..
The fact that they're being laid off at simply a slower rate doesn't make me feel like they're in higher demand. It could just as easily mean that they've run out of people to lay off.
Job cuts are down by 40% but that still means jobs were cut which still means that there is less employment.
Our fantastic contributors are not the only people that are this stupid. The same trick is used to manipulate national debt news. There is a diffierence between debt and deficit. When the deficit decreases then the government crows about having control of debt. Not so. Deficit is the amount that the debt grows by. Therefore even if the deficit reduces, the debt is still increasing.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I've run my IT consulting business now for almost 20 years, a succesful business in the Midwest that has extended past. We ignored the dotcom boom (and bust), we grew slowly but surely, and we focus on showing our customers a profitable return on every investment they make in us.
We can't find good workers. I've interviewed repeatedly and found the new talent is terrible -- it seems that has technology becomes more "known," the amount of GOOD talent is dropping. I've interviewed some people from top colleges that just don't know their way around a business at all, and I have no desire to train them in exchange for a high 5 figure salary.
The only way I seem to find valuable employees is by picking up the real outcasts from the larger consulting firm -- outcasts that have great insight and work ethic but are too far outside the box to fit in any MBA-run company. Every time a consulting group goes under, the same morons get new jobs with the next company that won't exist in 10 years.
For those in the same position, what are you doing for hiring? I don't see talent coming out of college and moving to the Midwest (a very profitable IT sector), most are instead moving to the west coast, taking a big salaried job, and finding themselves stuck in a very expensive area where the high salary doesn't seem to overcome the overhead of living there (stress, costs, traffic). I'd love to find a resource for good employees, but I guess the answer is right there: good employees don't get fired. The balance between efficiency and knowledge and salary is not something I worry about -- if my customers realize a gain on the money they spend on us, I have no problem paying the person right. For those who know, most of my employees work at minimum wage with a large project bonus (up to 80%), and I have enough people looking to work for us that it isn't the pay structure that isn't helping me find good help.
Also, it seems that many people going to college for computer science/engineering aren't even learning the basics -- what colleges have you recent graduates gone to that have taught you real consulting skills, business sense and responsibility?
"Some businesses may in fact regret some of the job cuts they made in recent years, which, in retrospect, may have been too deep. Recent surveys suggest that employers are having an increasingly difficult time finding information technology workers."
t ake-me-back phone call from my ex-manager?
So can I be expecting a late night, drunken I'm-so-sorry-I-broke-up-with-you-will-you-please-
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
I know this because I watch television. In it, they say they IT jobs are in high demand, and all I need is this certificate in order to get a yacht like the guy on the tv. So, this is true.
FTFA, "Some businesses may in fact regret some of the job cuts they made in recent years, which, in retrospect, may have been too deep. Recent surveys suggest that employers are having an increasingly difficult time finding information technology (IT) workers."
I was laid off in the fall of 2004 because it was determined that the company could outsource our System Admins and Database Admins to a domestic contractor and co-locate to save a couple bucks in the long run. (You can convince any executive to do anything, BTW, if you have a good PowerPoint ROI chart, laser pointer, and $800 suit).
Long story short, the fine print in the contract stated that only 2 major systems would be outsourced (which amounted to about 40% of the total workload), and after everyone was laid off, the contractor says, "Now... You know that we're not going to handle email, NAS, web services, and other misc systems, correct?"
Needless to say, they're now locked into a 5 year multi-million dollar contract, AND have hired back new system admins to replace the layoffs. I'm not bitter... But it still makes me smile anyway... =)
I wonder if they count people getting cut for reading slashdot instead of doing their job?
Oh... you mean slashdot isn't my job?
::looks around::
So just what am I supposed to do in front of this computer all day then?
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
Seeing a reduction in the number of people fired in no way translates to "tech workers" being in "hot demand".
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
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...
a) They are thousands of miles away.
Wait till the new guest worker program goes in to effect. Yeah, you probably thought it was all about Mexicans picking potatoes out in some farm out west, right? Wrongo. With the new guest worker program, H1B visas are no longer required. Employers can just ship in boatloads of Indians and Chinese to do your job for about 1/4 of the cost. I don't care how skilled you think you are, theres someone who will jump off that boat and say they can do the same job for much less.
President Bush will try to make you think this is all about people working jobs that Americans won't do. He's right. We, as natural born Americans, find it hard to work at wages way below the poverty line.
What can you do to stop this? Write to your two senators and tell them to put a halt to the "guest worker" program. Sure, we have jobs to do and can't go marching around the streets today like the immigrants, but we need to find the time to stop this before it gets out of hand.
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
Individual circumstances vary, but going straight to grad school often isn't cheaper in the long run. You're giving up 2 years of earnings (plus raises) and you have to pay for school yourself.
If you're only going as far as a Master's, consider working and having your employer pay for grad school. It's not easy, and it will take longer to finish your degree. But the real-life work experience will give you a new perspective towards your studies that full-time students will miss out on.
Don't procrastinate starting grad school after starting work though. Most people who "take a semester off" never get started. And voice of experience here, try especially hard to finish your degree before having kids.
The parent was dead on about quitting work and paying for grad school with retirement savings. This almost never pays off in the long run.
...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.
Customers care about results. If they guy of the boat can't speak english, can't interpret requirements, and doesn't know the clients business it won't matter that he works for $2 per hour.
Really? Why don't come and peddle that crap to my current employer? They obviously didn't hear about your theory before embarking on their current slapdash offshoring initiative.
We are talking here about sending our entire IT dept to a company which doesn't even have PC's for their employees. My numbskull employer agreed to buy them all laptops (at approx 1.7 times average market price).
Currently we are doing knowledge transfer via conference calls. The lines and the accents are so difficult for both sides to understand that we may as well be talking in different languages for the amount of knowledge that is being transferred.
Each time I mention the problems that are going to come our way as a result of this ridiculous approach I am told that I cannot see the "big picture" from my lowly "techie perspective" and these guys are really cheap. I wonder why.
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.
---
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?
---
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.